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(Disclaimer: I'm a franco-Canadian of mixed European descent.) This article doesn't give China a great image, sure. I can think of a million criticisms to levy

by epgui 5y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm a franco-Canadian of mixed European descent.) This article doesn't give China a great image, sure. I can think of a million criticisms to levy against China. However, I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China. I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power. I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of appreciating the things that China gets right, or does right. I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong, or do wrong. I wonder if we here in the West are as fair and balanced as we tend to think. This isn't merely an academic question, I think it goes to the core of the state of mind that is required to view situations objectively (regardless of whether we might be right or wrong in any specific context). In this case, I'm totally on Wikimedia's side. But I feel like we in the West are standing right on the slippery slope of nationalism.

ashtonkem 5y ago
> I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong, or do wrong. Why would you wonder that? This forum is chock full of criticism of the American government by Americans. I’ve personally levied a huge amount of it myself on this very website. In fact, I genuinely cannot imagine how you could possibly ask such a question in good faith.
- trasz 5y ago
  It’s a valid question, given that US perpetrators never meet justice and the society isn’t even trying to do anything about it.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Assuming that every American is incapable of questioning their government because entrenched systems protect the powerful is exactly the kind of thing OP was accusing others here of doing: crossing the line between criticizing the government and being anti the people.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Yeahbut(TM) the lions share of the criticism of American government that takes place on sites like this one is not people looking at and evaluating the things that happen in America but simply people repeating tropes to indicate membership of one tribe or another. You gotta go like five layers of comments deep before people making comments that are the result of substantive thought outnumber the people firing off tropes for virtue points.
musicale 5y ago
There's a difference between being anti-CCP and anti-China.
- Fricken 5y ago
  No difference really. Domestic approval ratings for the CCP are through the roof. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-china-grow-more-negative-chinese-support-for-their-government-ri https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-chi...
  - joyeuse6701 5y ago
    Does that include Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan? They're 'Domestic' according to the CCP right?
    - Fricken 5y ago
      The total population of those 3 regions amounts to 50 million, less than 4% of China.
      - schleck8 5y ago
        And yet Xinjiang makes up for 20 % of arrests in the entire country. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/19/chinas-treatment-of-uighurs-is-crimes-against-humanity-report https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/19/chinas-treatment-of...
        jikbd 5y ago
        Have you ever heard of the FBI crime statistics?
        schleck8 5y ago
        This just goes to prove that something about the politics in Xinjiang is not right.
smoldesu 5y ago
I think it will be hard to applaud China for anything until they stop systematically oppressing their Uighur population and quit terrorizing places like Taiwan for no reason. Maybe then it will be possible to reconcile our petty differences, but human rights abuses come first.
- King-Aaron 5y ago
  > I think it will be hard to applaud The United States for anything until they stop systematically oppressing their african-american population and quit terrorizing places like The Middle East for no reason. I'm certainly not trying to advocate an anti-US or anti-China stance here, but your comment can easily be turned around by the CCP for the same reasons when it comes to criticism of their internal affairs.
Glyptodon 5y ago
Does it really matter if they get anything right when they committing genocide against the Uighurs, ignoring their treaty obligations, and trying to make the whole world follow their lead in censorship and undermining any aspirations to an impartiality before and equality under the law? It's plain "whataboutism" not any different than folks being impressed with Nazi Germany before WWII. Which isn't to say that the "west" is perfect or good, or not stooping in the same direction as China. Obviously nationalism in the west is a problem, too, but I don't see that as a reason to give one of the most bellicose and thin-skinned nations on earth a pass.
- epgui 5y ago
  Yes, it matters. Goods and wrongs don't cancel out, but they both matter. It's funny you mention whataboutism, because that's what I was about to mention too. This really goes to my main point: it's important to be able to levy criticism and to NOT give anyone a free pass, but many of the comments in here seem to be implicitly (and arguably, erroneously) splitting world actors into "good" and "evil". Hence the "us vs them" mentality and the mounting nationalism.
  - Glyptodon 5y ago
