>Screenshots of Peng's original post continued to circulate widely on the Chinese internet even as censors scrambled to delete any references to her allegations within group chats and blogs, a sign of the immense public interest in her allegations. The speed with which her post was deleted also reflects the extreme sensitivity of her remarks, which come just as Communist Party leaders convene in Beijing for the Sixth Plenum, an important political meeting during which the state is on high alert for any sign of discord.
Chinese internet censorship is insane. How many people work as censors?
Right after I posted it, my WeChat started to take longer to load incoming messages, and my messages took longer to be sent. (I did a test with a phone logged into another account in the same wifi environment.)
This phenomenon disappeared a few days later though. I still wonder if I'm now in some watchlist or something.
There are also censors within companies since media is expected to be vigilant about it as well, so probably thousands more on top.
Literal armies of them https://theglobalobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/...
The story is a bit confusing. Sometimes it’s romantic, sometimes it’s not. There is also consent mixed in, that fluctuates.
He sexually assaulted her, then at some later point in time they had a consensual relationship.
There's not a contradiction there.
I understand that the consensual relationship doesn't rule out the sexual assault. I do have, however, trouble digesting such relations. Is it normal that people get into relations with other people that they intend to take to court?
Yes, it's very normal. Abusive partners can be very skilled at breaking down their victims; "you're so worthless, no one but me will ever love you" sort of scenarios. It's a very common phenomenon.
Normal? He was the 7th most powerful person in the CCP, in a country of 1.4 Billion. He was then a 65 year old having a "relationship" with a then 25 year-old...
Humans are complicated. I can't explain their point of view or the context, but I'm sure there's a reason. Sometimes it can be financial even. Trauma is a hell of a thing.
Think about kids who've been abused by their parents. They typically still can't help but try and earn their love. Human brains are. . . fucky, to say the least.
This model of government is toxic. You cannot memory hole the abused to protect the inner circle.
Maybe she's a liar, but this claim warrants investigation and corroboration with other potential victims. It should embolden other victims to come forward.
The government should serve the people. And its members should be held to a greater standard of accountability.
Furthermore, the Chinese government is very responsive to citizens' feedback. This means actually addressing feedback by changing policies. Online criticisms and offline protests are common. Threatening the govt with collective action, increases response rate.
Thus, a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is common in China: messages get censored and the govt does something about the issue.
All these claims are shown by research:
Harvard: Conditional Receptivity to Citizen Participation: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in China http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.703...
American Journal of Political Sciences: Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...
Harvard: How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
At the end of the day, westerners will still not agree with how China works. But I think it's important to keep in mind that China works quite differently from popular imagination.
In the real world the government serves the party people. This happens in democratic systems as well but in a communist/uni-party system is rapart as there is no election, no opposition and no real judiciary system! CCP can never be wrong or do wrong things because that would mean it must held accountable(by who?) and/or be changed...
These claims are backed by eyewitnesses (expats living in China) as well as research.
Cyrus Janssen: The Truth about Protests in China 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqcScSCTgbM
Harvard: Conditional Receptivity to Citizen Participation: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in China http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.703...
American Journal of Political Sciences: Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...
Interesting bits from this last source:
- In China, citizen engagement and protest do not contribute to regime change. Instead citizen engagement contributes to regime survival.
- Section 6: “upper levels of government use citizens as an oversight mechanism on subnational leaders, which imbues citizens with the ability to sanction lower level leaders, and generates responsiveness among local leaders to citizen demands.”
China is neither a western democratic system, nor a totalitarian/communist/dictatorial system. Instead, China is a third distinct category, fitting neither of the first two.
If there is no accountability at the top (and there clearly isn't), then there is no meaningful accountability at all. Such arrangements provide a veneer of agency, with lower level functionaries and regional governments acting merely as scapegoats when embarrassing situations get out of hand and cannot be suppressed. Likewise, when only one party is allowed to run for "elections", those "elections" by definition are a fraud with no meaningful choices.
> China does have accountability for government officials
True, but is it the case that the laws are upheld every time? Is there an independent judiciary that sees violations persecuted through with due process?
I submit: no, this is not even possible due to the level of corruption. Officials accumulate influence, wealth and power so they can extract themselves out of sticky situations. Occasionally, officials are held accountable to much public fanfare, but they happen to be unwitting pawns, scapegoats taking the fall for someone else, or faction members that are opportunistically eliminated by their rivals.
> criticisms and protests are common
True, but do they effect change? I submit: rarely. The vast amount of forms of criticisms and protests are suppressed before collective action can occur.
Source: eyewitnesses (expats living in China)
> China is [not] a totalitarian/[…]dictatorial system.
Shill harder. I've seen you approve of CCP apologist Barrett.
Everthing in a communist party is about loyalty and fear not merit or election. If you don't like censorship or try to challenge the direction of the CCP you are out of the club for life and maybe even in jail.
Imagine Jack Ma saying the Xi is a stupid bear and doesn't know anything about finance or technology and that he (Jack Ma) would be a better leader for China so the people should be let to vote him as China's leader.
Inland Chinese call these government agents "Little pinkies"
If they were Russian, those agents would be called spies.
Normally one gets a 99-year land lease to build a house, but the CCP has been repossessing the land after 30-40 years as it increases in value.
The CCP sends a goon squad with no uniform or id and a backhoe to tear down the house. Sometimes they wait for the "owner" to go to work, sometimes they just pull the house down with the occupants inside.
