China’s 'Thought Transformation' Camps [video] | Hacker News Reader

China’s 'Thought Transformation' Camps [video]

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172 pointsHillaryBriss186 comments

This is a concentration camp - they are collecting millions of specific groups of people and concentrating them. From the little information available: They are initially tortured and then brainwashed for several years, until possibly being released. The reason for doing this is for a crime they are supposed to commit in the future.

Add this to: the removal of religious symbols replaced with pictures of their president, the forced ownership of Hong Kong (who have a false democracy) and Taiwan, the debt traps in African nations, the artificial islands in the South China Sea (where they regularly threaten to blow US ships and planes up in international waters), the large amount of debt bought by China after the 2008 financial crisis, the monitoring and/or controlling of University students whilst overseas, meddling in foreign politics (e.g. NZ and Australia), cyber attacks (>80% of attacks on my servers come from China), ignoring international trade sanctions against North Korea (whose state backed hackers it trains) and Iran - the list goes on.

China also has the largest active military. Is this where we're heading?

I am an American, here is what I am going to do.

There's currently an USTR tariff review session happening right now in Washington. A bunch of companies are protesting against tariffs on China, saying they can't live without China. Some of these companies are:

- Best buy

- American Apparel

- Kenneth Col

- iRobot

- Roku

- Element Electronics

- Hallmark Cards

I will not buy from these companies for the rest of my life, as well as any other companies that have products that are 'made in China'. These companies must have heard about the concentration camps, and possible organ harvesting/slave labor in those camps, and choose not to divest away. These companies are horrendous actors who choose freely to prop up a regime like his.

> American Apparel

Wow, they've come a long way from how they were founded. Sad to see

> I will not buy from these companies for the rest of my life, as well as any other companies that have products that are 'made in China'.

Good luck with that. I hope you don't need any technology in your life since nearly all modern computing components are made in China. The only way to avoid Chinese imports is to live on a homestead and make everything yourself.

Good point. I'd like to find an article on phones with the least amount of, or no, Chinese parts. Anybody have anything like this on hand? Otherwise, I'll start researching and put an article together.

Similarly, I'd like to do the same for Laptops. Toshiba, Fujitsu, Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp may not come with "made in China" labels, but components will be Chinese.

I've been googling a bit and surprisingly am not coming up with pure non-Chinese machines. Given that some people believe China puts spyware on devices at the hardware level this surprises me - surely there's hyper-paranoid out there, or people selling to the hyper-paranoid market?

What about Apple and Microsoft? Should add these two to the list.

You're aware this is just a symbolic and futile action, right? Boycotting every company "tainted" by the Chinese is unfeasible if you keep your standard of living. I'm not talking about refusing to buy t-shirts, but cars.

"Our goal is to take a person who's on the edge of committing a crime and return them to normal society as a law abiding citizen"

Even the official party line is horrifying. Shows just how out of touch they are with the Western world if they think this message will be well interpreted.

> Shows just how out of touch they are with the Western world if they think this message will be well interpreted.

They aren't interested in being aligned with Western values - why would they be? Freedom and democracy run perfectly contrary to their goals. I've had very in depth philosophical debates with Party members.

Democracy - why would we leave the decisions to the people? The people don't know what's best for them, and they make bad decisions that lead to things like Brexit. Democracy is inefficient. FEMA can't adequately respond to disasters like the strong-arm of the Party can.

Freedom of Information - this is too scary for the people. The people shouldn't have to deal with so much confusing information. Look at Fake News and how scary the media is. It creates confusion and mistrust in the government. That isn't good. The people don't want freedom of information.

I unequivocally disagree with these arguments but these are the beliefs of the Party.

My take on it: Democracy is necessary and good. It can be inefficient when times are good, but it is the most efficient way to right the ship when things are bad...also unilateral actions may appear efficient, but there will be lots of stakeholders that get hurt by those unilateral actions.

Consensus takes time, and is susceptible to all sorts of poor arguments and one-liners, but when the people are suffering, I can think of no better way to peacefully overthrow the ruling body than by democratic elections.

