Hull teacher held in Chinese jail for 'not being a friend of the country'

[no1youknowz]

> "We got three meals a day, usually boiled cabbage"

> "In the afternoons, they screened really terrible films, usually with Nicholas Cage in them."

Damn, they actually found the quickest way to psychologically break people!

[bertlequant]

Although this may seem to be a torture strategy to those not from China, I can assure you after living there for a few years, Nick Cage is extremely popular in China.

[devdoomari]

woah! chinese gov. trying to be 'onion than the onion'

[jessaustin]

When Chinese police review this matter they might decide it wasn't the best way to minimize unflattering media coverage.

[tomohawk]

Not a great way to make friends

[nickpeterson]

Surely if the goal is friendship they should force them to watch the Golden girls?

[cryptarch]

It doesn't sound a lot different from "our moral compass", the U.S. of A. Pretty normal to treat unwanted civilians that way there, he should be happy he got off without being framed/jailed extensively/tortured/killed.

I'm not saying it's civil or good. Just not abnormal.

[Kenji]

Note that China has a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council, along with Saudi Arabia and others like that. It is the ultimate irony. They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals. Nobody stands up to China because we need the cheap goods. What is described in this article is one of the purest forms of fascism. It makes me sick.

[freshhawk]

I hope you aren't American, because then the talk of "our morals" is a bit rich when discussing imprisoning people for bad reasons. Or complaining about a seat for the Saudis that the US got for them while they fund their war crimes in Yemen.

[sunwooz]

Western nations aren't exactly standing on a moral high ground, either.

[coldtea]

>They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals.

You really have some catching up to do with regards to the modern history of western nations...

From enslaving billions of people in their colonies up to the 60s (and still in tens of still non freed nations) [1], to human zoos [2], to slavery [3], to gasing 6 million people to death [4], to 2 world wars [5], to nuking civilians [6], to killing democracies and supporting dictatorships [7][8][9][10][11], to mass killing people asking for their freedom [10], to off-law prisons [11], to record incarceration rates [12], to record open-season police shootings [13], to seggregation [14][15][16], and so on (and we barely scratched the surface, plus all these are the polished, generally accepted "official" stories: the reality on the ground, and the stories of the actual victims are much bleaker and morbid) -- western nations hardly place anything over greed and capitalism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war, [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_... [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 [11] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/01/indonesia.comm... [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp [12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... [13] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit... [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[phozy1]

I agree, the Irony is insane, but what can we do? Sometimes makes me wonder.

[alexro]

China, Russia, Turkey, Saudis do horrible things with their own hands, whereas the West has found a cleaner way to employ a middle man for that.

[dang]

Heading in generic political directions is one of the worst things an HN thread can do, but personal attacks are worse still. Regardless of how bad you think a comment is, please don't respond like this. Community members have a responsibility to protect this place if they're going to comment here.

We've had to warn you before, and you've continued to post uncivilly. That will get your account banned, so if you don't want to be banned please fix this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011908 and marked it off-topic.

[baybal2]

Well, at least it was made public that he was detainend. 9 out of 10 times, a foreigner just disappears tracelessly like that: https://www.reddit.com/r/shenzhen/comments/5vvvdv/father_mis...