China’s hidden camps

> The government denies the claims, saying people are willingly attending special “vocational schools” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”.

This is from the opening lines of the article. Every excuse the government provides seems to provide is similarly transparent. Roads close because they've "melted". Filming is not allowed, because of "military exercises". I don't know who they think they're fooling.

>The satellite photograph was discovered by researchers looking for evidence of that system on the global mapping software, Google Earth.

Presumably the NRO and NGA also knew about this place, likely as it was being built. It's a shame that imagery backing up human rights violations never comes out of the IC unless it's congruent with American foreign policy of the day.

Independent organizations then end up relying on Google Maps of all things, which can be downright glacial in its update frequency. It's promising that some NGOs are striking partnerships directly with commercial providers now:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/30/new-satellite-imagery-pa...

Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed on the front page a few weeks ago.

>“Yes, that's a re-education school,” another shopkeeper agreed.

>“There are tens of thousands of people there now. They have some problems with their thoughts.”

That reads like fictional prose, but it unfortunately isn't.

Sad that American greed is funding this... It is only the beginning though. Us or our children will be in those camps (or ones like them) someday. All funded by our dollars for a bunch of materialistic crap that now (or soon) will be sitting in our landfills and oceans...

When will the US and the EU strongly condemn these human rights abuses? I mean, we condemned the Soviet Union strongly again and again even though it was the world's second largest economy with the world'a largest military and nuclear arsenal, why does China get a free pass?

... it's the trade, isn't it?

Oct 4th 2018; USA VP called China out on the camps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYAHPPXmcts

Strange how so many of us in the US that seem so compassionate toward immigrants (legal and illegal) and refugees and denounce any opposition in the name of compassion and love for all, the people who protest and boycott anyone that opposes their views. These are the same people who are buying iPhones and other things from China whose sales basically sponsor massive human rights violations like this.

Do we not realize what hypocrites we are? We are funding the very actions and ideals that we vehemently oppose. All of us Silicon Valley residents who are so supportive of inclusion, acceptance and rights... Many of us work for the very companies that sponsor the exact opposite values on over a billion people. And we claim that we aren't tribal nationalists? What are we then? Why are our strong moral convictions so geographically limited?

We should ask ourselves and anyone around us who claims to believe in a cause for freedom, rights and equality to please explain why our beliefs don't go beyond the boundaries of the United States (or other western countries). Is it fake virtue? Is it blind apathy created by materialism and greed? It is nationalism, stateism, racism ETC? What is it? Shouldn't there be stories about things like this in the liberal media on a daily bases. Liberal ideas don't apply to China apparently. I dare to think how China may be different today if for the last 18 months, the Mainstream media covered stories like this one in place of all the millions of largely fluff partition anti Trump ones. My opinion is that at the very least least a large amount of pressure would have been put on China to address at least some of this trend. Perhaps our country country would have found some common ground and actually moved toward a center on a least something. All the while helping millions of Chinese citizens at the same time.

How is ignoring this situation and actually sponsoring it financially ok with the average American citizen (regardless of party affiliation)?

I understand why they're doing this, but that doesn't make how they're going about it any less upsetting.

The camps, and BBC mentions this too, is less about Uyghur identity but about imprisoning Muslim followers to stop following Islam, you can tell because they've taken in Kazakh Chinese too and likely devout Muslim Hui who are basically Muslim Han Chinese

This situation is absolutely disgusting. China will stamp out the Muslim religion, and anyone not preemtively converting will be destroyed. Indeed probably a lot more than that. Where does it end?

I have made the decision to support the Chinese as little as I can, and fight the regime where I can. In my field, academia, this can actually matter a lot. I encourage you to do the same.

Muslims arent the most popular people right now, but the parallels to another religious ethnicity in history are too strong. Dont be the one, years from now, having to claim that we did not know. We know. We see. We know where this ends, it is not the first time. Do what you can.

I feel really sorry for these people in Xinjiang. A friend of mine (American Chinese born in China and left in the 1980s) is working on a similar story about Xinjiang (he works for Buzzfeed which has an office in Beijing) and he has been denied the renewal of his Work Visa just a few months back so he is back in New York now still figuring out a way to get into China. In China people outside of Xinjiang in general have no idea what is going on in Xinjiang except that it has become "peaceful". And many Han people in China actually like the idea that the government is doing something about Xinjiang because of the incidents happened in Kunming, etc. In Xinjiang they even have a separate security-check channel (a much faster one e.g. without checking the luggages, etc) for you if you are Han Chinese v.s. if you are Uyghur. This further reinforces the reality bubbles for the Han Chinese where Uyghurs are viewed as potentially dangerous, and they deserve the current treatment because they oppose the Central Government, and reinforces the reality bubbles for the Uyghurs that the Han Chinese are more superior and this is what happens when there are people in your community opposing the Central Government (i.e. the extremists). Now that I have lived in China for a while I can see that reality bubbles are extremely ubiquitous here (one example: so many tech conferences here are branded as "international" so for the none-tech Chinese people they were surprised when I, coming from Singapore, told them I had never heard of the "X International Conference" took place in some Tier 2 city; I had the chance to visit one before and it was just filled with Chinese people and bad English translations). I'm starting to believe the main function of the Central Government in China is to mass-control the reality bubbles of its citizens. Economy and everything else actually come second.

And since I saw a lot of comments about Trump here, I just want to point out that if Trump runs for president as a Democrat, which he will certainly do in order to maximise his chances in the case that the previous president is a Republican (also, if he were to do so he will do everything he could to appear extremely left-wing and liberal), as a President from the Democratic Party he will certainly use Xinjiang as among the many main reasons to start a trade war with China (which we will soon see that he and his friends will benefit hugely from). The main difference would be that everyone on the Internet will cheer for him when he starts the trade war, and there won't be as many people as there are now who had experienced the bursting of their reality bubbles back in 2016. Reality bubbles are ubiquitous in the west too. The difference here is that no central system is trying to control these reality bubbles. Instead, the problem in the west is that there are platforms like Facebook which, for the sole purpose of their business interest (e.g. user retention), reinforce people's reality bubbles to be more monochrome with views on things that is very one-sided. But given the rapid advancement in technologies and an increasingly larger proportion of the human population becoming more intelligent and intellectual, eventually platforms like Facebook will collapse as everything becomes more decentralised.

And I'm looking forwards to something like this happening in China too in the next 30 years. I heard from friends working in AliCloud that they are doing some experimental projects to build an AI for decentralised governance for the Central Government. Sounds ironic but this may just be the best way to combat corruption and improve the Chinese economics and for Xi to make sure him and his friends continue to stay in power. The Central Government will be rebranded as an organisation in charge of these decentralised AI governments for cities designed to serve its citizens' needs and there will be no need to mass-control the reality bubbles of Chinese citizens. And there will be no need to resort to doing horrible things to places like Xinjiang and Tibet too.