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Comment by cybersnowflake | Hacker News Reader

A lot of superdefensive people over at quora everytime you ask a question about china.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry.

The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’ of western culture.

Plus there is a large group of astroturfers constantly scanning the web for mentions of China (aka “50 cent army”).

I don’t blame the individuals for holding these views but it’s something to always be conscious of when reading anything online about China. And I say that as someone who loves their country and people, just not their cultural controls.

Western media likes to portray asians as either brutes or poor or stupid or nerds.

I found that comment a bit bizarre, too, as an American.

Many (most?) people in America simply don’t care about this or have any general curiosity about the world outside of them. America is the land of fast food and unsustainable cheap beef; we have a president that denies climate change, so it’s no wonder that there is simply no interest in understanding sustainable fishing by a large portion of the population, regardless of which country is succeeding at it.

That is much different than some kind of conspiracy like that post implied. I think it’s actually worse than a conspiracy because it shows widespread ignorance and no desire to seek out the information or analyze the food we eat and it’s impact on the environment. America doesn’t need a conspiracy to hide this, they won’t seek it out anyway.

Americans work longer hours and save less than most other developed nations. Plus they don’t have extensive social safety nets. If you’re struggling to get by it’s hard to be curious about the world. Also the country is ginormous.

This seems like a ridiculous hypothesis.

America works longer hours, but not the most. Canadians save even less than Americans and have more debt.

And the US has one of the highest median incomes in the world (with a few exceptions).

For income, one interesting metric would be the distribution. How much do most people make?

Because the US is also a developed country where 15$ an hour with pretty much no coverage is considered "good" in some parts (ie good enough to work as a Facebook content moderator rather than making Big Macs at the local McDonald's)

Edit: I might be a bit rusty on US social safety net & health benefits

Of course Americans aren't in general interested in fish farms. Most Chinese are equally unlikely to know anything about their country's aquaculture development (not to mention sustainable ones). I don't believe the sarcasm is literally aimed at people's ignorance, but more at prevailing general notions (and closed-mindedness) about anything China related. The writer has a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge and still lives in Cambridge. He is entitled to his opinion of what he thinks as biases in the Western media. To me the "biases" much more reflect what the media think that their readers would like to read and believe than a conspiracy to "mislead" their readers.

Steve Jobs once said that when he was young, he was convinced that most TV was a conspiracy to make people stupid; but when he got older, he realized the truth was much worse: TV is just giving people what they want.

China today is in many ways very much like the U.S. in the middle of the 20th Century. New technologies and markets are creating rapid, wide-spread growth in living standards. At the same time, government and media encourage a culture of national pride bordering on paranoia, combined with intense pressure to conform. The U.S. grew out of it and I hope China does too.

It seems there's a lot of blame put on "the media" because there is a common mindset that someone else ("the media") is responsible for informing everyone, rather than anyone taking on any kind of personal responsibility of informing themselves. This manifests a lot in regards to Asian countries where many westerners (specifically Americans, possibly others idk) get the impression that China/Asia is nothing but a bunch of uncivilized villages, and they never learn otherwise (because they never educate themselves and/or "the media" never educates them).

And I don't think it is just astroturfers, either. Given the above paragraph, I think it's understandable that many Chinese become quite defensive about the fact that they/their countrymen aren't, in fact, savages. I spent some time living in Asia, and even just from that (without any stronger roots like growing up there or having a culture based there), even I personally became quite frustrated and 'defensive' when having to constantly inform my American friends that yes, they do have electricity and running water in Singapore. I can imagine that someone actually from those places would be even more defensive.

> having to constantly inform my American friends that yes, they do have electricity and running water in Singapore

I’m afraid to ask where in America is that common sentiment about Singapore. The only misconception I’ve ever heard about Singapore is being executed for possessing chewing gum.

