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Even in the 90s, when this was a prominent issue in American minds, when the State Department would offer the occasional "stiff rebuke", politicians told us that trade would inevitably move China toward an open democratic society.
More generally I think recent history has disproven a core tenet of libertarianism: that personal and societal level freedom are inseparable from economic freedom and capitalism (in the liberal meaning of the term) and the prosperity it generates.
China proves that capitalism works just fine and even "benefits" (in a raw GDP sense) from an otherwise totalitarian state and that personal freedom and human dignity are optional.
Pushing back on China is one of the very few things I agree with the Trump administration about, and I think it was bound to happen anyway without them. The deal was that we would open generous free trade with China and they would liberalize and open up to us. They broke the deal in multiple ways, taking that economic growth and then closing their markets and re-embracing totalitarianism.
Political freedom that is. Personal freedom and human dignity are optional in "open societies" too with many countries having it worse than in China.
Reports are going to have people claiming one thing and others denying that thing. This is a really serious human rights concern involving MILLIONS of people. It has been going on starting with Falun Gong since 2000 or earlier, then Uyghurs, Tibetans etc. It’s the word of the Chinese government vs all those groups. So it’s pretty clear this stuff is happening, but only because so many disparate groups are claiming this.
But there is nothing like VIDEO to make clear what exactly is happening. We need to have these videos in order to share them. Same as Tienemen Square videos.
On the other hand, such camps would not look much different from prisons, so I doubt you can expect KZ style pictures.
Edit: just wondering, is my argument really that bad, or am I dealing with patriotic bite reflexes?
I think that the following devices would be REALLY useful not just for human rights but proving what happened in an altercation:
A tiny device that can record video or video, perhaps embedded in the clothing or body of a person.
The stream is ENCRYPTED AND THEN transmitted to local towers or wifi or whatever, and finds its way to some servers. Maybe via a DHT routing.
Anyway, these servers store the encrypted data and the keys are generated by Shamir Secret Sharing so 3 or more parties can come together and decrypt the video.
In countries with rule of law, this could be used to figure out rapes on campus, by having such cameras in every dorm and bedroom. The keys would be obtained during a court case only.
In human rights cases, the keys would be generated by human rights organizations.
So this will eliminate “peeing toms” and “spying” by having warrants for decrypton of a video strean, and curation by trusted agencies what gets shown to the public.
I asked for the best VIDEO evidence from inside, showing the most people and smoking guns
It’s the difference between hearsay and video evidence. Like when people say the IDF harasses people in the West Bank, or cops kill unarmed Black people, and people dispute it one way or the other. But having video reveals exactly WHAT is happening. The more context for the video, the better.
Right now it's still more of a civilized sparring.
The rest of the world could easily get by by moving production lines and factories to Vietnam and Indonesia and South America, etc, while paying a flat “tax” in increased prices across the board for cheap products.
I have tons of motivation to do something about the largest totalitarian regime. Just tell me where to go and what to do.
I woulnd't assume that quite a few people don't feel this way. The issue isn't lack of motivation. It's the lack of any sort of leverage over a giant totalitarian foreign government.
Going there and spreading that message seems like a bad idea.
What's more, you replied without read my comment (or misread?). I said I'm a Chinese in the first sentence. I would like to have conversations with people who are serious about the matter but even on HN where people are rational and logical in most other topics are not showing their best when it comes to topics about China.
Anyway here's one guy who learned chinese: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaredfaa (he's a bigger influencer on bilibili coz youtube is unfortunately blocked in China)
here's a guy went around the world and passed China without knowing Mandarin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjI1O11S8KY (one of his several vidoes)
Anyway, ignorance promotes fear. Understand the problem first before propose solutions.
I mean no disrespect to Mandarin itself.
Anyway here's a Chinese social media site with many people working in SFBA. I guess you can have more access to places like that if you know a bit Mandarin.
Not that I won't try again, but I know it's an ordeal for me which takes lots of time I already don't have right now. I've taken and failed two separate language courses, not due to a lack of trying.
Learning foreign languages seems quite hard for me due to the nature through which I learned to read. I taught myself to read between age 2-3 and kind of just coasted on that for a long time, since I had mostly subpar public education.
But failing at multiple foreign languages has taught me the need to step back and have a better understanding of language in general before tackling it again.
