I wonder if Altman bought this up when he was in China.
replies(3):
"Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make 'pie' and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains.“
I have, and probably always will, find Chinese culture somewhat fascinating but I have no love for their political regime.
Surely.
Was it so or wasn't? At this point I don't know what to think.
Liu Wei, a Chinese artist goes around the streets of Beijing on June 4th asking people ‘What Day is it today?’ hoping for an answer on the lines of ‘Today’s the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre’ but what he gets instead is a lot of ‘I don’t know’'s from the people whose faces clearly say otherwise.
`An unknown protestor bravely stands in front of a column of armored tanks as an act of defiance against the Chinese government following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.`
`This photo is one of the most iconic images of the 20th Century and has since been widely used to represent the protests. It was a set of student-led popular demonstrations in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989 aimed at exposing the deep splits within China’s leadership. It was also known as the ’89 Democracy movement. The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of a communist leader.`
Some more context behind the photographer who clicked the photo - https://pastebin.com/aGVLYDVz
It doesn't sound terribly plausible as a disposal method to me. Not something I would believe without more sources / evidence.
Edit: Apologies for the bare quote - I've always found the concept of the "mutability of the past" a fascinating and particularly troubling aspect of Orwell's work.
“Other estimates
Unofficial estimates of the death toll have usually been higher than government figures, and go as high as 10,454.[2] Nicholas D. Kristof, then Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times wrote on June 21 that "it seems plausible that about a dozen soldiers and policemen were killed, along with 400 to 800 civilians."[1] US ambassador James Lilley said that, based on visits to hospitals around Beijing, a minimum of several hundred had been killed.[157] In a 1990 article addressing the question, Time magazine said that the Chinese Red Cross had given a figure of 2,600 deaths on the morning of June 4, though later this figure was retracted.[158] A declassified NSA cable filed on the same day estimated 180–500 deaths up to the morning of June 4.[159] Amnesty International's estimates puts the number of deaths at between several hundred and close to 1,000,[158][160] while a Western diplomat who compiled estimates put the number at 300 to 1,000.[1] Official US Government papers declassified in 2014 estimated there had been 10,454 deaths and 40,000 injured. In British Government papers declassified and made public in December 2017, it was revealed that its ambassador to China, Alan Ewen Donald had reported in 1989 that a member of the State Council of the People's Republic of China had estimated the civilian death toll at 10,000.[2][161]”
“Identifying the dead
The Tiananmen Mothers, a victims' advocacy group co-founded by Ding Zilin and Zhang Xianling, whose children were killed during the crackdown, have identified 202 victims as of August 2011. The group has worked painstakingly, in the face of government interference, to locate victims' families and collect information about the victims. Their tally has grown from 155 in 1999 to 202 in 2011. The list includes four individuals who committed suicide on or after June 4, for reasons that related to their involvement in the demonstrations.[162][163]
Wu Renhua of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, an overseas group agitating for democratic reform in China, said that he was only able to verify and identify 15 military deaths. Wu asserts that if deaths from events unrelated to demonstrators were removed from the count, only seven deaths among military personnel may be counted as those "killed in action" by rioters.[109]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
Clearly the figures are contested and undoubtedly 10s of security personnel were killed by protestors and hundreds (at least) of protestors were killed by security personnel. There's a _big_ jump between various claims of ‘in the hundreds’ and the ~10,000 claims made by US and UK declassified government papers. One would expect some sort of evidence eventually to filter out to support a figure as high as that, not “his source was someone who "was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council".” – that's not evidence, that's hearsay. I'm not saying the figure couldn't be that high, I'm saying extraordinary claims need more substantial backing up.
edit: Just to be clear – hundreds killed protesting political reform is in itself absolutely shocking when you think about it.
In the states we have alot of Cantonese speaking people with a disdain for the party and the outcome, masquarading their opinion and obsolete language as relevant and other Americans treat it as canonical
My experience with mainlanders is complacency and contentment with the expected role of government, who have no idea why some people focus on an old uprising as if nothing else happened in 30 years
Not supposed to be a popular opinion but thats what Ive observed
A fairer comparison would include Mao's killing of 45 million of his citizens.
EDIT: whoever modded me down, take a look at http://blog.samaltman.com/china or https://techcrunch.com/video/sam-altman-of-yc-china-remains-...
> China bans all activists' commemorations and highly regulates online discussion of the incident, including censoring criticism. But it is marked annually by activists elsewhere in the world, particularly in Hong Kong and Taiwan. [Emphasis added.]
Hong Kong is part of China, albeit as a special administrative region. So does the ban not apply in HK? Or does it apply in theory, but in practice is not enforced? Or are HK-based activists just more willing to flout the ban?
It is becoming very clear however, that a serious crackdown from Beijing is coming. Not on this particular incident, but in general on the political freedom in Hong Kong. It is becoming undeniable China demanded Hong Kong back in order to destroy it.
But when it will arrive. Good question.
