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At this point I'd say the goal should be to isolate China and make them suffer economically.. We can see what they've done to the people of Tibet, Hong Kong, Xi

At this point I'd say the goal should be to isolate China and make them suffer economically.. We can see what they've done to the people of Tibet, Hong Kong, Xijiang, those practicing Falun Gong and so many more. They're also stepping up their efforts of conquering Taiwan and the South China Sea.. the world can't keep turning a blind eye as their influence continue to grow.

boomboomsubban 8y ago
Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this worth preventing their influence from growing? Who benefits from it?
- ardy42 8y ago
  > Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this worth preventing their influence from growing? Who benefits from it? All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past [1]. Whatever can be done to prevent that is good in my book, especially since I think it's unlikely that these regimes will be content to limit their influence to their borders. [1] Nuclear weapons make them impossible to replace militarily, and digital surveillance + secret police may eventually make it impossible for internal change to replace them.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past So you're worried they'll use their influence to support authoritarian regimes in other countries? Maybe we should stop doing that ourselves before we start playing with Chinese lives.
  - simonh 8y ago
    I worry about this too. Pervasive surveillance and monitoring of communications could make an authoritarian regime super-stable and impossible to reform from within.
- BubRoss 8y ago
  That's a bold prediction when they are imprisoning so many people. I'm not sure why a flimsy assumption of the future for something that can't reliably be quantified would be used as a rationalization to do nothing.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    I can't come up with exact scenarios for what would happen, but the West has used it's influence to cripple the Chinese economy before and the results included famines killing millions.
simonh 8y ago
Isolation just doesn't work though, as I pointed out it's made zero difference to North Korea's behaviour and China was doing all the same things back when it was isolated. Arguably by making China more prosperous, we are empowering ordinary Chinese economically and eventually this could lead to broad demands for more political and social freedom. So it's quite possible sanctions would make the state more powerful with respect to individual citizens, not less. I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > Isolation just doesn't work though, as I pointed out it's made zero difference to North Korea's behaviour and China was doing all the same things back when it was isolated. > I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China. Except my understanding is that the modern PRC regime has staked its legitimacy on increasing living standards and economic development, since they de facto abandoned Communism. The regime itself fears an economic slowdown could loosen its grip on power. So, relatively onerous economy-slowing sanctions tied to demands for liberalization [1] may actually work pretty well, forcing the authoritarians to pick their poison. [1] e.g. make things like opening up the great firewall a condition for lowering tariffs/loosening embargoes.
  - simonh 8y ago
    If there is an economic slowdown and it does lead to challenges to the legitimacy of Communist rule, I think we'll find their source of legitimacy switches to the guns and jackboots variety PDQ. Honestly, is there any example ever where economic sanctions have forced a government to become less authoritarian?
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > Honestly, is there any example ever where economic sanctions have forced a government to become less authoritarian? Arguably the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. If they had been integrated into the Western economic system on favorable terms [1], material conditions there may not have been as bad and may not have fell in the late 80s/early 90s. [1] Such as being allowed to buy things on credit or buy advanced technology. IIRC, the Soviets were only allowed to trade with hard currency, and they were forbidden from buying most of the things they actually wanted.
dang 8y ago
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political, national, and ideological battle. That crosses into breaking the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, so would you please stop doing it? If you want to understand why we draw the line at "primarily", I've written a lot about it in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20primarily%20test https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- abc-xyz 8y ago
  If you feel that way then you better ban me because I know I'll continue to "primarily" advocate digital privacy, and condemn those who seek(/contribute) to turn the world into a surveillance dystopia.
  - dang 8y ago
    Those are fine goals, but fine goals aren't enough to prevent HN from burning itself down. Indeed, they're potent fuel for that, if people don't care about the purpose of this site or take care to protect it from becoming like the rest of the flaming internet. It's my job to prevent the latter from happening, even though I'm sure I agree with your goals. The loss of a community on the internet where people gather for intellectual curiosity would make the world a little more dystopian too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart?
    - abc-xyz 8y ago
      I think you've been doing a great job, the best of any networking site I've ever encountered (only Tildes appear to come even close in terms of purpose and leadership), and I truly wouldn't feel any resentment if you banned me because you felt the community would be better off without my comments. I think the place where we hold strong disagreement is in how to deal with evil. For instance I feel very confident that you (and almost every HN reader) agree that it's wrong and shameful that Apple would make it impossible for Macs brought in China to display Taiwan's national flag. I want to mention it whenever the context allows, even if it means repeating myself a thousand times, whereas you appear to prefer it being mentioned once and then never again. I feel my approach is necessary to achieve what I assume you agree is the morally right thing to do (that Apple will revert its decision and once again display their national flag). I of course also realize that it's you and not me who has to deal with moderating thousands of new comments every day, and that my comments likely make it much more tiresome for you to do your job. I can't stop making these comments, but I can agree to stop using nicknames such as Xitler. As for today's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554466), I feel what's happening here is the scariest thing I've read this year, and it deserves much more focus and not to be dismissed as unsubstantial because of guesswork. China does not deserve benefit of the doubt at this point, they've proven over and over again that they have little to no regard for human rights, that they want to censor everything that put them in a bad light, and that they'll take every opportunity to rewrite history for their benefit. This is a fact and only to what degree can be argued. Right now China can make UC Browser default on all Huawei, Lenovo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and many more devices. They've demonstrated countless times that they'll behave like a spoilt child to get it their way (e.g. fire an employee for liking a tweet thanking their company or we'll kick you out of the country).. they've just demonstrated they'll gladly censor a SSL protected page (before today I didn't even consider it was possible, did you?).. how can you not be scared? How can you not feel extremely confident that they'll end up modifying Google search results and abuse this in so many other ways? If they're willing to do it with a GitHub repo, why wouldn't they do the exact same thing with Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, etc? They're already forcing companies to censor and manipulate content, rewrite history.. if they could do it by themselves on a massive scale then why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they sell devices at a loss if it meant they could control these people to influence foreign policies? Honestly, I'd accuse you of being willfully naive if you saw a less evil outcome.

