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"How China buys the silence of the world’s human rights critics": https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2101795/how-china-buys-silence-world
by sehugg 7y ago
"How China buys the silence of the world’s human rights critics": https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2101795/how-china-buys-silence-worlds-human-rights-critics https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...
Even in the 90s, when this was a prominent issue in American minds, when the State Department would offer the occasional "stiff rebuke", politicians told us that trade would inevitably move China toward an open democratic society.
- api 7y agoI think you just nailed the narrative that has been proven wrong: that free trade would move them toward an open society. More generally I think recent history has disproven a core tenet of libertarianism: that personal and societal level freedom are inseparable from economic freedom and capitalism (in the liberal meaning of the term) and the prosperity it generates. China proves that capitalism works just fine and even "benefits" (in a raw GDP sense) from an otherwise totalitarian state and that personal freedom and human dignity are optional. Pushing back on China is one of the very few things I agree with the Trump administration about, and I think it was bound to happen anyway without them. The deal was that we would open generous free trade with China and they would liberalize and open up to us. They broke the deal in multiple ways, taking that economic growth and then closing their markets and re-embracing totalitarianism.
- zzzcpan 7y ago> that personal freedom and human dignity are optional Political freedom that is. Personal freedom and human dignity are optional in "open societies" too with many countries having it worse than in China.