But Mandarin is so far left field from other popular languages. Learning the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet was hard enough. I have severe ADHD and memory problems. I have used Anki for a long time and spaced repetition alone takes up a lot of my time. And the amount of symbols to learn for Mandarin is staggering.
Last year I took up memory training after studying the techniques of a few memory masters. I'm doing everything I can to improve my memory but just skipping to Mandarin right now is not a smart or efficient use of my time.
If you prefer to start right now, there are also plenty of Chinese people desperate for someone to practice their English with, e.g. on https://www.tandem.net/
It seems like a lot of people with moderate computer skills are fulfilling this role. My skills and time would be wasted on such an initiative.
I do think it's good advice to contact some people who are already involved, though. They would best know what else needs to be done.
I'm not taking a moral stand here. I don't think anybody not doing anything is a bad person. But let's not pretend ignorance and inability. We don't even try. Reading HN is much more comfortable, besides life has many challenges already.
I wouldn't spend 100% of my time on that singular social problem, but yes.
But that has nothing to do with reality on account of you having not given me any money, and me not having enough resources to quit my job and fund such initiatives against one of the largest economic powers in the world.
If you offer me (1G$/50yr=) 20 million dollars a year to spend eight hours a day trying to find a solution to this, then sure, I'll take that job and do it to the best of my ability. I don't expect to succeed, but as long as the paychecks clear I'll keep working.
If you offer me a billion dollars contingent on finding a solution, I'm going to ignore you, just like I ignore the people offering a million dollars for a solution to P vs NP, or XX million dollars for correctly predicting which six balls they pull out of a basket.
Honestly, most comments here misunderstood the problem to the point the purposed solutions are ridicules. Go talk to Chinese people living near you. Ask them why things are operating like this. Plenty live in SFBA/Seattle as far as I know.
I don't know any Chinese people living near me. I don't know many people here at all. I would definitely like to talk to people close to the issue.
The USA at least is doing something which respects their sovereignty and reduces their power.
And it's quite rude to project such a belief on someone. OP made no statement about their feelings toward mass incarceration, and claiming they are OK with it just because of the country they are in is like saying the Chinese are OK with what's happening in their own country.
Financial crimes always boil down to some kind of theft.
But specifically about your question, serious financial crimes are violent. Violence on this case is done by proxy, but abusing the State's position of power to help you on a crime shouldn't clean your hands of the violence.
Sounds just like the USA. Just look at Snowden or Assange.
The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)
If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)
Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?
Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.
If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.
Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.
As corporations grow more and more important (it's getting harder to do things without a credit card, for example), the government isn't the only important factor here. If the government outsources the punishment to corporations, what difference does it make that the government doesn't punish you for calling them incompetent but the corporations will terminate your accounts, cutting you off from much of modern society? You're getting cut off, because you said something.
It‘s not an isolated phenomenon. It is very widespread.
"During the rise of <insert power here> anti<blank> was a worldwide phenomenon. Recall that few countries wanted to take in the <blank> refugees. Had <power> not started the war, they might have gotten away with exterminating all the <blank>."
Substitute for whatever you feel most applicable. A frightening number of variables fit.
And that's about islamophobia? Saudi-Arabia is refusing to help because they hate muslims?
The Sunni-Shia conflict is an ancient one that's also a serious problem in the region for muslims, although how much of it is a religious conflict and how much is just a regular Iran-Saudi power struggle is hard to say.
Yemen is unfortunate in being both strategically located, having little oil, a huge problem with the drug Qat, and rapidly running out of water.
If they hadn't started the war, they wouldn't have had access to most of the Jews. Only around ~560,000 Jews lived in prewar Germany whereas Poland had over 3 million alone.
The Nazis would've needed the cooperation of the other governments in their plan.
0.7% of the US is in prison, so that would be about 1/10th of the prison population.
I'm not saying US prisons are the same - you get a vaguely proper legal process, and conditions are probably better. You're not likely to have your organs havested. But "a million people" isn't the problem.
"The USSR is bad for its people."
"What about Jim Crow?"
It's also worth noting that there is a bipartisan criminal justice reform movement in the U.S. that is critical of the U.S. government at various levels, so, no, it's not apples to apples.
Since China is so big anything they'll do will affect a huge number of people, even if it's not excessive.
This resemblance doesn't make a lot of sense.
Imprisoning someone for drug charges after due process is not the same as imprisoning someone for being the wrong ethnicity.
The moral weight of a life does not change based on the population of a country.
I feel like these statements are pretty close to being axiomatic.