I'd argue that democracy doesn't matter nearly as much as constitutional freedoms of assembly, speech (to a certain degree), independent press, ect. China still fears protest/revolution and will work in such a way that benefits their population in order to prevent uprisings and civil unrest.

Add on the fact that the vast majority of issues that we view as democratic victories in the US, were more than anything, driven by direct action or initial change at the local level (a level which is democratic in china). Where in the cases where major change happened in a different way, it happened through the Judiciary which is also not democratic.

Add on the fact that many of the direct democratic measures in the US tend to be destructive (prop 13, voting against any tax increase even if necessary over the long term), and there becomes a reason why a political system with a single party, namely a party with a largely unified political goal, is preferable.

I'd also question when in US history (or elsewhere) has there ever been a time where democratic elections peacefully overthrew the ruling body. Usually there is significant continuity from administration to administration, where any serious political change happens due to outside direct action.

It's only good if you have the cultural capital to back it up, and the institutions to push it forward. It will always come under attack because it's very inconvenient to the few who want power -- not every population can handle it well. It also requires a good amount of education, freedom and a willingness to discuss beliefs, etc. It also needs to be compatible with ones cultural identity and the history of a nation. The idea that you can just apply it everywhere universally is silly.

It sounds like party members are projecting their own insecurities.

It's not just "western" world. UN (which consists of not just western countries) has a concept of human rights that this would clearly fall out of.

It's arguably not even Chinese values. The situation went from "ok just China" to "totalitarianism" once Xi got a life appointment. Funny that happened when Mao got long in the years too.

Something Lord Acton said comes to mind.

Call them what they are: Concentration camps.

The term "concentration camp" has an extremely negative connotation though due to Nazi Germany. China isn't gassing and cremating people. They are helping minorities integrate into Chinese society via ethically questionable means.

They are not minorities in the region they mostly live.

It really isn’t that’s simple if we are talking about northern rather than southern xinjiang, where Han is much more common. The history of that area is really complicated (the Manchu brought in the Uighurs to help exterminate the Mongolians...).

This is off topic, but maybe you know: what’s the practical difference between being an autonomous region and being a province?

Effectively not much. They all have leaders (party secretaries) appointed by Beijing who are almost all Han (only ceremonial heads would be minorities, the autonomy is mostly ceremonial unless we are talking about the SARs).

Interesting that it’s mostly political dressing with little impact. Good to know, thanks.

Concentration camps are not necessarily death camps. They are prisons for specific political, social, or ethnic groups--this seems to qualify.

Even the phrase "concentration camp" is a bit of a euphemism. A better phrase might be a "political prison".

And yes it has a negative connotation, because it is a bad thing.

The same kind of terminology debate comes up when people use "third world" to mean "developing countries" and, when corrected, they just declare the meaning changed. So if that's how we're supposed to roll then why wouldn't the same logic apply here?

“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.” - Wendell Johnson

Language isn’t planned and created. It evolves. The problem isn’t language, but how it’s used. A dire statement from a doctor and the same statement from an unsympathetic actor comes across differently. That’s not quite the fault of language.

I thought "third world" was an informal and occasionally derogatory synonym for "developing countries". Is that not the case?

Originally not. The meaning as it existed during the Cold War was "block-free".

USA/NATO were the First World. USSR/Warsaw Pact was the Second World. Everyone else was Third World.

That definition includes countries like Switzerland, which sounds very strange today, because the meaning has changed to precisely the one you have in mind.

The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact meant the old definition was a bit meaningless, hence the shift in connotation where "First World" is a glorious modern stable democracy and "Third World" is "shithole."

That said, "developing country" isn't necessarily the most precise phrase either, since many of those countries are either keeping the status quo or are actively decaying due to environmental disaster, war, famine, etc... Also, when you say "developing country" what a lot of people still heard is "shithole". Still, it's the preferred phrase and the inherent optimism built into it does count for a little.

I read somewhere in the past few years "third world" is actually a political term. And the The third world being defined as being not aligned with either the first or second world.

Where the first world would be the US influence sphere, and the second world being USSR influence sphere.

Yeah, they aren't Concentration Camps, they are Democratic Non-Consensual Human Organ Arbitrage Facilities.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/18/china-kil...

