Zenz said the lawsuit shows that his research is having an impact, although he believes the case is symbolic. He said he had last been in China more than a decade ago and has no intention of returning to China in the immediate future.
I feel like someone who hasn't been there in a decade might not make a great researcher.
Even better since the camps weren't there until ~5 years ago
THIS LOOKS LIKE A CAMP
I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW CAMPS IN MY TIME.
Camps are what the Nazis have and the more Nazi you are the more camps you have.
Ever compare a Boy Scout uniform to a Hitler Youth outfit? It's not a coincidence.
Who needs to know Mandarian when you can just run any document you receive through "GoogleTranslate.Cia.coup" and find out the truth.
interesting how he mentions his last visit (2007) without mentioning it was also his only visit
Victims of Communism Foundation, a non-profit that researches
:soviet-hmm:
Zen in December published a report that estimated around half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang are employed in cotton picking through coercive labour transfer programmes.
I know it's a minor typo, but I do wonder if the editors of these papers actually read the articles. This article was posted on multiple news cites all with the same error.
Every article about China is pretty much the same copy pasted shit. Same language, same arguments, everything. The conclusion is always the same too: China bad, no matter what
It is inevitable that the US will keep declining and China will keep ascending. If the consent is being manufactured this hard already, I genuinely worry what they'll be up to in the coming years.
At first I cringed at "held accountable" but then I remembered that the US ruling class actually has the means to hold people accountable, which makes it threatening for real.
China must be held accountable
Oh thank god. I was worried we were actually going to try and do something.
I'm an "antifascist researcher" who works for The Daily Beast
This won't do anything. They won't get a cent out of him from a Chinese court and he's never stepped in China nor needed to in order to spread his lies. Also western press and peoples think its a foregone conclusion that the Chinese judiciary is a fraud that rules in whatever way the ebil ccp orders them to. They could file in Germany but they'd probably take the word of CIA cut-outs (aka "human rights NGOs) and western bourgeois press games of name a random building a camp from satellite photos over the Chinese.
This won’t do anything.
It's lets Chinese bureaucrats play the international legal game where you find a judgement and then you lean on other countries to uphold that judgement. So you go to Germany and say "Listen, if you want us to enforce a lien on Chinese Ex-pat Who Did A Thing You Don't Like then you need to uphold the agreement against Zenz in turn. Otherwise, it's not fair." And then Merkle gets to decide whether pressing a sanction on Chinese Guy Y is worth slapping a lien on German Guy Z.
As China has the stronger economic hand, the incentive to do business with their people will create more and more pressure to flip on Zenz (or, at least, stop promoting people who antagonize the Chinese, so there are fewer of these fights in the future).
They could file in Germany but they’d probably take the word of CIA cut-outs (aka "human rights NGOs) and western bourgeois press games of name a random building a camp from satellite photos over the Chinese.
Depends on how hard the Chinese agents want to press. It also depends on where they want the battlefield to be. Germany? France? Poland? Turkey? Kenya? India? Indonesia? Anyone notice how poorly the "Xinjiang Genocide!" line is playing in, say, Middle Eastern states?
In America, it's a foregone conclusion that everyone and everything in China is corrupt. But not everyone lives with American media blasting away their eardrums.
It’s lets Chinese bureaucrats play the international legal game where you find a judgement and then you lean on other countries to uphold that judgement. So you go to Germany and say “Listen, if you want us to enforce a lien on Chinese Ex-pat Who Did A Thing You Don’t Like then you need to uphold the agreement against Zenz in turn. Otherwise, it’s not fair.” And then Merkle gets to decide whether pressing a sanction on Chinese Guy Y is worth slapping a lien on German Guy Z.
Does China do this anyways? I mean I was under the impression what with the west's ridiculous sanctions regimes, them adhering to such reciprocity would be folly and they don't. I mean that's a very dangerous game to play because the west will just come back with something new, say on Hong Kong and demand sanctions against Chinese individuals for statements or actions towards that as a result of a European court ruling. Interesting in theory but as far as I know China doesn't really do this except on a case-by-case basis and Germany would look really, really, really bad for folding on this and punishing a renowned anti-communist "scholar", like it would get all the CIA carve-out human rights NGO's screaming their heads off and other European countries condemning them. They would gladly take China not enforcing legal decisions to protect such a person as anti-communist as they are and in their minds its a win because they can paint it as China being lawless and politicizing their courts and making unreasonable, human rights stifling long-arm requests in exchange for minor concessions on criminal or financial crimes. Yeah I don't think so unfortunately.
It also depends on where they want the battlefield to be. Germany? France? Poland? Turkey? Kenya? India? Indonesia? Anyone notice how poorly the “Xinjiang Genocide!” line is playing in, say, Middle Eastern states?
You can't just file cases wherever you want. There has to be some sort of relevance to the country it's filed in. If Zenz neither lives there, works there, works for some group there, or has taken actions there whither is the case that that country has jurisdiction or interest in it? And third parties taking action (sanctions, pulling out of business deals) as a result of another party they have no personal or business relationship with isn't really a tangible relationship to a country either. I mean if you could do this scummy companies would use barrages of lawsuits filed all over the place to harass people. I am not a lawyer but as far as I know this really has to be in either the US (Victims of communism foundation I believe is based here, his employer, an employer relationship though they may have to sue the employer not him personally), Germany which is his country of residence and the natural place to serve him as presumably he also does his work there and publishes his slander from within that country, or China the location of the aggrieved parties in the companies who are suffering business and reputation damage from his lies. There's also the European Union court system as Germany is a member but I don't know how that works or if you can go directly to it or not.
Does China do this anyways?
Yes. It's the primary means by which it got people to BTFO Taiwan and Tibet. It's a reasonably effective strategy, as it boils down to acknowledging their sovereignty.
