8 ms·

To admonish, you'd have to 1) Stop buying Chinese made products 2) Stop US violations of human rights (gitmo) Frankly, without doing this, you'd never be able

To admonish, you'd have to 1) Stop buying Chinese made products 2) Stop US violations of human rights (gitmo) Frankly, without doing this, you'd never be able to admonish and have it carry any real weight with Chinese policy makers. They'd just see a black pot calling out the kettle.

krona 10y ago
> 2) Stop US violations of human rights (gitmo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- idra 10y ago
  Is invoked in EVERY China-related thread on HN pretty much without exceptions.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 10y ago
    And Russia, and right vs left, etc. Invocation of whataboutism is a mind bug and a lazy excuse to be one-sided that has to die. And it's not just a "let's focus on X FOR NOW" issue (which would still be wrong, as issues should be judged relatively to gauge their importance). It's mainly invoked by people who never bother to point fingers on the non-X sides, so the "let's focus on X FOR NOW" is more like "let's focus on X permanently".
    - megous 10y ago
      Invocation of whataboutism is not a mind bug. It's the problem of never acknowledging your own issues and deflecting the criticism/concerns. The hypothetical interaction that would go "US: Hey China, we worry about your policy X. China: Hey US, we sort of understand where you're coming from, given your history. We also see similar issue with some of your policies..." would be perfectly fine.
- vetinari 10y ago
  In other words, do as I say, not as I do, otherwise I will call you names. You aren't going to push debate forward with this.
  - krona 10y ago
    It's like you're assuming I'm American.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      It's not important, whether you are American or not. See coldtea's reasoning bellow. BBC, The Economist or Edward Lucas are not Americans either.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Yes he is. I wonder if they teach whataboutism as a core argumentation technique in Chinese schools. No one is perfect, if perfection is necessary to criticise or even just report news, then nothing will be criticised or reported.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  There's a good Chomsky quote about this: "Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? Why did people here decide that Sakharov was a moral person? I think he was. Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical-he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, "I don't know anything about them, I don't care about them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities." And that was right-because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to influence. Again, it's a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions."
- coldtea 10y ago
  So, my sins don't matter, let's ALWAYS focus on the other side's sins. AKA my country, right or wrong. AKA, refusal to accept that value judgements are relative, not god given absolutes. AKA, priority (let's focus on X and only X now) without actually prioritizing (let's compare to see if X is actually the major offender we should be focusing on)
  - laurent123456 10y ago
    There's 41 people in Guatanamo, but there's 1.3 billion people in China. Sure there might be human right issues in the US and in other Western democracies but not at the same scale as China.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Who said this should be limited to Guatanamo? E.g. there are 1.5 million people in US prisons, the 25% of the world's prison population for a country with a mere 4% of the world's people. Predominantly black too. How's that not a huge human rights issue? Or the police abuse/innocent shootings, in numbers unheard of even in developing backwater countries? But even more so, who said the 1.3 billion people in China are "victims" needing our compassion? Have you asked them whether they like their government and how their country is going? And don't just ask some group back in the 90s in Tiananmen square -- because we could always ask the Kent State students in 1970, the blacks in Selma, the OWS, the Tea Party, the ones protesting against Bush/Obama/Trump etc and get a picture that wouldn't necessarily be what most of American's feel too. There surely are human right abuses in China. But it's the Chinese (the people, not the government) that should define what they are, through their own values and preferences, not some finger pointing foreigners. Especially from countries with a large history of plundering, which also involves China (opium wars, etc) and most of the Pacific.
      - PJDK 10y ago