Firstly, I'm not sure we're reading the same article, but by my summary count, the total death toll for all combined US war crimes detailed in that article isn't much more than 10,000.
Next, the veracity of some of those claims is questionable at best.
Finally, it should be noted that the Tiananmen Square protests, were, in fact, protests. This was not an action against civilians during war time, this was an action taken by a government against it's own citizens who were protesting.
Is killing unarmed soldiers or civilians in war time justified? Generally no. But it's a different type of crime when you're in the middle of a war zone. Humans don't deal well with the insane nature of war, and so they do horrible things. That's not an excuse, mind you. But I think collateral damage in a war and civilian casualties in a war zone are very different scenarios than Tiananmen Square.
It's sad that we keep feeding this dangerous psychopath which threatens democracy and freedom worldwide. This psychopath will eventually cause harm to a few countries (Taiwan, South Korea) when said and done, maybe enable North Korea to strike a few nuclear missiles into Los Angeles or Tokyo, who knows.
Good thing that's not a war crime, though.
But cultural divides are real and are not going away. And these kind of events and stories simply become opportunities to target other countries weaknesses, reassert a jingoistic sense of superiority and perpetuate existing comfort zones.
Or there would be protests daily in western capitals about the sheer unimaginable scale of destruction, devastation and millions of families destroyed and lives lost in the middle east starting from Iraq to Libya and now Syria done purely to further geo-political and financial interests.
But that is handwaved away as 'necessary' somehow. The fact is people don't even care about the poor and suffering in their own cities and countries, so how can they care about an unknown people in another part of the world? It's posturing, China's problems will be only be fixed by those chinese who truly care for their people and country.
I'm not defending a thing about Tiananmen square, I'm just marvelling at the power of nationalism to excuse anything.
Bunch of snakes in suits with American flag pins declare a war for no reason, knowing that hundreds of thousands will die, but it's all Legitimate State Behavior. I'm sure it's a huge comfort to the orphans.
People don't have the energy to protest everything, because we're poor, exhausted, distracted, and yes, often confused and hypocritical. It doesn't mean the observations we make about atrocities are insincere or untrue or that they are unworthy of attention. And independently of our sincerity or consistency, I think the observation is simply true on its merits anyway, and it's bewildering (to me at least) why anything other than that should matter.
Stop buying stuff from China. Just stop. Support local made.
> Mr Donald's telegram is from 5 June, and he says his source was someone who "was passing on information given him by a close friend who is currently a member of the State Council".
Here we have a telegram by a guy (British Ambassador) who heard from a guy (unknown) who heard from a guy (unknown State Council) facts about the events of the day prior (massacre was on June 4th). Where did the unknown State Council official get his estimates from; were those official or just something he heard and repeated (and when did he get them)? Initial estimates of disasters are often quite wrong; here they were produced in game of telephone in a day or less; and they are not collaborated by any evidence we have now.
I rank the quality of new evidence as low. Rumors repeated in old official telegrams are still rumors. I expected BBC to have reported more critically. Alan Donald is still alive; BBC could have asked him if he received any updates to that first number that he trusted more.
I also have to fault BBC for it's phrasing around Donald's source. At first reading it sounded like Donald's source is an unnamed member of the State Council who is a close friend of the Ambassador. After reading BBC's sentence a carefully however; it sounds like the Donald's source is a person who is a friend of an unnamed member of the State Council. This ambiguous sentence is deceptive.
EDIT: I see vote count moving up and down on this comment making me think it is controversial. If you disagree with my doubts on the veracity of this story, write a comment. Maybe I missed something.
all the progress China's made today is because the communist government took their foot off of the necks of the common citizens, and let the citizens work tears and sweats.
Stop using what-ifs to justify monstrocities.
You might as well say the current government in the US is the "Same government that mowed down innocent college students at Kent State".
It's actually not the same government. Some parts of it are significantly better, some parts of it are significantly worse. Either way, it does the discussion a disservice to call it the same.
To say that the wholesale slaughter of protesters was necessary to deliver market reform is simply absurd.
They're certainly a threat in Hong Kong, where they have a degree of control and influence, but how and where else?
While they lay claim to Taiwan, what harm do you think they are going to cause to South Korea and why would they even think of something as insane as enabling North Korea to strike Tokyo or Los Angeles (or anywhere else) with nuclear weapons?
People are tempted to bury it in a larger narrative of global complexity, thinking that treating it like a trick question is evidence of sophistication. But what if it's not a trick question?
My family comes from Bangladesh. In the 1970s, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan, and enshrined principles like secularism into its constitution. But in the 1990s, Islam was made the official religion, women were forced to don head coverings, etc. Today, Islamists are killing journalists who espouse the same secularist principles the country was founded on. As a Bangladeshi-American, I want Americans to criticize these things! It pains me when (often well-intentioned, but misguided) people apologize for and accommodate these things. It's a slap in the face of people in Bangladesh who are fighting for a more just society.
