Missing businesswoman urges ex-husband not to publish book critical of China
npr.org
npr.org
https://store.simonandschuster.com/on/demandware.store/Sites...
https://bookshop.org/books/red-roulette-an-insider-s-story-o...
After a quick search I've only found some of the author's history in finance and which suggests he has the background to write this book. If the kidnapping is indeed real, then the book becomes an interesting read indeed.
And from an external perspective, why would they be a more reliable source than let's say Voice Of America or Radio Free Asia, both of which ofc are "offensive" (as in vanguard/aggressive/warfaring) media outlets
> why would they be a more reliable source than let's say Voice Of America or Radio Free Asia
Voice of America and Radio Free Asia are governmental agencies; NPR is a private non-profit organization funded by advertising, donations, grants, etc (but not directly by the federal government).
Would my life be in danger? Would other businesses cut me off?
Will this become increasingly difficult to pull off in the US/West?
We know Disney and other entertainment companies don't want to touch it. Will that attitude stay the same now that China is beginning to cut off Western movie stars, movies, market access, etc.?
You can watch Death by China on YouTube, the film production of the book by Peter Navarro, which was narrated by Martin Sheen:
Maybe you don't know about LIHKG posters being attacked in the UK [1]. The CCP has teams of operatives working overseas specifically for this purpose [2]. If they will physically attack you for writing a few posts on a forum, you should certainly expect to be murdered by "car accident" while raising funds for a $100 million film.
The average HNer knows as much about China as they learned in their US Government-sanctioned high school history class (they couldn't point to Beijing on a map), yet comment as if they are experts. Remarkable.
Further, please don't stereotype commenters here. It's not a good look. We come from all backgrounds, all with different levels of education and life experience.
Hannah Arendt mentioned this: that people who can't be mobilized by the simplified ground truths of totalitarianism will not become more helpful after having pondered and analyzed the issue more, and that furthermore, a full analysis of totalitarianism is only possible after its defeat.
Easily digestible quotes from Western pundits who have probably never even visited China are not a substitute for having the barest understanding of modern China.
Most westerners who have been paying attention know that the majority of all that wealth comes from stealing western IP...
Not that western nations are blameless, we traded short term profit for long term superiority...
'Barest understanding' yes don't make me laugh, statement from a shill if I ever heard one. Try to claim no one understands you while also being hostile to any sort of press that's not propaganda...wonder why.
CCP is probably the most dangerous oppressive regime to ever exist, and I don't think that's an understatement.
Also 1989 is certainly a horror story reminiscent of Chernobyl, but it's a lot more complex than the cartoonish evil treatment it receives in the west.
Are you sure that nobody else is publishing it and if that's the case it's not some kind of usual all American copyright exclusivity deal not political suppression?
Copyright can look a lot like totalitarian control sometimes.
The platforms did not want his content, even though he is an academy award winning documentary director. You can read his interview with Variety below.
1. https://variety.com/2021/film/news/the-dissident-saudi-arabi...
"The film struggled to find a distributor for eight months and was not able to run on a large streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. It is widely believed this was due to those platforms' fear of offending the Saudi Arabian government and possibly losing subscribers.
Fogel showed disappointment at The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to acquire UAE e-commerce site Souq.com shortly after he refused to release The Dissident on Amazon Prime Video."
He tried to get it published by other means, but money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/business/media/dissident-...
The complexity is what would make such a film compelling. What are the subtleties glossed over in the typical account of the terrible event?
In a completely different context, I recently watched and listened to accounts of 9/11 from a wide variety of perspectives. What made them captivating were aspects of what happened that I wasn’t aware of before.
It's not just Chinese box offices. There is a lot of investment money coming from China to produce Hollywood films. As part of that investment, the scripts are definitely under a lot of scrutiny for how things are portrayed. Keep that in consideration the next time you see the distribution logos at the beginning of the film you're watching.