I used to work at a very large (and reasonably well-educated) company that had coworkers from everywhere (LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, NYC, etc) and it was quite a common misconception amongst almost all of them (and to be fair, I also met a handful of Europeans who thought the same). Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.

I don’t think you would ever hear something like that in Seattle. I’m guessing deep south somewhere?

One of my Seattle coworkers was one of the specific people who I was thinking of when writing the above comment, actually.

I think it's less common now due to stuff like pictures of Marina Bay Sands going viral over the past several years, as well as movies like Crazy Rich Asians "educating" people that Singapore is a modern city. But around ~2010, not so much.

I’m still not seeing it. A lot of my generations introduction to Singapore was via articles like wired’s Disney Land with the Death Penalty (still banned in Singapore to this very day). The Singapore being apart of China is even weirder for someone who knew nothing about Singapore (why would they even know it was populated by mostly ethnic Chinese?).

You're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

I didn’t say the article had problems, but Singapore lacking electricity wasn’t one of them.

I think you are making the classic nerd mistake of assuming the average person has done as much self educating as you have.

I heard they don't even have internet in the deep south.

Pretty sure that was true when I was living there (unless 300 bps model dual up counts).

> Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.

Yeah, that does not surprise me. Americans are not always that great at global geography.

I'm not sure why that is. Of course the country is huge, and American culture is such a dominant force that it is not so hard to live your entire life and never learn much (anything?) about a relatively small city-state far away in Asia. If you've never met anyone from Singapore, this doesn't surprise me at all.

It still feels like something that the US should be better at as a nation, though.

The tone is honestly understandable. It pains me to bring up this cliched point, but is the US media not constantly telling us that China is hostile, China is plotting? As someone with a foot in both worlds, US coverage of China is _at least_ equally warped. It's funny; to my parents and relatives in China I'm perceived as having a US bias, but everywhere else I get characterized as being too Chinese.

It's hard for me to emphasize enough how little typical Westerners understand about Asia. It goes both ways but I think they're doing a better job of it - at least in my opinion, China appreciates US culture much more than the US appreciates Chinese culture.

>It's funny; to my parents and relatives in China I'm perceived as having a US bias, but everywhere else I get characterized as being too Chinese.

Haha, I can relate. I'm as white as they come but I spent some time living in Singapore and traveling the rest of Asia. In Asia I was obviously "the American", but when I got home to the US I can remember a few distinct times where I was called a "wannabe asian" or something similar just because I was talking about how phenomenal public transit is in major Asian metros compared to the abysmal state of US public transit.

I am as "egg" as they come (white on the outside and yellow in the middle) but I am consistently abused by Chinese trolls. I love China but loathe the Chinese trolls.

Americans are way more defensive in preserving their perception of China whereas Chinese are removed from the political machinations and marginally curious about US culture at best

In other parts of “the west” nobody is deathly afraid of being disappeared by the Chinese government and just raves about how energetic Shanghai is

I think Americans are the outliers here, over emphasizing the darkest parts of China and should consider re-evaluating.

> It's hard for me to emphasize enough how little typical Westerners understand about Asia.

I bet the typical human knows very little about life and culture outside of their specific environment. A typical city-dweller knows little about rural life even in their own region, and vice-versa.

It's weird how easily we fall into a trap of saying "look how ignorant x people are". I mean, of course, it's a big world, and we're busy, so it's pretty hard to not be ignorant.

Maybe a bigger mistake is thinking that "Media" (news etc?) is an education system. It's not and maybe it's not supposed to be. We need to come up with a better system/expectation/culture around continuous education, but even in the best case that can only apply to the subset of the population that has the time and resources and interest to take part.

> I bet the typical human knows very little about life and culture outside of their specific environment. A typical city-dweller knows little about rural life even in their own region, and vice-versa.

