Tracking China's Muslim Gulag
reuters.com
reuters.com
So you're saying we should respect the views like:
1. the members of particular ethnicity and religion are terrorists, and
2. that mass-imprisonment of innocent members of an ethnicity is the correct response to the fear of terrorism from them?
Because those are some of the views expressed in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565634
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565128
Tolerance and respect of such views is shameful.
Since you've been using this account primarily for ideological and national battle, I've banned it. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've been creating accounts to break HN's rules with for a long time. Please don't do that anymore, or we'll ban your main account as well.
> In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of vocational training. “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.
> The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. [...]
> Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. They were “burned,” the locals told him. “These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”
As someone unfamiliar with the situation, a question I still have is whether this is something unique or unusual for the Chinese government, or how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism.
E.g. I've heard about their efforts to shift the ethnic balance in Tibet, has that been followed-up with similar indoctrination efforts?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
Otherwise now the Party is treating the same way they treat normal Han Chinese who have different thoughts on the CCP. However not everyone in Xinjiang is affected, mostly the religious.
They are taking a slower approach there. They were granted "autonomy" in the past.
ed. Tibet too
I think the more accurate interpretation, which applies to authoritarian or totalitarian power, is that they don't tolerate competing power structures. A competing power structure, whether a political group, a labor union, a spiritual organization, can easily become a political organization and therefore a threat to the power of the government. If they are organized and independent, they are a threat. The government's motive is to protect and enhance its own power.
Think about the Falun Gong: Certainly they were no threat to the "national integrity" (whatever that means precisely) of China. Also consider labor and human rights movements, who have no interest in separatism. In fact, democracies are much more stable governments in general, and are more likely to preserve "national integrity".
Think also about the Chinese military, which IIRC is under control of the Communist Party, not the government. They are careful to not allow it to be an independent power structure - an independent military has been the downfall of many authoritarian governments (usually replacing them with another authoritarian government).
Falun Gong is the blueprint for this: a homegrown spiritual practice that gained too much popularity in the ‘90s and the authorities turned against it. Human rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands are still in “re-education” camps.
As best I can determine it's a buddhist/meditation group that disagrees with the Chinese government on principles of fundamental human rights.
Speaking of tracking, is there a site that tracks and draws a graph of the position of a stories on the front page, their score and number of comments?
I made myself a little scraper, I hope it's okay to grab the front page HTML once a minute, or is that too often?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All: if you really believe you're seeing organized manipulation on Hacker News, that's obviously a bannable offence, and you should alert us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But please don't insinuate it in comments just to take a swipe in an argument. That's offside, and also mind-numbingly tedious.
Would actually recommend to fellow cheap-skates. Definitely no hard-sell from the believers to recite their scripture (which they call 'The Fa').
They believe in spiritual healing, reject modern medicine, and believe that one can gain superpowers and that only the leader of Falun gong can activate them.
an ironic and somewhat unclear turn of phrase
Let's don't bring them on the table. Just like you don't bring Peoples Temple or Branch Davidians or any other cult onto the table when you talking about such topic.
I actually knew some people who was practicing Falun Gong before the crack down (And some still practicing it after). If you want to paint a portrait of those people, just image an uneducated man/woman at age around 40~50, who probably encountered some misfortunes in their life and became vulnerable enough to take anything into their head without a thought, and act upon that thought.
They're those people who would also actually believed they can receive superpower from a tinfoil hat (Well, not actually a tinfoil hat, but guess what, they have upgraded version of that [0]), meditation, or, maybe, killing themselves/others.
Oh, also, do you know the "Eastern Lightning"[1]? Don't bring them as well.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/undersound/23239355 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Lightning#Zhaoyuan_McD...
No it's not. It's an espionage program funded by Taiwan.
Did you see any spiritual practice attack capitol hill? I think not.
the marginalized groups in the 1940s examples weren't popular anywhere, until stumbling upon the true nature of the camps for other reasons and liberation, so I see some parallels here
I think so, but only because I think governments know how little "us commoners" actually care, beyond wanting to virtue signal and wanting to see politicians raise a stink about things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#/media/F...
This Muslim ban came before the immigrant camps and migrant child detention centers, which Pence also supported. If we don't hold him accountable for hypocrisy, then who will?
Of course, he's not, though.
Given that both our politicians and corporations are content with helping China cover this up at best, or are complicit in identification and imprisonment of the Uyghurs at worst, I don't know.
Perhaps if China invaded Taiwan or enabled NK in an attack on South Korea, it would wake Western interests up.
Seems like political and economic isolation for China might be effective, but who wants to do that when they offer the world cheap labor and manufacturing?
So I except nobody will do anything that has any impact.
The big problem: it involves the world's consumers willingly punching themselves in the face at the same time. It might even throw the global economy into a deep recession and as a consequence kill a lot more people than the gulags are likely to. There are a lot of fallout problems in dealing with China, not least because they've historically shown a willingness to distribute any necessary pain upon their people to achieve party goals. There'd also have to be an elaborate verification program put in place, so China wouldn't continue their agenda in a more subtle manner; I don't see that sort of invasive foreign observation ever being allowed.
They've made a very conscious choice to eliminate the Uighur culture, as they did with Tibet before it. They have an end goal in mind, it's hard to imagine stopping them without upping the risks very high. Frankly I'm skeptical there is any way to stop them, I think they'd just take the pain and make it an us vs them conflict to convince the domestic population to absorb it (insert slogans here to drive loyalty during the great fight against the imperialists).
