I'm talking about China the country. A country with one of the most oppressive regimes in the world; a country with an appalling human rights record.
Yeah, too much western TV. What you need, my friend, what you need, my son, it's a holliday in Cambodia... or in Gaza right now, or in south africa in the Boer wars when concentration camps where invented, or in Kenya where MauMau were emasculated in interrogation, or in India where you blew rebels firing guns with them tied to the muzzle, etc, etc.
This is known as "What about-ism". All human beings used to be savages, and gradually, over the millennia and the centuries, humans became more and more civilised. Progress was patchy, and several times progress went backwards.
Like all countries - including China - Britain has a dark past. But what matters
right now is whether Britain has a dark present. The present is the only thing that is important, because none of us can undo the past. And no, Britain does not have a dark present. Britain embodies the principles of freedom, equality, democracy, the rule of law, freedom of expression. Yes, it is flawed and imperfect, but those are its principles.
In contrast China right now is imprisoning it's own citizens just for expressing disagreement with the government. Britain doesn't do that. China subjects the Uyghurs to mass imprisonment and the systematic destruction of the Uyghurs' racial and cultural identity.* Britain doesn't do that.
I won't go on - this is not a political forum, but my conviction remains as strong as ever: the Chinese state oppresses its own citizens, and oppresses Uyghurs and Tibetans even more. The Chinese state makes no effort to stop the widespread faking of products designed in Japan or the West, nor the theft of intellectual property. The Chinese government is explicitly opposed to the freedoms enjoyed by citizens in the West.
Because of those policies I believe that the Chinese state is a force of evil in the world, and one which imposes severe threats to Western values and freedoms.
So, my dear
@tatel, mock and laugh as much as you like. My skin is plenty thick enough. And when you've finished, read the following. If you think Wikipedia is biased, check out the extensive references (I've provided a link for you). See if you can keep an open mind - you might gain some new insights. And if you have any human compassion inside you, prepare to be horrified.
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From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China?wprov=sfla1 In 2014, the Chinese government announced a "people's war on terror". Since then, Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been affected by extensive controls and restrictions which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government has imposed upon their religious, cultural, economic and social lives. In order to forcibly assimilate them, the government has arbitrarily detained more than an estimated one million Uyghurs in internment camps. Human Rights Watch says that the camps have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017.
Leaked Chinese government operating procedures state that the main feature of the camps is to ensure adherence to CCP ideology, with the inmates being continuously held captive in the camps for a minimum of 12 months depending on their performance on Chinese ideology tests. The New York Times has reported inmates are required to "sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write 'self-criticism' essays," and that prisoners are also subjected to physical and verbal abuse by prison guards. Chinese officials have sometimes assigned to monitor the families of current inmates, and women have been detained due to actions by their sons or husbands.
Other policies have included forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion. According to German researcher Adrian Zenz, hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.