That is not to say I don't want Americans to feel shame for the bad things America did. But, at least on the east coast, at least, I grew up hearing about all the evils of slavery and the genocide of indigenous people. We can try to help the world move forward without forgetting that we also have things in our history for which we need to feel shame. I think Americans broadly recognize that.
I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_People
Their sole purpose is to learn, take as much as they can possibly get away, turn around and create entire industries overnight by creating a domestic bubble shielding it from foreign competition.
It's similar to how South Korea propped up it's economy in the 70s, by imposing high tariffs on imports and restricting consumer choice to only domestically produced imitations by a state bankrolled conglomerate. At one point I believe Samsung even sold pirated copies of SNES games according to allegations in a 90s magazine. Japanese consoles were harder to get than PC, hence the proliferation of broadband internet leading to other side effects (actually Son Masayoshi advised the Korean administration back in the late 90s to go broadband early as possible).
I'd say that we are likely to hear more "honeymoon" stories from Sam, just like the thousands of like minded hopefuls that came to China and have left empty handed.
....but prove us all wrong by being the first American to make his billions and be allowed to keep it under the nose of Communist Party of China.
My parents and wife were born in Syria. I lived and studied there for 5 years, and spent some time in then-liberated Eastern Aleppo in 2013.
I, and most Syrians I know, despise Obama not because he said Assad should step down; we despise him for not following through, or at least getting out of the way and letting regional players help Syrians get rid of Assad, and kick out Iran's sectarian militias.
Western powers are responsible for a lot of horror and misery around the world. But unlike Iraq in 2003, Libya and Syria in 2011 experienced genuine popular uprisings. Most of the death and destruction was caused not by the West, but by Gaddafi and Assad.
Despite what Noam Chomsky seems to believe, the West is not the source of all evil in the world.
So basically, you don't like these facts so we must be skeptical of them?
These were not two hostile countries in a war of whataboutism like the US and USSR.
China ≠ USSR - this was long after the Sino-Soviet split and by the late 80s the UK and China had good relations.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration (which would return Hong Kong to China) was signed in 1984, and Queen Elizabeth made a visit in 1986.
Also, a photo released in 2009 of "Tank Man" from another angle clearly shows a bulldozer:
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/behind-the-scenes-...
Larger image (direct link): https://static01.nyt.com/packages/flash/photo/Lens-Single-As...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...
There are increasingly significant trade agreements and loans with Latin America. They are striking deals across Africa for oil and minerals, and have a permanent naval installation in Djibouti, and seem comfortable supporting antidemocratic regimes on the continent.
>Huh?
This is an oversimplification, but basically Cantonese is the main language in Hong Kong and Macau and in parts of southern China (Guangdong) that border whereas other parts of China use Mandarin.
You can probably work out why someone who speaks Mandarin would call Cantonese a "dead language" in a thread about Tiananmen Square.
Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.
It's not nearly as cut and dried as you'd make it. How many Chinese deaths would be justified for such a transition, in your opinion?
Although I think China needs to credit much of its success to western ideas, but it doesn't accept all of them, it takes what it needs and rejects the rest. If this holds, then other developing countries may start adopt the China model (though I don't think it would necessarily work for them), instead of the West's solution, which might signal a global scale retreat on a lot of things, like democracy/free speech/more censorship...you name it.
Still lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused, and its a pity they rely on rewriting history and suppressing subversive thought to preserve the government’s legitimacy, but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted, blindly dogmatic and ignorant of the way the world works these days.
EDIT: to be clear, nobody is saying what they did is moral. But what I am saying is that the results of such an uprising was not guaranteed to be peaceful, orderly, nor lead to better outcomes; and furthermore you can make the argument that the success of modern Chinese governance has been one of the greatest triumphs of poverty alleviation and human development in all of human history. So to claim with such conviction that that branch of history would be the better option smacks of ignorance to me.
And I don't think it's actually an effective (or humane) was to try to solve problems like this to begin with.
For starters, whoever decides to delete references to Tiananmen from the Chinese internet, and the surrounding bureaucratic system that permits (or probably demands) it to happen. Whoever orders the media to omit reference to it every anniversary. Whoever continues to order that parents and/or spouses of the victims are placed under house arrest or removed from their homes on the anniversary.
But even replying that way feels kind of absurd, because it individualizes actions that are best understood as expressions the authoritarian regime itself, and it dismisses as a mere "grudge" the kind of thing anyone should remember in the name of maintaining a historical conscience.
We shouldn't forgive because it's not the type of thing that somehow becomes more forgivable with the passage of time. And most importantly of all, we shouldn't forgive because China is largely unrepentant and in every significant way they are still the same regime as the one that carried out the events in the summer of 1989.
edit: And as for who should hold a "grudge," I would say those of us with the energy to participate in these conversations for the purpose of minimizing the historical legacy of Tiananmen have plenty of energy to spare. Both for remembering what it was, and for remembering that the forces that allowed it to happen are still with us in the form of a regime that continues to jail and torture human rights lawyers.