        > But even more so, who said the 1.3 billion people in China are "victims" needing our compassion? Have you asked them whether they like their government and how their country is going? From the article "We'd arranged to meet a woman in her village in China's central Hunan Province and to then travel with her by train to Beijing, filming as we went. But we never did get to meet our interviewee. The story we ended up with, however, reveals more about the exercise of power in China than any interview ever could. It is one that involves violence, intimidation and a forced confession - my first in my long reporting experience in China - in which I found myself apologising for "behaviour causing a bad impact" and for trying to conduct an "illegal interview"." So, yes, this exact story is about asking Chinese people about their government and having their equipment smashed and being forced to sign confessions for their efforts. It should certainly be for the Chinese to define these things, the fact they can't is rather the point.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  The OP is not invoking whataboutism. It's actually an important point. If the US (or any other western country) tries to admonish China there are plenty of human rights violations in our own countries which China will come back with. The point is that they will be able to engage in whataboutism. In global politics hypocrisy (why do we need to call it whataboutism?) is going to come back to bite you.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    A century of examples from Russia and American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
  - seppin 10y ago
    No, it's textbook false equivalency. When Gitmo was called "the gulag of our time", the UN failed to mention that while Gitmo had about 150 prisoners at it's peak, Sibera had tens of millions. It's not an appropriate comparison.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    > In global politics hypocrisy (why do we need to call it whataboutism?) is going to come back to bite you. No, that is exactly the very definition of a whataboutism! Many Chinese feel like they always need the high ground, and if their criticiser is not "perfect", whatever they say is null and void. This is just nuts, because no one is perfect.
    - srssays 10y ago
      There's a slight difference between being "not perfect" and having a torture camp and a president who says the US doesn't torture enough people (!). When the US preaches about human rights it devalues the concept. That makes it harder to hold countries like China to account.
      - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        What do US torture camps have anything to do with BBC journalists? Really, what? And anyways, how do US torture camps compare to Chinese torture camps? Its not like China is a paragon of virtue here, torture by the police is a huge problem that even the gov admits to (hey, police shouldn't torture people, please don't, it makes us look bad). > When the US preaches about human rights it devalues the concept. And who is the "US"? It is like some unified person that speaks with one voice? Is the NyTimes the US? Is the BBC the US? When I speak out on China, am I the US? > That makes it harder to hold countries like China to account. That is a straw man. We can't hold China to account for their human rights behavior, we have no right to do that. But we can damn be sure that everyone knows about it. I would expect the same for other countries with respect to the US.
- taneq 10y ago
  Actually it's more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
  - seppin 10y ago
    Hypocrisy isn't a crime, and it doesn't erase crimes either.
Drakim 10y ago
What if I don't live in the US?
- coldtea 10y ago
  Then you still need to have a perspective (which includes seeing what all players are doing) instead of merely choosing one side. Especially since lots of those not living in the US, e.g. in large parts of Europe still take a lot of US-based worldviews and US-influenced news in (the "Americanization of Europe").
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    we're trying our best not to...
crdoconnor 10y ago
Making trade agreements contingent on human rights would help.
- sgift 10y ago
  The EU tried this with Africa, doesn't work so great as long as there are countries which don't do it. That's one of the reasons China is successful in Africa, they don't care what the countries do as long as China gets what it wants.
  - fjdlwlv 10y ago
    If only there were a mulitlateral trade agreement that could unite all the western and Pacific nations in a Partnership against Chinese abuses.
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      The TPP actually had a rider on it preventing the deal from going through with countries that practice slavery. This effectively ruled out Malaysia. In what is probably the lowest point in his career Obama objected and effectively said that slightly lower trade barriers mattered more than slavery.
    - jza00425 10y ago
      How honorable! Try to force Chinese to bend their knees.
PakG1 10y ago
