China sharply expands mass labor program in Tibet | Hacker News Reader

China sharply expands mass labor program in Tibet

reuters.com

444 pointsadventured425 comments

The whole Tibet situation is such a horrible one.

From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China.

But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff.

Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are going to lecture them about occupying a territory.

For China Tibet is a buffer between India and them and it is where most of their water comes from, so they're never going to let any foreign entity control it. Seems out of the question.

I live in a European area that was 'assimilated' into a bigger country and forced to use their language and customs. This was over 150 years ago for my area now. And most people don't remember it and just go with the flow of the country they are born in.

I hope for all Tibetans that there will be some sense of regional pride remaining (and allowed) as they find a way to live as part of China.

>From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China.

Yeah, kinda like Hawaii. (Not to mention Native Americans' lands, civilization, and culture). Or, well, Mexico.

Sure, it's, "whataboutism". Which is an improvement on the our-shit-doesn't-smell-besides-that-was-back-a-while-ago-so-we-get-to-keep-it-now "Western perspective". Or the "sure-we-can-get-to-our-shady-stuff-but-at-some-other-time-now-let's-talk-as-if-only-those-bad-countries-do-such-things".

>Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are going to lecture them about occupying a territory.

Yeah, that's the problem I'm talking about.

>For China Tibet is a buffer between India and them and it is where most of their water comes from, so they're never going to let any foreign entity control it. Seems out of the question.

Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be). Populations whose countries have wars and bases and proxy states and/or colonies all over the world (where they have absolutely no place to be), are in a "glass house" place to throw stones at what China does in its immediate borders...

so if a reformed mob boss sees other mobsters extorting people, he cannot step in and stop them because he did the same thing in the past?

every culture has done horrible things in the past. does that mean no one should try to prevent modern crimes against humanity?

i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands

It sounds like deflection, false equivalency and whataboutism. Discussions about the CCP frequently devolve into these tropes.

>so if a reformed mob boss sees other mobsters extorting people, he cannot step in and stop them because he did the same thing in the past?

Reformed? LOL.

>i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands

It's the ethical imperative of:

- not being a hypocrite,

- being the change you want to see in the world, and putting your house in order first

- the old-mob-boss not getting to keep his illegal riches (not to mention his old ways) and claim to be reformed,

- and not using the plights of "poor X" as an excuse to attack their opressor, when you don't really care about poor X, you have opressed and are still opressing others all over the world, and you have no problems with other opressors of third parties if they are allies...

Without self-reflection and equal corrective moves on the finger-pointing side, the finger-pointing at China is merely used as a political weapon to justify aggression and pressure against them in the ongoing trade/influence war.

As for the finger pointers, those higher-up cultivate this for this exact purpose (as popular support for their hawkish plans), and the masses just point at the "enemy of the day" as they are conditioned...

As for the "pious excuses to sit on our hands" that's what happens anyway, nobody is actually doing anything. The one's that do are those who control armies and policy - and those have their own agendas, could not give less fucks for justice for Tibet.

This why I say pair criticism of China with penance.

For example, give up Puerto Rico and Hawaii but recognize Taiwan at the same time.

China may not officially give a shit, but Europe and many former colonies should.

Puerto Rico does not want to be "given up". It wants, and deserves, statehood. A so-called "independent" Puerto Rico would be nothing more than an impoverished client of the United States.

That might be true, but then China get's to say:

> Taiwan deserves provincehood so it isn't a impoverished client of the PRC.

Now, Taiwan is quite rich, but still, optics matter. Better to give Puerto Rico tons of reparations if you are worried about it being impoverished and dependent.

so you are fine with allowing all the human atrocities by CCP because of what usa has done in the past? i cannot make heads or tails of this perspective

as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2, and didn't use its past injustices as an excuse to remain silent

>so you are fine with allowing all the human atrocities by CCP because of what usa has done in the past? i cannot make heads or tails of this perspective

Let me reverse the question: are you fine with selective-outrage against all the human atrocities by CCP be used as a tool for foreign policy to further interests/help in new attrocities?

At the same time when those using those (to help their policies) have commited themselves, and continue to commit similar attrocities?

I'd say condemn all attrocities, don't be selective.

Else I can't make heads or tails of this perspective. It's basically "my country right or wrong, plus, I will condemnt whatever country my country's foreign interests want to target this period and ignore what others that are allies do".

>as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2

Well, not that much. For one, its businesses gave the logistics assistance that helped it go through. And few batted an eye in such cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-respons...

"The American public discovered the full extent of the Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II. And as historians struggled to understand what had happened, attention increasingly focused on the inadequate American response and what lay behind it. It remains today the subject of great debate."

and do you think it was good the usa did so little about the holocaust?

there are a number of atrocities around the world today, but nothing approaches the scale of the ccp

Wait, are Hawaiians put into forced labour camps?

Can they own property? Businesses?

Vote?

Can the run for Congress, Senate, President?

Are they taught that they cannot have their heritage?

"whataboutism'.

Yes, they are "free", in their old land, under the laws and federal government of the US...

" the laws and federal government of the US"

Under their laws. They are equal to everyone else.

The Japanese were interned during WWII, illegals are in camps now, and the Chinese will likely be soon. Puerto Ricans STILL can't vote.

Its important to build your argument from sturdy facts, so that big bad reality can't huff and puff and blow it all down!

‘Illegals’ are not in forced labor camps and that sort of equivalence is just gross. Immigrants to Europe and the US need a place to stay while their cases are processed, with the increases in immigration (especially in Europe) it is difficult to keep up with. Does the west need to do better? Absolutely but stating that these immigrant camps are like forced labor camps is deliberately misleading and just flat out wrong.

Additionally - it hasn’t been until recently that Puerto Rico has favored statehood (over free association).

What is the difference in real terms between the border camps and forced labour camps? The labour? Taking bets that these camps introduce forced labour like the Nazi camps did. Odds stop at the decade.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac...

The difference is the reason to be in the camps. Breaking country's laws is generally viewed as legitimate reason to send someone to prison or camp, while being of a certain ethnicity is not.

Of course, there's an issue of laws that are by themselves are morally reprehensible, like the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany. However, immigration laws are clearly moral and expected to exist in some form or another in any modern country.

I have to say, this distinction is so obvious I'm very surprised that somebody asks this kind of question at all.

> However, immigration laws are clearly moral...

This is not, in fact, universally agreed upon.

It's a question of civics - entering the country is illegal, migrants do that knowingly. FYI they can leave anytime they want, there is a 72 hour clearing process. They are detained due to a transgression of the law, much like anything else. Where we can disagree mostly is the nature of the incarceration etc. - but this is besides the point - China's detention of citizens, arbitrarily, due to their ethnicity or because they simply want to 'move them into another job' is not remotely comparable to the detention of citizens who have broken very clear and stated laws, and of course can leave said detention as they chose.

It's reasonable that some degree of moral relativism can be made WRT China, but on these threads, there is no such thing.

China's arbitrary incarceration of citizens based on their ethnicity is beyond pale, the President should be bringing it up at every occasion, and it should be a pillar of our relations with China, including trade.

> It's a question of civics - entering the country is illegal, migrants do that knowingly.

So was rescuing Jews from the Holocaust, and China's acts against Tibetans and Uighurs. Let's not mistake what's moral with what's legal; they often overlap in a decent society, but that's by no means guaranteed. You can make a case for "immigration laws are moral", but "they're moral because they're the law" isn't that case.

Morality and legality are deeply intertwined.

Conflating the fact that some people face basic detainment (which they can leave quickly at any time by merely choosing to return home) for breaking clear laws ... with 'Putting millions of Jews in Gas Chambers' is not helping the cause.

If we are so deeply concerned about 'legality vs. morality' then I'd imagine the very first issue coming to mind would be the issue of Uyghurs being put in concentration camps by the 100's of thousands, possibly millions, for no reason at all, other than the fact they are Uyghur.

Especially those dying, having their organs harvested and sent to Chinese elite. [1] [2] [3]

Their arbitrary detention due to ethnicity, and the conditions imposed upon them, I think make a very good corollary to the Nazi / Jewish holocaust, worthy of intellectual consideration.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-religiou...

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-is-harvesting-tho...

You're not addressing the point about immigration laws not being universally recognized as moral and just.

What about child migrants? You're meaning to tell me that its morally just to intern preteens because they broke your immigration law? To force children to appear before a judge that are so young that they have to draw a cross as their signature? What's grosser here?

These moral equivalence arguments are futile.

I addressed the issue, not only that, the concern about the 'moral universality' of the border laws isn't very relevant.

We put people in prison for 10 years for stealing cars, and there is no 'universal moral agreement' on the issue.

Migrants are not even being held against their will - they can leave in about 72 hours by filing paperwork. They have knowingly entered the country illegally, and are detained. They can go home essentially when they please.

If families were required to 'wait the Holiday Inn' until their hearing (which I think should be the case, no need to hold them in detention), I suggest few would be concerned, so what matters is not so much the issue of detention, but the conditions. I think that most people would probably agree that conditions should be reasonable but that's an operational issue.

But it's besides the point: the US has borders, and just like any for other nation, those borders have to be respected legally by some means.

But this is a giant distraction from the fact that:

China is arbitrarily putting it's own citizens in totalitarian concentration camp conditions due to their ethnicity.

The 'corollary' would be Trump putting 100 000 Latino American citizens in concentration camps purely due to their ethnicity, with no legal recourse, removed from any communication with their families, their every move, thought, action suppressed as they go through intense 'indoctrination training' daily, for years at a time.

It's unthinkable.

But it doesn't stop there:

China spies and censors each and every citizen, kidnapping students, academics - anyone - who speaks out too vociferously against the regime. They rigorously control all established media to enforce propagandistic measures, and censor or suppress anyone who acts against that system. China does not allow citizens to access information outside the country. They've created a giant, dystopian suppression machine.

The corollary would be Trump closing down CNN, NBC, CBS, then taking governmental control of Fox news, and legally requiring Fox to tout his agenda every day. Trump would then mandate Facebook to censor anyone who speaks out against Trump or the GOP / Government. Trump would insert a team of 'GOP agents' within Facebook to ensure absolute compliance. Any FB user who 'talks funny' would be flagged for future reference (i.e. maybe just a little visit from the local cops will suffice to get them to shut up).

Protests would be met with bullets, all media completely suppressed, no legal action or recourse would be possible. To merely mention the issue could land you in jail.

Of course in this scenario, Trump also has absolute power, does not need to be elected, directly controls the Fed/Monetary System, directly controls all major financial institutions, can amend the constitution essentially at will, has no need for any kind of judicial system which would of course be politically controlled, so he could put his enemies (or whoever) in jail whenever he wants, for whatever reason.

Of course he could direct Verizon, Google, AT&T, Stripe, Amazon to provide him with transactional data for anyone, anywhere on earth at anytime, for any reason.

And all of that is only scratching the surface!

So start justifying that list of transgressions, and when we get down to things like 'North Koreans fleeing to Chine held in less than optimal conditions' ... then we're having a discussion.

First of all, you're looking for the word 'equivalent', not corollary. Secondly, a talented lawyer could make a convincing legal argument for anything. The holocaust was legal. So really, the morality of the act is everything. Sure in practice, children are supposed to be held for 72 hours, but in reality it can be much longer. I'm not sure if I'm addressing your claims because you're using a bunch of big words, and I'm not sure if you're trying to say what they actually mean, so thats what I got.

One is the result of excess immigration - where immigrants fleeing their countries come to hope for a better life in the EU or US. Immigrants are eventually granted asylum or are turned away.

Forced labor camps are created through force or threat of force and can detain people for decades with no recourse.

Judging the past on the standards of the present isn't a productive line of reasoning. Using past mistakes to rationalize further atrocities is beyond regressive.

True. On the other hand, many of those past behaviors that we see as wrong for today were a big part of how we got to our present high standard of living. Doing those bad things was cheaper and faster than less bad methods.

If we are going to tell lower standard of living countries that they need to take the slower or more expensive routes to wealth instead of using the same bad ways we did, we should be using some of our wealth to subsidize those more expensive routes for them.

So what happens next? 300 million people in the USA pull up stakes and move back to their (or ancestors) country of origin out of guilt?

It's not that the US government suddenly decided to be nicer to Native Americans. Rather, they're no longer deemed to be a threat to the United States and barely have anything that can be forcibly taken. In an alternate universe where Native Americans had connections with Islamic extremists, Native American reservations would closely resemble Xinjiang. Buildings getting their windows smashed in is enough to call the National Guard, so I can't imagine what real domestic tension would do to the US.

100 years from now, Xinjiang will most likely be peaceful when the last traditional Uyghurs pass away, and China will no longer have to force assimilation. That doesn't absolve China of its wrongdoings today.

> So like Hawaii?

Are people in Hawaii still getting held at gunpoint to assimilate to whatever American culture is? If yes, we should definitely complain about it now.

> Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be).

Yes, we all know about those claims like the comical nine dash line. Tibet has always been a historical buffer state between the Chinese and Indian civilizations, culturally influenced by both. Sure, some Chinese empires were able to defeat them to force them to be a part of the empire for some centuries but that's about it.

It must be fun to take out a map with some line that some loon drew in the past to lay claim over anything you wish. I guess we can even expect a map for Mars in future.

If you think the nine dash line is comical, you're going to LOVE the British drawn India-Pakistani border with the most important Sikh holy site in muslim majority Pakistan! After you have a chuckle at that, you can ask the native americans how much fun they had with map drawing lunatics during the colonization of the Americas.

