China is burning all its bridges with Israel
China is burning all its bridges with Israel
Desire to be seen as champion of Global South drives policy tilt
Love how this is portrayed as a bad thing lmao
Exactly, the author was like "How dare they not both sides this."
It was a difficult read cause of how biased it is
The author is a senior defense analyst at the fucking Rand corporation; there’s no way this wasn’t going to be anything BUT biased
The west is really looking bad when South Africa and China are outshining them on this issue.
I imagine it's highly political, and likely directly due to the fact they are an adversary to the US. So let's not get carried away...
But yeah, it's pathetic the US just sent a billion dollars in munitions to Israel.
As a Chinese person, when I was very young, I learned from books that "the Jewish people are a wise people; they put honey on books to let children know that knowledge is sweet." Before I went to university at 18, I believed that Jews were very smart, like Einstein. All my knowledge came from books. After I started university, I got my first mobile phone, and then I started accessing the internet. This led to a collapse of my worldview, as some things I had firmly believed in began to be questioned by myself. My perception of Jews was just one of many aspects that changed.
Chinese people do not discriminate against Jews. As I experienced, due to widespread propaganda, Jews have a generally positive and subtle reputation in China. The situation is more like a backlash caused by a mismatch between the promotional image and the actual product. Previously, Jews were portrayed as very wise and polite, but when the reality turned out to be different, people felt deceived, which led to what the article calls "anti-Semitism." However, in fact, on the Chinese internet, people are just bringing up the wrongdoings that some Jews have done.
Among Jews, there are both good and bad people. I support Jewish Voice for Peace and believe that a wandering people should not be discriminated against anywhere. However, Zionists want to hijack all Jews, using the concentration camps from World War II as an emotional card to coerce everyone onto their bandwagon. When the actions of Israel in Gaza reach China, almost all Chinese people are reminded of the atrocities committed by Japanese fascists in China, treating Chinese people like livestock for slaughter. The suffering of the Palestinians makes us empathize deeply. When their homes are destroyed and their relatives killed, it is reminiscent of our past. I saw a group of Israelis holding hands and dancing in front of UN emergency relief supplies to block the aid. It tore my heart apart. I don't know what to say, I can only say that the Palestinians are incredibly enduring. If it were me and most Chinese people, we simply couldn't endure it.
China has never oppressed or persecuted Jews. China even sheltered Jews in Shanghai, and the current Prime Minister of Israel has praised this. But ironically, it seems that now China still does not compare to Germany in the eyes of Israel.
Israel isn't Judaism.
Israel claims to be a secular state but also a state for Jews but also Palestinians are welcome but also Palestinians are not allowed to get an Israeli passport but also they can get a passport if they are Jewish.
Israel the quantum physics of countries. In a superposition until whatever is convenient needs to be observed.
…however Zionists want to hijack all Jews…
It seems pretty clear that they understand this. It looks like there’s just a little bit of a language barrier here, is all.
Indeed, I did not intend to equate Israel with all Jewish people or make it representative of Judaism as a whole. If it came across that way, I apologize. Labeling all peace-loving individuals with the actions of those who engage in war due to their ethnicity is similar to the wrongdoings of Germany in the past. Such thinking is almost nonexistent in China. As Mao once said, "Make as many friends as possible and as few enemies as possible." 😆
The popular view of Israel is as a modern state created with the backing of powerful western allies. This may be true of the current iteration of the state of Israel but the history is much older.
Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years dating back to the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel, though for much of the intervening time the area was called Palestine (or other names). Owing to its long history of conquests and migration, many Jews left Palestine and migrated throughout Europe, forming diaspora communities (and frequently subject to antisemitism and violent pogroms).
Back in the 1500s the Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine and considered it part of Ottoman Syria. This lasted for centuries until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
What Zionists want is the same thing that Palestinians want and the same thing that Chinese people already have (and Japanese and Korean and many other groups have): a homeland. Zionism as an idea goes back centuries, to the original departure of Jews and forming diaspora communities. The conflicts between Jews and other groups in Palestine (including Christians who migrated there in the Middle Ages) goes back centuries.
