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Comment by fxbl0i | Hacker News Reader

So, like everywhere in the world? This China bashing is getting stupid.

I’m not sure how factual reporting on what is in China is invalidated as China bashing because similar phenomena occur elsewhere on the planet? Aka the what aboutism logical fallacy.

It's not whataboutism, I'm saying that this is perfectly normal and therefore I don't think it's valid criticism of China in particular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

^ So to be clear this is normal too?

That has nothing to do with the subject at hand. You are conflating issues.

I don't think it's intended to be criticism of China in particular. "Common thing happens in China, here are the details" is interesting news for some people.

For example, I was aware that Northeasterners are seen as a distinct group, but not in terms of external rejection, but rather internal cohesion, e.g. when one of my friends joked that hearing the Northeastern accent of his taxi driver made him feel almost at home.

>not in terms of external rejection

I'm from the Northeast. Your initial assessment was the correct one. There is no external rejection of Northeasteners. Hearing others speak with a Northeastern accent is strangely reassuring though.

>"Common thing happens in China, here are the details" is interesting news for some people.

Except that's the issue, with articles like these the thing that's claimed to be happening are extreme cases but they make them out to be common. Because it's China nobody reading the Economist can smell the bullshit as they have no direct knowledge. I see it happen with Japan related news too.

That is exactly what a what aboutism is.

No, I'm not saying before we can criticise China we have to fix the rest of the world. Tribalism is normal and healthy, and there's nothing to fix.

>factual reporting

I'm from one of the regions mentioned and I've literally never been discriminated against or heard of anyone else being discriminated against because of it. The article likewise called all Han Chinese racist three paragraphs in so yes I would consider it China Bashing.

This was reported on in China, this is just a case of western news source re-conveying Chinese news. Of course, many Chinese call it China bashing if a Xinhua article is transcribed word for word in a western paper, and there is nothing we can do about that.

I can get that meituan was biased against Henan people, that doesn’t seem far fetched at all, I’m much less convinced they were biased against dongbei people but I know nothing about working for any Chinese company (Microsoft China did not discriminate at all as far as I could tell).

>Han Chinese are more than 90% of the population and their prejudice against ethnic minorities is well documented.

If I "re-convey" a CNN story and start out with "White Americans are more than 60% of the population and their prejudice against ethnic minorities is well documented" nobody would consider it a neutral piece. The article is obviously editorialized.

>Of course, many Chinese call it China bashing if a Xinhua article is transcribed word for word in a western paper, and there is nothing we can do about that.

Is making hasty generalizations about Chinese people all you do or do you actually have a life outside of this?

They have put more than 1 million Uighur muslims in camps, but go off

Was that mentioned in the article? I'm not an economist subscriber so I only read the free blurb.

There's been a lot of reporting on this really dangerous situation, here's a recent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/11/china-hi-tech-w...

I'm aware of the situation regarding the Uighurs, I'm asking if you're bringing this up out of the blue or if it's directly related to the article neither of us have read.

The complete article text is actually contained in the page source...

Discrimination against ethnic minorities is only mentioned in a single sentence, to serve as contrast for the actual topic of the article.

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