Is
blocked in China? Let's make it happen. Even if no one linked to us anyway.
Thrad title is a line from this protester:
"China is asshoe" which is now a full-on meme. Disclaimers:
- The full line is "Donald Trump, don't trust China! China is asshoe!"
- Yes, he's saying asshole. This is not about mocking accents.
- Even though he addresses Donald Trump, it's not about Donald Trump. "Trump" isn't going to do anything.
- It's about the Chinese government not the Chinese people.
- Although some Chinese people may also be asshoes.
There is too much stuff to discuss about China so I'm not going to pretend to mention let alone cover everything. Obviously the main current thing is the forceful application of the one system, party=power, to Hong Kong despite the "one country two systems" line. But don't forget, Xinjiang is a highly advanced surveillance police state with something like a million Uighurs in re-education camps. Governments around the world are still capitulating to China's demands that they don't have diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Tibet is still an occupied territory with the Dalai Lama in exile. China is still building "facts on the
ground sea" to try to expand its territorial claims in the South China Sea. Not even Macau is particularly happy.
In Hong Kong, the protesters are keeping going despite gatherings being made illegal (unless you're the police), wearing masks being made illegal (unless you're the police), singing anti-police protest songs being made illegal (no word on whether the police are allowed to sing). The original spark, a law on extradition to the mainland, has been dropped but too little too late: the protests now are about democracy and rights.
If Beijing does not budge, the struggle for Hong Kong will last decades | Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala | Opinion | The Guardian
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But meanwhile, we have the unrestrained tendency of China to threaten and bully countries, businesses and individuals anywhere in the world when they criticise China.
Tweet support for the HK protesters and China will block your organisation:
China denies it demanded NBA fire Daryl Morey over Hong Kong tweet | NBA | The Guardian
Protest in your own country and get family threats:
To suppress news of Xinjiang’s gulag, China threatens Uighurs abroad - Cutting the line
Quote:
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Kurban Niyaz, another Uighur exile in America, received a photo from his younger sister on WeChat, a Chinese social-media app. It showed two Chinese police officers sitting on her sofa (one of them smiled for the camera).
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'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests | Uighurs | The Guardian
Quote:
Then the Chinese official took the phone again with a final warning.
“You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. “You need to think of their safety.”
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I'm reading "Upheaval" by Jared Diamond, in which he writes about various countries who've gone through national crises. In the chapter on Finland he discusses Finland's conscious policy of accommodating the Soviet Union after the Winter and Continuation Wars (WW2 for the rest of us) and comments
Quote:
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It could never happen in the U.S. or Germany that a presidential election would be postponed, a presidential candidate would withdraw his or her candidacy, a publisher would cancel a book, or the press would censor itself, just to avoid inflaming Soviet sensitivities. Such actions seem to violate a democracy's right to freedom of action.
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And I thought - but that's happen right now - definitely parts of the press are self-censoring, businesses are self-censoring. Does China have the relative size and degree of threat to America and Europe as the 1950s Soviet Union did to Finland, 50 times smaller and still in the process of industrialising?
Asshoe.
Anyway just to make sure we get blocked: