China’s Re-education Camps
wsj.com
wsj.com
When that same motto was put on the gates at Auschwitz, the intent was to reassure prisoners that the camp was NOT a slave camp.
The point is that we should not bother calling these re-education camps. We all know what they are. THey're going to do what all camps do once they enclose large numbers of people.
I know it's popular today to call everyone Nazis whenever they show the slightest signs of analogous behaviour...but isn't re-education bad enough as it is? Shouldn't we focus on the issue at hand and challenge it's merits? Just saying "hurr-durr China = Nazis" is a big distraction that ignores the context of how this came about (ie, under a pretext of suppressing terrorism) and glosses over the countless other ways this is distinct from historical death camps.
Genocides/mass murders have almost always happened during the anarchy of war. They have almost never been done formally by an established state during normal civil life. The Nazis (and Turkey) started theirs in the stateless fringes of their warzones, after the local governments were razed.
Again, I don't see how any of this helps the conversation or our understanding of the issue.
Very few, if any, not tied to detention of those with some connection to a specific external enemy power in an interstate war; which is, to be sure, not to justify, say, the WW2 detention of those of Japanese descent in the US, but there are critical differences from the Chinese policy at issue.
I'm pretty sure the upthread poster is saying (and I'm not endorsing every element of this, only my understanding of the message) that China is in the process of committing genocide against the Uighur population, and the “re-education” camps are a component of that operation with a thin pretext.
> A better example of the next tier is the gulags
The gulag was not, as whole, specifically targeted at resisters against an ethnic displacement policy targeting a particular ethnic group; it was a tool in political repression, but it wasn't narrowly targeted at repressing political resistance to policy targeting a particular ethnic group on the basis of core elements of the shared identity defining the ethnicity.
So, while both are manifestations of authoritarianism, they are arguably different in fairly critical ways as relates to the inference that I've it the other is part of a genocidal strategy.
OTOH, the gulag was, very early on, integral in the anti-kulakization effort that, while notionally targeting an economic class, apparently also had political and ethnic aspects and was arguably directly tied to a Soviet-directed genocide in Ukraine (the Holodomor), so I'm not sure, even if one accepts the analogy with the gulag, that's historically a justified argument against the camps being a leading sign of imminent genocide.
Russian State aka Kiev’s Russia started in Ukraine, so saying Russia starved Ukraine is like saying USA starved California, if somehow California got independent and the rest of country blocked food stuffs.
That's ridiculous, almost like saying World War II was a civil war between two Germanic tribes (the Germans and Anglo-Saxons) or between Roman ones (French, Spanish, and Italians). You can't honestly and accurately claim a modern union by pointing back at an ancient political union. You also have to account that many political unions, until recently, were empires, that dominated many distinct nations of people.
Here is a wiki page with several different scholars positions. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Holodomor_genocide_question
Genocide doesn't require physical extermination. I believe some definitions consider forced assimilation and policies of cultural destruction to be genocide, and these camps are definitely tools to accomplish those things.
Yes.
> A better example of the next tier is the gulags, you know, actual work camps... mass murder is quite the leap.
And the Nazi camps weren't actual work camps? Well, okay, two of them were gassing facilities with nothing else, but all the others were built to extract labor from prisoners. Most started as quarries.
Once you've rounded up people into camps crowded enough that they are unable to protect themselves from their own shit, they will die in large numbers. It's that simple.
But: This. Is. Fascism.
Granted, the difference isn't much in terms of human rights.
I don't have the reference handy, but I remember reading about a priest who had the dubious distinction of having survived both a Nazi concentration camp as well as a Communist concentration camp. In his opinion, the Communist camp was worse. In addition to the hard labor, other physical hardships, and the ever-present threat of death, the Communists added brainwashing. “At least the Germans didn't try turning you into a Nazi.”
Don't forget. Cuba and Vietnam have the same system in operation. Ask anyone in the exile communities in the United States.
The Chinese Communist Party has the word "Communist" in its name, but it has nothing to do with Communism.
There is actually a huge nation-wide prison strike currently going on (of course, not even mentioned in popular news) right now that you might find interesting -- check out their list of demands. California only just recently abolished the ability to buy yourself out of jail - cash bail.
His point is definitely arguable and not at all obvious or clear: it rests on conflating prisons with political re-education camps. The two things obviously have similarities, but they also have important differences.
whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there? does it really matter what kind of grandiose intellectual contortions your captors use to justify their behavior towards you? if you are being raped or beaten or worked until you bleed do you really care what language they are using to scream at you while they do it? does your family, who doesnt know where you are, and wont see you for years, care what flag is flown over the walls that enclose you?
The differences are very important. In one, the prisoners are ideally a threat to the members of their society in some way: rapists, con artists, thieves. In the other, the prisoners are only a threat to or a scapegoat for the already-powerful rulers: intellectuals, dissidents, minorities.
> whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there?
Yes it does, because they're not "injust, ridiculous, hypocritical" to anywhere near the same degree.
Every concept or value that is in substantial demand will be abused to justify the most horrible things for power and profit. This is true for desirable traits or ideologies of systems such as: freedom, egalitarianism, democracy, anarchism ...
From the perspective of crook/opressor/... take your plan, and slap on it whatever concept is in vogue at the timme and place you find yourself...