- China puts a freeze on burning coal, leaving millions of families shivering in the cold http://shanghaiist.com/2017/12/05/coal-ban.php
- China Blowing Major Bubbles In 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/19/china-bubb...
- In locked-down Xinjiang, China is tracking kitchen knives with QR codes https://www.fastcompany.com/40510238/in-xinjiang-china-some-...
- Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cre...
- China threatens U.S. Congress for crossing its ‘red line’ on Taiwan https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/10/12...
- Joe Hockey’s stark warning to Australia over Chinese interference http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/joe-hockeys...
- Chinese diplomat in U.S. threatens Taiwan with military attack https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3316709
Most of the deaths occurred throughout the city as the people rioted (because who the hell likes having the military in their city), few deaths happened in the square itself, few of the deaths were actually PKU students, most of whom had gone back to campus before the real shit show began (you can find many in the tech industry today, though they don’t reveal that they were involved easily).
China back then lacked riot police, they lacked any form of non-lethal crowd control capabilities. Then you had confusion in the army, soldiers who didn’t load their weapons getting killed, then civilians getting mowed down by other units in retubution.
I honestly think that if the government went to find an accurate account of the event, they would find many mistakes made, many tragedies occurred, but they wouldn’t lose the confidence of the people. That they don’t bother just shows how far they have to go.
Chinese here. I could say, if our government proves capitalism can be very well integrated and become more productive in an authoritarianism society, then that is a really bad news for democracy.
On the other hand though, after watching many Fox News clips on Youtube, I don't think you guys are doing very well on democracy, especially the people in the US.
Democracy is much harder to maintain than authoritarianism. It's very easy to get hijacked, especially the world is full of liars now days.
I'm not saying you should abort democracy, instead, you guys should be grateful for what you have, and be careful don't lose it, because if you did, you probably won't get another one for free.
Love your arguments like this. How about the ban allows everyone to breath fresh air during winter instead of byproducts of coal burning? Omg, few families is going to be shivers. Many more will thank its government for that step. You are welcome to visit Beijing to experience constant smog yourself. I highly doubt you want your children to live in such environment.
A civil war is very different than a massacre of innocent protesters.
Tiannamen Square, conversely, was covered up, erased from history and is essentially unknown or uncared about by the majority of the Chinese population.
When a man with brains is on the top, big things do happen.
Now there is Xi, a semiliterate * who spent his youth as a pig rearer. Not a bright talent he is.
Crushing people into pies, then bulldozing them down and then washing what's left into sewers is hard to forget though. Add another 10k to the list tens of millions of victims of Communism.
To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.
That dichotomy was never made. The answer isn't today's ineffective democracies, but it is much closer to those than it is to governments which kill their own citizens to maintain power.
It always reads like whataboutism to say "but what about their mistakes"? In the 1930s there were plenty of cheerleaders for the USSR who made just as much progress at great human cost. You're aware of the sins of the West because a free press broadcasts them. What is it that the Chinese government won't let the world know about?
The regime in China also brought 650 million people out of extreme poverty in span of a generation. Somewhat unprecedented in world history, and definitely not something that gets dredged up time and time again to reinforce a distorted narrative. Rip the bandaid off that one and there's no wound underneath to pick at :(
I went to several major U.S. websites and didn't find any mention of this story at all. I can find plenty of Trump stories, but zero coverage of what in any sane world would be a major news event.
There's some really good discussion here around what to think of China. I love the Chinese. I'll let others debate what this says about their country and way of life. But this many people being killed in a public and brutal fashion in recent memory by a major world government? The country has nothing to do with it. This is a significant historical fact and it's major new information about a controversial and shocking story from just a few decades ago.
So why no coverage? My guess is that it's about money -- embarrass the Chinese and they'll hurt you in the wallet. But that's just my guess.
Democracies are not immune to that, of course, but the effects are exacerbated when nobody dares to point out obvious flaws like that to avoid embarrassing the leadership.
The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.
Also China is still the censoring, authoritarian regime it was before. Look at their citizen scores, monitoring, threatening South Korea, Taiwan, us, Australia, etc
How did the students talk and negotiate with the CCP on Tienanmen?
/s
There is no need to abandon old principles when you can just use doublethink to make them mean whatever you want them to mean.
If taxation by a non-representative government isn't as much common sense as abolitionism, it's only because of a huge amount of propaganda. It is not even much fundamentally different from slavery.
Which, according to Bad Samaritans, is the rational choice of any still developing country.[0]
This of course doesn't absolve China (or the US for that matter) of their abhorrent actions in any other realm.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Fr...
Until then "forgiveness" is an aloof and silly gesture that serves only to whitewash history and trivialize the concept of forgiveness.
Edit (since I can't reply any further): @Fricken: you're right. I feel perfectly comfortable making "overtures" that we not whitewash the massacre of 10,000 civilians. If that's to be redeemed it's going to take a lot more than vague exhortations about how the world is complicated.
