noemon wrote:You did not bring any evidence whatsoever, nor did you argue a single point which is yet more evidence of your desperation.
I have produced considerable amounts of evidence in this thread, 99% of which you have dismissed out of hand without even reading.
noemon wrote:You should take your own advice and try to engage with the actual evidence:
Uh huh. The reason I didn't reply last time is because I've addressed all of these claims ad nauseam:
noemon wrote:China is currently detaining arbitrarily hundreds of thousands of Uyghur men and women without trial
This is an assertion, not evidence. As shown
previously in the thread, this number is based on extrapolations by Adrian Zenz, based on something like eight total interviews. When challenged on the source for this number, the UHRP guy could do no better than "western media estimates". If you want to produce actual hard evidence of this, you are welcome to.
noemon wrote:is sterilising Uyghur women at unprecedented rates
We've already been over this. I am obviously never going to convince you that contraception is not the same as sterilisation, and you are not going to convince me that they are the same.
noemon wrote:and she does not recognise their religion.
Islam is an officially recognised religion in China, and there are thousands of mosques in Xinjiang. What China does not recognise is the East Turkestan separatist movement, or its Salafist interpretation of Islam. If you think Salafism is essential and integral to being a Uyghur, then I don't really know what to tell you.
noemon wrote:Your author is hypocritically pretending that China deserves the benefit of the doubt on the sterilisations, and just like you explains it away merely as "a levelling down with the Han" which is the mantra you have repeated for numerous posts, but this nonsensical mantra falls apart when one accounts for the internment camps and Chinese accusations that the Uyghurs are "terrorists".
Please show evidence that China classes all Uyghurs as terrorists.
noemon wrote:Like usual you totally ignored it.
Because I have addressed this repeatedly, and the argument is going nowhere. I ask you to provide evidence to back up a claim, and rather than do so you call me a propagandist, conspiracy theorist, genocide denier and troll, all while pretending you're above personal insults.
Why should I bother going round in circles any more?
noemon wrote:So you are actually doubling down? Wow. It's quite incredible.
Even that is false and off-topic too, the article is praising China for tackling chronic lung disease. It's got a nice graph too.
For anyone who wants to read it, here is the full text of the article. You can see for yourself if noemon's characterisation of its contents is accurate.
Noted Chinese propaganda arm NPR wrote:New Research: China Is Winning Some Health-Care Battles — And Losing Others
Ten years into China's multi-billion dollar investment in health-care reform, the country has made "spectacular" progress on some top public health challenges — including insurance coverage and deaths of children. But it's facing an uphill battle on others, including second-hand smoke and cancer, according to a special China-themed issue on September 28 of the journal The Lancet.
In the collection of nine peer-reviewed studies, commentaries, editorials and reviews of literature, researchers from academic institutions in Beijing and other areas of China, as well as the U.S. and Germany, found the country is making headway in reducing the incidence of infectious diseases like diarrhea and respiratory illnesses among its 1.3 billion citizens. They also found that China has dramatically increased the share of its population receiving insurance coverage for basic health care, up to 96%.
But they also show that the country has a long way to go in encouraging healthy lifestyles and cleaning up pollution to help people avoid cancers and chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. Deaths from these ailments are on the rise.
"China is beginning to look very much like the U.S.," says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Still, the country has done well in saving the lives of children, Murray says.
"China is a spectacular success story in reducing child mortality at one of the fastest rates of decline in history," he says. "Their death rate among children under five went down by 9% a year for the past 20 years. That's extraordinary." Murray was an author on one of the Lancet China-themed papers examining causes of illness and death in China since 1990.
A lot of the efforts to reduce infectious disease rates began as early as the 1980s, Murray says. But beginning in 2008, Chinese officials added significant money to their efforts — because, according to Murray, health care was getting increasingly costly, and the government recognized it would need to do something or face a public backlash. China quadrupled health expenditures from 359 billion yuan ($50.2 billion) in 2008 to 1.52 trillion yuan ($212.6 billion) in 2017, says Winnie Yip, professor of international health policy and economics at the Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
And they homed in on programs aimed at saving the lives of mothers and children. "They were very deliberate in focusing on reducing maternal and child mortality," says Murray. "They focused on reaching rural areas and ethnic minorities."
The Chinese efforts at saving children and reducing infectious diseases show up in a couple of examples. In a ranking of the number of deaths per 100,000 people, neonatal disorders was the fifth-most common cause in 1990; by 2017, it was down to 27th. And diarrheal diseases dropped from the 20th highest number of deaths per 100,000 in 1990 to the 78th highest cause of deaths in 2017, according to the Lancet study on causes of death and disease.