A lot of people misunderstand what concentration camps are because they get confused by the Nazi death camps.

Wikipedia has a list of concentration camps, including the ones currently run under the Trump administration:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_in...

All of them are bad. Some are worse than others, with Nazi camps being a well-known and egregious example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

Arguably worse

I'm not sure that it helps anyone's cause to try to rank the awfulness of various fundamentally awful things. Both of these things are unspeakably horrific.

Not unspeakably so - the more we speak about it, the more people aware that China is harvesting the organs of religious groups.

It just occurred to me. We're in a very similar situation as Americans were 90-100 years ago when hearing about the extreme atrocities of the Nazis. Many didn't believe it, many believed it but didn't know what we could do about it. I wonder what we can do about these abominable practices we keep hearing about in China. I mean, what can we, individuals, do to help put an end to the constant stream of injustices there?

The obvious solution is to boycott Chinese merchandise and vote with our wallets. But will we be able to overcome the inconveniences it would cause us? Could enough of us actually go through with it collectively to make a dent?

North Korea has been mass incarcerating and torturing its people in concentration camps for many decades now and America has done practically nothing about it.

I've always wondered the same thing. Why Germany didn't get away with it, but North Korea does? My only guess is because Germany started invading all of Europe and posed a legitimate threat to American interests, whereas North Korea doesn't. Added bonus of defeating the Nazis is we freed everyone in concentration camps, but I guess that wasn't why we mobilized the American war machine. It'll take more than crimes against humanity.

Having nukes, and a nearby country's capital in shelling range helps a bit.

> North Korea has been mass incarcerating and torturing its people in concentration camps for many decades now and America has done practically nothing about it.

North Korea is holding a gun to South Korea's head. America already fought the Korean War, what else can America do?

> what else can America do?

Go to war with North Korea.

Germany was bombing London.

Is going to war with North Korea worth losing South Korea (or at the very least Seoul)?

If South Korea is at actual threat of being lost in war, I believe North Korea would have already invaded.

South Korea is an incredibly militarily powerful nation.

What we are saying is "the loss of life in a war is not worth the freeing of people imprisoned and tortured in North Korea," which is fine to say, and pretty much my point.

I'm just saying that in this particular case, starting a war with North Korea means (at the very least) an artillery bombardment of Seoul which has a population of 9M+. This is a virtually unblockable attack that would (optimistically) kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Worst case scenario, Seoul gets nuked and millions die.

There are other ways to collapse a regime without that kind of collateral damage. The US is not in the best position to do it, however; China is.

Stopping Germany was more of a happenstance. FDR favored Britain and had the US assist in favorable "trade" but only officially entered the war and combat because of the Japanese. Had the japanese weathered the oil and metal embargo without retaliation maybe the US wouldnt have joined the war effort

North Korea is under the protecton of China. Going to war with North Korea means going to war with China as well. And China already has nuclear ICBMs.

China doesn’t have enough missiles for MAD, and perhaps they can only reach the west coast with most of their arsenal (though maybe they have a few longer range ICBMs now). At any rate, China isn’t going to risk anhilation for the North Koreans, who are frenemies at best.

Recall that America allowed Germany to start invading Europe, and may not have gotten involved outside of some supply chain assistance but for the fact that Japan literally attacked American soil first.

Voting with your wallet doesn’t actually push these practices to stop. If anything a more desperate China is going to be more willing to do things we consider immoral.

Why is it worse to harvest the organs from one group instead of another?

https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e...

I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to convey here as your link seems to be describing the same behavior.

If you’re asserting that it’s equally bad to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners vs. political dissidents... yes, somewhat obviously, involuntary organ harvesting is about as maximally evil as a government can get. My comparison was saying that it’s arguably worse than just killing people, but the rank order doesn’t really matter.

If you're going to quibble on terminology, you'll probably want to start with not calling this "helping minorities integrate into society".

heres the definition of concentration camp:

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.

Seems like we have:

- Large numbers of people

- Persecuted minorities (Uyghurs)

None of the reports seem to indicate forced labor or mass execution, but those seem to be optional requirements for a concentration camp.

