Is it just me, or are authoritarian regimes on the rise world-wide?
But Israel, Turkiye, and India are in a bad state. Netanyahu, Erdogan, and Modi are quickly tightening their grips on their respective governments.
Also I know China is not considered to be a democracy, but the past few leaders before Xi only lasted about 10 years each, while Xi is seeking a much longer rule.
I am not aware of any major changes in Europe, or the rest of Asia.
Israel, Turkiye, India, China, and Russia are heavy weights, though. So definitely something to watch for moving forward.
Russia had a "decade of democracy", which also failed quite spectacularly. It doesn't really have a long democratic tradition that you see in other countries.
On average, democracy is declining globally if measured with popular Democracy Index.
More on this The Economist article https://archive.ph/FJfMU
It seems like the West, and the US more specifically, isn't capable anymore of physically reproducing/replacing its technocratic elites, which in this day and age mostly means its tech elites. Which made me wonder what would happen in case of a direct US vs China war when in some companies 20% to 30% to even 50% of the engineers have some close family connections on the Mainland. Will those engineers and tech people be ok with seeing China losing and their close family back home physically hurting?
What would happen if the US starts playing it rough with India? When you've got the CEOs of some of the biggest US tech companies being of Indian descent themselves, not to mention the large percentage of Indian engineers active in the Valley and not only.
It was way easier to set up the Manhattan project when many of the people involved had escaped physical annihilation here in Europe (against them and against their close family), but will the US be able to reproduce a future Manhattan project (let's say in AI) using and employing people whose families back home (in China, most probably, in India, as a possibility) would be directly and life-threatening affected by their work? I have my doubts.
Actions to take against a ruling party that has widespread support from the police, legislature, judiciary, and media are limited.
In India, about 15% of Indians are Christians, Muslims, or other non Hindus. And among Hindus, about 40% are Dalits. The majority of Indians in India are threatened by this rise in fascist actions and rhetoric.
And yet, even against all odds, a few people in India stand up for justice. The silence or inaction of the majority should not be criticized too harshly since it is not easy to put everything on the line. But those that do deserve all of humanity’s appreciation.
Under Modi, India’s press is not as free anymore - April 2, 2020 - Vindu Goel and Jeffrey Gettleman https://archive.ph/zPhMH
Jailed Indian journalist gets bail almost two years after arrest - September 10, 2022 - Shaikh Azizur Rahman https://archive.ph/5sxUA
Rana Ayyub, journalist and Modi critic, barred from leaving India - March 30, 2022 - Aakash Hassan https://archive.ph/Ibu7S
I'm aware of that, as I'm also aware that many Russians (especially the educated tech elites) are against the current government in Moscow.
I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the guys calling the shots in Washington, as in, what measures should be taken in regards to the Chinese very-well represented tech diaspora in case of a war against China? (and, as I said, if some skirmishes involving the current Indian leadership were to start). When it came to Russia it looks like the the US and the West went all in, almost all Russians were treated as guilty by default unless.
I'm wondering if the same actions will be taken against the Chinese working for the big US tech firms (or against the Indians). I'm saying that that would be harder for the US to carry out (compared to the current shitting on the Russian diaspora).
There are also lower and higher castes among Indian Muslims and Christians as well. It's a indigenous form of social stratification, more analogous to how we think of ethnicity or race, that's independent of peoples' confessional identity.
Thanks for correcting me on OBC and Dalits. The framework is definitely problematic. And it adds another layer of complexity to racial, religious, and economic demographics. Thanks for prompting me to learn more about this. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-ab...
But I don't think it's accurate to say the majority of Indians are threatened by this. The BJP enjoys fairly strong support among Dalit communities (about 40% in the last election IIRC), with a decent amount of the remainder voting for Dalit organized political parties due to communal affiliation rather than categorical opposition to the BJP as a party. The party as a whole is not minoritarian or fringe (though it has such factions within it), and the attempts by English language media to treat them as a sort of pariah government will backfire.
The party's attacks on civil society are troubling and, while, the presence of roving goon squads running around terrorizing people over random slights didn't start with them (and is usually more by junior local parties like the Shiv Sena), their selective approach to meting out justice and slow-rolling investigations has begun to normalize this behavior. This will only mean further ratcheting up of communal tensions across the country and making the social trust and cohesive political culture necessary for democratic institutions to work more brittle.
But all that said, they don't seem to really be engaged in the kinds of election rigging we see from right-wing parties in other countries with creeping authoritarian movements (like the USA). They actually win fair elections straight up, without leaning on counter-majoritarian institutions or voter suppression schemes like our own GOP rely on. Nor do they engage in the same extent of corrupt, clientelist political organization that the opposition Congress Party is dependent on (there is plenty of corruption, but it's India and we apply a normalized scale). I think a lot of the English language commentary on Indian politics has trouble grappling with the fact that this is a political party with a broad-base of popular support across the country. They try to cast it as a minority faction that is playing unfairly, characterized by its most lunatic fringe elements, but that is simply not the case. It's a mainstream institution with serious statespeople in it that mostly engages in consensus-seeking approaches to enacting policy.