> the British drawn India-Pakistani border with the most important Sikh holy site in muslim majority Pakistan

As far as I understand for that at least, the divisions/districts were divided based on religion, because that's what the demand of the leaders who wanted Pakistan was. So Pakistan got every Muslim majority district on the west of the current Indian state. Is it possible the Sikh holy site you are talking about was a Muslim majority division/district?

But your point does underscore my point, look at all the chaos that line drawing left in the world. That's all the more reason to call out the comical claims that are being enforced now.

Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what we want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize about the structure of my last statement, it came out like that because of the tone of the parent comment and the constant whataboutism and general misinformation(like "valid old claims") we see in these threads. It gets tiring after a while.

I don't understand why my other comment down the thread was flagged by you though.

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563331? For two reasons: because it perpetuated the flamewar, and because 'whataboutism' breaks the site guideline against name-calling (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Dude have you been to hawaii? their culture is very much in tact and proud. Not only that but locals have special rights and privileges over mainlanders not the reverse.

I've lived there and I can tell you that many Hawaiians are not appreciative of being colonized, nor should they be. Having their own flag and extra labor laws does not ameliorate the injustices and negative consequences of colonization.

Nor am I qualified to talk, I just want to point out that many of my Hawaiian friends would not in any way agree with your statement, and it is worth factoring that in to the broader discussion.

Not my experience, they seem like proud Americans, but i'm an outsider. It was during the Obama era and they seemed quite chuffed to tell me Obama was born in hawaii.

I wonder what they'd say if you asked them if they'd like to leave the USA?

CCP can give you millions of examples of "their culture is very much in tact and proud. Not only that but locals have special rights and privileges over mainlanders not the reverse."

Does that make this reported events legitimate?

Han Chinese are paid to move to Tibet and then "act" Tibetan, for the benefit of Western tourists. My friend's sister is employed in this manner. It's enough to fool people like you, but it doesn't fool the local Tibetans, who are being sidelined more and more.

Hawaiian culture is not intact. The Hawaiian language has suffered enormous domain loss. Few are the shops or restaurants where one can get by entirely in Hawaiian, and forget about being able to speak your language with most of your elected officials and public servants.

Because Britain and Spain colonized Hawaii in the 1500s nobody can criticize China for using forced labor in the 2020s? That takes some serious mental gymnastics.

It makes sense when viewed as: people only care about us vs them tribal crap. The modern era and access to information just puts a veneer of "reasoning" for justifying their own BS.

Are you thinking of the Philipines or Puerto Rico? Hawaii was never colonized by the Spanish.

That said, I don't mind to refute the larger point. In fact, I would make Puerto Rico independent in conjunction with recognizing Taiwan.

Puerto Rico should be granted statehood, not independence, unless you want it to be an impoverished client of the United States.

Unlike how it is now?

It might have been clearer for "be" to be "remain".

I responded to your other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24558926. It's more important to valorize independence regardless of what's actually best for Puerto Rico. Any paternalism no matter how honestly felt will defeat the purpose of this gesture.

My proposal is "bleeding heart realpolitik", and bound to thus illicit confusion in the US.

Only 5% of Puerto Ricans want independence, in recent years there has been a push towards statehood though (and now a majority support statehood over their current status of free association)

https://web.archive.org/web/20121109002017/http://div2.ceepu...

we call out all our own flaws from the past and now reject colonialism

additionally, our country was founded by people escaping religious persecution

why are not right to call out others currently making our mistakes from the past?

> now reject colonialism

Nah, we just changed how it's done.

maybe we do something else bad now, but we no longer do the particular thing known as colonialism

Afghanistan, Iraq? And that's before we get into proxy wars.

Neither of those countries are being colonized, by any definition of the word.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/colonized

> adjective politically ruled by citizens of another country.

Seems to fit this definition

16 years ago, one of those countries met that definition for a period of 14 months.

If the Ba'ath Party and Taliban had taken back control after those 14 months in each respective country, are you under the impression the US would've gone "welp, we tried!" and left?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

If puppet governments don't count as colonialism, then the British were not very colonial and the Japanese did not colonize Manchuria.

Are Guam and Puerto Rico not de facto colonies?

Did this happen in the last 15 minutes?

Those fleeing were fleeing the precursors to secularism.

Publicly calling out the flaws of colonialism but privately enjoying the benefits of colonialism exactly convincing.

>additionally, our country was founded by people escaping religious persecution

I'm assuming this refers to the US. The US criticizes its treatment of natives and how they were decimated as the US expanded west. But at the same time, it enjoys all the benefits from not having a large indigenous population that occupies militarily strategic land, poses a military/separatist threat, and is too numerous to assimilate. I don't see the US deciding to return North America to its indigenous population so they can rebuild their historic societies because conveniently, all those lands are either settled or their previous inhabitants have no descendants. I can only conclude that words are cheap when it comes to foreign events, but when it comes to the cost of fixing domestic injustice suddenly no one wants to pay.

As an analogy, this is like the US racing to the top of a hill in a car, then telling everyone else they have to walk because driving is bad for the environment. And no, the US will not help pay for the extra time and water they'll have to take, nor will it drive back down and join them in a fair race.

so you agree colonialism is wrong, but will not denounce modern colonialism because the usa eliminated indigenous people in the past? colonialism is only wrong if done by the us?

and if we need a pristine past to denounce modern injustice, then that is a recipe to accomodate every injustice that comes our way

Welcome to the new left, where the only wrongs that can be discussed are those committed by Europeans or Americans. Ironic, because if you're truly committed to the idea that all people are created equal, you have to acknowledge that that means we all have a similar capacity for evil and brutality, regardless of race or culture.

Basically you're right. I'm extremely progressive on human rights, gender freedom, lgbqt rights, universal health care, etc but I refuse to bend to the whims of the current far left that teach we should hate ourselves (at least if you're a white cis male) and that we should shut up and let those outside that group decide everything and anything. Well I don't play that game and neither should others. Basically they think we should just walk around self flagellating in the public square.

There is a lot of morally repugnant commentary on this website. But I think this is the worst comment I've seen yet.

If US rejects colonialism, why doesn't Puerto Rico have voting representation in the federal government?

To be fair, if Puerto Rico wanted it's independence, the current administration would probably give it to them. Likewise, had they wanted to become the 51st state, I have no doubt that in 2009 President Obama and the Democratic super majority would have been happy to make that happen and grab up two extra Senate seats in the process.

The fact is, a lot Puerto Ricans like the current setup. The are natural born citizens who have full freedom of movement within the U.S. while Puerto Rico has fewer federal restrictions and obligations compared to a U.S. state.

> The fact is, a lot Puerto Ricans like the current setup. The are natural born citizens who have full freedom of movement within the U.S. while Puerto Rico has fewer federal restrictions and obligations compared to a U.S. state.

I think you have it reversed: Puerto Rico suffers from all of the federal obligations and has no states' rights to make up for it. No representative, no voting senator (and therefore no 'pork'). The burden of the federal restrictions were bared in the aftermath of the hurricane: the Jones Act meant relief could only be transported by American ships even as other countries stood ready to help.

"But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff."

20 years ago we were. Tibet was a little bit like BLM, all over Hollywood, in pop culture. The Dalai Lama was somewhat of a figure.

Then China told Americans to 'shut their mouths' and they did.

This is a tiny example of the tremendous power of that machine, it really cannot be ignored but I think we probably will.

Edit: some notes [1] [2]

[1] https://psmag.com/news/what-ever-happened-to-hollywoods-free...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/cause-hollywood-forgot-f...

I'll put money that the next pres. will probably be Joe Biden and he will never say the word 'Tibet' publicly. And who's 'free'?

The US government has exerted influence and control over Hollywood and pop culture for decades but it's so pervasive that you've just taken it for granted. Now you're seeing a foreign government to the same, at a much smaller scale and to a much smaller degree and you're hysterically suggesting that your freedom is being taken away by "the tremendous power of that machine". How do you think the rest of the world feels about having American culture shoved down their throats via every conceivable medium?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washingto... https://www.valuewalk.com/2014/08/hollywood-funding/

I think silencing criticism of human rights abuses is bad. Your whataboutism does not cut it here.

Call it "whataboutism" if you must, but I think it's strange and counterproductive to ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to influence and control over popular media.

Although I agree with the sentiment that US has a lot of soft power influence, I would argue that most of it is just US capitalism shining at its best. I think the best example of this is WW2 related content like movies. In France public perception of who won them World War 2 changed from Soviet Union in 1940s to US in 2000s. [1]

One major difference in US soft power is, they don't censor media critical of them to an extent even close to what CCP does. Look at the commentary on the pointless Vietnam War originating from US in their media, try to find something similar on PRC's pointless war in Vietnam which they lost.

[1] https://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sondage...

How is it an example of "shining at its best" when the Soviets made far more sacrifices during WWII only to be robbed of the credit in pretty much all western popular accounts. Yes, they were more brutal to those they defeated in many instances, but that doesn't diminish their military contribution.

The US government doesn't engage in direct censorship like the Chinese government but it does have some power, in practice, to shape its portrayal in the media. The Pentagon pulled production assistance from The Hurt Locker because it didn't like certain aspects of how the military was portrayed[1], as is their right of course. Most films cannot afford this luxury. The relationship between the state and the press is also closer than many think, particularly when it comes to briefings from the intelligence community.

Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook admittedly do a pretty good job of allowing a wide range of views to be expressed, although this comes at the price of allowing massive amounts of disinformation as well.

>try to find something similar on PRC's pointless war in Vietnam which they lost.

How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(2017_film)

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-feb-25-la-et-hu...

> How is it an example of "shining at its best"

Shining at its best, in terms of making a product that just sells well without the state taking much efforts at it. Like in case of WW2, they just made movies which glorify US's contribution at the expense of others, the product sold well because it was well made. So their role got pushed in the minds of people even outside US.

> How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(2017_film)

I read the synopsis, it doesn't seem like anything critical of their role in the war or need for it or their defeat. It talks about how they won bravery medals there and then it seems like a drama around love/work life.

Watch the Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns/PBS, that's the sort of media I am talking about.

The film is absolutely critical of the pointlessness of the war. Its most famous scene is of the PLA getting slaughtered in an ambush. Not everything needs to hit you over the head with a hammer like a documentary film.

> The film is absolutely critical of the pointlessness of the war. Its most famous scene is of the PLA getting slaughtered in an ambush.

That description seems like description of any war movie in general. While you are right about not everything has to be a documentary, my example was related to critical content like that.

To give an example which would be possibly more clear is, look at the current protests in HK. Do media in PRC cover the HKers side fairly on what they are demanding, the magnitude of ground support for the movement in HK, the excesses committed by the HK police daily? Contrast this with BLM protests where most coverage is anti establishment.

I don't know what teachers you had, but all mine taught it was a two pronged effort from USSR and the USA (and allies). It's Russian propaganda to say that it was only Russia that beat the Germans and that D-day was just a minor incursion.

The PRC conflict with Vietnam lasted 3 weeks.

Is it possible, that rather than being a massive cover-up, that war simply wasn't a generation-defining moment for them?

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War#Chinese_me...

Short in span, but about 30k deaths in those 3 weeks and being humbled by a much smaller opponent. While I will agree that it might not have been a generational defining moment, but those numbers are massive enough to warrant institutional and popular culture memory as it happened just 41 years back.

>One major difference in US soft power is, they don't censor media critical of them to an extent even close to what CCP does.

Agreed. The CCP's censorship is an exhibition of weakness.

While it is currently tumultuous, there's an argument that the introspective and critical nature of US culture is a strength.

Don't understand why you're getting downvoted. This is a pretty accurate summary, albeit somewhat uncomfortable to acknowledge.

This vlogger had extensive travel in Tibet. Just one person's glimpse of what Han-Tibetan interaction looks like: https://m.youtube.com/c/环华十年/videos?disable_polymer=true&itc... The most recent episodes about Tibet were about a year ago so one has to really scroll down to get to it.

The one silver lining is that Bhutan remains free and independent and intensely preserves its traditional culture. Its language, religion, and culture aren't exactly Tibetan, but they're fairly contiguous. About roughly equal to the difference between Spain and Portugal.

India. At least some number of Tibetans could feasibly find refuge there.

Along with hosting Dalai Lama, they have a government in exile there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Tibetan_Administration

There are many generations of tibetans in India. Even down south in Mysore there are large settlements and monasteries.

> The one silver lining is that Bhutan remains free and independent

... thanks to their defence agreement with India. Had that not been in place, China would have long occupied Bhutan too.

It's similar to our reluctance to criticize Saudi Arabia even when there are links between their upper crust and the largest terror attack ever on American soil. Saudi Arabia is still one of the largest oil spigots with the easiest ability to turn that spigot on and off and therefore set global oil prices, so we don't dare offend them.

US policy has been moving towards energy independence from Bush, Obama, and through Trump. We're pretty much there now, OPEC can't drive up prices without US shale producers ramping up production, sharply limiting their control.

Our arrangements with the House of Saud include the extremely sensitive matter of reserve status of US Dollar. Control over Persian Gulf — a matter that includes other parties not included in the US-Saudi strategic agreements — is energy related: it is not USA who is dependent on Persian Gulf energy, but near peer challengers, such as China, Japan, and possibly EU.

Jimmy Carter would like a word with you.

What would those words be?

https://www.masterresource.org/carter-jimmy/jimmy-carter-was...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/03/energy-independence-a-s...