Worldwide, diarrhea is the second leading cause of death among children under five — responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 children every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Getting the population covered by some level of insurance and tackling infectious diseases are impressive achievements. But China hasn't been as successful at helping its citizens avoid cancer, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes, all of which are increasing.
Those chronic diseases often relate to lifestyle choices. And, says Murray, the government so far doesn't seem to want to get involved in people's personal decisions, like whether to smoke, drink or eat unhealthy foods.
"In the case of tobacco, the government itself is a producer of tobacco, and it's a tremendous source of revenue," he says. Cigarettes are relatively cheap in China — a pack costs the equivalent of about $1.40, according to one of the Lancet papers. In China, 26.6% of adults smoke, compared to 19% around the world, and 14% in the U.S.
At least when they get sick, almost all Chinese citizens have health insurance. "China has two kinds of insurance. One is for the employed population, and the other for everyone else," Yip says. In 2003, only 22% of the population had insurance, and all insurance came through employment. That's when the government began rolling out subsidized insurance for those who didn't get insurance through their workplace. By 2008, 87% of Chinese people were insured. And now, almost everyone is covered.
"They were able to do that in a very short time. It's pretty impressive," Yip says.
But there's a significant hiccup to the high rate of insurance coverage. "The government's principle is to cover basic health care," says Yip. "But in practice there's no explicit list of what is basic care. About the only thing people agree on is that cosmetic surgery is not basic health care."
As in many countries, the escalating cost of health care in China is hard to control, says Yip. China has a very entrepreneurial, unregulated health-care system. For example, the government used to allow hospitals to mark up drug prices without limit. As a result, drug costs in hospitals were out of control, and hospitals were prescribing unusually high amounts of prescription drugs.
Then the government initiated a zero-profit drug policy. "They have to sell the drug at the price they bought it for. It's working in that it has reduced prescriptions in hospitals," she says. But to make up for the lost revenue from drugs, she says, hospitals are now ordering more diagnostic tests than they did before the zero-profit drug policy. To bring in revenue, "rather than giving them drugs, physicians are now sending patients off for lab tests," she says.
Two of the biggest threats to the health of Chinese people are tobacco and environmental pollution. "Smoking is a complicated policy in China because many regions in China rely on the tobacco industry," says Yip.
Rates of exposure to secondhand smoke have gone down from 2010 to 2018, but remain high, according to one article in the China-themed Lancet. For example, 63% of workplaces allowed smoking in 2010, and 51% still did in 2018. In 2010, 39% of China's hospitals and health centers allowed smoking; in 2018, it was 24%. For restaurants, the number dropped from 89% to 73%.
"Recently, in a major government restructuring, tobacco has moved from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Health," Yip says. "It will take time, but I think the health interest will eventually take priority."
And pollution? For decades, China was keen on economic development without much thought of the environment or the effects of pollution on health. One 2015 study by the independent research group Berkeley Earth found that air pollution contributes to 1.6 million deaths per year in China. But now, health is part of the equation when considering future economic development, Yip says.
"It's not easy," she says. "With the magnitude of pollution — air, water soil --that, too, will take time."
So the important quotes, which I have now given you three times, show that China has drastically reduced infant mortality rates, and has made special effort to do so in rural areas and those with ethnic minorities - like Xinjiang.
This is also backed up by the statistics, which once again you flatly ignored, showing
plummeting maternal and infant mortality rates in Xinjiang between 2010 and 2018. This is the opposite of what you would see if the intent was to eradicate the Uyghurs. Genocidal dictatorships don't tend to put a lot of effort into improving maternity and neonatal care for their target groups.
noemon wrote:It is certainly not praising China for her sterilisations and detainment policies against the Uyghurs which is our actual topic.
Last I saw, the "actual topic" was the alleged genocide of the Uyghurs, of which the alleged sterilisations and alleged detainment policies form a part. I am giving you evidence which would give you reason to question the narrative (if you had any interest whatsoever in thinking about this fairly).
noemon wrote:Are you implying that China is sterilising hundreds of thousands of Uyghur women per year in an attempt to bring down infant mortality?
I'm implying that the policies which Zenz and others have
deliberately misinterpreted as "coercive mass sterilisation" actually look a lot more like increased investment in public health, and that this is borne out by the statistics.
noemon wrote:China is targeting Uyghurs because she treats the entire ethnic-group as terrorists
Any evidence at all for this?
"Perhaps you want me to die of unrelieved boredom while you keep talking." - Martin Luther
You feel like inserting your feelings in the conversation as rhetorical devices but I am not interested in your feelings, nor am I interested to argue your personal insults or whether my "comeback on your trolling" was cool enough, it's not the topic nor is it my primary or even secondary concern. Again with the perception management, you evidently have very real and substantial issues focusing on the actual topic of the conversation.
What does one say to you without you getting offended and crying that you are somehow the victim here?
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