    Unfortunately there are things that are beyond permissible in this world - the holocaust was supposed to be never again. Trying to say "oh, but the west has problems too" when there aren't any comparable attempts at large-scale genocide ongoing is crazy. Not because the west doesn't have problems. Or because the west is somehow angelic. But because it's like comparing a nuke to a house fire. And some things really are evil in a whole different way.
    - epgui 5y ago
      > Trying to say "oh, but the west has problems too" when there aren't any comparable attempts at large-scale genocide ongoing is crazy. Again, this is not what I was trying to say, and if it came across that way then I was misunderstood or I did not express myself correctly. I can see how what I wrote could have been interpreted that way, but I would really encourage you to apply the "charitable interpretation" principle. I would also note that the topic of genocide is different from the original topic of conversation. While my comment was of a more general scope than the wiki drama, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that I'm trying to change the topic or deflect attention by way of whataboutism. --- Edit: reconsidering this thread, I think I would like to clarify that what my comment was trying to get at was that a lot of the criticism being levied against China suffered from the "genetic fallacy" [1]: regardless of whether the criticism was right or wrong, some of it didn't address the matter at hand (the wiki drama) and instead resorted to criticizing the world actor based on other baggage. It's not that the conclusion of the critiques is wrong per se, it's more that it might be right only by accident. I hope this helps clarify. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
jhedwards 5y ago
> I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong I feel like this is practically a sport in America. We love to criticize the government and everything it does wrong. That's part of democracy: the fact that Trump was voted out was very much a collective "we fucked up/this is wrong" where we decided to go a different path. In China, on the other hand, that is not allowed. We certainly do have issues in the US, but a lack to self-criticism does not count among them
wolverine876 5y ago
> I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China. Which ones? I don't see it myself.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
Does the CCP get much right?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  It is a complicated question. If you look at the results, China is now the ascending/aspiring world power. And they got here in how much time? From that perspective, they got a lot right. Worse, US planners got a lot wrong.
- epgui 5y ago
  Setting aside political beliefs/leanings, it would be very difficult to argue that they don't get a lot of things right. This type of rhetorical question or quip is a pretty good example of the mentality I was drawing attention to in my comment: it's entirely possible to think that something is generally bad (eg.: you might think the CCP is, on balance, not great or even terrible) while also recognizing that there are positive aspects to it. Recognizing the pros of a thing doesn't mean you have to forget about the cons. Being able to hold both in one's head at the same time also helps formulate better criticism of the bad things, as such criticism often becomes more precise. The heuristic of "CCP/China = bad" may very well be correct in a particular situation, but such heuristics are a very dangerous mode of thinking.
  - fennecfoxy 5y ago
    Gosh all your comments are just a roundabout fluff-fest dude. The CCP is committing some of the most tragic modern atrocities. The iron grip of the CCP and their "one china" brain-washing is ruining China for what it could be and the blood will be on your collective paws for generations.
sunir 5y ago
If you’re on Wikimedia’s side there is negative value in throwing chaffe into the conversation about imperial saber rattling. Focus on the ball please.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spacehunt 5y ago
You know what? Replace "Americans/Westerners" with "Hong Kongers", and you get the exact same phrases that were thrown at us, again and again, for over 20 years, until our entire way of life is gone. Ignore our warnings at your peril.
nova22033 5y ago
I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong You're shifting the goalposts...Has America or any western country blocked the wikimedia foundation from entering WIPO?
CogitoCogito 5y ago
> However, I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China. > I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power. > I wonder if we here in the West are as fair and balanced as we tend to think. All of that is unquestionably true. But what does it have to do with criticizing China's actions here? The criticism could be coming from anti-China bigots, yet still be entirely legitimate.
fennecfoxy 5y ago
>I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power Of course, but in many ways it's the threat of the same shift in power between the allies and the axis in WWII. China is not a nice country. Openly imprisoning and "re-educating" uyghurs there, Tibet, Taiwan, openly hunting down and organ harvesting the falun-gong. The West does plenty of bad stuff too but nothing on the same level, and definitely not as openly as if saying "what're you going to do about it". Same as Russia assassinating people recently, it's a "what're you going to do about it?" scenario. Now that nuclear weapons exists the world is going to go to shit because nobody can do anything about it anymore.

