China using families as 'hostages' to quash Uyghur dissent abroad
www.bbc.co.uk
Refugees and activists tell the BBC intimidation tactics are tearing apart Uyghur communities overseas.
  • yeather
    12·
    1 year ago

    How in went way is that a children’s story. It’s incredibly easy to understand like a children’s story but is very real, so real you can see it happening in real time. Your idea of China is more like a children’s fairytale rather than the reality it currently is.

    I do not support Chinese elections, same way I do not support Russian or North Korean elections. These are also similar to children’s stories.

    On your next point, politicians can argue all they want but in the end they will fall in line. Similar to journalists, who may I remind you are often targeted as political prisoners to be sent to reeducation camps. Also, yes, policy changes, people change their minds or gain retrospection on what doesn’t work and pivot, it happens often. For example, China’s Great Leap Forward, which really lead to mass starvation and steel barely useable. Then Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi reversed these policies and ended the great Chinese famine. Then Mao changing his mind again and having both of them thrown into reeducation camps, Shaoqi would die.

    • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
      21·
      1 year ago

      Your “no u” line about how actually I am telling children’s stories doesn’t work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren’t monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.

      Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn’t cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao’s death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng’s re-ascent).

      As an aside, I don’t think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It’s quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn’t it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.

      There’s a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).

      • yeather
        1·
        1 year ago

        In the case of stories and Kabuki theater, it is again as I said. The bickering of politicians and overall pro government journalists is inconsequential to the overall running of the country which Mao rules. For a sort ofexample of my home country, every Irish party bickers about immigration and procedure, but in the end they all support immigration. This is taken further in China, again bickering of procedure, but in the end the parties will support Mao and his bidding.

        On point two, I apologize for the miscounted timeline, but Deng and Liu were the men who ultimately ended the great leap forward and great famine in 1962 when Mao turned over day to day running of the country to them. They were both then imprisoned in 1967 as part of the cultural revolution, where Liu died of diabetes.

        I would never compare anyone to kruschev unless they deserved it, which neither of these men do.

        While the idea of a reeducation camp seem noble, the premise is in fact totalitarian in of itself. The need to force someone to confirm to your political ideology or face further improvement is not the mark of a free democracy, but the signs of an oppressive and controlling regime. Let’s also not kid ourselves here, they were work camps with reindoctrination added on top. Not a good model.