The main difference now is that Israel has an enormous amount of power due to their alliance with the UK and the US. The US in particular has a sizeable Jewish diaspora community that grew dramatically during the Holocaust. The cities of New York and Los Angeles are home to sizeable and highly influential Jewish communities, and many Hollywood executives, producers, actors, and comedians are Jewish. Jewish culture therefore forms a very substantial part of American culture (through TV shows like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and many movies) and many American non-Jews are politically friendly to the Zionist cause.
I, personally, don’t have a stake in the outcome. I want the violence to stop but I have no idea how that’s going to happen. The most recent conflict really has been going on for over a century. At one time even Nazi Germany had a side in it, supporting Arabic Palestinians. There have been many pogroms and genocides over the centuries, targeting both Jews and other groups. The Ottoman Empire committed genocides as well. It’s horrific but it’s so difficult to imagine a scenario where it will stop.
Indeed, I don't know how to stop it either. If saving the Palestinians leads to another massacre of Jews, then as a proverb says, "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind." “冤冤相报何时了。”It will only result in more bloodshed and cries of anguish. The Chinese government has consistently supported the 1967 two-state solution; I have seen this mentioned many times in official news. Perhaps what we need is an "Israeli-Palestinian Mandela." 😢
What a strange strange comment. Why are you talking about how "Jews" were "portrayed" to be "wise" but then "the promotional image didn't match the product"?
Among Jews, there are both good and bad people
Which should go entirely without saying, which is why your comment is so strange. You keep talking about "Jews" as an entity that has a "promotional image" and that you perceive collectively as "smart like Einstein", or not.
This is a difference between China and foreign countries. Let me explain:
I was born in 2001. When I started school, it was around 2008 in elementary school until 2019 when I finished high school. Many students didn't have mobile phones, and the internet was often seen by parents as something that affected our studies. The limited computer time we had was almost entirely used for playing video games. Apart from learning about pre-2000 foreign history in school, my main sources of external information were from newsstands outside the school and magazines bought by my parents. In these magazines, the images of foreigners were constructed: I believed Americans were innovative, Germans were rigorous, British were gentlemanly, French were romantic, Russians were bold, and Jews were wise. Due to the actions of parents and schools, education in China before high school was quite closed off. It wasn't until 2015, when I had to memorize Xi Jinping's new thoughts on green development in politics class, that I realized the current leader of China was no longer Hu Jintao. For those of us who had only study on our minds before entering college, there is a specific term in China: "small-town exam-takers."
When I got to college and had my own mobile phone, being able to browse the internet without a very purposeful mindset, it coincided with a "major upheaval." The rhetoric in those magazines that deliberately praised foreigners was heavily criticized in 2019. It was seen as deliberately arguing for the inferiority of Chinese people. Let me give you a few examples so you can understand what I saw as a child:
The sewage system in the former German-leased area of Qingdao had been operating efficiently for over a century. When some parts needed replacement, the original company no longer existed. A German company sent an email saying that, according to their construction standards, there should be a small storage room within three meters of the worn-out parts where spare parts could be found. The urban construction company found the small storage room in the sewer, and inside, the spare parts were still shiny and new, wrapped in oilcloth.
During a summer camp between Japanese and Chinese children, each child had to carry a 20kg backpack for a 50km hike. The Chinese children soon gave up, but the Japanese children persevered. The Chinese children couldn't endure the hardship and were not as tough as the Japanese children (my teacher even told us to learn from the Japanese children).
Once in America, a sparrow got tangled in an exposed high-voltage wire by the roadside. Its distressing cries caught the attention of passersby, who immediately called for help. After multiple levels of authorization, the rescue workers eventually got approval from the President within half an hour to send a special plane to cut the national power line in Washington, causing a temporary blackout across the U.S. to save the sparrow.
