Refugees and activists tell the BBC intimidation tactics are tearing apart Uyghur communities overseas.
  • fishtacos@lemmy.ml
    2921·
    1 year ago

    I found this to be a decent enough primer: https://medium.com/@bobbyarlan/a-case-study-in-racist-anti-chinese-sentiment-fuelled-by-american-bots-and-western-propaganda-f0a69978d568

    A decent TLDR: The article argues that anti-Chinese propaganda spread by the U.S. and Western media is fueling racist sentiment. Claims of mass detention of Uyghurs are based on flawed studies and sources like Adrian Zenz, a far-right Christian fundamentalist. Atrocity propaganda is a common tactic used by the U.S. to justify wars. The U.S. is threatened by China’s economic rise and technological progress, so it is trying to portray China negatively and prepare public opinion for a potential conflict. However, most of the world sees China positively and as an economic opportunity, making a new Cold War against China unlikely to succeed

    In short, a lot of information about China that has come out of Western news media has been proven to be based on known biased sources, known anit-China rhetoric, and/or outright lies. It’s difficult to prove/disprove of any information specifically, that takes time and reporting, but a lot of people see the anti-China pattern in BBC reporting, and tend to dismiss it because of known history.

    • MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca
      2415·
      1 year ago

      I think this flies a bit too far in the other direction. China is totalitarian. It is not a democracy. It is also increasingly antagonizing nations abroad. I think it is valid to consider it a threat if you are any other nation, period.

      Edit: Kinda like Russia

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
        1714·
        1 year ago

        How many seats are in the highest legislative body?

        What rights and responsibilities do autonomous regions within China have?

        What is the most distributed government legislative committee type and what is their role in the government?

        • yeather@lemmy.ca
          109·
          1 year ago

          1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.

          1. In the end they all answer to the whims of the central government, which can change or remove and rights and responsibilities autonomous regions within China have.

          2. See answer one.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
            54·
            1 year ago

            1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.

            Do you know what a legislative body is? Anglophones are almost all educated on “executive, legislative, judicial” aren’t they? Xi is the leader of the Executive branch in China, not the Legislative or Judicial.

            • yeather@lemmy.ca
              45·
              1 year ago

              You do know what a dictator is right? You can call yourself the head of this and that and have cronies technically control the rest, but it’s not fooling anyone slightly smarter than the average microwave. It’s inherently evident you do Xi Xinpings bidding no matter where you are placed or you will be replaced. Not a hard concept, even someone like you can understand.

              • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
                33·
                1 year ago

                Such fierce condescension and yet you’re the one pushing a children’s story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy’s control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don’t endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It’s all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.

                So no, “someone like me” cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children’s cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.

                • yeather@lemmy.ca
                  12·
                  1 year ago

                  How in went way is that a children’s story. It’s incredibly easy to understand like a children’s story but is very real, so real you can see it happening in real time. Your idea of China is more like a children’s fairytale rather than the reality it currently is.

                  I do not support Chinese elections, same way I do not support Russian or North Korean elections. These are also similar to children’s stories.

                  On your next point, politicians can argue all they want but in the end they will fall in line. Similar to journalists, who may I remind you are often targeted as political prisoners to be sent to reeducation camps. Also, yes, policy changes, people change their minds or gain retrospection on what doesn’t work and pivot, it happens often. For example, China’s Great Leap Forward, which really lead to mass starvation and steel barely useable. Then Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi reversed these policies and ended the great Chinese famine. Then Mao changing his mind again and having both of them thrown into reeducation camps, Shaoqi would die.

                  • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
                    2·
                    1 year ago

                    Your “no u” line about how actually I am telling children’s stories doesn’t work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren’t monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.

                    Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn’t cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao’s death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng’s re-ascent).

                    As an aside, I don’t think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It’s quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn’t it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.

                    There’s a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
            912·
            1 year ago

            So what I’m hearing is it doesn’t matter if you’re ignorant about the way China works because the US media told you Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything and you believed them. Got it.

            • yeather@lemmy.ca
              35·
              1 year ago

              No, Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything he wants to. It doesn’t matter if you technically control something you will always end up doing the bidding of Xi or you will disappear. From reading your replies, it’s evident you have fallen for Chinese propaganda and now simp for an evil dictator and totalitarian regimes. Got it.

      • fishtacos@lemmy.ml
        812·
        1 year ago

        So… No, it’s not like Russia at all. But that nuance is too long for me to explain right now. Short answer is that Russia is capitalist, and China is 50/50 capitalist/socialist, depending on definitions, and yeah a lot of nuance.

        But China is run by the people, their authoritarian politics keeps their billionaires and induatry in check. Their local politics is a negotiation with the national politics.

        And… How exactly is China antagonizing nations abroad? Because a lot of countries are choosing to work with China because they AREN’T antagonizing them as much as America and Europe. So… The reality is the opposite.

        • MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca
          138·
          1 year ago

          I mean, if you haven’t been there or don’t know anyone from there you could pretend they are a democracy, but they are authoritarian like Russia is authoritarian. Long term they will seek a wider swath to be authoritarian over.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
            73·
            1 year ago

            If Taiwan is its own nation, they should really specify that in their constitution instead of claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and Mongolia.

            • UFO@programming.dev
              42·
              1 year ago

              That still makes it a nation… That claims to be the rightful government. These are not mutually exclusive haha

              • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
                33·
                1 year ago

                That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being “its own nation” distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.

      • Fazoo@lemmy.ml
        156·
        1 year ago

        Or the fact we literally have drone and camera footage of mass arrests. I’m not one to view Vice these days, but one of their reporters went there and saw some rather suggestive situations as well.

        After Trump was so nice (dumb) enough to showcase just how clear US satellite photos are these days, one has to question why some here are so quick to cry in China’s defense. Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?

        I’m sure some pro-Chinese twit will come rushing in with some whataboutism or a crack on US history, as if that excuses things.

        • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
          47·
          1 year ago

          Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?

          After China followed the diplomatic agreement it had with Britain for decades to handle the transition from Hong Kong being a British colony back to it being under the jurisdiction of its own nation (as a Special Autonomous Region exempted, like other such regions, from a great portion of federal law), now that means China will do ethnic cleansing? Most of Hong Kong supports the mainland, but that falls very much along class lines. The protestors you saw on western news 24/7 for a while were mostly members of wealthier families who don’t represent the majority.

          I have mixed feelings about the protest itself in that I think back when it was more fragmented there were surely meaningful segments that weren’t concerned about an extremely normal (but now withdrawn anyway) extradition law, but once it became the Five Demands and begging for their white colonizers to return, the highest credit I can give them is that they still were at least dignified enough to turn away Azov fascists who visited them.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
          713·
          1 year ago

          Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?

          You’re projecting. China exempted ethnic minorities from the one child policy, that is how anti “han supremacist”(which itself is just white supremacist projection) they are.

          And the people of Hong Kong are 90 percent Han.

        • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          45·
          1 year ago

          I mean the nice thing about the internet is that you can at least find videos documenting what the article claims. I mean sure… it could all just be propaganda. But somehow there is a little much of it from so many different sources.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
            43·
            1 year ago

            You say this and yet, what videos? How many have you actually watched vs assumed were there vs read the headline? I’ve seen a bunch of photos and videos and all of them were either hoaxes (calling normal buildings camps), ridiculous misunderstandings (like saying the screeching of brakes was screaming victims), or gross misrepresentations (e.g. normal prison transfers being a slate of new genocide victims). But if you just skim through what just so happens to trend on Reddit, you’ll see atrocity after atrocity and not stick around long enough to see the retraction, or the people in the comments debunking it, and so on.

            There’s a reason neoliberal outlets walked their claims back to “cultural genocide” over time, because there was nothing there except the testimony of like three people from a region of 15 million.

            • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I mean I’ve seen a few recordings of Chinese officials calling folks abroad and making „suggestions“. That was more than just reading headlines.

              But I guess you are right. It’s likely all propaganda and China is a paradise.

                  • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    Your position doesn’t make sense. We know that testimony on atrocity propaganda is sometimes a complete fabrication:

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

                    So that is one of the things worth considering, but that hypothesis isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card and needs to be weighed against other factors like the variety of sources and people involved, their history and material interests, etc.

                    Yes, I am saying things need to be scrutinized instead of just taken at face value if they comport with our prejudices, I apologize if that takes the wind out of your sails, but blind faith won’t lead you to good conclusions.

      • psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de
        41·
        1 year ago

        Also your summary sounds like ChatGPT

        Nah they have a typo (“anit-China”) in their summary I think they’re fine.

      • fishtacos@lemmy.ml
        19·
        1 year ago

        We put a lot of stock in personal stories, but we also pay a lot for incriminating evidence against China.

        Do you know about the 1 child policy (That was recently ended?) And how that affects this? Because I actually looked into it. But I bet an online personality won’t change your mind. So I won’t even bother.

        Remember America didn’t forcefully sterilize anyone. We just straight up bombed them, raped them, and shot them.

        Your biases are showing.

    • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comEnglish
      78·
      1 year ago

      Apparently there is a PRC smear campaign against Adrian Zenz - https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/pro-prc-information-operations-campaign-haienergy, including by creating what Mandiant describes as what they “suspect to be at least three fabricated letters based on obvious grammatical errors and typos” to smear him - so I’d take anything that is ad hominem attacks against him rather than debating his actual work with a grain of salt.

      However, even if you don’t accept his writings, there are plenty of other people who have done credible research into the plight of the Uyghur people - e.g. resources contributed to https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/, such as articles like this one by Gene A. Bunin: https://livingotherwise.com/2021/01/04/the-elephant-in-the-xuar-ii-brand-new-prisons-expanding-old-prisons-and-hundreds-of-thousands-new-inmates/.