Now they’ve obligated themselves (morally) to refuse Chinese political meeting bookings as well, but we won’t see that happen
Opinion: Due to Chinese human rights abuses AND the threats against American business, the US should not attend the upcoming Beijing Olympics
Also, getting even a tourist/any kind of visa if your occupation is "journalist" is hard enough, I think they'd probably google you and see what you've written about China...
Set aside the reporter question - surely she has some colleagues, friends, and family for whom it would not be unexpected for them to stop by?
In a vacuum, I fully agree with protesting China to the fullest extent; however, if scientists are to be believed, these things (human rights, trade, etc violations) trifle in comparison to the climate change threat, and China has all of humanity by the throat here. We need a cooperative relationship with China for the coming decades, since we can't just move our manufacturing (and thus its pollution) out of China overnight and the climate can't wait for a more gradual approach.
EDIT: Looks like I struck a nerve. Folks, believe me, I don't like the idea of letting China off the hook in the short term for its violations, but if anyone has ideas for holding China accountable while also getting it to meet emissions targets, I'm all ears.
Ah yes, the old "murdering a few people now is less of a problem than potentially murdering more people down the road" argument.
But again I ask: what is your solution?
And when has this strategy ever worked? We did the same thing with Poland in WWII and look where that got us. You can't make deals with despots.
That’s not my claim.
It's certainly easy to brush it off if you're not a murdered Uyghur.
This is meaninglessly abstract. Anyone can offer trite platitudes. Concretely, how do we meet climate targets by the end of the century without China's participation? What additional burden does that put on the rest of the world, and how are we going to meet that when no one is on track to meet their current obligations?
> It's certainly easy to brush it off if you're not a murdered Uyghur.
1. No one is brushing anything off.
2. What's the Uyghur death toll, approximately?
3. I can similarly imply that you're being too cavalier about the people who will die of starvation, disease, and poverty, but I don't think these sorts of ad hominem are very productive.
(No, I do not think the US should go to war with China. But if you think that China's climate abuse is an existential threat to humankind surely it has to be considered as a possible solution).
* Which is worse in your mind? China's treatment of the Uyghurs or global civilizational collapse?
* Does holding China accountable for its treatment of Uyghurs increase or decrease the likelihood that China will cooperate on climate?
This is not even a remote possibility, or indicated in the IPCC reports.
I agree. One of many disconnects.
> It’s worth pointing out that all doomsday prophesies so far haven’t come true, not just about climate change but nuclear warfare, asteroids hitting the earth, over-population, etc.
Of these, I think only "nuclear warfare" was an alarm bell widely raised by scientists and it was precisely that alarm bell that led to nuclear disarmament and anti-proliferation policy (which averted the disaster). "We should do nothing because it always works out" is kind of silly when it has only worked out because people have done something. See also Y2K.
> overstating the immediate risks of climate change will lead to ignoring clear abuses like what China is doing to the Uyghurs.
Climate change isn't about the immediate risks (wealthy nations can largely live with a little drought, flooding, and wildfire), it's about the next century and beyond. But yes, I do think we should let this existential threat affect our decisions about Chinese human rights abuses, as a special case. Personally, I would love for the world to have invested heavily in nuclear 50 years ago to the extent that we don't have to worry about China's ego threatening all of civilization, but that's a reality we sadly don't inhabit.
1) the treatment of the Uyghurs, hands down. Sometimes standing on your principles is what you have to do. Justice be done though the heavens may fall.
2) neither. China will do nothing that makes it harder for them to become the dominant economic, social and military force on earth. If burning coal gets them there that's what they'll do, and if lip service buys them time that's what they'll do.
In case you haven't noticed, nobody is holding their feet to the fire on climate change. Turning a blind eye to genocide is not about climate change, it is about access to the lucrative Chinese middle class.
Luckily, it does not. Manufacturing is already shifting out of China to multiple other countries, and with increasing automation, might even end up back in the West.
We’ll almost certainly have to do a combo of the following anyway:
- limit emissions as much as possible using nuclear and solar
- scrape carbon et al out of the atmosphere somehow
- take a certain amount of warming on the chin and roll with it… again, somehow
Luckily, our species is incredibly resourceful at coming up with hail-mary’s when our lives are on the line (past examples are global trade, fertilizers, vaccines, WW2)
I'm nearly certain that it's not moving out of China into significantly greener countries, and certainly not at a rate that allows us to meet climate targets.
> We’ll almost certainly have to do a combo of the following anyway:
Yes, we will have to do those things anyway, but we in the west aren't even on track to hit targets that are based on the assumption that China and others will do some reasonable share. Unless the west kicks it into gear, we need China.
> Luckily, our species is incredibly resourceful at coming up with hail-mary’s when our lives are on the line (past examples are global trade, fertilizers, vaccines, WW2)
No, our civilization is incredibly resourceful. We've never had an advanced civilization until global temperatures stabilized within a few degrees. And we're threatening that because we're worried about the moral implications of allowing China to save face in order to save the world. Ironically you mention WWII, which involved far more, far worse moral tradeoffs than the one I'm proposing: firebombing and nuking civilians in Germany and Japan, starving the Indian subcontinent, etc. To be clear, those may well have been the right tradeoffs to make, but they cost far more lives and saved far fewer than what we're discussing here.
If we take this far enough, and we will, it also takes power out of China’s hands, meaning we don’t really need them to have the warm and fuzzies when we ask them nicely not to pollute. We tell them to stop polluting or we pull a boycott, divest, and sanctions on them.
WW2 was a last resort to stop a very nearly unstoppable madman, but we pulled together and we did it. The insane tradeoffs made was only needed because it was during wartime. Pressuring China need not lead to WW3 (perish the thought) nor need it involve death on a large scale. What’s needed is an intelligent 5-10 decade economic strategy. We did this to scuttle the USSR and it worked, with minimal total deaths.
Regarding the Uyghurs: a million-person concetration camp isn’t about “saving face”. Human civilization isn’t worth saving if we just let this slide because it’s easy and convenient to do so.
Maybe given enough time, but there's no way this is happening fast enough to meet climate targets.
> The insane tradeoffs made was only needed because it was during wartime.
This is cyclical reasoning. "We only needed to resort to warfare because we were in a war". Typically we justify warfare by something like, "if we didn't go to war, many more lives would have been lost". And if you can firebomb and nuke entire cities to save millions, can we not withhold a rebuke on Uyghurs to save hundreds of millions?
> Pressuring China need not lead to WW3 (perish the thought) nor need it involve death on a large scale.
If we can pressure China on Uyghurs without risking climate, then great. I'm not confident considering the tenuous relationship between China and the West.
> What’s needed is an intelligent 5-10 decade economic strategy. We did this to scuttle the USSR and it worked, with minimal total deaths.
We had a functional government and a more politically united population in the second half of the 20th century. Today we have one party that largely thinks climate change is a hoax and the other does little more than lip service.
What makes you think that you’ll be able to talk about climate change if the Chinese Communist Party decides doing so is against their interest?