I happily pay more for things not made in China, when I can.
When I can buy an iPhone that's not made in China, I'll buy it. Even if it means a downgrade.
Several of my family members buy as many vintage and second-hand goods as they can. Not to be hipsters (are hipsters still a thing anymore?), but because they do not want to support China.
Still, it doesn't have to be 100% or 0% made in China. 5% is better than 95%. Shades of grey exist, and that is ok. But earnestly trying to do better is what matters.
It is not wrong for individuals to choose to assimilate. The deliberate and systematic destruction of other cultures - which China is engaged in on multiple fronts - is wrong.
The fact that a country or civilization has past sins should not be a disqualification from taking a moral stand in the present. Some form of mild hypocrisy is vastly preferable to sitting silent while a country destroys another culture or puts it's Muslim population in concentration camps.
Suppose someone's great grandfather stole from my great grandfather something I was supposed to inherit. They inherited it instead.
It remains stolen property that belongs to me.
If someone dies and they owe money, the creditors have a claim to the estate.
If their claims exceed the value of the estate, they are out of luck; they can't go after other parties to recover everything.
If someone dies and leaves your their house, but it is mortgaged, then the mortgage likely has to be paid off before the title is transferred.
Creditors having a right to the estate means that you can't borrow (or steal) something, die, and have that property pass it to a heir free and clear.
Hypocrisy is rarely a substantive counterargument. It's much more often whataboutism.
Human rights are themselves a fairly recent idea. I can't think of a single powerful country/empire that hasn't committed them to some degree. And things were much worse in the past.
History is prologue, not destiny.
Source: Am South Asian.
Someone else in their reply mentioned Hawaii and the US but even Hawaii was unified by force by King Kamehameha. I’ve come to an uneasy acceptance of the fact that we’re all the conquerors and the conquered.
We all have to accept the past. We don't need to accept that the future will be the same.
There are many ways that different areas and cultures can share an assimilate. Trade, travel, multilingualism, federations, mutually-agreed democratic annexation, shared constitutions, diplomacy, immigration, intermarriage, etc.
Coercion is not the only option.
In this world, cultures built around immigration end up changing themselves to better compete for people. e.g. the US had to undergo civil rights reforms in the 60s and expand access to all as the USSR looked increasingly attractive to those traditionally left out.
Do you have examples of those alternatives, or are they theoretical?
'Everyone is a victim' is a cop out. The fact that some ancestor of mine was probably conquered by vikings doesn't mean that I shouldn't criticize china for doing the same thing today. Nor do I feel like a conqueror because some other ancestor was one of those vikings. Look to the deep past for lessons. Don't point to the deep past as justification for horrible actions today.
It’s just a fact that every single empire in history ended up with a society which hated the conquests only to be conquered by another, less ethically-concerned nation.
It’s easy to judge when you are in a privileged position, however the reason you do that is because you already made someone else pay the price of the externalities of your champagne pacifism.
Basically you have this ethical idea that war is bad, but you provide no solution as to how to make today’s poor people reach the same level of education and plenty without giving them the means to conquer you politically, economically or by the means of warfare.
Every other argument you make is akin to a “what if”. I am speaking about how it _currently_ is.
Will the future be different? Maybe.. technology (especially communications tech) might be the thing that lets us break the cycle.
For 2019 total US petroleum production (crude + petro products + biofuels) was 19.3m barrels per day (bpd), consumption was 20.5m bpd. Imports were 9.1m bpd, exports were 8.57m bpd.
Imports dropped from 13.7m bpd in 2005, to 9.1m bpd for 2019. Net imports (imports minus exports) dropped from 12.5m bpd in 2005, to 500k bpd for 2019 (the lowest figure since ~1952).
Imports from Canada have gone from 500k bpd in 1980, to 4.4m bpd in 2019. All of OPEC supplied 1.6m bpd to the US in 2019 for contrast. Imports from Saudi Arabia were down to just 530k bpd in 2019 (cut in half since 2015/2016). We could sneeze in West Texas and wipe that out at this point.
First, Ben Laden had ben persecuted by Saudi Arabia and had to flee the country. Long before the 9/11 attacks. Saudi Arabia was trying to get him.
