It’s just kind of annoying to hear a bunch of Americans call China a Muslim-hating, imperialistic hellhole without realizing that America has also been pretty terrible to Muslims (nobody talks about Abu Gharib), and that America has been far more imperialistic, especially historically. China is pretty dystopic but America is too, especially when we see recent news about how a black witness at the Amber Guyger trial got murdered right after his testimony.
I’m not saying that America is worse (I find it difficult to rate oppression anyway), but I wish that some of my white peers would care as much about American dystopia (which they can more easily address, as voters) as they did Eastern dystopia. In America people will rage with rhetoric against “the Chinese” while simultaneously giving you side eye for supporting BLM.
I’m having these thoughts in the first place because my white peer told me that “the Chinese” are going to take over the world because they’ve invested money into 3rd world countries. She knows I’m Chinese. It’s like, America has already done the same thing 100 years ago yet China is somehow so much more evil.
Edit: Please reread my post if you think I’m defending China’s actions.
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It’s a losing battle, mate. As someone who’s lived on both sides of the Pacific, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the inevitable conflict between Chinese and Western cultures.
Western media and public discourse LOVE to s**t on China, because it generates outrage and clicks. It’s pretty much impossible to combat and fact check, for two reasons:
1) Most of the stories are at least rooted in some semblance of the truth, for example, YES there are camps in Xinjiang where Uyghurs are being sent against their will, and YES the organs of executed criminals were indeed used for transplants in the early 2000’s.
2) As another redditor on this sub pointed out, there are ZERO repercussions for any Western media outlet that takes negative stories about China and blows them way out of proportion. The group of people who can both read the story and are knowledgeable enough to refute it forms such a tiny audience that their voices will immediately be drowned out by those calling for blood.
I really wish things weren’t this way.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on how the situation in Hong Kong reminds you of Taiwan. As the child of mainland immigrants, it’s never been in my DNA to question whether Taiwan and Hong Kong are part of China. “China” here doesn’t necessarily have to be synonymous with “PRC”; h**l, I would argue that the RoC did a much better job of preserving traditional Chinese culture until recently, plus I like the RoC flag better as it has more traditionally Chinese elements.
Media wise, SixthTone is good for general China-related issues, but as a mainland approved publication there won’t be any political content. SCMP is also good and is independent from the CCP; if you’re being shat on by both sides for being biased, then you’re probably doing a good job being neutral.
People also don’t realize China is constructing the camps in response to terrorist attacks (there was a massive knife attack too). There are also reports of extremists that cross the border into Xinjiang. China most like just felt the “shame”/”atrocity” of making these camps outweigh the possibility/danger of the formation of their own ISIS in their own territory.
People also need to think about what has been going on for the last 70 years. If they’re teaching all this “Chinese” stuff now, what the f**k were they doing before? My theory is that China probably thought “oh s**t, America is pulling out of the Middle East soon, the place next to Xinjiang is about to get messy”. The amount of political instability that immigrants created in Europe probably sent the CCP into “panic” mode.
Just some meandering thoughts I’ve pulled together from years of readings and observations…
As I write this, the three top posts in /r/worldnews are two posts about South Park in China and one post about blindfolded prisoners in Xinjiang. These are truly the most important issues of our times – Reddit hivemind curating your content at work.
No, Reddit isn’t the news, but a same curation process happens behind the scenes in every news organization. I encourage you to think critically. By this, I don’t mean a myopic focus on accurate reporting of facts (although this too is important and often in question when it comes to China) or even mere crude censorship, but the meta-news. Who decided something was newsworthy? Who decided something was not? What was left out? How important is it really in relation to everything else going on? Why are you hearing about this now? Who is the source of the claims? Who’s connecting disparate stories to form the official narrative? Better yet, who’s putting out the stories for you to “naturally” arrive at the narrative they’re trying to sell?
So as an example, let’s take the current Hong Kong protests. Without taking any sides, let me just point out that during this time, the Gilets Jaunes protests in France have continued (with fatalities and maimings from the police suppression), Kashmir has had telecommunications cut, been put under virtual martial law, and seen thousands of preemptive arrests, Indonesia has had protests (again, with multiple fatalities from police shooting live ammunition), and over a hundred protestors have been killed in Iraq. The popularity of these protests might not match HK, but I hope you’ll agree with me that comparatively the police response in HK has been restrained, as evidenced by, you know, protestors (at least so far) not getting killed by police. So why is it that the response to the HK protests have drawn so much condemnation and the other protests barely merit a mention?
