Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

In China, if you stand up and criticise the power elite, this is what happens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12174873
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12954811

To summarise the reports, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is an outspoken critic of the government. His studio was demolished a few months ago. Today, while en route to Hong Kong, he was taken away for questioning by Chinese police.

Maybe he lodged a complaint with the regional government and got pulled into a black jail for it at random. China sure is wonderful.

ShumaGorath wrote:Maybe he lodged a complaint with the regional government and got pulled into a black jail for it at random. China sure is wonderful.

I spend my summers there. The smog is very nice

Poor guy, I admire his courage, but suffice to say I think the Chinese will have him breaking rocks until he dies.

Or they buried him. :(

He is the man who designed the main stadium for the Beijing Olympics.

That's what happens when you are out spoken. Shut up and do as you are told.

sexiest_hero wrote:That's what happens when you are out spoken. Shut up and do as you are told.

Have you ever considered a career as a warden at the GW design gulag?

Not till now...

LOL @ MGS

Poor fellow. I think it would be alot more healthy criticising the Chinese Govt from ACROSS the border, say... The Arctic..

akira5665 wrote:LOL @ MGS

Poor fellow. I think it would be alot more healthy criticising the Chinese Govt from ACROSS the border, say... The Arctic..

Or Siberia? Political minds seem to congregate there for some reason.

Though to be honest, if I was there my mind would be a bit distracted from any dangerous idealogies due to the local wildlife.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1354445/Super-pack-400-wolves-kill-30-horses-just-days-remote-Russian-village.html

...and we continue to re source our production to the new China.

The more things change etc.

This is why you have you vote Trump in. He's said that he is going to kick the gak out of China.

Does anyone else find the 2012 in that poster ironic? (or foreboding?)

Definitely Emperors.
Apart from which, would everybody be okay with having a Trump in the Whitehouse?

Karon wrote:This is why you have you vote Trump in. He's said that he is going to kick the gak out of China.

Never vote for a president that was roasted on comedy central.

ShumaGorath wrote:

Karon wrote:This is why you have you vote Trump in. He's said that he is going to kick the gak out of China.

Never vote for a president that was roasted on comedy central.

But wouldn't that prove he can take the heat

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Definitely Emperors.
Apart from which, would everybody be okay with having a Trump in the Whitehouse?

Not really, I find him to be a detestable character.

I'm stuck with less exciting, but equally reprehensible, options back home.

I have a feeling you missed the thinly veiled fart joke.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
That poster is scawwy:
He is pointing (rude)
He is shouty (rude)
He has a comb-over (!!!!)

That image should not be on Dakka as it takes rule #1, jumps up and down on it, chews it up and spits it into the dust.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Apologies to KillKrazy
The original content of the thread means it ought be treated more seriously

Emperors Faithful wrote:Does anyone else find the 2012 in that poster ironic? (or foreboding?)

I'm just puzzled about his running. Because as part of nominating for the presidency he's going to have to reveal a lot of information that will result in everyone finding out how rich he is.

And Trump's image, and therefore his celebrity and his business, is very dependant on people thinking he's much, much richer than he really is.



EDIT - Ended up talking about Trump rather than something that really matters like political oppression in China. Ummm... not really much to say. Political repression in China sucks. It sucks hard. The Chinese government is so heavy handed that they interpret any criticism of government as a threat. If you get unlucky you can say something as simple as 'corruption in the outer provinces is very bad' and end up getting disappeared.

That said, this guy will likely be released at some point fairly soon. He'll probably even come out and tell us that it was all a big misunderstanding and that he wasn't really in detainment. That's kind of how it works. Which doesn't for one second mean it doesn't suck, and desperately need to change. But while there's economic growth in China there'll be no real drive for reform.

sebster wrote:
That said, this guy will likely be released at some point fairly soon. He'll probably even come out and tell us that it was all a big misunderstanding and that he wasn't really in detainment. That's kind of how it works. Which doesn't for one second mean it doesn't suck, and desperately need to change. But while there's economic growth in China there'll be no real drive for reform.

My guess is that once China has its first significant financial crisis you will see major pushes for reform. As it stands the country has too much social stratification to enable any kind of popular movement to take hold, which is basically why the Tiananmen protests amounted to nothing but iconic pictures and dead intellectuals.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

sebster wrote:

Emperors Faithful wrote:Does anyone else find the 2012 in that poster ironic? (or foreboding?)

I'm just puzzled about his running. Because as part of nominating for the presidency he's going to have to reveal a lot of information that will result in everyone finding out how rich he is.

And Trump's image, and therefore his celebrity and his business, is very dependant on people thinking he's much, much richer than he really is.

Thing is, he's basically the worst possible candidate given the current political climate: a lying douche who's name is closely associated with Wall Street, consumer culture, and sleazy business practices. I mean, Hawaii's governor already called the dude a fool due to his various birther/Muslim rants regarding Obama.

dogma wrote:
Thing is, he's basically the worst possible candidate given the current political climate: a lying douche who's name is closely associated with Wall Street, consumer culture, and sleazy business practices. I mean, Hawaii's governor already called the dude a fool due to his various birther/Muslim rants regarding Obama.

