I AM NOT THE ORIGINAL TEBANSKI, RATHER THE FRIEND IN CHINA - THIS IS MY SECOND CONTRIBUTION, (APOLOGIES FOR THE SWEAR WORD, I TOLD YOU I WAS NEW TO THIS)
A direct reply to "Evangelion" (19th Jan post)
Thank you for the detailed and interesting reply, I didn't feel attacked when I read it, it was the kind of reply I hoped for, and so I'd like to direct mine back to you now. Just gonna address the points in your original reply to me and ignore your subsequent ping pong with “Tefal” which is also interesting (although gets a bit too semantic for me at times)
the fact remains that you live in a nation with one of the worst records of human rights abuse in the entire world. This is an established, verifiable truth; it is not propaganda from the British media. It can be proved quite easily by reading the reports from such organisations as Amnesty International
Well please recall that my point was merely to highlight the way that people who don’t have first-hand experience, or research, just throw the lines “human rights abuses and China” together whenever they are on the radio or making their contribution,
not to actually suggest they don’t occur (I explicitly made that point then). And I still do question to what extent though, and I will read with interest your links when I come back from my holiday, so thank you
I do feel that I am willing to admit my own uncertainty on the issue, which was a key point to my contribution, whereas I feel you are not. Note, I’m not saying that makes you wrong on the issue
However, I do wonder how “worst record of human rights abuse in the world“ is actually defined. I mean if Amnesty International (people whom I do admire and respect) base this statement on
numbers of cases alone, then of course China will massively outdo Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan as its population is seventy and fifty-six times higher respectively. I think this is an important point as if it is the case, it would render the words “China, worst human rights abuser, established verifiable truth” as false. Agree or not? Is that a fair statement?
I mention those two countries deliberately because there exists an almost legendary infamous hypocrisy in our own governments (US/UK) and mainstream media sidelining human rights abuses in those two countries and other ‘client states’ or worse still justifying them in terms of ‘anti-terrorist measures’. I’m sure you are familiar with the Craig Murray story, the Andajin massacre, etc not to mention the cosy and nauseating oil-for-arms US relationship with the Saudis, and don’t forget a major current in my original link was the issue of whether media bias in our own countries was guilty of distorting or influencing people’s views
Three wrongs don’t make a right, but the key questions of “what do general populace back home know and think about China and where do they get those ideas from?” was another main plank of my contribution which I felt you chose to overlook
Hence I do think it was very unfair of you (and intellectually weak) to phrase your reply with sentences such as…
Your entire argument boils down to "Nothing bad has ever happened to me, so China can't really be as bad as you guys are saying".
… because you choosing to “boil down” my argument to these ridiculous words is a big misrepresentation of the full piece I wrote. I don’t think you’d be happy if I “boiled down” your contribution to some similarly daft statement
Choosing the weak or shakiest points of someone’s case and then amplifying and summarising it like that is not a reasonable nor effective debating approach. Well I’m sure you know that already so I won’t patronise you any further
Actually the statement provoking this was my “flake and bounty bar” reference, and yes it was shaky, but surely you realised was it also tongue-in-cheek. Remember I was just trying to explain to the earlier contributors who feared for me for breaking the law here that they had nothing to worry about. To suggest that I was implying that that fact meant bad **** doesn’t happen here is unacceptable
But yes “Evangelion” I do admit, I can only really draw on my own experience and existence in China, i.e. again I am willing to admit what I don’t know and don’t see here; and I do respect that you have read and research this and repeat my appreciation for your contribution and links
Anyway I didn’t mind that ‘laugh out loud’; you can have that one, but your next LOL, well that really is subjective surely:
China
is “slighted, tainted, sneered at and scorned at will in our media”. The reasons why can be debated (they are being), but would you admit that with most, in fact all complex phenomena there is usually a
range of factors and causes. You only nail one, a valid one yes, but not the full picture. What I mean is that anti-communist propaganda
did unarguably exist; the question is does it still exist in a lingering form? If you can concede ‘yes’ to questions like that, I will apologise for being blasé about human rights abuses here, and we wouldn’t need to debate to
what extent these factors are weighted (an impossible question to resolve anyway)
Have I been living under a rock or just not researched the cases? Well I fully concede the latter point, no I haven’t read up as I should have, and I’m grateful for your links. You might think this undermines my contributions, but if you read my words carefully, and the key themes I am stressing, then you’ll surely be able to see that my passages are not a denial of China human rights abuse, nor really even a discussion of them, rather much more about perceptions, how we really know what we know, all triggered from the fact that when I wanted help on listening to cricket, the first responses comically seemed to suggest that I would imperil myself, an idea so ridiculous that I had to question why people back home have such inaccurate perceptions of the country where I live and work and the people who are my friends
I don’t mind your thread solely being about the human rights stuff – admittedly the more serious topic – but I have to pick up on you “changing the issue” of my words:
You say that Chinese people are not prohibited from reading about the Tiananmen Square massacre on the Internet, and that's great. But hang on a minute - aren't you missing the real issue here? The real issue is that IT HAPPENED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
No. That it happened is the issue in your mind. You actually totally ignored my point which was so fundamental to my thread I’ll repeat it here – we are repeatedly told that Google colludes with the Chinese government to block reading about the massacre. This is a British media lie repeated over and over, yet in most people’s minds it is a ‘fact’
Instead you chose to assault me with what I felt was the petulant question: “Do you think it's morally acceptable for the government to massacre innocent people just because they want democracy?”
Of course I don’t. But I also think it’s morally unacceptable that when the exact same incident occurred in Uzbekistan three years ago, it got a tiny amount of press coverage because it was still then (just) a client state of the US and a key position in its geopolitical strategy, in which natural resources, such as energy, play a vital role as they have done for decades
I have read back my original post, and I’m willing to admit it could have been interpreted as being pretty generous to the Chinese state, I apologise for that. Actually I have no doubt that shocking and disturbing things happen in the name of authority here, but I still don’t think that detracts from the validity of my original post
Well that’s about it “Evangelion”… I hope if you write again you do so fairly and appreciate my efforts to be honest and reasonably analytical about what you wrote, it’s meant as a mix of thanks and compliments, defence against some of your points, and perhaps a kind of gentle encouragement for you to be less polarised, or should I say just slightly less
certain, in your case, because all of us have the evidence of our eyes and experience, but after that our ‘knowledge’ is at the behest of the words, photographs, reports, and allegations of others, sources whom
vary in motivation from the justice and truth-seekers at Amnesty International, through the spectrum to the worst machinations of totalitarian government propaganda
I look forward to reading your links with an open mind, one that for a long time has questioned every fact with the question “How do we know that is a fact?”. In some cases proof will be convincing to irrefutable, but in others is it possible that that ‘concrete’ may turn out to be a little crumbly upon closer examination?