boomboomsubban 8y ago

Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this worth preventing their influence from growing? Who benefits from it?

ardy42 8y ago
> Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this worth preventing their influence from growing? Who benefits from it? All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past [1]. Whatever can be done to prevent that is good in my book, especially since I think it's unlikely that these regimes will be content to limit their influence to their borders. [1] Nuclear weapons make them impossible to replace militarily, and digital surveillance + secret police may eventually make it impossible for internal change to replace them.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past So you're worried they'll use their influence to support authoritarian regimes in other countries? Maybe we should stop doing that ourselves before we start playing with Chinese lives.
- simonh 8y ago
  I worry about this too. Pervasive surveillance and monitoring of communications could make an authoritarian regime super-stable and impossible to reform from within.
BubRoss 8y ago
That's a bold prediction when they are imprisoning so many people. I'm not sure why a flimsy assumption of the future for something that can't reliably be quantified would be used as a rationalization to do nothing.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  I can't come up with exact scenarios for what would happen, but the West has used it's influence to cripple the Chinese economy before and the results included famines killing millions.

simonh 8y ago

Isolation just doesn't work though, as I pointed out it's made zero difference to North Korea's behaviour and China was doing all the same things back when it was isolated. Arguably by making China more prosperous, we are empowering ordinary Chinese economically and eventually this could lead to broad demands for more political and social freedom. So it's quite possible sanctions would make the state more powerful with respect to individual citizens, not less. I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China.

