I can’t think of any totalitarian country that has happily allowed its “undesirable” citizens to leave. Can you? There’s a reason for that.
Would you count the Soviet Union allowing Jews to emigrate?
I was mostly unaware of that, so ignorance fought. The only former Soviet Jews I know fled.
I think the general point that authoritarian countries generally aren’t happy to export people they mistreat is still mostly valid.
Another one was the Mariel Boatlift. These are exceptions though, generally this does not happen, a totalitarian state is likely to believe such people would come back to seek revenge (or to fight for freedom, but in such minds that is still revenge).
XT is very correct. To wit, China holds approximately USD1.1T out of a total of ~$22T US Government debt in 2019 according to The Biggest Foreign Holders of U.S. Debt - In One Chart
While one trillion sounds like a lot of money, it’s only 5% of the US government debt. On top of that, international investors do not buy Chinese government debt. There is one safe haven in the current global economic crisis, and that is USD and US Government debt (and the US stock markets).
The Soviet Union eventually “allowed” Jews to emigrate, but it would be a stretch to say that they did this “happily”. The government relented only after a considerable amount of internal dissent and external political pressure, and even then they would often throw up years’ worth of arbitrary social and financial roadblocks to the would-be emigrés. Jews in relatively high-ranking jobs could lose them if they so much as hinted at wanting to leave the country, and those with advanced academic degrees could be forced to “repay” the state many times the supposed value of their tuition before being granted an exit visa.
Even leaving the CCP out of this for a sec, the United States is generally just not in the business of rescuing foreigners when it doesn’t serve our national security or economic interests. Genocide or not, we condemn foreign atrocities with strong but empty words, and then go right back to fussing about our internal affairs.
That’s especially true when the offending party is a strategic partner. We don’t care about oppressed Chinese citizens any more than we care about oppressed Saudis or Palestinians or Native Americans. Many folks can probably claim asylum and become refugees, if they can get here, but we’re not going to go out of our way to help them do so. In general the Republicans don’t like non-WASPs and the Democrats just see them as economic vehicles and/or extended family of blue voters; refugees aren’t useful politically and are expensive to shelter. We don’t even take care of our own citizens after major disasters. The people who actually care about foreign suffering don’t have any meaningful political power.
China plays the long game too, knowing that American discontent with anything lasts a mere few weeks, and as soon as our attention spans move to the next scandal, the Uighurs will be forgotten. The CCP plans in timespans inconceivable to most Americans – just look at their Hong Kong or Tibet playbooks. I’m not defending them, just pointing out that our hypershallow electoral and educational systems are ill-equipped to deal with the nuances of international politics, especially against centralist regimes that can centralize planning over decades instead of in 2-to-4 year cycles.
It’s worth noting that there is growing opposition to Xi Jinping and his policies within the Chinese Communist Party itself.
Man, that article could’ve been applied to Trump or any other would-be dictator too. While encouraging, I find it unlikely that an interview with an ousted professor would reflect the actual state of power there.
Democracy in China faces many obstacles that other states don’t: One, China is heavily influenced by its Confucian collectivism and cultural patriarchy. Whether under emperors or Mao or this guy, the populace as a whole does not have a tradition of democracy or a cultural acceptance of free speech in challenge of authority. Two, it has an incredibly effective/brutal censorship regime, a combination of effective population management policies plus national monitoring of telecommunications plus lack of a free press or academia plus secret police with unlimited powers. Three, it manages to have those other things PLUS a powerful economy and military, with lots of resources, land, and foreign alliances. China is perhaps unique among dictatorships in that they may actually successfully prototype a fascist but productive economy that satiates enough of its populace that they’re willing to trade freedom for quality of life / material gains. Americans are increasingly moving towards that direction too, but we’re way behind China in that regard. Democracy is absolutely not a guarantee in either country, crushed protests in either notwithstanding.
Whereas most dictatorships keep their in-group limited to a tiny nepotistic circle, China has successfully (miraculously) moved many of its peasants into the middle class, all while keeping (and fostering) national identity at the expense of foreigners. To the Han Chinese, Tibetans and the Taiwanese and the Uighurs are targets to be assimilated; other foreigners are just eventual opponents and competitors. What to us looks like genocide is to them just Manifest Destiny.
