Chinese athlete accuses former top Communist Party official of sexual assault
npr.org
npr.org
>Screenshots of Peng's original post continued to circulate widely on the Chinese internet even as censors scrambled to delete any references to her allegations within group chats and blogs, a sign of the immense public interest in her allegations. The speed with which her post was deleted also reflects the extreme sensitivity of her remarks, which come just as Communist Party leaders convene in Beijing for the Sixth Plenum, an important political meeting during which the state is on high alert for any sign of discord.
Chinese internet censorship is insane. How many people work as censors?
There are also censors within companies since media is expected to be vigilant about it as well, so probably thousands more on top.
Right after I posted it, my WeChat started to take longer to load incoming messages, and my messages took longer to be sent. (I did a test with a phone logged into another account in the same wifi environment.)
This phenomenon disappeared a few days later though. I still wonder if I'm now in some watchlist or something.
Literal armies of them https://theglobalobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/...
The story is a bit confusing. Sometimes it’s romantic, sometimes it’s not. There is also consent mixed in, that fluctuates.
He sexually assaulted her, then at some later point in time they had a consensual relationship.
There's not a contradiction there.
Humans are complicated. I can't explain their point of view or the context, but I'm sure there's a reason. Sometimes it can be financial even. Trauma is a hell of a thing.
Think about kids who've been abused by their parents. They typically still can't help but try and earn their love. Human brains are. . . fucky, to say the least.
Why does Stockholm syndrome exist?
Because it benefits survival in a violent world.
Not politically correct, and absolutely not condoning violence, but a lot of women have a deep primeval sexual response(they lubricate) to displays of physical strength, dominance, aggression and violence.
I'm not sure why people get triggered by anybody mentioning these facts. Do you think that I or others are saying women should have no agency because they lubricate or "worse" have orgasms during rape?
> My point is this is not gender specific
I think the only stuff that is firewalled into gender specificity could be stuff that's in the Y chromosome, and even that would be debatable.
It might not.
Does Stockholm syndrome exist?
No doubt in my mind that it exists from the Sabine Women to the Abduction at Shiloh and every ancient siege aftermath to the war brides of WW2, the evidence is overwhelming.
May be entirely mythical, and certainly doesn't leave us with any useful evidence to evaluate from a psychotherapy standpoint.
> Abduction at Shiloh
OK, second pre-Christ example on the list, with only the Bible as evidence of its occurrence. Not super promising.
> war brides of WW2
I'm reasonably certain that didn't involve kidnapping at all.
I know quite a bit about psychotherapy (Schema Therapy, CBT, DBT, Transactional Analysis) and I see very little use of such evolutionary explanations, even if correct to any form of therapy.
If Stockholm syndrome was real and if women were evolutionary inclined to physiologically respond to their captors sexual advances and later "infatuate" (so as not to suffer violence and that the children survive), how could that be useful in any way to psychotherapy or law or any other area of human life?
The three examples you cited as evidence of Stockholm Syndrome are made up of two unverifiable cases from over two thousand years ago, and a third that isn't Stockholm Syndrome.
I understand that the consensual relationship doesn't rule out the sexual assault. I do have, however, trouble digesting such relations. Is it normal that people get into relations with other people that they intend to take to court?
The guy checks all the boxes, and will have to be punished, but giving the appearance of a scorned mistress doesn't help her convince something so wrong happened a decade ago.
But, no need to be perfect to he heard, and she'll have to have her chance.
> giving the appearance of a scorned mistress doesn't help her convince
Given that we are certain both of those things can exist together, the case must at least be investigated. People should not have to be punished (or disbelieved) for being what they are: imperfect beings.
> "Is it normal?" just sounds like you saying "it isn't normal, she did something bad", almost putting the guilt on her.
You:
> I disagree.
Also you:
> she also should have had the moral fortitude not to ...
This seems to be a contradiction, unless you disagree on some metalevel, disagreeing with the course of events in general.