I learned all three of these from books. Of course, you might say, what kind of nonsense is this, it's completely fabricated. This rhetoric wasn't meant for foreigners; it was actually used as internal propaganda within China. Afterward, it was tied together with the "toxic textbooks" incident (where illustrations in elementary school textbooks deliberately depicted Chinese children as ugly and foreigners as attractive), which was believed to be a deliberate attempt by some foreign enemies and domestic traitors to prove that Chinese people couldn't achieve the same accomplishments as foreigners, thereby belittling Chinese people. This is why I mentioned that Jews indeed have a "promotional image" in China.
In 2019, the Chinese internet was like a chaotic battlefield with all sorts of ideas, from the most peaceful to the most extreme, from the far left to the far right. I once received very hurtful insults for expressing left-wing views on a Chinese platform called Zhihu (similar to Quora). Mutual personal attacks are not uncommon.Now the Chinese internet is still influenced by this, which is why I find Lemmy to be a great environment. At least here, we are having discussions instead of cursing each other with voodoo dolls. 😆
English is a second language to them clearly. Cut them some slack.
It's about fucking time.
I like how this zionist author is trying to draw parallels between the Palestinian resistance and the separatist group the US created in Xinjiang through Afganistan lmao
Claiming both are "Islamist terrorism", which is an ironic thing to say considering israel's support of their fellow US proxy
Common China W
Now fund the PFLP like the USSR used to
They won't, not now anyway. The Soviet Union went as far as to fund wars against "israel", but China is clearly far more interested in Socialism In One Country and forming amicable ties with the rest of the world — including the capitalist shitstates — rather than spreading socialism like the USSR did.
Not necessarily a bad thing since I understand where they're coming from (and we know which of the two have managed to prevent a capitalist counter-revolution), but god I wish they did a bit more sometimes.
Genuinely aggressive Chinese sanctions on "israel" would cripple it in months combined with Palestinian resistance, but it also would create hostility with the US, signal to the Global South that they're willing to sanction states that don't do what China wants like the US does, and damage their reputation of being a peaceful superpower that they've been building for the last few decades.
Based
China is smarter than the US
Very nice.
Good.
bit goofy seeing as China continues to prosecute moslems and deny that they do it
Seems like both the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Muslim countries in general that have sent delegates to Xinjiang agree western propaganda about it is false too ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The only ones propagating these claims are imperial core countries that have actually invaded and colonized Muslim nations as you'd expect lol
The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”.
However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let's just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.
This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City's biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.
According to Wikipedia, "The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000." Let's assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?
Let's do some math:
Rikers Size Rikers Prisoners One Million Uyghurs Size 413.2 acres (0.645 square miles) 10,000 to 15,000 43 to 64 square miles In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.
For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You'd literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It'd be like looking at a map of California. There's Los Angeles. There's San Diego. And look, there's San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.
Literally visible to the naked eye from space.
CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn't even make sense from logistics perspective.
Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he's the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I'm talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.
Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”
Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.
The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it's clear that the methodology of his "research" doesn't pass any kind of muster when examined closely.
It's also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here's George Bush's chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here's an excerpt:
US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they've been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/
Here's an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html
Here's an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on "atrocities" are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/
It's also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.
- https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/on-eid-xinjiang-imams-defend-china-against-u-s-criticism-1.5425967
- https://www.bolnews.com/latest/2023/07/pak-religious-leaders-nurture-bonds-of-cooperation-with-xinjiang/
- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/islamic-envoys-say-china-is-protecting-minorities-in-xinjiang-after-five-day-visit
Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they're unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9
There's a further list of debunking here if you're interested https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/
The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.
The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”. However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let's just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.
Based on the article you linked from quartz, I think you may be misconstruing the claim of 1 million people in detention. The article seems to suggest that the potential million people have been through the process of work or education camps, not that there are a million people actively held in detention at the same time.
Rare China W
Very common actually
Well, they're best buds with Russia now ...
Nonsense, Russia is China's bridge to Israel