I also don't really think the BJP is in the driver's seat with the ratcheting up of rhetoric and political violence as much as it is victim of some sort of societal radicalization loop as everyone else (though Modi, and particularly some of the goons under him, are a bit of an accelerant). I think the conflicts about national identity is a predictable consequence of globalization and a colossal generation of poor and rural communities being fast-tracked into structured, urban, capitalist lifestyles and all the social dislocation that brings.
You actually see the same kinds of hardening of identity lines and empowering of regressive and conservative elements across all religious groups in India. It's just that the Muslims and Christians aren't numerous enough to push that agenda as effectively in the political arena. But internally Muslim and Christian communities in India have also begun to adopt more fundamentalist and hardline approaches to practice. Many of the traditional, indigenous Indian Christian traditions are losing ground to more aggressively evangelical Churches (largely bankrolled by American missionaries). The traditionally syncretic Islamic traditions in India have become increasingly strict. Even the vaguely atheistic, educated secularist set is enamored of Marxism and other dogmatic ideological positions. It's an endemic social disease that seems to be even worse in India than it is here.
The size of the Hindu population creates a disparity in power dynamics in a democratic country that makes the same tendency extra problematic. But characterizing this as just being a "Hindu" thing is missing the underlying driving force and mistaking a symptom for the disease. The pluralist country of my youth, where everyone was kind of loosey-goosey about these boundaries seems to be gone. I just hope this is some sort of temporary mania brought on by all the social dislocation I mentioned and not the new status quo.
GPs claims like: "They actually win fair elections straight up" need citations.
The rest of the pseudo theory about identity fault-lines, and mental gymnastics about "English media biases" doesn't even warrant a reply let alone a reductionist one. The right-wing political party governing India is affiliated with fascist organizations, and this isn't even remotely debatable.
Why do you feel it necessary to deflect criticisms instead of addressing them directly? The purported rigging of elections in the US does not justify the eroding of democratic institutions in India [0]. Claims of increasing evangelism and strictness among Christians and Muslims doesn’t justify the large number of public lynchings of minorities [1] and politically motivated prosecutions of media outlets perceived to be critical of the BJP or their affiliated organizations.
Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0]. I understand you may think this is a conspiracy against India, but be assured it is not. Western countries have a deep seated interest in preventing unfettered nationalism and fascism from causing a widespread conflagration.
The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps you were referring to the RSS when you say the BJP is not in the drivers seat.
You are well spoken and obviously care for India. I urge you to take a more critical look at what is happening in India. The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law. They also do not want to see a genocide occur in a country that is the worlds largest democracy.
0. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56393944
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremac...
The right wing in India plays from a position of electoral strength and they have a clearly defined ideology with an evidently compelling narrative. They have well articulated things they're fighting FOR, not just an inchoate ball of resentments they're lashing out against. They are simply more concerned with functioning governance and having a political system that works than the Republicans are because they expect to live out the next 100 years.
Because they are electorally competitive they do not meaningfully threaten free and fair elections. They threaten a specific cluster of civil society organizations that are politically hostile to them (and, just so we're clear, I think this is bad too) but that's a completely different and more solvable problem. Over the next 10-15 years I worry more about the long-term health of American democracy than I do India's. India's problems are more of a 50 year horizon depending on whether the bad trends soften or harden over time.
India suffers from illiberalism, not authoritarianism. The seeds were sown before Modi's political career ever got started. The Congress party was buying votes by currying favor with caste-based parties and religious leaders, building the salience of these factors in political organizing. The norms of censoring media due to public outrage were already well established in the early 2000s when Christian and Muslim leaders organized to ban controversial media like "The Da Vinci Code" and "Satanic Verses." This isn't whataboutism, but a demonstration that when international activists frame this as a uniquely BJP or Hindutva problem, it doesn't exactly look like they're prepared to grapple with how deep the problem actually goes and care more about scoring political points.
I mentioned how the boundaries between religious communities were porous when I was a kid for a reason. The only solution is to reduce the salience of communal ID as a cleavage point. You have to hamstring regressive goons across the board, you can't be particularistic it just doesn't work.