From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yr-LaMhvro
Now, the Iraq War and it's aftermath as a whole weren't bloodless, for sure. The "they'll greet us as liberators and there'll be a Western-style democracy in 90 days!" stuff was transparent bullshit.
Shock and awe was a specific bombing campaign, hitting palaces, military HQs, communications nexuses, etc. The targets chosen made it easy to avoid large numbers of civilian casualties, and trying to compare it to stuff like Tiananmen Square is just silly.
You appear to be uncritically accepting rumours on a leaked cable as a fact - instead I only urge caution on such emotional matters.
Were people run over? Were bodies moved by bulldozer? Those statements can be true without that particularly gruesome scene being accurate. It is its gruesomeness that makes me suspect - a property that makes urban legends infectious - the sensationalism outweighs the substance, evidence and rationality e.g. who saw it, when did it happen, how many people were subject to it, why was that a rational thing to do etc.
> These were not two hostile countries in a war of whataboutism like the US and USSR.
We are not discussing an official statement from the British government so geopolictical relationships are hardly relevant. Governments and civil services are full of agendas in every direction but more likely this is an embassy doing its job i.e. reporting on the various rumours circulating in the host nation.
The reason for caution is that people are describing their emotional reactions to these words without considering the grounds. At the best of times there is some pretty horrid anti-Chinese xenophobia on this board. People want the worst things to be true irrespective of evidence. US citizen's casually describe Russia and China as enemies today. Something you only have to say enough times for it to become true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-lat...
https://jezebel.com/heres-how-new-texas-public-school-textbo...
The truth about who really controls China is obscured.
Just a century ago, China was a backwater nation that got conquered by Great Britain. Within 60-80 years, they got nukes and became a super-power. Within 30 years, every nation sold out to China by giving them all the manufacturing technology. Bill Clinton sold them nuclear secrets. Israel regularly funnels intelligence and technological secrets to China.
What do you think is going on? Does anyone think the Brits who worked very hard to rule the world 200 years ago and had an advanced intelligence network just gave up and walked away? I don't.
That 10,000 number is contested, you do the truth a disservice by assuming it to be true. We hold ourselves to higher standards here. Other sources assert the figure was in the hundreds, still a lot but two orders of magnitude different.
Yale put Mao Zedong into power. Every US ambassador to China after that has been a member of Skull and Bones.
You are correct that maintaining power in a Democracy is more difficult. That is why the secret society wants to make China the model for a new world government. The US must be destroyed for this to happen.
The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.
Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
And yet, t is always at the forefront of the subtext of any discussion of China- the communist regime that's so unlike our Western democracies because it's communist and we're democratic.
As to governments killing their own citizens- the US, the leader of the free world, is one of the few nations besides China that still regularly uses the death penalty. And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts).
It's impossible to make a comment about the politics of China, without implicitly comparing them to the politics of the West; and vice-versa.
think it can't happen here? Waco.
Cases in point: the "Arab Spring" (culminating in the Syrian Easter, if I may be so bold); regime change in Libya; regime change in Afghanistan; regime chnge in Iraq; and so on.
This wonderfully altruistic feeling we have, that we want others to enjoy democracy like we do, is always exploited to invade countries "in need of democratic reform". So often, indeed, that I at least wonder if that's the whole point to cultivate this feeling in the hearts and minds of our people.
this is about as good as it will get. private industry will try to hide and/or paper over the abuses and we will continue to honor them as "progressives"
There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.
It is publicly discussed, but it is also drowned in a flood of other information.
The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punishment by the state simply for disagreeing. (EDIT: And, more to the point, Americans are increasingly using the power of their vote to abolish the death penalty.)
I hope you can see how the Chinese government's claim to the right to slaughter and imprison its citizens at will and in secret or the crime of expressing dissent is, um... different?
> "And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts)."
Who's this "they" you speak of? Obama's extra-judicial killing af Anwar Al-Alawki, for example, is one of the great stains on his presidency in the eyes of a large portion of the voting public, and it was hotly contested within the government too. And again, Americans are free to criticize these actions without fear of government reprisal. I remember calling Obama's action cowardly and illegal here on HN a few years back, and the thought of being killed or imprisoned for this never occurred to me. Exactly how does this situation compare to that of China?
As for Tiananmen, one needs to see the context. China had recently endured the cultural revolution and the leaders had a good understanding of the potential disasters of a revolution. In that context, if they believed that the ends justify the means and that millions would die if a new revolution happened, the leaders could rationalize their decisions.
I'm not saying it's not horrific. It is. But, it's the kind of decision that needs to be understood in it's historical context.
As for the actual mowing of bodies and the bulldozer's making a pie. I'm not sure if it's real or not. It does seem like the kind of rumors that circulate because they are particularly gruesome. What would be the point for the Chinese government to do that? I may be mistaken but, in my mind, the Chinese government at that time was nothing if not practical and pragmatic (in a horrifying way for sure), there would be no justifiable reasons for being this gruesome.
