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China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. They're using machine learning to generate social scores. If you don't like America or the UK, you can lea

China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. They're using machine learning to generate social scores. If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave. Try doing that in China. Dying in a free zone is preferable to the enslavement that the Chinese are subjected to. Freedom has a price, and it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. The usual counterpoint here is the US incarceration rate.
- ecocentrik 6y ago
  There's also indefinite detention and family separations at temporary immigration detention facilities. Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
- jaekash 6y ago
  A prison is not a concentration camp, US has a justice system with the right to trial and appeal, and if the people in prison actually committed crimes then I'm not sure what the problem is.
  - jk20 6y ago
    Even people in concentration camps went through legal proceedings of sorts. See e.g. the infamous Article 58 of Soviet penal code. You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
    - jaekash 6y ago
      > You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up. > Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape? Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
  - p49k 6y ago
    Many people in prison in the US did not commit the crime they were accused of; thanks to wildly inflated sentencing, many people choose a 1-year plea bargain over a 10-15 year roll of the dice.
    - jaekash 6y ago
      > Many people in prison in the US did not commit crimes; By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp. Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      Still not even remotely comparable to the legal system in communist China. This whataboutism really needs to stop.
  - dsomers 6y ago
    When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. It’s more akin to the U.S. being ‘the skinniest kid in fat camp.’ Congratulations on being better than China and Saudi Arabia I guess...
    - jaekash 6y ago
      > When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread. And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
      - Larrikin 6y ago
        There were judges that were convicted of sending black kids to for profit prisons they held stock in. Believing there isn't systemic racism in the prosecutorial system at this point is the same as believing there isn't systemic racism in policing. Just because you aren't personally affected doesn't mean a problem isn't wide spread. This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.
deadfish 6y ago
You can leave China. There are millions of Chinese nationals living overseas.
- bluerobotcat 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai Can you though? Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That seems very similar to what a certain US citizen that now lives in Russia almost had happen to them.
    - bluerobotcat 6y ago
      The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too. However: - Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish. - Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed. I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does. Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so. In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition". I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds. Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1397634 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1... There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more. There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year. There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US. Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
__alexs 6y ago
> China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. Is putting other countries citizens in concentration camps somehow morally superior? > They're using machine learning to generate social scores. America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout". > If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave. Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then. > it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them. No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding. The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
- reaktivo 6y ago
  Don't forget about the prison population and the prison industrial complex in the US
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  > Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then. If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad. > No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding. No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    The motivation for the hypocrisy, if we're assuming good faith, is either chauvinism or racism.
    - RHSeeger 6y ago
      Or the fact that most people are inclined to look upon the actions of their own country with rose colored glasses, where they are less likely to do so for other countries. There's nothing racist about that.
dang 6y ago
Please stop posting nationalistic and/or ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's against the side guidelines, and it evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Waterfall 6y ago
  Hi, sorry I am not sure what you consider nationalistic, or a flamewar. I am not solely criticizing the east, in another post I consider the US stuck in the 50s. I have family in China+HK and do not like the cultural values now. What would have been a better way to post that? I think the comment is relevant in a thread about Huawei and 5g and why people are pushing back against China.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. The usual counterpoint here is the US incarceration rate.

ecocentrik 6y ago
There's also indefinite detention and family separations at temporary immigration detention facilities. Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
jaekash 6y ago
A prison is not a concentration camp, US has a justice system with the right to trial and appeal, and if the people in prison actually committed crimes then I'm not sure what the problem is.
- jk20 6y ago
  Even people in concentration camps went through legal proceedings of sorts. See e.g. the infamous Article 58 of Soviet penal code. You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
  - jaekash 6y ago
    > You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up. > Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape? Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
- p49k 6y ago
  Many people in prison in the US did not commit the crime they were accused of; thanks to wildly inflated sentencing, many people choose a 1-year plea bargain over a 10-15 year roll of the dice.
  - jaekash 6y ago
    > Many people in prison in the US did not commit crimes; By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp. Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Still not even remotely comparable to the legal system in communist China. This whataboutism really needs to stop.
- dsomers 6y ago
  When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. It’s more akin to the U.S. being ‘the skinniest kid in fat camp.’ Congratulations on being better than China and Saudi Arabia I guess...
  - jaekash 6y ago
    > When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread. And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
    - Larrikin 6y ago
      There were judges that were convicted of sending black kids to for profit prisons they held stock in. Believing there isn't systemic racism in the prosecutorial system at this point is the same as believing there isn't systemic racism in policing. Just because you aren't personally affected doesn't mean a problem isn't wide spread. This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.

deadfish 6y ago

You can leave China. There are millions of Chinese nationals living overseas.

bluerobotcat 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai Can you though? Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  That seems very similar to what a certain US citizen that now lives in Russia almost had happen to them.
  - bluerobotcat 6y ago
    The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too. However: - Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish. - Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed. I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does. Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so. In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition". I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds. Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1397634 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1... There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more. There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year. There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US. Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.

__alexs 6y ago

> China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. Is putting other countries citizens in concentration camps somehow morally superior? > They're using machine learning to generate social scores. America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout". > If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave. Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then. > it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them. No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding. The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."

reaktivo 6y ago
Don't forget about the prison population and the prison industrial complex in the US
RHSeeger 6y ago
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then. If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad. > No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding. No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  The motivation for the hypocrisy, if we're assuming good faith, is either chauvinism or racism.
  - RHSeeger 6y ago
    Or the fact that most people are inclined to look upon the actions of their own country with rose colored glasses, where they are less likely to do so for other countries. There's nothing racist about that.

dang 6y ago

Please stop posting nationalistic and/or ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's against the side guidelines, and it evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Waterfall 6y ago
Hi, sorry I am not sure what you consider nationalistic, or a flamewar. I am not solely criticizing the east, in another post I consider the US stuck in the 50s. I have family in China+HK and do not like the cultural values now. What would have been a better way to post that? I think the comment is relevant in a thread about Huawei and 5g and why people are pushing back against China.