"They are helping minorities integrate into Chinese society "

They are already part of Chinese society. And they don't want help. They want to be let out of prison and to return to their families.

A more sinister reading could be they are disintegrating the minorities and recycling them (as organs) to be integrated into the Chinese (and Western) society.

The sad part is they probably could have assimilated the Uighers faster if the Han were less racist against them. There were pictures of job agencies that had signs up that said no Uighers.

Like how talking about IQ is just 'race realism' right

The Nazi extermination camps were just one of the types of concentration camp they ran, and the most notorious for obvious reasons. There were also the labour concentration camps, and the Work Instruction Camps that are most comparable here - they "re-educated" Poles to accept their new life as slavic slaves.

> China isn't gassing and cremating people.

Don't conflate concentration camps and death camps. Nazi Germany had both, and they are both different things.

Death camps operated very differently than the concentration camps. Specifically, people got off the trains and went into the gas chambers rather quickly. They didn't stay in the death camps for months or years awaiting execution. (This is in contrast to people who stayed in concentration camps.)

The death camps were also geographically isolated, so that it was very hard for civilians to learn that mass executions were happening. (The Nazis learned to do this when they performed mass euthanasia in hospitals in cities, because civilians would see people arrive in busses, then smoke come from crematoriums, and then more people arrive. They nearly got voted out of power because the churches started to turn against them.)

Honestly, as an adult, it's worth spending some time reading up on the holocaust. It's not that our history classes were wrong, it's just that the depth of understanding that we can get as adults is much more than when we learned about the holocaust in grade school or high school.

Yes, because they are a negative thing.

And it’s interesting to use phrase “indefinite detention and torture” as “helping minorities integrate”. The fact that we don’t know how many people are being killed doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Every time some country decides to do this they hide that they’re killing people. China is still actively trying to hide how many people are in these camps, and isn’t allowing anyone else to go in to verify that they aren’t just killing people.

Hell we can’t even get the from ICE.

Can powerful nation states that commit atrocities against populations of humans be over thrown peacefully? That is to say, without a war?

What will it take to have China removed from the UN? Or, is it better that they are represented so that these issues can be raised and resolved in a peaceful manner?

> Can powerful nation states that commit atrocities against populations of humans be over thrown peacefully? That is to say, without a war?

The USSR serves as a pretty good example.

Having learned what happened to Soviets/Russians, one would imagine they'd prefer avoiding a repeat of the consequences...

Perhaps (and perhaps not all of them). The fall of the USSR also includes places like Germany, though, where it's been a pretty clear benefit.

If we apply the USSR model to China we'll be bombing African countries a few decades after our proxy wars are done.

We've already been doing that for decades. Libya, Somalia, etc.

How would they be overthrown? Would someone write a letter so harshly worded that the ruling government would decide to step down and allow some presumably better government to take their place?

If you're talking about a place with a functioning Democracy then they could be voted out, but virtually every other form of government pretty much requires a coup, disaster, or outstandingly benevolent ruler to step aside. And when a ruler is benevolent nobody is really clamoring to change the government, it's only when total assholes are in charge.

Worse, power vacuums tend to attract the most opportunistic and corrupt. Rarely do they have the public interest in mind. Any time you see a leadership ousted by a coup you know it's only going to get worse in that country.

But economic sanctions do produce outcomes, and economic effects are why some areas of China have the freedom they do.

At the same time, it seems hard to imagine that economic effects alone are enough for the core of a government to change, and even if it did, at what cost to its people?

Even if the government officials were so distressed by the costs of the economic sanctions on their people that they offered to step down, who would be an acceptable replacement? Some puppet ruler that would sell the country to multinational corporations so they can exploit its resources and people?

One of the problems with democracies is that they're really hard to get started. There are a lot of institutions that need to be in place before they really work, and rushing right to elections just ends up with the same old assholes staying in power because that's all anybody knows.

England let a lot of its colonies go peacefully, I don't know if that counts.

If I'm not mistaken they were let go long after the industrial revolution, which changed the calculus around colonies. Pre-industrial economies expanded by territory, to over simplify.

Additionally, when the crown let the colonies go did it lose its business interests or did it still retain control of them? How much capture still exists?