by epgui 5y ago

ashtonkem 5y ago

> I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong, or do wrong. Why would you wonder that? This forum is chock full of criticism of the American government by Americans. I’ve personally levied a huge amount of it myself on this very website. In fact, I genuinely cannot imagine how you could possibly ask such a question in good faith.

trasz 5y ago
It’s a valid question, given that US perpetrators never meet justice and the society isn’t even trying to do anything about it.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Assuming that every American is incapable of questioning their government because entrenched systems protect the powerful is exactly the kind of thing OP was accusing others here of doing: crossing the line between criticizing the government and being anti the people.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Yeahbut(TM) the lions share of the criticism of American government that takes place on sites like this one is not people looking at and evaluating the things that happen in America but simply people repeating tropes to indicate membership of one tribe or another. You gotta go like five layers of comments deep before people making comments that are the result of substantive thought outnumber the people firing off tropes for virtue points.

musicale 5y ago

There's a difference between being anti-CCP and anti-China.

Fricken 5y ago
No difference really. Domestic approval ratings for the CCP are through the roof. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-china-grow-more-negative-chinese-support-for-their-government-ri https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/913650298/as-u-s-views-of-chi...
- joyeuse6701 5y ago
  Does that include Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan? They're 'Domestic' according to the CCP right?
  - Fricken 5y ago
    The total population of those 3 regions amounts to 50 million, less than 4% of China.
    - schleck8 5y ago
      And yet Xinjiang makes up for 20 % of arrests in the entire country. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/19/chinas-treatment-of-uighurs-is-crimes-against-humanity-report https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/19/chinas-treatment-of...
      - jikbd 5y ago
        Have you ever heard of the FBI crime statistics?
        schleck8 5y ago
        This just goes to prove that something about the politics in Xinjiang is not right.

smoldesu 5y ago

I think it will be hard to applaud China for anything until they stop systematically oppressing their Uighur population and quit terrorizing places like Taiwan for no reason. Maybe then it will be possible to reconcile our petty differences, but human rights abuses come first.

King-Aaron 5y ago
> I think it will be hard to applaud The United States for anything until they stop systematically oppressing their african-american population and quit terrorizing places like The Middle East for no reason. I'm certainly not trying to advocate an anti-US or anti-China stance here, but your comment can easily be turned around by the CCP for the same reasons when it comes to criticism of their internal affairs.

Glyptodon 5y ago

Does it really matter if they get anything right when they committing genocide against the Uighurs, ignoring their treaty obligations, and trying to make the whole world follow their lead in censorship and undermining any aspirations to an impartiality before and equality under the law? It's plain "whataboutism" not any different than folks being impressed with Nazi Germany before WWII. Which isn't to say that the "west" is perfect or good, or not stooping in the same direction as China. Obviously nationalism in the west is a problem, too, but I don't see that as a reason to give one of the most bellicose and thin-skinned nations on earth a pass.