It was a low blow for you to say I was "excusing lynching" by mentioning fundamentalism. I never said anything of the sort. You seem to view different religious communities as if they live on different planets and make decisions in isolation. These are the same people living in the same world and are all reacting the same way to the same cultural forces. Only directing the treatment at conservative Hindus is like only treating the orange cattle in the herd. They're just going to keep getting sick from the others. They pick up behaviors and respond to their surroundings. This is how the RSS started. Yeah it was modeled on Mussolini's party, but it is also true that it was a counter-reaction to the Moplah Massacre. You could tell a story that paints Savarkar as Huey Newton as easily as Mussolini and you'd only be about 10% less right. These sorts of people feed off each other and you cannot just expect one religious community to cast off its nutcases while allowing others to write the civil code and get government grants. Americans have a really reductive approach to power dynamics between races that buckets everything into White oppressors and non-White oppressed classes. It's a crude oversimplification here, but it is hilariously out of touch in India. There are a lot of overlapping dimensions of identity and everyone is a minority along at least one of them. There is a bottomless well of history for people to harbor resentments over, with plenty of justified grievances to go around.
> Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0].
I put it right in the start that there's been attacks on civil society and breakdown in social trust and political violence so I don't know why you're claiming I'm ignoring this. I will still stress that these adjustments are not uncontroversial, even within those organizations. In the actual text of the Freedom House report they point out that while the trend-line is bad the downgrade is partly a quirk of their methodology which doesn't handle edge cases well. The "Partly free" rating makes it look overly severe, and something as simple as using a 5 point scale instead of a 4 point one would have avoided it.
I sincerely do not believe a genocide is in the cards and people need to cool it. Violent riots and vigilanteism ARE going to happen, but that actually calls for a different set of interventions that revolve around professionalizing the police force, tackling corruption, speeding up timelines to prosecution and trial, and creating more jobs and opportunity for young men and women. The worst case scenario you are looking at is something more like the the post-Reconstruction American South than Rwanda or Kosovo in the 90s, or even Pakistan in the 40s and that's only if they fail at doing all of the above. (And I feel ridiculous needing to stress that the post-Reconstruction South was not good! But there are many different ways to not be good, some worse than others. And they require different responses.)
> The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship.
And it has evolved substantially in the nearly 100 years since then. We might as well be talking about how the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and Hitler modeled his Jewish policy on their model of segregation. The organization itself is enormous, and is affiliated with everything from priests who go around serving free school lunches to goon squads that go around beating up couples for holding hands on Valentine's Day. It is partly due to this big tent and their reformist streaks on social issues like casteism and LGBTQ+ rights that the more extreme wings think the RSS has "gone soft."
FWIW I'd see Modi as a Latin American caudillo type, like Juan Perón minus military regalia (who I will also stress WAS NOT GOOD). But even that's an imperfect analogy for a host of reasons.
> The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. . .They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law.
Firstly, upholding human rights and rule of law has never been a prerequisite for being a trading partner with the USA. Depending on what you're trading, it is as likely to be a detriment as anything.
Secondly, India has been held to a unique standard by the international community since independence. This is nothing new. Most recently the international community said and did nothing when Chinese forces illegally initiated skirmishes on the Indian side of a disputed border, but mere months later got on India's case about the importance of upholding a "rules based international order" when Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Narendra Modi was banned from entry into the United States, an unprecedented action to take against a foreign politician that we have never done before or since. Now he's not a great guy, but I will wear my keyboard out and not even get a fraction of the way through a list of deplorable leaders who would have been more deserving, starting with MBS on the night he dismembered an American journalist. Things like this make it difficult for even centrist or liberal Indians to take US based international organizations seriously. These antics have severely eroded their credibility when they try to raise alarms about things like the subject of this article.
For whatever it's worth I think India SHOULD be held to unique standards because it's got a billion people and if it ever bothered to project diplomatic influence it would exert enormous pull. But the hectoring tone that international organizations adopt reads as condescending, hypocritical, and filtered through the biases of a narrow clade of English media figures rather than coming from any position principled concern. All of this, obviously, makes it difficult for anyone who gives a shit to operate.
This is common for creeping authoritarianism, though. Putin won his first presidential election fair and square, and the first thing that he cracked down on was free press, not elections themselves. I'd say that the latter were not massively fraudulent until 2011.
I understand your point about how unfair and unjust guilt by association is. In a country that hoists the banner of freedom and attracts the best and the brightest from around the world, the US must take steps to protect civilians in the US from bigotry and discrimination. Regardless of their background.
I apologize for the current political climate causing Russians civilians in the US to feel this way. If it is of any solace, be assured they are not alone in their experiences.
> The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the most popular political party among Indian Americans. One-third of respondents favor the ruling BJP while just 12 percent identify with the Congress Party
> Indian Americans hold broadly favorable views of Modi. Nearly half of all Indian Americans approve of Modi’s performance as prime minister
This goes to a central contradiction which I’ve observed among Americans originally from the subcontinent: “liberalism for thee but not for me.”