Thanks for the context. I think the second one explains what you're trying to say better.

I think one can agree with the spirit of Carter's message while remaining skeptical of how practically it's stood the test of time. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, doesn't the last line of your second article seems to agree with GP's point? Can you describe what you're trying to say in more detail?

Those words would be that Carter was a leader who was looking for the American people. Regan reversed Carter's actions, got us more dependent on foreign oil, deepened our relationship with the Saudis. Rolled back efficiency standards and as a show of arrogant bravado, removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the Whitehouse. Not sure what Bush the GP was referring to, but what kind of revisionism claims that either Bush moved us towards energy independence.

It is important to recognize how we got into this mess and who the literal and figurative actors are.

The US is essentially part of OPEC now already. They legally can't be without going through congress, so they just called it OPEC+.

In OPEC+, the plus is for Russia, not the US. Russia has been directly coordinating with OPEC on market supply matters.

The US oil producers don't coordinate well with OPEC. It has been an ongoing problem that OPEC has been endlessly complaining about for many years.

Ah, I guess I misread that. Some article talked about how we were able to coordinate on the reduction even though congress had some moratorium on negotiating with OPEC, and I thought it was through that technicality and that OPEC+ was created specifically to work around it.

The US no longer requires any oil from Saudi Arabia, they're now almost entirely incapable of harming the US with that formerly potent resource weapon in terms of shutting off supply (mostly what they can do to harm US economic interests now instead of turning it off, is to flood the market and damage US producers).

For 2019 total US petroleum production (crude + petro products + biofuels) was 19.3m barrels per day (bpd), consumption was 20.5m bpd. Imports were 9.1m bpd, exports were 8.57m bpd.

Imports dropped from 13.7m bpd in 2005, to 9.1m bpd for 2019. Net imports (imports minus exports) dropped from 12.5m bpd in 2005, to 500k bpd for 2019 (the lowest figure since ~1952).

Imports from Canada have gone from 500k bpd in 1980, to 4.4m bpd in 2019. All of OPEC supplied 1.6m bpd to the US in 2019 for contrast. Imports from Saudi Arabia were down to just 530k bpd in 2019 (cut in half since 2015/2016). We could sneeze in West Texas and wipe that out at this point.

It's not about physical imports but about the price of oil which is set internationally. Oil is a global market.

Sure it is now, but if OPEC started raising prices drastically the US government can take measures to control prices here since we are more or less independent as far as oil supplies/refineries go.

Two points.

First, Ben Laden had ben persecuted by Saudi Arabia and had to flee the country. Long before the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabia was trying to get him.

Second, supporting current regime in Saudi Arabia sounds barbaric and morally reprehensible — as long as you don't find out who's their internal opposition is. Surprise: it's not freedom-loving democratic westernised students. It's even more radical and aggressive religious zealots. If US stops supporting House of Saud, it will be a new Iran or even ISIS there, but with much better economy and a pretty capable military.

> First, Ben Laden had ben persecuted by Saudi Arabia and had to flee the country. Long before the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabia was trying to get him.

Which didn't prevent them spawning, and continuing support of hundred others like him.

What you say is conflating with something like "If USA took down NSDAP, Germans would still burn Jews, and even more of them." It is infuriating.

US must stop supporting Sauds, end of the story.

> What you say is conflating with something like "If USA took down NSDAP, Germans would still burn Jews, and even more of them."

But this is not true, whereas the facts I started about internal opposition Saudis face are.

> US must stop supporting Sauds, end of the story.

This would make the world a worse place and lead to a lot of death and suffering, compared to the future where US would still support them. How can you justify such a thing?

Actually they don't and won't for a very long time to come. They are a source of stability in the ME that the US won't sacrifice for human rights abuses no matter how loud hacker news gets.

I was reading an account from the Roman Empire about parents begrudgingly using the imperial language while their kids grew up completely “Roman”. Then I reflected that if you go back far enough we all have a great^N parent who was in this situation.

Someone else in their reply mentioned Hawaii and the US but even Hawaii was unified by force by King Kamehameha. I’ve come to an uneasy acceptance of the fact that we’re all the conquerors and the conquered.

"I’ve come to an uneasy acceptance of the fact that we’re all the conquerors and the conquered."

We all have to accept the past. We don't need to accept that the future will be the same.

There are many ways that different areas and cultures can share an assimilate. Trade, travel, multilingualism, federations, mutually-agreed democratic annexation, shared constitutions, diplomacy, immigration, intermarriage, etc.

Coercion is not the only option.

One of my favorite quotes (don’t know the source): “we can either protect the past from the future, or protect the future from the past”.

It's interesting that you mention immigration and intermarriage because if your press Tibetan and Uighur activists, or look at their more private communications rather than their press releases, miscegenation is frequently at the forefront of their concerns (as tends to be the case when a predominantly male group perceives itself to be losing status, e.g. poorer white men in the west). Outside of the wealthy cosmopolitan west, views toward intermarriage tend to be extremely illiberal.

Just another way for criminals to excuse themselves of their crimes. Imagine if you said this to a black person in the context of slavery

True, I see the future as being coercion through soft power: e.g. people want to come to America because it has attractive political freedom, economic strength, and cultural capital.

In this world, cultures built around immigration end up changing themselves to better compete for people. e.g. the US had to undergo civil rights reforms in the 60s and expand access to all as the USSR looked increasingly attractive to those traditionally left out.

> Coercion is not the only option.

Do you have examples of those alternatives, or are they theoretical?

>> if you go back far enough we all have a great^N parent who was in this situation.

'Everyone is a victim' is a cop out. The fact that some ancestor of mine was probably conquered by vikings doesn't mean that I shouldn't criticize china for doing the same thing today. Nor do I feel like a conqueror because some other ancestor was one of those vikings. Look to the deep past for lessons. Don't point to the deep past as justification for horrible actions today.

Not to mention, China can’t seem to stop at simply owning the land, they want to wipe these regions and people of their culture and heritage.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, there is some evidence to suggest this, such as reports of them sending Han men to replace Uighur men in their homes after they've been sent to prison camps.

The fact that you criticise someone doesn’t make you right though.

It’s just a fact that every single empire in history ended up with a society which hated the conquests only to be conquered by another, less ethically-concerned nation.

It’s easy to judge when you are in a privileged position, however the reason you do that is because you already made someone else pay the price of the externalities of your champagne pacifism.

Basically you have this ethical idea that war is bad, but you provide no solution as to how to make today’s poor people reach the same level of education and plenty without giving them the means to conquer you politically, economically or by the means of warfare.

Can you explain how conquest is necessary for people to come out of poverty?

Conquest is necessary because if you take a conservative opinion that you should expect from the world what it currently gives you; and what it currently gives you is that a small minority of the world’s population lives semi-happily in the western countries; then the only way for the poorer countries to get on the same level of salaries is to take away those salaries from the west and make west the third world instead.

Every other argument you make is akin to a “what if”. I am speaking about how it _currently_ is.

Just because something is common doesn't make it right either.

Sure, we can criticize, but just keep in mind cycles of criticism and acceptance are the norm in the past. That many of us have forgotten the outrage and moved to acceptance is only further demonstration of this pattern.

Will the future be different? Maybe.. technology (especially communications tech) might be the thing that lets us break the cycle.

But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff.

I happily pay more for things not made in China, when I can.

When I can buy an iPhone that's not made in China, I'll buy it. Even if it means a downgrade.

Several of my family members buy as many vintage and second-hand goods as they can. Not to be hipsters (are hipsters still a thing anymore?), but because they do not want to support China.

I too go to great lengths to avoid purchasing Chinese made products. It seems that manufacturers and sellers are now trying to hide country of origin labeling, which is absolutely infuriating.

Some iPhone are made in India. Are they available outside it, that’s the real question.

That's great, but we can't get out of the trade situation we're in with personal choices.

AFAIK Samsung makes most of their phones in Vietnam. The batteries are mostly made in China though.

Still, it doesn't have to be 100% or 0% made in China. 5% is better than 95%. Shades of grey exist, and that is ok. But earnestly trying to do better is what matters.

Personal morality-based boycotts do nothing, you need to out compete China.

  > But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff.

Thinking of Lebron James who hypocritically spoke up about BLM and not about human rights abuses in China[1]. We cannot place our hopes in capitalism to deal with these human-rights atrocities, even though there is much the NBA could do to use their financial power to influence the region and demand change. MLK would use boycotts to force racist businesses to grapple with losing the black people's dollar if they did not stand up for justice. We can still learn from this; the Western gov'ts are not the only players in this game.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/lebron-james-nba-players-told-move-...

It's hypocritical to focus on issues in your own country?

The BLM movement is important; I have no interest in distracting from this problem. Lebron was explicitly asked about the CCP and their human-rights abuses after an NBA manager unpopularly criticized the CCP. The NBA would rather not talk about the CCP and the manager was effectively shamed for doing so. Capitalism cannot look past the $$$. China makes up 10% of NBA revenue [1]

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-needs-china-revenue-growt...

It's absolutely reasonable for NBA players to not want to comment on complicated issues that are outside of the scope of their political interests[1][2]. It would be nice to see the same humility in other aspects of our public discourse.

[1] https://www.radio.com/sports/nba/former-nba-star-anti-china-...

[2] https://www.freep.com/story/sports/nba/pistons/2019/10/12/nb...

"Complicated issues", ie outright slavery, which is very much on the minds of Americans?

These news articles are fallacious appeals to ignorance. We are not ignorant of the very blatant oppression in China. The Hong Kong issue is just another example of communism seeking to squash autonomy and basic human rights. You say 'humility' and another says 'cowardice'. I side with the latter.

> Thinking of Lebron James who hypocritically spoke up about BLM and not about human rights abuses in China[1].

I don't understand this take.

Why does LeBron James have to address human rights in China before he, a Black American, can address human rights abuses against Black Americans in America?

You're right that he shouldn't feel the same obligation to speak out in defense of Tibet. But the issue with James is his history of comments that support the PRC's regime in Uyghur land. He isn't neutral on the issue of China. See: his comments during the Houston fiasco.

That's a false choice, as James can do both things. He can choose to focus to a greater degree on matters in the US, and focus to a lesser degree on China, since his priorities are obviously in the US.

Why should he take an interest? Beyond the matter of being a world famous person with a giant bullhorn to speak from, he's also making an obscene sum of money from China and its people and stands to keep doing so. That's vulgar morally if you then simultaneously ignore what's going on there and refuse to say anything with your platform.

It is not difficult in terms of time or technically, for James to say something about China's human rights abuses on his prominent Twitter account (whether about Xinjiang or Hong Kong as two prominent examples). It would take a very small amount of effort and time. He doesn't do it because he's a hypocritical coward and knows China is a giant financial golden ticket and he doesn't dare upset them because he knows how they would react (the same reason so many are afraid of China and yet not afraid to say something against the US). The whole of the NBA is very terrified of China economically, the NBA hasn't been very subtle about their trembling post the Houston Rockets incident.

> Why does LeBron James have to address human rights in China before he, a Black American, can address human rights abuses against Black Americans in America?

Because as bad as the human rights abuses against Black Americans in America are, they pale in comparison to what China is doing. But that's not the only issue. The bigger issue is that LeBron James chooses to make hundreds of millions of dollars by staying silent on the China issue. I think he could have a tremendous impact by rejecting that money and denouncing China...what are the Lakers going to do, fire him? He can do both things. With BLM he's just one of many, many, MANY celebrities saying the same thing. What people with his level of reach are saying anything about China?

This is the point exactly. China brings in 10% of the NBA's revenue[1]. I am arguing alongside you that we can really effect change if we use our economic leverage and not merely our political leverage. We cannot stand for these abuses. I also really do not want to distract from the race issue we are working through today; it seems our news cycle can only handle one thing at a time though.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-needs-china-revenue-growt...

'Pale in comparison' is kind of icky sounding...

I don't see it as an either or proposition. He can speak up for both, but he chose to take an apologist stance on HK. The NBA made fans remove or cover up their HK freedom t-shirts.

It feels wrong but it’s also how pretty much every culture got to be the way it is. Why do I have an Arabic last name even though I was born 3,000 miles away from the Middle East? Because 800 years ago an Islamic empire conquered India and Bangladesh. Why do Bangladeshis wear powdered wigs in court? Because the British conquered them 500 years after that. The British themselves are the product of numerous waves of conquest: Angles conquering the Pictish, Saxons conquering the Angles, Normans conquering who by now were Anglo-Saxons.

Past wrongs do not justify present wrongs.

It is not wrong for individuals to choose to assimilate. The deliberate and systematic destruction of other cultures - which China is engaged in on multiple fronts - is wrong.

I think the point here is, what are you going to do about it? This is unfortunately how humanity operates. It disgusts me but history shows that it is nigh inevitable.

I don't have the answers that I would wish, but refusing to give up on humanity is a good place to start.

History is prologue, not destiny.

For what it's worth, there's been a lot of progress!

The international community banding together to impose extremely strong economic sanctions on countries with human rights abuses commensurate with the severity and magnitude of the offenses?

I see this a lot. There's a loss of confidence in the West, where people feel like you can't call out immoral behavior unless it's committed by another westerner or a western nation. This serves absolutely no one well.

The fact that a country or civilization has past sins should not be a disqualification from taking a moral stand in the present. Some form of mild hypocrisy is vastly preferable to sitting silent while a country destroys another culture or puts it's Muslim population in concentration camps.