Sounds like they have a choice.

They do not have the ability to fight with them, so let them go peacefully.

>> England let a lot of its colonies go peacefully,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March

The protesters were peaceful. The English oppressors were violent.

They didn't say all of their colonies. Some were let go relatively peacefully.

My uneducated hope is that Xi Jinping will consolidate too much power, then die, and the previously distributed One Party system will instead have become a One Man system that collapses before someone else can become that One Man. Hopefully the existence of rebel Chinese cultures like Hong Kong and Taiwan can spur this.

My pie in the sky hope is that the PRC collapses utterly and the ROC begins to rule the entire mainland as well. One China indeed...

There are plenty of dissenting voices against Xi in the communist party, not just the leaders but also the rank-and-file members. If Xi dies, I'm pretty sure the One Man system reverts to the One Party system, unless there's another leader eager to concentrate power.

True but at least from an outsider and naive perspective his dissenters are more hardline than he is! What direction they’d take China in is unknown, I guess.

Isn't India and Gandhi the inventor of this? I thought that was why he was essentially a political genius, because he invented a means of non-violent regime change. And that is why totalitarian governments respond so strongly to these nonviolent protests, because if left for too long not even tank treads can crush them.

To quote another: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

Nonviolent protests only work when the people they're protesting believe in some amount of basic human rights to begin with. Many Cherokee peacefully protested their land being taken from them in Georgia, but they were forcibly moved anyways because the US government didn't care.

This is the MalcomX counterpoint to MLK's movement - that one hand needs to be open and welcoming while the other wields a weapon. aka "speak softly but carry a big stick".

It's interesting to know if such a dynamic occurred during the Indian liberation movement, or whether it was more due to the British Empire being overextended at the same time (note: independence happened just after WW2)

Parts of the US Government cared, SCOTUS ruled for them. But the executive branch didn't care and did what he/they wanted.

There's some subtleties here. The "camp" is not targeted to all Muslim in Xinjiang. It's mostly targeted towards Uyghurs, and most Uyghurs is Muslim. Uyghurs is considered a minority in China. There are a tiny group of Uyghurs people that are considered terrorists or separationists. So the entire Uyghurs population in Xinjiang gets "educated". Why? I think it's fallacy of thinking. Suppose you know that of all the crimes committed, a large percent is by people of color x, then what's the chance of a person of color x commit a crime? Most people will think the chance is also very high. It's a incorrect inference. People of color x may have a very large population and if you apply Bayesian rules the chance would be very low. Now let's get back the Uyghurs case. For most Chinese outside Xinjiang, what they see is that most terrorism in China is carried out by Uyghurs. So they think that Uyghurs are terrorist and needs to be educated. While in fact I believe most Uyghurs are peaceful.

The sad thing is that this thinking fallacy happens everywhere in the past and now. And it's really hard to see it as an insider.

Somehow it's comforting to see how laughably bad China is at propaganda.

They probably knew exactly what they were doing. The truth being mostly already out there, they probably wanted to show something like "look, it's not that bad, we are not killing them". Some sort of damage control I guess.

To you. The truth stops being a tangible concept when it’s suffocated by a cloud of swirling lies.

> The truth stops being a tangible concept when it’s suffocated by a cloud of swirling lies.

American news media came to mind when I read this

I think this is the likely explanation, assuming the Chinese propagandists are competent. They need to put disinformation out there to cause people to doubt.

The other explanation is that it's a ham-handed attempt by propagandists that are operating outside their element (i.e. they are used to operating in an environment where they literally dictate the narrative to the media (whose surname is "party" and all that)).

What isn't a laughing matter is how we excuse all our favorite tech companies to continue manufacturing there.

Nobody cares. The international community generally shrugs when something is done orderly and internally.

China has too much money and business opportunities to be thrown away.

Lots of people care, they just can't do anything when every choice in the shops for countless things are manufactured there, and few web stores even list country of origin.

For a long time we excused China in the hope that integration of our economies would lift China towards Democracy and respect for human rights. We/It failed. For all the things I disagree with Trump about, the trade war is not. I hope the tariffs are increased over time so that the supply chain begins to exclude China. There are other countries that will do it for almost as cheap, and do not abuse the U.S.'s good will so thoroughly.

