China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes | Hacker News Reader

China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes

chinafile.com

56 pointsssvss22 comments

Also concentration camps.

But no one has pulled out of China. Companies still seem to be falling over themselves to help. Personally my feeling is that any engineer working on software or hardware to support this kind of effort should be considered a party to it, and so be subject to international law. Especially in the US and Europe where there is no “I was afraid for my life” justification.

Instead there's the arguably more vile "I was afraid for my job" coupled with people half-way across the world just being a statistic since most engineers/marketing/managers/everyone will likely have never even _met_ the people their product will adversely affect let alone gotten to know them.

What I find fascinating is that Xi Jinping was sent to a concentration camp from 1969 to 1975, and now he is the president of China.

I don't see why engineers should be particularly responsible. I don't see how any work could be done without everything from entrepreneurial or financial, legal, to janitorial help.

If you know you’re writing software that is directly used to violate basic human rights why wouldn’t you be?

Does doing it because you’re told to remove your complicity? (Hint: Nuremberg trials found plenty of guards at concentration camps guilty).

To you question on janitors, you’re right - there is clearly a point where there should be a cut off - does a person empty trash cans have they same culpability (or any) as the engineer who is writing software designed to support mass incarceration on the basis of race or religion?

I would argue no - much like I would argue that if an engineer making software to identify terrorists would not be. But once that engineer discovers “terrorist” now just means “Muslim” or what have you, then continued work would mean culpability.

Let's not sugar coat this, the CCP is engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing. They are trying Cultural Revolution style reeducation and surveillance first, but who knows how many will die in the camps.

This level of repression makes Northern Ireland look like a tea party. If it weren't that Xinjiang is so poor I'd think it inevitable that there would be armed resistance -- without a crop like opium the Taliban wouldn't have IEDs or guns.

The CCP is mad to think they can erase Islam by forcing the locals to eat pork and taking away their children.

I thought these current policies are a reaction to the armed terrorist attacks that happened in the past few years? Like the one at the train station that hurt hundreds of people?

No, this has been going on for decades. Mostly as a soft policy, allowing people to migrate without strict control (which is not allowed elsewhere in China), and though providing Han Chinese with government jobs. Lots second class citizen stuff, banning Uighur cultural practices etc. The knife attacks are an expression of the pressure the population is under.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1789160/chin...

There is armed resistance, the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party

They're deemed a terrorist group by US and EU and have fought in Syria.

I don't think they are really active in China though. If any of the modern IED tech had made it across we'd be seeing more than knife attacks. They are very good at supressing information but the casualties would be too large to cover up.

There have been more than knife attacks. China is good at suppressing info in the region. It’s easy because no other major nation state seamingly cares about the region at least for now and also due to its geographic location

I've heard of bus bombs and random unexplained groups of police casualties in Xinjiang but the Chinese Communist Party needs to maintain the facade of stability or else it would be breaking it's "promise" to the people.

> Let's not sugar coat this, the CCP is engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing.

They haven't been doing it and they're not going to do that. Why?

1. Ethnic cleansing (akin to what we see in Yugoslavia & WWII) just isn't a tool Chinese have used historically.

2. Unlike say the Nazis, the CCP does not see the problem mainly as race & genetics. The issue in their eyes is culture and behavior.

3. They have something else that's been proven to work in places like Mongolia. There's no official name for it but a faculty member from GaTech's International Affairs school has called it "reverse genocide".

What is "reverse genocide"? It's not as harsh as the name sounds. It's basically just a really aggressive form of assimilation. Here's a high level view of what happens:

1. Encourage Han Chinese to relocate to the areas that need to be changed with incentives. They will soon become the majority. The region's culture will become Han Chinese in a decade or less.

2. Encourage Han Chinese to intermarry with the native people. This is actually easy to do. Han males tend to be financially more well off then than native counterparts, and there is a huge gender disparity so no one cares as much when their sons marry someone who isn't Han. Their children and their families become Han and are treated as such. Any trace of the old native culture is just wiped out in 1-2 generations within these families.

Wash, rinse and repeat. 1 & 2 are ideal because there's nothing really horrible to criticize because it's subtle and it's highly effective.

For places like Xinjiang, where both 1 & 2 are not as effective initially, they implement the re-education tactics that we've read in articles such as the one posted. I'm going to guess that maybe 1 & 2 gets easier to do as well over time.

As I said, a Chinese style cultural genocide. Stealing the women, locking up the men, taking their jobs and scarce resources, banning religion -- what could go wrong?

But it now has aspects more familiar from the Cultural Revolution, like re-education camps, sending the cadres out to enforce correct thought (this time readings of Xi instead of Mao!). Though there seems to be little zeal in the cadres, and the Han population of Zinjiang sticks to their heavily patrolled enclaves in the north.

It is curious when you consider that both Hu and Xi were victims of the Cultural Revolution: https://www.thoughtco.com/hu-jintao-195670 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-17/why-maos-cultural-rev...

For the record you only mentioned ethnic cleansing in your original comment and nothing about cultural genocide until now. Let me be really clear - what they’re doing is both wrong & terrible - I don’t disagree with anyone on that, but specific words mean something. This is HN and not reddit. Ethnic cleansing is not the same thing as cultural or reverse genocide. Ethnic cleansing is much worse and it involves stuff like gas chambers instead of re-education camps. Don’t mistake my attempt at providing more info about the subject as condoning it.

Also I think you mixed up my comment with someone else’s. I did not mention either Hu or Xi

Discussion in r/China

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_govern...

1 million Uighurs = statistic. no media fallout or talk of not taking Chinese money or buying chinese goods or talks of companies not taking Chinese investment.

sad.

We definitely get excited when people we understand are hurt, but easily ignore those we don’t. I don’t know why that is. I find myself doing it sometimes. It is sad.

Basically, they send tons of people to islamic villages, with intention to push non-islamic values to locals. That includes systematic surveillance and "government watches" threats too.

Sounds familiar to a particular US ally.

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