The problem is not past sins, its past sins that have yet to be atoned for. Conditions for Native Americans are still inexcusable up to this day.

That is true, but all that means is that we have two problems, not that the criticism is wrong.

Hypocrisy is rarely a substantive counterargument. It's much more often whataboutism.

Okay, but in this case I'm not saying there's whataboutism in your argument. The point I'm trying to make is that if you're powerful enough, you can make human rights abuses and then get away with it scot-free and that America helped set this precedent.

Not defending human rights abuses or China's behavior, but the idea that America set the precedent is myopic. The US isn't even 300 years old. History is much longer, darker, and more violent.

Human rights are themselves a fairly recent idea. I can't think of a single powerful country/empire that hasn't committed them to some degree. And things were much worse in the past.

Those should be fixed and I would support them. but do I feel guilty about what my ancestors did to my ancestors? No, I don't. I feel we should right the wrongs, but I refuse to fold to the "woke" culture that I should feel like a POS for what my ancestors did.

So present day americans need to pay for the sins of our fathers so to speak? Or to put it another way, we present day americans had no say in the decision but we must pay for the past americans decisions?

The concept is valid.

Suppose someone's great grandfather stole from my great grandfather something I was supposed to inherit. They inherited it instead.

It remains stolen property that belongs to me.

No the concept is not valid and we have laws in place to protect against this very thing. Should all debts be transferred upon death? Do you want to pay for your parents loans they didn’t finish?

No, debts should not be transferred. What should be transferred to heirs is what is left of the estate after creditors are paid off, if anything.

If someone dies and they owe money, the creditors have a claim to the estate.

If their claims exceed the value of the estate, they are out of luck; they can't go after other parties to recover everything.

If someone dies and leaves your their house, but it is mortgaged, then the mortgage likely has to be paid off before the title is transferred.

Creditors having a right to the estate means that you can't borrow (or steal) something, die, and have that property pass it to a heir free and clear.

So someone who lost their property is a creditor now, having loaned the stolen object?

No we aren’t guilty for the sins of our parents but if we decide to ignore the ongoing injustice then we become complicit.

I’m sorry, but no.

And South Asia is not exactly a great example of how well things turned out after having been under multiple successions of conquering empires.

Source: Am South Asian.

> current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases

You make it sound as if they were a part of aggressive expansion and colonisation, which is a bit misleading. Vast majority of US military bases are in NATO countries that were very enthusiastic about outsourcing protection from the soviet threat.

It's definitely not colonization, but I'd still say it's aggressive expansion. We just happened to make people think it was a good thing.

Looking back now, I'm not so sure it was the net good it was sold as.

the net good is that the USSR didn't overrun Europe after WW2 and they could have easily if the US hadn't set up camp. It may have even still happened without the atomic bomb as a deterrent.

There are some bases that cause a lot of friction however. Behaving like they can do what they like is not in the US’s best interest. The latest rape saga in the Philippines comes to mind and the damage done by the 1990s rape of a child in Okinawa and it’s aftermath have damaged the US image. Also behaving like they are above the law, there was the appalling behaviour of the US military when a family member of a serviceman in the UK drove on the wrong side of the road, killing someone, then claiming diplomatic immunity to fly home. The base in Saudi has been the justification for some horrendous acts too. I’m not sure how you come up with a way of respecting people and their local laws whilst also having bases in places like Saudi, but the US can do better.

Crimes that number in the dozens of people and is disliked / prosecuted by the USA is a candle compared to the sun of China's concentration camps.

So because China is worse, the US is ok? How is that relevant? It’s also not dozens, not even in Japan alone (see links below).

The US military also didn’t punish for crimes against civilians on Okinawa much of the time and if it did, the punishment was relatively minor. This isn’t how assault, rape and murder are treated in the US.

http://www.uchinanchu.org/history/list_of_crimes.htm

https://apjjf.org/2018/03/Mitchell.html

I hope they have the tenacity to survive and resist and NEVER get conformed to live as part of China.

"China" is a vicious inhumane enemy, nobody in this World is innocent but there are some more innocent that others and the rhetoric of others being "bad" is no excuse for anything.

Language and customs are valued differently between Europe and East Asia, and one of the reason is poverty. I'll take Vietnam as an example as I grew there and now live in Europe.

We (the majority ethnics) do appreciate the cultures from minor ethics In fact, the minor ethnics regions have been a popular destination for young generation to get away from the urban life.

On the other hands, we cannot have a blind eyes on the taboos that comes from isolation, illiteracy and poverty. We're talking about little women rights, child labor, child marriage.

I'm not saying the same problems are in Tibet, but it wouldn't surprise if there other things going than what you're seeing from an outsider/tourist eyes, because the context is the same: high illiteracy rate and isolation.

Education is one way out. China is clearly having a strong take on this approach, but let's hope they do know how to preserve the culture as well.

It's not education though or a strong approach. They are literally annihilating the Tibetan culture and ways of life and attempting to force them to supplant it with Chinese culture and ways trying to convince them it is far superior to Tibetan culture.

A book for your consideration: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/china-marches-west-peter-c-... .

> From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China.

What China is doing is progressive system of genocide. They borrowed USSR's system of multiple nationalities, identified different ethnicities, and now are trying to wipe out the Uighurs by merging them into Han. It is only a matter of time till they start doing this with whole bunch of other groups. The Uighurs are seen as threats because of their resistance to adopting majority Chinese culture and because of their 1600 year old desire for self-rule.

LOL. Are you going to cry a river for all the Native Americans that got their lives and culture extinguished, to make way for the master white race to dominate the United States?

Did you know that the Sioux are actively protesting in South Dakota right now, for the very thing that you are preaching here?

Are you going to even lift a finger to support them? I doubt it. Hence, you’re just being a hypocrite

We can say things against China. China shouldn't do this. Plenty of companies don't operate in China, regardless of the money. Google has struggled with this. Apple surrendered and makes phones there and sells them. Disney is trying to surrender with Mulan, but apparently even those they cow-towed to them in extreme ways (in Mulan the movie they 'thank' the help of the Chinese authorities in some of the places that have the Uighur camps! They literally thank them.

The enormous sums these companies believe they will earn in China, the all mighty growth, that overwhelms their ability to consider the implications.

Disgusting.

From our Western perspective? No. From the general perspective of any culture that values human life.

Your words are an empty restatement that mirrors what most officially sanctioned Chinese media reports tell us:

That we should not/legally cannot/morally cannot oppose or interfere with these atrocities.

I urge HN readers to very carefully judge empty statements such as the GP, because while it doesn't seem like it, it is actually attempting to persuade you to accept that absolutely nothing can be done.

And that is utterly wrong.

Tibetan history, like Chinese history, is complicated.

On the subject of Tibetan assimilation: what most people think of Tibet - that is the current Tibetan autonomous region of the PRC - is actually only about 1/3 of what many Tibetans would call "Tibet."

What is culturally and ethnically Tibetan actually stretches across Qinghai province, as well as large swaths of Sichuan, and part of Yunnan and Gansu. If you go to these regions and talk to Tibetans, they will tell you you are in Amdo, Kham, etc, even though you may be in the administrative province of, for example, Sichuan. Residents will still sometimes even use these designations on their postal envelopes.

There are some historical reasons for the way Tibet is currently defined, but "Tibet" was also chopped up into a much smaller contemporary "tibet" for, er, strategic reasons.

If you are interested in the big 3 Tibetan regions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kham

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C-Tsang

"What is culturally and ethnically Mongolian actually stretches across the Middle East, as well as large swaths of Russia and Europe."

It simply isn't feasible to grant every cultural group the full extent of their historical claims.

Right, "It simply isn't feasible to grant every cultural group the full extent of their historical claims."

Doing this will extinguish multiple continents...

The point is these areas are still pretty actively Tibetan today, not just historically.

Is there a contiguous region stretching from Mongolia deep into the Middle East and to Europe where a high percentage of the population (like a quarter or more) speaks Mongolian as their native language?

I know that might be true for a small area surrounding Mongolia in Russia, but I think the comparison stretching into the Middle East and Europe is not accurate.

Qinghai is still almost a quarter Tibetan (a percentage that has probably been consistently shrinking in recent history due to migration) and is almost as large, area-wise, as the formal Tibetan autonomous region.

The dedicated Turanist will talk your ear off about linguistic co-evolution, haplogroups, and so on, but no, of course not. The example was deliberately outlandish. A quarter is lower than the proportion of Russians in Crimea.

I think we may ultimately be making the same point, that political borders are by nature artificial and often fail to reflect the historical fluidity of culture and ethnicity, but I objected to the perceived implication that these regions are uniquely Tibetan.

Regional designations are complicated, but there is nothing complicated about passing judgment over the atrocities being perpetrated today by the CCP.

I'm simply glad that there's finally cohesion by many leaders across the world in urging that Beijing be completely stripped of the prestige of hosting the upcoming Winter Olympics.

What China has done to Tibet is horrible.

One thing that is missing from this article is how they are doing this? How are they coercing people? Are they literally dragging them out of their homes? Threatening them? Or are they just offering them opportunities that are actually preferable to their current conditions, and the people are accepting them?

Is this a genuine question? I don’t want to be snarky, but you are aware of the fact that government-imposed “mass labour” has almost always meant “forced labor” (I’m sure there might be some punctual exceptions, but the conclusion is the same), no?

Is Roosevelts New Deal 'forced labor'?

> The government documents reviewed by Reuters put a strong emphasis on ideological education to correct the “thinking concepts” of laborers. “There is the assertion that minorities are low in discipline, that their minds must be changed, that they must be convinced to participate,” said Zenz, the Tibet-Xinjiang researcher based in Minnesota.

> One policy document, posted on the website of the Nagqu City government in Tibet’s east in December 2018, reveals early goals for the plan and sheds light on the approach. It describes how officials visited villages to collect data on 57,800 laborers. Their aim was to tackle “can’t do, don’t want to do and don’t dare to do” attitudes toward work, the document says. It calls for unspecified measures to “effectively eliminate ‘lazy people.’”

I don't remember the bit in history class where Roosevelt discussed forceful re-education.

I don't think you'd want to whitewash Zenz as a Tibet-Xinjiang researcher when he is known to have said that he is on a religious mission against China.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-...

Ok, so maybe the Zenz quote is out of place - I don't know his history, but I don't know think you can disregard the government documents by discrediting Zenz, especially as Reuters explicitly says it's investigated and corroborated some of those claims.

> Reuters corroborated Zenz’s findings and found additional policy documents, company reports, procurement filings and state media reports that describe the program.

> I don't know his history

Many redditors have revealed Zenz's background. Please see the second half of the comments (top ones are the typical "China Bad" ones)

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ixjuq2/china_for...

What's interesting is that there is censorship in r/worldnews.

After many people exposed Adrian Zenz's background and history, this post with 4k+ comments and nearly 50k upvotes got removed from r/worldnews front page and replaced by a new one with <200 comments and 1k upvotes which nobody got a chance to mention Adrian Zenz yet.

The new one:

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ixhd7x/china_sha...

Attacking the bias and faith of Zenz instead of his argument is poor form. Doing so while linking to "The Gray Zone" is ironic.

No, Roosevelt's New Deal was not forced labor. This is a false equivalence and whataboutism.

Oh, remember the "great opportunities in Siberia"?

The article says they are pushing them off the land and into factory jobs, so that implies to me that they don't want to leave, otherwise they wouldn't have to "push" them.

Why would the author use the word "pushing" if they don't know how this is actually happening? And if they know how it is actually happening, why leave it out of the article?

To stir more controversy and sell more pageviews? It's literally the definition of "clickbait".

In short "push" means to use violence to force the will of otherwise non-compliant "dissenting" citizens.

It's disgusting and a stunning violation of human rights.

I've hiked through regions of Tibet and talked to villagers in relatively remote areas. One thing I saw hiking in the mountains and valleys was abandoned nomad lodges and pastures. My Tibetan guide sadly explained to me that the local officials found the nomads too hard to manage when they were living independently and so used a system of sticks and carrots (fines and subsidies) to move them into villages that were created from scratch and comprised of cookie-cutter cement houses.

One effective incentive to get the nomads to settle down is to threaten their family members with fines or removal of subsidies unless they move into town.

I visited some of those made-ex-nihilo villages and talked to the people there. One immediately obvious thing is there are Chinese national flags flying on almost every single household and big posters of Xi in the households. I asked about those and the residents explained they get fined if they don't fly the flag or hang Xi's photo. They were definitely not acting out of patriotism. The scenes reminded me of a wartime occupation.

Military recruitment posters were also plastered everywhere, as it is a form of employment in a region with relatively few alternatives.

This is the first time I've heard of migration ratios as bureaucratic targets, but it's not surprising at all as it is typical for the government to set clear KPIs for their policies.

This is the information I was looking for, thank you.

This is a great point. An additional aspect to this is developers - while living in China, I spoke with a number of officials who essentially admitted that a major aspect of "relocation" was driven by developers who purchased land from the local governments and then were lent money by the local government. When those buildings weren't filled, and with the pressure to pay back loans mounting, the developers and local officials would conspire to force people from outlying regions to relocate in the town developments. The developers would then receive central/local $$ for "helping" low income citizens "move up." And then the cycle would repeat. This leaves out other aspects - but it certainly plays a role.

