Hacker News Reader

As a westerner outside China I'm not under the impression that the CPC cares much about your private or semi-private conversations with your friends and family, unlike notably the Stasi or early Soviet censorship.

But I bet you'd be running a very different mental calculus before saying some of those things you'd say in closed circles on your widely-read blog under your own name.

That's the thrust of what the GP is talking about, which I think you're taking a very selective view of in thinking that by "chilling effect" they're talking about Stasi-like censorship. Even if can get away with certain speech 99.9% of the time in a totalitarian regime just having to worry about the 0.01% has a huge chilling effect.

> provide no direct evidence relating to the claimed atrocities commited by the government. I tried very hard to find actual direct evidence and to justify their claims ... but discovered none

I'm genuinely curious about this. There are witness accounts of forced organ harvesting, and it's not too long ago that the government announced that it stopped the practice[1], implying that it was happening at least up until that point, and the rumors were correct.

There's no way for external parties to verify that forced organ harvesting has ended as promised. When a government does not invite external observers to verify such an important matter, shouldn't anyone's gut feeling go on red alert? Has there ever been a case when a lack of gov't transparency wasn't a bad sign? Is it cultural bias on my end to assume the worst-case scenario?

[1] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dk99ol0WsHPmCmdviXAReg?

So by forcing the use of illegal vpns, you can always be arrested. Or fired for not doing your job.

It's not that everything is terrible in China, it's that the Chinese government is an oppressive regime with severe totalitarian bent. Those oppressive regimes which least interfere in the everyday are the most likely to continue existing - we've known this since ancient times.

But censorship, ethnic camps, totalitarian power and mass surveillance do a reppressive regime make.

There are a few cases when it comes to arrests of VPN service owners, but zero incidents that I know of of VPN user being arrested. This is simply because the former breaks the law and the latter doesn't.

Censorship is no secret, totalitarian power is hard to define, but ethnic camps and mass surveillance may or may not exist depending on the existance of direct evidence.

Edit: Evidence is universal, and I suppose we can all agree that it is not dependent on me.

The existence of the camps is independent of whether you have evidence of them or not.

There is no country I am aware of, including China, which denies the existence of the camps. China contends that they are voluntary "educational centers" that just happen to only contain Muslim Chinese who aren't allowed to leave and spend their days singing praises to Jinping.

Here's some direct evidence of the atrocity that is the Tiananmen Square massacre: https://i.imgur.com/E3D9BuH.jpg.

I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed and killed anyone in their path.

I was refering to more recent events, e.g. FLG, organ harvesting, Uighurs, Hong Kong protests.

I am aware (as told by many, I was too young to know) that there were numerous deaths and many more injured in that year.

> Uighurs

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-48667221/inside...

This does a a good job at showing the huge number of people protesting in Hong Kong: https://gfycat.com/relievedcornychrysomelid-timelapse

That's very shocking to hear, but I'm not entirely surprised to hear that you doubt these events. The combination of censorship and propaganda is very effective. I try to keep an unbiased perspective and I am very aware of how the hidden motives of governments and media organizations can skew the news, even in the freest of countries.

My best media-savvy sense is that all of the things you mention are in fact happening and that they are atrocities. For example, here's some good reporting the BBC did: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...

My broader point though is that you won't change your mind because your livelihood and freedom depends on you denying or ignoring the actions of your government. So just like in the VPN experiment, we can remove the wall, but you will not leave the prison. I feel sorry for you, individually and personally, though it's probably for the best that you're not interested in questioning these things too closely.

I think the other posters all provide clear evidence of the issues raised. I'm wondering if you had a look and changed it at least started to doubt your current views? If not, what would convince you?

More importantly, you seem to be quite educated and tech literate, and use ok f vpn is natural for you. What % of the population would you think is able to access vpns and outside media and sites?

If this is indicative of the depth of your knowledge about government atrocities, I suggest you stop. Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting. It's meme-like at this point and has no bearing on reality.

Things that actually happened: rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted, things that can happen everywhere but happen with "Chinese characteristics" in a more volatile way because of the lack of rule of law and due process, often ending with violence or curtailment of basic rights. But these are not as trendy and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.

> If this is indicative of the depth of your knowledge about government atrocities, I suggest you stop.

Why? Because it's incorrect or correct?

> Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting

Ditto why - is it not happening?

> rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted

I can believe this but it does not disprove the other stuff.

> and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.

No. Listen carefully: we do care. I do, others do. Not all but most. I don't know why you suppose us so purely self-centred.

Extreme Islamic is a difficult problem to deal with globally. Look at Israel, they are taking extreme measure too.

Historically, this extreme ideology comes from Western culture. Both Christian and Islamic are exclusive religions. Drives each other nuts for thousand years.

US played a very bad role in modern days and caused the situation out of control. Iraq war and other mediterranean wars, all of them are unethical anti-human-rights wars. They have destroyed so many families. That's why nobody in the world believe US's so called human rights propaganda even though there are some America truly care.

Chinese don't believe that US is able to solve their own extreme Islamic problem. They invented their own method. They believe that the fundamental reason for the extreme behavior is because they are excluded from the society and the economy. They want to reeducate them to get them involved. However, the approach is a bit harsh. Not quite sure whether they will succeed.