I think this is certainly true, but at the same time, I've never met an American (even an otherwise 'uneducated' one), who was under the impression that London or Berlin are backwoods villages that struggle to keep the lights on, whereas I have certainly met people that think Hong Kong is. So then the question becomes "yes people are generally unaware, but what is it about Asia specifically that makes it seem like there is an even larger lack of awareness compared to somewhere like Europe?"

In regards to the rest of your comment: I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think it comes down to "time or resources". Some of it does just come down to personal habits/preferences. Without passing any judgement, there are plenty of people who spend their evenings watching The Bachelorette when they could just as easily be using that time to watch The Travel Channel (or Discovery Channel if it was still actually educational), but they actively choose not to. I think that's a societal thing much more than it is a time or resources constraint.

Maybe it's because of historical ties to Europe, both a partially shared culture and history?

As for the asymmetry. The US has been considered one of two, then the only, global superpower for the last 70 years, inundating the whole world with their culture the whole time.

Reminds me of a course on models, where they talked about "celebrities". Those who are seen by and influence most people, but don't know and aren't influenced by most of said people (might need to clarify that)

When the US was a backwoods nation, London and Berlin were world capitals, and Hong Kong was a backwater fishing village, so American culture does not have the same ingrained respect for Hong Kong that it does for European cities. That being said, I don't know if you are using Hong Kong as a stand in for major Chinese cities, but Hong Kong emigres make up a disproportionate amount of ethnic Chinese American immigrants, and the way many of them talk about the mainland, one might think mainland China is having a problem with the keeping the lights one.

At the founding of the US, China was the #1 economy in the world. This view of the world among Europeans is partially based of racism and racist accounts of the world going unchecked.

The most investment-worthy economies on the planet have been in Asia for the past couple centuries (if you understand buying the dip), this fact is an economic threat to Europeans with a zero-sum view of global capitalism (has been for at least 2 centuries). The rest writes itself....

That is sort of the thing. It isn't so much that people don't know as that it doesn't register as important. Hans Rosling ended up devoting much of his life promoting a fact based view of the world after learning first hand that some of the absolute top students in Sweden had an obsolete world view. The West is used to being "the first world" were most important things happen. But increasingly we are the ones "on the other side". In most of the West large government programs aren't on the table, so that doesn't register as important to us. I am not even sure there is much that can be done about it. It is literally history in the making really.

> In most of the West large government programs aren't on the table, so that doesn't register as important to us. I am not even sure there is much that can be done about it. It is literally history in the making really.

Well said....I'd agree that not much can be done based on the current nature of both political and public/personal discourse, but can the quality of this discourse not be improved? From where I sit, this is quite literally the biggest problem, and I see very little initiative from any camp to improve it. On the contrary, there are plenty of people who are in positions where they could make a difference, but seem to be completely unable to even consider the idea that there is even a problem in this area.

History in the making indeed!

> I'd agree that not much can be done based on the current nature of both political and public/personal discourse, but can the quality of this discourse not be improved?

Probably. But I also don't think the discourse matter as much as it used to. It used to be that to have a voice you had to build something. So the discourse was meaningful as in reflected what was going to happen. Today everyone has a voice and therefor the discourse more reflects whatever people want it to be but not necessarily what happens. That is why we can discuss things seemingly forever while they largely remain the same.

In that sense I think Rosling was right in refusing to be negative. Not, as some people think, because he thought everything was getting better but to show that they could better. When you provide your own signal with substance other people's promises or dismissals become less relevant.

The really hard part is that the West has increasingly lost the narrative. So now we have to translate what China does to our own environment. We want the long term thinking, investment and development but not the authoritarianism.

Which is what China did with the whole "Chinese capitalism". No longer did they have to come up with things from scratch in their own system, but could translate from the Western narrative by buying companies or technologies.

So you have to find a way to show people that it can be done in a way that fits into their narrative by taking their concerns seriously.

But honestly for some countries it might be too late. I believe in fairness as something to strive for, but from a greater perspective reality doesn't really care what people think or how things should be. Countries who can't provide things that matter are going to lose, unless they can come up with something else. Which would probably be war, so they still lose.