> she might have loved him or saw an interest in the relationship, but it does not matter for this
That's exactly the part I have trouble digesting. If I was sexually assaulted by person (that I want to take them to jail for it), how can I pursue a relation (later) with them? I don't think, also, that I'll be able to love such a person. But I guess that's just me?
[edit: added 'this' initially omitted]
And "mansplaining" is a concept that was created to justify having smaller seats in a train basically. And to target and ashame people that cames in different sizes and shapes. The solution to mansplaining whatever it means is simple: bigger seats.
This terms are based in the --false-- claim that [all] men are dominant and [all] women are passive and unable to defend themselves from the big-bad-male. They aim for a society uniform when people will have much less margin to be an individual, and people with long legs or that weight different will be ashamed for that. Both terms, mansplaining and manspreading evoke a very dystopian feeling.
But if this is the kind of society that you wish for, feel free to spread the sticky mess
Epistemic implication is saying, for example, "she is home, because her car is in the drive way". The car is not the reason, and the first clause is not a statement of fact. It is not too odd that "must" can be found in this middle voice, "She must be (a slut/a victim) because ..."
Saving grace is that the comment did not explain anything, so it can be chalked off as self-ironic take.
Mansplaining is the phenomenon of which an arrogant male-persons arrogance can be attributed to their sex/gender (as appropriate), usually with some reference to "patriarchy" and the undeserved confidence of those higher up in the power hierarchy when belittling or underestimating those lower on that same scale.
In practice, it is a gender-specific, weaponised term used in any situation where a man is perceived to be arrogant towards a women i.e. it is commonly abused beyond any positive philosophical aims.
Maybe it has a similar reasoning i.e. men sexist-ly assume women know less than them - but the fact is that it is rarely clear b/c arrogant, narcissistic people of both genders exist without the need for such a basis.
Yes, it's very normal. Abusive partners can be very skilled at breaking down their victims; "you're so worthless, no one but me will ever love you" sort of scenarios. It's a very common phenomenon.
Normal? He was the 7th most powerful person in the CCP, in a country of 1.4 Billion. He was then a 65 year old having a "relationship" with a then 25 year-old...
This model of government is toxic. You cannot memory hole the abused to protect the inner circle.
Maybe she's a liar, but this claim warrants investigation and corroboration with other potential victims. It should embolden other victims to come forward.
The government should serve the people. And its members should be held to a greater standard of accountability.
In the real world the government serves the party people. This happens in democratic systems as well but in a communist/uni-party system is rapart as there is no election, no opposition and no real judiciary system! CCP can never be wrong or do wrong things because that would mean it must held accountable(by who?) and/or be changed...
Normally one gets a 99-year land lease to build a house, but the CCP has been repossessing the land after 30-40 years as it increases in value.
The CCP sends a goon squad with no uniform or id and a backhoe to tear down the house. Sometimes they wait for the "owner" to go to work, sometimes they just pull the house down with the occupants inside.
But here's the wrinkle. Since it's extrajudicial, the owner can kill the goons and no arrest or prosecution follows.
This actually happened in 2020. An owner threw a brick at the backhoe operator, IIRC, killing him, without being arrested. Although the court system is fixed in China, the CCP doesn't want the publicity, since it would reveal a war on citizens' property.
So if you can keep killing the goons, you keep your house until the next round.
These claims are backed by eyewitnesses (expats living in China) as well as research.
Cyrus Janssen: The Truth about Protests in China 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqcScSCTgbM
Harvard: Conditional Receptivity to Citizen Participation: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in China http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.703...
American Journal of Political Sciences: Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...
Interesting bits from this last source:
- In China, citizen engagement and protest do not contribute to regime change. Instead citizen engagement contributes to regime survival.
- Section 6: “upper levels of government use citizens as an oversight mechanism on subnational leaders, which imbues citizens with the ability to sanction lower level leaders, and generates responsiveness among local leaders to citizen demands.”
China is neither a western democratic system, nor a totalitarian/communist/dictatorial system. Instead, China is a third distinct category, fitting neither of the first two.
