• @[email protected]
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    -21 year ago

    The US has non-public trials, with secret evidence, and even secret charges. China is nowhere NEAR the top offender on these issues. Not even close.

    Hong Kong was a literal British colony and China has allowed Hong Kong, a city that was stolen by Europeans and completely changed, to have its own system of laws and politics based on the British colonial project, and the politicians on Hong Kong that demand that freedom have Euro-centric financial interests since the UK made it into a global finance hub. The idea that these politicians were “pro-democracy”, but the Democratic People’s Republic of China was arresting them for being “pro-democracy” is about as smooth-brained a take as “they hate us for our freedoms”. It’s propaganda and the fact that you parrot it demonstrates you know nothing of the history or present of China, Hong Kong, and like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The subversive activities of the “pro-democracy” politicians is primarily their alignment with a Hong Kong independence movement, which is effectively a secession movement led by a pro-European minority that wants to keep financial ties with London and the US. It would be like New York City trying to secede to maintain its ties to Holland.

    Also, China ranks poorly on democracy indexes, freedom indexes and human development index.

    Most of these are Eurocentric, meaning orientalist and anti-communist. None of them are unbiased. 95.5% of China’s own people support how their government is serving them and supporting them. Whatever the fucking fascist Euro-colonists think “democracy” is, it’s curious that includes apartheid states, genocidal states, and monocultural states but excludes incredibly happy, incredibly diverse nations that have managed to life 800 million out of poverty in 60 years.

    But yes, individual freedoms and civil liberties are foundational to political agency

    Do you think that Chinese don’t have individual freedoms and civil liberties? If they didn’t, do you think they’d have a 95.5% approval rating over 15 years that was increasing among the most poor in the country while also managing 5 separate a distinct autonomous regions where unique cultures speak their own language in the millions? If individual freedoms and civil liberties are so foundational to political agency, then what’s up with the entire Western hemisphere where the colonist have stripped everyone of their individual freedoms and civil liberties except the land-owning white people? How’re those Nicaraguan Death Squads and Haitian assassinations and US trained coups, and US and Canadian genocidal policies against millions of natives - how are they doing? Do they impact those “indexes” you mentioned?

    You cannot engage freely with political issues you can’t freely discuss. This should be self evident.

    It is. And you’d be surprised just how much dissent there is in China that’s open, written about, etc. There are protests, there are essays, there are factions. You’re getting confused by the US media painting legitimate government intervention with universal oppression. The fact that 95.5% of people approve of the government should tell you this, alone. But even just doing a little bit of research on your own would disprove everything you believe about China. For example, Winnie the Pooh is not banned, nor are products bearing its visage, nor are websites with the content, etc.

    It’s really astounding how much projection you exhibit here. You say China does poorly on indexes, but you don’t question why those indexes look good for genocidal mass murdering settler-colonial states. You say Chinese people lack individual freedoms and civil liberties but don’t think about the binding arbitration epidemic, structural racism, deaths of poverty, the Princeton report demonstrating zero democratic influence in the USA, monocultural oppression throughout most of Europe, refusal of colonial states to repair the damage they did up to and including levying debt on all of Haiti for each black person freed because the slave owners need their money back (that debt is still generating profit through interests and fees and Citi is the one currently collecting that profit).

    Just take everything you criticize China for, look at the North Atlantic, and you’ll see the North Atlantic does this so often and so thoroughly that OF COURSE China has to do it worse, and then actually research China and realize that every single source you’ve ever believed on what’s happening in China is just bald-faced lying to you, completely outright, shamelessly. It was fucking eye-opening when I did it. I’m sure it will be for you, too.

    • @[email protected]
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      01 year ago

      The US criminal justice system does not have closed trials. Almost all trials in China are closed.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_trial#United_States - The USA has secret courts

        https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1991/us/ - and the USA has secret trials

        https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/09/us-secret-evidence-erodes-fair-trial-rights - and the United States has open trials with secret evidence

        https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-37515399 - The BBC, state-owned media by a country that launched multiple wars against China, got 40% of their population addicted to opium, then invaded them when they tried to outlaw opium and forced them not only to legalize opium but also make all Europeans completely immune to Chinese law, that colonized multiple parts of their country and only recently gave back their land holding but still operates a spoiler campaign against them and extracts as much wealth as possible from them, THAT BBC, the BBC even writes about the Chinese government live streaming trials.

