Uyghurs

I don't think this is an excuse to say stuff that might not be true (such as the sterilisation program) or hasn't been checked out by multiple sources that in the end just end up making nasty sorts like Nick Cohen look superior. Most of the press give the goings on in Xinjiang attention but it could come without the hysterics.

there's no genocide, because i don't like the messenger

You were downplaying Starmer's, calling him a 'dork' last week. I'd stay out of this.

*racism.

Why is a left-wing platform bringing out someone from Spiked to talk about this.

The only guest Novara had discuss (i.e. crudely demonise) China whines about “tankies”, writes for Spiked, shares articles on how “wokeness is the new racism” & retweets the horrible racist Matthew Goodwin. With an alternative media like this, an establishment one is unnecessary. pic.twitter.com/DD6IYLV3Kk

— Louis (@Louis_Allday) July 21, 2020

The account I link from is pro-PRC however it doesn't change what it is pointing out in this instance.

This is what I am talking about with everything being (deliberately) tainted by an agenda. It's a massive disappointment that (a) left wing commentators seem to have nothing to say about Xinjiang or HK and (b) Chinese overseas dissidents are now overwhelmingly firmly pro-Trump / virulently anti-EU.

Being pro-PRC-government is like being pro-Nazi, it should not be fucking acceptable.

Like what is wrong about this quote? Everything in it is right!

This is staggeringly bad. According to Sarkar, ‘the left’ hasn’t been sufficiently critical of China because it understands imperialism as a “uniquely European phenomenon” & it is excessively sceptical of mainstream sources of information because of the war on Iraq. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/34kX2Im2HC

— Louis (@Louis_Allday) July 20, 2020

Being pro-PRC-government is like being pro-Nazi, it should not be fucking acceptable.

― Anti-Cop Ponceortium (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 21 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

brb going to call Saddam 'H!tler' to make a point.

Mainstream liberal sources are often terrible and follow imperialist agendas. Look at the discourse on Morales and how it was used to support the coup last year. It's not just Iraq.

You can't just read Washington Post/NYTimes or The Guardian with a straight face on this at all.

Who is this person we're discussing here? He appears to be deeply suss to say the least.

Despite what the US wants you to believe, China is NOT akin to Nazi Germany, it’s NOT aggressive, it’s NOT imperialist & it’s NOT running “concentration camps”. It is going to eclipse the US economy over the next decade however, so expect the propaganda against it to intensify.

— Louis (@Louis_Allday) January 2, 2020

Imperialist propaganda successfully weaponizes well-intentioned people's instincts. A combo of naivety & western chauvinism leads them to easily believe the worst about the US' enemies & call for "us to do something" thus giving humanitarian credibility to imperialist aggression.

— Louis (@Louis_Allday) July 19, 2020

The reason calling Saddam "Hitler" was stupid was because he was really a much more minor figure, not because he was actually a nice guy and very misunderstood.

Not debating that mainstream liberal sources are often bad, however that doesn't mean we just go "oof, who knows what's really the truth" - that's exactly what they want, apathy. The PRC government are doing really fucking awful things and people are taking their side (which is very much not the side of the Chinese people) due to what seems to come down to "enemy of my enemy is my friend."

All of this is also true of Anti-PRC Trump-supporting Chinese dissidents btw.

Very much pro-PRC, Cuba, 'tankie' etc. I am not here to defend everything that he posts, but to make a point on the discourse using that one tweet I linked xp

I remember some fucking idiots selling communist newspaper outside SOAS ten years ago with the headline "CHINA IS NOT A CAPITALIST COUNTRY" and I wanted to give them a shake and ask them "have you ever been to China? It's capitalist in ways you've never considered possible!"

Idk, it doesn’t seem contradictory to utterly condemn what is happening in Xinjiang without giving succour to the various anti-communism without communism dangers, none of whom care about persecution of Muslims at home. The left needs a strong stance on this because otherwise it’s going to be the fascists happily joining in.