Inland Chinese call these government agents "Little pinkies"
If they were Russian, those agents would be called spies.
Second, the authors in your Harvard article are * Tinguang Meng * Jennifer Pan * Ping Yang
Jennifer Pan has Chinese backgrouds, as Tinguang and Ping do. I won't say the article is fake, I only hoovered over it, but I will put it in the same shelf where I keep RTNews (russian television) articles.
Edit: When I see a Harvard backed piece, the same as a Lancet piece, I don't give it a free pass. I read it because I know it is influential because of the name. We still have to go indeep, whenever possible.
You view the paper with suspicion because of Chinese names. Don't people usually tend to say "I support the Chinese people and I'm only against the CCP"? And yet Chinese people who live outside the mainland are suspect by default, without any evidence? Heck, whatever happend to "guilty until innocent"? I find your attitude to be highly problematic.
Furthermore, there is additional research which shows that:
1. The Chinese government doesn't force people to have positive opinions about the Chinese government. "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression" https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-... Pro- and anti-government messages are equally censored, based solely on the criteria of whether messages have collective action potential. Anti-government messages that lack collective action potential are not censored.
2. The Chinese government has no hidden astroturfing agents. "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument" — https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf They have agents, but these are government employees, and they post messages to distract to a different topic as opposed to defending a position in the same topic.
These two researches' authors only have western names.
The way I see it is that you have a prejudice. You stick to your beliefs even in the absence of evidence.
> China does have accountability for government officials
True, but is it the case that the laws are upheld every time? Is there an independent judiciary that sees violations persecuted through with due process?
I submit: no, this is not even possible due to the level of corruption. Officials accumulate influence, wealth and power so they can extract themselves out of sticky situations. Occasionally, officials are held accountable to much public fanfare, but they happen to be unwitting pawns, scapegoats taking the fall for someone else, or faction members that are opportunistically eliminated by their rivals.
> criticisms and protests are common
True, but do they effect change? I submit: rarely. The vast amount of forms of criticisms and protests are suppressed before collective action can occur.
Source: eyewitnesses (expats living in China)
> China is [not] a totalitarian/[…]dictatorial system.
Shill harder. I've seen you approve of CCP apologist Barrett.
I deny your accusation. I have my own opinion based on my own knowledge and research, thank you very much.
> True, but is it the case that the laws are upheld every time?
No. Accountability is not perfect. There is no country in which accountability is perfect. Accountability does not have to be perfect in order for there to be accountability.
I submit that the situation in China still has room for improvement, and that it is improving.
> True, but do they effect change? I submit: rarely.
The paper I showed you contradicts your submission. They define "receptiveness" as "actually changing policy".
> Source: eyewitnesses (expats living in China)
Please post their videos. I posted one, I showed data. In his videos he makes concrete, verifiable claims. I would like to see your data as well as concrete, verifiable claims.
> Shill harder. I've seen you approve of CCP apologist Barrett.
This reference to "shill" is uncalled for. It is an evidence-free out-of-hand dismissal of anybody who has a different opinion of China than yours.
I don't even watch Barrett's videos that often. The only time I posted something was when Barrett documented on how sanitary workers in Shenzhen receive 1 free meal every week. That's not even political, so why do you categorize this under "shilling"? Aren't we supposed to be "only against the CCP and supporting the Chinese people"?
I think it's made obvious that you're operating on a level in which you still critically think about the opinions that you hold. Most of the people who resort to anti-China platitudes or accusing others of shilling have simply tuned out the actual thinking part of the equation.
Most outrage culture nowadays involve blatant rage without giving a second thought. I checked out your links and it seems more substantial than "eyewitness accounts from expats".
A mafia family does not work for the interest of those it "protects", nor do people approve of them. The Chinese government does work for the interest of its people, even if you don't agree with all of the ways they operate. It also enjoys very high levels of approval by its people. Apart from hearsay or informal street interviews [1], there are two researches that corroborate this [2][3].
As Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat, puts it: the CCP is more accurately described as the Chinese Civilization Party. Ultimately, they work to further the interest of Chinese civilization.