IMO, the hope that trade and economics would bring democracy to China was delusional from the start. It's the same sort of flag-waving idiocy that assumed toppling Saddam would turn Iraq into the Middle Eastern equivalent of post-war Japan. The US has basically permanently nerfed its own global hegemony barely 2 decades after defeating its only major adversary (the Soviet Union), all because of the idealistic aspirations of flag-waving ideologues that triumphed over pragmatic realists and cynics.

You are probably right, but I think that there was an idea that empowering (by money) a broad swath of Chines citizens would naturally lead to increases in their political power, hence a nation that would lean toward democratic tendencies.

Simply because you are not the target demographic.

I think you should consider how well it has worked with the target audience (i.e. not the West).

Read Frank Dikotters 'Tragedy of Liberation' and you might have second thoughts. There is a sizable historical precedent--with measured success--for these kinds of indoctrination tactics in China.

If you visit some real high schools in China, you’d find they are not very different from these camps. Curfews, political classes, and compulsory attendance are commonplace.

These facilities are not built to treat ethnic minorities in the most brutal way, but reflections of an authoritarian society.

Compulsory attendance to political classes or high-school in general? Second one doesn't seem that bad.

> "The sound of thoughts being transformed echos late into the night"

Kind of a haunting last line from the video. They make them repeat the same formulas, presumably praises to the party, over and over, endlessly.

I have always wondered how effective that is and if some end up internalizing it and are actually brainwashed. I have recited many of those in the Soviet Union. Learned poems praising Lenin and the workers and whatnot but never believed a bit of it. How do officials test that their methods are working? "Will you follow the party's commandments?". How many would say "no" knowing they are buying themselves another yeah in the camps.

Enumerating candidate PR spin Camps that were likely rejected: (Just add camps for full effect)

>Cultural Enrichment >Sensibility Rectification >Behavior Rectification >Sentiment Realignment >Sentiment Engineering

>Fundamental reconstruction of basic societal interaction loop by way of teaching subordinazation of individual sentiment to collective will/norms >Happy >Reeducation >Sequestration >Organ Donor >U.N. Tribunal No-go >What >People Tranformation >Cultural Isolation >Cultural Indoctrination >Cultural Reorientation >Internment >Help, I'm trapped in a CCP PR Dept

Feel free to add your own.

"What will it take to have China removed from the UN?"

Until Taiwan can be reinstated at the UN, I don't think your question will have a satisfactory answer.

Why does China insist on using 1984 as a playbook, rather than a cautionary tale?

Aren't we going towards a technological omni-surveillance state? Aren't we going towards ubiquitous screens that monitor us while we get all of our information from them? Haven't we already had "2 minutes hate" with people screaming at the sky? Don't we already have a class of elite technocrats who create media for a proletariat they look down upon, kaleidoscopically recombining and rehashing old stories? Don't we already have Julias and the civic league she belongs to?

Why does the world of 2019 keep using 1984 as a playbook?

Not "1984", of course, but "Brave New World".

https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...

I agree Huxley was a bit closer (at least with regards to the West), depicting a "soft tyranny" rather than the "harsh tyranny" of 1984.

Whether it's soft or harsh depends on your POV. Inner and outer party members might well say "soft."

https://www.wired.com/story/how-silicon-valley-fuels-an-info...

The West is still indeed much better than other parts of the world. However, the West is supposed to be better qualitatively, not just quantitatively.

Because we have always been at war with Eastasia.

(1) It's only cautionary if you associate with Winston. If you wan't to be O'Brien, it's very tempting: a stable and not completely decrepit society where everyone is subdued except your clique.

(2) I'd not say "China insists", but rather "current CPC leadership insists". The very presence of a massive apparatus for suppression means that opinions within China still differ a lot.

1984 wasn’t written in a vacuum, it very much derives from soviet experience, which the PRC also inherited. None of the similarities are coincidental.

Can we stop arguing on the terminology and whether other countries do bad stuff as well and just agree that this is something we should condemn.

It may be difficult or even impossible for the rest of the world to stop it, but it shouldn't be so hard to come to a consensus that this is wrong.

