Hi folks. Hope you're all doing well.
Today, I want to talk about something serious. It's something that concerns all of us, yet it often goes unn...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
💯💯💯
As someone who identifies as Taiwanese American, and strongly advocates for Taiwanese independence, I really appreciated waking up to this article on DEV. Thanks for bridging my worlds a bit, @sarthology . The way companies have handled China's pressure on Taiwan, Hong Kong, et al. has felt like the slow death by a million cuts. For example, I can't fly to Taiwan on US airlines anymore (I can physically, I just can't call it that). And on a personal level, I recently had to support a Taiwanese friend who was physically threatened by their Chinese colleagues because my friend was trying to host a discussion surrounding the events in Hong Kong (in solidarity). This all happened at a U.S. tech company. Anyway, I digress.
Because people will want to poke holes in controversial articles like this, I just wanted to leave a note here to clarify that not all people who live in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese or are seeking independence. The result of foreign occupation and waves upon waves of immigration to Taiwan throughout the years has made the concept of 'identity' extremely complicated for the island. I thought you might find these two surveys done by the National Chengchi University interesting:
For anyone who's interested in learning more about Taiwanese history, check out Of Taiwan. It's what I do in my spare time.
At the end of the day, I hope folks will take an interest in these topics and make their own, informed, decisions. Thanks again Sarthak for challenging devs to question standards.
I was waiting for this. It’s my pleasure that I could write about it. I have been to Taiwan and happened to know about the history but I know that rest of the world don’t. Similarly there can be many countries that can be going through the same. That’s why we all do need to be more politically aware. It’s our responsibility.
Thanks to Sarthak for such a thoughtful and touching post. I appreciate any efforts that can help us who identify ourselves as Taiwanese keep this very unique identity. This means enormous to us that I believe people from a
REAL** regular country (which is be in part of UN etc.) hardly understand why we get emotional when people say to us - "I (we) will just call you Taiwan, not Taiwan (province of China)".I was asked a few times why don't we like to be seen or called as part of China? I was like - "because we're not"? It's like if you are Jonh and people keep calls you James or John (property of James), you must say it every time when that happens - "Hey - just call me John".
So that is basically what I and fellow Taiwanese like Jess do, when every time we get called in the name against our identity, we say - Hey, just call me Taiwan!
** editing to use "regular" instead of "real", since I actually feel like Taiwan is REAL but just not a regular country as most people read from books.
Thanks for the article, I think think this really show the problem with over control and communism I never really thought of china's influence in open source, I will do my best in my little slice of the open source world to protect people's rights as if they were right next to me in, portland oregon usa, Thanks again for that new angal.
Well... China is a capitalist nation. The problem is blatant imperialism, not communism.
You are right and wrong, Main land china is communist hong kong under a deal with great Britain is not.
I appreciate your perspective, but the fact is, CCP literally means Chinese Communist Party. China has been a communist nation since 1949. britannica.com/topic/Chinese-Commu...
That was the motive of this article Fulton. All the best for your Quest 😊💪🏼
I love this post and the idea of being more involved in political issues. I see too many devs taking the neutral path about well... everything political ( racism, sexism and other issues). We have too much "power" in the tech world to just blindly accept things. We all know the quote " If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor". It's definitely something to think about...
Thank you for this post!
Well said. Glad to see your views. 😊💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼
Oh wow I'm not taking any stand in any direction regarding these issues. Country borders are a very slippery slope. Very.
My policy is the following:
As a general rule, stay out of politics when doing code :)
That’s the point Rémy. One should not. Political issues are kind of new taboo but thanks to internet we can more sure about what’s going on by just talking to few people online from the same country. It may take time but it’s more responsible way. Though I do respect your choice here.
The issue is you are assuming by “talking to few people online from the same country” will just make you competent to make right decisions for those political disputes. But the reality is those issues are usually involving multiple countries, histories, economic factors. Who are we here to make the decision? And if it’s just your private project, it’s fine, but for an open source project, it gets worse if any political sides slipped in, because it will have a bigger influence to whoever is using or learn from the project. So focus on being neutral and like Remy said, let the clients make decisions.
Oh well but who am I to decide if Crimea is part of Russia or if Taiwan is independent. As a developer that's not really my problem and in fact I have clients in China that would be very offended if considered Taiwan and independent or vice versa. So it's up to my clients to decide.
Although if you edit a service yourself it's a different story, but politics and software should be orthogonal issues :)
If you read the woocommerce PR discussion, you will find that they resolved by choosing CLDR, which is “a much more politically neutral approach to list countries in a more loose way”. So, yeah, we're all in agreement :)
Thank you so much for this article! This is the type of point a lot of developers miss. I too take this stand when I work on projects.
I hope this article can make a change.
I support your idea of being more aware of political situations in an open source world, but which, should in a way to help our developers to be more neutral, not making the coding field another world of propaganda and politic battles. Your strong political opinions in your article undermines this purpose. (I don’t need to be pushed someone’s biased political opinion by dev.to, I can just read twitter myself)
What about the torrent of biased reports and fakes news from Western MSM? I do think devs do need to be more political but they should do a bit more independent research than simply taking the MSM narrative, often they paint a bias if not outright deceptive picture.
So are you saying we shouldn't listen and respect the developers and users from mainland China? 🤔
The woocommerce issue was resolved by choosing CLDR, which is “a much more politically neutral approach to list countries in a more loose way”. That means they tried to respect everyone :)
This is fair and I 100% agree with you, but this article itself seemed a bit biased to me...
No, what we're saying is that there are always compromises. But as stated, we should always try to make informed decisions. I agree with Andi here.
Hey Sarthak, I personally appreciate the effort you put into fighting a battle for the rights of all people (and I do support everything you bring to our attention), but starting your piece with assuming "the lack of political awareness among the dev community" is a little presumptuous... :)
Superb post!
Thanks Stephen.
I didn't realise this about Github, they would have lost all their work? That's so sad.. interesting this hasn't been on the news. Or at least even tech news.
The fact is that, connect to GitHub is prohibited in China...
U need to do it via VPN or shadowsocket
Mind your own business! What do you know about Taiwan history, mostly likely read some english article about Taiwan, obviously biased for western democracy, which fall prey to western narratives. GTFO
Picking part of the problem and rally people to support your own agenda, whatever that may be, isn't going to work. Devs are way smarter than that.