When did I change the definition of "communism" in an "ad hoc" sense? The "No True Scotsman" trope requires the person commiting the fallacy to change or revert his definition in some ad hoc sense...
It is a mix of several political ideas and capitalism is also a big part of it - it’s the part that leads other nations to produce goods at the cheapest rate there so they can say they’ve done everything they could to save the workers human rights.
The truth is that companies like Apple etc very well know that people there are treated like slaves - but profit is more important than human lives...
Well it isn't that either. Let's be clear that it's a concentration camp run by Chinese Communists with 'added brainwashing' as you put it.
There's a huge selection bias in asking emigrants or exiles or refugees or whatever you prefer to call them. If you are a militant Marxist-Leninist in Cuba you probably don't want to leave.
You say this as if that is a voluntary, natural outcome for citizens in these countries... they grow up hearing their governments blame every problem (their gov created) on the west, while bad news coming out of the West is promoted widely to convince the public that capitalism is backwards.
So while I'm sure there are some intellectuals who are legitimate marxists in Cuba, I doubt the average working class person knows the difference. If they were given the option of the wealth of the average American (or even Mexican) or the cuban one I bet they'd chose the US in a second over the rampant poverty in Cuba.
The people in exile have seen what the alternatives are. They are better informed, it can't all be dismissed as bias. If anything they should have less bias than a Cuban who has never left that bubble.
And if you ever visit the non-tourist parts of Cuba it's incredibly depressing what socialism has done to them.
The idea that all Cuban citizens are brainwashed applies also to US citizens. US citizens are also indoctrinated to believe that capitalism is the only way from when they are toddlers.
The Cuban immigrant's bias should at least be taken into account, you are selecting a group of people to interview who left Cuba because they hated the government. Of course they are going to say bad things about that same government.
"And if you ever visit the non-tourist parts of Cuba it's incredibly depressing what socialism has done to them". Socialism has done great things for the people of Cuba considering the constraints they have had put on them by the west. The government has massively increased the average Cubans literacy, improved working conditions conditions and instituted high quality free medical care making it so that wealth isn't the deciding factor on how long you live.
Cuba would be far worse in an alternative reality where Batista stayed in power.
I spent quite a lot of time walking in non-tourist areas, particularly small towns with dirt roads. I met a few locals on different occasions and visited their poorly built houses with no A/C, insects walking everywhere as the door was open to let the wind in, and pipes leaking.
The stores are also severely limited in supply and prices were high for everything.
The people were clearly depressed, which was apparent undertone even as they feigned niceness to the foreigners.
I'm honestly shocked at people with a clear ideological agenda who try to pretend like their economic experiment wasn't a complete failure.
Other parts of latin america and caribbean might be poor but Cuba could have done so much better. You can tell they are a strong-willed industrious people who work hard.
> Other parts of latin america and caribbean might be poor but Cuba could have done so much better. You can tell they are a strong-willed industrious people who work hard.
Wait so if they had capitalism the Cuban economy would be better than other poor Latin American economies because they work harder? At least you're not making the classic disingenuous comparison between the economic development of imperialist superpowers and socialist nations that started off poor...
China is using, at minimum, 4 million people in slave factories (basically jail) to produce products. They’ve banned ICE since 2009 over disputes around the meaning of “visit” vs “inspection”.
To see the media recently reporting “slave labor” in Texas border camps is the height of hypocrisy.
Why is it hypocritical? Just because the Chinese are worse doesn't excuse the US. Nor should the US use China as a basis for comparison when it comes to respect for human rights - that's a pretty low bar
It's the kind of “Communism” that is authoritarian, militaristic nationalism with significant economic role for private capital, but where both that private capital and labor are deeply intertwined with the administrative machinery of the state in a corporatist manner.
The system run by the Chinese Communist Party is “Communist” in the same way the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “Democratic”; it's a label on the package that doesn't accurately reflect what is inside.
Which, in China, is a lot closer to fascism.
Autocratic, opaque, statistics no one believes, infrastructure spending for cities and rails no one needs dictated by political hacks, entrenched corruption, rising national debt... a few wrong moves and the house of cards falls. The fact that the second largest economy is so radically different from western capitalist countries makes it difficult to predict how it will evolve. Democratic revolution could still happen.
China skirted that by pivoting to a market economy under political direction.
On the plus side, this affords them the power to directly deflate asset bubbles in a way democracies can't.
On the minus side, the lack of transparency and accountability increases inefficiency and hides issues.
It remains to be seen which of these will triumph. If the increased power offsets the inefficiencies, everything might stay fine. But if they fail to notice or act on a major issue... it's a pretty fragile system.
The world is complex. You can compress that complexity with tooling. But at some point, you're increasing technical complexity in exchange for decreased management complexity.
That isn't a guaranteed path to success.
Certainly something like Project Cybersyn [1] would have a much better chance of success now than in the 70s. (Although admittedly, the CIA backed regime change stopped it then)
And when I say compress complexity, I'm using it in an interchangeable sense with "increase efficiency of those humans who do make decisions." There are a huge number of actions that need to be taken -- but many require little or no thought.
Automating those formulaic actions and only surfacing critical decisions with relevant data qualifies as compressing complexity, imho.
Sadly, in China, this is being done in a politically paranoid police state.
One wonders what could happen if you had a computer-planned economy, some kind of basic income, and individual freedom to spend the rest of ones labor.