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Has anyone been following the scenes in China?
The government has changed the definition of a COVID death, apparently to slice the death statistics after relaxing zero-COVID and cases surge. Omicron emerged last year as it ripped through Africa, and that variant seemed less dangerous (although more contagious) than its ancestors. It's suspected that it could be a subvariant of that. Also worth mentioning that China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany, but only for German expats living in China. Too early to tell and we don't have the full facts yet, but I won't be surprised if the situation is grimmer than the PRC government is willing to disclose.
On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.
China covid policy is (was?) an immense success unfortunately the rest of the world is too inept and criminal to react efficiently to covid entry points and therefore millions of humans die and quality of life, worldwide intelligence level and lifespan are put at an extreme and yet unknown risk. How many times will people catch covid in their own lifetime? How many percents of neurons/synapse lost? This is extremely worrying.
China is the biggest exporter of vaccine worldwide (2 billions ?), while occident was keeping them all for themselves and did not allow other countries to produce patented vaccines (well it maybe was allowed very late I don't recall exactly the timeline) china saved the majority of mankind regarding covid deaths.
While their vaccine was a bit less effective, with the newer variant it is on par if not better? (I haven't looked at the viral load metric, where mRNA vaccine have become entirely useless) see https://old.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/zq0x2h/after_2nd_and_3rd_dose_chinas_sinovac_reach/
Of course the best vaccine would probably be a combination of distinct ones. Also, let me remind the world that the Russian main vaccine is very competitive and was denied out of pure racism, although nowadays we have the ukrainian war narrative.
As for accounts of said racism I invite the reader, for example, to ask himself if he knows what was the biggest genocide during WW2.
As for anti-sino racism, while on the digression, I'll ask the reader who caused the Great Chinese Famine.
You're rewriting history. China locked down intra-Chinese travel in January 2020 but left open foreign travel until March(!). A reasonable inference is that the Chinese leadership knew how bad it was in January and dissembled and misled for months and either wanted the virus to spread internationally or displayed callous disregard for that entirely predictable outcome.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how-china-locked-down-internally-for-covid-19-but-pushed-foreign-travel/
There is lots of data on efficacy of the different COVID vaccines, and Sinovac is mostly evaluated as among the worst.
reddit.com/r/sino is a cesspool of pro-CCP propaganda, and I am now skeptical of you for using it as an authoritative reference.
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When deciding how to react to a pandemic, one must take the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be. China knew that there were six and a half billion other people in the world spread across two hundred other countries whose governments would react in various ways to the pandemic. It was not reasonable for it adopt a set of polices that relied on the rest of the world suppressing the pandemic as well as they claim to have done.
It was a given that they would have to deal with constant incursions of the virus back into the country, with increasing evolved contagiousness, forever. It was a given that any country that wanted to control the virus indefinitely had to come up with a solution that could be made permanent.
Unless China gives up and proves that their zero Covid policy was an almost complete waste, this is just the beginning of the nightmare it has imposed on its population.
This is happening as we speak.
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Holocaust, 11 000 000 - 17 000 000 dead.
PRC, Mao in particular.
Well I'm not an expert on holocaust, a quick google gave me a 5-6 million killed jews estimate and that is the authoritative one on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#:
:text=Between%201941%20and%201945%2C%20Nazi%20Germany%20and%20its%20collaborators%20systematically%20murdered%20some%20six%20million%20Jews%20across%20German%2Doccupied%20Europe%3B%5Ba%5DIt seems the 11-17 number your refer is a mix of jewish kills and the killing of other minorities, especially Romani people
cf https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/holocaust-misconceptions/#::text=There%20were%2011%20million%20victims%20of%20the%20Holocaust%20(or%206%20million%20Jewish%20victims%20and%205%20million%20non%2DJewish%20victims)%C2%A0
I am not refering to the Jewish genocide but to one that is twice as big and that you never heard about because of racism:
It killed 11 million human beings, 11 million slavic civilian people for their ethnicity
https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/75106
Well that is a misleading answer.
Mao had its flaws but the general direction of china made sense, they suffered from the century of humiliation, something that isn't taught in schools because of racism.
As a result they went from the first economic power worlwide to extreme poverty and had to make, very late, a transition to an industrial revolution (from a mostly agriculture based economy)
There has been flaws during this necessary transition, however people completely fail to understand the reason behind 99% of the deaths, an artificial one, deliberately chosen by the U.S.A and other occidental countries, a worlwide ban on exports to China. A worlwide ban of many technologies including the main disruption of the century, the discovery and production of fertilizers.
Therefore the death of all those human beings has for main and sufficient responsability the occidentals hegemonists and their will to bend China and froze them into the middle age.
The ignominy of the west is rampant everywhere and the ignorance of those crimes againsts humanity continue even today.
You're on a board where people very often debate the Holocaust and other genocides - if you assume that "no one has ever heard of this" you are almost certainly wrong.
Again, Chinese history, including the "century of humiliation," is not some obscure topic no one here knows anything about.
