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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

> Uighers may be the first population to sign up for satellite subscriptions

If they can at all. Uighers can't even buy a knife without it being engraved with a QR code of their national ID number.

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I recently traveled to China and went to a fairly remote area dominated by Uyghurs and didn't see anything that would indicate that level of oppression.

They seemed quite free to do what they wanted to between themselves (such as buying a knife) although I imagine their political rights wouldn't be very strong.

If you visited Seoul in 1980s you wouldn't have seen much oppression, either, unless you knew where to look. (I grew up through it, so I know.) You can live a surprisingly peaceful life through some dictatorship as long as you toe the party line and don't get too unlucky. (And if you do get unlucky, you will be quickly removed from other people's lives, so that they can continue the semblance of peaceful lives.)

The Wall Street Journal did a report on life in Xinjiang last year. It demonstrates the security check points, the "study centers", and having to get your kitchen knifes engraved with your ID:

http://www.wsj.com/video/life-inside-chinas-total-surveillan...

On a meta-note, this seems to apply to every aspect of Chinese surveillance/repression. Every time someone here reports that a website is blocked in China, someone else will reply that it works for them.

Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners.

Then you hear about bloggers being imprisoned for pointing out corruption according to the government’s own definitions.

China’s authoritarianism looks attractive when it’s about infrastructure and efficiency, but the underside of it, the collective silencing and destruction of debate, the “blank spots” it introduces into its citizens understanding of history and the world, are truly disturbing.

China’s existential threat is an opportunity or technology which enhances its ability to control citizens but leads, in the long term, to destabilization of the regime. Could be AI, could be something else. But at some point one of these forbidden fruits will poison and what appears to be a manageable, technical problem will become a societal one that no one can control or censor.

>Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners.

So, bigger than the push to make it appear worse than it is?

Because that has been a tactic with any competing nation/enemy du jour of the west for over a century...

Not to mention that everything is judged with US-norms and interpreted through US-preferences in all those articles (aside and above the interpretation through their national interests) -- as if, e.g. rugged individualism and puritanism -derived principles is some universal law and e.g. a collectivist spirit, or some religious-derived norms, or other such cultural ways, are by default bad.

Human rights are not US-norms, there are many pitfalls that have been detected in last couple of centuries in the US and in representative democracies all over the world. Supressing freedom of speach, basic economic freedoms, due process... lead invariably to disaster, being it dictatorships, coups, generalized corruption, etc.

There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us.

>Human rights are not US-norms

In the main, they are not. But they are general platitudes, whose interpretation is left to the individual countries, and is subject to the power relations between them.

A country, then, might be seen accusing or even bombing another (supposedly) in defense of those rights, when itself doesn't follow them.

>There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us.

If only it was so simple. First, there are different concepts of what's OK and what's not. A crude example: US people don't like kings. English people are OK with their (but they don't have much power there). Thailand people love them.

Then, there's selective judgement. E.g. the US can have the largest prison population (25% of the world for 5% of it's population), and the most death sentences, mass surveillance programs, arbitrary cop killings, or even torture camps off-site, but it's OK because it has "free elections" (where two parties alternate in power for 50+ years and vote for more of the same -- never mind gerrymandering). Whereas another country is portrayed as some nightmare regime for not having elections, whereas life there might be better in those other terms. Sure, there are people that complaint for all of the above, but they still happen (and have happened for decades), and few judge the government/country in whole for that or say that it must be overthrown/invaded whatever (whereas for other countries, they do).

There's also selective enforcement, e.g. in how Saudi Arabia can be a worse regime for its citizens in all of those aspects, but as an ally it's not scolded for that, nor does it face sanctions/retribution that non-favorable (i.e. competing) countries that face.

Then there's people who have no idea of world history, little understanding of diplomacy, and how fragile states can be, and what local antagonisms and powers are held back even by some "bad" at first analysis regime, that play god, intervene (to bring "democracy") and, even assuming they do that in earnest, they end up causing civil war and chaos (see Libya, Iraq, and so on). So while "There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us", there could very well something special with China as a country, and it's constitution of people's, history, antagonisms, etc, that a change would unleash hell.

If only it was so simple. First, there are different concepts of what's OK and what's not. A crude example: US people don't like kings.

It is so simple because I'm not talking about US people and what they like. Not everybody in a country likes the same things... that does seem like too much simplification btw.

I'm talking about flaws that make a political system a tyranny. And they're the same for every country as History has repeteadly shown.

there could very well something special with China as a country, and it's constitution of people's, history, antagonisms, etc, that a change would unleash hell.

It's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a peaceful transition from dictatorships to democracy. There are many examples: Spain, Portugal, many South American countries, East Europe... most likely cause of hell unleashing is nothing cultural or historic, but money.

The West has been externalizing manufactures to China the same way we've been buying oil from Saudi Arabia. Those regimes are now armored with tons of money from any pressure to open.

> China’s existential threat is an opportunity or technology which enhances its ability to control citizens but leads, in the long term, to destabilization of the regime. Could be AI, could be something else. But at some point one of these forbidden fruits will poison and what appears to be a manageable, technical problem will become a societal one that no one can control or censor.

