China bad¶

The root of all "China bad"-type stories boils down to the following formula:

• A single or a few unnamed sources are cited, with their identity hidden because "Oooh, the scary, evil empire would surely crack down on them for their brave renegade reporting!" - These unverifiable "findings" are reported on by a "trustworthy outlet," like a "human rights watchdog" or an "unbiased newspaper," presented as eyewitness testimony. Doubting these sources amounts to conspiracy theorist crankery: people saw it with their own eyes!! - Once the claim has been presented in a "reputable source," other outlets can cite it, presenting the claim as having somehow been verified -- otherwise, how could such a respectable organization have published it?? (Note that "reputable source" always means "western," but when a Chinese or Korean or Russian outlet makes a claim, suddenly we're once expected to actually critically examine sourcing. Or just dismiss all claims entirely, because they're obviously making it up.) - When enough outlets have repeated a claim enough times, all citing each other, it becomes "common knowledge." Asking where the "evidence" comes from seems completely "ideological." You are a "campist" for entertaining the "maybe China is not ontologically evil" stance. - Doubting the veracity of the claim is seen as especially heinous, because the claim almost always revolves around human rights abuse. Doubting these allegations comes off the same as asking a victim of domestic violence for "hard evidence" when they're clearly suffering. - With every claim that gets laundered in this way, a broader narrative is further reinforced, cementing the inherent evil of these "authoritarian regimes" into the minds of the western audience, who are eager to drink up any suggestion that their lives are at least not THAT bad. - This narrative builds on itself. The sources need less credibility the more and more "obvious" it is that the alleged perpetrators are always up to no good. It took decades to get to that point for China, which needed its reputation re-sullied following the rapprochement era. (By contrast, it took very little effort to transition from "USSR-bad" to "Russia-bad," once it became obvious that post-Soviet Russia was not simply going to fold itself into the periphery of NATO hegemony. The DPRK has never been allowed a moment of positive coverage.) - This all comes together in a frankly childish credulity toward claims about the US's "rivals." Even as we watch the genocide in Palestine play out in real time, there are still those who believe it's obvious that there must be something genocidal going on in Xinjiang. - Any support expressed by the people of these "regimes" is because they're scared to dissent. Those who do dissent must have been disappeared -- because that's just something these places DEFINITELY do. And we know they do it, because we have "reputable sources" saying they do! In other words, the China-bad narrative is a closed loop of assigned credibility. If you believe it, you will believe the "unbiased sources" that support that belief. To disbelieve it, you have to also stop believing that any given outlet is "trustworthy." This is iconoclasm. To even start down that road, you must become comfortable with feeling set adrift. The epistemology you have lived with your whole life has been presented as a search for "objective, unbiased sources," but you start to realize there is no such thing. There is an objective reality. But unless you are omnipresent, watching everything that happens with your own eyes, you must -- at some point -- make a decision whether or not to trust a particular source of information. That decision can't be disentangled from ideology.