I was actually kind of surprised to see a such a direct analogy in a big Disney production; I'm going to hazard a bet that it was not at all intentional, but I'm not sure that China's foreign film approval body are going to see it the same way. If it gets released at all in China it's almost certainly going to bomb for that and other reasons.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/chinese-dissiden...
https://www.foi.se/rest-api/report/FOI-R--4933--SE
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/03/04/why-some-chinese-immigra...
https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression
https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of...
I read a good article on this some time ago, but I can't seem to find it right now.
I don't see any reason to trust CCP and also "former private-equity executive"
Nice family you have here. Would be a shame if something happens to it!
I wonder for example, how do they know that the woman that is talking by phone is really his spouse and not another woman pretending to be her? We have old actors making films in young roles again. To modify the pitch of a telephonic voice with a computer is standard and well developed technology. Specially when everybody is uploading their videos to internet and they have a wide sample to feed the software.
Hiding people for 4 years is hard. Disappearing if the government wants to find you in a world of cameras deployed and global watching is even harder. They could just put her in jail without taking so many troubles.
Moreover, would be the best option. A trial in a stranger country is very expensive. Involves a lot of people hiring lawyers, going to hotels for months to be close to his familiar, and spending tons of money in the area until the trial ends. Why the government would renounce to all this fresh money? As long as they had a minimum case, just to trow her in jail and shut the mouth would be stupid when they can milk the family for a long time instead.
- perfect publicity for the new book about to be published
- the wife isn't as innocent but part of the system
- the couple isn't that innocent but was part of a corrupted system
Can't tell wich one is correct, including the original version
Like with Zhao Wei. You think you get to be a billionaire from just being a good actor?
But even the worst kind of people deserve due process and like... some notion of rule of law. I think conflating "this person is being treated inhumanely" and "this person is a good person" are often conflated though, making it too easy to derail conversations about these kinds of cases.
I don't know much about this person's case. It could be that there's legitimate reasons for this person's wife to be in jail. But this sort of bargaining of a person's freedom for this kind of thing is really nasty. It's not something unique to China (there are lots of nasty US plea deals that involve essentially trading your freedom for someone else's), but honestly pretty unique when it comes to people that are clearly extremely wealthy.
And of course utterly evil they'd try to manipulate him by using his ex-wife they'd disappeared.
If the CCP wanted to give themselves the worst look possible, they succeeded.
The CCP does not care one bit what the international community thinks (look at Xinjiang & Hong Kong). So far it has not resulted in any meaningful economic consequences for the CCP...so why worry?
For reference, the New York Times [1] and Bloomberg [2] articles. They hit a nerve because they drive a wedge between the CCP's elite and China's people, something the CCP is sensitive to in a way it's not to international criticism of its actions as a state.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/xi-jinpin...
The fallout from a massive propaganda campaign would be very bad for us if it were to fail to depose the CCP, and not much better for us if it were to succeed.
It is! The more time, and resources Xi has to spend fighting dumpster fire at home, the less it has to destabilise USA! A very simple truth.
I would strongly disagree there.
- china law blog https://harrisbricken.com/chinalawblog/chinas-cultural-revol... has mentioned that now their audience is in agreement of opinion that CCP is becoming increasingly authoritarian and less tolerant of foreigners and foreign businesses. as a result, a lot of their business clients are saying "they will never go to China ever again"
- global equity funds exposure to china and kong kong has collapsed https://www.ft.com/content/daa7a70c-23fb-467a-b245-f57bd47f6... from 0.5% in 2011 to -1.0% in 2021
- Lehman moments with rescuing hourong, and evergrande about to collapse
- CCP obfuscates any official economy numbers, so you cannot judge their economy based on official numbers. You have to see what actions the CCP is taking. And right now they are making crazy moves.
How does negative exposure to China work, a hedge against? Or are these numbers derivatives (growth)?
The image of China being a place for international business has really took a nose dive over the last few 5yrs.
