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I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything

I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people, so we try to stigmatize our own government. But the truth of the matter is US government is nowhere near the heavy handed ness of China, and we can deal with China to some degree. We can hold China to its actions. After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China, I feel like it’s time to take a stand. It’s time to stop supporting such a bad regime. Time to voice my concerns about China to my government, and vote with my wallet. No more Chinese products if I can. No more trips to Shanghai. I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.

davesque 9y ago
I would have agreed with you before November 2016. Now, I'm being completely honest in saying I'm not so sure.
- refurb 9y ago
  Really? If I recall, HN was blowing up at all the surveillance and privacy concerns under Obama. Is it really worse under Trump?
  - hrktb 9y ago
    From a non US POV, under Obama people seemed disappointed and betrayed by how a man that they saw as on their side was not doing the right things in their eyes. Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
  - adventured 9y ago
    No. Nothing has fundamentally changed. That's merely partisan wishful dreaming, it makes people feel better to think their side isn't nearly so bad on eg privacy. The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
- drb91 9y ago
  Oh come on, neoliberals aren’t much better. They’re two feet to the left of the right wingers when it comes to surveillance, policing, funding the military & pro-military nationalistic rhetoric, with industry hands in their pocket, and their own hands in the media. The seeds for fascism, authoritarianism, and cults of personality are well rooted in the senior offices of congress on both sides. It has been ripe for abuse and we have seen only a small bit of this in 2016. Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while. If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
  - EggsOnToast 9y ago
    This. Obama radically expanded the surveillance state as did Bush and arguably Clinton abided it even if he didn't outright affect it in the same way as his successors. I'm not going to make the statement that the Chinese surveillance state is wrong, because in this instance I think it's irrelevant to the greater point that its execution is a totally different beast from the government surveillance that takes place in the USA. Whether or not one party in the USA is worse than another, neither is comparable in this context to the CPC.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    I think the issue is that Trump and the State department are not going to do anything about a strongman in China. Trump likes strongmen and hasn't doing anything to curb Duerte, Putin and now Xi in China.
    - drb91 9y ago
      Well, that may be true. I'm not sure what another state department might have done in this position against Xi, though; this is a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage either.
zombieprocesses 9y ago
> we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input. > After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand. > I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore. Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china? Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.
- anthonyleecook 9y ago
  > Native American > 150 years ago Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow. People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China. “ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it. A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence. sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“

davesque 9y ago

I would have agreed with you before November 2016. Now, I'm being completely honest in saying I'm not so sure.

refurb 9y ago
Really? If I recall, HN was blowing up at all the surveillance and privacy concerns under Obama. Is it really worse under Trump?
- hrktb 9y ago
  From a non US POV, under Obama people seemed disappointed and betrayed by how a man that they saw as on their side was not doing the right things in their eyes. Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
- adventured 9y ago
  No. Nothing has fundamentally changed. That's merely partisan wishful dreaming, it makes people feel better to think their side isn't nearly so bad on eg privacy. The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
drb91 9y ago
Oh come on, neoliberals aren’t much better. They’re two feet to the left of the right wingers when it comes to surveillance, policing, funding the military & pro-military nationalistic rhetoric, with industry hands in their pocket, and their own hands in the media. The seeds for fascism, authoritarianism, and cults of personality are well rooted in the senior offices of congress on both sides. It has been ripe for abuse and we have seen only a small bit of this in 2016. Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while. If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
- EggsOnToast 9y ago
  This. Obama radically expanded the surveillance state as did Bush and arguably Clinton abided it even if he didn't outright affect it in the same way as his successors. I'm not going to make the statement that the Chinese surveillance state is wrong, because in this instance I think it's irrelevant to the greater point that its execution is a totally different beast from the government surveillance that takes place in the USA. Whether or not one party in the USA is worse than another, neither is comparable in this context to the CPC.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I think the issue is that Trump and the State department are not going to do anything about a strongman in China. Trump likes strongmen and hasn't doing anything to curb Duerte, Putin and now Xi in China.
  - drb91 9y ago
    Well, that may be true. I'm not sure what another state department might have done in this position against Xi, though; this is a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage either.

zombieprocesses 9y ago

> we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input. > After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand. > I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore. Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china? Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.

anthonyleecook 9y ago
> Native American > 150 years ago Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow. People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China. “ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it. A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence. sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“