But here's the wrinkle. Since it's extrajudicial, the owner can kill the goons and no arrest or prosecution follows.
This actually happened in 2020. An owner threw a brick at the backhoe operator, IIRC, killing him, without being arrested. Although the court system is fixed in China, the CCP doesn't want the publicity, since it would reveal a war on citizens' property.
So if you can keep killing the goons, you keep your house until the next round.
You wouldn't want to hear the reason if you are dining now.
Parents do not want their juvenile or young adult daughters to be a rape target or even have consensual romantic or sexual relationships without parental consent, so they take away a part of their sexuality by making them unattractive or passing them off as male with clothing, hair-style, (lack of) jewellery and make-up, mannerisms.
smh typical storm in a teacup that only gets press because they can put "China" in the clickbait.
News was allowed to get out to the point that one could hear about that on abroad platforms. Usually anything that rocks the proverbial boat gets censored without trace.
Either there was a fuck-up of epic proportions with several fail-safes in a row not triggering, or (conspiracy theory) this is on purpose to "bury"/distract from more important news or to discredit Zhang so he can be removed easier by his enemies.
So the communist assault has two flavors: On at the individual level (as it happened) and then by the CCP government using censorship.
We're fine, but I do feel bad for the americans who live in some sort of delusion that their exploitation is freedom.
China certainly has its smattering of Han supremacy and engages in (mostly economic) imperialism, but even the Uyghur genocide pales in comparison to any of the multiple genocides of the Nazis.
What do you propose? Military invention would just mean global thermonuclear war. US sanctions against China? They'd either have to be ineffective enough not to have any significant impact (like the Huawei ban) or they'd amount to cutting off your nose to spite the face. The US (like most developed countries) is economically dependent on China at this point. China also holds a significant share of the US's debt. Cutting off China from the US would probably hurt the US more than China and nobody else would follow suit if it impacted their economy.
You want the US to cut off China? Sure. Stop relying on offshore production in developing nations. Pivot back to the isolationism of the pre-WW2 era. But that would mean giving up the excessive military domination and rebuilding the domestic economy from scratch. You can try to half-ass it and move production from China into other countries but that's just delaying the inevitable (who says India isn't going to slide into genocidal fascism next, given they already have a Hindu supremacist problem?).
A genocide is not defined by literal death of individuals but for killings to be part of a genocide they have to intentionally target a specific group and its culture.
The Nazi's Eastern front was explicitly a war to create "Lebensraum" (living space) which went with depopulating large areas. They also deliberately initially displaced and then systematically exterminated Jewish populations. They also targeted Sinti and Roma people. For Jews they also went to the lengths of deliberately destroying their cultural artefacts as well as works they claimed to be influenced by Jewish culture.
If you desperately want to pin a mass murder on historical communists, you probably want the Holodomor. But even the Holodomor seems to have at least in part been a case of administrative failure and apparatchiks not taking complaints seriously. But at least there are indicators of some level of malintent even if it may not have been intentionally genocidal.
Unlike the above, the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims does qualify as genocide under most definitions as it actively seeks out to erase culture and traditions even if the settling of Han Chinese people in Uyghur territory may not. But while it involves imprisonment, so-called reeducation and arbitrary arrests, it doesn't involve mass murder.
Note that what the Nazis did to Jews, Roma, Sinti and (to a lesser extent) Slavs wasn't unique in European history either (except for the technology available to them), but Europeans previously only had done this to populations in Africa or the Americas. From the victim's perspective the distinction between fascism and colonialism is at most times completely arbitrary.
> pumping money into this fascist dictatorship
SNAFU; people invest money into the regime unknowingly. It should be every government's ministry of finance's responsibility to clearly mark a financial instrument (retirement fund, stock bundle etc.) as having ties to a CCP controlled company, so that at least an investor can make an informed decision; and if the parliament has passed a resolution to condemn the genocide, then it should follow through and outright ban such investments. Instead nothing happens, apathy rules, and tragically the victims of the genocide have no mindshare to lobby to change the situation.
Twitter marks CCP controlled content as such, but your stock portfolio and broker do not.
Not so long ago, it was said that Xinjiang was "worse than the holocaust". But now "The barbed wire is almost gone. So are the armored personnel carriers. Young [supposedly genocided] Uyghur men are back on the streets" and "sense of normality is creeping back in". What's more, this "Nazi Germany-like regime" is doing all this voluntarily?!
The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.
There is a problem in Xinjiang, no doubt about it. But it's not the second coming of Nazi Germany. It's a heavy-handed fight against sallafist jihadists that have killed thousands of Han and Uyghur alike, with the end goal of making society safe again even if that means collateral damage and intruding on individual rights.
For example, this: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2019/06/china-s-uygh... "largest since holocaust"
Or this: https://twitter.com/SaeedTV_/status/1301991175713419264?s=20 "The number of deaths of Uyghur Muslims in camps or dead in China now surpasses the number of Jewish people killed in the holocaust."
It was (and I argue, still is) quite common for people to call someone a "genocide denier" simply for saying "what happens in Xinjiang is bad but it's not genocide / it lacks evidence". For example: https://twitter.com/redditiosymboli/status/13875617117339361...
They don't censor it yet because they don't have the capabilities and the actual man-force to do it, but they're not that far off [1]:
> The police watchdog is investigating alleged corruption in the Metropolitan Police, including claims it covered up child sex offences because MPs and police officers were involved.
Your perception on my argument is incorrect.