China is nothing if not utilitarian. They played the West, especially America, against itself, using capitalism to fuel their government instead of the other way around like we do, then stealing our research and tech wherever possible. Their populace largely accepts measures that would be considered overly authoritarian elsewhere, because 1) it works in terms of bringing economic benefits and 2) their families would disappear otherwise. The bargain is just “shut up and enjoy the new apartments”, which would seem perfectly acceptable to millions – in or out of China.
She is not just some random academic or dissident. She was a professor at the Central Party School - the elite institute for CCP members.
She says that at least 70% of CCP officials think that there must be reform. Whether and when this will translate into action we don’t know.
I’m sure 70% of Republican insiders don’t think Trump is great, either. Doesn’t mean they’ll be able to (or want to) actually enact reform if reform means losing power.
Reading between the lines, all she is really saying is that people are frustrated by Xi’s power. This quote:
To protect these rights you need a system based on democracy and rule of law. Only when human rights are protected, can people be free, and freedom is human nature.
is not really a part of the Chinese worldview, as far as I understand it. Concepts like duty, not rights, would be more appropriate, along with harmony and loyalty.
I think she’s pandering to a Western audience, especially The Guardian’s left-leaning one, in asking (futilely) for outside assistance, knowing that China will not reform from within so long as their economy prospers.
Actually, I think the international community can do more to fight China’s authoritarian system in terms of human rights by pushing for the first and most basic human right – freedom of speech.
This is trivially easy for the CCP to spin: “Look what free speech did to America from 2016-2020. We must protect our citizens from misinformation.” She outlines no pathway to power for the reformists, and acknowledges many times that Xi holds near-absolute power. She’s banking on him to make a mistake that would dethrone him. But Xi is far more competent and dangerous a politician than Trump. He’s about as likely to fuck up badly enough to lose his power as Putin is.
It should also be noted that she retired from the school nearly a decade ago, in 2012. The Party has survived many controversies since then. They’re not scared of her. Hong Kong was a far truer test of the (lack) of Chinese will for reform and democracy. They were begging for outside support and nobody cared. They lost.
I won’t quibble. It was an unusual circumstance. They did it to make a political deal.
True—I actually knew about Lemkin’s work, and how the United Nations defined the term in its Genocide Convention. I suppose what I ought to have written was “broadly”, not “figuratively”. (Some people do use the term in the narrower sense of effecting the physical destruction of a people, and KennyT’s second post in this thread rather strongly implied that this was his intended meaning.) Mea culpa.
He didn’t write, advocate or in any way campaign for such a bill.
He signed a bill that McConnell told him to sign.
China holding US debt actually gives us leverage on them, rather than the other way around. They use that debt as collateral against further borrowing as they build their “Belt and Road” empire.
If the US economy collapses, that debt becomes worthless, and they have less wealth to further their growth.
I think this actually deserves its own thread. I can’t decide whether or not it’s a good thing or bad thing - and have wrestled with this for years personally. There gets to be a lot of questions and complications and even the greatest of men might not know what’s right.
The “never again” pledge is something countries do for feel good purposes, it’s not actual policy. If the US took the pledge seriously, it wouldn’t have continued and escalated its cultural genocide against Natives after making the pledge. So the US will be happy to condemn China and not reject asylum claims out of hand, but not take any concrete action on the matter. Unless taking action helps the US. And while the US was much kinder to asylum seekers pre-2016, the rest of this policy is long-standing US tradition.
What China is doing to Uighur’s is basically what the US has historically done to Native populations in its own borders. The US has had boarding schools where Native children were taught to be ‘proper Americans’ and punished for speaking anything other than English, in their peak in the 1970s there were as many as 60,000 children being forcibly educated away from their native culture. While the schools have been declining, even in 2007 there were approximately 9500 Native children in them. This doesn’t get taught in US history, of course, I know about it primarily because I have a friend who is Native who talked about being punished for speaking anything-but-English while growing up and pretending that their non-American traditional household was an American-style household so that more kids didn’t get abducted by authorities.
I’ve never understood why people think that holding US treasury bonds gives a country leverage over the US. “You have some of my money, if you don’t do what I say I will… um… hold on to this until it matures maybe? Or tear it up so you don’t have to pay it? Something like that! Very scary!”.
China also doesn’t want to make it obvious what they’re doing. They firmly deny anything bad is happening. Handing first class tickets to the USA to all Uighurs would be a pretty clear admission of what they’re doing.
As already pointed out, the likelihood Donald Trump is going to do anything for Muslim people who aren’t Saudi oil billionaires is roughly zero. Even a real President couldn’t do much overt, though.