What you are saying is definitely true in a general sense; a lot of local gov income comprises of shady land deals. However it is a bit different in 'far border' areas such as Tibet/Xinjiang. Land is not scarce, and development not so attractive. Also as some one grew up in China I would take a pinch of salt on what the 'officials' are admitting. There won't be anything meaningful if you haven't got a real tie with them. Besides after Xi became president, calling out corrupted officials is a such massive effort and that's why Xi (or more precisely the group he may represent) has so many enemies even in the party.

Point taken, and agreed.

> Military recruitment posters were also plastered everywhere, as it is a form of employment in a region with relatively few alternatives.

China would love a propaganda coup involving Tibetans in their military like America's Navajo code talkers in WW2.

My wife is from Sichuan which is bordering Tibet. It is a bit more complicated than that. Over the years the development has been fast but still far behind the majority of China. The polices to 'encourage' and harness the great overall economic growth were uniquely shaped and had an element of 'outdated' fashion (or USSR style if that's your opinion). And the flags and posters you saw is probably a chicken and egg problem: the gov sees misinformation (or propaganda from west depends on your view) and wants more territorial control (against the largely available chinese language free Tibet tabloids) and people who actually wants to use it as a way to get more support from the gov. It was nothing like that a decade ago, the social media amplification definitely accelerated that as well.

I agree, there is some nuance to the matter.

I am partially sympathetic to the idea that this can be a way for people to lead better lives - in the modern, economic sense - instead of subsistence nomading.

At the same time, China has, over the past several years, also demonstrated a trend of new behavior and a clear break away from a previous trend of liberalization that started with Deng. This push in Tibet should be seen in light of what is going on in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, Inner Mongolia, and at the Indian border.

I want to agree with you but I too am a bit out of touch (all the information is from friends). I don't like to defend the central gov but there is too much smoke and mirror to see through things. A lot of press reports genuine issues about China but also a mix of unverifiable information. I believe the local governance is actually improving. At central level it might be a very different story. However that said sometimes it is hard to judge. Did it really depart from Deng's approach? Was Deng's method deserving applause? My parents generation (the equivalent of boomers) suffered most throughout their youth and it is only getting better now. So for any long term impact, I'm not sure myself.

There is of course a variety of opinions across any demographic.

My impression is that, aside from people who've studied abroad, Chinese youth today are more conservative and nationalistic than their elders. They've been fed only on a diet of domestic media with external news censored and have grown up only seeing their standards of living rapidly improving with China taking a more central role on the world stage.

The older generations, who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and then saw it end, and those who grew up during Deng's period are more likely to be liberal and sympathetic to the West. Even Jiang Zemin spoke English and liked Western opera.

But I think if you ask people of about any demographic, they will tell you Xi has changed the trajectory that China was previously on. The end of 10-year term limits demonstrated an objective shift towards one-man rule instead of an oligarchy where power was more diffused between elite factions.

I agree with you. However Xi is only one person, there is much larger power structure behind him. And you are absolutely right, Jiang and Deng have much more experience with the west and 'modern' at their times. As for the younger generation I couldn't really blame them; the ones who are interested in the outside world already did so. I believe there are substantial proportions of youth who have a balanced world-view. But given the education structure and absolute large population base you won't see them represented. I couldn't give much credit for chinese students abroad, since large part of them are quite privileged and ignorant(depends on how they were brought up), the rest were the poorer, sponsored students, they would naturally be very nationalistic.

>missing from this article

These things are always conveniently missing or deliberately misreported for manufactured consent. TL;DR: there's no clear evidence of coercion, also no evidence of no coercion, but China bad so ergo it's coercive. Western media: it's forced labour despite forced labour not being mentioned at all. But that's expected with another Zenz media push:

https://jamestown.org/program/jamestown-early-warning-brief-...

Conclusion: In both Xinjiang and Tibet, state-mandated poverty alleviation consists of a top-down scheme that extends the government’s social control deep into family units. The state’s preferred method to increase the disposable incomes of rural surplus laborers in these restive minority regions is through vocational training and labor transfer. Both regions have by now implemented a comprehensive scheme that relies heavily on centralized administrative mechanisms; quota fulfilment; job matching prior to training; and a militarized training process that involves thought transformation, patriotic and legal education, and Chinese language teaching.

Important differences remain between Beijing’s approaches in Xinjiang and Tibet. Presently, there is no evidence that the TAR’s scheme is linked to extrajudicial internment, and aspects of its labor transfer mechanisms are potentially less coercive. However, in a system where the transition between securitization and poverty alleviation is seamless, there is no telling where coercion stops and where genuinely voluntary local agency begins. While some Tibetans may voluntarily participate in some or all aspects of the scheme, and while their incomes may indeed increase as a result, the systemic presence of clear indicators of coercion and indoctrination, coupled with profound and potentially permanent change in modes of livelihood, is highly problematic. In the context of Beijing’s increasingly assimilatory ethnic minority policy, it is likely that these policies will promote a long-term loss of linguistic, cultural and spiritual heritage.

It's not very hard to imagine someplace like India getting praise for a nearly identical program. "Country offers job placement training to poorest rural workers" sounds like it would be popular everywhere.

It also reminds me that the US still has internment schools, where poor Native American children "voluntarily" live in Catholic foster homes and attend US public school.

The how part doesn't seem that difficult to me. It's like military conscription.

They offer you 'stable pay' and a 'chance to learn some useful skills' and a 'pension' if you accept and fines or jailtime for your whole family if you refuse.

Basically, it's work in a factory as an "employee" or work in a factory as an inmate.

People really have no other option than to accept.

Slavery is what it is, and it's good for business (in a 18th/19th century sort of way). If you can enslave people and force them to create wealth for you, you can spend the money on other things such as enslaving more people or convincing the rest of your population this is a good thing they should support.

Chinese history however is riddled with empires who eventually overreached their attempts to control everything and failed. All it takes is to mess up the economy so bad that most people suddenly are poorer, and some internal/external entity offers a better deal. A billion starving people can overcome any obstacle if necessary. Thus enslaving people to create wealth for you is another hedge to failure if you are a government.

A few days ago[0]:

> New York City Police Department Officer Charged with Acting As an Illegal Agent of the People’s Republic of China

> The Defendant Reported to Officials with the PRC Consulate About the Activities of Chinese Citizens in the New York Area and Assessed Potential Intelligence Sources for the PRC Within the Tibetan Community in New York and Elsewhere

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/new-york-city-police-departme...

Relevant to their global ambitions:

"Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons" - https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/china_shenzhen_zhenhu...

Make no mistake, such a database exists fo tech workers, scientists, and other creators of valuable IP.

Han supremacy has all the markings of other supremacist movements and will unfortunately need to be confronted. Not sure when the world will work up the courage to do so, though.

Not until China stops manufacturing everything, and I'm thinking by then it will be too late.

I fear it already is too late. China was brave enough to take Hong Kong in one swift motion. The international response has been so weak that China is already eyeing Taiwan. Just yesterday they flew with 18 fighter jets and a bomber across the unofficial but mutually agreed border between Taiwan and China. This is unprecedented.

If the situation doesn't deescalate quickly, we might see a war soon and if push comes to shove, the US could be in the middle of it.

> Just yesterday they flew with 18 fighter jets and a bomber across the unofficial but mutually agreed border between Taiwan and China.

There is no official border between these 2 "countries". They both officially claim they own the the other.

And China has made it plain that, as long as Taiwan is not pursuing independence, everything can be made as usual. That's backed by many popular demand from the ordinary people.

It's like US wont allow USSR to deploy nukes in Cuba. As long as you Cuba dont do that, US are OK with the communism on the island. Otherwise, sorry, you are risking the whole life for this whatever ideology you are pursuing.

The US could just extract a few key TSMC engineers, turn its facilities into a crater, and back out. I don't think anyone wants to start WWIII with China over an exiled Chinese government living on an island that's less than 200 miles from the Chinese mainland other than an occupied Taiwanese people.

I'm not even certain that the US could land a force in the area, given China's investment in defensive missile installations.

Appeasement didn't work back in the 1930s and won't work now. Let China take Taiwan and they'll probably look at Vietnam or even South Korea or Japan.

It's not appeasement. It's just not worth it. Wasting American blood in a region built up to be defensible specifically against the Americans to save a government that mostly only exists out of spite seems like a poor investment.

The kind of withdrawal I described would likely be accompanied by the expulsion of all non-immigrant Chinese nationals, a military build-up in friendly regional territories, and deployments in anticipation of blockading Chinese energy imports.

What govt do you mean exists only out of spite? You can't mean Taiwan. It's a real country. They are a democracy.

It is a real country, with a real Democracy. But if it weren't for an implicit threat of US intervention, it likely wouldn't be. My point is that its existence strikes me more as an artifact of America's of geopolitical posturing and, a policy of containment left over from the cold war than anything else.

This is delusional Cold War "domino effect" thinking but somehow even stupider because there was at least some credibility to the idea that communism would be a popular enough ideology to be adopted in such a fashion. Please tell me why China would ever have any interest in invading and occupying any of those countries.

China wants to control everything that could affect them. Eventually they will fight to take over Taiwan. They will use economic power to force Australia to do what they want also.

That's now how China works. It's a very different mentality - they _only_ care about China, specifically the boundaries of China defined by the "9-dash line."

The rest of the world will serve to feed 9-dash mainland China with raw materials (Africa) and loan repayments (Belt and Road). There is none of the "social justice" of Western imperialism, no interest in exporting Chinese values or ideology - there is only China.

The US may not need to land a force there, just ensure that China can't. Make sure Taiwan has enough missiles, subs, mines, etc to repel any PLA landing force, making it prohibitively expensive and embarrassing for China to attempt.

That's true. I honestly think an out and out invasion of Taiwan is exceedingly unlikely, when the CCP has the latitude to exert decades of concentrate soft power to render Taiwan a functional vassal long before Chinese boots hit the ground.

That would be by far the most sensible and effective strategy for China to pursue - subjugate your adversary without fighting, as Sun Tzu advised.

And they were until Xi made himself dictator for life. Under Xi it seems like the CCP has become unecessarily less rational and more insecure.

Isn't their only carrier retrofitted Russian tech?

Yes, but my understanding of their defensive strategy for tbe south China Sea is largely contingent on their ability to saturate a carrier group's defenses with missiles and torpedoes, and then fire a few more in order to score kill shots (I unfortunately can't find the source where I read this).

It's a poor strategy for power projection, but theoretically it's a comparatively economical method of negating America's capacity to power project in the region.

Here's a National Interest article on the dialogue around it: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/aircraft-carriers-vs-...

Its not only that, they have many politicians on their books. Even western publications are warry about highlighting what's happening prominently. Today a NYPD officer was caught spying for them.

https://abc7ny.com/nypd-spying-baimadajie-angwang-tibetan-of... (caution playing video)

And in an extreme twist of irony, the NYPD officer is ethnically Tibetan.

He probably had family they got to.

His dad was retired PLA and a party member. His mom was a government official and also a party member.

In a way they did get to them but not in the way you imply.

Thank you for giving more information, I should have researched more before commenting.

There will always be a segment of any oppressed population that is willing to side with their oppressors.

China has money. Let's never underestimate the greed of people when it comes to treason.

It may surprise you that Jews turned in other Jews during Nazi occupation. People are people, they don't fit into nice neat little boxes.

>Its not only that, they have many politicians on their books.

Citation needed, please. A cop is not a politician.

There's plenty of accusations being thrown around, but generally no hard proof that they're directly controlled by the Chinese Government (read into that whichever way you want).

Off the top of my head, there's:

Shaoquett Moselmane, Australian state politician. Recently had her home raided by the Australian Federal Police in relation to Chinese espionage (details are scant, due to the ongoing investigation)

Sam Dastyari, Australian federal politician. Resigned due to donations from Chinese entities

Jian Yang, NZ member of parliament. Former member of the CCP and civilian member of the PLA.

That’s how the game is played afaik... in Snowden’s book he mentions how the CIA operatives bribe assets in foreign countries (and himself witnessing a disastrous operation).

The prime minister of Singapore famously called the CIA out on it: https://mothership.sg/2017/02/cias-failed-attempt-to-bribe-l...

Are there any details of the operation Snowden witnessed? I don't think I'm familiar with that and would be interested in reading/watching it.

It's worth picking up his book and reading it firsthand. It's full of very interesting stories, the media coverage of him doesn't do justice to the real person.

I see companies shifting manufacturing out of the PRC, though sadly not fast enough and not for human rights reasons. Cellphones made in Vietnam etc. (e.g Pixel 4a I think) would be preferable to supporting the current regime in the PRC. Here's hoping we stop enabling the cruel regime in the PRC.

Genuine question: is Vietnam any better than China in regards to freedom and human rights?

Whether or not it's actually better, it gives leverage over China. Do better or else...

I think economic forces will play a part here. As China develops economically, it becomes more expensive to build there. That will tend to slowly but surely drive manufacturing to other locations. India has many strong technical universities and is a potential competitor.

We're already seeing massive movement of manufacturing out of China. Samsung no longer builds smartphones in China, and even Apple has been moving some of its products to India and Taiwan. While it should have been done years ago when it was overtly obvious that China isn't going to liberalize, now is the second best time to do so.

Not until we stop buying everything China manufactures. We need tariffs and sanctions on any country with China's human rights record.

It just takes organization, multi-lateral trade agreements. Unfortunately it may be too late for those the CCP has within their borders and perhaps those within arm's length, however it won't be too late to protect the CCP from successfully expanding and taking over the rest of the free world.

We have to recognize the problem before we can work up the courage. And unfortunately, most people don’t recognize the problem. Worse, there is a tendency for some people to smear you as a right wing Trump supporter when you criticize China.

