heraclius

Feeling sympathy based on economic importance seems bizarre. The economic impact of the HK protests on North America will be fairly minimal. The only reason to feel sympathy, then, is that governments are attacking their own people. That isn’t a reason to ignore Iraq.

Also it’s amusing that you’ve managed to elide the not insubstantial relationship of having started a war that killed at least a hundred thousand Iraqis and in all probability many more.

On the Razakars etc.: the report is unimpeachable—Nehru commissioned the report but it besmirches his claim to have unified India relatively peacefully. And yes I acknowledged above that Pak is worse—10s of millions is probably a high figure for ethnic cleansing at the moment but I can’t really defend what’s happening in Balochistan.

Europe: because things have been so poorly managed reasonably high proportions (~1%) have been accepted. Also I don’t see why integration is needed in India given very great cultural proximity.

As for knowing they were illegal migrants, some don’t—the need for papers only became apparent recently and some can’t find them. This is an unavoidable problem.

3.6mn is so trifling that Turkey can deal with it. Europe could too, with proper organisation; I hope that we face up to our responsibilities if Erdogan follows through—at least then something good would come of Turkey’s aggression against Rojava.

I share the author’s concern about the spread of the party’s totalitarianism. But one should think very carefully about whether this sort of action is productive, and I do not see anything like the level of reflexion that would be sensible in thinking about this; I hope that if this takes off such discussion takes place before, perhaps here.

A small contribution, then:

1. Open source components of VPNs help the spread of democracy, but wouldn’t work under OSOS.

2. Norms on communities like GitHub at the moment also exist in China because programmers will have to use GitHub (for example); now communities that will comply with CCP-imposed norms will spring up to replace them. And the Chinese market is pretty big.

I think this is an important concern. Two possible responses follow, though I don’t think that they are entirely adequate.

First of all, it’s not obvious why we should only consider technical concerns—perhaps reduced performance is a price worth paying. One might even say that technical performance is useless as a metric per se; technical performance is useful insofar as it works for good ends, which is exactly the sort of norm OSOS would work towards.

Second, it is possible to endorse some norms as above concerning who should use software without endorsing all possible norms, in the same way that we have a nonzero number of relatively uncontentious free speech restrictions (e.g., don’t shout fire, etc.) Now, whether OSOS is something that can be justified in a similar fashion is yet to be seen, but it is certainly worth trying.

There are a couple of problems with this argument.

The most important problem is that many people do not have documentation, but have lived in India for a very long time—since birth, in some cases—and think of themselves and live their lives as Indians.

More specifically:

First, India arguably also has a history of ethnic cleansing and more broadly ethnoreligiously motivated violence, a history that is all too often suppressed.

From the Sunderlal Report: “We can say at a very conservative estimate that in the whole state at least 27 thousand to 40 thousand people lost their lives during and after the police action. …Duty also compels us to add that we had absolutely unimpeachable evidence to the effect that there were instances in which men belonging to the Indian Army and also to the local police took part in looting and even other crimes. During our tour we ga thered, at not a few places, that soldiers encouraged, persuaded and in a few cases even compelled the Hindu mob to loot Muslim shops and houses.”

Similarly, the Gujarat riots suggest state complicity. It is often suggested that Muslims caused the violence. The truth is that the violence was initially by Hindus, on the train, that some Muslims then unjustifiably burnt the train, and then that the state compounded the tragedy by allowing Hindu mobs to rampage across the state, if not actively encouraging them to do so.¹

(To be clear I do not endorse the silence of some parts of the Indian left and liberal élite concerning Pakistan and Bangladesh; it is as abhorrent to me as silence concerning the violence of the Sangh Parivar. And I should probably say that if they had to be compared the Sangh Parivar is better than the Pakistani army.)

Second, it’s not obvious where the “cost and risk” is. No evidence has been produced to suggest that those left out of the NRC commit more crime or cost the state more. Indeed, the implementation of the NRC itself costs the state rather a lot, and threatens to encourage sedition in the northeast.

