If you're operating in good faith and genuinely want to persuade people, then your takeaway from this exchange is that how you're doing it isn't working and you should rethink your approach.
A more persuasive argument would be something like:
Concede the point that the CCP has motivation to perform these acts, has the capability to hide these acts, and a reason to attempt to deflect any investigation which might reveal the acts. Maybe the CCP has provided free and unguided access of independent western journalists to these supposed camps, where they discovered nothing more than a shoe factory. That’s didn’t happen.
Unfortunately, without the free press investigating, the CCP opens themselves up to criticisms, that, based upon their historical actions, is hard to defend.
How are independent western journalists going to ensure correct reporting? Independent western journalists lie and lie often, they're not much better than the rest of journalists.
So what happens if half of them find a shoe factory and half of them report something else as part of a governmental push for fabrication of ground for war and soft power?
We already see factually incorrect information in Western media, and Western journalists repeatedly lie in similar cases. So knowing that it only takes one story to set a narrative, how is your proposition any more conducive to finding the truth?
When war and empire are the driving concerns, truth is simply impossible. All you can do is reject unfounded information and be skeptical. Yes, that may mean that some atrocities will be successfully hidden. But more lies will not get through, and ultimately those lies can cause way more death.
How many deaths came from the gulf of Tonkin incident, and how many would have died if it is was real but not uncritically believed? How about the Nayiriah testimony?
Besides that, we live in 2021. It's really difficult to hide things. Proof of this was the unauthorized video evidence of a prisoner exchange in Xinjiang done with a drone. It could just as well have been a camp. But in the end it didn't show anything except that prisoner exchanges are done by train.
I’m not suggesting a pair of western reporters. I’m suggesting hundreds of western reporters, each with complete authorization to speak with anyone in private, to go anywhere and gain full access to any location of their choosing. If the NYTimes reports that they went to Camp XYZ and found a shoe factory, and the Washington Post went to Camp ABC and found something less pleasant, then the NYTimes would want to go visit that same camp, along with the other 98 reporters. This isn’t a sinking ship with no independent observers. These are millions of people, supposedly in camps… or shoe factories.
As for the gulf war justification, I have voted against every politician who ever authorized force based upon that deception. Unfortunately my fellow countrymen are willing to excuse it, and thus the lies will continue.
I don't see how two or a hundred reporters make any difference. It just takes one to find or fabricate a story and every outlet will run with it. That's just how the media works.
The only way is to require bulletproof evidence. But we both know that's not the standard that the media are working on.
I'm not saying that western media shouldn't be allowed there, by the way, I'm just saying that if they were or weren't there we would gain precisely zero information, because of a low standard of evidence, because of the certainty of deception, and because of the viral nature of reports.
It's pretty simple to set up such a situation. Instead of a fully accessible factory, you can make up a story of it happening in some sort of controlled, maybe military or otherwise secretive, area. Or you can just claim that they removed whatever you found there. It has been done and will be done again.
So if this openness were to be installed, I don't see how we could gain any information from it.
There is only one thing. Hard data and proof. Not testimonials or qualitative evidence, but hard data. All it takes is for someone to fly a drone in the right place or leak a video. And videos over controlled facilities in Xinjiang have been leaked, they just didn't show anything egregious. So I don't understand why it seems so hard to produce this kind of hard evidence.
Video or photo evidence. First person testimony is often contradictory and objectively very poor. In the case of this issue there were many contradictions.
You have to take a risk to obtain the evidence. I don't see any way for it to be facilitated, facilitated evidence is indistinguishable from fabricated evidence. You'd need to fly a drone or wear a bodycam. It would definitely come at a risk, unless you were doing it covertly with enough resources to minimize it.
Your “more persuasive argument” isn’t a restatement of xtian’s points at all, it is simply a statement of an opposing viewpoint.
It is somewhat ironic, given the context, that xtian’s dissent from the popular narrative is so vociferously countered, and without any recourse to facts.
I'm personally very sympathetic to China, and have a great deal of time for revisionism towards the world order, and like xtian, I take a pretty dim view on the way Xinjiang has been weaponized by western media in order to provide an ethical fig leaf for an essentially cynical western antagonism towards china.
However, at the same time, it could not be more blatant that the Ughyurs face persecution. However sympathetic one is towards China, nobody should forget that it is an authoritarian state, with few political or civil rights, and sometimes that can have serious consequences for groups targeted by the state.
China has historically had a great record in regards to minorities - far better than many countries in the west - but it's obvious that a combination of the war on terror and a rising form of Han nationalism has caused a drastic change in policy, first starting with fairly ordinary persecution (veil bans, etc) then escalating to acts that would be basically illegal in non-authoritarian states.
Denying this neither helps China nor anybody else. It is possible to find western behaviour cynical, and to have serious concerns about the path China is walking.
The weaker position concedes reality and let’s you build an argument on the nuances.
China does have a reason to want to detain and control the population. Even the US has detained 22 Uyghurs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantana...
The Uyghurs have many individuals who have joined terrorist organizations. Maybe we are looking at China’s Guantanamo.
China has the ability to suppress knowledge of any abuse. The United States has Guantanamo, which was the site of many “enhanced interrogation” techniques. That torture took a long time to surface, with years of lawyers involved to get the details out.
China has an interest in covering up any abuses. Of course they would. The US wouldn’t want details about torture in Guantanamo to come out either. It’s a blight which will be used against the US for hundreds of years.
Now that a baseline is established, why would the “West” want to use this situation against China? Political points at home? Taiwanese separatists trying to make China look bad? Trade disputes.
Sure those are all possibilities. Unfortunately, those motivations can exist, and China could still be doing something other than making shoes in those camps. They weren’t making Nikes in Gitmo either.
But we aren’t talking about 22 people in a Chinese terrorist prison. The accusation is millions. And yes, maybe 22 are being tortured, and the other million are making shoes. Allow hundreds of reporters loose, and one of them is going to find the Chinese Guantanamo, and suggest that all million are subject to that level of detention.
But how else do you assure the west that China is just making shoes around a tiny Chinese version of Guantanamo.
That’s really the argument.
Denying that China has the motivation, the means, and the ability to cover it up - those are all weak arguments.
And I really am trying to help you with your arguments. If the end game is war, it’s my children who will be fighting. Your arguments need to be stronger.
You can't break HN's rules like this, regardless of how you feel about another account. This is a well-established principle that has been explained ad nauseum in the past. If you want to see those past explanations, many are at these links:
