China instated the death penalty for "particularly serious" cases involving supporters of Taiwanese independence. New judicial guidelines, entitled "Opinions on Punishing the Crimes of Splitting the Country & Inciting Splitting the Country by 'Taiwan Independence' Diehards," were jointly issued by... Read moreChina: death penalty for advocating ‘Taiwan independence’
Sensationalist headline, trading journalistic integrity for website clicks. But I suppose “shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years” doesn’t draw as much attention.
I have this cherry for you to pick, if you want. Anyway, if your point is “independentism is not exclusively punished by death in China”… Yay? Best dictatorship ever.
I stated my point in my original post.
You can’t talk sense into these people, the propaganda and xenophobia runs too deep. China bad, to these people, regardless of what they actually do. These people don’t want the truth. They just want their koolaid.
It seems that way. I only addressed the article, and some of them were talking as if I was advocating death penalties for people expressing themselves.
It is funny to see how wild people get when someone points out an article about China is bad or a headline is deceptive, if the article was about Ukraine or somewhere doing the same thing then then the only comment you’d see is ‘bad headline!’ followed by endless nuance.
A lot of people don’t like their binary thinking and simplistic worldview tainted.
Absolutely. I agree that life would be so much simpler if it was only black and white issues, but rarely is that the case. And I get it, those binary beliefs are comfortable. But we need to endure the difficulty of questioning our assumptions, pushing out of that simplistic worldview, and learning. It’s the only way we grow as people.
That or you’re ignoring that they absolutely are establishing a death sentence for it. Will they apply it to everyone?
No, probably not. But who could stop them if they did decide that all Taiwanese advocates are extreme cases? Keeping in mind that their definition of extreme seems to be “leader.”
Personally I find your casual acceptance of the right of the state to execute anyone short of a brownshirt contemptible enough by itself, but go on about how they’re only going to put the non-leadership people in prison for 3 years.
My comments aren’t advocating, ignoring, or accepting the death penalty. I can’t speculate to China’s intent behind the law, or assume it’s application.
I was addressing the sensationalist nature of the article, about how it latched onto the passage about death for the purpose of generating clicks.
To discuss the why or the how behind the law is another matter entirely and goes well beyond the scope of my comment. I’m sure there are plenty of discussions out there that cover those topics, however.
lemmy.ml is at it again
Can you elaborate?
What are you referring to here? Your statement seems to contradict not just the headline but the entire article.
The first link referenced in this article. That article mentions the punishments and the severity of the crime required for those punishments.
This article seemed to only latch onto the more dramatic portions and threats of the death penalty to generate clicks.
I agree with you that the article is clickbaity, it implies that it’s the default punishment. But technically, it isn’t wrong. It’s still possible to get death penalty for advocating for Taiwan independence.
Without looking at your post history, I think your downvotes are unjustified. You merely pointed out the clickbait. But it would be better if you presented it in more affirming way, cause right now your comment kinda reads like you’re refuting the article and “it’s not a death sentence, it’s only a 3-year imprisonment”, which is also not true.
The clickbait nature of the headline does seem to imply that it’s death right off the bat. I never said that death wasn’t on the table, as unfortunate as that is. The death penalty is far from the only outcome, which is difficult to surmise from just this one article alone.
However, I’m not going to edit the comments I made in an attempt to present it differently. My goal was to get people to read into it, question their assumptions, and not take the article at face value. Media literacy is a skill and involves going well past the headline, so hopefully some people saw that while trying to prove me wrong.
I feel the downvotes are unjustified as well, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it. It’s a sensitive subject for a lot of people, and I saw that going into it.
I mean I think it makes sense to focus on the most severe possible punishment in this context.
That said, I did not find any mention of the death penalty in the linked page. I do not speak Chinese so I was relying on the translation feature in my browser, so I’m not sure if it was mistranslated, the article is wrong about that, or what. Curious if anyone has further information on this.
I used google’s webpage translation. It does mention death as a penalty, but it’s far from the only possible outcome.
OK so probably a translation issue. But to respond to your statement, if your city announced it would punish illegal parking with penalties ranging from 3 years imprisonment to fucking murder, which would you be more concerned with? And which would you rather local journalists make you aware of? Would you really be criticizing their clickbait headlines if they ran a similar story?
Like I said, focusing on the more severe possible punishment makes perfect sense in this context. Not to mention that all of the punishments are extremely excessive.
I never discounted the inclusion of the threat of death, I only commented on the fixation on it in that article. Of course the inclusion of the death penalty needs to be a part of the discussion.
We can spend the rest of forever discussing what-ifs and hypotheticals. I don’t think it does the original discussion justice to boil it down from the severity of secession to parking issues. I fear your simplification misrepresents the original discussion, as the nuance of the China-Taiwan situation cannot earnestly be recreated with parking violations in a city.
But yes, to answer your question, I do think that journalistic integrity is important at any level.
If you keep reading in that translated article linked in the original article, it says that if you change your stance and make an honest attempt to undo the damage you did, the charges may be dropped. So one could end up with no punishments at all.
Tankie
In what regard?
Such a dishonest reply. As the guidelines specifically even forbid using honest means to further a political goal. And the punishment goes up to the death sentence. But then you are a cheerleading an authoritarian government. Seems par for the course.
I’m not cheerleading anything, this is about an article. I have no political goal.
Imprisonment for simply saying something that in no sane world would be considered a crime.
I’ll notify Julian Assange.
But would give you a hell of a beating in the spanish Catalan referendum on Independence which was just a bunch of years ago and not some ancient happening.
There are at least 5 openly independentist parties, some of which held government, in Catalonia.
How many are there in China?
You wouldn’t get imprisoned for simply saying it, though.
"If the conduct specified in Article 7 of these Opinions is carried out and the circumstances are serious, causing serious consequences or causing particularly bad effects, it shall be deemed as a “serious crime” "
You’d have to take a more active role, and your participation would have to lead to something more major. It even goes on to say that if you renounce your stance, the charges may be dismissed.
It’s sufficient to mention it in a wechat group with >10 people, which already qualified as instigating “the masses”.
Interesting, I’d like to do more reading on the subject. Do you have any preferred sources?
Sure, though quite a few of those things are not explicitly written down, and court transcripts are only published in high profile cases, so you won’t find any official reference to the group size. So it’s mostly from second hand experience and hearsay. You pick up one or the other thing if you live in China for nearly a decade.
But here’s some official reading - I hope the sites are accessible from outside China, that’s something I can’t validate right now.
You should be good to go with google translate; though specifically for Chinese legalese, I suggest yandex translate (assuming you don’t speak Chinese):
https://m.66law.cn/laws/1470356.aspx
https://www.spp.gov.cn/spp/llyj/202111/t20211130_537133.shtml
http://legal.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0416/c205462-32079979.html
https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_20925867
Excellent, thanks.