What private business do matters, of course, but I think the conversation usually veers more into the territory of national action restricting companies or states from doing business with China. There doesn't seem to have been much meaningful action on that front
From personal conversations with some Chinese students, it seems like most of them know what they aren't allowed to talk about, and it's more about submitting to those demands.
Why are we, an extremely logical crowd, so prone to embrace fundamental logical fallacies when it comes to China?
What's the plausible alternative? That Duan is not in China, and has simply been in hiding for years for unexplained reasons?
Or maybe, she's actually been dead for years and her ex-husband made up the phone calls to get publicity for his book?
The CCP has a long track record of disappearing people without trial. Jack Ma is the most famous/recent example. It's completely plausible that they've done the same to Duan, much more plausible than those alternatives.
Also these aren't especially novel allegations. Interesting to have such a cynical take on the individual but not towards the police state.
Shum has a decision to Publish or Not Publish (P or NP). CCP has the decision to Retaliate or Not Retaliate (R or NR). In a one-time game, Shun chooses P and CCP chooses NR, because P/NR > P/R for CCP.
A one-time game may be a good model if there's only one thing you wish to keep out of the public eye (e.g. photos of Barbara Streisand's house). But CCP will play this game many times: establishing that they're able and willing to harm their critics, even at cost to themselves, has value. It encourages future critics to never publish in the first place.
Or did you just mean other people?
Is it?
How many millions of people are you ready to kill in this mission of opposing dictatorships? How many of them your own countrymen, and how many of them foreigners? Just looking for an order of magnitude estimate, here.
I'd like to see the ethical calculus on this, before joining in on this maximum use of force.
Or, did you mean that everyone should talk a big game about opposing dictatorships? We're already doing that. Talk is cheap, as is foreign oil and other goods.
Even if the fight IS hard and kills many people, it is worth it right? Or do you want your wife to disappear for four years and be kept in a black prison? Or do you want to watch millions of ethnic minorities being murdered in concentration camps?
It's better to fight, risk death, and be free than to cower in fear while your loved ones are tortured and murdered.
Those governments may be distasteful and do things you don’t like, but they’re very real and have been for nearly a century now.
There’s no reason for people outside of politics to pretend otherwise. It always comes off as childish, really.
Then I guess John Cena can retract his apology...
Same with South Korea. Both countries started as US-backed dictatorships, and US backed them mainly for its self-interest of halting communism (a threat to American invested political ideals).
Like it or not the majority of Chinese people fought for and aided the communists, and continue to legitimize the communist party government by engaging in orderly civil participation.
Like it or not, anything bad the Chinese government does the Chinese citizenry are culpable because they are not agent-less slaves of the party.
People in China can participate in government. Believe it or not a government which has no finger on the pulse of their constituency or acting outside of their interests can and will be overthrown. You eventually run out of bullets—and people, if you point a gun to their heads.
Sure because they weren't US backed but they still were a dictatorship...
Truman publicly signaled the US had no intention of defending Taiwan or SK, but public sentiment changed in the US after Kim il-sung invaded.
> One can easily say that China traded Taiwan (which it surely would have been able to take back without USA backing) for North Korea (which probably would have been folded into the ROK without Chinese intervention).
Korea was also the Japanese invasion point into China in WW2, which made it sensitive for the US to mobilize in.
Definitely. A lot of sentiment against mainlanders in Taiwan was created by the KMT’s rule as much as by the communists.
Truman’s hand was called as soon as North Korea invaded South Korea while UN troops were still stationed there. There would have been no way that the USA was going to stay out of that conflict.
Royalty existed for much longer than that in many countries, and it was never ever legitimate unless you believed in god-given power bullshit.
(Which is not to say CCP or monarchies are good, just that that's not the pillar I'd attack them on)
Just saying you don't like a form of government makes it illegitimate is a silly proposition. You get people every election in democratic countries saying the government is illegitimate. Usually they're considered crazy. Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate? What about tyranny of the minority, since in many countries, most people don't even vote?