I'm sure people were critical of China before Trump took office, nevertheless you've got a point and I don't get why you've been downvoted.

I hope it doesn't get to major atrocities to happen before the world wakes up to what China is doing.

People have been critical of China for decades and deservedly so. The only thing that has changed is that the political landscape in the US has descended into madness.

The CCP has already committed disgusting atrocities during the cultural revolution in the 60’s but the world magically ignores that so I am pessimistic to say the least.

The world magically ignores that? The excesses of the cultural revolution are covered in gory detail in any reasonable class that covers the modern history of China. The Maoist struggle session looms as large in the western popular imagination as the Spanish Inquisition and honestly larger than any of the historical red scares.

If by the world you mean the west (do you see the countries in Africa or the Middle East caring about this?) then only when China actually attacks western interests, namely allied democracies like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Note that the Allies in WW2 didn't go to war against the Axis supremacists until they expanded outside their borders, and the western allies didn't take significant action against Japan until Japan expanded into the west's Asian colonies. The Nanjing massacre was December 1937. The US oil embargo on Japan began summer 1941. Why did it take 4 years after a humanitarian crisis? Because Japan began occupying French Indochina in summer 1941 after France fell to Nazi German in summer 1940, and only after Japan started occupying western interests did it draw the full attention of the western Allies.

didn't go to war against the Axis supremacists until they expanded outside their borders...

Your parent comment is probably supposing that all supremacist movements eventually wind up doing this. Which is not a ridiculous suggestion- a fundamental precept of supremacist movements is usually the idea that the supposedly supreme group has a right to rule, and such ideas have a history of leading to invasion & conquest.

>Han supremacy has all the markings of other supremacist movements and will unfortunately need to be confronted.

Are you willing to sacrifice your life for the freedom of Tibet? I am not

Why were our grandparents willing to sacrifice their life for the Europeans?

We didn't enter combat of WWII until we were attacked via Pearl Harbor.

Also they hadn't been through nearly 30 years of constant war before hand. A nation can get weary from war.

Well they weren't. It took great deal of effort to get involved in both wars. The US has traditionally been isolationists on matters in the eastern hemisphere.

And it took world wars - here we are talking about internal china problem which is harder sell. China invading someone US cares about - like Japan may convince the US public to pay the nuclear butcher bill, but what they do on their own territory is not

They eventually were, because they died.

Worth noting that there weren't any 'good guys' in WWI like the story we're told about WWII. It was just a slugfest between colonial powers who were all doing awful stuff.

WWI is truly the most depressing war. International solidarity among the working classes folded like paper in the face of imperial force, leading to some of the most brutal and pointless combat in human history.

I wish grandchildren of your grandparents today would be less willing to sacrifice their lives for anyone in the world by playing the worlds' government, lawmaker and policemen.

The world would be much safer and peaceful place.

Do you think the world would be a safer and more peaceful place if nobody stopped nazi germany?

Yes. It wouldn't have been nicer probably since being populated only by ayrians would get boring, but once you are finished with genocide it would be peaceful and strong authoritarian states usually are safe.

Keyword: world

Could be safe internally, but that is utterly irrelevant to its neighbors, and the geopolitical order of a world in which the nazis weren’t crushed, the winning empires weren’t dismantled, and the US isn’t the guarantor of global trade and European security in order to combat the Soviets.

If Nazi Germany wasn't stopped we would be living in Man in the high castle world where japanese empire rule over asia, Italy over afrika and germany over all the rest with split of americas. It is potentially peaceful and safe world. Just not nice.

It’s not consistent with any of the myriad approaches to international relations either, and quite frankly, how agreeable you find a fictional world order isn’t worth discussing.

If you’re interested in geopolitics reading outside of Philip K. Dick, an accessible but satiating piece I always recommend is World Order: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821140

It’s written by a highly respected war criminal (how many fields can say that!)

No, but it honestly probably would have been if the Central Powers had won WWI. American entry into that war was made possible the sinking of the Lusitania, which was secretly carrying war munitions. There is some evidence that the British enabled the event although this is admittedly a minoritarian view among historians (last I checked). It was undoubtedly beneficial for the Allied Powers though.

The British Empire are pretty much the "bad guys" of world history insofar as such a designation makes sense. The punitive measures they arranged after WWI were directly responsible for the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany.

Yeah, life would be just peachy if half of Europe lived under the Germans or the Ottoman Empire. What? Why do people from large countries act like no one else exists? Would you like to live in a country run by someone who forces their language and culture on you?

What makes you think the Central Powers would have permanently occupied the nations it defeated when the Allied Powers did not? What makes you think Imperial Germany would have forced its language and culture on e.g. France when it would have been happy to simply install a friendly government?

WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

I'm not talking about territories invaded during WW1 like France or Belgium. I'm talking about new countries emerging from the collapsing empires. The people have lived there the whole time, they just didn't have a nation state of their own. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Armenia. The Kurds are still fighting to have their own country today. You get the picture. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire.

All of these people didn't work towards independence by accident. There were good reasons to, depending on whose empire you lived in, the ruling group was given preferential treatment, or maybe the minorities would be penalized for using their own language. Higher education and government services would often be provided exclusively in the ruling nation's language.

>WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.

The Armenian genocide sounds bad enough to me.

And of course these things happened even in the Entente empires, it's just easier to declare independence from an empire that just lost and can't do anything about it.

How did we go from 'more lenient war indemnities' and 'false flag operations are bad' to German and Ottoman occupation?

Because socialists failed to stop the senseless massacre that was WWI. I don't know if "willing" is the right word, but nationalist propaganda certainly triumphed over international solidarity among the working class, sadly.

The rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany was a direct consequence of the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles.

I am not sure why this is downvoted. Almost all such regimes in human history had to be confronted via war. I do not feel like my family, friends, and countrymen need to fight,die, or pay for for tibet.

You think they will stop with Tibet? The CCP wants China to be the new world hegemony. They think that their illiberal system is the only way and they want to spread it to every corner of the world. War is not the answer because it would be inconceivably horrific. But the world needs to stand up to China and stop putting up with their crap. Stop buying their crap. Start calling them out for their imperialism.

Citation?

The US has a record of wanting to be hegemon and specifically wanting to export our ideology. China, not so much outside of their borders and immediate sea lanes.

Are you just assuming they want to do so because that's what we do?

That's easy if you just unilaterally decide that anything you want is an "inalienable part" of your territory regardless of cultural, linguistic, historical, etc. differences. To say nothing of the local desire to be part of that inalienable territory and ruled by the CCP.

The US has a record of not wanting to get involved with anybody far away, until the rest of the world causes such a mess they have to get involved. Unless of course you think Nazis and Soviet Russia were no big deal. China is a nationalist ethno-state and they want to own Asia.

Honestly I think the best bet is we let Taiwan go nuclear. Oh, CCP says it will invade, but that's not really going to happen if they'll lose all their major cities.

It's all lies. I used to believe this line of thought about China. "We aren't expansionist like the US, we just want to do things our way inside of the country". It's not true.

China as a unified country has never been as large as it is today. They are actively taking over parts of Nepal, they have taken pieces of land from India, they invaded and took over Tibet, the are nearing genocidal strategies to eradicate any semblance of culture or different-think amongst the Uyghur and people of Inner-Mongolia (bet you haven't even heard of that suppression! They have banned the Mongolian language in schools and nomads are no longer allowed to _ride horses_ as of a few weeks ago!). Not to mention what happened in Hong Kong.

If not for India, they would have already taken over Bhutan. If not for their fighting spirit, they would have tried to take over Vietnam. They are building islands and taking over the South China sea. They are practicing debt trap diplomacy in Africa.

They are the most expansionist, imperialist regime in Modern times second only to USA. Chinese people feed us this line, that they aren't expansionist, that they aren't imperialist, that they are only inward looking. For some reason we in the West take them at their word. Look at their actions, the picture is not so rosy. As much as I hate Trump, his pressure on China has been a welcome policy shift.

All that without a shot fired!

Imagine if they actually had a military as active as the US, NATO, or the Russians. Where do you go from here, rhetorically?

Now I know you are lying! The Qing dynasty was far larger than China is today; in fact, it included Bhutan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Qing_dynasty_...

They're not lying, most likely, just uninformed.

Most Americans know literally dick-all about Chinese history and substitute a combination of Cold War and WWII history where we're the good guys and the antagonists are the bad guys.

DAMN! What a beautiful curb your ____ moment!

The British did more empire building in 2-3 hundred years than the Chinese did in a millennium!

Please stop breaking the site guidelines. You've done it a lot, we've asked you repeatedly not to, and I do not want to have to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's what the US said in WWI and WWII. It then had to sacrifice a bigger number of people. A supremacist globalist empire will not stop at its neighbors. Its plan is to invade the whole world.

Han supremacy? Laughably absurd. Just because some other cultures have a history of thinking they're better than everyone else doesn't mean that every culture does. Accounts of what China and the West thought of each other survive from the era of Marco Polo. The Chinese thought of Western Civilization with equality and respect. The West's opinion on the Chinese? Barbarians.

Every country has its bigots, but suggestions that a country that just came out of hundreds of years of institutional racism from the Qing and then the British opium wars has a deliberate agenda based on race supremacy just sound like projection to me.

Confront the mirror.

This is some grade A+ projection over here. Han chauvinism was so bad that Mao Zedong drafted a party directive specifically to address it.

Also, quite amusing you gave it a grade of A+. Can you define your scale? What constitutes A+ and is that the highest rating? Is this really the best example of projection you've ever seen?

The phrase han supremacy itself is projection. It's super American to put things specifically in racial terms.

Mao was giving minority cultures exemptions from the 1-child policy, subsidies, and all sorts of other stuff at a time when we were running Jim Crow.

90%+ of Han Chinese only ever see other Chinese, they do have a sort of belief that their culture is the best culture on the planet and the center of the world but so does everyone else, especially Americans. We can't say a thing.

Han Supremacy. I can't take these clowns seriously.

There's definitely some skeletons in the closet. The Han population was 1% in 1950. In the current year, it's 97%. Though I suspect it's not going to be geopolitically convenient for Adrien Zenz to write about the indigenous Taiwan people anytime soon.

Do you have a source on this?

You would think if China does something like this they might do a better job keeping it a secret. Any links to a credible source? All I find is "Hundreds of document" and opinions of some "Experts". And again, Adrian Zenz, who is by no means "independent", just check the guy's track record.

Optics only matters if there are consequences.

Forty-six per cent of the world’s population depend upon rivers originating in Tibet, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong rivers.

https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ixjuq2/china_for...

That's why I'm so hopeless about Hong Kong, much worse than that has been happening for a LONG time in Tibet and Xinjiang and nothing has happened, slowly people will forget all of these things and all that is left will be a picture (see Tian'AnMen massacre).

I'm seeing a lot of flagged comments and repeated commenters seeming to exaggerate viewpoints and stir up discord in this thread. I'm not always on the 'china bad' train but it seems like their social engineering efforts have reached HN.

Readers, please double-check your sources and form your own opinions beyond repeating what you read in an HN thread.

citation needed, who are these people?

The problem I am having is that articles like this make it to the front page of HN while not providing any sources of their own. We've seen a sharp uptick in anti-Chinese rhetoric over the last couple of years and most of it seems to be coming from the US State Dept. I have no special place in my heart for China, but this is too reminiscent of US propaganda tactics used to justify invasion in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

For the record, I'm a pro-CCP Chinese who turned from a CCP hater. I hated it because I was young, saw some bad things happened in the past, and read too much biased, anti-CCP opinions.

I've become an advocate of CCP after I learned some history, after having a deeper and broader understanding of all the things, after seeing what happened in the past ten, especially in the past 2 years, and so on.

You can check my HN profile and can easily tell that I'm not pretend to be, but is actually independent of CCP.

My father is a member of CCP though. Before my age of 30 or so, the one thing that I do the most when I'm home is to argue with him about the badness of CCP.

I'm older now, and it turned out that he's opinion was right, although he wasn't able to convince me - I came to my conclusion on my own, by self-thinking, reading, and observing.

I'm not saying that CCP is perfect, I still hate the Great firewall, but it's a complex issue that I'm not going to expand on it here.

Anyone who's with an open mind and is curious about my change (I know a lot of people changed like me), feel free to ask any question.

> A notice posted to the website of Tibet’s regional government website last month said over half a million people were trained as part of the project in the first seven months of 2020 - around 15% of the region’s population. Of this total, almost 50,000 have been transferred into jobs within Tibet, and several thousand have been sent to other parts of China. Many end up in low paid work, including textile manufacturing, construction and agriculture.

I guess this is what actual 'oppression' looks like.

There isn't just one type of oppression, so saying stuff like "actual" oppression does nothing but to disparage other types of oppression.

What do you mean by "actual 'oppression'" ?

Their nomadic lifestyle is probably a lot less stressful than wage labor in a city. That's why they don't want to, and the oppression is forcing them to.

On Amazon and other online shops there should be clear display of where the product is made. It is currently not the case.

All the international signaling so far is that they're not willing to do anything about Chinese domestic issues. Other than a critical word (often not even that) at the UN, what have the EU / Russia / SE Asia / Arab states done?

And if no one is even willing to call China out on its shenanigans, why would they stop? They'll just get even more emboldened. HK, Tibet, Uighurs are resolved, so the next stop clearly is Taiwan. If Taiwan's independence is eroded and the US doesn't step in militarily, it's game over.