1. Globalisation showing its cracks and becoming increasingly clear to be the reason for the skyrocketing of inequality and the widening of the wealth gap between the rich and the poor
2. People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad with a constant stream of bad leaders who make bad decisions for their own riches and for the huge hypocrisy as well as the apparent propaganda to which we are all (West and East) are subjected by our own governments and mainstream media outlets
3. Internet and social media making 1. and 2. extremely visible to everyone in every corner of the world
As a result the world is becoming a lot more cynic on a much wider scale than ever before, people are becoming increasingly more selfish because they see that this is how the world operates as a whole without any shame and people are therefore increasingly more inclined to give their vote to people who "offer" radically different views to the status quo.
If it's ok for them, gimme some of that sugar too!
Having said that, maybe it's only the loud minority amplified by a desperate mainstream media making it appear that way?
You probably want to define what "East" is in this context. If East is Russia + China, it's trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens.
1. Economic levels in the West.
2. Respect for citizens' lives in the West.
I'm from a country that used to be in the Eastern Bloc, and let me tell you, nobody respects its citizens' lives like the collective West. Yes, the West is still horrible for many groups for human dignity, and yes, they don't always respect their citizens' lives, but boy, are they an improvement over most of the rest of the world.
And we have the numbers, check out military casualties for each side in various wars. The West has by far fewer military casualties than China or Russia have.
And that mentality permeates everywhere. Because if you don't care if your troops die in a war, you won't care if they die in a mine or an office building.
Before you reply, keep in mind I'm talking about statistics.
Of course China still has many of its own problems. But the cartoonish notion that it's some sort of totalitarian police state dictatorship where everybody wants to flee from is propaganda. China and the west both have their own problems and their own strong points.
EDIT: Again, I'm not ignorant to the problems in China, but I don't need to list the because our main stream media makes sure that every person in the West knows about every little problem China has. So instead I focus on highlighting some of the many positives which I've seen and experienced as well, because for some reason the people in the West are (deliberately) not being told about those.
The population of China was about 1.412 billion, quite similar to the population of India at 1.408 billion so not really an accurate statement that nobody else has issues of population scale to deal with.
China has concentration camps.
- De Standaard (Belgium newspaper): "Are Uyghur detention camps really 'concentration camps?'" — https://m.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20210210_98292303
- Italian research paper: https://eurispes.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/rapporto.en-x...
- A legal analysis of ASPI's, Amnesty International's and Uyghur Tribunal's allegations: https://www.cowestpro.co/papers.html
China has prisons (for convicted criminals/terrorists) as well as compulsary rehabilitation and vocational training camps to combat terrorism. Western media puts both of them in the same bucket and calls them "concentration camps". A heavy-handed, quite possibly overload broad, anti-terrorism response where there are two different kinds of facilities is not at all the same as "putting innocent people in concentration camps for no reason" and certainly not "they're only doing it to ethnically cleanse". A heavy-handed anti-terrorism response deserves criticism, but is not at all the same as "genocide". The fact that media does so anyway is disingenuous.
Besides, most of the compulsory rehabilitation/training facilities have already been dismantled a couple of years ago when they concluded that the terrorism threat is gone. See this very biased AP article where they try to make you feel like something sinister is going on, but when you read the content then they essentially admit that many security measures are already gone: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
Earlier in this thread it is said that China uniquely deserves punishment for its actions in Xinjiang, implying that India doesn't have any problems with minority group abuse, but you really should read into Kashmir and why nobody makes a fuss about that. Even if China's Xinjiang response deserves legit criticism, the fact that Kashmir is given a free pass means that western governments, media and public don't really care about Xinjiang human rights, but merely use Xinjiang as a club to beat China. Not to mention that e.g. France also has an anti-terrorism response on which the Xinjiang response is partially inspired, but nobody talks about that as being some sort of mortal sin. This sort of double standards is a huge abuse of the concept of "human rights".
Look, I support genuine efforts to help China improve in the area of human rights. But current efforts are not genuine, they're just geopolitical attacks hidden behind the guise of human rights, and the public even can't see through this bullshit even though it's apparent if you research things up close, so I do not support them.
So does USA. It’s called the prison system. Except USA is imprisoning many more people, per capita.
But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
> But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
Again you're engaged fully in whataboutism here. I get that you have a giant hate boner for the US, but you're spewing nonsense. I'm not here to justify the war in Iraq, it was wrong. But locking up 3 million people in your own territory for no reason and surveilling a whole population around the clock is pure evil. Its gross that you're trying to defend it.
"Locking up 3 million people" is a false claim. If you look into the source of the claim that "1 million people" are locked up then you'll see that that's based on interviewing around 10 people, and then extrapolating their villages' figures to the whole of Xinjiang. The quality is evidence is so bad that even the Uyghur Tribunal failed to provide any evidence for the "1 million people" figure, but they still concluded "genocide" despite lack of evidence.
This "3 million people" figure that you cite now is absolutely without evidence. It's just the media taking the "1 million" figure and then sensationally inflating it, until finally people like you take "3 million" as a fact.