ardy42 8y ago
> Isolation just doesn't work though, as I pointed out it's made zero difference to North Korea's behaviour and China was doing all the same things back when it was isolated. > I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China. Except my understanding is that the modern PRC regime has staked its legitimacy on increasing living standards and economic development, since they de facto abandoned Communism. The regime itself fears an economic slowdown could loosen its grip on power. So, relatively onerous economy-slowing sanctions tied to demands for liberalization [1] may actually work pretty well, forcing the authoritarians to pick their poison. [1] e.g. make things like opening up the great firewall a condition for lowering tariffs/loosening embargoes.
- simonh 8y ago
  If there is an economic slowdown and it does lead to challenges to the legitimacy of Communist rule, I think we'll find their source of legitimacy switches to the guns and jackboots variety PDQ. Honestly, is there any example ever where economic sanctions have forced a government to become less authoritarian?
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > Honestly, is there any example ever where economic sanctions have forced a government to become less authoritarian? Arguably the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. If they had been integrated into the Western economic system on favorable terms [1], material conditions there may not have been as bad and may not have fell in the late 80s/early 90s. [1] Such as being allowed to buy things on credit or buy advanced technology. IIRC, the Soviets were only allowed to trade with hard currency, and they were forbidden from buying most of the things they actually wanted.

dang 8y ago

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political, national, and ideological battle. That crosses into breaking the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, so would you please stop doing it? If you want to understand why we draw the line at "primarily", I've written a lot about it in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20primarily%20test https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

abc-xyz 8y ago
If you feel that way then you better ban me because I know I'll continue to "primarily" advocate digital privacy, and condemn those who seek(/contribute) to turn the world into a surveillance dystopia.
- dang 8y ago
  Those are fine goals, but fine goals aren't enough to prevent HN from burning itself down. Indeed, they're potent fuel for that, if people don't care about the purpose of this site or take care to protect it from becoming like the rest of the flaming internet. It's my job to prevent the latter from happening, even though I'm sure I agree with your goals. The loss of a community on the internet where people gather for intellectual curiosity would make the world a little more dystopian too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart?
  - abc-xyz 8y ago
    I think you've been doing a great job, the best of any networking site I've ever encountered (only Tildes appear to come even close in terms of purpose and leadership), and I truly wouldn't feel any resentment if you banned me because you felt the community would be better off without my comments. I think the place where we hold strong disagreement is in how to deal with evil. For instance I feel very confident that you (and almost every HN reader) agree that it's wrong and shameful that Apple would make it impossible for Macs brought in China to display Taiwan's national flag. I want to mention it whenever the context allows, even if it means repeating myself a thousand times, whereas you appear to prefer it being mentioned once and then never again. I feel my approach is necessary to achieve what I assume you agree is the morally right thing to do (that Apple will revert its decision and once again display their national flag). I of course also realize that it's you and not me who has to deal with moderating thousands of new comments every day, and that my comments likely make it much more tiresome for you to do your job. I can't stop making these comments, but I can agree to stop using nicknames such as Xitler. As for today's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554466), I feel what's happening here is the scariest thing I've read this year, and it deserves much more focus and not to be dismissed as unsubstantial because of guesswork. China does not deserve benefit of the doubt at this point, they've proven over and over again that they have little to no regard for human rights, that they want to censor everything that put them in a bad light, and that they'll take every opportunity to rewrite history for their benefit. This is a fact and only to what degree can be argued. Right now China can make UC Browser default on all Huawei, Lenovo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and many more devices. They've demonstrated countless times that they'll behave like a spoilt child to get it their way (e.g. fire an employee for liking a tweet thanking their company or we'll kick you out of the country).. they've just demonstrated they'll gladly censor a SSL protected page (before today I didn't even consider it was possible, did you?).. how can you not be scared? How can you not feel extremely confident that they'll end up modifying Google search results and abuse this in so many other ways? If they're willing to do it with a GitHub repo, why wouldn't they do the exact same thing with Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, etc? They're already forcing companies to censor and manipulate content, rewrite history.. if they could do it by themselves on a massive scale then why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they sell devices at a loss if it meant they could control these people to influence foreign policies? Honestly, I'd accuse you of being willfully naive if you saw a less evil outcome.