China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation.
In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th)
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...
People talk. My grandmother passed down first hand accounts of her living through the Japanese occupation during WWII. There are also stories passed down from the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Believe me, the Chinese know something happened in 1989 at Tiananmen. Hong Kong has been a torch bearer in keeping memories of those events alive.
Now the better question is if many Chinese still care in face of growing prosperity and what version of the "truth" they have.
State censorship isn't as simple as not talking about something. The cleverer way of doing it is to spin the truth. As they say in China, Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. That's how they spun it. Sure the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions were terrible but on the whole Mao was good. Then add in some story about liberation from the Japanese and the corrupt KMT and Mao's legacy survives.
People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “wrong”, but maybe not for the same reasons as the west (China has invested a lot more in riot police since then).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album)
Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.
Interestingly, she performed (4 I think) concerts in China for 1989, but none are scheduled in the country this time around.
For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about.
This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page.
The look of utter horror on her face, followed by pain and grief and rage, was a little much for a friday night out with the gang...
On the other side, I know people living in china who have known all the tricky ways to get around the censors since forever, and are totally up to speed on things.
So it's probably a mixed bag.
Same with some Filipinos' opinions of Rodrigo Duterte, who said all the bad news being posted about him were "American propaganda."
Have other people here asked a Chinese expat what they thought about their government back home? What kind of answers did they give?
Bombing the shit out of Laos
Massive numbers killed in the CIA operations overthrowing governments in South America
The duplicitous and two-faced foreign policies which fund genocides and killings all over the globe while we try to put on some good face about making the world a better more democratic place
Selling arms to murderous regimes who torture and kill as we turn a blind eye to profits
Repatriating Nazis responsible for the war crimes we decry in order to get their tech/medical advancements
The extent at which Native Americans were murdered
Lots and lots of things get rose-colored glasses because the populous lives rather comfortable now...
This is the only one you gave that actually was committed against Americans in the US.
• Plans to nuke the Moon [2].
are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Not sure if they count as "that most of us don't know about."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs.
We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they are trying to build, and are trying to suppress and change this culture in a deeply authoritarian way.
Communist regimes, including China, have a history of suppressing religion and pre-existing traditional culture (e.g. the Cultural Revolution of the 60's and 70's).
Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.
Best guess is that it hasn't fully reached their populations / news audiences. It's only in the last four to six months that Western media has begun to actively talk about it and pursue the truth of what's going on there.
Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp had less than a thousand total detainees over its history (currently an estimated 40 people held there), most of whom were pulled directly off of battlefields. Guantanamo became a global scandal and blackeye for the US, drawing countless mass protests across the Middle East.
Here we're talking about millions of Muslims being tortured, 're-educated,' stripped of their Islamic beliefs, and apparently many are dying or being murdered in the process. An estimated 1,300 camps and growing. All without any external access or oversight, happening under an aggressive rights-denying dictatorship.
These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
One Muslim country at least, Egypt, is doing China's bidding on Uighurs https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/fear-panic-egypt-arre... :
> Egyptian police have detained scores of Chinese students from the Uighur ethnic minority on Beijing's request, forcing dozens into hiding or to flee to Turkey, activists have said.
> These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population. So genocide will have been an option under consideration. On the other hand, they must know that descending to Nazi levels of evil is unlikely to improve China's image.
China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.
Because everybody who was capable of putting up a riot was killed, nobody put up a riot.
Sad to say, I did not. Many majority-Muslim nations at current have ethno-nationalist tinges to them and a general low opinion of their religious and ethnic minority groups. Many are more interested in the money the Chinese government makes available for infrastructure than in some internal issue in China.
A wide international, non-exclusively-Muslim, based response, on pure human rights grounds would possibly be a good thing. Unfortunately nobody in the world right now is interested/capable/etc. to respond to religious/ethnic/etc. cleansings on pure human rights grounds (of course there are responses when it comes to economic interests when it can be covered by human rights interests)
The rest of the world is sick of your filth! You couldn't do anything even if you tried! WE ARE THE FUTURE AND WE STOMP ON YOUR DEAD NATION
Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
As always, follow the money -- and power (authoritarian governments).
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h...
However in the eyes of most people concentration camp refers to the extermination camps where the Nazis systematically kill everyone who was brought into them. I think most people feel that it is important to distinguish between camps that lock people up without recourse, and camps and kill people. That is why we aren't referring to them as concentration camps. If you call them concentration camps people expect that means systematic mass murder, when they realize that is not what is happening you loose credibility and those people end up ignoring the real human rights crisis.
To be more precise under today's usage concentration camps include both the extermination camps, and internment camps. Internment camps is a more precise definition of what this is.
Also I think unfortunately while that while their is wide expression of the belief that extermination camps are immoral and should not happen. I don't think there nearly the same expression around internment camps.
Lack of surprise doesn't mean much of anything w/r/t what the appropriate response ought to be.
Their economy is obviously capitalist. And although Xi has been leaning towards more dictator-like behavior, they haven't been a dictatorship since Mao.
It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
But also not much less absurd than that.
Taking the words of totalitarian leaders literally is very naive.
Does mandated 50% local (aka party) ownership align with "obviously capitalist"? That seems a stretch (aka crony capitalist).
Xi has asked for indefinitely long term of power and gotten it. Handover of power?
> Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
> Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state
The caveats that I mention aren't just "not like the USA" but specifically not like most other capitalist economies either.
Slapping a bunch of incorrect trigger words together terminates thought.