Fox News is populist media; populist media is a "feature" in practically every country. On the other hand, populist media on the "other side" exists without too much conflict here so far. There's also more sober sources of information too, for those that feel that both are pretty junky. Honestly, the fact that polar opposite populist mouthpieces can both exist is probably a better indicator of democracy than the fact that a single populist media outlet exists. If one had to ding our democracy at the moment, it's that high level government officials in the US are trying to discredit media sources more than in previous times. It's not censorship by any means yet, but it is something to watch (and, if one was a US citizen, seriously push back on).
China will be interesting to watch too. Although they've come a long way, they are still a middle income country by PPP. I can't think of any high income country of late (other than petro-dictatorships) that hasn't embraced some form of more democratic, more open model. Xi Jinping is going in the opposite direction.
The interesting question is whether his current concentration of power will satisfy, and truly keep the stability they seek, of all of the 1.4 billion people in China... especially at a time when China's middle class is rising. I also wonder whether the current control tightening of information, and a reluctance (so far) to ease off the heavy handiness of government involvement in business, will harm innovation in China in the long run. We'll see -- not being Chinese, I obviously don't know enough to wonder anything other than some vague "armchair thoughts".
- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...
- France couple in China unreachable after Liu Xiaobo tribute - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42454865
- China Continues Hunting Down Liu Xiaobo Commemorators, Rounding Up Dissident Writer https://chinachange.org/2017/12/22/china-continues-hunting-d...
In effect the argument is being made that without any of the above successive governments have been complicit during or after the fact.
HAHA! Now I must read this book.
Any book banned by a government that doesn't incite terrorism outright is worth a read imho.
It's hard to argue with the results though. South Korea was pretty much a third world country but state directed infrastructure building in key productions like steel, shipyard building, all had roots of building up a deterrent against North Korea.
In the last week lightly veiled comments have been made in parliament over where National Party funding came from, with the implication being that China was behind it. It’s early in the piece but there is plenty enough here to drag this out for ages.
I'm sure China's system has some high-minded "nominal" goals too. Why should we give the US a pass for its practical outcomes while holding China to a higher standard?
Remember, for all that talk about how horrible China is, the US imprisons many times more people per-capita.
(I tend to agree with you that Chinese practical outcomes are worse in various intangible ways, but I'm not willing to write off US prison populations like that, it's a blemish and a stain and it's such a massive problem that people are unable to address it on any sort of a political level. Which is basically the same problem as in China, just with a different set of social strictures. In both cases it comes down to a basic sense of "shou ga nai" - nothing can be done.)
What is that large difference? Authoritarian states deal with their people basically as if they were their property. They dispose of their lives at will, they dictate what they think and what they work on, they take their labor at will.
I hope I don't sound like a China apologist: the Chinese government has done a terrible crime, and it's a shame that not enough Chinese people are demanding justice, and sooner or later they will have to look back and recognize what happened, hopefully sooner rather than later.
However, packaging that as "the threat of China" is a self-serving narrative that will harm people. I guess you mean well, but in the end that justifies America interfering with other small countries and supporting their dictators, because, hey, otherwise China will be doing the same and at least "our guys" won't be as bad as "their guys". (Just don't look too closely at what our guys are doing.)
More personally, as a South Korean, America having such an opinion basically means my country is forced to "choose side", hurting our economy and destabilizing military balance in East Asia. The only benefactors are military complexes of China and the US.
In contrast, as an American, I can lend out my copy of "The New Jim Crow" and rant and rave in public about how unjust the American justice system truly is, and never once fear punishment by my government. It's never once entered my mind.
See, this is what I mean when I say I object to such reasoning. People are so bold, they're always willing to sacrifice other people's lives to defend freedom.
I doubt this number. And let's not forget that they let them protesting for some time. An highly unusual event in China. Problems occurred when protests did not stop.
"threatens democracy and freedom worldwide." China is not totally undemocratic and I doubt that democracy is necessarily the best solution at all times and for all states.
"This psychopath will eventually cause harm to a few countries (Taiwan, South Korea)"
South Korea?
On the other hand I am sure the people in Syria, Libya and Iraq were happy about the US bombings. Remember "highway of death" in Iraq?
"when said and done, maybe enable North Korea to strike a few nuclear missiles into Los Angeles or Tokyo, who knows."
North Korea is a buffer sate for both, China and Russia. China has NO interest in a war in North Korea.
By the way, North Korea. The Soviet Union fought an existential war against Germany and lost 10% of their population. This war DEFINED the Soviet Union. In Europe the second world war was basically a Soviet-German war (9 out of 10 German soldiers that died, died on the Eastern Frontier).
This being said, this is NOTHING compared to the war that North Korea fought: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/11/state-fear...
Yes, North Koreans are paranoid. They may have reasons to be.
Unfortunately, they will only recognise and apologise after that generation is long gone, that is the reality of politics.
Alliances are double-edged swords. I'm curious, what would be your perspective if the U.S. decided that South Korea was no longer worth defending and pulled it's troops back to Guam and Okinawa?
