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Yet another one of China's elite has disappeared after criticizing Xi Jinping
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Western media talking about "disappearances" is always the funniest thing to me. If somebody just goes like a week without appearing on TV, they can say they "disappeared," and the audience will immediately assume that they're in some black site with a bag over their head. If they show up the next week and tell everyone they're fine, then they have plausible deniability since they never actually said anything bad happened to them. Of course, then you've got your audience primed to believe that something's up and can write another headline like, "Questions remain regarding the disappearance of so-and-so." Once you get a name trending, it doesn't matter what the facts are.
I remember coming under fire from an irl friend over the "disappearance" of tennis player Peng Shuai... until she reappeared, and the International Olympic Committee confirmed that she was perfectly fine. The only evidence that anything bad had happened to her was the lack of a public appearance, but then, after making public appearances, the story didn't die, instead each new appearance simply gave the media more to talk about, keeping it in the public consciousness and always insisting that "questions remain."
Of course, that's not even mentioning all the times the media doesn't just claim a "disappearance" but just outright lies about these things. If Business Insider can't even muster up a "detained," it's pretty safe to assume it doesn't mean anything. And of course, if someone says anything critical of the government, then they are immediately absolved of any and all suspicion of having committed actual crimes - absolutely zero investigation into the charges of corruption is needed for everyone to conclude with 100% certainty that they're trumped up.
I can't wait to see how many downvotes I can get lmao.
I try to take such claims seriously and I think we all should, just in case there’s any truth to them and someone is actually kidnapped. Of course knowing that they may not have been. Flagging certain individuals as potentially at risk isn’t wrong per se. But I get your point about how it is a relatively easy claim to make and exploitable politically. Still, I think it should be taken seriously, just in case.
That's perfectly fine, I just think it's important to treat claims critically, and to understand what it actually means to say that someone has "disappeared" in this context - it doesn't mean that their friends or family have reported them missing, it doesn't mean that a reporter has checked their house and found it abandoned, it just means that they haven't been on TV, and it requires a lot of assumptions on the part of the audience to conclude from that that they've been kidnapped or extrajudicially detained.
You make a fair point. Not all “disappearances” are made equal. Unfortunately some people on here (and many out there) love taking sides, and once they have, they find it difficult to process anything with a certain critical distance. Maybe it didn’t help that your original comment sounded very dismissive, as if any such claims in Western media are more likely to be BS than not. We don’t know that. At least I don’t know that. One could of course collect data on that, could be an interesting little project. I’m sure there are folks tracking disappearances and disappearance claims.