Second, supporting current regime in Saudi Arabia sounds barbaric and morally reprehensible — as long as you don't find out who's their internal opposition is. Surprise: it's not freedom-loving democratic westernised students. It's even more radical and aggressive religious zealots. If US stops supporting House of Saud, it will be a new Iran or even ISIS there, but with much better economy and a pretty capable military.
Which didn't prevent them spawning, and continuing support of hundred others like him.
What you say is conflating with something like "If USA took down NSDAP, Germans would still burn Jews, and even more of them." It is infuriating.
US must stop supporting Sauds, end of the story.
But this is not true, whereas the facts I started about internal opposition Saudis face are.
> US must stop supporting Sauds, end of the story.
This would make the world a worse place and lead to a lot of death and suffering, compared to the future where US would still support them. How can you justify such a thing?
I think one can agree with the spirit of Carter's message while remaining skeptical of how practically it's stood the test of time. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, doesn't the last line of your second article seems to agree with GP's point? Can you describe what you're trying to say in more detail?
It is important to recognize how we got into this mess and who the literal and figurative actors are.
The US oil producers don't coordinate well with OPEC. It has been an ongoing problem that OPEC has been endlessly complaining about for many years.
... thanks to their defence agreement with India. Had that not been in place, China would have long occupied Bhutan too.
We (the majority ethnics) do appreciate the cultures from minor ethics In fact, the minor ethnics regions have been a popular destination for young generation to get away from the urban life.
On the other hands, we cannot have a blind eyes on the taboos that comes from isolation, illiteracy and poverty. We're talking about little women rights, child labor, child marriage.
I'm not saying the same problems are in Tibet, but it wouldn't surprise if there other things going than what you're seeing from an outsider/tourist eyes, because the context is the same: high illiteracy rate and isolation.
Education is one way out. China is clearly having a strong take on this approach, but let's hope they do know how to preserve the culture as well.
From our Western perspective? No. From the general perspective of any culture that values human life.
Your words are an empty restatement that mirrors what most officially sanctioned Chinese media reports tell us:
That we should not/legally cannot/morally cannot oppose or interfere with these atrocities.
I urge HN readers to very carefully judge empty statements such as the GP, because while it doesn't seem like it, it is actually attempting to persuade you to accept that absolutely nothing can be done.
And that is utterly wrong.
Yeah, kinda like Hawaii. (Not to mention Native Americans' lands, civilization, and culture). Or, well, Mexico.
Sure, it's, "whataboutism". Which is an improvement on the our-shit-doesn't-smell-besides-that-was-back-a-while-ago-so-we-get-to-keep-it-now "Western perspective". Or the "sure-we-can-get-to-our-shady-stuff-but-at-some-other-time-now-let's-talk-as-if-only-those-bad-countries-do-such-things".
>Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are going to lecture them about occupying a territory.
Yeah, that's the problem I'm talking about.
>For China Tibet is a buffer between India and them and it is where most of their water comes from, so they're never going to let any foreign entity control it. Seems out of the question.
Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be). Populations whose countries have wars and bases and proxy states and/or colonies all over the world (where they have absolutely no place to be), are in a "glass house" place to throw stones at what China does in its immediate borders...
Nor am I qualified to talk, I just want to point out that many of my Hawaiian friends would not in any way agree with your statement, and it is worth factoring that in to the broader discussion.
I wonder what they'd say if you asked them if they'd like to leave the USA?
I don't mean to pick on you personally and I'm not commenting on your views—only that your comments stand out in this thread as particularly nasty, and from a moderation point of view that's not ok.
From a human point of view, I sympathize. Most of us would feel and act this way in your position. I know what it feels like to be the sole person arguing against a majority view—it is extremely activating, and when people are speaking out of ignorance, it can be maddening. Nevertheless you can't post to HN like you've been doing in this thread. You have to manage the activation in yourself and post within the site guidelines.
In a way this is not fair, because others are also being nasty, but happen to have majority opinion on their side, which creates a false impression of reasonableness. But fair or not, it's the way that mass psychology works—there's a greater burden on the one who holds a contrarian position.
I would have just spray-painted the han supremacy equivalent of a swastika onto a few walls, but there's no such thing. No Chinese KKK to join either. We really are lagging behind the west!
Does that make this reported events legitimate?
If we are going to tell lower standard of living countries that they need to take the slower or more expensive routes to wealth instead of using the same bad ways we did, we should be using some of our wealth to subsidize those more expensive routes for them.
