Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/what-could-go-wrong-3.html
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This is awful. Other countries will of course follow suit.
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Well on one hand, this is very dystopian and X-Files-like.
On the other hand, it bet some a detailed DNA map would glean some interesting info about the region’s ancestry and how humans intermingled in the past.
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Haven’t many people already done this voluntarily through private corporations that look into your genetic family history?
Most certainly. That’s probably not their goal, though, at least not their primary one.
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Oh, I know. This is why we can’t have nice things.
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Many people have done this, but the very clear, and concordant with historical activity, implication is that the Chinese state will enhance the suffocating and crushing impact they have had on the Uyghur people.
In the long, long run, this will play ill to their strategic objectives, as they increasingly (and, like all tyrannical regimes, crazily) seek a reduction in heterogeneity, which fundamentally hinders innovation and ingenuity.
Also, rebellion. The Uyghurs have already been active, and crushed, but if they look to the Rohingya, I rather suspect they will start to fight like mighty bastards.
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I’m aware of that. I’m not saying they should or that this is in anyway good. I’m saying we’re already doing that here voluntarily, and that too can have long term negative consequences…
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Yes, China does seem to be a few pages ahead in the manual, compared to the rest.
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It can, but at the moment the sample of Americans who use a private company like 23andme is too small and too WEIRD to be useful for tyrannical states and corporations (which will generally make such DNA collection mandatory anyhow).
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I like to save articles like this for when people claim China will overtake US on the world stage. Their economy may be ramping up, but Trump is temporary, and systemic abuses of human rights baked into a system that runs a literal Great Firewall are forever.
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Actually, I think they took their cue from American insurance companies. Sure, they may have extrapolated some, but not much!
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Meh - no one cares though, as long as they keep the iPhones rolling. We can’t get the world to care about shit happening in their own country, much less half a world away to people they don’t care about. It will be chalked up to an “internal” issue. The fact that China is on the Human Rights Committee on the UN is an example of both China’s clout and how little people give a shit.
China will continue to grow and mature. Most likely their human rights issues will go under reforms. People can wag their fingers, but few nations could actually put any real pressure on China to change, and even then, they stand more to lose if China shuns them, not the other way around. This isn’t like Cuba where we can embargo them and it wouldn’t affect most Americans.
Also China is investing in Africa, and it will probably be the new China in the coming decades.
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I mean, have you looked around these parts lately?
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I get the impression that people who make that claim either admire(and not infrequently seek to emulate) the willingness to make an omelette by killing a few people; or don’t much like it but fear that it is, nevertheless, efficient enough to have no fear of the moral arc of history moving against it.
I’m not sure that the “end of history” types who hold out hope that China is just another few notches of GDP per capital from liberal democracy are still a thing.
D[quote=“Mister44, post:12, topic:112742”]
how little people give a shit.
[/quote]
+1
All we’d need to do is stop buying doohickeys. Just stop wasting money on stuff we don’t need.
But, alas. Historically, the Chinese have an awful history of massacre, plunder and in-fighting. Their veneration of their history means this will not change.
Does that mean they will develop new methods of torture for human rights lawyers?
It means as China evolves and power is distributed more to the people than the state, and they take a bigger seat at the World’s table, they are most likely going to start conforming to what is expected of a first world nation.
It won’t be over night. They won’t be giving Tibet or anywhere else independence (they want the buffer zone of the mountains between India). They may even still do state sponsored repression. But it should get better.
I may be 100% wrong, but I am optimistic that I won’t be.
Considering that the US is widely considered to be a first world nation, I’m not optimistic. About either country.
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You’re literally replying to someone who just criticized China.
What evidence do you have to support this theory? Time is not an incremental march towards democracy. It’s just as likely they end up being Disneyland with the Death penalty ala Singapore.
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Yes I am aware. I guess I should say “almost no one cares”. Or, not enough people care for it to matter.
I am optimistic it will get better.