You are living in a world awash with information and even without resorting to lying, facts can be cherrypicked to support just about any narrative. There are whole knowledge-creation industries, such as lobbyists and think tanks, out there to convince people to believe things that align with the interests of whoever funds them. You are targets for influence campaigns to manipulate your sentiments, beliefs, and actions – and I don’t mean just the Russians or Chinese or Iranians or whoever the enemy of the week is, but everybody. That especially includes the largest Military-Industrial Complex in the world. Organizations that run these campaigns aren’t interested in informing you or encouraging public debate. They do strategic messaging – this means they put out whatever is necessary to achieve their desired strategic effects. Things like consolidation of national broadcasters, dying local news, social media, big data/AI will only make things worse. These are the times you live in.
Not too long ago in historical terms, people used Christianity or Civilization to justify the rape, slaughter, slavery, and pillage of other peoples. Eventually, Freedom and Democracy became the justification for foreign intervention. Then it was Human Rights. And these excuses will continually morph to whatever is necessary to get your support. Watch this space – personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Global Climate Change/Saving the Planet as the next big justification. Feminism/LGBT is already in vogue. I’m not saying that these causes are not good causes – what I’m saying is that actors will try to hijack your views on these causes to advance their own interests, just like how corporations do Pride Week to improve their image and sales.
I think it’s dangerous to rationalize away a concerted effort to confront a potential humanitarian crises by just asking “what about the US?”
I’m born and raised in China, I totally understand the outrage. I understand the political sensitivities there, and I have family friends who have been persecuted for being too religious or too influential. Of course, Chinese citizens/netizens aren’t the party, but the level of propaganda, combined with a deep rooted (super-)nationalist ideology drilled into our minds at a very early age, means that our entire communications ecosystem is just a giant propaganda bubble. My parents still talk about the protesters as if they’re rabid thugs looking to target mainland nationals and beat them or kill them. This isn’t the isolated discourse either, as their entire WeChat experience these days is just revolved around who can come up with the scarier story about the protest.
It’s overly naive at best, and disingenuous at its worst, to claim that the netizens are not part of the problem. They’re not the CCP, and they don’t have executive, legislative, nor any real decision making powers, but they’re definitely in line with the party, and they serve as the direct channel for party propaganda.
I also want to point out that criticizing Chinese policies, its propaganda arm, etc, aren’t racially motivated. It’s different to observe the fact that Chinese influence over international affairs may bring political instabilities to the world than someone claiming that we are racially different and hence must be born to be evil. It’s equally valid to criticize US involvement in international affairs and the instabilities that our war mongering foreign policies have brought upon the world over the past 50 years, but that’s not a valid rationalization in support of Chinese policies. Sure, it’s hypocritical, but it does not excuse the evilness of China today.
I’m totally on board with China getting criticized but at some point, Americans going on and on about China just kinda feels like a “China bad, America good” situation.
For most of us here, we live in America and we have the right to vote in this country, but there’s not enough happening to make the necessary changes that this country needs. Americans are not actually as critical of America as like they to believe. Even groups like Asian Americans, I find the level of criticism towards America as a country is incredibly weak.
This country shouldn’t even exist in the first place because it’s built on stolen land but Americans still have all the energy in the world to focus so much of their hatred on China, it’s ridiculous. We’re imprisoning people for profit, we’re sanctioning the living f**k of countries, we’ve gone to war slaughtering the h**l out of other Asians, but nobody really wants to talk about that because they don’t actually have a problem with human rights abuses.
The CIA also toppled the democratically Iranian government, not even for oil, but as a favor to England; which led to the overthrow of the Shah and Ayatollah coming into power. The Iranians at the time even thought of the US as friends and fellow revolutionaries, who both tried to secede from English. rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
There was also the Iran-Contra affair, where the CIA sold arms to our newly-made enemy Iran, to fund right-wing deathsquads in Nicaragua, who almost solely targeted civilians and the families of civilians suspected of being communist sympathizers, to “stop the spread of communism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
Also the US supported Augusto Pinochet who extrajudicially executed tons of leftists and socialists to stop the spread of communism and turn Chile into a capitalist state. The US even educated a group of Chilean economists called the “Chicago Boys” under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago to liberalize Chile’s economy while people were being jailed and thrown out of helicopters to their deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
There was also the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia, the subject of the documentary “The Act of Killing”, where militias went around massacring suspected communists and communist sympathizers, or failing to find those, blindly killing Indonesian ethnic Chinese. This was at least complicitly supported by the CIA and US government, while publicly denounced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
And there’s literally so many more terrible things the US has perpetrated or supported to maintain access to oil, or stop the spread of Communism or whatever other reason.