They'd just see a black pot calling out the kettle. Not they would. They DO. But honestly, despite its evident corruption that even their own leader admits is the biggest threat to the viability of their government, their government still strikes me as more competent in a gets-shit-done way than most other countries I see these days (considering only G20 countries, the smaller your country is, the less complex your problems are, and consider that China's problems are MASSIVE). Canadian living in China, amazed by how well things get done here, despite the massive problems they have. Albeit they aren't a democracy, so they don't need to care as much about doing what people want. On the flip side, the government is focusing mostly on what people want anyway, so it mostly works out. People who are ignorant about China are significantly ignorant about how well-run their government is. It's much more of a meritocracy than other countries' governments are, despite the evident corruption. I'm not justifying abusing human rights. I am torn in that I don't know how they keep a handle on their country if they don't have an iron fist. I find that most people who say otherwise are ignorant about the complex reality in China. It's not a simple situation.
- muglug 10y ago
  The problem highlighted here is that a lack of free press in China means you will never know the scale of corruption, especially at a provincial level. Unless you have access to a vast underground network of informers, I don't much trust your view that the government is 'well-run'.
  - PakG1 10y ago
    I'd say the question is what does "well-run" mean? Does it mean infrastructure is getting built at a high-quality level, GDP per capita is rising, life expectancy is increasing, quality of life is increasing, and so on? All of that stuff is happening in China, and the world doesn't require a free press to confirm that. Again, people who don't know much about China don't know about the details of what's happening on the ground. They just see all this fear-mongering in the press about how horrible and evil China and its government is. The truth is always much more nuanced. Everyone lives in their own echo chamber. Just some people aren't aware that they do. If Clinton supporters didn't live in such an echo chamber, they wouldn't have realized how out of touch they were with all the people who voted for Trump, and how angry all those Trump supporters were at the establishment. If the Trump supporters didn't live in such an echo chamber, they wouldn't have elected someone who looks like he doesn't know what he's doing. Again, Xi Jiping is on record saying that corruption is the biggest risk being faced by the Chinese government. He is on record saying that the Communist Party's future depends on stamping out corruption. Their methods for identifying and stamping out corruption may or may not work. But it is disingenuous for anyone to suggest that their government is either ignorant of the level of corruption or actively trying to hide it. You didn't say that. But constantly focusing on corruption is preaching to the choir. Would a free press help? It may, it may not. It may not because a free press is also a blunt instrument. You have a large percentage of the population that's uneducated and easily manipulated. Think fake news and alternative facts are a problem in the US? China does not want to open that Pandora's Box. Seeing what's happening in the US, I don't blame them. A lot of China's problems require finesse in terms of sound long-term policy and policy execution, and I am sad to say that after living here for a while, I agree that a free press could whip uneducated masses into an unproductive frenzy. This situation is very dissimilar to how Wycliffe, Huss, and Luther translated the Bible to English to free them from control of the Catholic Church. These people are often literate already, thank you very much.
simonh 10y ago
Stopping buying Chinese products isn't going to help anyone in China and isn't going to hurt the Chinese government even slightly. In fact arguably supporting the growth of the economy outside the government sector in the long term could be the single most important factor in opening the country up by lkeading ona path from expectations of property rights to expectations of civil rights. Frankly there is very little we as individuals outside China can directly do about the situation over there. Maybe contribute to some charities or such that operate in China? They have to be very careful not to be seen as interfering politically, but just the fact of them existing and doing good work can help establish a culture of civic engagement and responsibility. Your second point is bang on. Restrictions on free speech and rights, intrusions into private life and communications over here, all of that is hugely harmful not just to ourselves but also to our moral authority and expectations of civil liberties across the world.
ajross 10y ago
Your point is that the 41 people held at Guantanamo Bay invalidate every human rights criticism made by an American? I don't follow. You don't need to think the Gitmo nether void is a good or just thing to realize that there are staggeringly larger human rights violations in the world...
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Ad hominem appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque) is not a valid argument. The pot can call the kettle black, and be objectively correct. The kettle can then call the pot black, and be objectively correct. It makes no difference if neither one subsequently goes over to the kitchen sink to take a bath in the dishwater.

