
China’s Communist Party and Its American Media Enablers - jamesdd
https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/05/26/china-s-communist-party-and-its-american-media-enablers/
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killjoywashere
Is there a bot that can look up news organizations for us and report basic
facts, like

Long name: International Policy Digest

ISSN: 2332-9416

Founder: John Lyman

Founded in: 2011

Crunchbase: not found

Wikipedia: not found

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willis936
I’ve not seen such blanket downvoting in a comments section in a while. Is
this a genuinely unpopular topic, are the comments unpopular, or is there
brigading going on?

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TimTheTinker
I suspect a lot of commenters and voters in this thread are from mainland
China.

It's astonishing to hear Chinese citizens' opinion of their government, even
those who have emigrated elsewhere. The look of shock and disbelief when you
relate commonly known events of the last 10 years is sad and underscores the
power of propaganda.

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DiogenesKynikos
The fact that so many Chinese people's opinions of their country differ so
markedly from what you would expect, based on what you read in Western media,
should at least lead to you reevaluate your own views. What you're saying is
that Chinese people who have lived in the West, who have seen Western coverage
of China, nevertheless are much more sympathetic to their government than you
would expect. Doesn't that pique your interest?

I'm not going to paint a rosy picture of China, but the view you get in most
Western media is extremely heavily distorted, and almost completely out-of-
touch with what is actually going on in China, what most people in China care
about, and so on.

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TimTheTinker
> the view you get in most Western media is extremely heavily distorted

I actually avoid mainstream Western media for news on China, as it frequently
bends the truth in their favor, or fails to cover significant human rights
abuses.

The news I get (that matters to me) is more from groups with boots on the
ground in mainland China.

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Barrin92
The article has a very strong "throw enough sh__ and see how much of it
sticks" tone to it. Mark Zuckerberg asking Xi for a baby name or American
entertainment producers trying to play friendly with the Chinese market isn't
really 'enabling the communist party' in any meaningful sense of the word. And
Chinese media replaying some CNN clip isn't really evidence of anything either
given that you can take everything out of context.

The one thing from the article I'd agree with is bad is Bloomberg interferring
with the journalists reporting at his own company. There should be a strict
line between Bloombergs other business interests and the editorial at the
newspaper.

Otherwise I think there's a lot of confusion in the article between the
conflation of the private market changing products to be popular in China,
which is fine and simply reflects their status as a consumer, and actual
propaganda efforts.

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woutr_be
> American entertainment producers trying to play friendly with the Chinese
> market isn't really 'enabling the communist party' in any meaningful sense
> of the word

I think this is where a lot of people would disagree. Once companies give in
to demands of censorship or anything that goes against our Western values,
you're basically letting China know that they can get away with it. And to me,
that's directly enabling their behaviour.

On the other side, if you don't give in to their demands, you're essentially
missing out on a huge market, so most companies pick money over morals.

There's a difference between changing products to be popular in China, and
censoring words to be allowed to operate in China. Sadly for a lot of
companies, one cannot go without the other.

~~~
082349872349872
As a capitalist in a third world country, it seems like in principle a bit of
competition ought to be good for both the 2nd and 1st largest economies.
Remember the Avis "we try harder" campaign?

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CountSessine
Except this isn’t commercial competition - it’s a competition in values and
the role of the state in people’s lives. It’s Enlightenment values vs thinly
disguised fascism. It’s a competition, alright - just be careful which side
you’re fighting for.

~~~
082349872349872
Thankfully there are almost two hundred sides from which to choose. Il faut de
tout pour faire un monde. Nie mój cyrk, nie moje malpy.

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airocker
Now I know why Jin Yang is this adorable and Dinesh Chugtai is Pakistani.

