GarbageShootAlt2

Pardon me, I thought you were responding to a different comment (I was replying in my inbox to many different disputes). Seeing the actual context, this is ridiculous. You accuse me of being a paid actor and then say that you have no reason to present evidence of the accusation?

Let us imagine that I was a paid actor and would behave exactly as you expect. Aren't there other people reading the conversation? Wouldn't it be worth proving to them that you aren't just going on paranoid rants because your ideology has no way to deal with the concept of westerners freely disagreeing with you on these issues?

You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either.

Firstly, there is much more restriction on tourist movement in the DPRK for a litany of reasons, mostly pertaining to national security. Tourists in Xinjiang can move pretty freely, though if they are going all over the place they will cumulatively need to pass through many checkpoints.

Secondly, "work camps" here is what people call prison labor in Bad Country. The DPRK has prisons, certainly, and we can have discussions about penal labor, but it's much less notable than people pretend and much less secretive as well.

Thirdly, "work camps" are not remotely comparable to committing genocide against one tenth of the entire population of the region, which is the claim that was popularly made against Xinjiang before it got walked back to "cultural genocide".

Such fierce condescension and yet you're the one pushing a children's story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy's control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don't endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It's all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.

So no, "someone like me" cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children's cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.

And yet surely these people must have a reason to believe it, don't they? Even if one assumes they are wrong, this doesn't just come from nowhere, it must have some cause to seem reasonable to them, right? They are like you, thinking human beings, and no progress can be made in understanding the disagreement if you start from them being, in so many words, intellectually inferior to you.

There are literally pictures of bloodshed.

Not in the Square itself, which was the scene of many absurd claims by defectors, like the "tanks crushing people to wash them down the gutters" cartoon bullshit.

Here are interviews with some of the leaders of the protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA

You say this and yet, what videos? How many have you actually watched vs assumed were there vs read the headline? I've seen a bunch of photos and videos and all of them were either hoaxes (calling normal buildings camps), ridiculous misunderstandings (like saying the screeching of brakes was screaming victims), or gross misrepresentations (e.g. normal prison transfers being a slate of new genocide victims). But if you just skim through what just so happens to trend on Reddit, you'll see atrocity after atrocity and not stick around long enough to see the retraction, or the people in the comments debunking it, and so on.

There's a reason neoliberal outlets walked their claims back to "cultural genocide" over time, because there was nothing there except the testimony of like three people from a region of 15 million.

That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being "its own nation" distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.

There's no substance to this, you have no evidence and merely impugn my character.

Of having hysterical bullshit invented about them? True enough. Quick, does every man in North Korea need to have Kim's haircut or is no one allowed to have it?

Mostly they got banned wherever they congregated on Reddit. Not knowing they existed seems like a significant oversight, but to be expected with the way that China is depicted to you.

They just want to remove your agency by calling you brainwashed

Unlike when the liberals in this very thread accuse people of being brainwashed or paid shills, because then it is righteous!

do the sealion “source” thing,

lmao what dastardly trolls they are to care about sourcing

and then ad hominem away any sources you do provide.

Like you'd ever accept People's Daily or whatever. The "tankies" need to mostly rely on liberal outlets because you will discard reporting out of China (etc.) out of hand.

the world deserves a better class of communist.

If we had a better class of communist, you'd hate them too because you'd believe everything you're told about them, just like you do with the existing breeds.

The June 4th Incident gets wildly misrepresented very consistently in the west and China doesn't like being libeled as butchers. literally 1984