Third, all parties in India profess to reject two-nation theory. The RSS itself claims that Muslims are also children of Mother India.² And of course Congress claim to support a secular India. Since there is political consensus on this matter of course the idea that loyalty to Bharat or India or whatever conception thereof one supports should be determined independently of religion.

Fourth, many European states indeed have welcomed large numbers of Muslim migrants, often to much greater cost than what India has incurred—for example, Germany and Sweden. These actions need not have been unsustainable had all Europe helped; similarly, migration to India as a whole is not particularly unsustainable because India is very large.

0. https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl1805/18051140.h...

1. Christophe Jaffrelot, “Communal Riots in Gujarat: The State at Risk?” Working Paper, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (Heidelberg: South Asia Institute, Department of Political Science, University of Heidelberg, July 2003), http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/4127/1/hps....

2. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/the-saffron-muslim/stor...

Daesh in Iraq and Syria are or were indeed well-funded and equipped, especially after they seized most of the reserves at the Mosul branch of the central bank. But I’m a bit confused as to how they’d manage to get substantial quantities of military equipment to Nigeria. I imagine it is at the very least rather difficult and expensive to do so, so they probably wouldn’t go round sending equipment willy-nilly.

As I noted in another comment, a majority of Hong Kong people did not identify themselves as “Chinese” when given the choice.⁰ It is rather implausible to claim that over three million Chinese people are “sponsored by black hands from America and the UK”. Moreover it is quite unlikely that the majority of them are “abject outcasts.” And, finally, as a Marxist, I should like to know in what sense you consider your remarks to be compatible with the compassion for “outcasts” that animated at the very least Marx: “we should not abandon Marxism-Leninism;”¹ “[a]ll Party members must…be firm in their commitment to…the Marxist view on development;”² “[w]e must adhere to Marxism.”³

0. https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/eidentit...

1. XI Jinping, The Governance of China, p. 10

2. Ibid., p. 23

3. Ibid., p. 25

When asked, over 50% of Hong Kong people identified as “Hongkonger[s]”, even though various Chinese options were available.¹ Clearly then at least some non-protesters agree.

1. https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/eidentit...

The point isn’t that you know; it's that the vast majority of Hong Kong people know.

It's unfortunate that the article doesn’t really mention bindings properly. As I see it, there are three main issues in modern bindings:

- the use of inflexible hotmelt glue instead of flexible cold glue,

- the death of signatures in which paper is folded like in a booklet and sewn around in favour of perfect bindings in which the edge of each page is stuck with glue onto the spine, and

- lack of awareness of grain.

It is common to find hardbacks that lack signatures and are bound using hotmelt. They are even worse than cold glue paperbacks of signatures. Sometimes printers even get the grain wrong.

This is awful for functionality as well. Books cannot open flat without splitting the spine, and signatures can be rebound many times. Hyphen Press’s article is quite good, though incomplete.[0]

0. https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey

Presumably this could be abused by the sort of people you’re trying to ban—most people wouldn’t do this sort of thing but bad faith reports are a problem on lots of social media sites.

The reason to send in the PLA would be to increase the level of violence, but there’s no reason to risk the backlash of sending them in when the HK police can do the job too—even if the Central People’s Government were to suddenly decide that live ammunition is needed, they would still be able to rely on the HK police. The deployment of troops is therefore almost certainly, as was noted in the SCMP, a statement of intent as opposed to a sign that there will be a deployment of troops.

1. Counterexample: if I were to become an arms dealer I should have more money with which to educate my children.

It is not narcissistic to give nonzero weight to the greater good. Inevitably one attempts to achieve that by implementing the conception of the greater good to which one subscribes.

2. The author strictly speaking isn’t doing what you call narcissistic, and doesn’t seem to be advocating that either. What is noted is that the result of many parents’ seemingly individually innocuous actions is an overall injustice. The author does not send the child to the worst school mentioned and does not therefore prioritise “ideology” over children. Moreover the author is not saying that this is the obviously correct course of action to take. It is merely noted that to take this course of action is part of a collectively regrettable pattern.

