Isn't India and Gandhi the inventor of this? I thought that was why he was essentially a political genius, because he invented a means of non-violent regime change. And that is why totalitarian governments respond so strongly to these nonviolent protests, because if left for too long not even tank treads can crush them.

To quote another: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

Nonviolent protests only work when the people they're protesting believe in some amount of basic human rights to begin with. Many Cherokee peacefully protested their land being taken from them in Georgia, but they were forcibly moved anyways because the US government didn't care.

This is the MalcomX counterpoint to MLK's movement - that one hand needs to be open and welcoming while the other wields a weapon. aka "speak softly but carry a big stick".

It's interesting to know if such a dynamic occurred during the Indian liberation movement, or whether it was more due to the British Empire being overextended at the same time (note: independence happened just after WW2)

Parts of the US Government cared, SCOTUS ruled for them. But the executive branch didn't care and did what he/they wanted.

My uneducated hope is that Xi Jinping will consolidate too much power, then die, and the previously distributed One Party system will instead have become a One Man system that collapses before someone else can become that One Man. Hopefully the existence of rebel Chinese cultures like Hong Kong and Taiwan can spur this.

My pie in the sky hope is that the PRC collapses utterly and the ROC begins to rule the entire mainland as well. One China indeed...

There are plenty of dissenting voices against Xi in the communist party, not just the leaders but also the rank-and-file members. If Xi dies, I'm pretty sure the One Man system reverts to the One Party system, unless there's another leader eager to concentrate power.

True but at least from an outsider and naive perspective his dissenters are more hardline than he is! What direction they’d take China in is unknown, I guess.

How would they be overthrown? Would someone write a letter so harshly worded that the ruling government would decide to step down and allow some presumably better government to take their place?

If you're talking about a place with a functioning Democracy then they could be voted out, but virtually every other form of government pretty much requires a coup, disaster, or outstandingly benevolent ruler to step aside. And when a ruler is benevolent nobody is really clamoring to change the government, it's only when total assholes are in charge.

Worse, power vacuums tend to attract the most opportunistic and corrupt. Rarely do they have the public interest in mind. Any time you see a leadership ousted by a coup you know it's only going to get worse in that country.

But economic sanctions do produce outcomes, and economic effects are why some areas of China have the freedom they do.

At the same time, it seems hard to imagine that economic effects alone are enough for the core of a government to change, and even if it did, at what cost to its people?

Even if the government officials were so distressed by the costs of the economic sanctions on their people that they offered to step down, who would be an acceptable replacement? Some puppet ruler that would sell the country to multinational corporations so they can exploit its resources and people?

One of the problems with democracies is that they're really hard to get started. There are a lot of institutions that need to be in place before they really work, and rushing right to elections just ends up with the same old assholes staying in power because that's all anybody knows.

> Can powerful nation states that commit atrocities against populations of humans be over thrown peacefully? That is to say, without a war?

The USSR serves as a pretty good example.

Having learned what happened to Soviets/Russians, one would imagine they'd prefer avoiding a repeat of the consequences...

Perhaps (and perhaps not all of them). The fall of the USSR also includes places like Germany, though, where it's been a pretty clear benefit.

If we apply the USSR model to China we'll be bombing African countries a few decades after our proxy wars are done.

We've already been doing that for decades. Libya, Somalia, etc.

England let a lot of its colonies go peacefully, I don't know if that counts.

>> England let a lot of its colonies go peacefully,

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

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...

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

The protesters were peaceful. The English oppressors were violent.

They didn't say all of their colonies. Some were let go relatively peacefully.

Sounds like they have a choice.

They do not have the ability to fight with them, so let them go peacefully.

If I'm not mistaken they were let go long after the industrial revolution, which changed the calculus around colonies. Pre-industrial economies expanded by territory, to over simplify.

Additionally, when the crown let the colonies go did it lose its business interests or did it still retain control of them? How much capture still exists?

There's some subtleties here. The "camp" is not targeted to all Muslim in Xinjiang. It's mostly targeted towards Uyghurs, and most Uyghurs is Muslim. Uyghurs is considered a minority in China. There are a tiny group of Uyghurs people that are considered terrorists or separationists. So the entire Uyghurs population in Xinjiang gets "educated". Why? I think it's fallacy of thinking. Suppose you know that of all the crimes committed, a large percent is by people of color x, then what's the chance of a person of color x commit a crime? Most people will think the chance is also very high. It's a incorrect inference. People of color x may have a very large population and if you apply Bayesian rules the chance would be very low. Now let's get back the Uyghurs case. For most Chinese outside Xinjiang, what they see is that most terrorism in China is carried out by Uyghurs. So they think that Uyghurs are terrorist and needs to be educated. While in fact I believe most Uyghurs are peaceful.

The sad thing is that this thinking fallacy happens everywhere in the past and now. And it's really hard to see it as an insider.