Calling it "[genocide] denial" (sic) is a way to shut down conversation and to dismiss counter-evidence and criticism out of hand.
Was the poster defending Chinese crimes? I see it entirely differently: he's pointing out double standards which is completely legit, even necessary. Let's say that China and the US are both bad. But only one of them is painted as a genocidal fascist expansionist existential threat. There can be no honest conversation about China until double standards are destroyed.
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You invoke whataboutism, but mentioning the US here is absolutely relevant because US officials have admitted on video that an important reason why they were in Afghanistan was to encourage Uyghur extremism, forcing China to respond with anti-terrorism measures.
Imagine your neighbor funding your enemies to harass you. You take measures against the harassers, but you had to resort to some dirty tricks and had to overrespond to make them stop. Your neighbor then reports you for those dirty tricks and overresponse in which you violated some laws. Yes you were absolutely wrong for violating laws, but you are also right in pointing out that your neighbor instigated the situation. Calling out your neighbor is not whataboutism, it's essential context. I don't think you think will appreciate people who deliberately ignore your neighbor's contribution and only focus on you.
How could you possibly know this? I'm from an Eastern European country that was under dictatorship (partially inspired by North Korea and PRC).
There's a deep culture of duplicity in such authoritarian regimes. You'd be a fool to say stuff that puts a bullseye on your head.
Saying that stuff is not working correctly and the future isn't bright is an implicit criticism of the authorities and I'm sure the very politically astute and smart Chinese citizens are super aware of this.
Research by Harvard, York University, Democracy Perception Index, more.
Or you could... go visit China, talk to Chinese people. The majority of them support the government.
And I haven't even brought up my own friends and family as anecdotal evidence.
But let me turn this around. If you're so convinced that all satisfaction is fake and a result of coercion, then how do you possibly prove that western European countries are not dictatorships? You could always argue that elections are fake, and that all their citizen who says that their country is a democracy only say so under coercion. One can always rationalize this to the point where the notion becomes unfalsifiable.
You should check out the talks of Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat. He has seen the Soviet Union, he has seen what a dictatorship looks like, and what's going on in China looks nothing like that. The past 40 years, the freedom of the Chinese people have exploded. 40 years ago you couldn't choose what clothes to wear, what to study, where to live, where to work. All of that has changed. Millions of Chinese travel abroad every year, and they all return to China. Why would they do that if China is such a miserable place? Why would a "dictatorship" allow its citizen to travel abroad where they are exposed to democracy?
The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy. These are the best 30 years out of 3000 years for Chinese people, Chinese people have been freer than they have ever been in Chinese history. Western analysis projects a Stalinist communism dictatorship on China but this projection is wrong and doesn't fit. China has authoritarian elements, yes, but it is still very far removed from the typical dictatorship that people imagine.
Case in point: the recent Covid protests. Western media has been writing for several years now about how "all-powerful dictator-for-life Xi Jingping" made up an anti-Covid apparatus merely for his own entertainment and to show off power and to control people. Then suddenly there were protests. Did they sent in the tanks? No, they... lifted the 0-covid measures!
Seriously, does this sound like what a power-hungry dictator would do? Maybe, just maybe, everything you think you know about China is wrong, and all the shallow China analyses you have read in the news are all wrong. In this "dictatorship" there are 15000 (!) protests a year, and often the protesters get what they want.
Can I complain about the man in charge? If I go to social media and I post that I hate the bear, what happens? :-)
For comparison purposes, on a daily basis, Klaus Iohannis (the Romanian president) can fill his fridge with meat, as we say in Romanian (I'll let you figure out from which body part that meat comes from :-))) ).
* * *
Oh, to note. I hope you're right and those material freedoms cover more non-material freedoms and that China will especially have a friendly policy towards its neighbors. I'm not optimistic at the moment.
Concretely: yes in China there is censorship, and yes you can't just criticize the president. However, you can criticize policy. Not only can you, people do: as I've said before, there are 15000 protests in China every year, and often times the government gives in to protesters. The 0-covid protests resulting in lifting of 0-covid measures being a big recent one.
In contrast, in many western countries you certainly have the freedom to complain about more things, but your ability to get policy changes is almost non-existant. Not so in China: policy changes happen all the time as a result of protests, even if there are topics that are more taboo than in the west.
Material vs non-material freedom is also not the point (even though it's somewhat relevant). There are classes of immaterial freedom in China that the west doesn't even recognize as freedom. For example, the sheer safety in China grants one a huge amount of freedom of movement. A female Australian acquaintance once told me that she thought that political freedom and freedom of speech are the most important things. But once she visited China and experienced how safe the streets were, and how she could walk around during the night without escort, she realized that she valued freedom of movement much more.
