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Comment by point78 | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully, the west doesn't budge until China stops commuting human rights violations (won't happen but would be nice)

In 2010 I asked two different party members* about the western Muslim relations. Both had the same answer that it was the same as the black people prison population in the US, and a red herring the US used for leverage. My Chinese and their English was never good enough to discuss things like due process. At any rate, the pressure on human rights needs to come from countries other than the US.

* being a party member not quite what you’d expect. Requires being in the top 10% of your HS class plus learning a bit of propaganda, and agreeing to harsher punishment for committing crimes. The ones I spoke to were successful business people, and willing to criticize the party.

Maybe I'm a cynic but I don't believe that's the real issue. We're friendly with plenty of countries that do far worse. I think it's about economics and strategic interests.

What other countries USA is friend with has concentration camps? Turkey and Saudi Arabia have problems but I believe human rights situation is better there than in China. What else?

Australia has one on Nauru despite repeated condemnation from various international bodies.

Referring to Australia's offshore immigration detention facilities as "concentration camps" in this context is incredibly misleading. There is absolutely no fair comparison to be made between Australia's detention of illegal immigrants in these facilities and China's human rights abuses. Regardless of your views on the human rights implications of Australia's mandatory detention policies, labelling them as such is dishonest.

Nauru isn't anywhere close to that. According to a close friend who visited, it's not really that bad of a place. I think that there has been a lot of political play around it to drum it up as worse than it is.

Interesting perspective. Do you also have a close friend who visited Chinese concentration camps for comparison? Why do you think one is drummed up by political play while the other is not?

At least we can view the detention centers on AU without a satellite....that says more than enough

What about Guantanamo Bay?

It is USA. I'm asking about other countries.

The USA itself has by far the highest incarceration rates of any developed country, over 5x that of China. In certain demographics this rate is as high as 1/3. By the numbers this is more than what the Uighers experience in China, and e.g. Europeans can and do criticize the USA relentlessly for it.

If you're wondering how people in China justify the government's treatment of the Uighers, the answer isn't that they have different moral instincts than you. They justify it to themselves in the exact same way you justify America's incarceration rate to yourself. (If you're thinking that it's different, because what they're doing just feels dystopian and evil, while we're just doing the best we can, obviously realize that this is pure tribal bias. Others might have the reverse associations.)

Of course, what I am doing is textbook whataboutism. But that is the correct response to a claim that some foreign country is uniquely evil.

The Uighers do not have access to due process and a trial. I find that a glaring, obtuse omission in your argument besides doing whataboutism. It is a terrible situation in the US in regards to incarceration and our politicians (Bernie Sanders for example) openly, freely, fearlessly oppose it. I urge you to take a deeper look into China's state powers and complete lack of liberty, due process or law (yes, there are courts and written law in China but they do not appease the dissidents of the CCP's agenda).

What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals, sending them all to re-education camps and then building HUGE projects to house them - all sponsored by the Federal government with strict orders from Washington, and the entire operation carried out by military and special police forces, setting up checkpoints in Seattle. Oh and I forgot that the threat is simply to sell your organs if you squeak and then kill you.

You're completely right that there's a big difference in how much control the government has over the legal system. I'm just trying to communicate how the end result looks similarly justifiable to the people in each country. After all, that end result is what we are upset about.

> What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals

You're not really engaging with the example -- you substituted it for another. I'm sure if you proposed locking up 1.4 million people from Shanghai for no good reason, the average Chinese citizen would react in horror, while they would dismiss what is actually happening exactly as you did, as a "regional regression of a particular demographic".

My bad, I see the problem with the Seattle analogy. Let's just say locking down people of Alaska (remote, has some culture). It would still be equally outrageous.

Due process and a trial has not done Americans any good because the laws are unjust.

Problem with your answer is that I'm not from USA. My question was about other countries not USA.

Lastly, two wrongs don't make right.

I think the issue is that China wants to be #1 while America doesn't want to be #2. No one wants to be #2.