You’re right—I remember reading something from AsiaSentinel and getting there via the Wikipedia page on media censorship in HK, but it doesn’t link to anything any more. I should have checked. There are lots of stories on Google though so is possible to verify that I am not in fact making things up.

I don’t think that there is much evidence of being excessively against China; I remember one incident suggesting the opposite.¹ There are certainly more establishment voices in the opinion pages than elsewhere, but they are on the liberal side of the establishment camp; the editor, for example, has attacked the government’s intransigence in the handling of the extradition bill, but is generally pro-establishment.

1. http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&tas...

These sorts of organisations are less threatening than direct threats to family, which seem to have become the norm in forcing oversea Uighurs to go back.⁰ There isn’t really anything to stop this being applied to all Chinese. I don’t know any Mainland relatives, but if I were to receive a message from a Public Security Bureau threatening the livelihoods of several randomly chosen people I would still be a little shaken, regardless of how tenuous my connexion—and most Chinese are a little more dutiful in maintaining contact with relatives. This poses an unfortunate dilemma: if every Chinese person is a potential mole, what is a liberal democracy to do?

0. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/ordered-050920171555...

It’s quite plausible that he has friends in Pakistani intelligence; many journalists (and, in the past, Marxists) came from élite families. Tariq Ali’s interview in the London Review of Books is very illuminating.⁰

> Our house was often filled with peasant leaders, trade-union leaders, radical poets, essayists, short-story writers, and occasionally, not encouraged too much, members of the family, or old family friends. In Pakistan, the Communist Party was banned, and two of its leaders, Muslim intellectuals from India who’d been sent to fertilise the barren land which was now Pakistan, were trying to create a party. One of them was a brilliant literary critic, Sajjad Zaheer, who was the party secretary. When the party was banned, they went underground, and Zaheer was put up in our house, pretending to be a professor of literature from Aligarh University. One night we were eating supper and there was a knock on the door. In walked one of my grandfather’s oldest and dearest friends, but who happened also to be inspector-general of the country’s police force. In he came, sat down and ate with us. There was a slight nervousness, but the professor/underground CP leader carried it off brilliantly. He knew how to deal with these people, discuss literature and Quranic interpretation, but after supper he beat a retreat: ‘With your leave, sir, I’m tired, I’ll just retire to bed.’ The inspector-general of police turned to my parents, and said: ‘I wish all your friends were like that! Where did you find such a cultured guy?’ A week later, when he was looking at pics of the disappeared CP leaders, he saw that the person he’d met at dinner was actually on the most-wanted list! So, it was a contradictory existence, though I never had any doubts which side I was on.

0. David Edgar, “That was the year that was”, London Review of Books 40.10 (24 May 2018), pp. 3-10, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n10/tariq-ali/that-was-the-year-th...

Isn’t the point of “standard censorship” the creation of an alternate reality?

Are these relatives Chinese or American? I hadn’t heard of this but would be interested to see.

A notice of no objection for Sunday’s march has been issued.¹

1. https://www.police.gov.hk/info/doc/nono/POERN19007953E.pdf

The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they need to show that the initial step taken somehow leads to the bad outcome mentioned. The obvious solution is to stay at 50k. I think that the political situation still would create a huge uproar if it were lowered significantly.

It’s certainly more comforting to imagine that Xi is losing all four wars. But I do not see effective opposition anywhere. The party has lost, hence the removal of term limits. There is no effective protest in Xinjiang or Tibet. HK will soon follow once pan-democrats can be extradited and executed. China has the advantage in the South China Sea in that it has the equivalent of several aircraft carriers in the islands it controls under the status quo. It is only the trade war that might go awry for Xi, and rare earths are a relatively credible threat.

I would however withdraw money, because loss on those fronts isn’t necessary to cause unhelpful instability.

The restrictions placed upon the fellow are more “capricious” in the words of the judge than necessary. Perhaps all his communications need to be read. I somehow doubt that prevention of communications by his lawyers is an important part of counter-terrorism, or that it can take more than a day or two to make sure that correspondence does not promote terrorism.