100 years from now, Xinjiang will most likely be peaceful when the last traditional Uyghurs pass away, and China will no longer have to force assimilation. That doesn't absolve China of its wrongdoings today.
Puerto Rico can have independence any time they want. They've had several referenda, and independence has yet to win.
Good one, no.
I think that the lands they lived and had autonomy and their rule of law etc, have been taken from them as their ancestral places, and have been confined to the reservations.
The fact that they can move "freely" to New York or the greater South Dakota are irrelevant. It's like someone coming over, taking your house, handing you over the "right" to live and rule over the backyard, but also giving you the "freedom" to rent/buy/live in a room on their own old house if they want.
And that's with tons of shady behavior from the federal/state level even for them living there and their resources (e.g. when uranium was discovered in those places).
That said, I don't mind to refute the larger point. In fact, I would make Puerto Rico independent in conjunction with recognizing Taiwan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121109002017/http://div2.ceepu...
My proposal is "bleeding heart realpolitik", and bound to thus illicit confusion in the US.
Are people in Hawaii still getting held at gunpoint to assimilate to whatever American culture is? If yes, we should definitely complain about it now.
> Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be).
Yes, we all know about those claims like the comical nine dash line. Tibet has always been a historical buffer state between the Chinese and Indian civilizations, culturally influenced by both. Sure, some Chinese empires were able to defeat them to force them to be a part of the empire for some centuries but that's about it.
It must be fun to take out a map with some line that some loon drew in the past to lay claim over anything you wish. I guess we can even expect a map for Mars in future.
As far as I understand for that at least, the divisions/districts were divided based on religion, because that's what the demand of the leaders who wanted Pakistan was. So Pakistan got every Muslim majority district on the west of the current Indian state. Is it possible the Sikh holy site you are talking about was a Muslim majority division/district?
But your point does underscore my point, look at all the chaos that line drawing left in the world. That's all the more reason to call out the comical claims that are being enforced now.
If what you have written is true, do you want the same to be inflicted into new sets of people by a hegemonic power.
I don't understand why my other comment down the thread was flagged by you though.
every culture has done horrible things in the past. does that mean no one should try to prevent modern crimes against humanity?
i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands
Reformed? LOL.
>i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands
It's the ethical imperative of:
- not being a hypocrite,
- being the change you want to see in the world, and putting your house in order first
- the old-mob-boss not getting to keep his illegal riches (not to mention his old ways) and claim to be reformed,
- and not using the plights of "poor X" as an excuse to attack their opressor, when you don't really care about poor X, you have opressed and are still opressing others all over the world, and you have no problems with other opressors of third parties if they are allies...
Without self-reflection and equal corrective moves on the finger-pointing side, the finger-pointing at China is merely used as a political weapon to justify aggression and pressure against them in the ongoing trade/influence war.
As for the finger pointers, those higher-up cultivate this for this exact purpose (as popular support for their hawkish plans), and the masses just point at the "enemy of the day" as they are conditioned...
As for the "pious excuses to sit on our hands" that's what happens anyway, nobody is actually doing anything. The one's that do are those who control armies and policy - and those have their own agendas, could not give less fucks for justice for Tibet.
For example, give up Puerto Rico and Hawaii but recognize Taiwan at the same time.
China may not officially give a shit, but Europe and many former colonies should.
> Taiwan deserves provincehood so it isn't a impoverished client of the PRC.
Now, Taiwan is quite rich, but still, optics matter. Better to give Puerto Rico tons of reparations if you are worried about it being impoverished and dependent.
as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2, and didn't use its past injustices as an excuse to remain silent
Let me reverse the question: are you fine with selective-outrage against all the human atrocities by CCP be used as a tool for foreign policy to further interests/help in new attrocities?
At the same time when those using those (to help their policies) have commited themselves, and continue to commit similar attrocities?
I'd say condemn all attrocities, don't be selective.
Else I can't make heads or tails of this perspective. It's basically "my country right or wrong, plus, I will condemnt whatever country my country's foreign interests want to target this period and ignore what others that are allies do".
>as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2
Well, not that much. For one, its businesses gave the logistics assistance that helped it go through. And few batted an eye in such cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-respons...