Not nearly on the same level economically though. The problem is that China both denies basic human rights and is big enough to push these viewpoints in the west. The same can't be said of minor trading partners.

I don't agree. The Saudis have been extremely effective at pushing Wahhabism across the world. In many places traditional (usually more tolerant) forms of Islam have basically disappeared.

The Saudis are not a minor trading partner or minor player in the global economy though. For decades they've been the cornerstone of the global fossil fuel economy and the controlling member of OPEC.

While the US has been able to heavily shift off of Saudi oil more recently, now the Chinese are picking up that supply and are becoming increasingly dependent on the Saudis. That's a remarkable position of power & influence across multiple decades, to have superpowers vested in your stability and well-being (the well-being of the House of Saud specifically).

Very few countries have ever had the sort of oil-derived slush fund (which enabled the Wahhabism push) that the Saudis have had since the early 1970s. However, for the Saudis those days are ending, as their population has skyrocketed and their oil output has not kept up (and can't), so they're under persistent budget crunch and their domestic population is increasingly growing restless as stagnation (more realistically they're seeing rapidly declining average standards of living) and unemployment become serious problems. Saudi Arabia's population has doubled since 1990, while their private industry has gone nowhere and their oil output has been near the ceiling. All you have to do is run that population growth forward another 20-30 years and it's obvious what's about to happen. The loose funding capabilities of the Saudis will decline markedly in the coming decades.

US dependency on Saudi Arabia is not just about our access to their oil. Due to quite prescient agreements dating back all the way to 1974 is the reason that Saudi Arabia, to this day, only sells oil in the dollar. [1] We made them a deal that seemed too good to be true. They simply sell their oil in the dollar (and only the dollar) while investing any surplus resources in US treasuries, and we'll provide them with military aid and equipment. Essentially getting a free military alliance with the strongest military power in the world in exchange for nothing.

Of course it's not nothing. Imagine we do things some might consider a bit dubious. Perhaps accepting the running of a deficit in the trillions of dollars, or injecting trillions of dollars into the economy and calling the resultant price inflation growth. The natural consequences of these sort of actions are things such as inflation and a weakened dollar on the international scene.

But now here's the interesting thing. Imagine we do create inflation or weaken the dollar and so there is a surplus of USD in circulation and things start to increase in price. And now imagine a country wants to go buy oil from Saudi Arabia ( though now a days, it's not just Saudi Arabia but the majority of oil producing nations ). The first thing they need to do is accumulate the USD. And since they're getting less oil for the same USD (due to said inflation and/or a weakened USD) they need to take even more USD out of circulation than usual. They then go buy their oil. Saudi Arabia then ends up using that USD to secretly buy US treasuries. That money is now back in the hands of the government and out of circulation and, like magic, the inflation and/or weakening of the dollar starts to revert.

---

This was an extremely clever strategy. This is why things like China and/or Russia increasingly becoming buddy buddy with Saudi Arabia is such a big deal. It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement). But the petrodollar also ended up creating a bit of a funny relationship. We thought we were using Saudi Arabia, but ultimately we ended up dependent on them as our economic behavior took them for a given. So we now have the nation with the largest military force in world and the largest economy in the world behaving in an oddly deferent way to one little nation in the Mideast.

So I do fully agree with you - the next 20-30 years are going to be incredibly interesting. But not just for Saudi Arabia. The interplay between oil, economic power, and all of these other major issues (let alone huge wildcards like space) mean we're in for one terrifically unpredictable and interesting future.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia...

It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement).

By sheer coincidence I’m sure, just before Iraq got invaded, Saddam was planning to start pricing oil in EUR.

I have to agree with geowwy on this one. I think the issue is more that China hasn't been playing by the US's normal business rules for a while now, while most other bad actors the US is friendly with do play. For example, currency manipulation, outright IP theft, state-sponsored propping up of US business clones, mandatory dual-ownership of companies, and now strong-arming US companies if they want unfettered access to the China market. Enough influential people's feathers got ruffled to get the ball rolling, which just happened to coincide with worse-than-usual human rights violations.

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