You can recognize that a dictator is the legitimate ruler of a country, while also acknowledging that he's not working in favor of the people. If someone has an entire territory's military at their command and they can write and enforce laws, that's usually a sign that they have a legitimate government.
Legitimacy based on force is not legitimacy. It's just tyranny: if you never ask people how to want to govern themselves how can you meet the criteria of legitimacy, like EVER? Holding the biggest guns does not replace agreement and contractual acceptance of how things are run.
> Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate
It's a hell lot more legitimate since you can actually expect to change the rulers/people in power at some point through popular action. Under royalty/tyranny, you are forced to accept whoever is at the top and you have no recourse until they die.
That's kind of a huge difference.
I think it’s more like this: Governments the US doesn’t like very much are 'illegitimate' because 'not liberal democracies'; regimes the US does like are 'important allies' or otherwise not talked about.
The whole 'not democratic' thing is more like a type of post-hoc justification for what, to many, looks like blatant imperialism. It would appear it is successful at least some of the time.
As governments get more oppressive and arbitrary in their exercise of power, it becomes harder for them to make credible claims of legitimacy. I'm not saying the Saudi government is legitimate, but it is possible for it to do things that increase or decrease it's relative legitimacy. Increase consultation and individual freedoms? More legitimate. Crack down on peaceful protests or oppress minorities? Less legitimate.
Saudi Arabia does not get called illegitimate, but Cuba does.
Pinochet was 'legitimate'.
i.e. they weren't voted in; they ceased power by violence.
You can't vote them out.
No one has freedom of association to form an alternative political party that strongly opposes the status quo.
Without those things one party governments can't say they are legitimate, only vanguard dictatorships.
It's 2021. People claim governments are illegitimate for any number of selfish reasons, usually disconnected from reality.
It stays in power by a combination of active repression, murder of potential opposition (great leap, but not forward), and bread & circuses (we provide economic progress, you keep quiet), and disinformation via controlled media.
To me and many others, legitimacy requires some mechanism for the people to consent to the rule.
The CCP (not it's people) are scourge to this world and should be dealt with by all countries it has brought pain too!
Not rebelling against the heavily armed PLA is a pretty low bar for legitimacy.
You've probably been fed propaganda that legitimacy comes from democracy, but it does not. Democracy has long been seen as the least worst of any system for Americans. It is only as legitimate as those of use who fight to defend it, because freedom isn't free, and neither is our system: democracy.
Ultimately legitimacy comes from whether people fight for their government and defend their way of life, regardless of however wrong you may think it is. What is the legitimate government of Vietnam, Afghanistan? Clearly the the US-backed democratic government in Afghanistan is now going the way of illegitimacy (because no one cares enough to support it), despite being fully democratic. It's illegitimate because neither the US aid, weaponry, training, was able to get its democratic supporters to care enough to fight for their way of life. If people had to fight for what government they wanted (democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy), and a foreign nation comes in and props one of these up with advanced weaponry and military force, and still fails, is it still legitimate just because it was a Democratic government?
China is betting on the reverse and honestly I think they’ll win. The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy is just not there.
Combined with the fact that the Assange situation is not at all similar, I don't see it as relevant.
BTW, even the historical example of Russian "and you lynch blacks" to the US in response to human-right criticism is relevant, as exemplified by the export of BLM as a general civil rights movement. The US/UK should still be able to criticise China, but without pretending to be a laudable moral example.
It's already happening. China is no longer the us' #1 trading partner. Europe is deleveraging off of china. Canada is on the verge of boycotting the chinese olympics.
Even if there weren't geopolitical conflict involved, it's going to happen out of sheer economics; labor costs in china are no longer competitive with those in neighboring countries e.g. thailand, vietnam, bangladesh, and, for the US, mexico, and there is going to be a rough demographic transition as due to decades of one child, there are fewer entry-level people to take on entry-level low-skilled jobs in china (and basically no one wants to immigrate to china because the government has stoked chauvinistic nationalism way worse than trump ever did).