epgui 5y ago
Yes, it matters. Goods and wrongs don't cancel out, but they both matter. It's funny you mention whataboutism, because that's what I was about to mention too. This really goes to my main point: it's important to be able to levy criticism and to NOT give anyone a free pass, but many of the comments in here seem to be implicitly (and arguably, erroneously) splitting world actors into "good" and "evil". Hence the "us vs them" mentality and the mounting nationalism.
- Glyptodon 5y ago
  Unfortunately there are things that are beyond permissible in this world - the holocaust was supposed to be never again. Trying to say "oh, but the west has problems too" when there aren't any comparable attempts at large-scale genocide ongoing is crazy. Not because the west doesn't have problems. Or because the west is somehow angelic. But because it's like comparing a nuke to a house fire. And some things really are evil in a whole different way.
  - epgui 5y ago
    > Trying to say "oh, but the west has problems too" when there aren't any comparable attempts at large-scale genocide ongoing is crazy. Again, this is not what I was trying to say, and if it came across that way then I was misunderstood or I did not express myself correctly. I can see how what I wrote could have been interpreted that way, but I would really encourage you to apply the "charitable interpretation" principle. I would also note that the topic of genocide is different from the original topic of conversation. While my comment was of a more general scope than the wiki drama, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that I'm trying to change the topic or deflect attention by way of whataboutism. --- Edit: reconsidering this thread, I think I would like to clarify that what my comment was trying to get at was that a lot of the criticism being levied against China suffered from the "genetic fallacy" [1]: regardless of whether the criticism was right or wrong, some of it didn't address the matter at hand (the wiki drama) and instead resorted to criticizing the world actor based on other baggage. It's not that the conclusion of the critiques is wrong per se, it's more that it might be right only by accident. I hope this helps clarify. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

jhedwards 5y ago

> I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong I feel like this is practically a sport in America. We love to criticize the government and everything it does wrong. That's part of democracy: the fact that Trump was voted out was very much a collective "we fucked up/this is wrong" where we decided to go a different path. In China, on the other hand, that is not allowed. We certainly do have issues in the US, but a lack to self-criticism does not count among them

wolverine876 5y ago

> I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China. Which ones? I don't see it myself.

Hnrobert42 5y ago

Does the CCP get much right?

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It is a complicated question. If you look at the results, China is now the ascending/aspiring world power. And they got here in how much time? From that perspective, they got a lot right. Worse, US planners got a lot wrong.
epgui 5y ago
Setting aside political beliefs/leanings, it would be very difficult to argue that they don't get a lot of things right. This type of rhetorical question or quip is a pretty good example of the mentality I was drawing attention to in my comment: it's entirely possible to think that something is generally bad (eg.: you might think the CCP is, on balance, not great or even terrible) while also recognizing that there are positive aspects to it. Recognizing the pros of a thing doesn't mean you have to forget about the cons. Being able to hold both in one's head at the same time also helps formulate better criticism of the bad things, as such criticism often becomes more precise. The heuristic of "CCP/China = bad" may very well be correct in a particular situation, but such heuristics are a very dangerous mode of thinking.
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  Gosh all your comments are just a roundabout fluff-fest dude. The CCP is committing some of the most tragic modern atrocities. The iron grip of the CCP and their "one china" brain-washing is ruining China for what it could be and the blood will be on your collective paws for generations.

sunir 5y ago

If you’re on Wikimedia’s side there is negative value in throwing chaffe into the conversation about imperial saber rattling. Focus on the ball please.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

spacehunt 5y ago

You know what? Replace "Americans/Westerners" with "Hong Kongers", and you get the exact same phrases that were thrown at us, again and again, for over 20 years, until our entire way of life is gone. Ignore our warnings at your peril.

nova22033 5y ago

I wonder if Americans/Westerners are capable of acknowledging the things that their countries get wrong You're shifting the goalposts...Has America or any western country blocked the wikimedia foundation from entering WIPO?

CogitoCogito 5y ago

> However, I feel like a lot of the comments aren't just criticizing China, they seem to be outright anti-China. > I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power. > I wonder if we here in the West are as fair and balanced as we tend to think. All of that is unquestionably true. But what does it have to do with criticizing China's actions here? The criticism could be coming from anti-China bigots, yet still be entirely legitimate.

fennecfoxy 5y ago

>I wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, Americans/Westerners might be feeling threatened by the shift in power Of course, but in many ways it's the threat of the same shift in power between the allies and the axis in WWII. China is not a nice country. Openly imprisoning and "re-educating" uyghurs there, Tibet, Taiwan, openly hunting down and organ harvesting the falun-gong. The West does plenty of bad stuff too but nothing on the same level, and definitely not as openly as if saying "what're you going to do about it". Same as Russia assassinating people recently, it's a "what're you going to do about it?" scenario. Now that nuclear weapons exists the world is going to go to shit because nobody can do anything about it anymore.