[1] Street interview: what does democracy mean to the Chinese? https://youtu.be/nl59t---30g
[2] https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/05/did-pande...
If there is no accountability at the top (and there clearly isn't), then there is no meaningful accountability at all. Such arrangements provide a veneer of agency, with lower level functionaries and regional governments acting merely as scapegoats when embarrassing situations get out of hand and cannot be suppressed. Likewise, when only one party is allowed to run for "elections", those "elections" by definition are a fraud with no meaningful choices.
> Likewise, when only one party is allowed to run for "elections", those "elections" by definition are a fraud with no meaningful choices.
In China, parties don't run for elections, people do. People from other parties (China has 8) are elected. At present, there are 152000+ members from other parties that hold positions in People's Congresses (China's representation body) as deputies. [1]
Parties don't form adversarial, power-balancing relationships with each other. The existance of other parties are not used to put up a fake display of western-style multiple-party elections. Instead, the system works completely differently, trying to push participants towards unity, even if only outwardly.
> and regional governments acting merely as scapegoats
Given the meritocratic system, in which officials are promoted based on KPIs, this is not a logical thing to do. Scapegoating your own subordinates undermines the system's selection process of a future leader. Even Xi himself started at the village level, working his way up to county, city and province level over a 30-year period.
It is also illogical given that China's governance system is highly decentralized. The central government doesn't make all the policies, a lot are left to local governments. They aren't mere puppets that follow instructions. That wouldn't even be scalable given the country's size.
---
China's system is distinct, and different from both actual western systems and from western imagined dystopias or fake democracies.
You can argue that only the western democratic way is acceptable. Fine, that's your opinion. I disagree. I subscribe to Kishore Mahbubani's thought. He's ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat. He says that the west should accept that not all countries will become carbon copies of the west. He says that the west should accept a world with a diverse range of governance systems.
This is sophistry considering that out of the one group of representatives that are elected directly, those candidates are only allowed to run at the pleasure of Chinese Communist Party (the "CCP") leadership. Saying there are eight parties, when one party controls the candidate selection process is again just thin a veneer slapped on a defacto single-party system. It is worth noting it is impossible for the populace to determine if a leader is "actually governing well" considering the heavy restrictions on information, free speech, and a non-existent free press.
> You can argue that only the western democratic way is acceptable. Fine, that's your opinion. I disagree.
I made no such claim about democracies. My main point is that the CCP is objectively repressive and despotic on a scale, consistency, and breadth not yet seen over such a sustained period of time (i.e. Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, One Child Policy, The Great Firewall of China, Hong Kong, etc.). Therefore, the CCP regime is utterly loathsome from a humanitarian perspective.
Not familiar with Chinese governance but on your last point, if we take the worst actions of the US Democrat and Republican party, don't they also have a horrific track record over the last 70+ years, both domestically and internationally (mass murder in Vietnam, Iraq, Cambodia, Japan, Afghanistan, South America, and so on..., mass surveillance, assassinations, racist laws, mass incarceration, etc)?
It would be hard to claim that just because we segment the atrocities into 4-8 year periods, these parties (which are united during the execution of much of these atrocities) are not as objectively repressive and despotic as the Chinese variety.
Where scale is concerned, we get equivalent scale by operating internationally while the CCP operates primarily domestically.
Everthing in a communist party is about loyalty and fear not merit or election. If you don't like censorship or try to challenge the direction of the CCP you are out of the club for life and maybe even in jail.
Imagine Jack Ma saying the Xi is a stupid bear and doesn't know anything about finance or technology and that he (Jack Ma) would be a better leader for China so the people should be let to vote him as China's leader.
Furthermore, the Chinese government is very responsive to citizens' feedback. This means actually addressing feedback by changing policies. Online criticisms and offline protests are common. Threatening the govt with collective action, increases response rate.
Thus, a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is common in China: messages get censored and the govt does something about the issue.
All these claims are shown by research:
Harvard: Conditional Receptivity to Citizen Participation: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in China http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.703...
