179
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
179 points (98.9% liked)
science
20058 readers
688 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
A few dozen of more than 200 hundred researchers were charged and convicted?
That doesn't seem like a small percentage.
Do you understand the life significance of being arrested under threat of deportation? What if it happened to your daughter with absolutely no warning or reason?
Now do number convicted vs total number of researchers in the country and we can decide if that "non-small percentage" was worth officially, systematically disenfranchising and vilifying an entire culture and driving this woman to suicide.
I mean, in a murder investigation, you might go through a dozen people, checking alibis and generally investigating to find the final suspect and convict.
Granted, what happened here was unconscionable for someone that was only being investigated. I can see her being put on administrative leave while it were sorted out to minimize damage if she actually were guilty. But what was done beyond that wasn't right.
But you also can't ignore investigations because people might get upset. Unfortunately China has spent decades committing provable industrial espionage, so it's hard to say you can't go down that road. And when you get that high of a percentage of convictions, it proves that out. Frankly, the Chinese government should be as much on the hook here for what was done to her as NWU because they sure make it hard to be even-handed when it comes to theft of IP.
Who are you defending?
Ok, if you won't do it, I will: The US has 1,889,780 researchers, with old data and rough math, we'll just round that to 2M. We'll rough-in 30 for "a few dozen", giving us a ratio of 3/200,000 or 0.000015 or 0.0015%. I'll be generous and round up to 0.002%. Far less than one one-hundredth of a percent of researchers is worth establishing an official, named, racist government program? And what did we gain? The knowledge that poor Chinese people will stay poor and undoubtedly get poorer? The ire and distrust of an entire demigraphic of citizens and residents in our own country? More opportunities for white men? A few extra pennies in the pockets of billionaires? Yay, yippee, woohoo, another wonderfully beneficial use of taxpayer dollars from the party of small government. ๐๐๐
And given what we're seeing with the current federal ~~hate~~race-based law enforcement programs, we have absolutely no reason to believe those few dozen convicted researchers were actually even guilty of anything. I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if they're not all Chinese. But I'm sure the bigots met their quota, so that's really all that matters. ๐