> Probably. But I also don't think the discourse matter as much as it used to. It used to be that to have a voice you had to build something. So the discourse was meaningful as in reflected what was going to happen. Today everyone has a voice and therefor the discourse more reflects whatever people want it to be but not necessarily what happens. That is why we can discuss things seemingly forever while they largely remain the same.

You're not wrong, but I tend to disagree. I would say because everyone now has a voice, the nature of discourse is more important than ever. And if you look carefully, it tends to be full of delusional thinking. Black and white thinking about things that are extremely nuanced. Opinions stated as facts. Mind reading.

I would say the reason we can never get things done is because almost no one realizes they don't actually know very well what they're talking about. Such people are incredibly easy to divide and conquer.

> The really hard part is that the West has increasingly lost the narrative. So now we have to translate what China does to our own environment. We want the long term thinking, investment and development but not the authoritarianism.

Agreed. We used to be capable of it though. It seems to me figuring out how to regain that capability is to start to look very carefully at exactly what's going on, perhaps assembling a list of commonly believed or published "facts", that aren't actually facts. "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So."

> reality doesn't really care what people think or how things should be

Getting people to realize fundamental truths like this would be a good place to start. I suspect before too long, large amounts of people would start to realize how delusional current Western beliefs are, and then maybe we could finally start to get some change. But as long as everyone is still asleep, I think it's status quo as far as the eye can see, until we are bypassed by the rest of the world, or as you say resort once again to our old standby: war.

I think there's reason for hope, but not until we realize the problem.

This. So much this.

I've spent all my adult life bouncing between the US and China. It's fascinating to see the biases from both sides. In some cases, it's outright propaganda, but most of it is just plain, simple lack of familiarity further fueled by otherwise benign nationalism.

What are the biggest misunderstandings of Chinese culture you encounter from Westerners?

If I could I'd upvote this 100 times, it's funny to see people thinking their side is the "one true side of the story", be it the US or China. If you haven't lived in both worlds and understand values and cultures of both, don't be so quick on your feet to think your existing beliefs are the entire truth.

Didn't you here? American capitalism/democracy won history and now it's over.

I have known and worked with several mainland raised Chinese and there is no doubt that the schools in China teach anti-American propaganda. Whereas America does not teach any anti-Chinese propaganda in their schools.

This is really kind of weird since it was the Americans who provided the Burma-to-China airlift during WWII that allowed China to expel the Japanese from China. Furthermore, if you look at world trade balances since 1978 it is America, and only America, that has carried the burden of an imbalanced trade relationship with China of billions of dollars per year; year after year.

I'm not anti-Chinese in any way, I've traveled through the country three times, but the facts are the facts.

Chinese domestic media threatens to nuke US just any godly day, but saying that, you should also know that quite a number of Chinese media personas were sacked for wrong gestures towards the West in their English language medias, and their military bamboozlers were few times sent to jail over unauthorised threats to USA made in small, nobody known military newspapers.

I heard once that 50 centers were at some point prohibited to do anything English language, to avoid Western ire.

Though, it seems to become much less of a case today.

Chinese domestic media is for the most part trash and it's well understood that it conveys the views of the ruling political class. It has never even pretended to be an unbiased source of information.

As far as the Chinese domestic media threatening to nuke US just any godly day, I highly doubt it and I've never seen this. Their domestic media is much more focused on internal development and accomplishments. It serves the purpose of reminding the people how great the Central Government is, which is the CCP's primary objective. International affairs (even with the U.S) are an afterthought. You won't find nearly the amount of vitriol directed towards the U.S that the U.S media directs towards China.

The US media is also trash. It's a different sort of bias. A bias towards big business.

