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Is it time to ostracise China?

Such hard and painful reading that it makes me weep.

Me too.... a mixture of anger and deep sadness.

Let’s not also forget cruelty to humans. Death penalty, organ harvesting, working conditions, Hong Kong, Uighur genocide come to mind.

Of course, but I am active in campaigning against animal cruelty so this is an area where I have some real knowledge.
 
Personally I’d like nothing more than to see an international trade embargo and general ostracism of China. Won’t happen though because of too many selfish and greedy large and locked in small parties that depend too much on them.

I detest that NZ bends over to Chinese interests. The last National govt even allowed a “former” Chinese spy to be an MP.
 
China has a lot of people, the fact that the ones you know have not said that to you hardly invalidates what I said.


eh?
did I say anything about invalidating what you said?

I just told you what most of the Chinese I know tell me. nothing more and nothing less.

My experiences in China varied hugely. In Harbin I was constantly followed by "helpers", in Shanghai it was much more relaxed.

Sh1t happens in China and in other places. In Nigeria I had the services of an armed driver and guard and a pile of cash to bribe both government and non government militia at road blocks.

In Saudi I was held for several hours by the Muttawa as they objected to some literature I had freighted into Jeddah.....
 
Actually sod that, here are some examples:
  • Dogs and cats are, amongst other things, boiled, stabbed, drowned, bludgeoned, strangled, poisoned, hanged, and electrocuted...experiencing unbearable pain as their legs are routinely broken while trussed up and hung in local markets for human consumption, or skinned alive and cast off like garbage, for the despicable fur trade.
  • Dogs (both owned and stray) are relentlessly hunted down by 'police authorised' roving mobs and savagely beaten to death by the hundreds of thousands, in the name of 'rabies' control.
  • Bears suffer a lifetime of excruciating pain as they are surgically mutilated and milked each day for their gall bile. Their paws taken as delicacies for the Chinese restaurant trade or ground into powdered 'medicines'. The use of bear parts supplying the traditional Chinese medicine trade and exotic meat market is the major reason why bear species are declining around the world. Endangered species of bears are fast becoming extinct.
  • Rhinos are butchered for their horns and are now highly endangered.
  • Sharks - over 70-100 million sharks per annum are 'finned' and their carcasses dumped into the sea, to accommodate Chinese' growing taste for shark fin soup.
  • Turtles - 20 million turtles are devoured in China per annum. Slaughtered alive & fully conscious, their heads are decapitated and crushed. Two thirds of the world's turtles are now threatened with extinction.
  • Elephants - elephant tusks are carved into ivory trinkets - their feet hacked off for stools and coffee table legs.
  • Seals - China's role in the single, largest mass butchery of marine mammals on Earth, the annual Canadian seal slaughter, happens in part, so that dried seal penises can be turned into aphrodisiacs to "theoretically" increase the libidos of elderly men engaging in sex (there is an even more sinister element to this, but let's not go there right now)
  • Zoo slaughter - live domestic pets, as well as cows and chickens, are fed to lions and tigers for the "entertainment" of visitors at Chinese zoos. Zoo officials encourage guests to buy domestic animals on the premises, and feed them to the carnivores through special vending flaps fitted onto tourist buses...allowing individuals to throw chickens and other live animals to the waiting predators.
  • Animals are used as "dried" ingredients in traditional Chinese 'medicines' and killed in the billions such as tiger parts, crocodile bile, deer musk, sea horses, lizards, sea cucumbers, powdered antlers, dog penis, pangolin (scaly anteaters), only to name a few on a seemingly unending list. All are considered no more than 'products' to be abused and murdered in the most monstrous ways possible, even if it means permanently wiping many of these species from the face of the planet in order to fulfill often frivolous, antiquated and selfish needs.
  • Chinese traditional 'medicine' industry - a nonsense hocus pocus, and not grounded in any form of science, practice that routinely involves cruelty to animals or hunting them to extinction from the large (e.g. tigers) to the small (e.g. pangolins).
Obviously I am not blaming the entire nation of Chinese people in general and I am not absolving the West from many of their own practices that are less than pleasant towards animals and must also be addressed, but as I have said before China is on a whole other level and the government and a proportion of the population do think much of the above is acceptable. It isn't!!!

**** me. How on earth is behaviour like this still allowed.
 
eh?
did I say anything about invalidating what you said?

I just told you what most of the Chinese I know tell me...


First they came for the Kia drivers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Kia driver

Then they came for the Passat drivers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Passat driver

Then they came for the BMW drivers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a BMW driver

Then they came for the Audi Drivers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Audi Driver

Then they came for the Porche Drivers
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
 
In response to the thread title, yes, but it will take a lot of effort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
The name is derived from the ostraka (singular ostrakon, ὄστρακον), referring to the pottery shards that were used as voting tokens. Broken pottery, abundant and virtually free, served as a kind of scrap paper (in contrast to papyrus, which was imported from Egypt as a high-quality writing surface, and was thus too costly to be disposable).

