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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

China is a big growing market and the CCP cleverly share a huge piece of the pie with Western companies. Western Democracies are growth addict and China is their dealer.

Another "problem" is that despite its corruption and autocracy, the CCP still manages to make life better for the average Chinese. On the street it is not a hopeless hell, so right now giving up some of their freedom looks like a good deal to them.

So even if Apple manage to break free from its manufacturing lock in, that's a lot of general inertia to go against. Also, considering that Apple approach to privacy is more and more at odd in the Western World, they have enough on their plate already.

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> right now giving up some of their freedom looks like a good deal to them.

Getting that freedom back once the deal sours will be very hard, and get much harder each year as surveillance and repression grow.

As much as this seems like a foreign concept to westerners, most Chinese citizens (outside of the European provinces) simply do not care about it the way westerners do.

To GP's point, their lives have and continue to improve, with the fastest growing middle class this decade. And before you project western ideals on China and start doomsaying about their impending economic collapse, understand that people have been saying that for a decade too.

I was not aware the desire for freedom (of speech, and otherwise) was such a uniquely Western ideal.

And it's easy not to care about it - until its absence is used against you. At that point, it changes from an ideal, to a very pragmatic matter (ask the Uyghurs or Tibetans). But by then it's too late.

The history of freedom of speech is rooted in western philosophy, right down to it's origins in Greek and English cultures.

Yeah, that's human nature. A lot of people were fairly satisfied even behind the Iron Curtain for a time before the economic dysfunction became too apparent.

Yet even then as now, we have every right to project and even attempt to impose these "western" ideals of individual human rights on systems that try to deny them from any one individual.

The only "western" thing about them is that the particular framework of discourse we currently use to describe these values was born here. Yet those values are, or should be, universal. I refuse to take any bullshit claiming otherwise from any collectivist ideology, with or without Chinese characteristics. They have no legitimacy in overriding the rights of an individual based on any braindead ideology or concept of an essence of a society or culture, historical dialectics or whatever.

Right, but it will be several generations before that even becomes a possibility. Right now you have the famine generation who remembers how terrible things used to be, and will be content as long as things are and continue to improve.

Perhaps. Then again, people don't often get, for example, how brutish even Western Europe was pre-1945. But realistically, yeah, not during the current generation of people in power.

The next generation looks worrying, too, and authoritarian systems certainly can persist and are able to adapt over time. Yet they are always brittle in many ways. It sure looks like Chinese leaders know this, too.

With the caveat that people are essentially forced to conform to the model of "average Chinese." I would conjecture that many Chinese do not know what regional, cultural, or ethnic indigenous groups they belong to because the pressure to conform to the Han majority is so great that their parents or grandparents self-censored when talking to their children.

It's also been repeated many times but it bears repeating that in Xinjiang China is attempting to erase the culture of ethnic Uighur people on a mass scale. China previously did a similar attack on Tibetan culture. This is not good. It is a terrible crime.

> the CCP still manages to make life better for the average Chinese

Only if you are an average Chinese that toes the party line, and even then you've got to be careful. Otherwise, if you are Christian, Muslim, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhist, or any other ideology that threatens the communist monopoly on authority then you are 'disappeared' and your organs end up in some rich Westerner or a research lab.

It is a false comparison to look at whom tyranny benefits. Tyranny always benefits someone, else there wouldn't be a tyrant. The real question is who does the tyranny harm.

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