American Journal of Political Sciences: Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...
Harvard: How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
At the end of the day, westerners will still not agree with how China works. But I think it's important to keep in mind that China works quite differently from popular imagination.
If there are to be such marches, it is the govt which will organize them. Not bottom up action, not via any process which could generate alternate leaders, power structures, organizations, etc
> Another example is the following censored post supporting the state. It accuses the local leader Ran Jianxin, whose death in police custody triggered protests in Lichuan, of corruption:
> “According to news from the Badong county propaganda department web site, when Ran Jianxin was party secretary in Lichuan, he exploited his position for personal gain in land requisition, building demolition, capital construction projects, etc. He accepted bribes, and is suspected of other criminal acts.”
One way collective action potential is measured is by measuring the virality of a post.
The owners of those are fellow Chinese citizens who become understandably ticked off and come to the government for redress for the damage and can be a right pain. So it's less work to maintain public order and not let demonstrations like in 2012 spiral out of control.
This is, then, ultimately against the government's interests and thus it is suppressed. The CCP would be completely okay with the torching of Japanese property if it wasn't against the state's economic/diplomatic interests (arguably such property would not even exist if it was against the state's interest).
So let's stop saying the CCP will suppress "pro government" speech.
You wouldn't want to hear the reason if you are dining now.
Parents do not want their juvenile or young adult daughters to be a rape target or even have consensual romantic or sexual relationships without parental consent, so they take away a part of their sexuality by making them unattractive or passing them off as male with clothing, hair-style, (lack of) jewellery and make-up, mannerisms.
smh typical storm in a teacup that only gets press because they can put "China" in the clickbait.
I even question the assertion that no one is allowed to gather data about the government's conduct or performance. The research "Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China" [1] did exactly this.
[1] https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...
News was allowed to get out to the point that one could hear about that on abroad platforms. Usually anything that rocks the proverbial boat gets censored without trace.
Either there was a fuck-up of epic proportions with several fail-safes in a row not triggering, or (conspiracy theory) this is on purpose to "bury"/distract from more important news or to discredit Zhang so he can be removed easier by his enemies.
So the communist assault has two flavors: On at the individual level (as it happened) and then by the CCP government using censorship.
How's is supporting China(CCP) different than supporting Nazi Germany burning jewish people during WW 2?
Not so long ago, it was said that Xinjiang was "worse than the holocaust". But now "The barbed wire is almost gone. So are the armored personnel carriers. Young [supposedly genocided] Uyghur men are back on the streets" and "sense of normality is creeping back in". What's more, this "Nazi Germany-like regime" is doing all this voluntarily?!
The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.
There is a problem in Xinjiang, no doubt about it. But it's not the second coming of Nazi Germany. It's a heavy-handed fight against sallafist jihadists that have killed thousands of Han and Uyghur alike, with the end goal of making society safe again even if that means collateral damage and intruding on individual rights.
For example, this: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2019/06/china-s-uygh... "largest since holocaust"
Or this: https://twitter.com/SaeedTV_/status/1301991175713419264?s=20 "The number of deaths of Uyghur Muslims in camps or dead in China now surpasses the number of Jewish people killed in the holocaust."
It was (and I argue, still is) quite common for people to call someone a "genocide denier" simply for saying "what happens in Xinjiang is bad but it's not genocide / it lacks evidence". For example: https://twitter.com/redditiosymboli/status/13875617117339361...
A direct quote from you:
The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.
You're comparing your impression of a bunch of poor quality news with an article by the AP and calling it backpedaling. The AP did not backpedal, because it never said that Xinjiang was worse than the Holocaust.
Further, things can change with time... that AP article is saying that things used to be much worse.
In any case, your focus on whether AP specifically said or didn't say something misses the bigger picture. The real world isn't a high school debate in which only strict debating rules are important.