Is it a sign of internal struggles that China is trying to foment foreign relations 'situations' to divert attention?

I really wish the world would rescue Tibet from China.

Ye, but how could one possibly do that?

Break the great firewall. Show the Chinese citizens exactly what the CCP is doing and hope that they revolt. Starlink should have the power to do that very soon.

Nope. It is a country by country basis and requires permission from the CCP. Without it they can blow the satellites up that are sending these signals into China.

From [0]

> The Chinese government would have to agree to let SpaceX build antenna dishes, or ground links, to send and receive data to and from the company's spacecraft. But that nation routes internet access for its 1.37 billion inhabitants through "the Great Firewall," a censorship technology that blocks foreign news, mentions of citizen uprisings (like the Tiananmen Square Massacre), or anything else Chinese officials don't like on the web.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-internet-satellite-co...

Starlink is a Musk project. So is Tesla's Giga production facility in Shanghai. Will he want to be forced to choose between them?

You know the Chinese citizens live there, right?

Consider that they probably understand their government better than you do. They saw a great coronavirus response followed immediately by a stellar response to a 100-year flood event, the kind that used to dislocate millions of people. Meanwhile, they can all see the results of the US system at present.

Chinese citizens generally know more about what the CPC is doing than foreigners. They're not nearly as information-starved or brainwashed as you probably think.

The thing that would really blow many people's minds is that most Chinese people support the types of policies that people in the West find disturbing. One of the things that really surprised me was the level of support for the One Child Policy, for example. Part of this is that the news media in the West generally do a terrible job of describing Chinese policies - they tend towards sensationalism and demonization. The other part of it is that many people in the West have a hard time understanding the priorities and mindset people in a developing country.

It's a good question and I wondered the same, why start all this ?

They probably could've had more success with the long game as the world became more and more reliant on them.

Now, it seems there is an urgent need to escalate ?

I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History and the origins are the following:

* Initially they had a huge amount of prisoners and shortage of workers in key regions. Naturally they had them work in remote areas.

* The real motivation is economic - the central planners simply loved the flexibility of slave labor - they could start pet projects quickly. They wanted to complete vanity projects that made no economic sense like the Belomorcanal. Their need for hard currency also meant that they needed raw resources for export, most of which were in faraway, underdeveloped regions.

* Repressive organs found that they were strongly incentivised to send even more people to the camps.

* There was obviously no free media - which meant that any excess was covered up or spun as success - for example Gorky acknowledged that prisoners don't have the proper skills or tools, but somehow claimed that ideology and superb management created wonders. This eventually emboldened the government to enslave even more people.

In short they created a slave economy. It wasn't by design, in so far that the leaders of the country didn't explicitly wish the return of slavery and serfdom, but there was a spiral of reinforcing incentives in the system.

Just like the USSR of the 20s and 30s China is desperate to create economic growth at all costs, will eventually run out of cheap rural labor[0], on which it used to rely for the last few decades and is not beholden to either national or international opinion. Who can stop the CPC from reintroducing slavery or serfdom? The Gulag system developed over 10 years to reach it its classical form, we may well see the first steps.

Economist Evsey Domar famously created a model where high labour demand and lots of available land creates incentives for landowners to reintroduce serfdom [1] as they didn't want to compete with each other. Is China's capital being accustomed to cheap labourers migrating from poor rural areas the reason why rural minorities are now forced into labour by the government?

[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/rural-population-percent-... - this is the total rural population, but I assume eventually many of the remaining people will be old or average-off Han that like it in the villages.

[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63299/causeso...

>will eventually run out of cheap rural labor

Premier Li KeQiang revealed this year over 600m Chinese still live on 1000RMB a month. China will _never_ run out of cheap labour. The reality is, even at the height of Chinese export economy 10 years ago, manufacturing "only" employed ~400M workers. China has more cheap work force than _global_ demand.

These poverty alleviation / sinicization programs are just that. They're trying to reign in minorities in frontier regions with separatism risk. The vocational training salaries compensates better than the aforementioned 600m on 1000RMB per month. The mass of Han rural poor looking for migrant work opportunities would riot if they found out how much minorities are "privileged" in these programs. Many are already pissed at the affirmative action privileges afforded to minorities in many facets of life.

The margins are razor thin and cheap is relative. Chinese manufacturers are used to paying close to nothing and now there is wage pressure. https://www.marketplace.org/2018/12/04/what-worries-chinas-m...

Also, in textile manufacturing for example you can see that firms are already moving away from China to places like Bangladesh.. unless they are using Uyghur labor.

Regarding the rural population - Chinese agriculture is extremely inefficient and still needs huge amount of labour - the reason is that the large agricultural enterprises are in effect limited to family businesses by law. If they actually reform agriculture China will have no issues feeding itself cheaply, but it probably will not as it will be a huge social disruption.

1000RMB per month is currently competitive with ASEAN wages like Vietnam, problem is lack of focus on interior development until recently. Coastal manufactures with 2000RMB wages were shifting to Vietnam due to lack of interior development and US tariffs. Push comes to shove, interior supply chain will be preferenced if policy pressure dictates holding on the domestic manufacturing. Won't stop foreign companies who wants to diversify supply chains though, but would also influence underlying economics of domestic companies moving.

As for work force, China has abundance of cheap labour that's still regionally competitive. Official CCP poverty definition (lower than world bank) is 250RMB/month. Incidentally why Xi's poverty alleviation by 2020 is a meme. There's still 600M Chinese who'll work for 250-1000RMB. That's still multiple medium sized countries worth of "close to nothing" tier labour, competitive from Bangladesh to Vietnam. Real problem is social disruption from outsourcing from coastal to interior provinces, China dealing with coastal rust belt is going to be interesting. Hence new duo circulation / domestic consumption strategy which may or may not pan out.

>unless they are using Uyghur labor

Vocational training covers many sectors not just textiles, and no report alleges these are cheap / unpaid positions, merely forced. Lowest wage for out of province contracts works out to be 2000RMB with state subsidies to companies. Obviously not sustainable for 600M+ Han, but can swing it for "only" 11M Uyghurs because underlying concern is security not cheap labour. I see it like TSA funding, it doesn't make economic sense on it's own, at best it stops a few attacks, at worst it's wasted security theatre. It's "cheap labour" in the sense that state provides subsidies for companies taking on Uyghur workers, but ultimately not sustainable or efficient use of resources. Frame another way, it's also similar to US agriculture industrial policy, subsidize farmers because it makes political sense foremost and some economic sense in that it provides domestic industries some protectionist barriers even though on net it's bad use of resources.

>Chinese ag

They're actually moving towards US style industrial farms for efficiency and improved food security. Rural collectives from land reform legacy is being phased out for some sort of share system with prospectvie big state Ag companies. Will definitely cause social disruption but also long overdue. IMO previous reluctance probably because land reform central to CCP origin story, pretty embarrassing that replacement for CCP core policy = more capitalism.

lots of prisoners, shortage of labour, this also sounds like the US-Mexico border and the shortage of farm workers

This could be in response of India creating Tibetan special forces division. India wants to create a Tibetan rebellion in case of war.

https://theprint.in/opinion/indias-use-of-secret-guerrilla-f...

This is a separate generalized poverty alleviation scheme that started last year. Tibetan with exile influence gets tossed in the XJ style patriotic re-education system.

Communist always have the best branding.

That is not new, the wiki article mentions it existing from 1962: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Frontier_Force

One of my favourite publications is The Grayzone https://thegrayzone.com/ it helps to remind me that BS such as these https://narratively.com/the-literally-unbelievable-story-of-... are still being orchestrated by the US today.

In it, they have also reported about the Xinjiang situation, which you can all read here: https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-... Since I know that reading is not HN's forte, what basically it says is that there is no solid evidence for what's been reported about Xinjiang, and most of what's reported is basically lies fabricated by one Adrian Zenz. The same Adrian Zenz quoted in this Reuters article. It's really kinda funny what people hold up as evidence these days, no wonder why the world is going against the 'intelligence' from the 5-eye countries.

And the world does nothing. Lucky the third reich wasn't the workshop of the world.

I wonder where all the people begging others not to forget about the Holocaust are. The fact that such astrocities still exist proves that remembering past ones is self-serving in a sense.

The comments on HN on Chinese aggression are so pathetic. They are conducting a systemic genocide by UN definition on Uighur muslims, and coercing people to make cheap products. Yet, you come here, and you see, oh US, Europe did this too. SMH.

Agreed. Most of the discussion focuses on comparisons to the west. Classic whataboutism, false equivalency and deflection. You see this on every critical post about the CCP across the Internet. It is an effective way to derail a discussion.

Even if HN's guidelines prohibit "nationalistic flamewars", these arguments are allowed by moderators.

Imagine in an alternate world, it is 1937 and America imports most of its products from Nazi-run Germany, because they are better at producing them at lower cost. There have been persistent rumours of mistreatment of Jews, particularly on the periphery of their empire, but the reports are disparate and refuted by the Germans. Every year more and more evidence is mounting of German nationalism and forced labour, but surely it's just exaggerated and it will all just work itself out in time?

What is the rest of the world to do? Do people have the appetite to give up their access to cheap goods?

You do know that most of the Europeans didn't have a problem with Germany's antisemitism. What do you think why germany had such a big jewish community and culture in the first place? Because they were driven out of the other countries and could live freely in Germany. But also in Germany the hate finally prevailed.

Be real. They don't/didn't

Antisemitism was/is widespread in Europe. Germany was long time a safe haven for the Jews. What do you think, why german and jiddish share so many words and similarities?

Welp, Adrian Zenz strikes again.

If you haven't heard of this guy, he's a fellow at 'Victim of Communism Foundation Memorial', set up and paid by US.

Anecdotally, private businesses in China very much dislike taking in labor transfers (more or less a gov initiative) - because they had to provide housing, specific food (halal, etc), and even religious facilities while paying the same. The labor quality is not nearly as high as one on the market. This is essentially China's answer to increase employment for the remote regions.

Of course they would 'suggest the transfers have coercive elements.' The same pay and benefits simply doesn't exist in the region, why would anyone want to go? /s

Reuters explicitly says that it has "corroborated Zenz’s findings and found additional policy documents, company reports, procurement filings and state media reports that describe the program". I understand that Zenz may be controversial, but are you suggesting that Reuters in general is suspect because it's speaking out about this?

Please take information with a grain of salt that tries to discredit the researcher, without even mentioning the actual argument. You might not agree with his world view, but Zenz found hard evidence of repression in Xinjiang and uncovered a Chinese government financed program for forced sterilization.

If you are Chinese, be aware that any state-control model that works in Tibet or Xinjiang might also be transferred to other parts of China. The current political trajectory might continue. Xi Jinping is still young, he might be president for the next 30 years.

Yes, in the study he claimed 80% of all China's IUD happened in Xinjiang, where simple math resulted in 8.7%.

link to his report: https://web.archive.org/web/20200629192118/https://jamestown...

link to actual source that Zenz himself used: https://preview.redd.it/xkytzc0iuna51.png?width=1425&format=...

Make it what you will.

Zenz extrapolated based on Food Subsidies. There are NO FACTS on number or what is done there. Go look at Grayzone on the coverage on Zenz. What motivation would they have to make China look better.

I could claim people are learning mandarin there.

As you can find in one of his articles, he deducted his findings from from job descriptions and articles in newspapers (Renminribao, Xinhua):

Xinjiang's rapidly evolving security state, Zenz et al., 2017

http://www.academia.edu/download/52174157/Xinjiangs_Rapidly_...

So, they prepare for a land war. "Military-style training", groups of 10 and 30, logistics, ideological instruction... the end goal looks quite obvious.

It has been sad to learn about the U.S. fighting fires in CA with prison labor.

It is sad for a number of reasons, but in situations like this it removes moral standing of the US to criticize others, because clearly there is little introspection happening.

The US houses 25% of the world’s prison population, how much more law and order do we need? Why do our prisoners labor for our governments and companies? Is this forced?

Prison work release programs in the US have no fucking resemblance to forced labor in chinese concentration camps.

US prison work release programs are strictly voluntary, are paid (a pathetic pittance, but still paid), and prisoners can use the work experience to support applications for early parole. In many cases the work experience is valuable for gaining employment after parole.

The natural result is that these programs are popular with inmates, in spite of insultingly low pay.

Since you didn't bother to support your strawman (or should we call it a scarecrow?) with any citations:

https://fair.org/home/us-media-cant-think-how-to-fight-fires...

For those interested, hourly pay for prisoners in the US can legally be as low as $0.04. Three orders of magnitude away from citizen wages, i.e. a citizen working 3 days ~= 10 years prison labor.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Yes, as I said above, and as the link I gave said, the pay is insultingly, embarrassingly low. And yet work release programs remain highly popular among US inmates. It allows inmates -- even violent felons in some cases -- to do meaningful work outside the prison, gain credit for their debt to society, and gain work experience they can use later. Yes the pay is way too low, and yes these voluntary programs are often very valuable to the inmates. Both these things can be true simultaneously. Read the link I gave you for a start.

You got anything more to say about your bullshit comparison to concentration camps? Or are you going to go on pretending that low wages was your only point?

It is reasonable to point out that the US currently has prisons with arguably poor conditions. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50114468

This is an argument over the term ‘concentration camp’ in effect.

Do we concentrate the most ‘criminals’ into ‘camps’ where they can ‘work’ and ‘play’? Arguably yes.