They are working hard on eliminating the language barrier.
The rurals do not benefit.
But more than that, China is hard at work at ensuring that all Chinese speak Mandarin.
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
Source: I’m native Chinese
You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.
My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.
Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.
So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.
As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.
The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.
> the written form is universal
That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.
This is only true in a very strained sense of "the Latin alphabet". No two of the languages you mention have an alphabet in common.
The Latin alphabet has no U or J, and while Y and Z were known to Latin speakers they do not appear in any Latin words.
Compare ø, ç , ß, and ő.
Even alphabets that appear visually similar may be quite different. The Spanish alphabet I was taught went:
A B C CH D E F G H I J K L LL M N Ñ O P Q R RR S T U V W X Y Z
The Ñ is not the only difference there.
Something analogous is true for the different varieties of Chinese; there are a handful of "regional" characters with no standard use.
But here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
Can you articulate a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.
> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН
Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.
> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.
¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.
² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.
I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.
Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages
Spelling with Chinese characters is a tricky business. It is not enough to write the syllables; for each of ~1200 syllables there are several characters to choose from. Which to use in each word is purely a product of history, but the rules people learn are only for Mandarin.
It is funny that Chinese people who only know Mandarin mostly don't know this; it is not safe to talk about in China. So, Cantonese speakers let them continue to believe that Cantonese is "just pronounced differently", rather than being a whole language of its own. (Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?)
Italian syllables/minute: 405
Spanish syllables/minute: 526
https://irisreading.com/average-reading-speed-in-various-lan...
Italian: 6.99 syllables per second
Spanish: 7.82 syllables per second
https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/list-of-the-fastest-spoken...
Whose fertility has for the last several decades taken a historically massive hit from one child, sex-selective abortion and the policy of taking young rural women to single-sex urban dorms to provide their once cheap labor. A rural region with increasingly middle aged farmers with a rapidly shrinking highly gender imbalanced youth is not a recipe for medium to long term abundant labor supply. Certainly, China’s economy is a profligate debt fueled fever, however, their biggest bill coming due is the demographics.
According to highly suspect official Chinese statistics.
> The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost.
It’s not a sunken cost because it’s ongoing and must be ongoing as if it ended the whole Chinese economy would sink.
> They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.
They’re not exactly rich to begin with. Or by poor do you mean let them starve? Nor is that a recipe for staving off revolution!
One example. Drones have proven to be a strategic gamechanger in the 2020 Azeri-Armenian war. In the same league with the musket, the machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the carrier. Who is the world leader in commercial drones? DJI, a Chinese company. US market share? 76%. It's not even close.
https://dronelife.com/2021/03/05/has-the-u-s-china-trade-war...
is there anything cutting edge about DJI products aside from volume? TBH I think probably the only thing truly special about DJI is that their software interface actually works, but in the world of "all software" it's still pretty janky (the bar is low in drone-world).
I keep waiting for a model that will do something I want (image -> language with a transformer model that doesn't have a fixed token length during training). I have been waiting for about 3 years, haven't seen it yet.
You can't measure innovation by bulk flow of humans through a system. If anything if you force too many humans through a pipeline that needs innovation you risk kneecapping progress because the separation of wheat and chaff becomes quadratically harder, increasingly gamed, and the people who actually have talent and creativity inevitably burn out and fuck off to do something else.
Cutting business ties is a playable card, but not over this. China knew. If you were the president of a country, you wouldn't either. There is too much on the table already to just give it away.
The focus of the 2020s and 2030s will be decoupling and decentralizing. New trading partners will be comfortably lower down the value chain, and we won't make the mistake of letting suppliers turn into adversaries again.
You wouldn't read this thirty years ago, not when the Soviet Union still have its influence. When the US is trying to have China on its side. Shared and competiing interest is, and will always the core of any diplomatic relationship. China isn't any less commie or more worker-friendly back then, but that wasn't the focus of the conversation isn't it.