krona 10y ago

> 2) Stop US violations of human rights (gitmo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

idra 10y ago
Is invoked in EVERY China-related thread on HN pretty much without exceptions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago
  And Russia, and right vs left, etc. Invocation of whataboutism is a mind bug and a lazy excuse to be one-sided that has to die. And it's not just a "let's focus on X FOR NOW" issue (which would still be wrong, as issues should be judged relatively to gauge their importance). It's mainly invoked by people who never bother to point fingers on the non-X sides, so the "let's focus on X FOR NOW" is more like "let's focus on X permanently".
  - megous 10y ago
    Invocation of whataboutism is not a mind bug. It's the problem of never acknowledging your own issues and deflecting the criticism/concerns. The hypothetical interaction that would go "US: Hey China, we worry about your policy X. China: Hey US, we sort of understand where you're coming from, given your history. We also see similar issue with some of your policies..." would be perfectly fine.
vetinari 10y ago
In other words, do as I say, not as I do, otherwise I will call you names. You aren't going to push debate forward with this.
- krona 10y ago
  It's like you're assuming I'm American.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    It's not important, whether you are American or not. See coldtea's reasoning bellow. BBC, The Economist or Edward Lucas are not Americans either.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Yes he is. I wonder if they teach whataboutism as a core argumentation technique in Chinese schools. No one is perfect, if perfection is necessary to criticise or even just report news, then nothing will be criticised or reported.
crdoconnor 10y ago
There's a good Chomsky quote about this: "Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? Why did people here decide that Sakharov was a moral person? I think he was. Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical-he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, "I don't know anything about them, I don't care about them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities." And that was right-because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to influence. Again, it's a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions."
coldtea 10y ago
So, my sins don't matter, let's ALWAYS focus on the other side's sins. AKA my country, right or wrong. AKA, refusal to accept that value judgements are relative, not god given absolutes. AKA, priority (let's focus on X and only X now) without actually prioritizing (let's compare to see if X is actually the major offender we should be focusing on)
- laurent123456 10y ago
  There's 41 people in Guatanamo, but there's 1.3 billion people in China. Sure there might be human right issues in the US and in other Western democracies but not at the same scale as China.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Who said this should be limited to Guatanamo? E.g. there are 1.5 million people in US prisons, the 25% of the world's prison population for a country with a mere 4% of the world's people. Predominantly black too. How's that not a huge human rights issue? Or the police abuse/innocent shootings, in numbers unheard of even in developing backwater countries? But even more so, who said the 1.3 billion people in China are "victims" needing our compassion? Have you asked them whether they like their government and how their country is going? And don't just ask some group back in the 90s in Tiananmen square -- because we could always ask the Kent State students in 1970, the blacks in Selma, the OWS, the Tea Party, the ones protesting against Bush/Obama/Trump etc and get a picture that wouldn't necessarily be what most of American's feel too. There surely are human right abuses in China. But it's the Chinese (the people, not the government) that should define what they are, through their own values and preferences, not some finger pointing foreigners. Especially from countries with a large history of plundering, which also involves China (opium wars, etc) and most of the Pacific.
    - PJDK 10y ago
      > But even more so, who said the 1.3 billion people in China are "victims" needing our compassion? Have you asked them whether they like their government and how their country is going? From the article "We'd arranged to meet a woman in her village in China's central Hunan Province and to then travel with her by train to Beijing, filming as we went. But we never did get to meet our interviewee. The story we ended up with, however, reveals more about the exercise of power in China than any interview ever could. It is one that involves violence, intimidation and a forced confession - my first in my long reporting experience in China - in which I found myself apologising for "behaviour causing a bad impact" and for trying to conduct an "illegal interview"." So, yes, this exact story is about asking Chinese people about their government and having their equipment smashed and being forced to sign confessions for their efforts. It should certainly be for the Chinese to define these things, the fact they can't is rather the point.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
The OP is not invoking whataboutism. It's actually an important point. If the US (or any other western country) tries to admonish China there are plenty of human rights violations in our own countries which China will come back with. The point is that they will be able to engage in whataboutism. In global politics hypocrisy (why do we need to call it whataboutism?) is going to come back to bite you.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  A century of examples from Russia and American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
- seppin 10y ago
  No, it's textbook false equivalency. When Gitmo was called "the gulag of our time", the UN failed to mention that while Gitmo had about 150 prisoners at it's peak, Sibera had tens of millions. It's not an appropriate comparison.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  > In global politics hypocrisy (why do we need to call it whataboutism?) is going to come back to bite you. No, that is exactly the very definition of a whataboutism! Many Chinese feel like they always need the high ground, and if their criticiser is not "perfect", whatever they say is null and void. This is just nuts, because no one is perfect.
  - srssays 10y ago
    There's a slight difference between being "not perfect" and having a torture camp and a president who says the US doesn't torture enough people (!). When the US preaches about human rights it devalues the concept. That makes it harder to hold countries like China to account.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      What do US torture camps have anything to do with BBC journalists? Really, what? And anyways, how do US torture camps compare to Chinese torture camps? Its not like China is a paragon of virtue here, torture by the police is a huge problem that even the gov admits to (hey, police shouldn't torture people, please don't, it makes us look bad). > When the US preaches about human rights it devalues the concept. And who is the "US"? It is like some unified person that speaks with one voice? Is the NyTimes the US? Is the BBC the US? When I speak out on China, am I the US? > That makes it harder to hold countries like China to account. That is a straw man. We can't hold China to account for their human rights behavior, we have no right to do that. But we can damn be sure that everyone knows about it. I would expect the same for other countries with respect to the US.
taneq 10y ago
Actually it's more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
- seppin 10y ago
  Hypocrisy isn't a crime, and it doesn't erase crimes either.

Drakim 10y ago

What if I don't live in the US?

coldtea 10y ago
Then you still need to have a perspective (which includes seeing what all players are doing) instead of merely choosing one side. Especially since lots of those not living in the US, e.g. in large parts of Europe still take a lot of US-based worldviews and US-influenced news in (the "Americanization of Europe").
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  we're trying our best not to...

crdoconnor 10y ago

Making trade agreements contingent on human rights would help.

sgift 10y ago
The EU tried this with Africa, doesn't work so great as long as there are countries which don't do it. That's one of the reasons China is successful in Africa, they don't care what the countries do as long as China gets what it wants.
- fjdlwlv 10y ago
  If only there were a mulitlateral trade agreement that could unite all the western and Pacific nations in a Partnership against Chinese abuses.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    The TPP actually had a rider on it preventing the deal from going through with countries that practice slavery. This effectively ruled out Malaysia. In what is probably the lowest point in his career Obama objected and effectively said that slightly lower trade barriers mattered more than slavery.
  - jza00425 10y ago
    How honorable! Try to force Chinese to bend their knees.

