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China using families as 'hostages' to quash dissent abroad
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Can you specify? How many cases do you know? And in which countries? Otherwise its hard to guess if the CIA can fake it. But I'd say if it is up, say to a hundred then: Yes totally something the CIA could and would do.
To influence public opinion and manufacture consent for a wide range of political actions against the only threat to US hegemony in existence
That is not even close to the "too ridiculous for the CIA to do" scale. They once produced Bin-Laden dolls whose face would scrape off to reveal a demon. It was called operation Devils Eyes.
You have to imagine people sit there 8h a day to hatch schemes on how to best sway public opinions
Some of the assasination attempts on Castro were also quite ridiculous.
It's in the article I referenced:
"Last December, a report from NGO Safeguard Defenders said it had identified 102 Chinese police stations operating in 53 countries, including five in Canada."
To be fair, the article you posted claims that NGO is some kind of CIA backed organization. I don't know if I really buy that, but I suppose it is possible. Antcedotally, I've heard other stories of China doing stuff like this (particularly when there were a lot of Hong Kong protests) but I'll admit I don't have much first hand evidence myself. It's just, on a balance of probabilities, I'm much more likely to believe that an authoritarian regime like China is capable of doing it.
Also that example about the "Devil Eyes" dolls is bit disengenious to bring up. Your own source states that they only ever built a few prototypes. Granted, it does say an anonymous Chinese source says hundreds were shipped to Pakistan, but again I don't think we can really trust China's take on this.
The CIA has lots of looney plans (likely a product of Military-Industrial complex), but not many come to fruition becasue they are not practical.
Wasn't me. I haven't read that article yet
As I obviously have not read yours. I will catch up on both. Thanks for quoting that anyways
I wouldn't be surprised. The CIA has a history of backing NGOs like this dating back to the Congress for Cultural Freedom whose goal it was to purge leftism in europe of communism. Nowadays they usually use the NED for that though
Whether or not it is true they only ever produced prototypes I don't think its disingenious as my point was not the impact it made but how the CIA operates and this is a good example as it simultaneously needs to be: somewhat recent, yet not too recent so its publicly known (declassified or uncovered) and ridiculous.
I wanted to push back on your notion that something sounds too ridiculous for the CIA to pursue, which generally is just not a framework in which to understand the CIA.
The Chinese source was not "China's take on this" it was a source of the washington post in China where the CIA allegedly commissioned the dolls (which they did not dispute according to wapo).
But since you brought up the trustworthyness of a take: I wouldn't trust the CIAs take on this, which is the source claiming "too their knowledge" only 3 dolls were produced.
But personally I think its clear these dolls never got into the hands of many customers, its just such a dumb plan.
Historically many narratives about China have been proven false or misrepresented too (social credit system, authenticity of tiananmen papers,...) thats why I am sceptical.
Thanks to the illusory truth effect this anecdotal gut feeling is terribly vulnerable to manipulation. It happens in media all the time, i.e. some rightists believe the LGBTQ community is full of groomers bc its what they are told all the time (not sure if this is a good example, I just wanted to pick a partisan one)
If the targets voice is not represented its even worse bc the claims stay largely uncontested and false claims can stack up (one misrepresentation giving you the feeling "this is totally something they would do", strenghtening your misconception), creating a gut feeling in the population that is wrong. A fairly uncontested example for such a deconstruction of a foreign target through the media would be Iraq pre invasion. You can look up polls from around the time and correlate it with the reporting of the time. This is also the effect of filterbubbles of course filtering out the opinions you lose the corrective
Whether or not the CIA was/is involved in influencing public opinion like this (personally I have no doubt), this is absolutely what is happening WRT reporting on China ATM, there is no corrective and false claims just stack up.
Look at the histeria that an off-course weather balloon caused: people would line up at an event to scream at Biden about the balloon, even though the initial press release of the pentagon clearly states that this was not an uncommon phenomenon and that there is no threat associated with it (granted its longer than that and one can have a discussion about some of the wording, but this comment is long enough already)
Fair enough. I appreciate the detailed response. I agree there's lots of reasons to be skeptical of claims made against China. At the same time, I think we can still be critical of China's actions and not merely dismiss everything against China as some CIA backed plot.
I agree, the best thing is to not jump to conclusions neither the conclusion "Everything is 100% CIA lies" nor the conclusion "China bad" and be patient with individual topics before stepping onto the emotional roller coaster
I've listened to a podcast ("Silk and Steel") by a Chinese living in the US and he describes the media coverage of China in the West as skewed, but he describes it as narrowed onto a certain slice of Chinese reality that is there just blown out of proportion.
I don't remember his exact words and I am not an English native so I might not transfer the nuance precisely. But along those lines is what I remember. And even IIRC its just the opinion of one person, but it stuck with me. Tbf that was years ago though and narrative has certainly picked up since then
Thank you for the appreciation, I have to say I have yet to get used to the discussions on lemmy being seemingly way more good-faithed than on reddit!