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Chinese Boarding Schools and the Indoctrination of a Generation
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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It’s important to say “Chinese government” and not “China”. That’s not a minor point. Saying “country X is a shithole” is the kind of racism we criticize Trump and the rightwing for, and for good reason. I’m surprised by this rhetoric on Lemmy.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but a non-Chinese person calling China a “shitty haven for cheats and liars” is obviously not comparable to an American criticizing their own country. Likewise, a white person saying a black neighborhood is a shitty haven for cheats and liars is different than that white person criticizing their own neighborhood.
China is a place and country. Chinese is a ethnicity. As a Chinese American myself, I had no confusion over what the commenter was saying. When we talk bout nations and their governments, it is pretty common to just refer to the country's name. I don't necessarily agree with the statement being made, but I did not at all take it as a ethnic or racial criticism.
Frankly, I’m not even sure how someone reads the comment that “China is a shitty haven for cheats and liars” as directed mostly at the government, and not about the country, people, and culture in general. The government is a haven? The government is a cheat and liar? These readings are a stretch even at the level of syntax.
A "haven" is a place, not a people. And a haven usually describes a place that has favorable laws, regulations, or attitudes towards certain behaviors. To me that is a government since havens usually have laws to support that. For example, a tax haven is a place where laws and government are organized in a way to be favorable to tax evasion.
Yes, I suspected you might go this route of saying "well, the shitty place is made shitty by the government, so it's really a claim about the government after all." I find that as dubious as saying "Africa is a shithole. That's a claim about their governments, nothing racist against Africans!"
Look, I think the Chinese government is authoritarian, immoral, and repressive, and what they're doing in Tibet is genocide. But you're turning a blind eye to anti-Asian racism if you're doing mental gymnastics to defend racist generalizations against Chinese people. Another person in this very thread said, "China is a terrible country. There’s no discussion to be had here". Are you going to make excuses for that person too? Maybe they meant the government too, and not the country or culture? That would be absolutely beyond naive.
As a Chinese American I in now way interpreted the comment as being a generalization about Chinese people. A haven is a place, normally referencing a port. I think it requires a lot more gymnastics to turn a statement about the country to a generalization about ethnicity.
Also, weird take to have and not also be critical of the headline of this article or language in the article itself. This comment uses the term "China" in the same general sense as the article.
Sure you can dig your heels in, and there’s apparently nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. You haven’t addressed my analogies to other similar expressions, so it sounds like we’re not even really having a discussion anymore. Are you also defending “China is a terrible country”? Who knows!
The article says “China’s brutal treatment…” where “China” is clearly a metonym for the Chinese state. But “China is a haven” is not a metonym and doesn’t refer to specific state actions. I don’t see any similar usage in the headline, “Chinese” is an adjective, so that’s a real stretch.