This business action and news reporting seems like it is coordinated by Western intelligence agencies and Governments to discredit China.
When can we ease up the geopolitical conflict and just live in peace with the other peoples of the Northern Hemisphere?
The idea that intelligence agencies and governments would coordinate such a campaign is absurd. First, the government doesn’t have that kind over influence over corporations and news outlets. I mean, the West isn’t China after all. Second, there are far easier ways to discredit China, like point to their very real abuse of people in Hong Kong.
"The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit"
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-pa...
I don't think it is absurd. FUD seeds only need to be planted and social media and news outlets will be more than happy to make this viral by themselves. Once public opinion is perceiving things in a certain way the situation becomes very difficult for companies, which obviously do not want their sales or image hurt and the facts become irrelevant. This is the subtlety our Western system where influence and fabrication of narrative still exist but are much more subtle than the blunt tools used in countries like China.
It is quite likely in my opinion that the Xinjiang cotton 'issue' is at the very least massively overblown. This is a modern, mechanised industry and China is not exactly short of labour so the idea that Chinese cotton is produced by forced labour seems far-fetched and it is 'interesting' that this somehow suddenly becomes such a global issue.
Shooting down Chinese cotton would not only hurt China and perhaps foster unrest in Xinjiang (people would lose their jobs), which can be useful to the West, but would also serve the economic interests of China's adversaries. After all it so happens that the top 3 cotton producers are India, China, and the USA, in that order. So this is very possibly a geopolitical powerplay.
Calling out negative reporting from China as attempts to “discredit” smells.
> When can we ease up the geopolitical conflict
Where? Between China and the rest of the world? Or in general?
When there are no systematic government sanctioned human rights violations. These aren’t exactly “internal” affairs. Just like jailing and silencing. dissenters isn’t.
Now, I don't think China is a comic book villain - I doubt many people within the government are hatching nefarious plans to convert America to communism in 2021. But with all the horrible shit they do it seems like it sometimes.
America has a huge rap sheet of bad shit it's done, but at least in Western democracies we make (slow) progress towards being more moral and equitable societies. I'm convinced China goes the other direction.
With that going on I don't think neither China nor America will ever be able to overcome the current us-vs-them mentality. And tbh while I don't want a war with China, I don't think we should just accept their actions and move on.
Why do you think this? Yes I know they're called the "Communist Party", but going from that to "unite the world under communism" is a big step.
Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat, says that China is communist in name only. In reality, the CCP is more like the "Chinese Civilization Party", Mahbubani said. Their goal is to advance the interests of China, not to promote world-wide communism. The opening-up since the 80s have been relentless. It's been going on for decades and they're still further opening up.
Why do you believe that their goal is to unite the world under communism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split
> In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the USSR's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western world, which Mao decried as revisionism. Against that ideological background, China took a belligerent stance towards the West, and publicly rejected the USSR's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Eastern and Western blocs.
Wrong and uninformed. They've not invaded another country since Vietnam in the 1979s, they're more interested in expanding their soft power. Also they haven't followed the communist ideology for a long time, abandoning it when Deng opened up China.
> America has a huge rap sheet of bad shit it's done, but at least in Western democracies we make (slow) progress towards being more moral and equitable societies. I'm convinced China goes the other direction.
In fact as a non-US observer I think the US has made negative progress on democracy thanks to Trump. Thanks to that China is now doubling down on its version of democracy.
> And tbh while I don't want a war with China, I don't think we should just accept their actions and move on.
Big powers will always get away with shit like this. When George Bush needed to get oil out of Iraq, he had to convince the UN security council that the war was not illegal. China helped them on this.