FWIW I think comparing China to the Nazis is stupid and counterproductive as well, in any case the right-wing press barely needs an excuse to demonise China right now and that's going to intensify, but if anything this story is going under-reported there. I know you're not defending it, but the desire to fly into a protective huddle when faced with stories of a large-scale human atrocity taking place is deeply dubious, we've seen that enough times before. By contrast what he's saying about our media is shooting fish in a barrel, everyone already knows this stuff.

(xpost)

I also find phrases like "demonise China" very odd - does this mean the government of China or the people? Distinguishing the two is key to everything here, blurring the distinction between the two is bad whoever is doing it, and tbh I do not understand why everyone doesn't just get this.

(Duplicate message deleted, nothing to see here)

There are a lot of people who aren't interested in making those distinctions or who will enthusiastically blur the lines. Chinese people over here are experiencing the sharp end of a climate of rapidly rising sinohobia this year and there are enough people in this country who don't care about that any more than they care about the treatment of Muslims in this country.

Matt you're talking to someone with a Chinese wife + child, I'm sure he knows all that!

I didn't actually realise that, apologies.

The sinophobia I see is 100% from racist idiots who absolutely don't read the Guardian, let alone Novara Media

Also, everyone with a Hong Kong flag in the bio is a total danger, let’s be clear. Got nothing to do with supporting protesters in Hong Kong and everything to do with acceptable Sinophobia (towards the people, not the regime).

I don't ever like flags in bios, however is that not including all of the HK democracy protestors?

not that we can ever have any good faith assumptions on Twitter of any sort ever again of course

it would be great in these situations to have a news source that one didn't have to second guess the agenda behind

China discourse on twitter is of different brands, from full-on Tankie to anarchist-left and against PRC but not exactly interested in the capitalist sort of 'liberation'.

By contrast what he's saying about our media is shooting fish in a barrel, everyone already knows this stuff.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 21 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

He was talking about the discourse on left-leaning and liberal media and I wouldn't be so sure on that. Yes, trust is poor on the media in general but on international reporting I've seen people gobble up no questions the reporting on Morales last year, for example. A Nick Cohen piece was linked here no questions asked (imagine if someone linked one of his pieces approvingly on the uk politics thread). Decent, accurate reporting is key but if that isn't available then that isn't available.

I think orgs such as Victims of Communism blaming the virus as solely China's fault is part of the propagation of really awful views on China that has contributed to Sinophobia too.

The disturbing reality of sinophobia in the West should not blind us to the atrocities committed by the CPC, just as the existence of antisemitism is never sufficient grounds for silencing critics of Israeli expansionism. Likewise, opposition to Western neoliberal imperialism should not automatically lock you into a binary alternative (if it can even be called that!).

no doubt, but the discussion here is on the difficulty of finding journalism that doesn't serve one side or other of the binary

"no questions asked"

This liberal vermin asked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camp

See the ‘Testimonies of treatment’ section in particular.

And did anyone watch that Al Jazeera video I posted upthread?

Allday's similar to Brendan O'Neill, in that you know exactly what he's going to say about any particular topic long before his fingers hit the keyboard.

idk how to solve the media trust issue. It obviously doesn't help when you have papers of record publishing reports from Falun Gong front organisations as independent, for example. One of the most interesting pieces i've seen on Xinjiang was, iirc, from some idiot tech blogger who'd somehow wound up there and detailed how surveillance-heavy and militarised everyday life is.

If you’re hoping for impartial, freely available investigative news sources from China, I’m afraid you’re bound to be disappointed.

Not linking to dodgy people doesn't help.

(goes for all of us :-))

Nick Cohen is obviously a POS on both personal and professional levels, however he's sometimes right, for example he's been one of the few people to consistently fight against Spiked/LM for the last 20+ years. I wouldn't dare post anything by him on the UK politics thread, but we all know that's a special place. He can be right about things sometimes, and he has a platform, if that's the best we can get then of course that's not good enough, but it's better than silence.