Vietnam isn't less commie than China is. India doesn't have better working conditions than China is. We aren't reading them because they are not as significant. Vietnam is simply too small, and India is still struggling to find its own way.
I don't think the parent post is implying they'll do anything over a writer. But there is significant awareness now regarding the threat CCP poses.
Last week Lithuania recalled their ambassador to China, and they're urging EU to cut dependence on China. Post-Merkel Germany might take a stronger stance against China, going by what their leaders are saying of late.
That changing entirely depends on who wins the election in a month. If it will be Red-Green (Social Democrat + Greens) or Red-Red-Green (Socialists + Social Democrat + Greens), it might very well be that we will cutting down the influence of the automotive lobbyists... but if we end up with the free-market liberals (FDP, yellow) or, worse, the endemically corrupt Conservatives (CDU/CSU, black) we will keep on bowing to the whims of everyone who can't grow in the Western markets.
For everyone in Germany: please vote. This election is crucial.
But as so often, things are not that easy and are more grey than black and white:
The liberals (FDP) are among the biggest supports of closer contacts to Taiwan, while some parts of the Socialists (Die Linke) argue that the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen.
Regarding the tankies in our leftie rows... you are completely correct and I hope that in an R2G coalition the foreign ministry ends up at someone from the Greens. SPD botched it the last time with Maas and we have too many questionable comrades to fill that job with someone guaranteed sane...
China has never been the US' #1 trading partner. That has been Canada, because Canada imports ~300 billion, and exports ~300 billion to the US. China only imports ~100 billion from the US, but exports ~452 billion. Both numbers are growing, year over year.
If anything, maximising interoperation with non-free countries only benefits free countries, making their position more exclusive. Say: Chinese rich are likely to settle in US and Europe once they made it, just because it's too scary to stay in China, but they spend and pay taxes there.
The world will never be "free" in the Western sense of it, because even the very concept of "society" is foreign to the vast majority of people, the concept of "public good" is foreign too, damn it, in the most countries people can't even queue: they fight for their turn to be served and everyone accepts it as fair. Not just democracy, but even freedom or "rights" in the very basic sense are not understood, or actively rejected by people from all walks of life in most of the world.
Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia? Extent of human right abuses in the former is bigger than in either of the latter; it's a no-brainer to invade and occupy it - it's a plain desert great for tanks and they have no nukes; and they have oil. Yet this isn't done for the simple reason - no one is going to benefit from it.
On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country. China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea and Taliban. And threatening democratic Taiwan almost every other week with invasion.
SA has been directly involved in funding terrorism(1), they're fighting a war in Yemen for their own national interest(2), they are pressuring countries in very concrete ways (e.g. Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's resignation in 2017 was basically forced by SA)(3), they've been trying to isolate Qatar since 2017(4), they have no qualms about murdering a critic in an embassy overseas(5), they're increasing their influence in places like Bosnia(6).
________________
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Lebanon%E2%80%93Saudi_Ara...
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_diplomatic_crisis
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
(6) https://www.france24.com/en/20181113-focus-bosnia-herzegovin...
Lmao what. Have you followed anything at all they've been doing?
>China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea
You know they've had those relations with north korea since forever. You might remember a bit of a war that split the country.
>and Taliban
Just like every other surrounding country and countries like the US with business interests in the nation.
Saudi Arabia was the second country to recognize their government in the past. Pakistan was bombing for and aiding the taliban before the invasion because they prefer them over pashtun nationalists and for other reasons. Iran which was fighting the Taliban has dropped their rhetoric a good bit.
Even older, it is the classic "don't pay the danegeld" situation:
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...
No. It is meant to encourage others to never write such things in any context. This then leads to the masses not thinking such things, after which the censorship will be unnecessary as such thought patterns will not exist. This is Orwell manifest.