All that is true is that the U.S. loves its very large prison system enough to not change it. It has gotten so large that it removes a leg to stand on when criticizing other countries for imprisoning people.

Edit: Professors call these places gulag’s: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49323320

So maybe it would be a better term to describe what the Chinese are doing, since they clearly aren’t filling trains with bodies to be sent to the incinerator. (which is what the term concentration camp brings to mind in the west).

Perfect, you've moved the goalposts so that all prison systems across the world count as "concentration camps". Now you can use your fallacy to defend China's worst human rights abuses from any and all criticism, because you can claim that anyone's judgement is tainted by the mere existence of their own country's "concentration camp" prison system.

> All that is true is that the U.S. loves its very large prison system enough to not change it.

There have been literally hundreds of criminal justice reforms enacted in recent years, in all fifty states and at the federal level, covering all aspects of the American criminal justice system; drug laws, courts, bail, and yes prison reform. Guess which country the author of The New Jim Crow is from? I'll give you a hint if you need it. Criminal justice reform is a one of the most bitterly fought issues in American politics, and in case you haven't noticed, the fights are recently getting more serious.

It's clear to me that, regarding this particular topic, you have no idea what you're talking about.

> It has gotten so large that it removes a leg to stand on when criticizing other countries for imprisoning people.

Whose "leg" are you talking about? Mine? Michelle Alexander's? It may surprise you to learn that the US is home to over two hundred million adults, who do not all think alike or speak with the same voice. It may also surprise you that many American who are passionate about prison reform here at home are also passionately opposed to China's ongoing ethnic cleansing. I can confidently predict that those people will continue to speak out against China regardless of mensetmanusman's disapproval.

Prison reform has been talked about for decades, there has supposedly been progress, but it hasn’t looked too promising in the data:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_...

I think we both agree that the US would have better standing on this issue if we didn’t have the highest per capita imprisonment.

China would almost have to 10x their imprisonment rates to overtake us...

Sorry to make you angry about this.

You're completely missing the point. Yes, the American criminal justice system needs a lot more reform, and yes progress on civil rights issues is painfully slow. No shit, congratulations for noticing.

There are millions of people in this world who care deeply about humans rights, and these people are the only reason any progress is ever made, whether in America or China or anywhere else. Do you really think you're helping by shitting on them because the progress hasn't yet achieved your satisfaction?

If I may offer a suggestion, either do something to join the fight, or shut the fuck up about it.

Some things never change, such as using tu quoque fallacies to distract people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

> "And you are lynching Negroes" (Russian: "А у вас негров линчуют", A u vas negrov linchuyut) (which also means "Yet, in your [country], [they] lynch Negroes") and the later "And you are hanging blacks" are catchphrases that describe or satirize Soviet Union response to United States criticisms of Soviet human rights violations.

I think the million+ uighers in concentration camps are a precise analogy for death camps run by you know who in the 20th century. The u.s. should tell China, hey you hid your concentration camps really well, we totally just found out like today, but the thing is we can't let this go on so you have to free all your concentration camps in 18 months or we come invade. Sorrrry. We totally didnt know you were doing this. Take your time.

What's China going to do? Keep up its million people in concentration camps?

It'll totally say "hahaha that's funny we dont have any concentration camps though" and then free its concentration camps by deadline.

I think that's how it should play out.

Of course it is not what's happening. Everyone is turning a blind eye including me and people in this thread. The last time I suggested this course of action I was downvoted.

Guys, a million people is SO MANY. I mean ignoring fifty or a hundred thousand people is one thing. But a million?

Edit: this is not a hawkish sentiment. Obviously the suggestion is absurd.

I don’t think the US alone has any appetite for a land war in China, nor does the rest of the world. They have such a huge population, it would be very, very hard to win a war like that.

If they were to confront China directly, I would guess the US and the west are much more likely to take a containment approach like they did with the USSR.

You don't have to have any appetite for a land war to say you gotta free your concentration camps within 18 months or we have to come invade. It's a million people.

If it isn't a credible threat it won't be very effective. Gathering a coalition to embargo China would be a more credible threat, but even that requires some legwork to develop an alternative set of trading partners.

Problem is, the concentration camps are just as real as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

You are correct but not in the way you think. WMD were found in Iraq and the concentration camps are real.

https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...

If you insist on calling something resembling juvenile detention centers a "concentration camps", then indeed, they do exist.

And you will be in the first wave of the invasion force? The one that takes 90+ % casualties?

The US had no problem with dead 500,000 Iraqi Children, why should they care for a million uighurs? What if China says they will release them if we take them in? Then suddenly there wouldn't be any uighurs but only Muslims and we "know" they are all "terrorists".

This statement smelled fishy to me as there are only 40M or so people in Iraq to begin with, so I Googled around a bit.

Despite politicians and talking heads claiming for years that either Desert Storm, UN sanctions, or both caused half a million child deaths, evidently most studies found that the child mortality rate in Iraq was unchanged throughout the 1990s.

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Iraqi-death-toll-doe...

While this apparently fake statistic has mostly been used to criticize the US and UN, it seems Tony Blair used it to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming the dead kids were Saddam's fault.

I guess this is why I don't read the papers much anymore.

Whether or not there really were so many dead children or not does not change anything in Albright's statement. If it serves the goals of the USA, they are willing to let 500.000 children die.

OK. But if you believed that lie, how many other lies do you believe?

Which lie? I refer only to her statement, which illustrates her character and that of the USA. The correct answer from her would have been, "it's not 500,000, but every dead child is one too many". They didn't care about 500.000 dead Iraqi children, period. If the children really died, is important to the children and their families not for the characterization.

Yea war is a terrible idea. Even if we “won” it would come at great cost. The best strategy is to contain them and wait for the inevitable communist collapse. Also, breaking the great firewall would do wonders in encouraging Chinese citizens to stand up for themselves. Hopefully Elon doesn’t kowtow to the CCP with Starlink.

Regardless of what Elon Musk does, very few SpaceX Starlink ground terminals will ever make it into China. Dissidents might smuggle in a few but that isn't going to crack open the Great Firewall on any widespread basis.

Yea you are probably right. But it makes it so that the CCP can’t actively control the ISP directly. Perhaps people will hack together ground terminals or something? Where there is a will, there is a way. In any event, just standing up to China and telling them that we won’t block out service to those who can access it is better than nothing.

I’m taking part in this discussion from inside China. I teach 16 year olds who have Astrill subscriptions (It’s a VPN). The point of the GFW isn’t to stop information getting in or out. It’s to maintain control over what gets discussed and to ensure that all Chinese language cultural interchange of any importance is controlled by the CPC.

You are aware that most people know perfectly well how to use VPNs?

Well, the Great Firewall recognizes VPN packets and can decide to drop them, so you might not even be able to complete a login with the VPN server...

Perhaps it can, but it doesn't. Lot of people use VPNs in China.

"It depends". Last year in September they had the 70th anniversary of Communist Rule, and a few weeks before that connecting to VPN was a pain. For some reason there's also less restrictions e.g. if you're close to an airport, WhatsApp would work.

> breaking the great firewall would do wonders in encouraging Chinese citizens to stand up for themselves.

Not too sure. There are obvious fake negative news about China and racism comments from Fox News/YouTube. For Chinese people, it’ll be quite a mixed feeling to see toxic content on China, e.g. Wuhan virus, China must pay, etc. I’d say those content might come first to hurt their feelings.

As a native Chinese, it’s still emotionally tough for me to browse China related topic even on HN which is a much more principled forum. Let alone other media

1)From the historical perspective internal conflict within China would be the deciding factor.

2)India isn't dovish or shy about confronting China.

3)The PLA is comprised of mostly only-sons and hasn't been deployed in a real conflict.

> PLA is comprised of mostly only-sons and hasn't been deployed in a real conflict.

Sorry, did you forget the Korean war? Sure, Sino-Indian and Sino-Vietnamese wars were much smaller by comparison, but also very real conflicts.

Fighting an adversary like the PLA in occupied areas like Tibet, Xinjiang, HK and maybe Taiwan someday plays to the strengths of the US armed forces. It would be an embarrassing disaster for the PRC that would very likely lead to a collapse of the party and force them into some type of hermit kingdom, like NK.

The US has been in near constant war for almost 100 years, having big parades with uniforms doesn't make up for that.

A thing of note - this "near constant war" has always been fought against weaker nations, which the US military industrial complex has been able to outproduce utterly. China is a completely different kind of adversary and has historically proved that it can match the US - again I refer you to the Korean war, where China was able to check and drive back the US forces.

You don't threaten to invade a nuclear power unless you mean it. We wouldn't mean it. Instead, we have begun decoupling.

Yes obviously we wouldn't mean it.

And they won't notice that?

Nah the way to do it today is to create internal struggle and division based on fake news and manipulating people

Why are you being downvoted? This is a completely rational take.

Probably because they think it's a hawkish sentiment. No way.

There's nothing rational about starting a war with China. The most we can possibly do is propaganda and sanctions.

How is invading China rational? America can't even bother to decouple financially. In what world is it rational that a country lets its allies commit genocide in Afrin and Yemen, yet boldly stands against someone else.

Good luck invading China when your planes melt in the rain and your boats are constantly running into each other.

> What's China going to do?

Nuke everybody. The CCP would have nothing to lose.

> The u.s. should tell China, hey you hid your concentration camps really well, we totally just found out like today, but the thing is we can't let this go on so you have to free all your concentration camps in 18 months or we come invade.

The US isn't going to invade China; I mean, it fought North Korea to a draw and could stomach Vietnam, and you think it's going to make a credible threat to invade China over internal policy?

And, if it did make such a threat and China believed it, that would just drive things into high gear. When someone's already doing a plan that is basically forcibly assimilate or exterminate, a timeline just pushes it to expedite the latter.

The UN soundly beat North Korea, but it fought China to a draw on Korean soil.

Korea ended in a draw b/c the soviet union was entering the conflict in support of mostly defeated NK/PRC forces and the fear was it could escalate into a nuclear war.

Vietnam is more interesting but I think it's very unlikely that a conflict with the PLA today would unfold in the same way.

Figuring out what type of conflict would force China into a nuclear exchange is probably the only question worth asking. would liberating Tibet and Xinjiang do that? Probably, but it also could be the case that Beijing wouldn't risk being vaporized themselves for a people and place they deem so inferior.

It's like nuclear weapons just don't exist in your mind.

I am so glad that geopolitics I'd handled by a select few rather than the supposedly educated crowd of hacker news...

Supposedly educated? That pretense has all but fallen off. The only difference between here and reddit is that people THINK they're educated.

> over half a million people were trained as part of the project in the first seven months of 2020 - around 15% of the region’s population

In the meantime countries such as Spain “enjoy” 50% unemployment of the young.

Are you suggesting that the Spanish gov't forcibly enroll youths in labor camps?

What is Conscription then? Or compulsory National Service?

I'm not going to voice support for compulsory national service but at least their purpose isn't to purge the social identity of an entire ethnic minority. Which, if you actually dig a little deeper into the Tibet issue, is exactly what China is trying to achieve (and having some success at too).

Funny how you arrived at “forcibly” while there’s not a single proof this program is forced on anyone.

So China has a free press now to find such proof! How silly of us. This myopic, appeasement view of an authoritarian regime has been shown time and again through our history to not end well.

So what you are saying is that if there's no free press, it's a valid reasoning to just invent things out of thin air and assume they are true, like in this case with "forced labor".

There's no free press in China, not elsewhere dear.

Great, yet another China bad article that paints what is probably a jobs and reeducation program to modernize Tibet as something much more sinister.

Edit: Reeducation might be something as normal as going from an agricultural society to a modern one. Reeducation sounds very sinister, I'm sure, but Tibet was a feudal society just 60 years ago.

Also "reeducation" is entirely my phrasing and has connotations different from say "job training" or "education", which I could have easily used.

You can make almost any government program sound super sinister, especially when there are translation complications thrown into the mix.

What is a "reeducation program"? What are they being "re-educated about"?

Being alive, eventually.

It appears it’s mostly the language, interaction with various services and institutions, and skills necessary to get a job.

What language? If they have their own language, wouldn't there be plenty of jobs where they can just use their own language?

Are you pretending not to see how a language outside your tribe opens up more opportunities. The entire tribes of Africa and South America underwent the same massive foreign language reeducation now being demonized

No, I just want to understand. What opportunities exactly?

Plenty of nineteenth-century type jobs. Anything modern - anything that actually improves their standards of living - requires the ability to read and write Chinese.

The glories of Xi, presumably.

That their old culture, and its old power structures, are bad, and that the new culture, and the new power structures (with Han at the top) are good. New is good. Old is a bad look.

Tbh the power structures in Tibet [0] weren't that great.

[0]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951)#/Socie...

This article is about the power structures in 1951. That's history, not current affairs.

I'm not certain I agree with OP, but you could call workplace diveristy seminars or code bootcamps reeducation programs.

(Not that I think either of those are bad things)

The words "reeducation program" don't frighten me on their own. I'd like to know more about it.

So, in other words, it sounds like changing the culture?

Please show me a "reeducation program" that was ever not a euphemism for something much more sinister.

> A report released in January by the Tibetan arm of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a high-profile advisory body to the government, describes internal discussions on strategies to tackle the “mental poverty” of rural laborers, including sending teams of officials into villages to carry out education and “guide the masses to create a happy life with their hardworking hands.”

I mean, we don't have to look elsewhere, direct quotes about this program sound super sinister

Like in any country with a working social care system, which includes free skills training?

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