To understand China one must move away from the dichotomy. China should be understood using entirely separate paradigms, on its own terms, not the terms that the west (in its relation/history with the Soviet Union) tries to project on China.
Personally, I could not tolerate living in a country where I have to watch what I say out of fear of me and my family ending up in prison for years. (Or in an internment camp, depending on my ethnicity.) Perhaps your Australian didn’t think they had anything interesting to speak out about; if they did, they might be singing a different tune.
By the way, a decade ago, Russian leadership suggested that Russia was a “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that it had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last. If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent? I think not.
To make a comparison: the US also has many grave human rights abuses, including jailing people for saying "too interesting" things. But the US is not painted as some human rights abuse hellhole. It's clear that in the minds of many, human rights abuses in western countries can be bad but are at least redeemable or even incidental, while Chinese sins are inherent, systematic and unforgivable.
And again: here you hold political rights as the highest goal. I dispute this notion. This "one might be singing a different tune" can be reflected right back at you: if you've experienced how it is like to live in a country that has had 150 years of war and poverty, where eating your next meal is not guaranteed, with western "democratic" countries looting your treasures (and still having them on display in foreign museums today) back then when your country was itself dabbling in introducing democracy and republicanism, then maybe you would value safety and economic prosperity way more than you do now.
Said differently: when you are poor, you are not free, period. The ability to vote has no value on an empty stomach with thugs roaming the streets. The Chinese government has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is also a big human rights improvement. That does not excuse bad things, but it's worth putting things in perspective, something which many refuse to do because few are willing to hold an honest conversation about China.
> By the way, a decade ago, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia had “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that Russia had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
Whatever problems you have with Russia has got nothing to do with China. Saying that "X has problem A, so Y must also have problem A" is a fallacy. Correlation is not causation.
> I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last.
The ability to affect policy has increased over years, not decreased. In the past 15 years, government has improved systems to consult citizen.
This notion of yours have been around for at least 10 years. But when you ask Chinese how many of them would rather live in 25-30 years ago, you will not find many.
> If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent?
You got this entirely backwards. Many people in China support reunification with Taiwan. If Xi Jingping announces today that he accepts Taiwanese independence, then he'll be overthrown tomorrow and replaced with another government that supports reunification.
Also, dropping this here: https://asiatimes.com/2022/11/harvard-guru-gives-biden-a-d-f... Dr. William Overholt, Harvard professor: "we are creating the problem that we think we’re trying to deter." In other words, all this talk about China invading Taiwan, and taking actions to "deter" China from invading Taiwan, incentivizes China to invade — because people fundamentally misread China's relationship with Taiwan. But the US government knows this and is deliberately stirring things up, breaking decades of diplomatic agreements, in order to goad China into shooting first so that the US can have a war with China while claiming moral superiority.
I did not: I am fully aware of this fact. However, while the majority of people in China may support a war with Taiwan, many will not. What will happen to those that oppose it? Will they be allowed to protest in the streets, or will they be brutally repressed? I know where I'd put my money.
As to everything else, China should be commended for bringing so many people out of poverty. But authoritarian regimes are not sustainable. Give too much power to one man, and he almost invariably gets it in his head that he is the state, and starts repressing, pogromming, and dismantling any person or institution that gets in his way. (Observe that Xi has already eliminated presidential term limits.)
I was born in Russia. The Soviet Union brought many millions out of poverty, including some of my direct ancestors. Was it all worth it in the end, though? I'm not so sure. The sins of the Soviet government ruined millions of lives and lead the country to where it is today: a crippled, fascistic, frothing-at-the-mouth oligarchy. Perhaps that's what's in store for China in the future. I really hope it manages to avoid this fate, but I'm not optimistic.
With your point wrt Taiwan you seem to be saying that if anti-war protests are suppressed then that is evidence that the country is a dictatorship. But the problem is that many countries — even western ones — suppresses dissent once they enter a war. Heck Germany is not even officially at war but anyone voicing public support for Russia can be legally reprimanded.
You also seem to ignore the aspect of whether people can actually enact policy changes. People protesting against the Middle Eastern wars didn't prevent them. What use is the ability to protest when they don't change anything?
I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign. Observe that Xi has been around for about as long as Merkel and Kohl.
More generally, all this talk about "authoritarian regimes" is projecting something into China which does not fit. Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us: poor, exploited by foreign democratic powers. When you look at the past 2000 years of Chinese history then you see that prosperous times come when central government is strong. Conversely, when central government is weak, the people suffer. Whatever problems you have with Russia and Soviet Union should not be projected onto China. Whatever problems the west had with strong governments should not automatically mean that China's biggest problems are the same. We've had more problems with not having enough state power than too much state power.
