Ok, so the core of your argument is that there are certain unalterable rules concerning the position and rights of citizens within a society and no particular circumstances justify meddling with these?
(I want to get this clear first.)
The core of my argument has been that your essentialist view of civilizations is a badly mistaken premise â that itâs nonsense to treat a modern country and its iron age predecessor as one entity, and short-sighted to claim something as âworking for themâ with indifference to which people it works for and which it doesnât.
Iâve checked this thread, and all my posts have repeated this, without any mention of unalterable rules or anything of the sort. @Purplecat gave some and I did like their post; but for you to invent that as the core of my argument means youâve ignored everything I actually said.
Then we seem to be in a situation of mutual misunderstanding. I was rather trying to say that Chinese way of political thinking may be in certain ways fundamentally different from ours, in part as a result of a different (and considerably longer) development of their statehood and civilization. Which manifests itself inter alia by their greater willingness to submit the needs and rights of the individual to the perceived needs of the whole.
And this cannot be really judged from within the perspective of our system, because for us the only measure is the individual. Your response was that by making my claim, I was begging the question. Because how can individuals democratically* decide to forgo some of their fundamental liberties in favor of the system? From the individualist perspective they can not, because within such system there is no more democracy and hence no legitimacy for the very decision. From the collectivist perspective, it is however a given. An organism is formed from individual cells and the focal point of interest shifts to a higher level.
So Iâm saying you are a fish in water, not realizing water is a thing: looking at this from a particular unacknowledged standpoint and not realizing this standpoint is inevitably presupposing your response. Your perspective is ârightâ given primacy of certain values (freedom, political participation, assertion of the individual). But there are other possible perspectives likewise justifiable by a different set of values (prosperity, stability, glory of the nation etc.).
And at this point we essentially have to decide what to do about the different value systems. Do we accept them? Voice our disapproval? Send in the marines? And why?
*I understand there was no actual democratic decision by the Chinese people to elect this path of development, but I am asserting that the current regime would likely get a retroactive approval in the even of a plebiscite.
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Those Democracy protesters in Hong Kong are sadly estranged from their own culture.
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So the Uighurs and Tibetans should just suck it up and the Tibetans setting themselves on fire in protest are just the cost of doing business? YeahâŚ
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I hope you get a nice high score for your participation in this thread. Youâve earned it!
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Again, at what point did I say anything like that? My post is solely concerned with the situation of an established society âdecidingâ (however you want to square that) to curtail the rights of its citizens with their tacit approval. I didnât bless and beatify every action of PRC.
Invasions and annexations of other territories are a completely different matter. The occupation of Tibet is unjustifiable, but I assume they will at least be in practice mostly spared from the Obedience Monitoring Index by virtue of its social media-based nature.
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Fair enough, but then what about Hong Kong, or the Zhuang people, or the Cantonese? How did you decide which people have their own interests worth considering and which count as nothing more than pieces of the PRC?
I understood this claim entirely. It is in fact exactly the position I was calling short-sighted, because it ignores that the cells include separate and disparate entities only grouped together for convenience, and that the organism only exists as a fiction of essentialism. You keep repeating your conclusions based on allowing such an entity is real; my whole point is that it isnât.
Even trying to recount this objection, you keep changing it into terms it rejects, talking about political thought or approval as properties of this ancient creature and so presuming away its actual heterogeneity. So it feels like you havenât understood me, but after these six repetitions of the same point, I doubt more will help.
Edit: and your response is to disingenuously equate rejecting the entity of a contingent assembly of a billion people with different characters, interests, in many cases even languages and customs, with rejecting the entity of a contiguous body made of genetically-similar cells differentiated from a common zygote to form a single functional unit. Thanks, now I can be sure more will not help. Good day.
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Except the Chinese say âWeâve always had hegemony over this territory for most of a thousand yearsâ so it isnât an âinvasionâ in their opinion. Whose word do you take?
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So you, being composed of individual and disparate cells, arenât real either?
The cells themselves consist of organelles, grouped together for convenience. The organelles consist of proteins and other molecules, only grouped together for convenience. The proteins consist of individual atoms, grouped together for convenience. The atoms are just a bunch of subatomic particles, so are they real or not?
You keep using that word essentialism a lot, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
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One would think that the voters in Taiwan would recognise that âdemocracyâ and âhuman rightsâ are inappropriate for their culture, and would vote en masse to come under the sheltering umbrella of rule from Beijing.
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In the history of conquest, colonies and genocides, at some point you start running out of good answers.
Every single state is today occupying a territory that previously belonged to someone else. So we are again talking a matter of degree. I consider the occupation of Tibet unjust because it took place over a fierce resistance of the majority of its population and had a highly negative impact on the lives of its inhabitants.
If, in 200 years, the resistance pewters out, we are just going to have to get over it and accept it as a geopolitical fact. Otherwise Americans should pack their bags and leave the continent to the First nations. (I just have no idea where could they conceivably go to.)
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You realized the Uighurs have been detonating bombs in their provinces for years and attacking PRC police?
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The point being�
(I donât know enough about the Uighur situation to make a judgment on it, so I remained silent. This was not intended as dismissing their claims of oppression.)
Thatâs my point. Youâre still all hand-wavy that a large chunk of âChinaâ is not actually Han Chinese and arenât necessarily, historically, even wanting to be part of China.
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Suggesting that the Maoist dictatorship was a necessary expedient for lifting people from subsistence poverty is an odd apologia, given the estimated 20 to 43 million death toll from starvation during the Great Famine.
The argument also
(1) is irrelevant to the initial post, which is about the continuing suppression of political liberties, almost as if the Chinese government enjoy and profit from their positions of power and do not want to risk relinquishing them; and
(2) suggests a disturbing lack of faith in the previous argument (i.e. that the rightness of suppressing political liberties must be left for the Chinese government to decide, because cultural relativity).
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The show Community covered this concept in the episode âMeow Meow Beenzâ; it did not go wellâŚ
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Wow, meowmeowbeans is Peeple!
ITâS PEEPLE!
This feels a lot like having a discussion on the Russian invasion of Crimea in the light of its historical interests in the area and somebody coming in to remind everyone that the Koryaks of Kamchatka never chose to become a part of the Russian empire and it thus cannot be fairly claimed that âRussiansâ (who do not really exist as an entity but are a mere conglomeration of individual peoples) have a unified position on the annexation.
Itâs technically true but irrelevant to the discussion. You are mistaking a semantic shorthand denoting the acting political entity (which always has some continuity of ruling philosophy and historical inertia) for some claim on a universal unified hivemind.
When someone says: âAmericans, in the light of their longstanding fossil fuel policy and acute needs, decided to invade Iraq.â it does not mean that this decision came from or was approved by every Navajo in every reservation, based on their need for gas.
States are for all practical purposes real (as far as anything can be claimed to be real within your chosen philosophical system) and discussions of their history and policy inevitably gloss over the lower-level diversity of their constituents. The same way a discussion of an individual person glosses over the interests of his gut microflora or the genetically disparate mitochondria in his cells.
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Again, when did Mao come in? When I say âthe latest directive authoritarian blend of pragmatic etatism and free market elements has been very successful at thisâ - which is when the actual lifting from poverty took place - this pretty clearly refers to the era after Xiaopingâs reforms. When PRC was still suppressing dissent and curtailing political rights of its citizens, but also delivering something close to 8 % of annual real growth.
You do not understand my arguments so there is no point in replying to the rest of your post.
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