[osdiab]

I’m not Chinese, but I did live there for a bit. If you haven’t already I suggest you take the time to get acquainted with Chinese culture, modern history, and modern Chinese lifestyle. In recent times there have been significant human tragedies there for sure, but given the historical context they feared to relive, and the incredible gains they’ve made in recent years, you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.”

Still lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused, and its a pity they rely on rewriting history and suppressing subversive thought to preserve the government’s legitimacy, but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted, blindly dogmatic and ignorant of the way the world works these days.

[aaron-lebo]

but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted

That dichotomy was never made. The answer isn't today's ineffective democracies, but it is much closer to those than it is to governments which kill their own citizens to maintain power.

It always reads like whataboutism to say "but what about their mistakes"? In the 1930s there were plenty of cheerleaders for the USSR who made just as much progress at great human cost. You're aware of the sins of the West because a free press broadcasts them. What is it that the Chinese government won't let the world know about?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> That dichotomy was never made.

And yet, t is always at the forefront of the subtext of any discussion of China- the communist regime that's so unlike our Western democracies because it's communist and we're democratic.

As to governments killing their own citizens- the US, the leader of the free world, is one of the few nations besides China that still regularly uses the death penalty. And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts).

It's impossible to make a comment about the politics of China, without implicitly comparing them to the politics of the West; and vice-versa.

[nate_meurer]

IMO the death penalty is a disgrace, but it's not comparable to things like Tianamen Square. Not even remotely.

The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punishment by the state simply for disagreeing. (EDIT: And, more to the point, Americans are increasingly using the power of their vote to abolish the death penalty.)

I hope you can see how the Chinese government's claim to the right to slaughter and imprison its citizens at will and in secret or the crime of expressing dissent is, um... different?

> "And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts)."

Who's this "they" you speak of? Obama's extra-judicial killing af Anwar Al-Alawki, for example, is one of the great stains on his presidency in the eyes of a large portion of the voting public, and it was hotly contested within the government too. And again, Americans are free to criticize these actions without fear of government reprisal. I remember calling Obama's action cowardly and illegal here on HN a few years back, and the thought of being killed or imprisoned for this never occurred to me. Exactly how does this situation compare to that of China?

[paulmd]

> The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process

I'm sure China's system has some high-minded "nominal" goals too. Why should we give the US a pass for its practical outcomes while holding China to a higher standard?

Remember, for all that talk about how horrible China is, the US imprisons many times more people per-capita.

(I tend to agree with you that Chinese practical outcomes are worse in various intangible ways, but I'm not willing to write off US prison populations like that, it's a blemish and a stain and it's such a massive problem that people are unable to address it on any sort of a political level. Which is basically the same problem as in China, just with a different set of social strictures. In both cases it comes down to a basic sense of "shou ga nai" - nothing can be done.)

[nate_meurer]

I agree! The critical difference, of course, being that if we lived in China we'd quite likely be imprisoned (or worse) for simply talking about this.

In contrast, as an American, I can lend out my copy of "The New Jim Crow" and rant and rave in public about how unjust the American justice system truly is, and never once fear punishment by my government. It's never once entered my mind.

[erikpukinskis]

We are not giving the US a pass.

[nicolas_t]

Is it really communist beside the name? I wouldn't say it is and the very important increase in the wealth and salary gap between classes shows that it's far from being a communist regime nowadays

As for Tiananmen, one needs to see the context. China had recently endured the cultural revolution and the leaders had a good understanding of the potential disasters of a revolution. In that context, if they believed that the ends justify the means and that millions would die if a new revolution happened, the leaders could rationalize their decisions.

I'm not saying it's not horrific. It is. But, it's the kind of decision that needs to be understood in it's historical context.

As for the actual mowing of bodies and the bulldozer's making a pie. I'm not sure if it's real or not. It does seem like the kind of rumors that circulate because they are particularly gruesome. What would be the point for the Chinese government to do that? I may be mistaken but, in my mind, the Chinese government at that time was nothing if not practical and pragmatic (in a horrifying way for sure), there would be no justifiable reasons for being this gruesome.

[lostlogin]

>the ends justify the means

> lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused.

Which is it?

[osdiab]

Unjust or immoral actions can ultimately have on balance positive ends. What you decide to do is a matter of your philosophy, but in most significant cases none of your choices are completely moral.

[lostlogin]

Choosing to turn 10,000 people into ‘pie’ would seem a fairly black and white case. Do you think it possible to justify? You don’t seem whole against it.

[osdiab]

I’m not saying it’s moral. Obviously I would prefer my government to not do this sort of thing. But I am saying that the motivations are understandable with historical context and that the legitimacy of a government’s decisions go deeper than just a binary good or bad judgment; and that all governments face these sorts of decisions at some point. For instance, any time the USA intervenes militarily or economically elsewhere, it is an unavoidable calculation that some (potentially large) number of innocent people on those countries will suffer or die. To ignore the obvious example of all of America’s armed conflicts since WWII, embargoes on North Korea, for example, have likely lead to a huge amount of suffering and death in that country, but our governments have deemed it worth it to some extent. How do we make decisions in these cases?

[erikpukinskis]

In what sense is you saying “the ends justify the means” not “excusing” the means?

[osdiab]

Yeah, I’m not saying it’s an excuse, nor that it’s moral, just that it’s understandable and that there is a value in trying to understand.

[cgmg]

> you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.”

I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government?

> our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy

What do you mean by this, and what alternative do you propose?

[osdiab]

For the ends justify the means part, each time China went through a major revolutionary attempt in the last 150 years or so it led to incredible amounts of human suffering (on the orders of millions to tens of millions of deaths each time) and blatant foreign exploitation of their country, and some of those revolutions were for dumber things than a call to democracy (I find the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to be particularly interesting, where a guy who thought he was a literal descendent of Jesus Christ caused a rebellion that lead to the deaths of possibly around 20 million people). I could see why they would want to take extreme measures to maintain stability, especially given how difficult it was to maintain China as a unified country that could stand up against western imperialist exploitation. Once again, not saying it’s moral nor that there wasn’t some amount of a selfish attempt to maintain control, but it’s not so black and white, especially in a society with such a strongly collectivist mentality like China; and arguably, unified control in fact was the primary deficit in Chinese government and primary cause of social instability in China since the days of the Qing Dynasty.

As for alternatives, I have no good alternatives, but what I can say is that while people from the USA decry authoritarian rule as being 100% evil, it’s hard to ignore how efficiently it has been working in the Chinese case. In a developing country being inefficient at developing has real human consequences, prolonging disease, hunger, malnutrition, undereducation, and lack of opportunity for incredibly large numbers of people. So I don’t believe that opting for a maximally representative but likely significantly less efficient form of government is necessarily a good choice for all countries, which seems to be the subtext of many people who draw a hard line on the Chinese government’s misdeeds, and proceed to label it as uniformly detestable, without considering the potential human cost of its alternatives. As for whether installing a democratic government at that point in China’s history would have been successful or even possible at that time would have been a huge uncertainty, even with what we know today.

[cgmg]

Like I said elsewhere, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have a similar culture and shared history yet became liberal democracies. They are also much more prosperous.