But he's got a TV show and a catch phrase. The dude's bulletproof!

dogma wrote:My guess is that once China has its first significant financial crisis you will see major pushes for reform. As it stands the country has too much social stratification to enable any kind of popular movement to take hold, which is basically why the Tiananmen protests amounted to nothing but iconic pictures and dead intellectuals.

Yeah, definitely. In the early days of the GFC China had 40 million newly unemployed. There were riots on the streets and people died. The Chinese government piled more money in to their recovery package than anyone else, as a percentage of GDP, and the underlying engine proved more than strong enough* to overcome their issues quickly. But the underlying economic engine proved strong enough for there to never be any real chance of major civil unrest.

As it is though, as long as the economy keeps growing at 10% all we'll see is imprisoned intellectuals and the ocassional deady party member who stepped out of line. But if anything ever happened to threaten that steady rate of growth...


*They did some other stuff like outlaw firing people, but like a lot of Chinese regulation it wasn't enforced in any way. Would you believe China actually has some of the strongest copyright laws in the world...

Thing is, he's basically the worst possible candidate given the current political climate: a lying douche who's name is closely associated with Wall Street, consumer culture, and sleazy business practices. I mean, Hawaii's governor already called the dude a fool due to his various birther/Muslim rants regarding Obama.

Yeah, definitely. He's got no chance of winning, and he must know he's got no chance of winning. So I'm left wondering if this just a product of his ego, or if it's all part of growing his brand.

Actually, now I'm wondering if there's a clear line between those two things.

sebster wrote:But if anything ever happened to threaten that steady rate of growth...

One of the funny things about international politics is that you can identify regions according to common behavioral trends. So you get places like Latin America and the Middle East where the countries are all, more or less, sensitive to the same pressures. China, being on the edge of South East Asia , is just prime for its own incarnation of the Baht crisis.

The thing about China is that it isn’t really a country, it’s an ancient conquest empire like the Persian or Roman, that managed to survive into the 21st century through various lucky circumstances.

The governing elite has little legitimacy and faces a number of disruptive and centrifugal forces which threaten its rule. Repression is a standard technique for authorities in such a situation.

Kilkrazy wrote:The thing about China is that it isn’t really a country, it’s an ancient conquest empire like the Persian or Roman, that managed to survive into the 21st century through various lucky circumstances.

Do you mean, it's not a country like most other countries?

I think he means that due to chinas size and population, it's made up of many ethnic and cultural "nations" where most country's are comprised of one. so where someone from Australia can be recognised to be Australian someone from china might be Han or Zhuang or Manchu. the same thing can be seen in places of a similar geographical construction, like Russia where one might identify as a Russian a Cossack a Tartar or a Kazahk.

Kragura wrote:I think he means that due to chinas size and population, it's made up of many ethnic and cultural "nations" where most country's are comprised of one. so where someone from Australia can be recognised to be Australian someone from china might be Han or Zhuang or Manchu. the same thing can be seen in places of a similar geographical construction, like Russia where one might identify as a Russian a Cossack a Tartar or a Kazahk.

That, plus these other ethnic groups were brought into the Empire by conquest and the Imperial political system never gave way to a democratic form of government. Instead it fell apart and was eventually restored by military conquest by the communists, and effectively Mao became Emperor, and the Communist Part became the Mandarin Bureaucracy.

In contrast, take the UK. It started with England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland as separate countries 1,000 years ago. By various measures, England became the dominant power and absorbed the other three countries into the United Kingdom by the early 18th century.

This nation started to become democratic centuries ago and had democratic representation for MPs from these other regions since Victorian times if not earlier. And now we have regional assemblies. Thus the different countries had a shared government with a mandate from the electorate going back over a century, and the other countries were part of a national project of making the British Empire.

Tell an Irishman, to his face, that he and his country are both part of the UK. I'm sure he'd love you very much

Anyway, the main story here isn't suprising at all. It's pretty much a given that if you so much as -look- at a member of the Chinese government the wrong way, they'll order you detained and 're-educated'. It's sad, but the Chinese Gov't can be compared to a Shih-tzu. They're extremely difficult to train for proper behavior, because they just really don't care about what you tell them.

Likewise, China's Communist Party continues this sort of behavior because they know that the west is too heavily dependant upon their factories and cheap labour to do anything more than write angry letters warning them that if they don't shape up, then they'll recieve an even angrier letter. When a nation doesn't care about international opinions of it, and it knows it's safe from military or other serious reprisal, it's left to police itself to it's own morals. If those morals are corrupt then you get, well, this sort of thing.

metallifan wrote:Tell an Irishman, to his face, that he and his country are both part of the UK. I'm sure he'd love you very much

Well, Northern Ireland IS part of the UK, and most Northern Irish are loyalists.

Albatross wrote:

metallifan wrote:Tell an Irishman, to his face, that he and his country are both part of the UK. I'm sure he'd love you very much

Well, Northern Ireland IS part of the UK, and most Northern Irish are loyalists protestant deviants.