        You can select any Euro-centric standard you want and show that China doesn’t meet your Euro-centric standard. It won’t change the fact that China is serving its people far better than European countries ever have and ever will. You can always imagine that China is violating some inviolable ideal that makes it evil and terrible, but even closed trials are not seen by the Chinese people as a significant hindrance to their fulfillment, most likely because the court systems haven’t actually been organized against the working class, against non-white people, and against women, like they have been in Eurocentric countries.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          FISA courts don’t convict people of crimes.

          But sure, let’s talk about why FISA courts are bad, and also why China should have public trials?

          I’ll start - though some consider them a national security essential, FISA courts represent a fundamental gap in oversight which has the potential to erode civil liberties. If it must exist at all then it needs a significant overhaul in the way oversight is handled, even mandatory congressional review.

          Now you go. How would you improve China’s legal system?

          • @[email protected]
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            -31 year ago

            I don’t live there. The idea that I could improve China’s legal system is arrogance on top of ignorance. Keep beating your drum and drowning out everything else. Your cognitive dissonance will eventually get the better of you.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              Ah I thought you were interested in having a conversation perhaps instead of just vomiting geopolitical head cannon, so that’s on me.

              But just to clarify, you are or are not in favor of public trials?

              • @[email protected]
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                -31 year ago

                I could go either way. In China, it seems as though each municipality has different rules for who’s admitted and different criteria. I think whether trials are public is far and away less important than class warfare. For example, see all of the public trials that didn’t do shit to stop the cash-for-kids travesty.

                Also, you thought I wanted to engage you in trying to analyze the precise details of the Chinese judicial system vis-a-vis trial access in order to arrive at analytical conclusions about how to improve China? Yeah, that is on you. The idea that you think you’re even remotely qualified to have that conversation is ridiculous.

                As for spewing geopolitical headcanon, I know you’re a lost cause but try going back to the beginning of this thread and look at your own words wherein you spew forth completely unfounded claims based in entirely Eurocentric cultural virtue signaling as though it’s the standard from which to judge all societies and try to here the words “spewing geopolitical headcanon” while imagining the multiple ongoing cultural genocides that the Eurocentric world is actively maintaining to this day against indigenous people on multiple continents.

                • @[email protected]
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                  1 year ago

                  To recap, it seems like I’m the one here willing to engage in critical discussion about both the west and about China. Perhaps that’s because I have a personal stake in both societies and wish better for both. You are just hiding behind unfounded and poorly defined accusations of “eurocentrism” and name calling to shut down discussion, without even realizing that it’s the exact same cognitive bias you seem so critical of.

                  Obviously European enlightenment values are not above reproach. I have certainly never made such a claim. You, however seem to be actively asserting that the Chinese system is indeed above reproach, and you also seem to be under the impression that this is the less biased stance. I have not and will not remove your agency by declaring you brainwashed as you have done repeatedly.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    -11 year ago

                    Please explain how you plan to liberate workers by removing their basic political agency. “You are just brainwashed. Please try to keep up.”

                    This is how you began the engagement. This is not a critical discussion. This is you parroting Western propaganda and the rest of your comments are an attempt to back your way into a rationalization. The basis for your claim has shifted from complaining about separatists on a former British colony espousing secession being arrested to trials not being open to the general public. Neither of these intersect at all with “basic political agency”. If you knew anything at all about what actually goes on in China, you would understand that citizens of China have far and away more political agency than citizens of the US have, it just looks different than Euro-centric democracies.

