Biden team faced "tirade" at meeting with Chinese over America's poor human rights record in "Diplomatic humiliation"
- Thread starter Dwarvenhobble
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Do you really need a list of the many reasons equating western imperialist propaganda's stranglehold on western discourse about the entire world and your inability to know certain things about the internal working of China is horseshit? Especially when western imperialist propaganda will typically assume the worst and state it as fact?
What I'd like more is an explanation for how a complete criminalisation of independent reporting doesn't constitute a stranglehold on the information we have access to.
I suppose if it's information you're simply uninterested in, then it wouldn't bother you. I'd quite like to know the people who made my computer monitor weren't enslaved children.
You don't live in China. You do live in the UK. There is absolutely no sense in which China has a stranglehold over discourse in the UK.
You are awash in propaganda by the ruling class of the various western countries including the UK. You don't know something about China. These are not the same.
This is absurdly simplistic. UK-based media will most directly be influenced by monied interests based in the UK and US. So those will be the perspectives and information I am most readily able to access, if I live in the UK.
Is this the be-all and end-all of how a country controls information? Obviously not. Because of the complete criminalisation of independent reporting in China, and the state-sponsored murder of journalists, the only information on certain topics to leave China will be from the state mouthpieces (or, occasionally, lucky survivors or independent reporters to escape).
"Discourse in the UK" includes issues going on in China-- not least because our government has endless contracts and debt with the Chinese government, the products we consume come from there, and one of our largest and most powerful tech companies is controlled by the Chinese state. The information on these topics is strangled and controlled.
If you don't think "discourse in the UK" should include the working conditions and standards of the people who produce the products we consume, then say so.
So my comment did not apply to both. Yet for some reason you continue to insist otherwise.
Your comment related to a "stranglehold" on the discourse in the UK. The CCP imposes stranglehold on the information accessible, and the narratives permissible by reporters. It does so on information that's directly relevant to discourse in the UK.
Again, if you don't think "discourse in the UK" should include the working conditions and standards of the people who produce the products we consume, then say so. Or alternatively, if you don't think criminalisation of independent reporting constitutes a stranglehold on information, then say so.
Yes.
Not in the UK, obviously.
This is completely irrelevant. There is no way in which China has any control of what news organizations that dominate UK discourse tell their public. You want to know whether there are slaves in China? Western media has said there are, there you go.
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How do you think information regarding the working/living standards in China gets to be in the UK? Does it magically appear in the minds of a British person in Britain? Or does, perhaps, it actually come from China-- requiring somebody to report on it if we are to learn about it?
China controls what information reporters and journalists have access to regarding what goes on in China. By extension, China controls what information the British public have access to. The fact that a western media company can say some broad, general stuff even if they're starved of information means precisely jack shit. What, do you genuinely think that a news org's ability to broadly say "there is some slavery" is of equivalent value to actually being able to report on it?
"Western media has said there are"... based on what little information has escaped the censor's eye and escaped the borders. We lack detail of extent, severity, etc. Funnily enough, there can actually be quite a lot of complexity in a country of 1.4 billion people, and I'd like to know how bad the conditions are for the people making the products we consume.
No. They don't. Because your media can and does just say things. China absolutely does not have a stranglehold over discourse in the UK because it has very little influence on what the media in the UK says. Having influence over what the media in the UK can find out about China if it has any interest in doing so is a very different thing; BBC, Sky, etc. are absolutely able to say whatever the hell they want about China and all manner of other topics. There is no stranglehold that China has over them or the discourse they are involved in informing.
Weird way of saying "people (often) just make it up", but yes.
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You don't see literally preventing access to the facts of the matter to be restricting our ability to know about it?
Absolutely laughable.
"Stuff that's made up" = "Genuine information about the topic", apparently. If we have the former, no need to have the latter! Jesus wept.
A few resources for anyone else following along;
https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca/ - Xinjiang Documentation Project. Repository of white papers, first-hand sources, & evaluations of reliability, run by the University of British Columbia. Also quite a few survivor accounts.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/architecture-repression - Report by the ASPI identifying specific mechanisms of enforcement (such as how someone may be interred in a "re-education camp" for 3 years for using a filesharing app, and then their family will be subject to constant visitation by the authorities). People may also be interred for lacking a fixed address or a stable income; in short, criminalising poverty, in a manner similar to how some western authorities outlaw homelessness.
https://xinjiang.sppga.ubc.ca/ - Xinjiang Documentation Project. Repository of white papers, first-hand sources, & evaluations of reliability, run by the University of British Columbia. Also quite a few survivor accounts.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/architecture-repression - Report by the ASPI identifying specific mechanisms of enforcement (such as how someone may be interred in a "re-education camp" for 3 years for using a filesharing app, and then their family will be subject to constant visitation by the authorities). People may also be interred for lacking a fixed address or a stable income; in short, criminalising poverty, in a manner similar to how some western authorities outlaw homelessness.
Well, I guess the CIA has a stranglehold on discourse in every nation on earth because it keeps secrets relevant to everybody, then.
Absolutely pathetic logic.
Way to quietly add "genuine", there.
Anyway. A stranglehold on discourse means that you can control what vast swathes of a population see as the permissible views regarding a subject. It does not mean that there are some things that are kept secret and left to speculation. China so obviously does not have the former where you are that your insistence otherwise appears pathological.
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And what is your evidence that the US can control what vast swathes of Brits see as the permissible views regarding subjects?
And based on your definition the US doesn't even hold a stranglehold on the US. Or did you miss how the American elites, both political and business and both democratic and republican, failed to stop Donald Trump's rise to power ?
Anglophone mainstream media is largely owned by and subservient to the global capitalist ruling class. as for the argument that these media complexes constitute such a case, see either Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent) or Parenti (Inventing Reality).
On those specific topics, the CIA would have a stranglehold, yes. The differentiating factor would be the importance of us knowing it vs any benefits of keeping it secret.
As I said before: if you have no interest in knowing the living standards of the people who make the products you consume, just say so.
Pathetic logic would be the ludicrous equivalence you drew between having access to actual information on something, and having the right to make it up. That's some laughable shite.
You can define it in whatever conveniently restrictive way you want. I don't buy into that at all. If a power has a stranglehold over available information, then it's exerting an enormous restriction over what people can know. And controlling available information is a method of controlling the discourse.
Very mealy mouthed, good job.
That something "is a method" of doing something does not make it sufficient to actually accomplish the task. When there is an unremittingly hostile press reading entrails instead, "limiting available (and factual) information" is very far from "controlling the discourse" nevermind having a stranglehold over it. You keep ignoring the existence of spurious information and its influence on the discourse, which is absolutely ludicrous given that we're talking about the discourse of a country under the influence of the global capitalist ruling class.
Pots, kettles, etcetera etcetera.
The idea that the UK press is "unremittingly hostile" to the CCP is a bit silly; China barely factors into coverage. In fact, the UK press is more frequently critical of America (which plays to a sense of superiority over Americans that a lot of British people buy into). Now, they're very defensive of corporate interests, wherever they are... which is beneficial to the corporatists of the CCP, who share an interest in suppressing wages and driving profit.
I'm not ignoring the presence of spurious information. I'm saying that the presence of spurious information is not equivalent to actual information. And our access to the latter is strangled. By the CCP.