"The American public discovered the full extent of the Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II. And as historians struggled to understand what had happened, attention increasingly focused on the inadequate American response and what lay behind it. It remains today the subject of great debate."
there are a number of atrocities around the world today, but nothing approaches the scale of the ccp
Can they own property? Businesses?
Vote?
Can the run for Congress, Senate, President?
Are they taught that they cannot have their heritage?
"whataboutism'.
Its important to build your argument from sturdy facts, so that big bad reality can't huff and puff and blow it all down!
Additionally - it hasn’t been until recently that Puerto Rico has favored statehood (over free association).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac...
Forced labor camps are created through force or threat of force and can detain people for decades with no recourse.
Of course, there's an issue of laws that are by themselves are morally reprehensible, like the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany. However, immigration laws are clearly moral and expected to exist in some form or another in any modern country.
I have to say, this distinction is so obvious I'm very surprised that somebody asks this kind of question at all.
This is not, in fact, universally agreed upon.
It's reasonable that some degree of moral relativism can be made WRT China, but on these threads, there is no such thing.
China's arbitrary incarceration of citizens based on their ethnicity is beyond pale, the President should be bringing it up at every occasion, and it should be a pillar of our relations with China, including trade.
What about child migrants? You're meaning to tell me that its morally just to intern preteens because they broke your immigration law? To force children to appear before a judge that are so young that they have to draw a cross as their signature? What's grosser here?
I addressed the issue, not only that, the concern about the 'moral universality' of the border laws isn't very relevant.
We put people in prison for 10 years for stealing cars, and there is no 'universal moral agreement' on the issue.
Migrants are not even being held against their will - they can leave in about 72 hours by filing paperwork. They have knowingly entered the country illegally, and are detained. They can go home essentially when they please.
If families were required to 'wait the Holiday Inn' until their hearing (which I think should be the case, no need to hold them in detention), I suggest few would be concerned, so what matters is not so much the issue of detention, but the conditions. I think that most people would probably agree that conditions should be reasonable but that's an operational issue.
But it's besides the point: the US has borders, and just like any for other nation, those borders have to be respected legally by some means.
But this is a giant distraction from the fact that:
China is arbitrarily putting it's own citizens in totalitarian concentration camp conditions due to their ethnicity.
The 'corollary' would be Trump putting 100 000 Latino American citizens in concentration camps purely due to their ethnicity, with no legal recourse, removed from any communication with their families, their every move, thought, action suppressed as they go through intense 'indoctrination training' daily, for years at a time.
It's unthinkable.
But it doesn't stop there:
China spies and censors each and every citizen, kidnapping students, academics - anyone - who speaks out too vociferously against the regime. They rigorously control all established media to enforce propagandistic measures, and censor or suppress anyone who acts against that system. China does not allow citizens to access information outside the country. They've created a giant, dystopian suppression machine.
The corollary would be Trump closing down CNN, NBC, CBS, then taking governmental control of Fox news, and legally requiring Fox to tout his agenda every day. Trump would then mandate Facebook to censor anyone who speaks out against Trump or the GOP / Government. Trump would insert a team of 'GOP agents' within Facebook to ensure absolute compliance. Any FB user who 'talks funny' would be flagged for future reference (i.e. maybe just a little visit from the local cops will suffice to get them to shut up).
Protests would be met with bullets, all media completely suppressed, no legal action or recourse would be possible. To merely mention the issue could land you in jail.
Of course in this scenario, Trump also has absolute power, does not need to be elected, directly controls the Fed/Monetary System, directly controls all major financial institutions, can amend the constitution essentially at will, has no need for any kind of judicial system which would of course be politically controlled, so he could put his enemies (or whoever) in jail whenever he wants, for whatever reason.
Of course he could direct Verizon, Google, AT&T, Stripe, Amazon to provide him with transactional data for anyone, anywhere on earth at anytime, for any reason.
And all of that is only scratching the surface!
So start justifying that list of transgressions, and when we get down to things like 'North Koreans fleeing to Chine held in less than optimal conditions' ... then we're having a discussion.
So was rescuing Jews from the Holocaust, and China's acts against Tibetans and Uighurs. Let's not mistake what's moral with what's legal; they often overlap in a decent society, but that's by no means guaranteed. You can make a case for "immigration laws are moral", but "they're moral because they're the law" isn't that case.