I don't understand. Can you explain that more? How does AI or other tech create something that cannot be controlled or censored? I can only see, say, facial recognition, being bad for freedom of the Chinese citizens.

Probably the law of unintended consequences. Imagine now that this makes the surveillance of the bureaucracy itself more or less infallible. Someone, or many people, now know which party officials are meeting with which, know who their mistresses are, know the places they are going to hide assets or crimes, know the people bribing them. Now you have a roadmap for corruption of the state.

If that data leaks, is hacked by a state actor and released, or becomes the tool by which bureaucrats seek to manipulate and blackmail each other, it could destabilize the party itself.

Nice example. Interesting, thanks for that.

I wonder if that kind of authoritarianism can already be qualified as fascism. Declared total unity of state, people and industry? Check. Militarism? Check. Indifference to violence? Check. Concentration camps, mass political persecutions, expansionism? All there.

When does it cross the line from bad to Hitler?

Marx called it "Bonapartism" (after Napoleon), certainly if the authority truly centered upon one leader. He wasn't for it, to say the least.

There's no line between bad and Hitler - the Nazis were bad because (in naïve, coarse terms) they crossed the line between bad and good.

So the NSA was bad - violated the laws and constitution according to the U.S. Courts, therefore we're already at Hitler? What they did was bad. On the road to Hitler, maybe, but not there yet, surely.

> When does it cross the line from bad to Hitler?

There's no line; fascism is a subset of bad, not a separate category.

It's almost like repressive regimes have departments of the government responsible for monitoring and changing the discussions of open websites.

Or maybe that's just twitter, facebook, reddit...

I haven’t found anything in this thread except the most radical and unconfirmed claims which don’t correlate with some result of corporate capitalist applications of the same technologies. Note I say result because the acts and perpetrators themselves would unsurprisingly differ in various societal structures. The sacrifices and misplacements are plenty congruent in effect and affect to warrant acknowledgement. The tone of PR and response to PR, the latter being a measure a couple degrees insulated by public interpretation, presents as nearly identical. I find nothing intriguing or enticing about observing these Huxleyan scenarios so if anyone can refute this angle, please share.

Maybe the great firewall is more akin to WSJs article-viewing mechanism(that was recently featured on HN)?

Repression in Urumqi will likely be an order of magnitude more intense than in smaller municipalities around the province. The CCP is still working off their own revolutionary playbook from the 30s and 40s, when they effected change through organization. The "right to assemble" is one of the most feared rights in China.

Enforcing QR codes on knives is one thing. The real weapon is forbidding all social media apps except for (the thoroughly government monitored) WeChat.

People can still use other apps, though it's getting tougher, but there are still other options, and if people really care more about privacy they may get a proxy and use Telegram.

I've been to Xinjiang also (Urumuqi and other parts of Beijiang). I didn't see a Uyghur get beat up or anything, but this was (a) way back in 2006 before the riots of 2009 and (b) I don't think we would notice much as tourists even IF there was something going on.

Beijing used to have a lot of Uyghurs before the 2008 Olympics, but they were mostly all driven out and not allowed to return after the event.

"Beijing used to have a lot of Uyghurs before the 2008 Olympics, but they were mostly all driven out and not allowed to return after the event." Any source on that? You can still easily see Uyghurs' barbecue stalls and restaurants in many cities including Beijing. Though security check on stations has strengthen since 2009 riot.

Well, I was living there at the time, and lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2016, I saw it happen. It was no secret either, the gov was open about the evictions. The chuan places took a super long time to recover, and it still isn’t what it was like in 2007, especially in northwest Beijing where most of migrants used to live.

The parent's comment was taken directly from the OP article.

Which is sourced from a New York Times _opinion_ piece without any documentation or second sourcing to back it up. I'm comfortable putting this in the "dubious" and/or "overblown anecdote" bin unless evidence shows otherwise.

I was curious and found this article (https://www.fastcompany.com/40510238/in-xinjiang-china-some-...) which references this series of tweets (https://twitter.com/joshchin/status/943159015994880000/photo...).

Thank you for finding that! Why didn't Engadget or the New York Times put that photo into the article? Engraving kitchen knives with your ID number sounded like hyperbole. Nothing proves it like a photo or video. Same with articles on security or privacy compromises -- you need an actual exploit before (most) people take it seriously.

Direct link to the photo:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRbGEKdVAAAtVis?format=jpg

Typically pieces written directly by experts - instead of by journalists interviewing experts - are placed in the opinion section. The author of that piece is a historian from Georgetown who wrote a book about the region.

An article on the order that kitchen knives must be engraved with IDs with pictures of the order and the QR codes:

https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/10/xinjiang-household-kni...

If you were in a remote area of Xinjiang, are you sure that the locals were Uighurs and not ethnic Kazakhs? To an outsider the populations are easy to confuse, but the Kazakhs are not under the same restrictions that the Uighurs are.

Don’t forget the massive Chinese re-education camp for 120,000 uighers.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/...

Typical HN pedantry forthcoming, but I fucking hate AMP, so here's the direct link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...

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