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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.

Feel free to read the yearly reports from the HRW:

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/china

Random selection from the report:

> In May, a court in Hainan province sentenced former journalist Luo Changping to seven months in prison for a Weibo post that questioned China’s justification for its involvement in the Korean War.

Details on his case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Changping#Arrest

> Sanya Ji'an Police Bureau summoned Luo for investigation into his "illegal remarks" suspected of "insulting heroes and martyrs".

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> By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.

I don't think anyone is saying China has "more freedom". But that does not seem to automatically imply that's "worse", which seems to be your ground assumption!

If you believe more freedom is always better, do you agree that social media should have absolutely no moderation? If you don't, then it seems to me you concede that freedom is good, but up to a limit. Then the question become, does China have the right amount of freedom or the USA does? How about the EU, which is quite noticeably less free than the USA? I don't think the answer to these questions are nearly as obvious as you seem to believe by making such blank statements, which leads me to agree with the other person that this is something someone helplessly affected by good old propaganda would do without realizing it (good propaganda is like that, you have no idea you're affected, trying to recognize that is very important).

You have conspicuously avoided addressing the specific, systemic human rights abuses unique to China.

Instead, your post employs a series of rhetorical tactics aimed at stifling constructive dialogue:

First, you assert a false equivalency between China and the USA/EU by trivializing the qualitative difference in freedom levels, thereby attempting to normalize authoritarianism.

Second, you use a slippery slope argument about social media moderation to suggest that all limitations on freedom are essentially the same — equating limited, private content moderation with systemic human rights abuses by government.

Third, you engage in an ad hominem attack by accusing me of being influenced by propaganda without providing substantive counter-arguments.

Were I to adopt your approach, I could easily make similar sweeping ad hominem accusations based on your behavior here.

This response is comic. Are you sure I am the one stifling dialogue?

I did not assert any false equivalence, that's your mistaken interpretation. Given your poor reading skills, I agree there's no reason to continue a dialogue, actually.

Your first false equivalence arises out of trivializing the qualitative differences in freedom between China and the USA/EU, implicitly framing the limitations in China as comparable to those in democratic societies.

This is misleading given the severe restrictions on human rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law in an authoritarian regime like China.

Your second false equivalence is in your equating of limited, private content moderation by a social network with systemic human rights abuses by government.

Sure, but China has lifted nearly a billion out of poverty in the last half century. Would it be superior if that didn’t happen but there was no censorship?

Human rights and human prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive.

On top of which, they did such a terrible job of lifting people out of poverty, they unnecessarily killed tens of millions in the deadliest famine in human history:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

Sure. Im saying they did a good thing, you’re saying they did bad. I think lifting a billion out of abject poverty is overall net positive against freedom of speech. There’s no objective way to say one way or another overall.

If you look at removal of poverty China is unquestionably better. There’s simply no unbiased way you could say China is better or worse overall. Any weights you apply to certain things are inherently biased.

I don’t believe you’re engaging in good faith; you are employing tactics meant to stifle discourse:

1. False Equivalence: Suggesting that economic progress and freedom of speech are interchangeable or mutually exclusive is intentionally misleading.

2. Relativism: By stating there's "no objective way" to compare, you are deflecting any form of critical evaluation.

3. Unfalsifiability: Your assertion that any evaluation is "inherently biased" is an unfalsifiable claim meant to immunize your argument from critique.

Yes, there is an objective way to say that you don't have to institute a fascist totalitarian regime to make people not starve. It is witnessed by the fact that many countries do not have a fascist totalitarian regime, and still do not starve. In fact, mountains of evidence - including in recent Chinese history - point to the fact that a fascist totalitarian government is more likely to cause a mass starvation than to prevent one. Yes, the current fascist dictatorship finally learned how not to make people starve. It doesn't prove it is the only solution to starvation, and the choice is either starvation or fascism - it only makes this particular totalitarian dictatorship a bit less horrible. But still plenty horrible.

Prior to my post, were you aware of the Four Pests Campaign and its results?

Let's makes this clear: when we say China is bad, we mean the government. The CCP. We're not saying Chinese people are inherently bad.

To credit the "a billion being lifted out of poverty" to "China" (remember in this context we're talking about the government) is just like saying "the US" invented PC, network, lightbulb and the other thousands of good stuff we rely on today.

No, some smart people in the US did that. But it can't be simply credited to "the US".

Chinese people worked hard to lift themselves out of poverty. Did some policies help? Absolutely. But it's not "China lifted them out of poverty".

If it's true, we can even say the US lifted them out of poverty, since the China economy boom came in place when it became the major trade partner of the US. See? The US' foreign policy helped!

If there wasn't censorship and the regime that produced it, many of those people wouldn't need to be "lifted" at all. In a normal country, there's no special effort required from the government to "lift" people from anywhere. Surely, there are still poor people, but not mass poverty that requires heroic efforts to overcome. When did you last hear that Swiss government lifted people out of poverty, for example?

I think it’s fair to say that the CCP has hindered that lift more than helped. You could argue that it might not have happened without their involvement, but I think it unlikely that history would be much different. Other than China being a free market economy of course, and maybe everyone learning Chinese instead of English.

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