"Leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”" Oh the irony.
The US has a real negative mark there and deserves the flack that it gets for it.
However, while China seems to be racing toward some terrifying authoritarian nightmare with its Xi dictatorship and bringing back camps, the US incarceration rate has been declining for a decade. It has been rolled back to 1995-1996 levels and is on an aggressive downward slope.
Most likely with the continued legalization / de-criminalization of marijuana, the US will see its incarceration rate continue to plunge for the next 10-20 years. The prison explosion began around 1978-1979. In another ten years we should have the incarceration rate back down to late 1980s levels. That would still be 2x higher than the late 1970s levels, and a lot more work would still need to be done. For reference, peak incarceration was around 2007, and was about 5x what the rate was in the late 1970s (per capita).
Both political parties have widespread agreement that the failed US policies of mass-incarceration have to be reversed / ended.
You really need specify exactly what you're referring to, otherwise there can be no discussion and your comment is content-less snark.
I'm guessing that you're referring to the high numbers of African Americans imprisoned in the US. However, the situations are clearly not comparable. These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.
It's exceedingly frustrating that whenever there's an article about Chinese human rights abuses, there are dozens of comments that seem to just want to deflect attention from them. We never actually end up talking about China, just the US.
Is this just your conclusion, or the conclusion of anyone who has studied mass incarceration in the United States?
i find it fascinating how to some folks, pointing at obama's ethnic background is apparently some kind of knockdown argument.
It's pretty close to a knockdown argument against someone whose position is US government policy is to imprison black people on account of their ethnicity.
The great-grandparent comment may have been suggesting that. However, she was too vague to be sure.
That being said, it's just plain easy to find actual incidences where US policy was explicitly racist in it's intent and effect.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
it's not, not even slightly, as far as i can tell. what makes you feel this is the case?
If there was a high level policy to explicitly imprison African Americans (rather than one that disproportionately imprisons blacks because of complicated circumstances), it's hard to believe a black president would support it or allow it to continue.
Can you provide a source for this wild claim?
The commenter I responded to was so vague, that they could have been making that claim. After all, they were likely drawing parallels between the situation in the OP and the US.
But who knows what they really thought; they never clarified. I called that out at the time and in every comment since.
Lastly, you are wildly off the mark regarding racialized drug policies in the US. Just two references:
https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass-incarceration/racial-dispar...
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
In an article about Chinese human rights abuses? At the most charitable, needing to make everything about the US is a form of political narcissism.
If you want to talk about US problems, post an on-topic article and talk about them there.
Calling this “political narcissism” is thinly veiled political solipsism. I’m amazed to read that here—do you just put your thoughts about the country in which you live in a little box, separate from everything else? It’s not like you can’t ignore these threads if you’d like; most of us can walk and chew gum at the same time.
It sounds to me like you have some deep-seated insecurities that I really don’t think you should have. I think you should address these before you go around whining about other people’s attempt to discuss things.
How condescending.
I have a deep-seated frustration that threads on this and similar topics become trainwreck full of derails and distraction. I'd be surprised if the majority of comments in this thread even discussed China or the situation there, rather than use it as a jumping off point derail to a US topic. As far as I can tell, I'm the only person to have used the term Xinjiang in this entire thread. This is in a post about Xinjiang.
Just to emphasize: this thread is such a trainwreck that it dropped like a rock off the front page. That does no one any good.
> It’s almost like this is one reason to read world news.
A better reason to read world news is to understand and discuss the world, not to compulsively engage in domestic topics.