I bring up Russia because it's the authoritarian government I'm most familiar with. An authoritarian government doesn't "reprimand" people when it needs consent for a given policy: it imprisons them or worse. You can see this happening in Russia today with anti-war protests, where dissenters are thrown into prison for years or even sent to the front. I believe similar things were happening to the protesters in HK when China took over. Are you saying people won't be imprisoned for protesting military action in Taiwan? I find that unlikely.
If I lived in Germany, no part of me would fear imprisonment if I voiced support for Russia. (Though it's likely somebody would kick my ass.)
> I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign.
Why did he do it if not to consolidate power?
> Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us — poor, exploited.
Authoritarian policies also got you the Great Chinese Famine, leading to tens of millions of lives pointlessly thrown away. Was anyone held accountable? The answer is no, because an authoritarian government's "strength" is also its weakness when fault lies with the strongman at the helm. (As an aside, Yang Jisheng is the author of perhaps the most comprehensive account of the famine, "Tombstone." Are there any universities in China teaching his work? Are his books even allowed to be published?)
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In Germany, displaying the letter "Z" in a way that is meant to show support for Russia can lead to up to 3 years in prison: https://www.rnd.de/politik/z-symbol-strafbar-bis-zu-drei-jah...
"Mehrere Bundesländer haben bereits angekündigt, das öffentliche Zeigen des Symbols zu ahnden. Grundlage ist der Paragraf 140 im Strafgesetzbuch zur „Billigung von Straftaten“. Demnach kann dies mit bis zu drei Jahren Haft oder einer Geldstrafe bestraft werden"
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The famine was a result of inexperienced governance in peace time, not "authoritarian policies". Just like the Irish potato famine was not a result of "democratic policies".
The Cultural Revolution was not a display of authoritarian power. Instead, it was mob rule fueled by revolutionary zeal. During the Cultural Revolution, the state was largely non-functional. Many people joined Mao's campaigns willingly, as opposed to Mao sending his army to force people at gunpoint to do things.
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to fix a broken country, by leaders who had little experience with peacetime operations. Today, Mao's mistakes are officially recognized. Both good and bad came out of the Cultural Revolution: there was a famine, but life expectancy also rose by more than a decade. One also has to keep in mind that famines were a regular thing in China during previous rulers, so with this context one can say that that famine was the last one China ever had. Given all this, to then describe the Cultural Revolution and the famine as "authoritarian rule" is hugely reductionist and misleading.
The sort of reductionist rhetoric you employ can just as easily be applied to democracies. Nobody was accountable for when the British Empire put China on drugs. Nobody was accountable for the Iraq war. By your own reasoning, "democratic policies" lead to imperialism — a wrong conclusion due to reductionism.
The west is far bigger and more varied than the US.
I'd love to see a defense of China that doesn't immediately delve into "US also bad" or "US made us bad".
Yes the west is far bigger than the US. However the west is also broadly aligned with the US. Whereas e.g. western Europe condemns and even sanctions China for what it sees as human rights abuses, they look the other way when it comes to US abuses, giving no more than a "tssk". There has been no diplomatic sanctions against the US for its illegal Iraq invasion (amongst others). Worse, some of them even join the US, such as Australia who went to Afghanistan and then killed a bunch of children. The west is bigger but many are complicit.
Of course US crimes don't excuse Chinese crimes. But when double standards are so widespread, it's simply impossible to have any kind of honest or constructive discussion. The double standard must be destroyed first.
Citation needed.
Western policy changes happen all the time due to protests, all across the West.
Look around you. More and more people are disillusioned by the fact that they can't get meaningful positive changes.
Polling. How could you possibly know the opposite?
> I'm from an Eastern European country that was under dictatorship
Not every country criticized by Western governments is fungible. Your home country was not China. North Korea is almost nothing like China.
TLDR: heavy-handed anti-terrorism response, even if it deserves criticism, is not at all the same as "millions in concentration camps", "forced labor" or even "genocide". Many allegations you read in the media are grave distortions of reality for the purpose of geopolitical attacks and fostering consent for a war against China.
You're claiming that the Uighur women that got forcibly sterilized are terrorists? Modi similarly uses the terrorism bogeyman to suppress criticism. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/10/how-terrorism-...)
And why isn't it easy for western journalists to report from Xinjiang, if it is as you describe it, a benign situation?
And no, I'm not claiming that Uyghur women who got sterilized are terrorists. I'm claiming that the entire story of there being widespread, systematic, forced sterilization for the purpose of genociding a people, is a false. The source for the forced sterilization claim is Adrien Zenz, who in his "research paper" said that IUD usage in Xinjing accounted for 80% of the country. But when you go to his cited source for that 80% figure, you see that the source actually said 8%. Then when some people made a fuss about that, he... wait for it... changed the 80% into 8% but did not change the paper's conclusion, and tried covering up the fact that he changed the paper at all! Meanwhile, no media is interested in reporting this.
