2 ms·

Well said. I think my post was a little misunderstood - it wasn't my intent to draw an equivalence. I was using the mass incarceration point as an example of ho

Well said. I think my post was a little misunderstood - it wasn't my intent to draw an equivalence. I was using the mass incarceration point as an example of how wolf warrior diplomats and the media in China disingenuously try to move the conversation away from injustices happening under the CCP. A sibling comment to yours raised Assange. That's another unfair comparison, when in 2020 alone over 100 journalists have been disappeared or detained in China. Assange has just been indicted and failed to appear in court. My point was that in order to have a constructive conversation, it might be better to acknowledge and compare the facts, rather than jumping in with emotional language in the vein of (paraphrased) "no matter how bad it is in the west, nothing can hold a candle to China".

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>That's another unfair comparison, when in 2020 alone over 100 journalists have been disappeared or detained in China. Assange has just been indicted and failed to appear in court. Assange has been indicted for his journalism acts, and there has already been a sham trial to push his extradition. This follows the years of what the UN calls torture we've already subjected him to. Further, in 2020 alone over 100 journalists have been detained in the US. https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-us/ https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-...
- elefanten 6y ago
  False, false, all false. Some of Assange's activity could be described as journalism, but a lot of it was not and clearly ran afoul of laws on the books. It is also a generationally-unique case and far from any kind of norm. Detentions of journalists in the context of protests etc needs to be carefully monitored but also has legitimate safety impacts in some cases. The trend in the US was not good this year, but it was an unusual year in multiple ways and the trend was not that bad either. The part that matters more is that very few are being tried for anything. A short detention is not "jailing journalists" in the traditional dictatorial sense.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    >but a lot of it was not and clearly ran afoul of laws on the books Though I find this claim to be ridiculous in general, even the US argument boils down to him claiming he'll help crack a password that provided no additional data and him saying "curious eyes never run dry." And a "generationally unique case" is the kind used to build precedent, like how locking up foreign journalists critical of the US is OK. Beyond that, you just have a baseless statement that US detention is justified and acceptable while Chinese detention is not.
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  Again, this is an unfair comparison, since in the US many detained journalists will not be charged, and if they are charged, they will almost certainly not be imprisoned. That doesn't mean that the Trump administration hasn't overseen an alarming increase in violence against journalists. But Trump is out, so let's see whether that trend holds up. The Xi administration - like all previous CCP administrations - can and does hold journalists without a charge, and once charged there is a 99% conviction rate. In the US right now there are 0 journalists in prison. In China there are at least 50 (per CPJ[0]), and possibly more if you include citizen journalists (per RSF[1]). In China, the government sends memos to the editorial boards indicating how they should report on topics. China Media Project[2] has some good insights there. Anecdotally, there are a lot of Chinese people who have experienced first-hand both the mainstream media and social media "deleting" events from history. In the west we often think about June 4 incident (Tiananmen), but there are far more cases that never made waves overseas. In particular reporting around natural disasters in rural areas can quickly get scrubbed from the internet and written out of history, or retold to pin the blame for a poor response on a politically useful scapegoat. I can't personally speak to the accuracy of those stories, but this is what I heard from several different colleagues and friends in China. Even just living in China through coronavirus, I was there when they literally went back and rewrote history to rename what had originally been called the Wuhan coronavirus to instead call it the novel coronavirus, a silent edit designed to quietly lend credence to growing social media rumors that suggested the virus originated overseas. This kind of manipulation of the truth is standard practice in the Chinese media, on many topics. Countries that have a free press, where anyone can publish whatever they like, whether on Substack or WikiLeaks or wherever, where the majority of arrests are happening because reporters were tangled up in the middle of a protest (and not because the police came to their door to punish them for something they already published), it's really not the same thing. [0] https://cpj.org/ https://cpj.org/ [1] https://rsf.org/en https://rsf.org/en [2] https://chinamediaproject.org/ https://chinamediaproject.org/

boomboomsubban 6y ago

>That's another unfair comparison, when in 2020 alone over 100 journalists have been disappeared or detained in China. Assange has just been indicted and failed to appear in court. Assange has been indicted for his journalism acts, and there has already been a sham trial to push his extradition. This follows the years of what the UN calls torture we've already subjected him to. Further, in 2020 alone over 100 journalists have been detained in the US. https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-us/ https://freedom.press/news/2020-report-journalists-arrested-...

elefanten 6y ago
False, false, all false. Some of Assange's activity could be described as journalism, but a lot of it was not and clearly ran afoul of laws on the books. It is also a generationally-unique case and far from any kind of norm. Detentions of journalists in the context of protests etc needs to be carefully monitored but also has legitimate safety impacts in some cases. The trend in the US was not good this year, but it was an unusual year in multiple ways and the trend was not that bad either. The part that matters more is that very few are being tried for anything. A short detention is not "jailing journalists" in the traditional dictatorial sense.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >but a lot of it was not and clearly ran afoul of laws on the books Though I find this claim to be ridiculous in general, even the US argument boils down to him claiming he'll help crack a password that provided no additional data and him saying "curious eyes never run dry." And a "generationally unique case" is the kind used to build precedent, like how locking up foreign journalists critical of the US is OK. Beyond that, you just have a baseless statement that US detention is justified and acceptable while Chinese detention is not.
alisonatwork 6y ago
Again, this is an unfair comparison, since in the US many detained journalists will not be charged, and if they are charged, they will almost certainly not be imprisoned. That doesn't mean that the Trump administration hasn't overseen an alarming increase in violence against journalists. But Trump is out, so let's see whether that trend holds up. The Xi administration - like all previous CCP administrations - can and does hold journalists without a charge, and once charged there is a 99% conviction rate. In the US right now there are 0 journalists in prison. In China there are at least 50 (per CPJ[0]), and possibly more if you include citizen journalists (per RSF[1]). In China, the government sends memos to the editorial boards indicating how they should report on topics. China Media Project[2] has some good insights there. Anecdotally, there are a lot of Chinese people who have experienced first-hand both the mainstream media and social media "deleting" events from history. In the west we often think about June 4 incident (Tiananmen), but there are far more cases that never made waves overseas. In particular reporting around natural disasters in rural areas can quickly get scrubbed from the internet and written out of history, or retold to pin the blame for a poor response on a politically useful scapegoat. I can't personally speak to the accuracy of those stories, but this is what I heard from several different colleagues and friends in China. Even just living in China through coronavirus, I was there when they literally went back and rewrote history to rename what had originally been called the Wuhan coronavirus to instead call it the novel coronavirus, a silent edit designed to quietly lend credence to growing social media rumors that suggested the virus originated overseas. This kind of manipulation of the truth is standard practice in the Chinese media, on many topics. Countries that have a free press, where anyone can publish whatever they like, whether on Substack or WikiLeaks or wherever, where the majority of arrests are happening because reporters were tangled up in the middle of a protest (and not because the police came to their door to punish them for something they already published), it's really not the same thing. [0] https://cpj.org/ https://cpj.org/ [1] https://rsf.org/en https://rsf.org/en [2] https://chinamediaproject.org/ https://chinamediaproject.org/