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Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

Why are you comparing blatantly racist actions with mild, indirect criticism of a government?

What are you even talking about? Posting racist cartoon depicting stereotypes about Chinese is exactly what the Chinese studies PhD student did, so this is an exact parallel.

Do you have a copy of the cartoon? The article intimated that it had possibly exaggerated Asiatic features. It did not indicate that the cartoon’s actual intent was to lampoon an entire race, which is what would traditionally qualify as racism (although I know the goalposts have been moved quite a bit).

I don’t have a copy of the cartoon, and I haven’t read anything about this story other than what’s in the article. But that the article is very vague about the cartoon is rather telling in itself: if it is innocuous enough why isn’t it included or at least described in more detail as ammunition? The author wasn’t shy about including the full tweet they’d like you to believe was the smoking gun. It’s also impossible to tell “actual intent” even if the image is provided; pushing a political message is not at all mutually exclusive with contempt against an entire people.

Anyway, this jollybean poster apparently also doesn’t have a copy and posted in bad faith just to mislead people who didn’t actually read the article, or only read what the author intended to highlight. Really tried of this bad faith engagement.

A cartoon which has Chinese characters is not racist.

It was just a „Cartoon with Chinese characteristics“!

It had winnie the poo memes afaik. It would be like posting the drawn image of obama as a monkey (which caused a stir a while ago) while criticizing his policies in the US.

Wait a second. Is the argument here that comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh is "racist"? As opposed to just, say, offensive to a very powerful fat man? Wow, OK. I think we have a new standard for the use of racism accusations to censor people.

This is a straw man because that’s not what the cartoon was about, at least not according to TFA.

Of course it is racist. I'm not sure if it was the Winnie the pooh, I assumed it was due to its prevalence and how the article described it as a cartoon depicting stereotyped features (yellow skin).

"Of course"? You've got a link? Can you share?

Maybe you read about the incident elsewhere but TFA vaguely hints at a drawing of a Chinese person with offensively stereotyped features, which doesn’t sound compatible with your Winnie the Pooh theory.

In any case TFA deliberately made it hard for readers to form their own judgement.

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