- Joined
- May 8, 2013
Now where have I heard that line before? Obviously it's going to be nearly impossible to pin down an exact number and I'm pretty sure that's by design, but the issue is more that it's happening at all rather than just how wide-spread it is.The biggest counterargument I found is speculation that the purported number of surgeries carried out could not have been completed in the time frame suggested.
It's dealing with situations like this that reveal one of the West's biggest Achilles heels. Because English is the lingua franca for a lot of the world, native English speakers are both at an advantage and a disadvantage. For instance, the Chinese can create English-language propaganda targeting Westerners specifically, while hiding all their dirty secrets in their own language. They can easily keep tabs on what's happening in the West because English-speaking Chinese aren't that hard to find, but we have pretty much no idea what's happening on Weibo or BiliBili because it's all in Chinese. Gathering intel like we do from Facebook and Twitter won't be nearly as easy and there's no saying what kind of misunderstanding might arise from machine translations. It's not a bug, it's a feature.