You're getting reported a lot, and while most of those reports are because you're taking an unpopular ideological position (people are allowed to be Maoist apologists or PRC defenders here), you are also making a lot of casual assertions like "no one knows anything about this because of racism" that veer into consensus building and inflammatory claims without evidence.
Do not make assumptions about what people don't know and the reasons they don't know it, and if you want to argue that there are historical facts being suppressed because of racism, you need to actually back that up, not just assert it.
Hi, thanks for the heads up.
I agree I said the claim of racism with a bit too much insistance and that I shouldn't have used a universal quantifier "no one"
In case it wasn't clear, it was a figure of speech, I'm obviously not claiming at all litterally that no one knows about the slavic genocide but it is an emphasis to make people realize how strikingly underknown, undertaught and undertalked it is.
Context is key, did I say straight out of nowhere that the person I'm answering to did not know about the slavic genocide? No,
My initial comment was a question:
Then the person answering mostly failed the test as there was no mention of the slavic ethnicity being twice as big as the jewish ethnicity, which is the salient and useful fact.
They have mixed up the term holocaust (jew only genocide) with other ethnicity which hide the salient fact and defeat the purpose of the question.
Although my two salients statements, that china were induced extreme suffering because of the west especially fertilizer ban and unfair treaties, and that the biggest genocide concern the slavic ethnicity, are example of an asymetry in what matters to people from the west, the differentiating factor between slavic and jewish is none except the possibility of differential racism.
Therefore this asymetry of reporting and of caring of human suffering and of responsibility is an evidence based example of racism mechanisms or at best ethnicity selective apathy.
It would be hypocrisy to not admit to the asymetry of public commemoration between the two genocides. Shoah is a worlwide topic that is a basic fact.
Another piece of evidence is that I was mostly not taught those facts in my standard school (France) or they were mentionned for a minute.
The litteral title of the scholar paper research I linked on the slavic genocide is "The forgotten Holocaust"
I'm sure that make much more evidence than needed to get the point and have a civil discussion about it. But alas, people are polarized.
Yes some people in this community knows about those historic events contrary to my lazy claim however it is very likely that for the rest of people it should make them question their information feeds and their opinons about worlwide justice. Hence a rare and useful contribution.
Again I will avoid needless universal quantifiers in the future.
I wish people would come with intellectual curiosity and good faith.
pedantic note:
I am not doing any ideology here and I have stated no defense or approval for the PRC.
I am stating facts that can hurt beliefs in the anti-sino tribe. That does not make me a part of the pro-sino tribe.
I'm interested in reality, not ideological sects.
Apply a little nuance and good faith here yourself. I am aware you didn't mean literally no one else in the world but you knew about this subject. But you're coming in hot with a lot of statements about how "no one knows" things that in fact have been discussed here frequently.
I am not making assumptions about your "sect," but you are making too many ideological statements to be convincing as a non-ideologue.
Seeing the world for what it is does not imply having mild opinions about things, quite the contrary.
In many cases, what people might perceive as ideological can sometimes be instead simple debiasing statements.
If in the future you see me say potent statements without any evidence nor trivially accessible evidence then I would like to be noticed and to provide said evidence or otherwise change my mind and exit a sect I was unaware to be in.
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Remind me again how the "first economic power" was humiliated for a century by mere white pigs?
I see multiple flaws in that single sentence:
Given the implied snark I will assume there is no reminding because you never learnt about it in the first place
The quote of course aims to reject the claim and even ridiculize it despite being true for most of history and shifting in great parts because of the century of humiliation
Here you can obvserve GDP over time: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xb5zYKYF3Xo
As you can see, china has been the #1 economic superpower consistently during the last centuries.
The century of humiliation is from 1839 to 1949 but even still apply to this days regarding territorial losses.
This is bad faith and low quality.
No need to attack white people as a group, after all sociopathic policies are mostly not derived by genetics.
So about the century of humiliation, China was militarily forced by western countries to sign treaties against its own will and interests and to secede territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
The British forced the government to let it massively drug its population via opium
Colonization of Hong kong and Macao
Sacking of palaces
Invasion of various large territories including outer Manchuria
And various treaties that ruined the economy
As a result, China lost its functional sovereignty and prosperity.
The mere white pigs as you say, have induced similar suffering in most parts of the world.
What parts of China are still not under a nominally Chinese government, after the return of Hong Kong and Macau in the 1990s? Are we waiting for the absorption of Outer Mongolia and Jiaozhou into Chinese rule?
Even leaving aside that many of these wouldn’t reflect a drop in sovereignty or prosperity (sacking of Yuanmingyuan, cession of Hong Kong - notwithstanding that the cession of Macau was under the Ming 500 years ago!!!, and that that arrangement was amenable to all parties involved), or occurred late (e.g. Boxer indemnity being much more damaging than others prior, invasion of outer Manchuria was a failure by the Russians and only occurred in the 1930s by the Japanese), or are controversial in professional discourse (e.g. effect of opium smuggling in the long term), or that you’re intentionally using inflammatory rhetoric and wildly exaggerating historical fact to an astonishing degree (e.g. “forced the government to let it massively drug its population via opium” lol)…
Pray tell, what effect did you think the Taiping and the other rebellions in the 19th century have on Chinese prosperity?
