A "the worst has already happened, let's move on" approach? That's nasty

To those that will downvote me: I wouldn't prosecute the guy without proof even if I thought he was guilty.

> Why?

Why does Stockholm syndrome exist?

Because it benefits survival in a violent world.

Not politically correct, and absolutely not condoning violence, but a lot of women have a deep primeval sexual response(they lubricate) to displays of physical strength, dominance, aggression and violence.

Then that's a nice rhetorical trick, but dishonest.

A direct quote from you:

The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.

You're comparing your impression of a bunch of poor quality news with an article by the AP and calling it backpedaling. The AP did not backpedal, because it never said that Xinjiang was worse than the Holocaust.

Further, things can change with time... that AP article is saying that things used to be much worse.

Come on man, "New Statesman" and Twitter?

From the paper:

> Another example is the following censored post supporting the state. It accuses the local leader Ran Jianxin, whose death in police custody triggered protests in Lichuan, of corruption:

> “According to news from the Badong county propaganda department web site, when Ran Jianxin was party secretary in Lichuan, he exploited his position for personal gain in land requisition, building demolition, capital construction projects, etc. He accepted bribes, and is suspected of other criminal acts.”

One way collective action potential is measured is by measuring the virality of a post.

“Let’s form a patriotic march to support the govt on day X”

If there are to be such marches, it is the govt which will organize them. Not bottom up action, not via any process which could generate alternate leaders, power structures, organizations, etc

Anti-Japanese collective action, which nominally aligns with the interest of the government, would occur every year but it's clamped down early. When uninhibited, it culminates in riots where sushi restaurants, Japanese cars, buildings with Japanese consulates are torched and demolished.

The owners of those are fellow Chinese citizens who become understandably ticked off and come to the government for redress for the damage and can be a right pain. So it's less work to maintain public order and not let demonstrations like in 2012 spiral out of control.

From what I've heard, purging opponents was not the secondary motive but the primary.

it's ineffective if you replace one corrupted opponent with corrupted friend, that's not anti-coruption campaign by my standards, that's just purging opponents, because you are not really improving things, makes almost as much sense as war on drugs

Was the mass killing of landlords before that not murder as well?

I’ve generally heard the Chinese treatments of Uighurs called “genocide” in reference to the practice of forced abortions and sterilizations: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...

> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile

To elaborate on Soviet and Maoist "administrative failures": both governments heavily relied on central planning and thus transferred authority from individual farmers to the bureaucracy. This often meant bureaucrats would set export quotas based on calculations rather than merely exporting excess product and making decisions based on spreadsheets rather than relevant expertise.

From what I can gather, the unofficial story behind the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward seems to be that Chinese bureaucrats fell for exaggerated claims about farming techniques used in the Soviet Union and pivoted the farmers to using those techniques and set quotas based on the expected returns. When the results didn't match the calculations, nobody wanted to (likely, literally) bite the bullet so they tried to make good on the overpromised exports, starving the local populations.

Much like the Chernobyl incident, this was more of a case of bad judgement followed by a rigid chain of command playing chicken with a catastrophe to avoid taking responsibility for a comparably minor gaffe.

Of course the CCP didn't want its bureaucracy to appear incompetent and for the US it was more useful as anti-communist propaganda to frame it as mass murder than administrative failure, so neither side has been particularly honest about it in most "official" material until the end of the (first?) Cold War.

If you want to point out deliberate mass murders by China or the Soviet Union there were plenty of those (e.g. Mao killing the landlords) but in terms of scale they don't really compare.

EDIT: Also if you seriously want to count famines as mass murder, you won't like hearing about what the British did in India.

Be my guest, if you are a woman. If you aren't, then I think this is what even I'd have to call mansplaining.

[edit: added 'this' initially omitted]

That’s not at all what’s being asked. It was an honest question and you are attacking the asker for not being as woke as you in how relationships of victims often play out.

I'm not putting the guilt on anybody. I just have a hard time to understand the dynamics of such relations. I don't have any hidden motives for my comment.

> she might have loved him or saw an interest in the relationship, but it does not matter for this

That's exactly the part I have trouble digesting. If I was sexually assaulted by person (that I want to take them to jail for it), how can I pursue a relation (later) with them? I don't think, also, that I'll be able to love such a person. But I guess that's just me?

I disagree. Yes the law is the law and he should not have raped her, but she also should have had the moral fortitude not to then get into an affair with him.

The guy checks all the boxes, and will have to be punished, but giving the appearance of a scorned mistress doesn't help her convince something so wrong happened a decade ago.

But, no need to be perfect to he heard, and she'll have to have her chance.

> Sabine Women

May be entirely mythical, and certainly doesn't leave us with any useful evidence to evaluate from a psychotherapy standpoint.

> Abduction at Shiloh

OK, second pre-Christ example on the list, with only the Bible as evidence of its occurrence. Not super promising.

> war brides of WW2

I'm reasonably certain that didn't involve kidnapping at all.

All right. I don't believe I am "lying" or being dishonest, but point taken.

I suppose the difference between us is that you care a lot less about this topic and thus aren't constantly bombarded with extreme claims and things such as being called a genocide denier, while for me the topic directly affects the lives of my family.