Conflating the fact that some people face basic detainment (which they can leave quickly at any time by merely choosing to return home) for breaking clear laws ... with 'Putting millions of Jews in Gas Chambers' is not helping the cause.
If we are so deeply concerned about 'legality vs. morality' then I'd imagine the very first issue coming to mind would be the issue of Uyghurs being put in concentration camps by the 100's of thousands, possibly millions, for no reason at all, other than the fact they are Uyghur.
Especially those dying, having their organs harvested and sent to Chinese elite. [1] [2] [3]
Their arbitrary detention due to ethnicity, and the conditions imposed upon them, I think make a very good corollary to the Nazi / Jewish holocaust, worthy of intellectual consideration.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-religiou...
[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-is-harvesting-tho...
Under their laws. They are equal to everyone else.
What China is doing is progressive system of genocide. They borrowed USSR's system of multiple nationalities, identified different ethnicities, and now are trying to wipe out the Uighurs by merging them into Han. It is only a matter of time till they start doing this with whole bunch of other groups. The Uighurs are seen as threats because of their resistance to adopting majority Chinese culture and because of their 1600 year old desire for self-rule.
You make it sound as if they were a part of aggressive expansion and colonisation, which is a bit misleading. Vast majority of US military bases are in NATO countries that were very enthusiastic about outsourcing protection from the soviet threat.
The US military also didn’t punish for crimes against civilians on Okinawa much of the time and if it did, the punishment was relatively minor. This isn’t how assault, rape and murder are treated in the US.
Looking back now, I'm not so sure it was the net good it was sold as.
20 years ago we were. Tibet was a little bit like BLM, all over Hollywood, in pop culture. The Dalai Lama was somewhat of a figure.
Then China told Americans to 'shut their mouths' and they did.
This is a tiny example of the tremendous power of that machine, it really cannot be ignored but I think we probably will.
Edit: some notes [1] [2]
[1] https://psmag.com/news/what-ever-happened-to-hollywoods-free...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/cause-hollywood-forgot-f...
I'll put money that the next pres. will probably be Joe Biden and he will never say the word 'Tibet' publicly. And who's 'free'?
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washingto... https://www.valuewalk.com/2014/08/hollywood-funding/
One major difference in US soft power is, they don't censor media critical of them to an extent even close to what CCP does. Look at the commentary on the pointless Vietnam War originating from US in their media, try to find something similar on PRC's pointless war in Vietnam which they lost.
[1] https://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/sondage...
The US government doesn't engage in direct censorship like the Chinese government but it does have some power, in practice, to shape its portrayal in the media. The Pentagon pulled production assistance from The Hurt Locker because it didn't like certain aspects of how the military was portrayed[1], as is their right of course. Most films cannot afford this luxury. The relationship between the state and the press is also closer than many think, particularly when it comes to briefings from the intelligence community.
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook admittedly do a pretty good job of allowing a wide range of views to be expressed, although this comes at the price of allowing massive amounts of disinformation as well.
>try to find something similar on PRC's pointless war in Vietnam which they lost.
How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(2017_film)
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-feb-25-la-et-hu...
Shining at its best, in terms of making a product that just sells well without the state taking much efforts at it. Like in case of WW2, they just made movies which glorify US's contribution at the expense of others, the product sold well because it was well made. So their role got pushed in the minds of people even outside US.
> How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(2017_film)
I read the synopsis, it doesn't seem like anything critical of their role in the war or need for it or their defeat. It talks about how they won bravery medals there and then it seems like a drama around love/work life.
Watch the Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns/PBS, that's the sort of media I am talking about.
That description seems like description of any war movie in general. While you are right about not everything has to be a documentary, my example was related to critical content like that.
To give an example which would be possibly more clear is, look at the current protests in HK. Do media in PRC cover the HKers side fairly on what they are demanding, the magnitude of ground support for the movement in HK, the excesses committed by the HK police daily? Contrast this with BLM protests where most coverage is anti establishment.
Is it possible, that rather than being a massive cover-up, that war simply wasn't a generation-defining moment for them?
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War#Chinese_me...
Agreed. The CCP's censorship is an exhibition of weakness.
While it is currently tumultuous, there's an argument that the introspective and critical nature of US culture is a strength.