Show us the links for those things in your comments. I don’t see any of these

"The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them"

But the US is openly hostile towards China (and not just president Trump) - you don't need the Chinese media to notice that. Also, if you follow US media a bit carefully, you'll notice things like the "Pivot to Asia" (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/14/pers-m14.html), the layout of US military bases around China and so on - which, well, kind of constitutes plotting.

Chinese propaganda is definitely part of reason Chinese people online are unusually defensive. However, it doesn't help that a lot of "facts" about China that circulate on the internet are completely false. "Facts" like this one:

> Plus there is a large group of astroturfers constantly scanning the web for mentions of China (aka “50 cent army”).

The 50 cent army is really a China-only thing. I highly doubt that China thinks that the most effective use of their limited number of fluent English speakers is argue with people on Reddit and HackerNews.

They’re running concentration camps for a million people, on the grounds that some small number of them might end up being Islamic terrorists in the future. I don’t think paying a few people to sow discord on Reddit would be the most absurd use of resources they have.

Uyghurs who are devout Muslims impede development and are generally hostile to the Han Chinese. Redditors in America, on the other hand, literally have zero effect on China, so the party doesn't care what they think. Sowing discord might make sense, but it definitely wouldn't come in the form of defending China on internet forums.

> Uyghurs who are devout Muslims impede development and are generally hostile to the Han Chinese

i really want to know if there's any legitimate reason why the uyghurs are being imprisoned and "re-educated". Do they actually post a threat? Media coming out of both sides (US and china) are untrustworthy. The US media paints it as a nazi concentration camps. China calls it reeducation because they want more conformity and prevent civil unrest (and that sounds pretty reasonable, if the uyrghurs are really plotting etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Xinjiang_conflict

Thanks! That was quite enlightening. I barely heard any western media coverage of this riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_Ürümqi_riots

They’re pretty unambiguously concentration camps. The Uyghurs aren’t getting gassed yet, and maybe China never plans to go that far, but if you watch the BBC’s footage from inside, the sanitized version China wants to show the world is still very bad. They don’t even bother pretending that everyone in the camps has done something wrong.

(But that doesn’t mean China fabricated the underlying issue; they really do face a large problem with Uyghur terrorism, with many attacks having multiple casualties in the past decade.)

I got downvoted here on HN for saying things like "living in China isn't so bad. " A huge number of people on this site think it's something akin to North Korea.

I grew up in China and had all my education in China up until my undergrad. I got my PhD in a top US school. I consider myself highly educated even in US standards. When I was in China, I was very concerned about my country and my government. I was worried and feeling hopeless of my country. Man, was I young and naive. I have since lived in the US for almost ten years. Five years for my PhD and almost five years for a high tech job. Throughout the years, I have learnt what's called bias, political games, double standards and western media hypocrisy. I can browse a free internet as opposed to a "censored" internet in the China. However, instead of hating my government more, I start to appreciate my government deeply. I have seen changes of my country in the past thirty years. Without the leadership of my government and the CCP, none of these would be possible. These comments are from a highly educated person who has deep and extensive experience of both countries, can and is capable of thinking independently. And these are not only my opinion, these are consensus of all my educated generation working in the US. If this is something bewildering to you who only consume information from western media, I don't blame you. I encourage you to visit and see for yourself.

I can appreciate your point, but I think it'd be good to say why. I'm European, so for example I found the GFW to be a refreshing and ultimately beneficial contribution to the world, simply because it maintains diversity - a global monoculture would cause serious problems. This isn't to say that Chinese policies are right, but rather that going against the West does not automatically signify malign intent. Indeed it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the West, it has so many problems. But what exactly is China's context for so confidently treading it's own path? Is it not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the West? How exactly can that be achieved? I think that is part of the PRC's direction, but not entirely. What are the nuances?

Edit: I feel obliged to point out that supporting the GFW is not that same as supporting Tiananmen Square. In the same way I'm sure supporting Google/Facebook etc does not imply support for the Opium Wars.

