China Uighurs: Xinjiang 'legalises' Muslim internment camps | Hacker News Reader

China Uighurs: Xinjiang 'legalises' Muslim internment camps

bbc.co.uk

102 pointsloriverkutya28 comments

It has been suggested that, in Xinjiang, "owning too many books" or "receiving email from abroad" contributes to one's likelihood of a police visit and ending up in such a camp.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democrac...

Textbooks printed before 2009 were burned, and houses are regularly searched just to be sure.

Mandatory checkpoints between parts of the city.

Arbitrary arrests, arbitrary permission-restrictions.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/10/01/an-internment-camp-f...

>Xinjiang's new legislation says examples of behaviour that could lead to detention include [...] refusing to watch state TV and listen to state radio [...]

Similar repressive policy was used against the native population of Canada. It failed to achieve its intended goals, destroyed lives, and left behind a painful legacy. It's a shame the CCP has decided to take this dark path.

Did it fail though? Or do you only see the failures?

How many natives went through that? How many ended up with children that are more or less fully assimilated into mainstream Canadian culture?

It deeply, deeply failed. Residential schools were an atrocity. I'd show you articles about them but I'm afraid that no matter what I show you, you'll consider it wrong for some reason, so I ask to try to convince yourself that Canada's residential schools were overall awful.

I'm not making any value judgement, I'm just asking whether or not there is data to state that they didn't accomplish their goals (with some failures along the way)?

Make a good faith attempt to convince yourself that residential schools were an utter failure (e.g. go read up about them in the book of your choice). I am just afraid that I may attempt to do the work myself and be met with someone who has already made up their mind in bad faith and I'd be wasting my time.

If you did make an effort and did indeed find positive effects of residential schools, I'd be more willing to discuss the merits you found.

Taking children by force, confining them in education centers, and violently coercing them to assimilate is counterproductive. A third of them went through the residential school system. The land was fully conquered well before the state setup that system. All it's done is produce generation after generation with very good reason to hate and fear the culture that abused them. Not to mention the related damage going through that does. Been to a few reserves before, and what I see mostly isn't good. I consider it a failure because had governments just done nothing and let them be for the last 100 years we'd surely have the same dominant culture now in place regardless. So much harm done for nothing.

Is there data to support that idea though? Or is it just your gut feeling based on popular opinion?

This story is getting suppressed from HN. As of this writing, it has 25 points and was posted 1 hour ago, but it's already off the front page. In contrast, there's currently a story on the front page about mosh pits that only has 6 points and was also posted 1-2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179662

In other news: Y Combinator announced two months ago that it's launching a startup incubator in China: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/14/y-combinator-china-qi-lu/

Is that actually true? Or is there another nuance to the formula that determines what ends up on the front page?

> Is that actually true? Or is there another nuance to the formula that determines what ends up on the front page?

I doubt it. I've noticed that China stories similar to this one are pretty consistently down-weighted once they hit the front page. They'll get knocked to the very bottom of the first page, or more usually the second page, regardless of how many votes they get.

It's a very subtle form of censorship. The post still exists, just with drastically reduced visibility.

HN tends to want to avoid political flamewars. Articles about China tend to devolve into political flamewars. If HN has an algorithm that spots flamewars (and I think they do), that could explain some of the behavior you're seeing.

> HN tends to want to avoid political flamewars. Articles about China tend to devolve into political flamewars. If HN has an algorithm that spots flamewars (and I think they do), that could explain some of the behavior you're seeing.

I don't think that explains it either. On most of the stories I'm talking about (including this one), there are little to no comments before the story is down-weighted. There's no flamewar for an algorithm to spot.

It really feels like topic-based censorship, and likely manual since it seems reactive to popularity.

Great. They're still persecuting people in a way that might legitimately be described as genocidal, but now they're doing it with the support of Chinese law. If we're going to oppress people and stomp all over human rights, let's be sure that we do it legally.

I wonder, what will the reaction of the "respect local laws and regulations" crowd will be to this development?

Yup, remember that the holocaust was "legal", Stalin's purges were legal, the confinement of japanese americans was "legal", ....

Oct 4th 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYAHPPXmcts

This story is deeply upsetting. This is what genocide looks like. I feel so powerless. Is there nothing we can do?

I just wrote an email to info@enoughproject.org to point the fact that this situation is heading towards dangerously close levels to a genocide. I suggest people here do the same to raise more awareness.

I was surprised to see what's happening with the Uighurs doesn't put China on their watchlist despite criterias being fulfilled: http://endgenocide.org/whos-at-risk/

Contact email taken from: http://endgenocide.org/who-we-are/contact-us/

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