The US sanctions regime has massive carve-outs for Hong Kong and Taiwan, which turns them into loopholes through which much of Chinese-US commerce flows. And one big reason why Americans are hitting the roof wrt Hong Kong stems from the fact that they don't want to lose their ideological pass-through to explain why they can do business with a Communist superpower guilt free.
They would gladly take China not enforcing legal decisions to protect such a person as anti-communist as they are and in their minds its a win because they can paint it as China being lawless and politicizing their courts and making unreasonable
All this is rhetorical and mostly only good for squelching Maoist attitudes at home. Germans (and Europeans generally and Americans) are more than happy to do business with their Chinese counterparts, thanks to the low labor costs and economies of scale China's state system provides. Nobody wants to give that up.
At the same time, Westerners don't want China to become a black-market shield behind which international crooks can do crimes in the West without consequence. They want international law to extend to China for the same reason they want it enforced in Brazil or Ireland. This sets up the need for reciprocity.
You can’t just file cases wherever you want.
You can. Although there's a question of whether those cases will be taken up or dismissed. I have faith in the ability of Chinese litigators to navigate the international legal system. And one of the first steps involves filing a case in the region subject to the malfeasance.
Think of it as comparable to the American legal case pressed against Bin Laden after the '93 WTC bombing. Nobody expected this case to be a serious mechanism for establishing culpability or meting out justice. But the pro forma act of conducting the trial gave the US a legitimate cause of action and a case to press on the world stage. This led to the pressing of sanctions on various nations accused of harboring Bin Laden and was eventually used in the international call to invade Afghanistan after 9/11.
Yes. It’s the primary means by which it got people to BTFO Taiwan and Tibet. It’s a reasonably effective strategy, as it boils down to acknowledging their sovereignty.
I meant with the west. But okay. I'm just not aware of any examples of Chinese courts having reach or for that matter with China allowing international rulings much reach as much as insisting aggrieved parties go through the Chinese court system from the start. China also doesn't extradite AFAIK. Not citizens.
All this is rhetorical and mostly only good for squelching Maoist attitudes at home. Germans (and Europeans generally and Americans) are more than happy to do business with their Chinese counterparts, thanks to the low labor costs and economies of scale China’s state system provides. Nobody wants to give that up.
Maoists as in MLMs are largely against China. MZT types are pro-China but most MLM's I know of seethe about ppw and China doing trade with countries that have been at war with Maoist insurgencies (which are not Marxist at this point in my mind) for decades. But that's something else.
Well they don't want to give up trade with China but they're absolutely not going to cede the high ground on human rights which is what they think this is. And they don't have to, China is very patient and has been incredibly tolerant of these aggressions against it, largely fighting back with words not actions outside of against sanctions with real bite. China's strategy remains weathering this whole thing and continuing to grow and trade until it surpasses the west technologically, establishes global trading partnerships and makes itself truly indispensable by virtue of the number of countries it has good relations with and being ahead of the west in technology and can begin the lower stages of socialist construction in 2035.
At the same time, Westerners don’t want China to become a black-market shield behind which international crooks can do crimes in the West without consequence. They want international law to extend to China for the same reason they want it enforced in Brazil or Ireland. This sets up the need for reciprocity.
International law is a lie. It's a code-word for whatever suits the American/NATO/Five-eyes/Western bourgeoisie/Western Imperialists. It always has been. It means rules for thee, no rules for me. Yes some international institutions have dinged the US in favor of China but largely the rules were written in such a way as to favor the west. The institutions themselves are often staffed with western-biased sycophants. Yeah they'll rule the US has to import Brazilian beef sure, yeah they'll toss China a bone. But if we're talking outside the trade arena, in the area of criminal law, it's all bullshit. The US has been trampling Nuremberg standards for half a century without consequence. The US regularly uses the long arm of the law to punish people and countries who cannot hope to fight back, it regularly bullies other countries into extraditing those they want extradited and when that fails they set up ploys in the US or a friendly nation (job offers, etc) and then straight up kidnap the person, either legally through an interpol notice or similar (see Huawei's founder's daughter in Canada) or illegally using a CIA jet as they once did in Italy with a "terror" suspect. The US does not want reciprocity. The west does not want reciprocity. These racist anglo crackers see their liberal system as the best thing that there ever is or will be and see China's system as repressive and totalitarian. They would give reciprocity only on the condition China changes it's judiciary to be very western, the kind of place that doesn't execute billionaires. No. They don't want reciprocity. China is not in their anglo white cracker lib club. They want domination, they want to be able to force China to give over people they want without giving back anyone who hasn't committed a crime according to the standards of the west anyways. Let's not even get started on the number of people who've done financial crimes in China who fled with their money to the US and are now living here as citizens or legal extended residents, many of whom the US openly calls victims of persecution because these corrupt capitalist assholes of course made statements against the CPC.
You can. Although there’s a question of whether those cases will be taken up or dismissed.
Pedantic point. You can file just about anything, I mean stuff that had better than a reasonable chance not to get tossed out before the trial phase at the first hearing.
I have faith in the ability of Chinese litigators to navigate the international legal system.
I also have faith in Chinese litigators but I don't have faith in the international legal system in holding any western, white, capitalist, liberal, developed nation accountable to a non-western, non-white, non-capitalist, non-liberal, developing nation.
This led to the pressing of sanctions on various nations accused of harboring Bin Laden and was eventually used in the international call to invade Afghanistan after 9/11.
Again you're comparing the actions of the world hegemon and super-power, one with a coterie of sycophants, collaborators and subjugated neo-colonized nations under its thumb with other things. If you take the US at its word. If you take the racist anglo/global north developed nations at their word regarding international law being something they deeply care about (cries in war crimes victims) then you don't have a good frame for it.
