You're right. And I'm surprised more Silicon Valleyers have not figured out that China, a country that has concentration camps going right now is racist.
You're much more likely to hear negative comments about Uyghurs (terrorists), Tibetans (underdeveloped people who'll never make it at a university), South Koreans (obnoxious) and Japanese (the arch-enemy).
On the other hand, Westerners (whether black or white) are seen as exotic and high-status and their presence in China indicates how far the country has made it.
It's probably similar to European authors like Karl May (who'd never been to America) glorifying Native Americans as noble heroes, while Europeans who settled in America did their best to demonize and kill them. Simple tribalism: strangers from a distant land are exotic and no threat, but neighboring tribes that are only slightly different need to be shunned at all costs.
This is an oversimplification. Westerners are seen as exotic and high-status as individuals, but (Han, at least) Chinese also see China as a civilization as the "the Middle Kingdom" (between Heaven and the rest of the world) and that the West is currently dominant in global affairs is an unnatural occurrence that China is destined and entitled to rectify.
The two are quite contradictory if you reflect on it at all, but most people in any country (whether China, America, Europe, or elsewhere) really all that reflectful in general so we are where we are.
It's not impossible, but it does seem a bit unlikely that most Chinese people are holding a grudge about the Opium Wars, or that you would know what most Chinese think. Perhaps you meant to say you believe most Chinese shouldn't forgive or forget about the Opium Wars?
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...
> a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.
The most famous usage was by Germans and is heavily associated with extermination, but the British just wish to deprive the Boer’s of support and to put pressure on them into surrendering. Hence the term “concentration” rather than “extermination”. Many Boers did wind up dying due to inadequate sanitation and food, but the point wasn’t to kill them.
Whether the camps in Xinjiang are concentration camps or not remains to be seen. Definitely some of the awful work camps in China in the 70s met the threshold.
"a guarded prison camp in which nonmilitary prisoners are held, esp one of those in Nazi Germany in which millions were exterminated"
"A place for assembling and confining political prisoners and enemies of a nation. Concentration camps are particularly associated with the rule of the Nazis in Germany, who used them to confine millions of Jews (see also Jews) as a group to be purged from the German nation. Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other persons considered undesirable according to Nazi principles, or who opposed the government, were also placed in concentration camps and eventually executed in large groups. ( See Holocaust.)"
Particularly associated
The debate on the word is also well known, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment:
> As a result, some[who?] say that today the term "concentration camp" may be conflated with the concept of "extermination camp" and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" should be used in order to describe other examples of civilian internment, such as the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II,[4] the Australian government's immigrant detention facilities,[25][26] and South Korea's detention camps for "undesirables" in the 1970s and 1980s.[27]
Yes they are.
> The word concentration camp has a specific connotation with the extermination camps build to eliminate (aka kill) Jews and other undesirable under Nazi Germany.
Those are the most well-known concentration camps to many people today, but the term is older, going back to Spanish practice in Cuba in the Ten Years War and popularized for British camps in the Boer War.
Extermination camps are a distinct subcategory of concentration camp, and have a unique name specifically because their nature is not fully captured by “concentration camp” (which in their case was—somewhat amazingly for a title that even before that was typically associated with things that by modern standards would be grave human rights abuses—was actually a consciously used as a deceptive euphemism.)
> To conflate the two here like many people conflate Japanese internment camps with “concentration camps” is so off the scale it borders on misleading.
“internment camp” is a synonym for “concentration camp” and those operated by the US for the Japanese were exactly concentration camps in the usual sense of the word.
Edit: you've been posting a lot of flamewar comments lately (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620146), and we've already asked you not to. If you keep doing it, we're going to ban your account.
http://www.wbtv.com/2018/11/27/desert-detention-camp-migrant...
And if you think this policy isn't racist, then you haven't heard of the "Mexican Repatriation" in the 30's. And then when after WW2, Mexicans who were promised citizenship were again denied.
Or we can look at this:
https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
Our prison system, man.
And of course, you can say this is whataboutism, but you asked for a contrast and compare. The US is horrid when it comes to race.
Irony is dead.
Applying American conceptions of racism to Asia is ignorant, full stop.
Yes America, Australia, the UK, etc are all running a great experiment to see if multiculturalism can work.
The rest of the world might follow if multiculturalism ever ends up working.