- 赵薇 (Zhao wei), a very famous and popular actress in China, was recently scrubbed from the internet. Her work, including movies or tv series she produced, were scrubbed from streaming platform like Tencent. Her follow feature on Weibo was disabled. Pages that used to mention her now have blank space where her name used to be. This is part of a broader crackdown alongside tech, education, effeminate men, celebrities, etc. Some of these efforts have to do with reducing the foreign culture effects that could lead to discussions about western ideals like freedom or democracy.
- English is deemphasized in classrooms, even in Shanghai. What follows is now 'Grandpa xi Jing ping thoughts', for students as young as 6. The thoughts comprises of 14 principles that promote communist ideals.
- An unknown blogger named Li Guangman (李光满) posted claim that revolution is in the air in China, with profound transformation to be felt by all. https://chinamediaproject.org/2021/09/01/profound-transforma.... This post was spread by official party media websites, no doubt in support of the current CCP agendas.
- All this is in the backdrop of xi jing ping attempting to get his 3rd term next year. That will cement his legacy as the most powerful man since Mao, and his dictatorship for life.
“The United States is more aggressively waging a color revolution through the fifth column within China. If this time, we still have to rely on those big capitalists as the main force of anti-imperialism and anti-hegemony,” China will not need enemies to fight. “It will fall first by itself,” just like the Soviet Union back then. That’s why China is reforming the “capital circle” and the “entertainment circle.”
I haven't read the text, my assumption is that it would be similar to Mao's, Deng's and Jiang's Thought. Why I consider it is about the government? For example, Deng's thought would set modernization as the priority for country's development. Xi's thought would set new priority. It is just how Chinese government works.
By putting the woman in the public eye, they can use that fact to discredit the author's implication that she was captured or ill treated.
After all, if the woman is on TV saying 'It's fine, I'm fine, I love the CCP, I live China, don't publish this book or read it, it's full of lies' ...
... well that's all the CCP needs for their home audience at least.
They also may have calculated that having the woman in public and 'appearing ok' would do enough to at least discredit claims that she was killed or something macabre.
Yet NPR fails to tell us how they verified the source’s claims. Have they listened to recordings of the call? Have they had some sort of proof? There is no line that says they’ve independently checked the claims. Or did I miss that somehow?
When the topic is China we definitely end up accepting very low journalistic standards of verification that we would never accept for other topics. This is due to the mostly justified bias we might have in the West against China, but there's no why this bias is useful in understanding the geopolitics of the USA vs China scenario properly.
As a journalist is clear to me how the process behind such a piece goes: we haven't verified anything, but we're making the person speak directly, so if they're just making shit up, well, you know, it's just them that said false things on air, not us.
> If the CCP wanted to give themselves the worst look possible, they succeeded.
I think they realize just fine...
Then again, CCP may be so blunt intentionally, just to set of some bells or warn other citizens. Maybe they even have some (fabricated) counter evidence ready to go or something.
If it's legit, my comment is really bad and I apologize. What a hero in that case, although, the wife is even more the hero. Or isn't she. What a situation. No one should have to live through this. 4 years, what a nation.
CCP doesn't care about looks any more. Not since they realized they could take Hongkong over and no one in the West would bat an eye, sans granting visas to well-known exilants. For what it's worth, since the US pulling out of Kurdistan and then the clusterfuck that was the Afghanistan retreat, it doesn't even seem like the US will defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion.
That's why it is vital to rein in bullies as long as you can... as soon as they realize no one will stop them, they will only escalate.
Sometimes people’s naiveness wonders me.
Yeah, their international image is not the most stellar one. But what will people do about it, besides bitching online?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Peaceful_Liber...
I don't think China is "bad at PR"; they just don't care what you or I think. In international relations it seems a small hindrance at best, and it sends a clear signal to both Chinese people and everyone else: "we just do what we want, just try and stop us".
Caring about PR is a property of democratic systems.
The one thing wrong here it is the PR is not international, it's for eyes, and ears of rich, and powerful people at home.