China isn't organized by any free trade principles, they've just formalized their black markets and cronyism.
> It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
You're writing this on an article titled, "China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight," with the subtext, "Around 1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come."
Dictatorship is about an individual. The chinese government has not been since Mao.
All non-western-democratic governments are not the same. They're not all some giant grab-bag of interchangeable scare words about communism, fascism, dictatorship.
Norway's a socialist state. Do they belong in your bucket too?
Their economy is the exact opposite of Capitalist in fact. It's de facto state controlled top to bottom.
1) The Chinese economy is overwhelmingly state owned or directly controlled. All the major banks are directly owned or controlled by the government. All of their major industries, such as steel, aluminum and energy, are directly owned or controlled by the government. Their largest electronics and telecom companies such as Huawei and China Mobile are directly commanded by the government.
2) No company may do anything out of lock-step with the government. Whether you're Alibaba or Baidu, you must obey at all times, no matter what the stray edict of the week is. You may not challenge the party. Ask Tencent about the government's damaging, arbitrary restrictions on gaming for example. [1]
3) There are no actual property rights. Your property may be revoked, taken from you at any time for any reason. You will not get it back, and you have no ability to challenge this in a court of law. The Chinese Government issues arbitrary rules non-stop that alter your property rights and how property may be used (including randomly choosing to restrict what's acceptable day to day; one day you may have joke apps, the next day they're illegal).
4) The entire economy operates on a system of bribes. You can't operate anything in China without paying bribes. There are no exceptions, whether you're trying to operate a small food business or put up a skyscraper. This means the rule of law is entirely lacking, which is why Transparency International ranks China #77 in the world on corruption.
5) The economy is entirely closed to normal foreign business operations. You can't just set up a business in China as a foreigner. You can't buy Chinese businesses outright, or in most cases take a majority ownership position. Contrast this with the US (which isn't even the best example): you can spend less than a thousand dollars with Stripe Atlas and set up a US corporation at any time, without permission, having never once visited the country and you own it outright.
6) Capital is locked down. You may not take your wealth and flee the country. You and your capital are held captive by their very tight capital controls. You can hardly legally get enough cash out of China to buy a middle class house these days.
7) As a Chinese business you may not operate outside of the country in any manner that the government disagrees with. They approve all large transactions and all large investments. If they don't like something you've done, you will be forced to liquidate out of that position no matter the consequences.
8) It's almost entirely illegal to privately own farm land. This contributes to China having the most backwards and low output farming industry of any major economy.
How is all of this obviously Capitalistic? The state completely controls everything. It's the exact opposite of Capitalist.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-ord...
Find a Chinese person over the age of 40. Ask them if they've experienced 2 economic systems in their life, then ask them if the first one was communist, and the second one was capitalist. They'll answer yes on all 3, with maybe some elaboration about transitions, legacy effects, and the peculiarities of China.
Then break out the list and try to change their mind. Let me know your results.
Describing an oligarchy as a communist dictatorship is near-equivalent. Far from dishonest.
> Their economy is obviously capitalist
It's capitalist at specific granularities. This is a derail, at best.
> They have a process, they have regular handovers of power.
So does an oligarchy.
But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same!
Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?
> Group vs individual.
If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).
[1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.
They are Communists even if they aren't communists.
I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.
Both strongmen did whatever they could and wanted to do. Don't buy the bullshit.
This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.
YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
Generic ideological comments and denunciations of entire countries are examples of empty, fiery rhetoric that we don't want on HN. Why? Because their information content is low, they provoke others into posting worse, and they lead to extremely predictable discussion. The main thing a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity needs to do is not be predictable, so HN is a bad place to fight the same fights over and over.
In case it helps, I've been asking people for years on this site not to bash each other's countries, and the countries that have come up would make a long list. There's no national bias in it.
"You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."
More seriously, though, the highbrow dismissal of very real problems as tribalism on the same site that frequently has slapfights over technology and news/advertising spam of various forms seems a little much.
Like, if the answer is just "Hey, knock it off we don't want flamewars" that's totally respectable...but the other arguments you've used come off as really smug and out-of-touch.
The moderation issue is garden-variety internet flamewar and requiring people to adhere to the site guidelines. That is mundane stuff, regardless of how much rhetoric people pour out on the internet.
Given that it is a Communist Dictatorship and that it does not have rights-based rule of law, mass internment camps are not very surprising.
Note that despite these highly coordinated, anti-China circlejerks (seriously look at the other thread [2], just two down, all the same people and new accounts spouting the same exact nonsense, virtually all of it baseless propaganda) the moderators are to pounce on any "meta-commentary" that tries to pushback or highlight the stupidity.
We need you to stop insinuating astroturfing in the threads ("highly coordinated"). People are simply divided on this issue and it's a gross violation of the HN guidelines to insinuate otherwise. All it does is escalate the toxicity and we don't allow people to do that here.
It's worth pointing out what is actually happening here. This story about "massive internment camps" has been pushed relentlessly on HN for the past two weeks. There's been at least five stories on it.
Actual journalists investigated the story and proved quite clearly the story has been entirely fabricated [1].
Post the results of this story on HN and it is immediately flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846148
At this point I think it pretty fair to say there is a highly coordinated effort to push a wholly fake anti-China story.
> In reality, of course, it's neither: we're just trying to prevent HN from going up in nationalistic flames.
Somehow you think being "neutral" is the right strategy when one side is invested in a deliberate propaganda effort.
[1] https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...