Many US universities have a Chinese Student & Scholar Association and it's not like they try to hide that they are arms of the CCP. (Just for a random example https://myinvolvement.org/organization/cssaatualbany - "The Chinese Student and Scholar Association at the University of Albany is joined and organized by the Chinese students and scholars at the University of Albany of their own record. It is a nonprofit organization that is supported and guided by CCP through the Consulate-General of the PRC in New York.")
Mass organization can do incredible things -- a group of people is much more effective than the individuals.
It'd be an effective way of control, "Hey why didn't you come to our student org meeting last week?".
I speculated last year that the CSSA was also involved in the arrest of Chinese student Luo Daiqing from the University of Minnesota. He was arrested when he set foot in China for Xinnie the Pooh meme tweets he made while in the states.[0]
[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/university-of-min...
~ George Orwell, 1984
The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty.
My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family.
All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example.
While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages).
Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say.
One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force.
To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level.
Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way.
The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...
Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
Have you read 1984? Neither are the Party members. (And also, the quote doesn't mention the people.)
Neither were inhabitants of all the other nations where totalitarian regimes seized power, but it did not help them.
Totalitarian systems are really adept at controlling people. It is a matter of survival for them.
The (Chinese) people are the victims in this.
The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
Can Chinese people freely communicate with each other? The ability to do so is critical for unimpaired mental faculties of the collective.
I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while.
One and a half billion is still a big number though.
Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
0 - https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-the-us-officials-who-now-...
But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.
I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.
This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.
If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.
It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency
Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.
I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.
I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.
What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of
what kind of example can the west be to the world
Who is this?
> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp
https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.
>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia
If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...
Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.
This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.
Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.
No country is innocent, some are, however, free (moreso, at least, enough to matter, enough to choose if the need arises).
In some ways, I think this can actually serve to make people believe that real events were fictional - after all, movies are generally fictional or at least with a good dose of artistic license.
I also must point out that some western governments will go to extreme lengths to bury bad actions as deeply as possible - if it wasn't for leakers, there are a whole host of Western war crimes and atrocities that would never have surfaced to the public. Even when they do, government and media propaganda machines are very efficient at convincing the general populace there is nothing to see here.
We like to berate China and others for bad actions (rightly so), but in many respects Western governments are appalling hypocrites.
As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.
Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.
Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.
[0] https://www.defense.gov/News/Inside-DOD/Blog/article/2062735...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-aug-21-la-ca-mi...
Second, the USA/EU is not perfectly innocent wrt to propaganda, but still... it could be much worse.
The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.
Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.
That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.
Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).
Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.
O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.
Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?
Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.
Every country has it to some degree, authoritarian regimes typically go crazy with nationalism since it's the most powerful tool they have to force their victims on the side of the aggressors against the evil foreigners.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Equity loving" sects applaud disregarding national boarders, easy release of multiple time offenders, shouting down those who disagree, and the death of any vaccine protester.
Of course, the situation in Russian popular forums is not better in the slightest, and the relevant patterns of conspiratorial thinking are reproduced at even the smallest of scales all the time. It has become a bit of a trope on 4chan that some contingent of posters will, if more than one post disagrees with their viewpoint, immediately claim that the two posts were actually made by the same person sockpuppeting; and last time I checked the recurring threads for some video games I play (still among the best sources for real-time information and gossip about updates and what-not...), they were all getting torn apart by mutual accusations of off-site conspiracies (usually on Discord) to push some viewpoint or meme or another.
Plenty of groups of Western folks get super amped up over any threat to the continuity of their chosen self destructive, unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. Because freedom!
You can bring a horse to the library, but you can't make it read
One of the things I've learned in my years on this planet is that propaganda works. It works very very well. That's why governments, corporations, and special interests spend so much money on it.
In case anyone is curious, the group fka the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2005, they won a Grammy award. In 2007, they won five Grammies, including all three overall major categories (excluding "best new artist" from the four general field categories, because they weren't new). They are also the first female band in chart history to have three albums debut at No. 1.
In 2020, the group dropped the word "Dixie" from their name ... because of cancel culture? In any case, the Chicks then performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
It seems like the summary of their story is that at worst they "switched sides", attracting fewer fans from Texas (though their tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_%26_Accusations_Tour still finished with a couple shows in Texas) but more from the rest of the country, something they had struggled with. Harvey Weinstein even produced one of their films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks:_Shut_Up_and_Sing
Regarding the Dixie Chicks, I'm not sure that's a good exemplar to support your main point. (See sibling comment that suggests they did quite well.)
These are people who are simultaneously calling for America to be dissolved on the grounds of repaying for slavery while also arguing that the youth of Hong Kong are confused and mislead.
Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...
Escaped? Lolololol.
If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.
Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.
Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]
Don't get confused with the CSC who mainly give scholarships (tuition, accommodation, stipend) to non Chinese nationals to study in China.
Imagine a US college student studying overseas commenting about the US failures in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War over nonexistent WMDs. Would other US students harass that individual, and if so, would they report the individual to US "authorities" to make sure a message was passed on to the individuals parents?
I get riled up about bad opinions, but I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable or report them to authorities. Fuck man, I've got shit to do of my own.
But things like that often happen in the US, like, for example, in the case of people who spoke against the invasion of Iraq. This can even escalate further, I will never forget the “freedom fries” or “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!”
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but usually that level of zealotry requires a few years of career and relationship failure that's out of reach to the average student.
China is not a global power, it is a regional power.
Zealots make great cannon fodder, and the more cannon fodder the higher the chance of winning.
It bodes poorly for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and any other country with a coastline along the South China Sea.