I haven't heard of these "Victims of Communism" people before, but they sound pretty typical. They are coming from a place where everything you see is propaganda, and the way you fight against that is to make some more propaganda for "your side" - and being used to armies of wumaos means assuming there are similar armies of 白左 doing the same thing in the west, only they don't even get paid. Conspiracy theories flourish everywhere, because nobody trusts anyone or anything. For my wife, being left wing and opposed to the PRC makes her basically alone in the online Sinosphere, and it's really pretty sad.

One of the most interesting pieces i've seen on Xinjiang was, iirc, from some idiot tech blogger who'd somehow wound up there and detailed how surveillance-heavy and militarised everyday life is.

― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Tuesday, 21 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Similarly one blogger posted his journey to North Korea by rail, got there by a back route and saw it for a few hours before he was picked up iirc, and it was just this poor, mostly rural bit of land.

I didn't know anything about Nick Cohen other than that he is a columnist for The Observer until imago pointed it out. I am not as well versed in British journalism and politics as you are, for obvious reasons.

guys xyzzzz JUST HAS SOME QUESTIONS

Don't really need to reach for Victims of Communism (who most people have never heard of) when Donald Trump is saying basically the same thing on a much bigger platform.

In general its extremely difficult to report on this story full stop - probably harder than in most wars - with a reliance on any first hand testimonies you can get. And as with Syria the grey area that creates becomes highly fertile ground for all sorts of charlatans with dodgy agendas.

Thing about Nick Cohen is that he's always more interested in bashing "the left" or even liberals in general than he is about what he's writing about. So internment camps and forced labour become just another stick with which to beat his usual targets. There's other dodgy stuff about his behaviour as well but he has forged a 25 year career denouncing everyone else's hypocrisy while being blind to his own (or just conveniently pretending it doesn't exist).

They are coming from a place where everything you see is propaganda, and the way you fight against that is to make some more propaganda for "your side"

Indeed. It's also interesting to note that Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa and Emil Constantinescu have sat on its international advisory council.

You don’t have to have heard of Victims of Communism when the narrative they’re pushing gets disseminated by much more high profile people than them.

the grey area that creates becomes highly fertile ground for all sorts of charlatans with dodgy agendas

Paul Celan:

No one
bears witness
for the witness

"Victims of Communism (who most people have never heard of)"

Its one of two orgs Zenz is linked to who has done a lot of the research on this issue, whom Cohen links to.

I haven't heard of these "Victims of Communism" people before, but they sound pretty typical. They are coming from a place where everything you see is propaganda, and the way you fight against that is to make some more propaganda for "your side" - and being used to armies of wumaos means assuming there are similar armies of 白左 doing the same thing in the west, only they don't even get paid. Conspiracy theories flourish everywhere, because nobody trusts anyone or anything. For my wife, being left wing and opposed to the PRC makes her basically alone in the online Sinosphere, and it's really pretty sad.

Yep, it's pretty eye-opening to be in China with people freely talking about how corrupt the CPC is, how much land and how many state-backed corporations are still owned by Mao's relatives, how ludicrously expensive things like healthcare and housing can be, etc, etc, in a way that never makes it into the online space for obvious reasons.

Yes that's true, I would entirely believe you if you told me Trump and his team were avid followers. (xpost to gyac)

Re “sinophobia” I think it’s also important not to treat this “phobia” as equivalent to a pure racial prejudice. China is a longtime imperial power that is not that far off from playing an equal or greater role in global dominance to the US. Anti-China sentiment is not really the equivalent of “these damn Mexicans sneaking across the border” or whatever liberal centrists try to make it out to be.

the victims of communism folks include the nazis killed by the red army during wwii in their tally of communist atrocities iirc, just to give you an idea of the level of their playing field