I already mentioned the salient one in my comment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Manchuria
What are you talking about?
The rest of your message is extremely flawed, to deny that the century of humiliation implied a loss of sovereignty and sovereign interest is beyond absurd and bad faith.
One can attempt to analyze and mitigate that some of the unequal treaties or actions were not that potent but that is overall an impossible goal.
See e.g: among many:
The Boxer Protocol of September 7, 1901, provided for the execution of government officials who had supported the Boxers, provisions for foreign troops to be stationed in Beijing, and 450 million taels of silver— more than the government's annual tax revenue—to be paid as indemnity over the course of the next 39 years to the eight nations involved.
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I can't help but notice that despite your line by line reply you never addressed the question. Please speak clearly and explain how the "first economic power" was subjugated by inferior powers.
I don't think there is any possible kind/good faith interpretation to your question.
It just doesn't make sense and yet it was upvoted by 5 readers..
It should be painfully obvious that economic power is mostly hortogonal to military power, while there is some correlation it is obviously contingent.
It should be universally known and was explicited by one of my comments that China like the rest of the non western world was late regarding the industrial revolution, the design of war/killing machines and the use of powder/guns (which is ironic since Europeans originally imported that tech from China)
I didn't think it was useful to explain those things and why the west was able to militarily dominate the rest of the world.
Also the wars on china were a worldwide coalition of coercive powers, including Russia, the British empire, the French, and the U.S
I think people are being a bit unfair to you, but you're also saying a lot of dumb stuff yourself.
China definitely was a great economic power, despite that by the ~1500s Europe started to surpass them technologically and by the 1800s significantly surpassed them militarily. I agree with you there.
But Mao definitely had a lot of very stupid policies that led to a lot of deaths, e.g. the killing of the sparrows, or trying to have farmers make steel instead of grow crops. I think his most deadly mistakes were made of ignorance not malice, but they still weren't the West's fault.
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Putting aside that this is obviously a snark against extreme sinophilic (honestly, PRC-philic) history rewriting, this is actually an interesting question that has spawned an entire discipline of historical study. Not really as simple as “lol we better than you”.
(The Great Divergence debate has since expanded to include other polities and regions of the world, but IIRC for decades the majority of ink was spilled on Euro-Chinese comparisons.)
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For anyone stumbling upon this thread and not sure what to believe, this is a case where the conventional wisdom is correct, Mao was a terrible leader and his misguided policies were responsible for the deaths of 30 million people from 1960-1962. You can say it was ignorance, not malice, that caused Mao's error, but the fact is that if he didn't know any better it is because he didn't want to know any better.
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I specified number of victims of Holocaust, not victim count of Shoah, not a victim count of Jewish Holocaust dead.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
(if there is a better word/term for overall extermination done by Germans around WW II less likely to result in confusion and is not annoyingly long then let me know)
I am considering it as part of Holocaust (and less than half of Holocaust dead were Jewish)
I assure you that you are mistaken in this specific case, I am from Poland. Though in general I agree about blatant racism/politics/propaganda/failed PR in this area.
nope, less than half million Romani were murdered (mostly because Germans run out of people to murder in this group after murdering about 50% - 75% of European population)
Soviet civilians were largest group of people murdered in Holocaust.
Around 5 000 000 Poles were murdered.
(in both groups there is large overlap with murder of Jews - around 1.3M of murdered USSR civilians were Jews, around 3M of murdered Poles were Jews)
That description is part hilarious and part horrifying.
Well no. Great Chinese Famine and Holodomor and similar catastrophes were primarily caused by murderous communist rule.
Backyard furnaces, four pests, pressure to blatantly falsify reports, Lysenkoism including deep plowing etc and so on. Describing it merely as "flaws" is an absurd denial.
Do you have any sources? From what I remember one of problems was exporting food while millions starved to death, so presumably they also imported something. But I may misremember this one.
The Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of Jews by the Axis powers during the Second World War.
I have often heard it used to refer to all the systematic exterminations by the Nazis in World War 2.
That may be, but it's an incorrect usage of the term.
I don't know what you mean by that.
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I've seen various attempts to expand the definition of "the Holocaust" to refer to all civilian deaths caused by German aggression; directly and indirectly. I think it's not a very rigorous approach. Academic historians generally use the term solely to refer to the persecution of European Jewry by Germany (and its allies).
There’s a whole Wikipedia article for all the different names.
Probably the most interesting part is that “holocaust” referred at some point to the burnt sacrifices at the Jewish Temple, making its use to refer to the murder of Jews and industrial burning of their bodies an abominable irony.
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No sources from me, but I don’t think you misremember this one. IIRC the PRC was exporting food to Africa during that time and refused any foreign aid (I believe there was a Japanese offer at one point that was rebuffed, amongst other things). As far as I know, the Great Leap Forward was an entirely home-grown disaster, no foreign intervention needed.
Probably trivially checkable, too, now that I think about it.
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