The major powers attempting to put roadblocks in the way of China's ascent were quite instrumental in aiding China's decline over the past couple centuries.

I think the trust deficit coming from the East towards the West is more warranted than many in the west like to admit.

The most upvoted answer is probably the most awesome pierce of information I’ve seen in 2019 though, holy socks that’s a great Quora answer.

And it’s the top answer, clearly distinguishable from the answers you’re referring to, which I think is better than most social media, HN included.

There are a lot of snide remarks in that answer, however, detracting from otherwise great information. (Eg what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this?)

> what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this

The snark likely comes from the fact that Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party. They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government policies, while tunnel visioning solely on human rights abuses.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the answer, however. Xinjiang and Tibet are complicated, China has obviously improved their economies and has obviously trampled on human rights. Both of those things can easily coexist (the same could be said about western colonialism, one doesn’t excuse the other).

The western media does report those things, it’s just that the Chinese media only focuses on those pieces from the western media that it wants to be defensive about. Call it tunnel tunnel vision if you will.

I don’t disagree with you that the two can coexist. I’m saying the mainstream publications have skewed most people’s perception of Xinjiang so far out of the realm of reality that they would likely be absolutely shocked if they ever actually set foot there. World class airports, modern agricultural techniques, a high speed rail system that would put the ones in NY or London to shame [1]. Stray from the “dystopian Xinjiang” narrative and you’re automatically branded a 50c army propagandist.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a sensational exposé about alleviating poverty through technology-driven, sustainable farming in Xinjiang, in a mainstream publication. On the other hand, I don’t have enough hairs on my head to count the number of condemnations and denouncements.

This is likely the cause of frustration that you see seeping through in answers such as the one posted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHCs582uUx8

So is your argument that they should be grateful for what they e been given? Because this is an absurd argument. Nowhere is it written that they can’t have both be treated like the rest of the country and economic prosperity like the rest of the country.

This is just a bullshit way of justifying oppression using the economic development they would have received anyway.

People make the same absurd arguments about slavery, and lack of suffrage, and it’s just as obviously bullshit in those cases as it is in this one.

I recommend reading comments in this thread:

"Tibet used to be a feudal serfdom with the Lamas lording over everyone else. Most Dalai Lamas were murdered by their rivals for control over the country. So yeah, of course the Lamas are upset that they're no longer in power."

"I’m of the opinion that it’s impossible to achieve economic progress with social upheaval, threats of separatism and terrorist attacks. Economic progress is incompatible with the others.

It's the extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunities which drive destabilizing forces such as these.

Prosperity by means of terrorism then separatism is the path offered by the WUC and ETIM.

Prosperity by means of forced “re-education” in vocational skills and poverty alleviation plans [1] is the one offered by the CCP.

I think it’s the CCP’s gambit that when there is economic prosperity in the region, there will be room for expanding human rights. There won’t be a need or desire to separate from a system which you are actively benefiting from and when that threat goes away, so do the armoured patrols and surveillance mechanisms.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-poverty-xinjiang/china...

Meanwhile California can't even put together a high speed rail line between SF and LA because of Human rights.

Your right to have good public transit is being violated by someone else's right to not have a rail go through their lawn. Protect that man's right to a lawn at all costs.

human rights, property rights, labor costs, and a lot of slow and costly government procurement processes

Re-reading my comment, I should have actually written “I don’t disagree with you that the two can coexist, but only in certain contexts”.

I’m of the opinion that it’s impossible to achieve economic progress with social upheaval, threats of separatism and terrorist attacks. Economic progress is incompatible with the others.

It's the extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunities which drive destabilizing forces such as these.

Prosperity by means of terrorism then separatism is the path offered by the WUC and ETIM.

Prosperity by means of forced “re-education” in vocational skills and poverty alleviation plans [1] is the one offered by the CCP.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-poverty-xinjiang/china...