As of late, default subs are frequently flooded with pro-CCP disinformation when any article painting China in a negative light, or (especially) Taiwan in a positive light, is posted.
I'd say that reddit PR for China is doing quite well, when the top comment in a thread is anti-CCP, often other top comments are pro-CCP (and filled with disinformation)
Ermmmm we might be seeing different trends here, or at least different things from what you believe to be "favorable to ccp"....
It looks creepy as hell from a western perspective.
http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/che...
All the principles are correct but I applied them in the wrong order. The article's title is misleading in the way gojomo points out below, so the title rewrite was good.
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The submitted title is heavily editorialized, breaking the site guidelines badly. We take submission privileges away from accounts that do that, so please don't do that. "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title is the main way that people break this guideline. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Threads are sensitive to initial conditions and titles are the mother of all initial conditions, so this is a big deal.
Normally we'd change the title, but since the thread has been entirely determined by the editorialized title, I don't think it makes sense to do that in this case.
Edit: yikes, this is the third title in a row that you editorialized. I don't want to take submission privileges away from you! so please don't keep doing that!
The current HN title is: "Missing businesswoman urges ex-husband not to publish book critical of China"
The NPR title is: "'Red Roulette' Reveals The Inside Of China's Wealth-Making Machine"
Notably, the interview is entirely about the details of the strange & sinister calls the author received. There is only a vaguest blurb of the book's topic in the interviewer's intro/outro. There are no questions or answers about the larger topic of "China's Wealth-Making Machine" or specific material in the book. It's all recounting the circumstances of the surprise calls, happening after the book's contents were written.
This article is truly well-described by "Missing businesswoman urges ex-husband not to publish book critical of China", instead of NPR's anodyne title – except insofar as the author's whole recounting of the calls is clearly part of the book's pre-launch PR.
(In fact, the contrast between the interview contents & NPR title is so large it raises at least 2 more questions:
• Did the author make up these calls as PR?
• Did NPR itself feel pressured to 'hide the lede', genericizing their title, either because of their own doubts about the story credibility, or geopolitical concerns about angering the CCP?)
Edit: ok, I read the article (which I hadn't before) and you're right. Sorry! I should have checked for that posting.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brie...
Unfortunately they aren't exactly a proponent of free speech themselves.
Fake news isn't a marketplace of ideas, it's the opposite. NPR is calling for roadblocks on fake news and misinformation. Many intellectual people who should better seem to intentionally promote the right to spread fake news and facts as something good for society because it is primarily helping their side politically. Whereas free speech is being able to speak your mind freely. We already have some limited laws restricting free speech like in cases of fraud and libel. Why shouldn't they be extended to news sources making up bullshit that never happened like NPR was suggesting?
How are we to differentiate speaking one's mind freely from spreading misinformation? No human possesses perfect information.
Also the word 'outlaw'. What if tech companies don't amplify the fake news of both creators and repeaters?
As far as the law is concerned a narrow and carefully crafted law can written, a repeater does not get in trouble unless it can be proven without a doubt that they knew it was fake news yet chose to spread it. As far as who decides it(in the legal system), we already have a system that works fairly decently, the court system. Maybe just civil sanctions, like a $500 fine. The accused will have a chance to explain to the court and the public their rationale behind what they wrote/said.
We already have libel and other laws that restrict free speech. E.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#United_State...
This law wouldn't affect opinions in the slightest. Saying "x gender should stay home", "y race people are terrible" would still not violate law.
Again, this is something that I just threw together, I am sure there are many smarter people than me who can refine it so we can protect true free speech while restricting fake news.
So I guess it's time for the courts to pack up and shut down and go home.
>to the definitely impossible task of determining what someone believed at the moment of speech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
Yes, the courts should definitely turn off the lights right away.
>Pray you never have to answer in court for this thread.
Even if I was somehow successfully prosecuted it'd only be a civil fine. I am not worried.
Maybe these people are worried?