In 2017, the people old enough to be grad students truly don't know about it because the Party has successfully erased it from public discord within the mainland.
But you can't sell prospect of a nuclear war against China, because people have iPhones made in China, so they know it's absurd: why would China want a nuclear war? A threat has to be believable to sell to people. So we talk about North Korea. Nobody in the US has bought anything from North Korea: they are a dark, evil, and mysterious people, and it's easy to believe they can be also suicidal.
(Yes, the North Korean regime is evil: they're so evil that they make China look like boy scouts. But they aren't suicidal.)
What the heck are you talking about? South Korea has already chosen a side. Your country runs military exercises jointly with the USA and Japan.
Americans spilled blood and gave their lives to defend South Korea after North Korea (backed by China and Soviet Russia) invaded on 6/25/1950. The US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to defend South Korea, and currently has 30k troops stationed in South Korea. Our two countries have agreed that the USA would take military command if war were to break out.
There are extreme human rights abuses and health deficiencies on the north side of the 38th Parallel, but the south side has grown to be economically powerful and extremely prosperous despite being a fairly poor country at the outset of the war. Your country and mine maintain a free trade agreement, and have traded 100 billion dollars worth of goods this year.
I personally bought a Samsung phone and a Samsung TV, so I'm about $3k of that.
Don't forget who your friends are!
South Korea's forces had lost 70,000 men in five days before the USA came to your aid in 1950. In the fighting that ensued, 37,000 Americans perished to defend your country. Please consider that.
You mean, what if the US decided that keeping an air force base within 1000 km of Beijing isn't worth the cost?
Well, it that case, it sucks, because our national defense budget will likely have to increase a lot. But an independent country cannot outsource its defense to others forever, so South Korea should have contingency plans for such a case, or at least I hope so.
As you said, alliance goes both ways. The military ties to the US did help us tremendously in the past. But the US is not stationing thousands of soldiers out of goodwill: they're doing it because South Korea is located at a really convenient position in America's game of global dominance. I think it's mutually beneficial (for now), but if America decides it isn't, well then that's it.
Residents of SARs are just as discontent with the mainland as anyone else who escaped before transitions
The mainland has a national language
You can't directly implant process X from culture A to culture B. The checks and balances and social norms between different cultures are different. You can implant an industrial process, if you educate a workforce, i.e. transform culture B to A onsite. Changing the culture of an entire civilization is considerably more difficult.
That's not to say I don't like democracy or markets. But a country does not become a western democracy by having an election an privatizing everything.
Labeling china as bad guys trivializes several aspects of differences between cultures. I'm not sure there are any good guys in global politics, so I'm not sure how the labels good or bad should be applied.
I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government?
> our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy
What do you mean by this, and what alternative do you propose?
China could make the the whole problem go away by withdrawing their support of Kim.
And remember that if it weren't for us, the entire peninsula would be "North Korea." Including your own home.
You're welcome.
I heard about one other aspect to Tiananmen - 20 years before Tiananmen the young generation back then perpetrated the Cultural Revolution with all the related mass crimes and violence, in particular against the representatives of the older generations. To them, now 40-50 years old, the students at Tiananmen looked like the start of possibly something similar to Cultural Revolution and having been perpetrators themselves, they were very afraid of such a new thing starting, especially with them now possibly being the target, and this is why the society was in general ok with the thing crushed mercilessly right at the beginning. Again, i'm not a China expert, just heard/read things along these lines, and being from USSR (where in particular young revolutionaries fervor had been a thing) find such situation and its explanation pretty plausible.
The Chinese government should certainly be judged based on rumors such as these, until they open up their archives and allow free investigation of the events.
Totalitarianism comes in may forms. Countries such as China and Russia have specific characteristics that US, Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia, etc, etc, etc are trying to emulate.
Freedom is a lost art today and jingoism has risen its head again.
There are other reasons why going to war against China wouldn't be that advisable.
http://www.businessinsider.com/navy-chinese-microchips-weapo...
https://www.wired.com/2011/11/counterfeit-missile-defense/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/fake-parts-in-hercules-aircr...
Hint: maybe we keep military bases in SK to defend South Korean, because over the past 67 years of our alliance, South Korea has become a fantastic trade partner and we want to ensure that such a mutually beneficial relationship continues far into the future.
The US destroyed literally every single town. A State Department official in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.” For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population and the Khmer Rouge killed ~21% of Cambodia's population during Pol Pots reign of terror.
Western media fails to ever mention this grievance when trying to give a reason for the state of NK's behavior, instead painting a picture of a zany regime that operates without rhyme or reason. For them, it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened and have not forgotten the devastation.
That's just one example. I could substitute in the US's use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Cambodia (who we were not at war with), the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed a democratically elected leader, the 1973 coup in Chile that put Pinochet in power, or the shooting down Iran Air Flight 655.
