That's very interesting. So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China are due to the West's psychological struggles (?), and not due to actual suffering caused by the Chinese government?
Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.
> So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China
I think that generally western news have a tendency to misrepresent countries that are culturally different.
E.g. as a Russian, reading western news about Russia makes me think that journalist play a broken telephone game, misrepresenting marginal stuff as some kind of insane norm, in a completely unnuanced way, without any context.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same was for China. Probably even worse, as verification is even less accessible.
Dramatic news get clicks and there is no accountability for spicing them up.
I guess, in the age of AI-delivered clickbait media, the old saying "Don't believe everything you read in the papers" was never as true.
I agree, this rhetoric is true for western news about India as well. The BBC for example known to be awful at times, actively misrepresenting and hiding facts to suit their narrative. I guess they have to cater to their population with colonial mentality which can't bear the fact that some ex-colonies are on track to surpass them in the Asian century.
Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.” It’s not very convincing.
> Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.”
What? Why? How? Where does this extreme binary logic come from? When have I said that he should "trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government"? When have I said that "I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government"?
You don't need any "propaganda" to leave the house and live a life. I have all the empirical evidence I need to competently state "well, that's not how it works IRL" when I see some weird journalism full of factual errors and false assumptions.
Why are you acting as there is no personal experience?
I am 100% British. You misunderstand me. I am saying that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism, its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
We can split hairs about Boris Johnson throwing private parties or Joe Biden not wearing a mask or something equally trivial, but at the end of the day, I know of only one major world power which is systematically rounding up its citizens and sending them to reeducation and sterilization camps. It frustrates me when people try to defend China in such roundabout ways when the proof is in the pudding. If anything, humanity would be better off if we were _more_ harsh on China, and willing to call out its grave, grave sins, rather than absurdly shifting the discussion to Western colonialism.
The CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! And lying about it! Why is it even worth discussing the context of Western colonialism when there's a true and honest legal genocide being performed at the hands of the government? This argument is no different than saying that if we just understood the context of Germany's situation in the 1930s better, perhaps we wouldn't criticize the Nazi regime as strongly. There are some acts which transcend cultural context because of how barbaric they are, and in my opinion, what's happening with the Uighur peoples is beyond forgiveness.
This is a misunderstanding of my viewpoint that I often get. I'm not defending China, and I'm not engaging in Whataboutism. Although I certainly understand how it seems like that. My point is that words are more effective when the speaker of those words lives by those words. Of course the metaphors of Boris Johnson's parties and Joe Biden's lack of mask wearing are trivial, it's just an example.
Yes, the CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! But also yes, the entirety of the Americas and Australia are already ethnically cleansed. The West has set the precedent. We simply have no power to, as much as it's the ethically correct thing to do, admonish China.
Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.