The enormous sums these companies believe they will earn in China, the all mighty growth, that overwhelms their ability to consider the implications.
Did you know that the Sioux are actively protesting in South Dakota right now, for the very thing that you are preaching here?
Are you going to even lift a finger to support them? I doubt it. Hence, you’re just being a hypocrite
additionally, our country was founded by people escaping religious persecution
why are not right to call out others currently making our mistakes from the past?
>additionally, our country was founded by people escaping religious persecution
I'm assuming this refers to the US. The US criticizes its treatment of natives and how they were decimated as the US expanded west. But at the same time, it enjoys all the benefits from not having a large indigenous population that occupies militarily strategic land, poses a military/separatist threat, and is too numerous to assimilate. I don't see the US deciding to return North America to its indigenous population so they can rebuild their historic societies because conveniently, all those lands are either settled or their previous inhabitants have no descendants. I can only conclude that words are cheap when it comes to foreign events, but when it comes to the cost of fixing domestic injustice suddenly no one wants to pay.
As an analogy, this is like the US racing to the top of a hill in a car, then telling everyone else they have to walk because driving is bad for the environment. And no, the US will not help pay for the extra time and water they'll have to take, nor will it drive back down and join them in a fair race.
and if we need a pristine past to denounce modern injustice, then that is a recipe to accomodate every injustice that comes our way
Nah, we just changed how it's done.
> adjective politically ruled by citizens of another country.
Seems to fit this definition
Those fleeing were fleeing the precursors to secularism.
The fact is, a lot Puerto Ricans like the current setup. The are natural born citizens who have full freedom of movement within the U.S. while Puerto Rico has fewer federal restrictions and obligations compared to a U.S. state.
I think you have it reversed: Puerto Rico suffers from all of the federal obligations and has no states' rights to make up for it. No representative, no voting senator (and therefore no 'pork'). The burden of the federal restrictions were bared in the aftermath of the hurricane: the Jones Act meant relief could only be transported by American ships even as other countries stood ready to help.
> But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/lebron-james-nba-players-told-move-...
I don't understand this take.
Why does LeBron James have to address human rights in China before he, a Black American, can address human rights abuses against Black Americans in America?
Because as bad as the human rights abuses against Black Americans in America are, they pale in comparison to what China is doing. But that's not the only issue. The bigger issue is that LeBron James chooses to make hundreds of millions of dollars by staying silent on the China issue. I think he could have a tremendous impact by rejecting that money and denouncing China...what are the Lakers going to do, fire him? He can do both things. With BLM he's just one of many, many, MANY celebrities saying the same thing. What people with his level of reach are saying anything about China?
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-needs-china-revenue-growt...
Why should he take an interest? Beyond the matter of being a world famous person with a giant bullhorn to speak from, he's also making an obscene sum of money from China and its people and stands to keep doing so. That's vulgar morally if you then simultaneously ignore what's going on there and refuse to say anything with your platform.
It is not difficult in terms of time or technically, for James to say something about China's human rights abuses on his prominent Twitter account (whether about Xinjiang or Hong Kong as two prominent examples). It would take a very small amount of effort and time. He doesn't do it because he's a hypocritical coward and knows China is a giant financial golden ticket and he doesn't dare upset them because he knows how they would react (the same reason so many are afraid of China and yet not afraid to say something against the US). The whole of the NBA is very terrified of China economically, the NBA hasn't been very subtle about their trembling post the Houston Rockets incident.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nba-needs-china-revenue-growt...
[1] https://www.radio.com/sports/nba/former-nba-star-anti-china-...
[2] https://www.freep.com/story/sports/nba/pistons/2019/10/12/nb...
"China" is a vicious inhumane enemy, nobody in this World is innocent but there are some more innocent that others and the rhetoric of others being "bad" is no excuse for anything.
From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China.
But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff.
Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are going to lecture them about occupying a territory.
For China Tibet is a buffer between India and them and it is where most of their water comes from, so they're never going to let any foreign entity control it. Seems out of the question.
I live in a European area that was 'assimilated' into a bigger country and forced to use their language and customs. This was over 150 years ago for my area now. And most people don't remember it and just go with the flow of the country they are born in.
I hope for all Tibetans that there will be some sense of regional pride remaining (and allowed) as they find a way to live as part of China.