Edit: this just dropped off the front page from #4 to #34 in a few minutes while another article about China selling US dollars with far fewer upvotes and comments from around the same time is still at #2. Can we get an explanation for why this happened?

Edit: It's now almost off the 2nd page at #52 in under an hour.

Upvote this! Just because other regimes had done something bad, it does not remove the fact that this is also bad. 2 wrongs don't make it a right.

"other countries do bad stuff as well" is just the excuse you have, when you would like to support your country doing the bad stuff... Everybody has a free will and can decide what to believe and what not. Forcing other people to believe in something is making robots out of humans. But robots can't express love... Love can be expressed only out of a completely free will, where no force is present...

Well, please define what is "wrong".

"Transformation camps" on your thoughts and how you think. Hmm.. That sounds wrong to me.

Education is a transformation of your thoughts and how you think. So does education sound wrong to you?

Education is a choice. You can choose to be educated by religious schools, or going to public schools.

To those in Xinjiang Uyghur regions, this is not a choice.

Yes, to an adult, it's a choice because he/she knows the difference. But to a kid, it that a choice by himself/herself or by his/her parents, or by the ideology group he/she is in? To some extent, we chose a kind of education to be mind washed.

Sure, so it's the same for the kids. We never expect a 7-yrs old mature enough to make such judgement. But the choice is still there with their parents. Does that choice exist for these folks in Xinjiang Uyghur regions? Is it free to join/leave or is it forced?

Folks in Xinjiang are free to leave if they choose to be "educated". By the way, do you really think you got to choose the education you want? Can't education transform your mind before you can make such choice? Ever read "Educated"? Do you know how much effort there is to realize that there is alternative choices? Do you remember reading anything that says good things about communism or socialism? Why is it always portrayed badly here? Is it really that bad or someone for some purposes makes it look totally bad?

A moderator downweighted the thread the same way we downweight any topic that has been highly repeated, especially when it is highly repeated and also highly politicized and provocative.

I know that sounds tendentious when you feel strongly about a story, but you have to remember what HN exists for. We're optimizing for one thing: intellectual curiosity. If you take that statement literally, which you should, then it will be obvious what the moderation call is here. Curiosity is incompatible with repetition and rage, however justified the rage. Actually, justified rage is even worse for curiosity; it crowds it out for longer. This doesn't mean the story is unimportant—quite the contrary.

More on this for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand that you're optimizing for curiosity, but I feel that on some issues that this goal should take a backseat. For instance, I don't think that optimizing for curiosity would be a particularly convincing defense for a popular science type magazine that refused to publish letters to the editor/articles related to the situation in Germany in the early 1930s.

Nevertheless, I understand that this is a subjective issue--there is room for argument on whether allowing such discussions here would have any real world benefit anyway, so thank you very much for the transparency.

These camps are clear evidence that the Honk Kong Democracy Protesters, inheritors of the Umbrella protests, need our whole hearted support.

They're also harvesting their organs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

big if true!

unfortunately the Falun Gong is an insane cult and not a very reliable source of information

RationalWiki has a big citations-packed section on their claims of organ harvesting in China:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Victims_of_Organ_Ha...

I hope after the Iraq "incubator smashing" fiasco, and "WMD"s, Americans apply some skepticism towards claims that their geopolitical adversaries act like fantastical TV show villains.

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edit, bc can't reply because I'm massively getting flagged and downvoted across all my posts

here's me addressing claims that nobody has challenged the Matas report:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgour–Matas_report

> The report, based on circumstantial evidence, concluded that "there has been, and continues today to be, large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners."[2] China has consistently denied the allegations.[3][4]

then

> The initial report received a mixed reception. In the US, a Congressional Research Service report by Thomas Lum stated that the Kilgour–Matas report relied largely on logical inference, without bringing forth new or independently obtained testimony; the credibility of much of the key evidence was said to be questionable.[5]

RationalWiki is not a credible source.

Falun Gong being a weird culty organization (they absolutely are) doesn't mean China isn't abusing them, which they are, or that they're not harvesting their organs, which they may well be.

