This amount of cultural relativism is silly and frankly just plain ignorant. China doesn't restrict free speech for cultural reasons. The CCP restricts free speech because it fears losing its ruling status.
And that's China's own problem (or lack thereof) as a sovereign nation, not something for Apple or the US to decide.
Not every country wants (or even works better) with a US style system, and interventionism has led to disastrous results in the not that far past.
One way to not have that problem is to let China has its own Apple - how's that for non-interventionism and non-colonialism?
In what possible way does it make it a US problem?
Besides, western companies make tons of money by selling arms, doing deals, and supporting all kinds of regimes, including the most abhorrent ones, from Pinochet's Chile to S.A.
Here, we're objecting to Apple's behaviour.
(I also wonder if they pay US taxes off any of these profits?)
This is a single country, with its own culture, history and tradition, minding its own affairs.
And blacks were clearly against apartheid and fighting fiercely for decades. Have you talked to many locals in China and found out they were against their regime?
The ones whose opinion would be interesting are in prison, or no longer locals.
There are whole bookshelves of books describing the wholesome family and city life people "on the right side" in Nazi Germany engaged in. They had their pleasures, their had their excuses, and I care not for either. The phrase "whitewashed tombs" comes to mind.
> blacks were clearly against apartheid
Blacks? Or "the blacks"? Because I'm sure I could find you Uncle Toms, there's always some. And since I also could find you people fighting against the Chinese regimes since Mao, the sentence "Chinese were clearly against oppression" would also be correct and we achieved nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
Really, the nerve. Did I ask the dead if they are against their regime?
Similarly, as a German I flat out don't care much for people from the GDR who aren't dissing it. I don't care if that was their "culture" (what a totally empty word, it's like a void pointer). They survived it with their blinders intact, and that says something about them, not the GDR. I feel the same way about "the West" before anyone asks, but that doesn't mean I find more backwards tyrannies cute. I don't need to borrow their blind eyes to see what I see, and if I have to be against thousands of them to be for those I HAVE to be for to not spit out when I look in the mirror, so be it. The more, the merrier.
I actually have. In fact, every single one that I talked with was against their regime.
The Chinese culture is not the victim here. The "evil whites" are not trying to mess with the eastern cultures in this case. Instead, the Chinese people are the victims, victims of the fascist regime that rules over them.
Because (a) the whites were colonizers, where Chinese are at home in China. And because in apartheid it was whites against blacks, whereas in China it's not "chinese vs chinese" -- chinese in general LIKE their government.
What happens if you make your displeasure with the CCP known publically?
In case your question wasn't rhetorical: nothing would happen. That is, unless you were a very public figure or made it your life's mission. Fun fact: China has a very low incarceration rate, about 15% that of the USA. It's not like people are getting thrown in jail right and left for opening their mouth.
I know, it's a hard pill to swallow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China
I know, it's a hard pill to swallow.
Actually, far from surely.
That's not a good comparison. You would need to compare stats for number of people thrown in jail for speaking out against the government.
The US has the idiotic war on drugs and terrible recidivism driven by bad incentives to thank for its high incarceration rate.
So, I wonder if it's not all ignorance. I just don't see how anyone with access to uncensored history books can give credit to the CCP for the economic growth. Surely they could tell that Taiwan, also a Chinese country, has a far better track record when it comes to economic growth and the well being of their population (not to say that the Kuomintang has a squeaky clean record)?
The view that "Meh, it could be worse" is the one that's been most prevalent among those who I've talked to about the issue. As mentioned higher up in the thread, it's easy to look the other way when it comes to a couple of human rights crimes when your family has gone from starvation to owning cars and apartments in skyscrapers in less than a generation.
If you're Polish or even Russian you are far more likely to have a nice car, food on the table, a nice house, the ability to blog about whatever interests you, read what you want and even run for office than if you're a citizen of the PRC. So, again, it sounds like it's mostly ignorance, or expectations that democracies never experience setbacks.
Political systems are in part products of their culture. Free speech is not part of the cultural or political history of China, as it is in the West.
And that has absolutely no impact on whether or not free speech is a fundamental human right. There's many examples of cultures with abhorrent traditions. It doesn't make them just and that's why many of those cultures reject those traditions today.
Only you don't get to decide what's a "fundamental human right" for others (something that's based on one's own culture and, when intervened and enforced, is often interpreted by their own national interests -- like "bringing democracy").
Not to mention that what's "free speech" is not clear cut, most EU countries for example have totally different laws than the US, and you can land in jail or be hit with a hefty fine for stuff that's considered as protected by "free speech" in the US, and they consider it totally fine.
>There's many examples of cultures with abhorrent traditions. It doesn't make them just and that's why many of those cultures reject those traditions today.
Well, until China rejects their traditions, it's not for other countries to dictate it to them.
If you accept the concept of "fundamental human rights", then it seems to me that they are rights that are derived from the simple fact of being a human, regardless of what your culture or rulers currently impose on you, and which you accept axiomatically. That is what makes them "fundamental", rather than just the (larger) set of normal rights afforded to you by your state.
