This is maybe a devastating example why centralization and central planning is a bad and dehumanizing act for individuals in a society. There is a good documentary about China’s so-called “Ghost Children”. These are those who were born as younger siblings during China’s One Child policy.
The documentary was made in 2014. It shows how quickly things can change, and how people suffer now and then due to bad politics.
It’s really worth your time.
China’s Ghost Children – (video, 36 min)
Second or third children born illegally during China’s One Child Policy - implemented between 1979 and 2015 to curb the country’s population growth by restricting many families to a single child - are banned from marrying, having children or simply boarding a train. Condemned to a non-life, these ghost children do not officially exist according to the Chinese state. ARTE Reportage goes in search of these ‘Haihaizi’, those children who should not have been born.
[Edit typo.]
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This is very good. We need more of this ‘grassroots media’.
It’s real …
Forced organ harvesting and transplant tourism – (May 2024)
China’s new Regulation on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs takes effect May 1, 2024 […] However, experts suggest the regulatory change will not lead to transparency, bring an end to China’s transplant tourism business, or protect prisoners of conscience and ethnic groups from crimes in organ transplantation, including forced organ harvesting.
I guess this is just an introduction into the story, but I also feel it is a bit too long. A sentence or two would have been sufficient.
Read what Al Jazeera has been reporting on and you know the answer to your question.
ICC’s Karim Khan announces arrest warrant application for Israeli and Hamas leaders
[Regarding Israel, the arrest warrants so far go against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.]
Just stumbled upon this on social media as a message to democratic countries:
What happens in Xinjiang is as disgusting and inhuman as is what happens in Gaza, and so is this whataboutism that is still widespread here.
Just one among many examples is this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/18948648 with the title: “English-language Wikipedia editors concluded: Israel committing genocide in Gaza”
At the time of this writing, there are 69 comments to this post, but none of them is mentioning the genocide in China, no whataboutism. Why not here?
And the whole ‘story’ is based on a Wikipedia entry, you know, the same Wikipedia that is criticized in the .ml communities for its bad quality seems to be good enough here. Why?
Imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Narges Mohammadi Denied Urgent Medical Treatment — (Archived)
The Islamic Republic of Iran is deliberately withholding critical medical care from renowned Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is unjustly imprisoned in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison for her courageous and peaceful human rights advocacy.
Mohammadi is suffering from serious cardiac issues, long-standing gastrointestinal disorders, and most recently, painful spinal injuries. Iran’s prison authorities have not allowed her to receive full or proper treatment for any of these medical issues.
“Iranian authorities are not only unlawfully depriving a Nobel Peace laureate of her freedom but also jeopardizing her life by denying her essential medical care. Narges Mohammadi’s deteriorating condition underscores the Islamic Republic’s brutal and lawless treatment of human rights defenders,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
An addition:
Chinese border guards are putting a surveillance app on tourists’ phones (2019)
The spyware: Traders, tourists, and other people crossing the land border from central Asia into Xinjiang are being asked to hand over their phones. Border guards are then loading an app known as Fengcai onto them. This sucks up calendar entries, text messages, phone contacts, and call logs, all of which are then sent to a remote server. It also checks which other apps are on a device. The Fengcai app studied by the reporters was for Android phones, but they also saw guards collect iPhones and plug them into a handheld device.
Content snooping: Security researchers who studied the app found it was also checking phones’ content against a register of over 73,000 items included in a list embedded in the app’s code. Some of the items are things that could be used by terrorists, such as instructions for making weapons and derailing trains.
But the surveillance net is being cast very wide. The list also includes material like books about the Arabic language, audio recordings of the Quran, and even a song by a Japanese band called Unholy Grace, which may have attracted China’s ire when it came out with a track called “Taiwan: Another China.”
One of the things that are disgusting here that they actively urge people to denounce fellow citizens. This is exactly what the Gestapo (‘Geheime Staatspolizei’ - ‘secret state police’) in Nazi-Germany did in the 1930s, its just that now they have better surveillance tools.
The PRC intentionally deflated private companies that it felt needed deflation (e.g. construction sector)
The PRC didn’t “intentionally deflate” private companies, not in the construction sector nor in any sector.
The property crisis in China may have a few reason, but one of them clearly is the failure of a centrally-planned economy. The state was putting in ever more money in a market without demand. The result are ‘ghost towns’ and unfinished buildings that are often in such a poor state that they must be demolished. Problem is that many ordinary Chinese people already poured their savings into property that never get build. (One detail here: such pre-payments in China typically run much higher than in the Europe and the U.S. as a share of the purchase price. It’s not very funny for the people effected.)
China doesn’t ‘intentionally deflate’ private companies but will be forced to direct more state-owned money to solve the issue as private foreign creditors aren’t an option. They won’t return to a Chinese property bond market where they’ve lost already more than USD 10 billion. And there is a risk that a lot of those private companies which have already been engaged for some time will again lose money. In the future, however, China would need more private businesses. More market, less state. A country that is more open to the world. Such a policy would support Chinese people in the long run. It’s just that most observers aren’t too optimistic that this will happen anytime soon.
TLDR: Here you can support it: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en
Yeah, I agree with you in principle, it’s just that I usually try to not edit the original version if it’s not absolutely necessary for clarity, but, yeah …
As tempting and reasonable as it may seem to counter disinformation with disinformation, it is the wrong path imo. It would play directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes and further undermine democracy in the long run. What we need is an educated, well-informed population and transparent political and economic processes so that leaders at all levels can be held accountable for what they do.
I have been thinking the same. Maybe ghost.org’s federation over ActivityPub can solve the problem?
Yeah, they work in a huge network mainly in Europe. As always, we should never trust blindly, but Epicenter appears to do a solid work. I have been disagreeing with what they said in the last years on some incidents, but all in all they do a good work. At least that’s my opinion.
Epicenter Works is a digital rights organizations based in Austria.
https://feddit.org/u/[email protected]
The article says the factor are economic and cultural. For example, it reads that “online, young people openly discuss their frustrations with societal expectations […] Hashtags related to singlehood, career focus, and discussions around marriage trends regularly go viral, amplifying the voices of those who feel pressured to conform to traditional life paths.”
The ‘surplus apartments’ are the result of a real estate crisis that, among others, has cost a lot of money. Many Chinese has lost their live savings. In the meantime, many experts (inside and outside China) are afraid that the problems in the property sector could severely hurt the financial and banking system and the whole economy in the long run.
Regarding migrant, especially from Africa, I suggest your read a release by a rights group (2023), or a very informative expert video (19 min, here is the archived link for this video). The video is from 2022.