No joking. Source: live in China for 10+ years.
I asked him about 'state media control' and he said "well, you know, someone could just, you know, get a knife and start stabbing people!" which was his justification for all the control.
I asked him, while we waiting for CalTrain ... 'do you feel safe right now?' he said 'sure'.
The paradox is uncanny.
I'm from Canada, I like it, and it's great in many ways, but I'll be happy to tell you all the ways that it's wonky.
Open question: What would you do if you have increasingly frequent terrorist attacks in major cities year after year at the same time that Wahhabism is taking root in your previously tolerant community? China doesn't have the luxury of two oceans to protect itself from religious fanatics. Xinjiang itself was Buddhist and Indo-Persian in culture well into the medieval period, until conquered and forcibly converted by Turco-Islamists who reveled in "shitting on the Buddha's head" and destroyed many monuments -- basically the Taliban and ISIS. Since then, Xinjiang's Islam has mellowed out but the insidious and fanatical influence from West Asia continues nonstop.
It's absolutely defensible and moral to stop any fundamentalist backsliding in Xinjiang or indeed anywhere in the world. Modern day Xinjiang's problem is very simple, it's one of people losing their identity in a modernizing world. You see the historically more Chinese-influenced Northern Xinjiang more peaceable and prosperous, and religion more tolerant and tolerated. The opposite can be said of Southern Xinjiang. People who fear change tend to become reactionary and turn to religion. It would have happened regardless of whether they were in China. The alternative is to never develop like some of the Central Asian -stans (e.g. bride kidnappings in Kyrgyzstan), but then who wants to live there -- not even Uyghur émigrés, who never go to those places but always head for the EU, the US, or if they have no choice, Turkey. It's sad to say but it might take materialist brainwashing ('re-education') to reverse religious brainwashing.
It might seem that way when you ignore attacks on people by the surveillance state. From the invasion of privacy en masse, to people being disappeared, thus robbing them of even their deaths in a way not even the most heinous terrorist attacks do. It's like nuking a city and then saying you "stopped all car thefts" in it.
It's just as fundamentalist and religious, only with a party line that can shift on its own, vs. preachers who shift their interpretations of fixed scripture, for the same result.
Also, monuments destroyed in medieval times? Really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
> The start of the Cultural Revolution brought huge numbers of Red Guards to Beijing, with all expenses paid by the government, and the railway system was in turmoil. The revolution aimed to destroy the "Four Olds" (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) and establish the corresponding "Four News", and this can range from changing of names and cutting of hair, to the ransacking of homes, vandalizing cultural treasures, and desecrating temples. In a few years, countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards.
Doesn't sound so great. A book I can recommend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Swans
> it might take materialist brainwashing ('re-education') to reverse religious brainwashing.
They're not even getting "materialist" brainwashing, whatever that would even be, they're getting totalitarian brainwashing. Within the framework of totalitarianism, where there is no truth except the truth enforced by coercion, what you say makes sense: only a stronger lie can combat an existing lie, and anything grounded in truth or voluntary insight is lava.
It's still essentially arguing wether a turd or a puddle of puke constitutes better tasting food -- any no doubt existing differences are meaningless, they should never make you pick one or the other.
> "Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world." -- Hannah Arendt