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It is useful for people like Wang Yi and Xi Jinping to pin the "clash of civilizations" terminology on American hawks and seemingly wash their hands of it, but

It is useful for people like Wang Yi and Xi Jinping to pin the "clash of civilizations" terminology on American hawks and seemingly wash their hands of it, but the party media outlets still persist in implying that Chinese people and Americans (or is it "Western people"?) have fundamentally different values, and this is what I dispute. I really think it's disingenuous to imply that in a country of over a billion people, with countless regional traditions, where many different languages are spoken, there is a singular unified set of values that is somehow unique to within the political borders, as compared to people who live just across the mountain, just across the river, or just across the strait. It is a misunderstanding of American politics to imply that adopting socialism and intending to move toward communism is 180 degrees to their opposite. There are plenty of American politicians who admire socialism, and who call themselves socialists, and who would like to implement socialist policies - if not taking it all the way to communism. There are lots of grassroots communist publications in the US. Communism is discussed in school and universities, and it has champions in members of the public. In any case, your claim was that the West as a whole had different values to China, not just the US. There is explicit Communist Party representation in the EU and other Western governments, so even if it were true that all Chinese have exactly the same political values as defined by the CCP, it is not true that no people in the West share those. To get back on the actual topic, which is human rights, the UN has discussed human rights since the very beginning, and plenty of people from all around the world have agreed on some basic fundamentals, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and so on. Personally, I find it hard to believe that one country's citizens are so unique that a definition of human rights coincidentally matching their current authoritarian government's ideology is merely a difference of opinion that should be immune to foreign criticism. But also, personally, I do not think there is enough evidence to definitively call what is happening in Xinjiang "genocide". However, I also think that the words do not matter so much. The basic point is that it seems to be a universal human rights violation to imprison people solely because of their religious or cultural beliefs.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> There is explicit Communist Party representation in the EU and other Western governments, so even if it were true that all Chinese have exactly the same political values as defined by the CCP, it is not true that no people in the West share those. The post-Maoist CCP has very different ideology from Western Communist parties (heck, even the original Maoist CCP had a distinct ideology from the contemporary Stalinist Soviet Communist Party.) But even if ignoring that, it's the fallacy of composition to conflate “some people in the West have the same ideology as the dominant ideology of the PRC” with a contradiction to “the West as a whole has a different ideology than the PRC”.
justicezyx 6y ago
People are OK to throw radicals into internment camp, just because they showed signs of radical religious behavior. Are you OK with that? You did not seem to get the idea of clash of civilizations. That framing is about the civilization as a whole. In that scale, you cannot apply your concept of people individuals etc.
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  Personally, I am not okay with that. But also, I have lived in several countries (China included) where the government did exactly this, and I did not object, because I had no power, and anyway it did not much impact my life directly. When people have no power, it does not really matter whether they object or not. This is why you see Canadian politicians making bold statements about "genocide", but the vast majority of Canadians you meet on the street do not even know what a Uighur is, and even if they condemn the idea of internment of suspected terrorists in theory, they do not feel the need to make some statement on the record about the livelihood of people imprisoned 10,000km away. Many do not even care about people imprisoned in their own country. This, in fact, is very similar to how most people in China view things, and most people in the US, and many other countries too. Their immediate personal and household concerns outweigh their greater ideological beliefs. This is why I think it is misleading to imply that "China" and "the West" have diametrically opposed value systems. What might be true is that the political party currently governing China has a different ideology to many of the political parties currently governing other countries around the world. But that's just politics. The special situation in China is "party, government, military, civilian, and academic, north, south, east, west, and center, the party leads everything". So, in China, the average citizen will never have any power, not unless they filter through the party framework. This makes the party ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my opinion this is why people both inside China and outside China get the impression that there is such a thing as "Chinese values". In reality, I think ordinary people in China have just as much diversity of opinion and diversity of values as any other country, they just have less power to express it politically, so it seems more like a monolithic culture than it actually is. Of course, in any case, many people do not much care about political ideology anyway.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> There is explicit Communist Party representation in the EU and other Western governments, so even if it were true that all Chinese have exactly the same political values as defined by the CCP, it is not true that no people in the West share those. The post-Maoist CCP has very different ideology from Western Communist parties (heck, even the original Maoist CCP had a distinct ideology from the contemporary Stalinist Soviet Communist Party.) But even if ignoring that, it's the fallacy of composition to conflate “some people in the West have the same ideology as the dominant ideology of the PRC” with a contradiction to “the West as a whole has a different ideology than the PRC”.

justicezyx 6y ago

People are OK to throw radicals into internment camp, just because they showed signs of radical religious behavior. Are you OK with that? You did not seem to get the idea of clash of civilizations. That framing is about the civilization as a whole. In that scale, you cannot apply your concept of people individuals etc.

alisonatwork 6y ago
Personally, I am not okay with that. But also, I have lived in several countries (China included) where the government did exactly this, and I did not object, because I had no power, and anyway it did not much impact my life directly. When people have no power, it does not really matter whether they object or not. This is why you see Canadian politicians making bold statements about "genocide", but the vast majority of Canadians you meet on the street do not even know what a Uighur is, and even if they condemn the idea of internment of suspected terrorists in theory, they do not feel the need to make some statement on the record about the livelihood of people imprisoned 10,000km away. Many do not even care about people imprisoned in their own country. This, in fact, is very similar to how most people in China view things, and most people in the US, and many other countries too. Their immediate personal and household concerns outweigh their greater ideological beliefs. This is why I think it is misleading to imply that "China" and "the West" have diametrically opposed value systems. What might be true is that the political party currently governing China has a different ideology to many of the political parties currently governing other countries around the world. But that's just politics. The special situation in China is "party, government, military, civilian, and academic, north, south, east, west, and center, the party leads everything". So, in China, the average citizen will never have any power, not unless they filter through the party framework. This makes the party ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my opinion this is why people both inside China and outside China get the impression that there is such a thing as "Chinese values". In reality, I think ordinary people in China have just as much diversity of opinion and diversity of values as any other country, they just have less power to express it politically, so it seems more like a monolithic culture than it actually is. Of course, in any case, many people do not much care about political ideology anyway.