                    By the way, I use “Euro-centric” as a way of catching the entire history of the dominant European powers, the colonial powers, and the settler-colonial states that proceed from them, because it’s the easiest and most accurate short-hand despite being imprecise. I could use “North Atlantic” but it doesn’t capture the fact that the settler states all base their legal systems on British Common Law. As another aside, British Common Law is what Hong Kong operated under during colonization, except only the British were considered full citizens whereas the Chinese inhabitants of Hong Kong were subjugated and marginalized by the law. In this way, Hong Kong is a great example to expose your Euro-centric bias, by saying that democratic forms of the European pedigree are somehow “more free” than democratic forms of the Chinese variety. This is clear bias because the democratic forms of the Chinese variety clearly address the largest form of European subjugation - structural racism - but somehow all the Euro-centric “Democracy Indexes” don’t seem to be structured to capture this difference.

                    In the US, there are some native languages that have less than 10 fluent speakers, all of whom are in their 80s and will die soon. In China, there are native languages that are used throughout a citizen’s entire educational process from grade school through university. China is not above reproach, it’s above reproach by the North Atlantic. Europeans (and settlers) have no standing to reproach China. They gave that up during the century of humiliation when they subjugated the country, made themselves immune to the legal system, stole their land, poisoned their land, enslaved their people, created opium addiction in 40% of the national population and then invaded the country when the country tried to outlaw drugs and forced them to legalize the drug trade.

                    If the North Atlantic had atoned for their atrocities, MAYBE they’d have a standing to critique China. But then they kept Hong Kong until 1997 and did everything they could to foment unrest and rebellion. They established an East Turkistan radicalization project to create religious extremists to commit acts of terror in China, just like they did in Afghanistan. They trained Tibetan separatists in terrorism and airlifted into the country to fight China. They supported Chiang Kai-Shek when he lost the civil war and they supported the establishment of a separatist outpost on Taiwan, they armed them, they protected them with naval blockades.

                    There is no position anymore from which the North Atlantic can levy criticisms of China. Any critique is immediately tainted by the attempts to completely undermine and subjugate China that have been occurring non-stop for over 2 centuries now. Non-stop. Unbroken. The North Atlantic in 200 years has never stopped trying to subjugate China, lie about China, propagandize about China, and dominate China. It has literally never stopped. So, no, I have no interest in having an uninformed conversation about theoretical comparative liberty comparing China and other societies with someone living in the North Atlantic that has zero issue regurgitating claims that are easily dismissed through basic research.

                    I have not and will not remove your agency by declaring you brainwashed as you have done repeatedly.

                    I have literally never called you brainwashed, because I know what the term means and where it came from. I was raised in America. I was indoctrinated in my country’s cultural belief system. I am now brain washed, that is to say, I have washed my brain from that indoctrination. This is the original meaning of the term, and it refers to the way that Mao managed to keep the war effort going - when the PLA captured KMT soldiers, it had a program of pairing those soldiers up with PLA soldiers and letting them have conversations. The KMT was run like a feudal military, and the soldiers were treated poorly by their commanding warlord. They have no power and or influence over their lives, their tactics, etc. The PLA, on the other hand, was much more egalitarian. The KMT troops had been indoctrinated to believe terrible things about the PLA. But then the KMT troops actually spoke with PLA soliders, and saw how the PLA operated, many of them joined up with the PLA. Some units in the PLA had a greater than 100% death rate (counted against the number initially deployed to the field) and still operated because they converted so many KMT troops to their side. That’s what brain washing is. It’s washing away false beliefs that were placed there through indoctrination.

                    I was not indoctrinated by China, I was indoctrinated by the US (a continuation and collaboration of European power projection). I believed the same things about China that you believe. I recognize your beliefs, because I used to have them. I don’t believe those things anymore, because I did engage in critical thinking, and I critiqued my indoctrination. And it’s a lot fucking harder than the alternative. It’s easier to not challenge this indoctrination, not the least of which because family, friends, and coworkers all believe the indoctrination, too, and my critique of that indoctrination is met with suspicion, derision, anger, and even risk of various forms of harm.

                    So ask yourself, why would an American, indoctrinated by America, previously believing the same shit you believed, why would I go through the discomfort, the difficulty, and the risks inherent with changing my beliefs when literally all of the media, all of the peer pressure, and all of the structure around me is replicating American ideology?

                    It’s because the facts don’t match the message, and critical thinking requires it.