Interpol chief Meng Hongwei vanishes on trip to China
bbc.com
bbc.com
"The 64-year-old official, who is also a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Public Security, was “taken away” for questioning by discipline authorities “as soon as he landed in China” last week, according to the source."
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2167213/fr...
> Chinese mega star Fan Bingbing has been fined around 883 million yuan ($129m; £98.9m) for tax evasion and other offences, authorities said Wednesday. The star, who disappeared in July, posted a long apology on social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#T...
etc, etc...
Those both still sound like tyranny to me.
Its most certainly incorrect to compare Mao with Xi.
He was unabashedly and indisputably, totalitarian. The fact that he lost power eventually, is irrelevant. Every type of leader, eventually, loses power.
You don't need a dictatorship for horrific things to occur.
edit: And before this devolves any further, no I don't give the "West" a pass for its tyrannical tendencies either...
edit: President is elected by the General Assembly [1]
[1] https://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Structure-and-govern...
As people in the field, we need to resist this at every turn but the money is just too great of a lure for now.
I like the way Yanis Varoufakis frames the matter - do you want a Matrix style future where the machines control you or a Star Trek kind of future where the machines take care of all the mundane BS and we get to go places we haven't gone before.
I don't think there is a big debate about what people will choose. We just have to get the mindlessly ambitious minority of the population with god emperor delusions to behave themselves.
Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared.
What do the flight manifests say?
How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff.
For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say?
It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media.
I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.
"The French official said Meng did arrive in China. There was no further word on Meng’s schedule in China or what prompted his wife to wait until now to report his absence."
The article says they can issue one for a certain purpose, and it's not clear to me that this situation fits that purpose; it doesn't say that they have issued one.
Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person.
But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals, nor issue arrest warrants.
Please don't turn this beloved site into a news aggregator.
From the guidelines : "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...]"
Just because it's real doesn't mean is less interesting, for some readers.
Now you, I, and many others have to filter more submissions to get to a real "HACKER" piece of news.
I kindly meant that it's good to have a somewhat specialized site towards intellectual curiosity.
It takes more time to visually filter submissions if they are interspersed with world news in general.
Hong Kong Booksellers are a great example[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...
http://shanghaiist.com/2016/03/16/china_conviction_rate_near...
"In Canada, the national conviction rate is about 97%. This does not include cases in which the charges are dropped, which comprise about one-third of criminal cases. Absent Quebec, the province with the lowest conviction rate, the figure is 99%."
"In China, the justice system has a Conviction rate of about 99.9%. This has been attributed to the use of torture and other coercive measures to extract confessions and pressure on courts and prosecutors."
Either their justice system has incredibly low false positives (99% of people charged are provably guilty), or it's rigged.
Or their prosecution standards are much higher before the cases come to courts...
Although I'd still question the fundamental ability of any bureaucracy to be correct 99%+ of the time.
Given correlations that high, one almost suspects the courts and government aren't independent.
https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/advisories/china/criminal-la...
Highlights:
- 1-7 days arrest and detention without a formal arrest filed (up to 37 days in some cases)
- Up to 13.5 months detention without formal charges filed
This is contrast to the US 72-hour rule & writ of habeas corpus avenue.
Objectively, I feel it's merited to say the Chinese judicial system is inefficient, unjust, and inhumane... at best.
I would not want to live under CCP rule, but it seems like skepticism goes out the window and people will believe anything if the story is about China.
In the US maybe. In the rest of the world it will be a much more nuanced discussion.
So, like Guantanamo, kidnapping, secret sites [1],[2], [3] and so on?
Or routine police shootings, Judge Dread style?
Or having an out-of-all proportions inhumane incarceration system, with 25% of the world's prisoners for only 4% of the world's population? (a statistic many ignore, and I like to emphasize).
Or like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but not having been snatched in the last 150 years out of nowhere, but actually like Tibet having centuries of being part of China in the past?
So, like those bad things, but restricted to their own citizens? And with no bombings and military invasions in 3-4 different countries just in the past 20 years?
Where do the rest of the world signs up so that other countries restrict those activities to their own citizens too?
If you expect a nuanced discussion about the US, you should expect a nuanced one about China.
(Not to mention being the greatest trading partner with China, token statements aside the US have more actual business interests in common with them than even with Britain)
https://www.businessinsider.com/at-least-54-countries-helped...
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/fact-sheets/investiga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
The parent isn't arguing that Americans are angels, but that it is well established that the Chinese state (which is a glove on the CCP) is responsible for pretty brutal and systematic repression (of Uyghurs in particular), but also dissidents.
And despite the regular injustices America dishes out through love of greed, people are not disappeared because they have incorrect thought. >10k people were massacred in 1989. Millions were killed by famine during the cultural revolution. These are only contested in the same way that climate change is contested.
One could argue that the 2003 invasion of iraq body count outweighs these sins, and ascribe malice to the US versus high intentions to the Party. But it doesn't change the fact that China is now, and has long been, an authoritarian state. In fact, it is now pre-eminent, the poster-child for post-capitalist autocracy.
(But there is one one demonstrably wrong part of the grand-parent's post: calling China 'Communist'.)
So while it may trend autocratic, it seems inaccurate to simply call it an autocracy.
Just because communist power struggles happen out of sight doesn't mean they don't happen.
Similarly, in China today, everyone who is anyone in the apparatus is cheating taxes in some way, but it's brought up only if they become a problem for the leadership for some other reason.
Jailing after trial and due public process is one thing, "disappearing" people is another.
Literally makes me want to move to Mars as soon as possible.
He didn't vanish, that's something he signed up for. Just the Party decided to execute call in the contract at this time.