Why would you wonder that? This forum is chock full of criticism of the American government by Americans. I’ve personally levied a huge amount of it myself on this very website. In fact, I genuinely cannot imagine how you could possibly ask such a question in good faith.
It's completely disingenuous to suggest that recognizing the horrors of an oppressive nation-state equates to some sort of bigotry against the country itself.
The people of Taiwan don't want any part of CCP China, and in spite of a lot of noise about "One China Policy" the only people arguing right now for reunification are Xi and the cadres.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-chi...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/19/chinas-treatment-of...
1. China, as a nation consists of ALL the citizens of said nation.
2. CPP, only consists of ruling party.
The people's opinions don't matter as to their grouping. I can still be for one group and against another.
If the CCP is so popular, why not have free speech and elections?
CCP chose stability of system above all else.
It was a rhetorical question. The CCP doesn't allow elections and free speech because they don't want to lose power.
> elections and free speech are aspects of the system that by design introduce certain level of instability
That's the standard claim of dictators, including the CCP, but it's just their propaganda. Democratic governments are far more stable. Chinese democracies - Taiwan and Hong Kong - are/were very stable. Japan, South Korea, etc. When was the last time the US, UK, etc. had a stability problem? Compare that to China, North Korea, and the rest.
Also, that claim looks at it only from the dictator's point of view (a natural bias): Will my power last? I might be voted out at any time! I could be criticized into irrelevancy! That would be a catastrophe for the country if my great leadership was removed! Democracies change leaders frequently and with ease; it's rule of law, not of a person (or personality).
Finally, from the ordinary citizen's point of view, democracies are far more stable: Their rights are protected; they won't be arbitrarily arrested, have their assets seized, be sent to reeducation camps, etc.
Many would have liked a/one more counterbalance to US hegemony. From the latest polls though, it seems people would rather the US hegemony continues/strengthens rather than seeing CCP/"China" rises further.
Such intangible acts will, sooner or later, have tangible consequences.
They idea that there is any non-controlled wide-spanning media where this could be discovered is I'm afraid laughable.
Moreover, as with democracy, it is more than having the right to vote. It is also the right to know what your elected representatives are up to and what the state of the nation is. So if you ask people thoroughly drowning in state enforced propaganda from an early age what they think about something, you'll usually get what the propaganda machine told them to think.
[1] https://ash.harvard.edu/news/ash-center-researchers-release-...
[2][pdf]: https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...
You have the option to stick with what the propaganda machine told to you to think.
Ignore our warnings at your peril.
Focus on the ball please.
Which ones? I don't see it myself.
It's funny you mention whataboutism, because that's what I was about to mention too.
This really goes to my main point: it's important to be able to levy criticism and to NOT give anyone a free pass, but many of the comments in here seem to be implicitly (and arguably, erroneously) splitting world actors into "good" and "evil". Hence the "us vs them" mentality and the mounting nationalism.
Trying to say "oh, but the west has problems too" when there aren't any comparable attempts at large-scale genocide ongoing is crazy. Not because the west doesn't have problems. Or because the west is somehow angelic. But because it's like comparing a nuke to a house fire. And some things really are evil in a whole different way.
Again, this is not what I was trying to say, and if it came across that way then I was misunderstood or I did not express myself correctly.
I can see how what I wrote could have been interpreted that way, but I would really encourage you to apply the "charitable interpretation" principle.
I would also note that the topic of genocide is different from the original topic of conversation. While my comment was of a more general scope than the wiki drama, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that I'm trying to change the topic or deflect attention by way of whataboutism.
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Edit: reconsidering this thread, I think I would like to clarify that what my comment was trying to get at was that a lot of the criticism being levied against China suffered from the "genetic fallacy" [1]: regardless of whether the criticism was right or wrong, some of it didn't address the matter at hand (the wiki drama) and instead resorted to criticizing the world actor based on other baggage. It's not that the conclusion of the critiques is wrong per se, it's more that it might be right only by accident. I hope this helps clarify.
It's true that on some level blocking Wikimedia from a global organization isn't directly about genocide - it's about Wikimedia not being a centralized entity kissing the ring the way the China wants it to. But on another level that is really about the fact that articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide exist, and that they're guided by an aspiration to encyclopedic documentation and not Xi Jinping Thought (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought). Because China would like Xi Jinping Thought exported globally.
I feel like this is practically a sport in America. We love to criticize the government and everything it does wrong. That's part of democracy: the fact that Trump was voted out was very much a collective "we fucked up/this is wrong" where we decided to go a different path. In China, on the other hand, that is not allowed. We certainly do have issues in the US, but a lack to self-criticism does not count among them
You're shifting the goalposts...Has America or any western country blocked the wikimedia foundation from entering WIPO?
> I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power.
> I wonder if we here in the West are as fair and balanced as we tend to think.
All of that is unquestionably true. But what does it have to do with criticizing China's actions here? The criticism could be coming from anti-China bigots, yet still be entirely legitimate.
This type of rhetorical question or quip is a pretty good example of the mentality I was drawing attention to in my comment: it's entirely possible to think that something is generally bad (eg.: you might think the CCP is, on balance, not great or even terrible) while also recognizing that there are positive aspects to it.
Recognizing the pros of a thing doesn't mean you have to forget about the cons. Being able to hold both in one's head at the same time also helps formulate better criticism of the bad things, as such criticism often becomes more precise.
The heuristic of "CCP/China = bad" may very well be correct in a particular situation, but such heuristics are a very dangerous mode of thinking.
Of course, but in many ways it's the threat of the same shift in power between the allies and the axis in WWII. China is not a nice country. Openly imprisoning and "re-educating" uyghurs there, Tibet, Taiwan, openly hunting down and organ harvesting the falun-gong. The West does plenty of bad stuff too but nothing on the same level, and definitely not as openly as if saying "what're you going to do about it".
Same as Russia assassinating people recently, it's a "what're you going to do about it?" scenario. Now that nuclear weapons exists the world is going to go to shit because nobody can do anything about it anymore.
I'm certainly not trying to advocate an anti-US or anti-China stance here, but your comment can easily be turned around by the CCP for the same reasons when it comes to criticism of their internal affairs.
This article doesn't give China a great image, sure. I can think of a million criticisms to levy against China.
However, I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China.
I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power. I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of appreciating the things that China gets right, or does right. I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong, or do wrong. I wonder if we here in the West are as fair and balanced as we tend to think.
This isn't merely an academic question, I think it goes to the core of the state of mind that is required to view situations objectively (regardless of whether we might be right or wrong in any specific context).
In this case, I'm totally on Wikimedia's side. But I feel like we in the West are standing right on the slippery slope of nationalism.