I could easily see things like having the right to not be held as a slave as belonging to such a fundamental set.
> Not to mention that what's "free speech" is not clear cut, most EU countries for example have totally different laws than the US
I think the issue is more about how much trespassing on the freedom of speech is allowed by different jurisdictions. Even in Europe very few argue that holocaust denial laws, or blasphemy laws are not a trespass on freedom of speech. It is just that many accept them. And many, including myself, do not, because it has had a chilling effect of public discourse on many important issues.
Or how the Arab Spring devolved into brutal civil wars.
It's not tenable to pretend that western values can be separated from western culture and exported to other cultures as-is.
It doesn't work.
...by force.
50 years ago we had less freedom than the Chinese have today. Then the tyrant died of old age, and the absolute monarch that succeeded him decided democracy was the way to go.
Latin American countries have the same cultural roots as Spain. They were part of Spain for more centuries than they've been independent; and even after independence the cultural exchange has been continuous. Today, some are free, and some like Cuba or Venezuela are tyrannies.
That fatalism about some cultures not being ready for freedom is too simplistic when faced with the details of reality. The Chinese of Hong Kong and Taiwan handled freedom no problem; one from within, the other "pushed on them" by the British.
The right to self determination for every nation is the bedrock of the international system that Europeans created after centuries of bloody religious strife. Not sure how Hong Kong is a great example, unless you're proposing to go back to the days of colonialism and Westerners imposing their rules and values by force.
This is not at all unique to Chinese culture - It is and has been the universal argument of dictators and oppressors worldwide. Putin uses it in Russia these days.
The claim is belied by Taiwan and Hong Kong, two indisputably Chinese places where free speech is highly valued. The idea that it's a Western value at all is belied by places like Japan, South Korea, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey (until recently) and endless more nations and cultures. Protestors in Iran and throughout the Mideast and into N. Africa in the Arab Spring risked (and many paid with) their lives for it. And very rarely does anyone with a choice vote to be rid of it.
It's widely considered a universal human value, and I think the evidence is overwhelming in support of that.
You also haven't really put forward any argument that the Chinese value free speech - you can make a base argument that it's valued in some Western countries because they've codified it in their laws - most notably the FA in the US(it's questionable how much this "basic right" is respected in reality). Calling it a "basic right" is culturalism by your own definition, as you apply your own cultural values(whatever they may be) over the whole of humanity. What makes you think humanity as a whole values this "basic right"? Millions of people live in countries where free speech is not as important as religion, for example, and blasphemy laws exist.
By claiming there's some Universal Principal that's superior is basically saying that you're own beliefs and culture (presumably the one and the same as the proported Universal Principle) is superior.
This isn't mathematics where there's some objective truth.
You can give a name to anything, and call it a no-no, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are nuances, and there's also the matter of who gives the name, and under what premises.
>Because I am Chinese/Saudi/Russian etc. in no way implies that I, or my culture, does not value such a basic right as free speech
Actually it does. Many cultures value other things over and above free speech or individual freedom, like cooperation and social cohesion. Try selling the Japanese your "universal idea" of free speech in social situations for example...
It's funny how the "fundamental" rights projected to others as "universal" are often the rights and cultural preferences that are characterizing and championed by one's own culture.
"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." (G. Bernard Shaw, Julius Caesar)
Free speech, privacy and access to a free press are part of the legal and constitutional/meta-legal framework for many democratic systems of government. In principle and in practice. There are laws in the US guaranteeing these freedoms, and hundreds of years of common law supporting and interpreting them.
Subverting those freedoms in the US, is subverting the US' system of government, and ilegal. There are (as they demonstrated) legal channels to defending their users' rights within the US' legal framework because they exist in the US' legal system.
There are philosphical elements to this, universal & inalienable rights and freedoms. But, these are philosophical. In the US, Apple acted at the legal level, with a legal argument not a philosophical one.
China is not a democracy. These rights are not a part of their system of government and there is no legal way to defend rights that are not recognized in that country. This is not some postmodernist or nihilist relativism. It's just recognizing that different laws and rights exist in different countries.
I'm not sure what you expect from Apple. They could pull out of China altogether, on the grounds that China's laws are too immoral. They could try to promote their idea of what a government should be and what rights citizens should have. This amounts to calling for a revolution.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation of a company. I don't think it will lead to a good place either. Apple are a computer company, not a revolutionary movement (1984 ad notwithstanding). The revolutionaries need to be (or not to be) Chinese citizens, not foreign companies.
This is literally restating this:
>the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is
Who decides when and where it is okay to disobey laws that restrict freedom/privacy? If not the modern day multi-nation states of corporations, who? Serfs?
They don't have any fear about that. The CCP is widely supported and deeply entrenched in Chinese society. This is just about preventing civil unrest/promoting a "harmonious society".
Unreasonable cultural relativism would be something like, pretending that child sacrifice is ok.
There's no reason to believe that absolute privacy and absolute freedom are universal objective moral values.