"Modi apologists" have got absolutely nothing with me, but by citing them you're making the claim that everybody who claims that the media is biased is nuts. Then pray tell, what do you call media who looks the other way while a "researcher" fudges his numbers like that? What part of me pointing out shoddy research is "nationalism"?
I dare you to read Adrien Zenz's paper and tell me that it's reliable.
I would love to see a statistic where China has more military casualties than let's say the USA, in total numbers and in % of population I think the USA will exceed China, not least because the USA has been at war ever since I'm alive, China, well not so much.
I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole with you. You can select metrics which will "prove" that the West cares more about its people than China or other Asian countries and equally you can pull metrics which will unequivocally "prove" the opposite. This is precisely what I meant in my original comment.
LOLNO.
This is very well documented, and even if you ignore all the Chinese civil wars, most of which had more casualties than regular wars. Heck, one of their civil wars had almost as many casualties as WW1.
The US has been in a lot of wars but their military casualties are very low overall. They generally beat the other guys up very badly but they're quite careful to not lose people, in comparison with other countries.
Also, it's not really thoughtful to compare 3000 years of Chinese history to the history of the US since 1898 (the US's first modern imperial war, against the Philippine population.)
At least 10 million casualties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
At least 20 million casualties.
Who said anything about 3000 years of Chinese history? You created a strawman and jumped with it from a bridge...
China has killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens in the last century and a half alone.
Just the Taiping Rebellion almost beats WW1.
The West has resources and well-oiled propaganda machinery in place to control the dissent that's why they don't need to use violence as openly as not-so-rich countries. When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
Can you elaborate on this? Resources I agree with - but that boils down to controlling dissent by just removing a source of it which is not the same as controlling dissent by cracking down
You will have to elaborate on how these two phrasings mean different things i.e. what's the difference between "cracking down" on the sources of dissent and "removing" the sources of dissent, and why you support one and condemn the other (if you do.)
Cracking down - the government suppresses dissent by force.
Removing the source of dissent - this means solving the underlying issue that would otherwise cause the dissent. This would be government/society providing for the needs and desires of it’s population.
I think most would agree that the first is much worse than the second.
Disregarding the fact that proving your angle is super hard.
So what? It sure beats beating and killing people.
> When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
Ok, but if they don't have to do that all the time, it <<still>> makes them better.
It's a tough pill to swallow, go check military casualties for wars. Get back to me after reading Wikipedia pages (so nothing super fancy) for 50-100, chosen randomly, and tell me how many have higher casualty rates for the Western party.
My back of the napkin analysis says that at most 10% of those wars have more Western casualties.
At the end of the day, that's what it boils down to. If you find ways to avoid violence and when you do have to become violent your stuff is better armorer, moves faster, shoots farther, flies higher, well, that's because someone ultimately, to some degree, maybe because they were forced by public consensus, respected citizens' lives.
It doesn't much matter how you get to that respect if you do get there more than your perceived rivals.
Post cold-war there was maybe a few years or less of Fukuyama-esque optimism. The Arab Spring looked positive and ended with most places worse than they started.
So - not sure there was much of a window of invincibility. Unless of course you want to hark back to the Fin de siècle period. Imperialism was in full swing so that's controversial.
What liberal East India Company? There were a number of EICs, but all of them I can think of (certainly most especially the British) were mercantilist and parts of mercantilist national policies, not liberal.
The mercantilism of British policy and the British EIC were, actually, a quite important factor in both the US push for independence and its ideological connection with liberalism.
While liberalism might eventually have become a nearly consensus ideology in the West, but it certainly wasn’t in the late 18th Century and it certainly wasn’t the ideology of or behind colonialism.
That’s unsupportable with evidence because we don’t have a world to test the effects of liberalism in an environment where it isn’t a reaction against established mercanitilism in a number of empires, one of which alone controls a sizable fraction of the globe, but I’m going to say, no, its not.
(I will admit that one problem with economic liberalism is that it tends to entrench existing inequalities, including those produced by pre-existing mercantilist arrangements, but that’s very different than producing the same results.)
It’s the BBC. Also, India is drifting towards the American sphere of influence. It’s historically been between non-aligned and anti-American.
As far as I know, conscription is the major Muscovite danger talked up in the NY Times.
In 2022 there were 138 homicides in Brooklyn which comes out to 4.98 homicides per 100k residents. In comparison in Moscow Oblast there were 6.9 homicides per 100k residents (in 2017, which is the latest year I can find information for this stat).
So at least by homicides, Moscow seems more dangerous.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
The numbers clearly show that in general Moscow is much safer.
Index Brooklyn, NY Moscow
Crime Index: 45.75 36.86
Safety Scale: 54.25 63.14Pick a statistic that is a reasonable representation of danger (I think homicide rate is a reasonable one) and show that Moscow is lower on that statistic than Brooklyn.