> I find it weird that you trust the inspections

Well, that's something for you to work out. China was great at monitoring the population. If there was a Christian missionary somewhere in those villages they would have been swiftly found (and they were). But you think 50 million people dying and Mao didn't know? Entire villages wiped off the map and no one noticed? Emaciated bodies walking around, children with distended bellies everywhere and it was a secret? Remember for every one that died, there are 100 more walking skeletons that didn't. No serious historian believes this:

Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward," Mao warned colleagues a year later. "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill."

And it was the exact same thing that happened in the USSR when they did the same rapid industrialization program and the same forced collectivization scheme, done for the same reason, in the 30s. Even up to similar proportions of the agricultural population dying. No one is claiming that the Soviets didn't know they were starving the countryside to enable rapid urbanization - they rode up with trucks and took all of the food from the farms, across the entire countryside. So, I don't understanding the apology for Mao here, we have logic, we have precedent, we have a documentary record, and we have his own speeches.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...

That assertion rests on the assumption that the Chinese government is like a mafia family. That premise requires evidence. As I mentioned in another reply to you, I disagree with this premise and I gave my reasons why.

I even question the assertion that no one is allowed to gather data about the government's conduct or performance. The research "Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China" [1] did exactly this.

[1] https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/pe-2014/10062014_Paper_Jen_Pan...

Okay so your opinion is complete speculation. Got it.

Maybe because I couldn't care less about those stupid new void concepts that are used basically as 'holier than thou' weapon against other people.

This terms are based in the --false-- claim that [all] men are dominant and [all] women are passive and unable to defend themselves from the big-bad-male. They aim for a society uniform when people will have much less margin to be an individual, and people with long legs or that weight different will be ashamed for that. Both terms, mansplaining and manspreading evoke a very dystopian feeling.

But if this is the kind of society that you wish for, feel free to spread the sticky mess

You seem to be describing slut-shaming, not mansplaining.

Mansplaining is the phenomenon of which an arrogant male-persons arrogance can be attributed to their sex/gender (as appropriate), usually with some reference to "patriarchy" and the undeserved confidence of those higher up in the power hierarchy when belittling or underestimating those lower on that same scale.

In practice, it is a gender-specific, weaponised term used in any situation where a man is perceived to be arrogant towards a women i.e. it is commonly abused beyond any positive philosophical aims.

Maybe it has a similar reasoning i.e. men sexist-ly assume women know less than them - but the fact is that it is rarely clear b/c arrogant, narcissistic people of both genders exist without the need for such a basis.

That is certainly one way to view it, but it's not the only one. China is all about outcome legitimacy (actually governing well = legitimate, regardless of the selection process) as opposed to process legitimacy (legitimacy is tied to how officials are selected). Many Chinese prefer meritocracy because it makes it harder for bad leaders to get to the top in the first place. Many think it's backwards to oust a bad president after the fact. In China, it takes 30 years of political career to become the president. Of course meritocracy has its problems, as has democracies in which the top leader is directly elected. They both have their own pros and cons. There are examples which are accountable in the Chinese system but not in western democracies, and vice-versa.

> Likewise, when only one party is allowed to run for "elections", those "elections" by definition are a fraud with no meaningful choices.

In China, parties don't run for elections, people do. People from other parties (China has 8) are elected. At present, there are 152000+ members from other parties that hold positions in People's Congresses (China's representation body) as deputies. [1]

Parties don't form adversarial, power-balancing relationships with each other. The existance of other parties are not used to put up a fake display of western-style multiple-party elections. Instead, the system works completely differently, trying to push participants towards unity, even if only outwardly.

> and regional governments acting merely as scapegoats

Given the meritocratic system, in which officials are promoted based on KPIs, this is not a logical thing to do. Scapegoating your own subordinates undermines the system's selection process of a future leader. Even Xi himself started at the village level, working his way up to county, city and province level over a 30-year period.

It is also illogical given that China's governance system is highly decentralized. The central government doesn't make all the policies, a lot are left to local governments. They aren't mere puppets that follow instructions. That wouldn't even be scalable given the country's size.

---

China's system is distinct, and different from both actual western systems and from western imagined dystopias or fake democracies.

You can argue that only the western democratic way is acceptable. Fine, that's your opinion. I disagree. I subscribe to Kishore Mahbubani's thought. He's ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat. He says that the west should accept that not all countries will become carbon copies of the west. He says that the west should accept a world with a diverse range of governance systems.

I disagree. I think it has more in common with the traditional Chinese imperial Confucianist meritocratic bureaucracy. In fact, this is corroborated by political science professor Daniel A. Bell: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/12/chinas-poli...

A mafia family does not work for the interest of those it "protects", nor do people approve of them. The Chinese government does work for the interest of its people, even if you don't agree with all of the ways they operate. It also enjoys very high levels of approval by its people. Apart from hearsay or informal street interviews [1], there are two researches that corroborate this [2][3].

As Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat, puts it: the CCP is more accurately described as the Chinese Civilization Party. Ultimately, they work to further the interest of Chinese civilization.

[1] Street interview: what does democracy mean to the Chinese? https://youtu.be/nl59t---30g

[2] https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/05/did-pande...

Low-level elections in China are by no means perfect. That I do not dispute. But you know that your source is Radio Free Asia, a CIA-funded propaganda organization, right?

What does rigorous research from renowned institutions such as Harvard have to do with "little pinkies" a.k.a. nationalistic Chinese Internet users? Are you saying that their research methodology does not sufficiently account for bias? If so, can you point out which part of the methodology is flawed and why?