What's happening here is that the US government and the military industrial complex are manufacturing consent for a war against China, and the media is ignorantly taking the claims at face value and giving the messages a platform. Sure, the media may not always literally make the same claims word for word, but the point is that all these insinuations and mood-making still instil ideas in people's minds. That's why on the one hand "State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China" [1] while on the other hand we have people like shell0x proclaiming that China is the second coming of Nazi Germany.
Have enough people with such a sentiment, and the sentiment becomes truth even if nobody explicitly said it. That's why Dutch parliament members said in parliament debates that "1 million Uyghurs are imprisoned" (not "up to"; exactly 1 million, or even more), even though "reputable" media such as AP only ever said "up to 1 million". Dutch parliament members even said "Amnesty International confirms that there's a genocide", but if you go to Amnesty International's website then the website says "there's not enough evidence for a genocide".
The public and even politicians are being psychologically manipulated to accept a war against China. In the mean time, even though accusations of "genocide denial" don't come from the mainstream media, having enough people say something like that will deter other people from speaking out against the genocide narrative out of fear for being socially ostracized. For a while I feared speaking up for this exact reason. Aren't we supposed to be a free society in which we can question things?
Also in the mean time, actual Uyghurs who wanted to speak out against the genocide narrative are being banned from social media platforms simply for not abiding to that narrative. [2]
And I'm sure I don't need to remind you how devastating a war against China would be for the entire planet.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-...
I suppose the difference between us is that you care a lot less about this topic and thus aren't constantly bombarded with extreme claims and things such as being called a genocide denier, while for me the topic directly affects the lives of my family.
China certainly has its smattering of Han supremacy and engages in (mostly economic) imperialism, but even the Uyghur genocide pales in comparison to any of the multiple genocides of the Nazis.
What do you propose? Military invention would just mean global thermonuclear war. US sanctions against China? They'd either have to be ineffective enough not to have any significant impact (like the Huawei ban) or they'd amount to cutting off your nose to spite the face. The US (like most developed countries) is economically dependent on China at this point. China also holds a significant share of the US's debt. Cutting off China from the US would probably hurt the US more than China and nobody else would follow suit if it impacted their economy.
You want the US to cut off China? Sure. Stop relying on offshore production in developing nations. Pivot back to the isolationism of the pre-WW2 era. But that would mean giving up the excessive military domination and rebuilding the domestic economy from scratch. You can try to half-ass it and move production from China into other countries but that's just delaying the inevitable (who says India isn't going to slide into genocidal fascism next, given they already have a Hindu supremacist problem?).
A genocide is not defined by literal death of individuals but for killings to be part of a genocide they have to intentionally target a specific group and its culture.
The Nazi's Eastern front was explicitly a war to create "Lebensraum" (living space) which went with depopulating large areas. They also deliberately initially displaced and then systematically exterminated Jewish populations. They also targeted Sinti and Roma people. For Jews they also went to the lengths of deliberately destroying their cultural artefacts as well as works they claimed to be influenced by Jewish culture.
If you desperately want to pin a mass murder on historical communists, you probably want the Holodomor. But even the Holodomor seems to have at least in part been a case of administrative failure and apparatchiks not taking complaints seriously. But at least there are indicators of some level of malintent even if it may not have been intentionally genocidal.
Unlike the above, the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims does qualify as genocide under most definitions as it actively seeks out to erase culture and traditions even if the settling of Han Chinese people in Uyghur territory may not. But while it involves imprisonment, so-called reeducation and arbitrary arrests, it doesn't involve mass murder.
Note that what the Nazis did to Jews, Roma, Sinti and (to a lesser extent) Slavs wasn't unique in European history either (except for the technology available to them), but Europeans previously only had done this to populations in Africa or the Americas. From the victim's perspective the distinction between fascism and colonialism is at most times completely arbitrary.
From what I can gather, the unofficial story behind the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward seems to be that Chinese bureaucrats fell for exaggerated claims about farming techniques used in the Soviet Union and pivoted the farmers to using those techniques and set quotas based on the expected returns. When the results didn't match the calculations, nobody wanted to (likely, literally) bite the bullet so they tried to make good on the overpromised exports, starving the local populations.
