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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Umm, with respect - it is the US anti-Chinese rhetoric that is changing, rather than Chinese government policy.

There are many repressive aspects to the Chinese regime (and government specifically I suppose); but this is probably less the case today then, say, 30 years ago. Certainly I doubt very much repression has been tightened over the past few years.

If I'm mistaken - please provide references, preferably to non-US-aligned media sources.

*Edit:* Hong-Kong situation notwithstanding.

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>If I'm mistaken - please provide references, preferably to non-US-aligned media sources.

Here's an official Chinese government source defending the use of labour/"re-education" camps in Xinjiang: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201903/19/WS5c9033f0a3106c65c... . In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.

> In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.

Before 2003 the Chinese government just randomly pull people off street and if they can't prove (i.e. by showing an ID card) they live in this city they go to a camp [1], and this happened everywhere.

Heck, even less than 20 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custody_and_repatriation

The relevant section of that article is Section V.

China has had a system of labor/re-education camps in the past, named laojiao:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/ch...

These were supposedly abolished in 2013, but in fact many of them may have been rebranded using other titles, see:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/12/china-s-re-ed...

and this is why I was making the point that such policies are not new.

That being said - the article you linked to really sends chills down one's spines, and just reading the Chinese government's self-justification for forced interment of people not convicted nor charged with any crime indeed serves to emphasize the repressive nature of this practice.

> In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.

In past the Chinese government did send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.

Tibetans - since 1957

Mongols - since its first years

Miao/Yao - 1982

Koreans - Koreans Chinese were routinely rounded up every time NK-China affairs were flaring up since seventies

And Uighurs were in, and out of concentration/extermination camps many times already in the past. In 1949, 1967, 1976, 1991, 1998

First time learning about these. Any sources?

> In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.

No they just occupied whole of Tibet and converted the whole area into a re-education camp while working to wipe out local culture.

It has tightened e.g. in HK and significantly so. With these things it’s not a matter of averaging oppression to judge the level. If a specific group of people, geographic area, etc. are being targeted you don’t really judge based on how the rest are doing.

Do you actually believe there is some sort of repression in HK? Black people are more repressed in the US than anyone in HK… I just visited HK on a business trip (had to quarantine) and there were no signs of oppression or any sort of police brutality at all.

The final judgement at https://chinatribunal.com makes somber reading about forced organ harvesting from prisoners in China and its increase in the last 20 years.

Funny how people blindly trust a private company with no public mandate just because they called themselves a “Tribunal” and call their press releases “judgements”.

I have personally spoken with mainland Chinese Christians who report increasing persecution there.

> Umm, with respect - it is the US anti-Chinese rhetoric that is changing, rather than Chinese government policy.

100% - but such a sentence also needs to come with a disclaimer explaining that it doesn't mean the CCP regime isn't guilty of killing millions of its own people over the years and that any ideology or technology they export needs to be viewed as such.

> If I'm mistaken - please provide references

Yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/hong-kong-pi...

> Hong-Kong situation notwithstanding.

They're currently removing the Tianamen commemoration statue.

For other readers who are not familiar, here are two newspaper articles about it:

https://hongkongfp.com/2021/12/23/breaking-fears-for-condemn...

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/3160744/universi...

Well, OP didn't really complain about government policy or repression, but rather about hostility. Even if there are no repressive aspects (but I agree with other replies that they do exist!), the behaviour would still be problematic in itself.

And it's not just an US thing, btw. Many nations perceive dealing with China as walking on eggshells.

The burden is on the person making a claim, not on others to disprove it. Furthermore, "no US aligned media sources" is ad hominem. Objective facts don't become falsehoods because of who is saying them.

Since you've formed the opinion that Chinese government policy hasn't become more repressive, and that opinion is clearly educated, surely you have plenty of links to give us to back up your position.

Listen to the Sinica podcast. It covers China-related topics "without fear nor favor". You'll here politicians and experts talk about the increasing, and often baseless, hostility of Western media over the past 5 years.

To add to that - putting aside the present state of Sino-US relations, our prior beliefs should reflect what academic work on lying in politics tells us (1):

* lying in official diplomatic relationships between countries is rather rare

* within countries, democratic leaders are much more likely to lie to their population than autocrats

* countries with imperial ambitions and long-distance ventures lie more often than others

* within great powers, the depiction of the rival great powers is especially lie-ridden

In other words, for a person living in the US - it's likely that whatever US news sources tell you about China (or Russia) is mostly lies or exaggerations

(1) https://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/international-deceit/

Objective facts can become very hard to discern in a highly partisan environment though. That's the problem with how lots of US (and UK, etc) media works: there's obvious partisanship which can make it hard to extract the truth. Everything ends up as "the truth + highly political framing devices". There is no outside to observe from.

There’s obvious partisanship in uk and us media, but the difference vs totalitarian states like China, is that the partisanship is in a thousand different directions. So in the US or UK you have access to all agendas and can reason for yourself about what is true. If Fox says something untrue MSNBC will point it out, if the New York Times gets something wrong it’ll be all over OAN. If AOC lies about something you’ll have Lauren Boebert screaming about it. By having a free media it allows you to form the correct view by holding your views and others up to scrutiny.

In comparison, in China if the state media decides to lie for its partisan reasons then there is no where you can go to hear the truth so you never can distinguish the truth and we have a thousand different examples of that happening.

> If Fox says something untrue MSNBC will point it out, if the New York Times gets something wrong it’ll be all over OAN. If AOC lies about something you’ll have Lauren Boebert screaming about it.

And if all these media outlets say Russia/China/Iraq/Iran is evil at the same time, then it must be true, right?

1990 (still roughly qualifies as 30 years ago, I guess): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baren_Township_conflict

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