To be clear, I'm not excusing China's behavior at all. I think it's sad that Americans forget the atrocities it committed. I don't think there can be a peaceful way forward if we are on a high horse, believing that we possess some moral superiority. Although we are correct to criticize the Burmese treatment of their minority Rohingya, the US is still a country that had race riots in the 21st century and a violent Neo Nazi rally in 2017.
P.S.
The US is the unchallenged global leader at hiding messaging behind marketing, propaganda, consumerism and strong arming other countries, and we are ruled by a powerful group of multi-national corporations.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
-Edward Bernays (often considered the father of PR), from his seminal work, Propaganda.
Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”
He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows. And yes, he was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.
Where and when did you go to school in Canada?
No, at the best of times China is discussed as an exciting place where cool tech is happening.
Horrid xenophobia would be the worst of times. Or are you saying HN has something even worse than that for China?
As for people believing exaggerations about the Tiananmen Square Massacre: sorry, not sorry. If China wants there to be a measured and accurate public accounting of that then they can participate in the free and open discussion of that history. As long as they continue to murder or otherwise destroy the life of anyone who discusses it, the consequence is that people are forced to guess what happened. Too bad.
Chung Kai-Shek is the romanization of 蔣介石 in Cantonese. If those post-docs weren't native in Cantonese, there's almost no way they can connect the pronunciation of Chung Kai-Shek back to 蔣介石.
In another romanization system used by ROC, 蔣介石/蔣中正 is Chiang Chieh-shih/Chiang Chung-cheng. Mainland Chinese can probably recognize them, but no guarantees.
They may not be traded on degrading markets, but that just make people valueless from the point of view of a dictatorship. And I do actually expect people are being mutilated by the Chinese government all the time, we just probably don't hear about it. Again, that what this kind of government normally does.
Yes! Of course. Do you think those of us who think Tiananmen Square was an atrocity that should not have been forgotten are waving away slavery or the current American prison system as forgiveable?
We’re not. America’s sins are many and we are squaring up to those too.
I have a hard time believing all of you posting this are actual HN readers and not paid political operatives. I don’t know how anyone could read this board and think none of us are criticizing the U.S.
The crimes of all nations will be laid bare to history. No one will be spared. There guilty will pay and then history will move on. Not before.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Student_Protection_Act...
-Obama said, on multiple occassions, that Assad using chemical weapons would be a "red line". Assad crossed it. Obama did not strike Assad.
-Syrians asked repeatedly for a no-fly zone like that imposed against Gaddafi, to prevent Assad from pulverizing residential neighborhoods. Obama refused.
-Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey wanted to send serious weapons to those struggling against Assad. Obama essentially vetoed any such steps.
I don't recall any specific conversation with DonHopkins.
I think there's a HN guideline about assuming good faith.
Not sure what to say to that. I don't know who 'all of you posting this' means. Me? and who? People write stuff you disagree with, so you find it hard to believe they actually think that?
Again, you just mention US internal matters. That wasn't what I was talking about. The US has done its repressing/slaughtering all over the world, at least the last 120 years, not mainly internally, so that's why I talk about that. Americans it seems, as in your comment, prefer ignoring the foreign policy slaughters/bullying/destruction. Well, imagine 9/11 x100 or x1000.
No idea what your last paragraph means. Sounds kind of biblical or something. There's no reason to believe the world has, done or will work like that.
(Edit) Oh, and I forgot to mention - that 'expensive quagmire' is 'acceptable opinion' seems to me obscene. As if the main problem with (among other things) mass slaughter and killing children with uranium bullets that remain and cause birth defects, is how much money it cost! And it seems a lot of Americans think 58,000 people died in Vietnam; that's the main figure for Vietnam War deaths I see in US media.
I can list horrible things the US has done abroad... regime change in Central America, torture and destruction in Vietnam, thousands of drone killings up to the present day. The U.S. has done things at least as horrible as Tiananmen at home and abroad.
These things are openly discussed in this country every day. They are openly discussed on HN. I resent your accusation that I am ignoring them.
To expand my comment on history: due to the massive amount of data and metadata and metemetata being recorded, there is a class of open evil which will inevitably enter the public record. Maybe not this decade, maybe not next decade, but the information wants to be free. For a certain class of events which are both evil enough and open enough, they will be inevitably exposed.
I understand the reluctance for them release publicly right now, but it would be a shame if it was all effectively lost because of that.
As for alternatives, I have no good alternatives, but what I can say is that while people from the USA decry authoritarian rule as being 100% evil, it’s hard to ignore how efficiently it has been working in the Chinese case. In a developing country being inefficient at developing has real human consequences, prolonging disease, hunger, malnutrition, undereducation, and lack of opportunity for incredibly large numbers of people. So I don’t believe that opting for a maximally representative but likely significantly less efficient form of government is necessarily a good choice for all countries, which seems to be the subtext of many people who draw a hard line on the Chinese government’s misdeeds, and proceed to label it as uniformly detestable, without considering the potential human cost of its alternatives. As for whether installing a democratic government at that point in China’s history would have been successful or even possible at that time would have been a huge uncertainty, even with what we know today.
