
U.S. issues China travel advisory amid increased tensions - h-
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-travel-idUSKCN1OX1DJ
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grecy
After traveling for over 2.5 years through 30 countries in Africa (still
going)[1], I've learned travel advisories are extremely Political.

Senegal wants to get a fair price for it's resources and asks for that? France
issues a travel warning and decimates their tourist industry for a few years.

It's common place for Western countries to issue travel warnings when they
just don't like what a certain country is doing politically. It's often got
nothing to do with traveler safety.

[1][http://instagram.com/theroadchoseme/](http://instagram.com/theroadchoseme/)

~~~
Latteland
Sounds believable that countries do these alerts for sometimes political
reasons, but China is actually keeping people from leaving the country for
unspecified reasons and is seizing people, even their own citizens.

~~~
grecy
Plenty of countries do bad things to their own citizens that have absolutely
no impact on foreign tourists who visit.

I'm not saying it's OK, but it's hardly a reason to warn people not to go
there.

~~~
kyrra
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/politics/china-
canada-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/politics/china-canada-
huawei.html)

China has been holding 3 Canadian's, likely in retaliation to the CFO of
Huawei being held. So it may seem warranted here?

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gringoDan
To put this in context, the US Travel Advisory for China is "Level 2: Exercise
Increased Caution". This is the same as the travel advisory for the U.K., most
of Western Europe, and the touristy parts of Mexico.

Map of US Travel Advisories:
[https://travelmaps.state.gov/TSGMap/](https://travelmaps.state.gov/TSGMap/)

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stcredzero
According to YouTubers fitting the description, lots of ex-patriate westerners
have been leaving China in recent months. The climate there has changed from
tolerant/friendly towards westerners to "we don't need you."

(serpentza and laowhy86 on YouTube are how I became aware of this.)

~~~
ssnistfajen
More like those two did not possess enough skills to qualify for a better
visa. No country inherently needs immigrants who can't contribute anything.
Zero sympathy for them.

laowhy86 and serpentza subsisted off a horde of uninformed people who couldn't
be bothered to even read Wikipedia articles about a country. This is evident
through the clickbait-y style and non-existent intellectual depth of their
videos.

~~~
ProAm
> No country inherently needs immigrants who can't contribute anything. Zero
> sympathy for them.

We're all people of the earth who do not need inherit value to live with some
imaginary line on the ground.

~~~
EpicEng
>We're all people of the earth who do not need inherit value to live with some
imaginary line on the ground.

I'm not agreeing with the GP, but the world simply doesn't work that way.
Travel across the "imaginary lines" you speak of are controlled via military
might, so perhaps they're not just "imaginary". See how well you fare
attempting to run across the NK/SK border.

~~~
claudiawerner
Being "made up" (what I think GP means by "imaginary") doesn't mean that such
things lack force. For instance, class is "made up" and some ontologies of
race and gender fix them as "made up" \- this does not, of course, mean that
class, race and gender do not have very real effects on society and the
individuals therein. But humans have power over human abstractions, so such
"made up" things can be changed, as opposed to what I presume OP would group
into things not "made up", such as the laws of physics. Being "made up" hints
to a possibility, no matter how remote, of a different (and dare I say better)
world.

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EpicEng
Calling them "imaginary lines" was an obvious attempt by the GP to disregard
them as meaningless. They are not meaningless, that was my point.

~~~
claudiawerner
But by the same token, if we assume that GP is more than a simpleton (in the
principle of charity) we must say that they would also consider art (always
created by human intention) to be "imaginary lines", but I doubt they would
deny paintings can have meaning. Words (usually though not always naturally
evolved), by the same token, are just scrawls, but they have meaning despite
being "made up" in the same way. GP knows they have meaning because he/she is
using them in such a way. I read the idea that the lines are imaginary to mean
that they don't have to be that way.

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tonfa
Headline is somewhat misleading, since that advisory seems to be the same as
previous year (and maybe previous years?).

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rdlecler1
One Chinese idiom is “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” — right now Canada
is the chicken.

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yourbandsucks
I guess 30 years of peace and prosperity was too much for people to handle..
we can't just read our history, we have to learn the hard way.

~~~
api
I dunno... a travel warning about a country with over a million people
currently in camps seems reasonable.

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itslennysfault
We have about 1/4 their population and over 2 million people in prison I'd
think people visiting the US from China should be the ones that are worried.

~~~
tossaccount123
prison =/= forced labor camp for political prisoners or Muslims

I have yet to see Trump arrest the hundreds of thousands of people who marched
against him and send them to perform slave labor in Alaska. Or arrest members
of the media or opposing political parties who criticize him

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I only wish that was true[1]. Of course, that does nothing to let the Chinese
government off the hook for imprisoning and 're-educating' their Uighur
citizens.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States)

~~~
gruez
>I only wish that was true[1].

he said

>for political prisoners or Muslims

Penal labor is bad and all, but equating what china's doing with what's
happening in the US is giving china too much credit.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I wasn't trying to give China any credit, what they're doing is reprehensible,
no doubt about it. I was suggesting that the situation of African-Americans in
the US prison system[1] is less different from the Chinese example than we'd
like to think.

1: [https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-
sheet/](https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/)