PakG1 10y ago

They'd just see a black pot calling out the kettle. Not they would. They DO. But honestly, despite its evident corruption that even their own leader admits is the biggest threat to the viability of their government, their government still strikes me as more competent in a gets-shit-done way than most other countries I see these days (considering only G20 countries, the smaller your country is, the less complex your problems are, and consider that China's problems are MASSIVE). Canadian living in China, amazed by how well things get done here, despite the massive problems they have. Albeit they aren't a democracy, so they don't need to care as much about doing what people want. On the flip side, the government is focusing mostly on what people want anyway, so it mostly works out. People who are ignorant about China are significantly ignorant about how well-run their government is. It's much more of a meritocracy than other countries' governments are, despite the evident corruption. I'm not justifying abusing human rights. I am torn in that I don't know how they keep a handle on their country if they don't have an iron fist. I find that most people who say otherwise are ignorant about the complex reality in China. It's not a simple situation.

muglug 10y ago
The problem highlighted here is that a lack of free press in China means you will never know the scale of corruption, especially at a provincial level. Unless you have access to a vast underground network of informers, I don't much trust your view that the government is 'well-run'.
- PakG1 10y ago
  I'd say the question is what does "well-run" mean? Does it mean infrastructure is getting built at a high-quality level, GDP per capita is rising, life expectancy is increasing, quality of life is increasing, and so on? All of that stuff is happening in China, and the world doesn't require a free press to confirm that. Again, people who don't know much about China don't know about the details of what's happening on the ground. They just see all this fear-mongering in the press about how horrible and evil China and its government is. The truth is always much more nuanced. Everyone lives in their own echo chamber. Just some people aren't aware that they do. If Clinton supporters didn't live in such an echo chamber, they wouldn't have realized how out of touch they were with all the people who voted for Trump, and how angry all those Trump supporters were at the establishment. If the Trump supporters didn't live in such an echo chamber, they wouldn't have elected someone who looks like he doesn't know what he's doing. Again, Xi Jiping is on record saying that corruption is the biggest risk being faced by the Chinese government. He is on record saying that the Communist Party's future depends on stamping out corruption. Their methods for identifying and stamping out corruption may or may not work. But it is disingenuous for anyone to suggest that their government is either ignorant of the level of corruption or actively trying to hide it. You didn't say that. But constantly focusing on corruption is preaching to the choir. Would a free press help? It may, it may not. It may not because a free press is also a blunt instrument. You have a large percentage of the population that's uneducated and easily manipulated. Think fake news and alternative facts are a problem in the US? China does not want to open that Pandora's Box. Seeing what's happening in the US, I don't blame them. A lot of China's problems require finesse in terms of sound long-term policy and policy execution, and I am sad to say that after living here for a while, I agree that a free press could whip uneducated masses into an unproductive frenzy. This situation is very dissimilar to how Wycliffe, Huss, and Luther translated the Bible to English to free them from control of the Catholic Church. These people are often literate already, thank you very much.

simonh 10y ago

Stopping buying Chinese products isn't going to help anyone in China and isn't going to hurt the Chinese government even slightly. In fact arguably supporting the growth of the economy outside the government sector in the long term could be the single most important factor in opening the country up by lkeading ona path from expectations of property rights to expectations of civil rights. Frankly there is very little we as individuals outside China can directly do about the situation over there. Maybe contribute to some charities or such that operate in China? They have to be very careful not to be seen as interfering politically, but just the fact of them existing and doing good work can help establish a culture of civic engagement and responsibility. Your second point is bang on. Restrictions on free speech and rights, intrusions into private life and communications over here, all of that is hugely harmful not just to ourselves but also to our moral authority and expectations of civil liberties across the world.

ajross 10y ago

Your point is that the 41 people held at Guantanamo Bay invalidate every human rights criticism made by an American? I don't follow. You don't need to think the Gitmo nether void is a good or just thing to realize that there are staggeringly larger human rights violations in the world...

logfromblammo 10y ago
Ad hominem appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque) is not a valid argument. The pot can call the kettle black, and be objectively correct. The kettle can then call the pot black, and be objectively correct. It makes no difference if neither one subsequently goes over to the kitchen sink to take a bath in the dishwater.