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airocker
Why the downvotes? If Dinesh Chugtai was Indian, how would the Chinese
audience take it? By the name he sounds Indian. It's a business decision but
it is what it is! I just started watching the show and love it btw.

~~~
willis936
If we assume the character was modified to fit the actor who was chosen for
the role, then why change him from Pakistani to Indian? Dinesh’s actor, Kumail
Nanjiani, even made a popular (and good) movie related to Pakistani culture in
contemporary times: The Big Sick.

It’s a bit of a stretch to think that the show creators chose Kumail because
he was Pakistani rather than Indian. He’s a talented comedian and, at the
time, unknown. The showrunners were smart to pick him up.

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airocker
Btw the character itself is possibly that of Aditya Agarwal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aditya_Agarwal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aditya_Agarwal)

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jillesvangurp
The premise of this article is that the US is the victim of Chinese
incompetency. The opening sentence more or less tries to state that as a fact.
Basically, the authors are parroting Trump here.

The reality is that Wuhan has been open for business again for two months or
so after China dealt swiftly and efficiently with the pandemic while the US
was still in denial about having a crisis while at the same time experiencing
the crippling effects on the economy. If you want to use the word incompetence
in relation to this pandemic, there's no need to look beyond Washington.

This article is the Republican narrative that this thing that happened on
their watch isn't their fault at all because evil foreigners tricked them.
It's a blatant deflection of any form of responsibility.

Like most of the world, the US was getting all the signals that bad shit was
going down late last year, early confirmations that it was going to be really
bad in January, and the rest is just plain incompetent governance,
opportunistic posturing by populist morons, wishful thinking, and a generally
unprecedented level of ineptness throughout layers of government that
Republicans have had no small part in helping to deconstruct in the last
decades. If you want to point fingers, use a mirror.

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dgzl
Yes unfortunately Americans have rights and our federal government doesn't
have authority to micro-manage our life like a Sim game. So sad.

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abroter
you guys don't live in China, you know nothing about China, I don't know where
did you get these information about China. But you can say what you think,
that's your freedom.

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nxc18
It’s so exhausting having to live through this ridiculous propaganda war.
Everyone seems to suck here, but there’s so much finger pointing. The people
on the US side of the isle seem to be especially frantic now that it’s
abundantly clear they dropped the ball about 100,000 times (underestimate) and
trashed their economy in the process.

Can we stop pointing fingers and just take a break ffs? Everything China does
the US does, sometimes with variations in degree but most often just with a
different label (occasionally with different timelines, but it’s hard to take
seriously the idea that US 70 years ago should just be off the hook while we
roast China).

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jimmaswell
I feel like I'm in the Twilight zone seeing these kinds of equivalencies made
online. "China does organ harvesting and brutally supresses the entire
populace's rights and did Tiananman Square and arrests and interrogates you
for criticizing the police but we had internment camps in WW2 so look in a
mirror and stop talking about China" ..no, I'm not going to "stop roasting"
China just because my country, like every country, has an imperfect past. At
best that's a defense mechanism to feel smug about being silent on crimes
against humanity.

Criticize the American covid response all you want but spreading this false
equivalence that sounds deep unless you think about it is outright dangerous
and a shameful disservice to the citizens of Hong Kong and everyone else
impacted by the Chinese government.

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nxc18
Yeah, there’s lots of bad on both sides.

Here in the US we have crimes like Driving While Black. There was just a high
profile execution the other day that made headlines, but most fly under the
radar.

We also just killed 100,000 people, minimum, through deliberate incompetence,
so there’s that. Technically it’s the past, but in practical terms it’s the
present. I’ll remind you that Tiananmen Square was quite a while ago.

Rights are relative, people in China don’t have them, people in the US kind of
have them sometimes, assuming they’re the right color or have enough money. In
broad strokes it’s better in the US, for now.

I personally like to count the foreign deaths and foreign intervention when
evaluating countries-the US really likes interfering with our neighbors, and
kills lots of people in the Middle East - 200,000+ innocent civilians. But
they’re foreign, so they’re not really people, right?
[https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-
us-w...](https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-us-war-on-
terror/) I won’t even begin with the non-lethal interventions, or more subtle
interventions like giving arms to authoritarian regimes and/or terrorists.

But I guess China spies, so that’s really bad. It would be terrible if they
stole the NSA’s idea and interfered with network equipment. They do like
stealing IP. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-
nsa...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-
factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/)

The US does a disservice to the world by not being better in the present. We
can’t hold China accountable when we don’t hold ourselves accountable.

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jimmaswell
> people in the US kind of have them sometimes, assuming they’re the right
> color or have enough money

Complete hyperbole. Squint as hard as you can but the poorest minority in
America is still better off than almost anyone in China. Yes we have a racial
profiling problem but on the whole we have our rights much more than "kind of
sometimes."

Yeah, we have an incompetent administration this time around. At least we have
real elections with more than one real candidate.

Last part is a total non sequitur and would make as much sense flipped around.

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bildung
_> At least we have real elections with more than one real candidate._

For some definition of "real elections" \- the voting suppression techniques
employed in the US are study material in politics courses in other
democracies.

* gerrymandering

* not allowing for remote votes by letter

* having votes on days that are not free for working people - this is interesting because many other democracies used that to discourage working class people to vote, e.g. Germany in the late 19th century. But most countries now mandate that votes have to fall on either sundays or national holidays.

* (Edit:) Felony disenfranchisement - this in combination with the war on drugs is a very effective way to strip voting rights from minorities, e.g. this isn't even visible in voting turnout comparisons between countries.

And the techniques work: The US has one of the lowest voting participation
rates of all OECD countries.