This isn't the last gulag of the CCP. We would never know how many future atrocities were prevented with proper diplomatic and economic sanctions against them.
Look at Venezuela. It’s starving its own people for political reasons, they have some oil, but we could survive without it... do you think we’re gonna go down there and do anything about it? Nope!
You sound like you think that we aren't going to do anything because we just don't care, or at least don't care enough. But "doing anything about it" in Venezuela would mean an invasion. It would mean killing a bunch of people in the name of helping people. (Granted, at least some of those killed would be part of the problem. Still, killing people to help people has a pretty bad track record and a very moral foundation.)
In China, it would mean all-out war with a near-peer nation, which would probably result in nuclear war. While what China is doing is horrible, nobody wants to stop them at that price, and not because we don't care enough.
Why would we (the US, Nato?) do anything about that? Compared to Colombia, Guyana, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Panama etc
I just want to read the articulate logic
edit: we had stories rallying for the workers protesting Google making software for the Chinese, why not rally against any manufacturer making product there? The tech sector is a place where it can bring pressure
Let's think about an individual/NGO-style boycott where you encourage a billion people to boycott Chinese goods. Could you even boycott Chinese goods? What phone would you buy? What computer? Even if the place of final assembly isn't China, what percentage of the parts would be Chinese?
If we're talking about countries doing something, it's hard to look past the huge economic ties in place. We'd be talking about really a drop in the S&P 500 that would make every recession look tiny. Apple needs China for iPhones, Amazon needs China for goods for its retail operation and server components (as well as Microsoft, Google, etc.), Huawei powers most of Europe's mobile infrastructure, Volvo is the largest company in Sweden and Chinese owned, Foreign Direct Investment from the US to China topped $100B in 2017... Would the US or EU take such a huge hit to their economy for the Uighurs?
As you noted, the Allies didn't come for the Jews. They came to contain a Germany that was taking over Europe. The Soviet Union was content to let Germany do as it pleased until it was attacked itself. The UK and France tried appeasing the Nazis while they took over Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Memelland. The US didn't join the war in Europe until Germany declared war against the US.
If China doesn't attack Taiwan, Japan, or India, I can't see us doing anything. Tibet happened and while we might have had some strong words about Tibet, we haven't done anything about it.
Plus, to be honest, it's hard to see us doing a lot when the right-wing in Europe and the US has started replacing Jews as their go-to "it's their fault" target with Muslims. Hatred is a terrible thing, but there has been growing anti-Muslim sentiment. While that doesn't rule out saving people, I think it does make it less likely.
This isn't meant to say that we shouldn't do anything. It's more that I don't think we (collectively, governmentally) have the will to do something given the huge economic ties in play.
Russia might provide some clues, but it's also important to remember that our economic ties with Russia are a lot simpler: Russia has natural resources. While we have applied some sanctions, Russia is still in Ukraine. Given the level of our reliance on China, I can't imagine we will bring might strong enough for China to really change.
I would love for someone to change my mind on this comment. I really hope this comment is just totally wrong.
NATO intervened to stop the war crimes in the Yugoslav civil war mostly because it was right on the doorstep to Western Europe. Other Arab countries had already intervened years earlier with some people/weapons since the arms embargo had to some extent disproportionately affected the Muslim populations (one common thread with this gulag). This aid /intervention was only possible due to the geographic circumstances of the former Yugoslavia - no outside forces are going to step into China, and stuff like the Opium Wars/forced open doors afterwards means very few in China want foreigners to come in and help.
Write to your congressman/woman and senator about this and support the motion (forget his name) to sanction the chinese officials and frozen of their assets in America. And promote this sanction to uk, a/Nz, Eu.
Better but may be too ambitious not allow their family and they go come to study or live.
That hurts. Really hurt.
Sanction anyone support any electronic survillence work ...
Support HONG kong and Taiwan for its democracy drive and enforce both us-hk and us-t rigourously.
Do you seriously think, given the way he's been treating them, that ANY of those countries/groups would go out of their way to help Trump? 0 chance.
What I fear though is that any treatment that I would approve of would be ineffective in preventing radicalization. Is there any example of ethical and tolerant treatment that manages to prevent the spread of Salafi radicalism once it has taken root? In adjacent Pakistan we are seeing millions of people throwing a fit because a Christian woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death was finally ruled innocent and released after 10 years in prison. How can China avoid ending up like this and avoid having to deal with its own version of the Taliban? Is there any country that has pulled it off without resorting to brutal totalitarianism?
Until the last few years, I would have said Turkey was doing OK, even with the various military coups it's had; whether those count as "brutal" is an interesting question. The last few years, Turkey has definitely turned in a totalitarian direction, though I don't think combating radical islam was the cause.
I _think_ Bangladesh has done more or less ok. But I don't know much about it, to be honest.
Malaysia I think has done ok. So has Morocco.
Again, none of these completely lack radical Islamists. But that would be a pretty high bar to clear (e.g. the US probably doesn't clear it, and definitely doesn't clear it if you replace "Islamists" with "Christians", but keep the radicalness).
Reading some comments in r/China, makes it seem like it is not an exaggeration. https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_govern...
i was also very naive my first year there, many people won't get even past that period, many people just enjoy pubs and don't care about the rest too muchmuch
and most of the people have no clue at all with zero first hand experience
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...