I think the issue here is that there’s often very little distinction with being “Anti-CCP” with being “Anti-Chinese” or “Anti-Asian.” We are often seen as some sort of foreign monolith, even if some of our families have been in this country longer than some families from Europe. One of the first racially-based murders after 9/11 was of a Sikh man. Different religion, different culture, different ethnicity, but he died because he wore a turban. Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps because they couldn’t be trusted to be American enough. I think that’s why I’m wary of the anti-China sentiment I’m starting to see a lot of recently, even if I have been staunchly anti-CCP all my life (my family were forced to flee China in 1949). When people say things that are anti-China, I wonder what the subtext of their reactions are. I do agree that dealing with it by saying, “Well, the US did worse!” is backward and not where any of us should be with this. But it is an issue that may start affecting a lot of us very negatively because of our Asian identities.
People in this thread keeps say whataboutism or what not, but really what bothers me is that a pro-China opinon is not allowed in the US and West on anything.
For all of the west’s domestic and international issues (BLM, France yellow vests, multiple wars of terror and associated civilian deaths, US border camps), regardless of what people supporter, we at least accept that there can be multiple perspectives on the cause and reasoning behind what government / non- government groups motivation for doing things.
With China there isn’t, anyone who is anti government is automatically good, and anyone who supports government is automatically brainwashed. And the media only represents the anti government view.
Take Hong Kong protests for example, no one questions whether they are protesting for right or justified reasons (“anti China = freedom = good”), when it started due to an new extradition law (now canceled) with Taiwan to extradite a murderer (China was one the countries that the new extradition agreement included, and people claimed that would allow political enemies to be extradited but the law spelled out clear criteria where extradition is valid).
Never take anything the US media says about china on face value, it’s not a coincidence that yellow peril and anti china rheotoric has increased exponentially in the past few years. History repeats itself
Edit: Daily reminder that multiple BLM protestors have been found murdered and that Joshua Brown was just murdered for testifyng against Amber Guyver (can’t wait for that investigation to coincidentally result in no leads). Reminder that in recent history the US has had AND CONTINUES to have the absolute worst record of imperialism and atrocities committed. Reminder that the dems and republicans have equally awful foreign policy and that your consent is being manufactured. Reminder that you don’t need a red and yellow flag to engage in propaganda.
Idiots will call this post wHaTsBOuTism and reply with some dumb s**t like yeah but both sides are bad
If you blindly accept US journalism as fact but refuse to emgage with any MILDLY Chinese or pro Chinese narratives then you don’t think both sides are bad. You think China is Nazi germany reincarnate and pay bullshit lip service to condemning the US because you’ve been raised with western chauvinism and american exceptionalism
Yes, but people like the OP and I feel that a lot of times the anti Asian sentiment leads to an exaggeration or distortion of the facts in people’s critique of China. It’s a small difference between China is doing something bad vs China is doing some insane dictator evil s**t and the anti Asian/racist sentiment is the extra push that is making these differences. People might think we are defending China or giving China an excuse but it is more about the racism that bleeds onto/affects us in the long run. Not to say some people don’t have a blind nationalistic love for China because some people certainly do. I think for me and the OP we are concerned about the racism.
There was a news documentary video of white reporters sneaking into a factory of Chinese workers and it claimed that they yelled and abuse their workers and they secretly filmed it. When I watched the video and listen to the Chinese supervisor, they were actually just talking to them normal in Chinese… To an outsider it sounded like yelling and abuse because of cultural differences. Does the Chinese yell and abuse their workers… Sure, probably. But the video was propaganda, a product of racist thinking against Chinese people, and not realistic of the fact. White people watching the video- “See!!! Everything in China is fucked up!!! Chinese people are fucked!!!
I’m sick and tired of being expected by the AA community (especially the other one on this website) to defend China’s barbaric actions just because I’m Chinese. I cannot in good conscience defend China. That doesn’t make me any less Chinese than any of the people defending the CCP. HKers, Tibetans, and Uighurs are all also Asian, yet all I see is “poor oppressed China” posts.
The abuses at Abu Gharib became public and the perpetrators were punished. Why is it that China only arrests the human rights defenders and not the abusers??? “America is just as bad” my a*s.
There is documentary evidence of China harvesting organs of political dissidents. “Difficult to rate oppression” my a*s.
If you want to talk about the issues facing all Asians in western countries, sure let’s talk about that, but don’t expect me to defend China’s crimes against humanity, and don’t you dare chastise me for not playing along with your false narratives.
Who are these people commenting?
I don’t think they are real users it’s probably been copied and pasted from another website
I can tell that those people that wrote that comments are Chinese