107
Chinese Boarding Schools and the Indoctrination of a Generation
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
107 points (92.1% liked)
News
23284 readers
1652 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
China is a place and country. Chinese is a ethnicity. As a Chinese American myself, I had no confusion over what the commenter was saying. When we talk bout nations and their governments, it is pretty common to just refer to the country's name. I don't necessarily agree with the statement being made, but I did not at all take it as a ethnic or racial criticism.
Frankly, I’m not even sure how someone reads the comment that “China is a shitty haven for cheats and liars” as directed mostly at the government, and not about the country, people, and culture in general. The government is a haven? The government is a cheat and liar? These readings are a stretch even at the level of syntax.
A "haven" is a place, not a people. And a haven usually describes a place that has favorable laws, regulations, or attitudes towards certain behaviors. To me that is a government since havens usually have laws to support that. For example, a tax haven is a place where laws and government are organized in a way to be favorable to tax evasion.
Yes, I suspected you might go this route of saying "well, the shitty place is made shitty by the government, so it's really a claim about the government after all." I find that as dubious as saying "Africa is a shithole. That's a claim about their governments, nothing racist against Africans!"
Look, I think the Chinese government is authoritarian, immoral, and repressive, and what they're doing in Tibet is genocide. But you're turning a blind eye to anti-Asian racism if you're doing mental gymnastics to defend racist generalizations against Chinese people. Another person in this very thread said, "China is a terrible country. There’s no discussion to be had here". Are you going to make excuses for that person too? Maybe they meant the government too, and not the country or culture? That would be absolutely beyond naive.
As a Chinese American I in now way interpreted the comment as being a generalization about Chinese people. A haven is a place, normally referencing a port. I think it requires a lot more gymnastics to turn a statement about the country to a generalization about ethnicity.
Also, weird take to have and not also be critical of the headline of this article or language in the article itself. This comment uses the term "China" in the same general sense as the article.
Sure you can dig your heels in, and there’s apparently nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. You haven’t addressed my analogies to other similar expressions, so it sounds like we’re not even really having a discussion anymore. Are you also defending “China is a terrible country”? Who knows!
The article says “China’s brutal treatment…” where “China” is clearly a metonym for the Chinese state. But “China is a haven” is not a metonym and doesn’t refer to specific state actions. I don’t see any similar usage in the headline, “Chinese” is an adjective, so that’s a real stretch.