It didn’t really work for the British, it didn’t work for the Afrikaners, it didn’t really work for the Americans, why do the Chinese think they will get it right?

If I understand the point you’re trying to make correctly, you’re likening China’s claim to Xinjiang to that of the historical colonial powers?

Because if we’re going to go down that road, I have to warn you that the Xinjiang story is not nearly as black and white as the British, Dutch or American stories.

I’m pretty aware of the history: the Qing brought the Uighurs into north Xinjiang to genocide the Mongolians, who already killed a bunch of Han living there already. Still, again, nothing in history has shown that China is any better at colonizing lands than the west (or even the Russians).

I'm glad you know the history there. It's definitely more convoluted than most people think.

> nothing in history has shown that China is any better at colonizing lands than the west

I agree - I guess historically speaking, China just hasn't colonized enough countries to have a decent sample size.

No. Xinjiang, or whatever its name was, was controlled by the Chinese government more than a thousand years before the Qing dynasty.

China didn't really colonize, if colonization means to move there and enslave the natives.

>They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government policies, while tunnel visioning solely on human rights abuses.

And I'm sure that many folks made the argument that Africans working on plantations in the South had a higher standard of living than where they came from.

Hitler had some great social programs too, what's your point?

> Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party

That’s because it is, and if you visited you wouldn’t be so flippant about it. In large part because a tourist can’t even make a stop in the area without getting their own personal police minder.

It’s little different than North Korea.

I’ve visited Xinjiang in 2006, before the 2008 riots mind you, but it’s just another Chinese province and you wouldn’t know there was trouble going on if it weren’t for the armed police, extra internet fire walling, and so on.

That is not to say there isn’t a problem, but hanging out in Urumqi is definitely nowhere near as interesting as hanging out in Pyongyang.

Tibet is much harder to visit, foreigners have to apply for a permit (which you don’t need to visit Xinjiang).

I prefer the approach to Xinjiang deradicalization over our methods in Iraq and Syria.

I am grateful for these "snide remarks", as to me there is nothing so important and interesting as trying to bring humans out of oppression and suffering (no matter who is the instigator).

Something I found amazing (horrific) when reading the article: what if this writing only sounds snide to us, but not to others? Consider your examples:

> Some of these Uyghurs, Kazakhs are sent to the reeducation camps and they are forced to learn Mandarin Chinese and the latest drip irrigation techniques to save water and reduce costs. Moreover, each village is assigned with one or more communist party members to guide them through to make sure that they don’t mess up the newly cultivated land.

> I mean, the Chinese government has also forced Tibetans to build a massive amount of greenhouses on the Tibetan plateau. Those Tibetans have no time to go to temples for worshipping any more, instead, they have to work in the greenhouses taking care of tomatoes. This is why Dalai Lama is not so happy to hear this.

This is horrific and dystopian to me. But imagine if you believed the Uyghurs/Kazakhs are inferior peoples, and that Tibetan temples/monks are evil. You could read these paragraphs and consider all of this to be positive. I wonder how popular that type of thinking is in China.

> But imagine if you believed the Uyghurs/Kazakhs are inferior peoples, and that Tibetan temples/monks are evil.

That's a big stretch. More likely that

1. The author, like many Han Chinese people, was raised in a completely atheist environment, and just don't put any value on religious activities at all.

2. Again, like in many East Asian countries, Chinese people value/praise hard work above "enjoying life".

So, what you see as horrific and dystopian is seen as progress and a sign of a thriving community.

Woah.

I thought you were being hyperbolic.

Man!

That was a well fleshed out answer. Is Quora always like that? Or is that a one off kind of thing?

One-off. Most stuff on Quora is a thinly veiled advertisement for something - at least when I search for something and end up on Quora.

But there are exceptions - and boy is this article a great example of that.

If you follow the right people you can have a good experience. I try to strike some balance to avoid echo chambers. If you've ever wanted to learn the perspectives on life and fighting of a convicted war criminal/terrorist then Quora's your place.

The thing I absolutely loathe, however are these clickbait answers - always about sex - written by anonymous users and normal answers that - because the photos load before the text - have borderline porn to draw people in. It ruins the site.

Quora is way, way better than say, Yahoo Answers, and rivals AskReddit in its own way. Here are some well fleshed out answers you may like.

https://www.quora.com/What-was-very-useful-when-it-first-cam...

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Gray-codes-used/answer/Steve-B...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-proper-name-for-a-roly-pol...

https://www.quora.com/How-much-damage-does-Marine-1-cause-to...

https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-put-out-candles-in-the-...

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-urban-trees-have-short-lives-co...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-normal-in-your-country-but-wei...

I enjoyed having my perspective on China as a country expanded; I don't hear many positive things about it, and the environmental focus is genuinely refreshing, in stark contrast to my own country's idiocy in that department.

With that said, nothing outweighs their government's human rights violations. Nothing. I know the U.S. has some of its own, but not to an extremity nor scale nor public acceptance that comes anywhere close to that in China.

Both countries are equal in terms of human rights violations. It's not popularized, but the US has a good amount of this stuff as well.

The very existence of America is a human rights violation, vis-a-vis the original inhabitants and African slavery. Not to mention the multitude of similar abuses those same Europeans caused over the rest of the world. China's violations are certainly serious, but it's just not comparable to the sheer extent of the West's.

I was of course only talking about the present and future. That's what matters when it comes to foreign policy.

We are tied to so many treaties and agreements made in the past, that I believe this is not the case.

> China's violations are certainly serious, but it's just not comparable to the sheer extent of the West's.

Within recent history this just isn't true.

In fact I'm not even sure it's true over history going back to the creation of the colonies: Decades spent under communism - millions dead, freedom totally unknown and nothing to show for it. I don't know to assign magnitude to anything like that, but to say they aren't comparable is wrong.

India never had a famine before the British landed on its shores, when all was said and done, they stole over $45 trillion dollars worth of value from that single nation...

I imagine Africa's stolen loot was many times larger (just the gold export records from South Africa are staggering), not even counting the rest of the world. China would have to maliciously work for decades (maybe centuries) to do the same kind of economic damage that Europe did to these regions.

Realize we are comparing the Chinese, who invaded almost nobody in the last 2000 years, to Europeans, who have invaded almost everybody just in the last 500 years. Not even close here....

How many people do you estimate died unnecessarily under Mao?

> the original inhabitants

could say the same about China's history, how many ethnic groups have been genocided because they didn't want to be ruled by the Han

The Dzungar People might disagree, if they were not killed off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide

"Nothing" you say? What about wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with hundreds of thousands killed in the name of lies hidden behind "human rights" narrative?

It's rather glaringly clear that we, Western populations, are constantly fed with biased information from Western media, making us believe that our utopian notion of "human rights" is superb and that we know how to achieve it, at least in theory, while in practice our US-led coalition used these beliefs only to justify its tragic agendas leading to hundreds of thousands of casualties; that's much worse effect than what China induced in Tibet and Xinjiang, no matter how you look at it.

Yet, after all this, we still somehow believe that we have an upper hand in the "human rights" game?

Aparting from political views, it does depend on types of questions are asked to some degree.

Like 'Do China have cars?'

Questions without basic googling. Well, even this type of questions, there are still many people who try to answer it by statistics.

Usually either:

1. Paid Chinese State-sponsored propaganda/troll [1]

2. Super nationalist Chinese person (most are) either from China or abroad who take major offense when "their" views are challenged.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/17/how-to-spot-a-state-fun...

Besides being a broad generalization, your point #2 applies to basically anybody on the internet who has their views challenged, to be honest. Doesn't need to be a paid troll or nationalist at all.

I'm Chinese, I think the trolls (50 cents army) is mostly just a joke/meme. But I might be wrong.

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