Title should read:
"Zuckerberg’s Anti-China Rhetoric Roils (Chinese) Facebook Employees"
At any rate, I applaud Zuckerberg for actually having a spine when it comes to China, unlike Tim Cook.
"Zuckerberg’s Anti-China Rhetoric Roils (Chinese) Facebook Employees"
At any rate, I applaud Zuckerberg for actually having a spine when it comes to China, unlike Tim Cook.
What spine? Facebook is blocked in China. It costs him nothing to take this stance. If Tim Cook tried the same, China could seize the factories and Apple would have no product to sell.
I'm sure in private Tim Cook would admit that Apple needs to diversify their manufacturing out of China as a hedge against the risk of a hostile government there. That is a process which cannot happen overnight, however, and so in the mean time it's best to tiptoe around the sleeping dragon.
This is exemplified in his address on free speech several weeks ago - trying to position Facebook as a defender of American values (free speech and human rights) versus big bad China.
Make no mistake, if Zuckerberg actually cared about the values of a free society he would fix his own platform. Don’t applaud him for throwing shade at an even more authoritarian regime.
The Chinese government was not elected by the Chinese, is not in any sense a legitimate representative of the Chinese, and has no more right to rule over China than I do. Conflating criticism of the CCP with criticism of the country that they illegitimately rule is CCP propaganda techniques 101.
You may think the Chinese people chose poorly, but I think it is clear that they definitely chose.
And to put this in some context, China has had an authoritarian government for the past 2000 years, so it's not like choosing an authoritarian regime is that much of a change. You might as well pick the authoritarians who are less corrupt. And post-Mao the CCP has been pretty effective in building the country.
[0] traditionally spelled "Kuomintang" but Wade-Giles is a horrible romanization. You think you know how to pronounce it after looking at it, but you're wrong; it's actually worse than just having a bunch of characters, because at least you know you don't know how to pronounce them.
IMO China is not ruled by a legitimate government, the Chinese government should not be granted the honor of national sovereignty any more than North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, or the like. Geographic regions ruled by gangs and thugs should not considered legal states. (Just my opinion man, I know the law doesn't agree with me.)
A government's job is to serve as many of its people as much as possible for as long as possible, so playing devil's advocate, why isn't the legitimacy of a government judged by how good it's doing its job vs. how it came into power?
Historically speaking there have been plenty of prosperous societies that was ruled by "illegitimate" governments (and I'm not even saying China is one), and plenty of government that was put into power by the people (actually the original, populist CCP government is one example) that ended up being disastrous.
Even if we want to always put democracy on a pedestal, how do we qualify it? Does only direct democracy count? What about representative democracy? How "representative" can it be before it's no longer democratic, i,e electoral college? Do any of those actually matter?
Absolutely. But if you are referring to what's happening in HK, debate on evidence of concentration camp aside, lately many of the protestors have been anything but "peaceful".
That does tend to happen when peaceful protests get violently suppressed. It's extremely difficult to not defend yourself against violence.
There were no serf class, but of course there were peasants/farmers of course since someone had to grow food.
Within that definition there’s certainly some ambiguity as to what counts as a “good enough” election to confer legitimacy. Edge cases would be things like Singapore, Russia or Hitler’s Germany... but Communist China is not close to an edge case.
Says who? Is there an universal law declared by someone at the beginning of time saying that?
Trying hard to prop up the motherland in the public eye?