Each year the Athenians were asked in the assembly whether they were wished to hold an ostracism. The question was put in the sixth of the ten months used for state business under the democracy (January or February in the modern Gregorian Calendar). If they voted "yes", then an ostracism would be held two months later. In a section of the agora set off and suitably barriered,[1] citizens gave the name of those they wished to be ostracised to a scribe, as many of them were illiterate, and they then scratched the name on pottery shards, and deposited them in urns. The presiding officials counted the ostraka submitted and sorted the names into separate piles. The person whose pile contained the most ostraka would be banished, provided that an additional criterion of a quorum was met
Just off to smash a few plates.
 
China will never be held accountable for what they've done due to the western world relying on them to fill their homes full of iphones, 4k TVs, and overpriced lamps from Next.

China is generally a horrible country with barbaric attitudes towards animal rights, working conditions etc
 
eh?
did I say anything about invalidating what you said?

I just told you what most of the Chinese I know tell me. nothing more and nothing less.

My experiences in China varied hugely. In Harbin I was constantly followed by "helpers", in Shanghai it was much more relaxed.

Sh1t happens in China and in other places. In Nigeria I had the services of an armed driver and guard and a pile of cash to bribe both government and non government militia at road blocks.

In Saudi I was held for several hours by the Muttawa as they objected to some literature I had freighted into Jeddah.....

You're making me feel I've led a very sheltered life!
 
Sept 2019 mate of my optician was finishing a contract in 'research' near Wuhan. Stopped off here on his way to new contract in Canada...epidemiology or some such. This chap has always had a grim outlook on life...kinda like Marvin from HHGTTG.

Quote....'What is on its way from China will change the world.....for a long time.

Who knew!

I'm convinced that Covid was around in Wuhan at that time. My wife was at a conference with a lot of attendees from a computer research facility in Wuhan, shortly after that she was sick, our daughter then got sick with flu like symptoms, she was tested for flu, pneumonia strep etc, and the doctors could not figure out what she had. That was November 2019.
 
Worth remembering, though, and I'm not excusing it, is that nearly all the things tiggers mentions began centuries before, and are/were traditions that began under the first emperors, when China was considered one of the most advanced countries on the planet.

Make no mistake, breaking those centuries old conditions won't come quickly, China in many ways is the oldest civilisation on the planet.

I'm not sure the word civilisation really applies to some of what they get up to and hiding behind the fact that many of the atrocities routinely carried out on animals are centuries old carries little weight with me. Either that or perhaps we should still be burning witches!!
 
They should of course be held accountable for a lot of things but who will hold them? Western countries are just as culpable for many of the same things so it's a farce.
 
Worth remembering, though, and I'm not excusing it, is that nearly all the things tiggers mentions began centuries before, and are/were traditions that began under the first emperors, when China was considered one of the most advanced countries on the planet.

I'd also point out that Chian Kai-shek did much to promote the rise of Mao's communist party, not out of sympathy but because he waged relentless war against the peasants via his scorched earth policies, increasing dramatically the numbers in Maos armies. In fact, quite a few of the ambassadors resident in China, including the US, recommended dropping support for Chiang and working with Mao. The actions of the then Imperialist powers cerainly pushed Mao into isolationist policies, with the exception, of course, of the then USSR. When the bamboo curtain was raised, it was to reveal a China well on the way to economic stability and dominance.

What I am saying is that, if there is a chance, the EU and civilised countries should be working with the Chinese to address the humanitarian concerns, despite the support the single party still has, rather than strutting around bandying empty words . Make no mistake, breaking those centuries old conditions won't come quickly, China in many ways is the oldest civilisation on the planet. It also means working with other Asian countries who either have learned how to live with China, and those who are fundamentally opposed.

Finally, even to talk of ostracisation will lead nowhere. Remember that the Chinese economic rise had as much to do with raising the living standards of its people as it did ensuring invasion by the western powers was not going to happen. That, incidentally, is why the whole Taiwan issue remains a festering sore.
There is a fair amount of revisionism in your post IMV.

Oldest civilization on the planet: probably not. The first signs of agriculture and villages, fortresses, shrines, organised systems of writing etc. all appeared around Mesopotamia and Anatolia a couple thousand years before the same showed up in China, and the West has generally maintained that edge since. To say this is not to minimize China's ancient and advanced civilization.

Both Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao started out in the same Nationalist party supported by the Soviet Union, both were ruthless leaders who had no scruples slaughtering soldiers and civilians in their millions to consolidate power in China. Mao ultimately won by dint of sheer cunning and ruthlessness, using the Soviets, the Japanese and ultimately the Americans to his advantage to gain total power. Not many people manipulated, milked and bamboozled Stalin the way Mao did and still survived.

All that is in the past. The Chinese economy is huge again and deeply intertwined with all the other economies in the world. China cranks out more engineers and more patents that any other country in the world, and its market is too large for any global company to ignore. We depend on them and they depend on us for business. China is also becoming increasingly assertive in its near-abroad with the usual combination of carrots and sticks. Ostracizing China just doesn't seem a very realistic idea. On the other hand, negotiating better terms for market access may just be possible, provided the US and the EU develop coherent strategies backed by political will, unity and staying power. Based on recent history, the odds don't look brilliant, but you never know. Needless to say, humanitarian concerns will continue to get short shrift.
 


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