And I fail to see why we should force-feed a prisoner in the first place, which is the main problem.

They should be allowed to die. This is the reasonable position. Societal reaction to such action may change administrative policy, but it would do so through entirely proper political channels. The job of the civil servant is to implement policy and advise, not to determine or defend it from changes made in a proper fashion.

The SCMP seems to have been fairly vocal. There doesn’t seem to be anything that would stop the removal of all the critical journalists though, so I am somewhat confused.

> And probably I will get downvoted by mentioning this. The Tiananmen Square massacre, which originated due to the protesters fighting for more freedom/human rights, from I heard from my uncle, it was because of the influence from westerners.

Marxism, or the morphed variety of the CCP, also originates from the West. That doesn’t mean that Mao or the 6/4 movement didn’t have a genuine appreciation of “Western ideas” and want to implement them.

And yes, the West causes lots of problems. At least there is freedom to discuss them, and the probability of being sent to a camp for pointing things out is extremely low. That doesn’t discredit Western ideas; indeed, the self-awareness and capacity for self-criticism of the West is an important feature of its political system that the CCP increasingly lacks.

This idea that fundamental human rights are “western values” is profoundly unhelpful, because it implies that in some sense to fight injustice is to no longer be truly Chinese—a nonsense whose propagation is both supported by and helpful to the CCP.

There is a strange man who shouts “no Brexit” very loudly outside parliament every day. None of the residents like him. He hasn’t been run over by a tank yet.

For forty years mothers of disappeared people have assembled in the Plaza de Mayo.¹ They have not been run over by a tank yet.

In Belgrade protests have been held for twenty-six weeks against government corruption.² The police have attempted to repress the protests, but not with tanks.

A UK student protest in 2011 continued for several months.³

There is nothing strange about protests continuing for a long time. If the party had repressed the protests with tear gas a week after they started, most liberals’ view of the party would have turned out much better than the current view. The point is that using the army on one’s own people is taken to be bad, and repressing that memory is taken to suggest that there is a deeper malaise that creates a general willingness and ability to use such force.

As for causing trouble, it is unlikely that those whom the journalist messaged will actually “get problems”; they may be put on a list, but unless they do anything further, they are unlikely to face any consequences. And had they, for example, held a public vigil without the journalist (or tried), they would have ended up in a sticky situation anyway. So I don’t see what’s wrong with the journalists’ actions.

As for the view of Chinese, it is up to you to decide what “China” actually is. Of course you should respect the “true China” in some sense, but many will claim to be that—the party, activists, people like me, etc.; at some point you must choose. The events of 6/4 are a reasonable indication of what Chinese unencumbered by excessive government restrictions on expression think, as are today’s in Hong Kong, or the long history of peasant revolts and political strife. The Chinese people’s reaction to “sensitive” issues like the Rape of Nanjing was unstinting resistance to the Japanese occupiers; to the ineptitude of the nationalists the struggle of the People’s Liberation Army; to everyday injustice the sight of the millions of petitions that are the mark not of deference to authority as it exists but loyalty to an ideal of good governance. In attempting to be a “tolerated guest” you necessarily have chosen a China, even as it seems in its simplicity to be the most neutral one. But ultimately all these choices are anything but neutral, and Chinese history would suggest that most Chinese would choose otherwise.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/28/mothers-plaza-...

2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/4804638...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hetherington_House_Occupa...

I’m not sure where your sample starts but to start from the beginning one has to take into account the Great Leap Forwards, Cultural Revolution, invasion of Tibet, and so on. The ineptitude and corruption of the Nationalists never approached the suffering of the 50s and 60s which were actively difficult to achieve.

The sole mechanism by which the party became a force for stability is slowly being eliminated: collective leadership in China is now something of a joke. That’s where things went wrong under Mao; it’s why the “bad emperor” problem exists as a concept; and it’s where things are beginning to go wrong at the edges (Xinjiang, Tibet…) under Xi.