China instated the death penalty for "particularly serious" cases involving supporters of Taiwanese independence. New judicial guidelines, entitled "Opinions on Punishing the Crimes of Splitting the Country & Inciting Splitting the Country by 'Taiwan Independence' Diehards," were jointly issued by... Read moreChina: death penalty for advocating ‘Taiwan independence’
The first link referenced in this article. That article mentions the punishments and the severity of the crime required for those punishments.
This article seemed to only latch onto the more dramatic portions and threats of the death penalty to generate clicks.
Among them, those who cause particularly serious harm to the state and the people and whose circumstances are particularly bad may be sentenced to death
; those who actively participate shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than ten years; those who participate in other activities shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years, criminal detention, control or deprivation of political rights.
Tbf it’s not super clear i had to read the whole thing 3 time. Sorry about the brillant people calling you a tankie, they prob don’t even know what it mean…
Yeah, it’s legal language that’s been translated, so I can’t expect vernacular clarity.
I don’t get the tankie comments, either. My original post was about the article being biased towards sensationalism. It seems lots of people have strong opinions and feel the need to lash out.
I agree with you that the article is clickbaity, it implies that it’s the default punishment. But technically, it isn’t wrong. It’s still possible to get death penalty for advocating for Taiwan independence.
Without looking at your post history, I think your downvotes are unjustified. You merely pointed out the clickbait. But it would be better if you presented it in more affirming way, cause right now your comment kinda reads like you’re refuting the article and “it’s not a death sentence, it’s only a 3-year imprisonment”, which is also not true.
The clickbait nature of the headline does seem to imply that it’s death right off the bat. I never said that death wasn’t on the table, as unfortunate as that is. The death penalty is far from the only outcome, which is difficult to surmise from just this one article alone.
However, I’m not going to edit the comments I made in an attempt to present it differently. My goal was to get people to read into it, question their assumptions, and not take the article at face value. Media literacy is a skill and involves going well past the headline, so hopefully some people saw that while trying to prove me wrong.
I feel the downvotes are unjustified as well, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it. It’s a sensitive subject for a lot of people, and I saw that going into it.
I mean I think it makes sense to focus on the most severe possible punishment in this context.
That said, I did not find any mention of the death penalty in the linked page. I do not speak Chinese so I was relying on the translation feature in my browser, so I’m not sure if it was mistranslated, the article is wrong about that, or what. Curious if anyone has further information on this.
I used google’s webpage translation. It does mention death as a penalty, but it’s far from the only possible outcome.
OK so probably a translation issue. But to respond to your statement, if your city announced it would punish illegal parking with penalties ranging from 3 years imprisonment to fucking murder, which would you be more concerned with? And which would you rather local journalists make you aware of? Would you really be criticizing their clickbait headlines if they ran a similar story?
Like I said, focusing on the more severe possible punishment makes perfect sense in this context. Not to mention that all of the punishments are extremely excessive.
I never discounted the inclusion of the threat of death, I only commented on the fixation on it in that article. Of course the inclusion of the death penalty needs to be a part of the discussion.
We can spend the rest of forever discussing what-ifs and hypotheticals. I don’t think it does the original discussion justice to boil it down from the severity of secession to parking issues. I fear your simplification misrepresents the original discussion, as the nuance of the China-Taiwan situation cannot earnestly be recreated with parking violations in a city.
But yes, to answer your question, I do think that journalistic integrity is important at any level.
If you keep reading in that translated article linked in the original article, it says that if you change your stance and make an honest attempt to undo the damage you did, the charges may be dropped. So one could end up with no punishments at all.