Frankly speaking, getting everyone involved in the society is the key for US as well. Rich people don't pay tax, don't participate in the economy, and don't care about poor guys. They have their robots. More and more poor people have left the economy completely for years. The middle class is vanishing quickly. The extreme behaviors are emerging fast these days.

Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.

> ...islamism...

My post had nothing to do with that. Mentioning it is irrelevant.

> US played a very bad role...

possibly true and I'm willing to slag off the US at the right time (and many americans do, and do so in safety), but this subject is about china.

> even though there are some America truly care

I'm not american, and even if I was it would make no difference. Ethnicity does not matter. Moral decency, consideration for others, does.

> Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.

We can care about both our own cultures and others, at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The American government being wrong does not make the Chinese government right. There's actually enormous pressure on Washington, both internationally and internally, to stop these human rights violating conflicts that only serve to further inflame sectarian violence. Right now, as some call for war with Iran, there are other voices calling for peace.

This is not a competition for which country's government is more right, rather it is an effort to promote global peace, prosperity and human rights. Rather than zero-sum thinking, people of conscience seek to lift all boats.

If you look you'll always find others doing wrong. You can look historically and find for most countries some rather big wrongs.

But the question is what is happening right now. The Chinese government has rather successfully made two ethnic groups minorities in their own homelands through an intense government-stimulated migration of Han Chinese to in particular Tibet and Xinjiang. Both used to be own states that were brought into China in the creation of the PRC. What you see in Tibet and Xinjiang is a direct result of that policy of forced integration/ethnic takeover.

Israel is a perfect comparison because the Israel conflict similarly stems from the creation of Israel itself: a country was declared by the colonial power (UK) of the Palestine territory due to a 2000-year old claim of that being the Jewish homeland. This was done without any care or concern for what the current citizens of those territories wanted. And those left in the territories are massively disadvantaged in all aspects of life. That is the source of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Israel's conflict with most Muslim neighbors. And the Uighur conflict similarly stems from the annexation of those territories - with different cultural and ethnic groups - by the PRC. The religious expression of this conflict is a symptom, not the cause.

Think of Chinese resistance against the brutal Japanese occupiers. Your people, from our perspective today, were fighting heroically against an outside enemy that wanted to assimilate them and steal the territory and resources. That's how Tibetans and Uighurs see the takeover of Han-Chinese and the PRC.

> Why? Because it's incorrect or correct?

> Ditto why - is it not happening?

There are memes that everybody hears or passes around without any critical processing, like "in China they eat dogs" or "in Alabama they marry their siblings". Is it correct or incorrect? Is it not happening? You can ask yourself the same questions. When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.

They were not memes, they were questions. So please try to answer them.

Whether they eat dogs in china I don't know. Whether some americans marry in, I don't know.

> When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.

What does this even mean? (BTW that was a question too).

> Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting. It's meme-like at this point and has no bearing on reality.

https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/China-T...

All I did was post a picture which provides direct evidence of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

A government killing thousands of people absolutely has a bearing on reality, and nothing about it is "meme-like".

I believe the fear and anti-China sentiments stemmed from the the past history of the regime in China. It's okay to bear the "outsider" concept that as long as you are not doing something wrong then the gov won't do anything to you. However, please do keep in mind that if you are not voicing out for the others that are suppressed, then no one would voice out for you when you are the target of suppression. Assuming you had some sort of higher education, it's hard to gauge when will your interest conflicts with the central government's. The fact that people around the world are resisting and pressuring such regime is because the fear that it would spread its influence globally. I personally don't think the issue relates to the people itself, but I would not trust the central government at all. (Tienanmen square, "re-education camps", Surveillance, Censorship, Persecution of political dissidents)

Conflict of interest: Hong Konger

Your link [1] goes to an exhaustively researched and documented conclusion that China is participating in "widespread or systematic" state-sponsored forced organ transplants, torture, and extermination, targeted specifically against Uyghurs and Falun Gong, "beyond any reasonable doubt."

What were you trying to accomplish by posting that? Did you skim the first couple of pages outlining the claims, get bored, and assume their conclusions would match your beliefs? Or did you hope that no one would bother to read enough of the bloody dense thing to figure out what it actually said?

Either way, you're lying when you say you "tried very hard to find actual direct evidence but discovered none."

I didn’t lie, and actually wasted my valuable time on this bloody dense thing and found it to be extremely biased and lacks solid evidence.

The report summarizes eyewitness testimonials given in front of the tribunal; I'm not sure what other evidence you expected.

FWIW in 2009 China Daily, which as you may know is a party-owned newspaper, published an article on the practice of taking transplants from prisoners. Unfortunately the original article was not archived, but it appears in this listing of headlines: http://web.archive.org/web/20090828122112/http://www.chinada...

There's also plenty of reporting in Western media quoting the China Daily article, e.g. by Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-organ-idUSTRE57P0EN...

Now maybe what you're actually sceptical about is whether Falun Gong practitioners wre specifically targeting. I don't believe they were, it's just that there were a lot of them, so when membership was prohibited, a lot were sentenced to death and consequently had their organs harvested. They also had enough members abroad to complain loudly about it and get people to actually care, in contrast to most other human rights violations.