Much like the Chernobyl incident, this was more of a case of bad judgement followed by a rigid chain of command playing chicken with a catastrophe to avoid taking responsibility for a comparably minor gaffe.
Of course the CCP didn't want its bureaucracy to appear incompetent and for the US it was more useful as anti-communist propaganda to frame it as mass murder than administrative failure, so neither side has been particularly honest about it in most "official" material until the end of the (first?) Cold War.
If you want to point out deliberate mass murders by China or the Soviet Union there were plenty of those (e.g. Mao killing the landlords) but in terms of scale they don't really compare.
EDIT: Also if you seriously want to count famines as mass murder, you won't like hearing about what the British did in India.
The official story is false. They knew what was happening -- they had agents in every village, who amazingly were always well fed. There were regular visits and inspections. Look, both the USSR and China had mass famines in the countryside, and it was for the same reason:
They wanted to rapidly industrialize which meant the creation of a large factory worker class in rapidly growing urban areas. This required a smaller and more productive agrarian class with surplus food being shipped to cities.
But rather than wait and let normal urbanization take its course, they simply transferred populations to the city and confiscated all the food that was needed to feed this class, letting a fraction - about 10% of the rural population - starve to death. The remaining farmers were forced to work harder to make up for their dead colleagues and this was accomplished via intimidation and near-slavery conditions. That is, at the end of the day, what forced agricultural collectivization was all about. It was to make up for the fact that a lot of the farmers would not be given food. And everyone understood what this was about.
It was intentional democide to free up mouths to eat in the cities, in order to achieve rapid industrialization.
The Great Leap Forward was remarkably incompetent in many parts exactly due to the same circumstances I described: forcing ordinary citizens to produce shoddy steel in their backyards to meet quotas for example. You seem to give Mao and the mid-century CCP a lot more credit than they deserved.
Well, that's something for you to work out. China was great at monitoring the population. If there was a Christian missionary somewhere in those villages they would have been swiftly found (and they were). But you think 50 million people dying and Mao didn't know? Entire villages wiped off the map and no one noticed? Emaciated bodies walking around, children with distended bellies everywhere and it was a secret? Remember for every one that died, there are 100 more walking skeletons that didn't. No serious historian believes this:
Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward," Mao warned colleagues a year later. "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill."
And it was the exact same thing that happened in the USSR when they did the same rapid industrialization program and the same forced collectivization scheme, done for the same reason, in the 30s. Even up to similar proportions of the agricultural population dying. No one is claiming that the Soviets didn't know they were starving the countryside to enable rapid urbanization - they rode up with trucks and took all of the food from the farms, across the entire countryside. So, I don't understanding the apology for Mao here, we have logic, we have precedent, we have a documentary record, and we have his own speeches.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...
> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile
But "classicide" is not genocide. I'm not interested in defending authoritarian governments or state capitalist empires. I'm pointing out that it is extremely ill-informed to compare modern China (or even Maoist China) to the Nazis.
> pumping money into this fascist dictatorship
SNAFU; people invest money into the regime unknowingly. It should be every government's ministry of finance's responsibility to clearly mark a financial instrument (retirement fund, stock bundle etc.) as having ties to a CCP controlled company, so that at least an investor can make an informed decision; and if the parliament has passed a resolution to condemn the genocide, then it should follow through and outright ban such investments. Instead nothing happens, apathy rules, and tragically the victims of the genocide have no mindshare to lobby to change the situation.
Twitter marks CCP controlled content as such, but your stock portfolio and broker do not.
We're fine, but I do feel bad for the americans who live in some sort of delusion that their exploitation is freedom.
They don't censor it yet because they don't have the capabilities and the actual man-force to do it, but they're not that far off [1]:
> The police watchdog is investigating alleged corruption in the Metropolitan Police, including claims it covered up child sex offences because MPs and police officers were involved.
To those that will downvote me: I wouldn't prosecute the guy without proof even if I thought he was guilty.
Your perception on my argument is incorrect.