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Comment by BelenusMordred | Hacker News Reader

Opening line:

> The PRC executes between five and ten thousand people per year

Anyone got a source for that claim? Amnesty estimates "1000's" but doesn't actually give a figure and claims to not know it. I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?

For comparison we have the Saudis, Iraq, Egypt and Iran coming in with a few hundred executions each while certain other allied countries refuse to publish and are also hidden away behind government secrecy.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/

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The figure comes from the source of the photos: https://www.friendsoftibet.org/main/execution.html

All I have to say about this is that China, the supposed epicenter of Covid, apparently stopped having any new cases at about 100k.

GDP is about the only thing we can measure objectively from this country, and air pollution when we point our satellites at them.

Given the absolute infallibility of the state in China, I suspect they declared "war won" and just stopped reporting any spread.

Run society like nothing is going on.

There's a reason NK and China made sure there were televised cities with people packed like sardines.

If Amnesty International estimates it to be "1000s", which I think we can agree is a reputable source, and the Chinese government is extremely restrictive in news and data that it releases, it's quite possible it could be 5,000 people a year. What's unknown is if they still charge your family for the bullet.

> I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?

I would guess ramblings from some dark Falun Gong blog, as clearly he has no issues quoting them elsewhere on the piece, which on my eyes for as gruesome as the topic might be takes a huge amount of credibility away of him and the piece

These are the kind of numbers and narrative Tibetan/FLG NGOs from the west throws out. Read: outdated propaganda from a bunch of exiles from 20-30 years ago stuck in "immigrant time bubble" where their impressions of the country is locked in a outdated reality. Which more or less summarizes this entire article and most ridiculous amateur CCP bad analysis regurgitated by western "enthusiasts".

It's like whenever people insinuate Tianamen 2.0 will repeat for xyz events like China is trapped in some pre reform time bubble in terms of culture and capabilities. Somehow a modern China with 14T economy is going to have deal with problems the same way as post war China with 200B economy. I've never seen so many seemingly intelligent people go full smooth brain on this subject matter including in this thread. It's particularly hilarious to see people claim their very smart PhD Chinese colleagues being brainwashed, when theses colleagues have experience in both east and west - they're not the ones with singular perspective and the information deficit. It's not their brain washing, it's yours. Chinese diaspora reciprocate stories of how brainwashed their western coworkers are.. Queue reactionary 50c accusations when 50c doesn't operate in English inside or outside GFC.

China is ~50X wealthier since 89, a wealthier China with riot gear and information control doesn't need to Tianamen dissidents haphazardly. A wealthier China with lethal injection doesn't need to shoot people in back of head in open fields and bill family for bullet, nor execute as many when it's economical to lock them away. Which is largely what happens outside of most egregious crimes / drug smuggling charges. Not to mention much of China executes XYZ for bullshit reasons media reporting turns out to be China sentences person to "death sentence with reprieve" - a symbolic sentence that's functionally life imprisonment. Things aren't the best, but they are generally trending in the right direction.

> It's not their brain washing, it's yours.

The main difference I found between China- and Western-style brainwashing is that, in general, in the West people have much more negative attitude toward killing others, no matter what narrative is presented. Whenever USA tries to wage a war, there are many demonstrations against the war, and societies at large are anti-war and opposed to all forms of killing.

The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to believe in consequentialism to a larger degree. They argue that sometimes killing is necessary to prevent more killing, for example. This is presented in a way very accessible for a Western person in the wuxia Hero (2002) where it is the main point of the movie.

All in, I consider the Chinese more brainwashed because Western people have access to all kinds of propaganda - American right & left, Russian, Chinese - whereas the Chinese have much more limited sources because the government is putting an enormous amount of effort in controlling the sources of information, and given the size of the population, they're extremely successful.

Don't forget Chinese "peaceful expansion" which is just another way of saying "We're going to come over and set up in your backyard, and if you don't like it, you're just causing aggression." The Chinese government is the most opaque and two-faced system in the world. At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.

Chinese/PRC "peaceful expansion" is resolving 12/14 (most) land border disputes with the most concessions, in shortest time period in human history. Chinese "peaceful expansion" is also being the 2nd last out of 6 claimants to conduct land reclamation or weaponize features in South China Sea disputes. Chinese "peaceful expansion" is _INHERITING_ all these disputes from ROC (Taiwan) i.e. they are not dispute of CCP's making, but hand me down disputes that must be resolved somehow... which China has done mostly diplomatically so far, with minimal blood shed.

Without exaggeration, PRC ascent and border resolution is unprecedentedly peaceful relative to human history. In terms of modern dispute management, it's has been the most peaceful. Japan has disputes with 5/5 her maritime neighbours. And she's an island.

> At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.

lol what is this, modern China has trials too. Maybe one day China's foreign policy will use paperwork to make enhanced interrogation not torture, and droning combatants not random civilians.

Please keep nationalistic flamewar off this site, regardless of how right your country is or you feel it is. Comments like this are a major step into the hell we're trying to avoid here.

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

>consequentialism

Moral calculus is clearer when growing up without basic needs met. But more or less.

>access to all kinds of propaganda

Access to information does not make one more informed. Chinese who live through daily propaganda inherently understands nature of propaganda. Very few trust official news sources. Outside extremely partisan media platforms, western manufactured consent is more subtle and sinister. Most global south diaspora in the west will tell you how absolutely bullshit western reporting is in general, a free fifth estate is frequently seemingly indistinguishable from state propaganda from those who know it intimately.

It's a matter of comprehension. There are more Chinese diaspora multilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.

Chinese information control doesn't generate brainwashed people as much as create political disengagement. The more ideology Xi pushes the less believers there are are outside of the inevitable proportion of fierce nationalists / new generation of little pinks. But much of CHinese society skew old, have through Mao/Deng - they've experienced the spectrum of propaganda and understands when the levers are being adjusted.

Modern western ecosystem generate extreme dogmatism without media literacy. Too many think access to information is the same as being informed. The debates people have on the effects of social media are similar lessons learned through the "lived" propaganda experience of just growing up in China. Recognition of the issue frequently doesn't generalize outside of the domestic realm, i.e. China issues. The fact that this story, a substack post by a non-subject matter expert using biased sources is generating this much engagement is more or less illustrative of the point.

Please make your points without crossing into flamewar accusations and name-calling ("brainwashing", "ridiculous amateur CCP bad analysis regurgitated"). You're badly breaking the site guidelines when you do these things, and it sadly also guarantees that what you say won't be heard by anyone except the people who already strongly agree with you. That's not conversation.

This is a highly emotional topic on both sides, and that makes it more important to follow the rules, not less: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I know all too well what you're experiencing from "seemingly intelligent people", but fulminating not only doesn't help, it reinforces the very things you're complaining about. We all do this, and in that sense we're all creating our own enemies. It's a trap and it takes a lot of work to even begin to become aware of it, but what choice do we have? Certainly if HN is to be a place where people have curious conversation, everyone needs to work on this.

> Anyone got a source for that claim?

We will probably never know the real number. Please also remember we have under-estimated for a very long time the victims of the Soviet Union until we found out more about the gulags and all other repressive systems they had in place.

> We will probably never know the real number.

So then why use such numbers, when there's no expectation of accuracy?

My high school teachers would have been rather upset at me had I been so liberal with facts

Because it can establish a lower bound. When we say "we'll never know the real number", we are saying "the real number is at least X, but it could be a lot more". If X is already high in our eyes, it can be useful for providing a view on the true magnitude of the problem.

> So then why use such numbers, when there's no expectation of accuracy?

The exact number is not important when considering the massive scale.

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