"China is harvesting organs from detainees, tribunal concludes. Victims include imprisoned followers of Falun Gong movement, China Tribunal says"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

> An independent tribunal sitting in London has concluded that the killing of detainees in China for organ transplants is continuing, and victims include imprisoned followers of the Falun Gong movement.

> The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who was a prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said in a unanimous determination at the end of its hearings it was “certain that Falun Gong as a source - probably the principal source - of organs for forced organ harvesting”.

Looking forward to your links showcasing the evidence Geoffrey Nice put forth.

RationalWiki covers a lot of claims, and the counter-claims. It's overall not very compelling, very "I swear I heard about incubator smashing", with retracted claims and whatnot.

See Amnesty International's seal of approval for the fraudulent Nayirah testimony:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

Falun Gong claims they could cure any cancers. If you believe them, cancer patients could save a lot.

> Questions of feasibility aside, it is highly unlikely that such operations would escape the attention of Western intelligence agencies

"If this was happening, the CIA would tell us" doesn't count at all as a successful defeat of the argument, IMO.

Whether or not the Falun Gong harvesting can't be decided definitively either way. I lean towards it happening based on more evidence favoring that. There's no smoking gun because while the Party is pretty shit at their job, they're also extremely powerful, and as much obfuscation as the Falun Gong can manage, they'll never achieve the levels at which the Party intelligence apparatus pulls of on a daily basis.

I don't think the claims are primarily being made by the Falun Gong, and I don't think it's fair to dismiss a religion you don't agree with as "an insane cult".

There are no credible refutations of the findings of the Kilgour-Matas report that I could find... it seems to be just the Chinese government saying "nuh uh, we don't do that".

My metaphor for China is in this timeline, the Chinese Nazis won and now you see the results of a stable Chinese-Nazi dictatorship.

Concentration camps

I think the better parallel is not with the Nazi concentration camps where the goal was to methodically eradicate people, but rather American conversion therapy camps where they try to "convert" gay kids to straight.

Not all of the Nazi concentration camps served as extermination camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp

Where is terrorism coming from? Why they attack USA? What about domestic terrorism? What are the USA's solutions?

> What are the USA's solutions?

Definitely not concentration camps. Not since WW2 anyways.

Not on American soil, I believe more accurately.

Prisons are a bit different from concentration camps. One has people accused of doing the deed, the other has people who are friends, family or somewhat remotely connected with those doing the deed. As a mainly British invention (rounding up the Boers during wars in colonial South Africa), the past time America bothered with something like that was the Japanese internment camps during WW2.

So what are the USA's solutions anyway?

Policing the populous? It isn’t rocket science, something like the kunming train station knife stabbing would have been seen as a heinous criminal act rather than a reason to intern many people of a particular ethnicity.

I think many of us wouldn't mind the capability to Transform the Thoughts of large segments of our society...

Humans are generally prone to this, alas.

A great essay on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

How about Guantanamo? Is that a concentration camp? And what about those border facilities detaining immigrants? What's happening inside there? Why eliminating terrorism justifies bombarding a country most of innocent civilians? Our views are always biased by what we think is right. However there's no absolute right or wrong, only stories planted in our minds.

I don't think you'll find many on HN supporting Guantanamo so the point is kind of moot.

Then do something.

Fight with the evil which is so close.

Although I don't support the existence of a detention camp controlled by any nation, the detention camps meant for terrorists are at way higher moral grounds, than someone adhering to a particular ideology.

People at the border facilities are encouraged to leave back to their home country and to use the US Immigration system properly.

I don't know much about Guantanamo. Who is currently held there? I've read they recently expanded the facilities but I'm not aware of new arrivals.

Guantanamo will be used as the detention facility for illegal immigrants pretty soon based on the news.

Reference?

US immigration officials looking at housing migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, report says

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Yes, Obama administration was working to bring down its operation. But after the arrival of Trump in the office, he has vouched to bring it back it in significance during its golden 2002-7 era. There are around 40 detainees there now.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

All those things you mentioned are a) bad and b) off topic. I suggest you create a new post to discuss those.

The right vs wrong question seems straightforward. If the people in these concentration camps are suffering, then it is wrong. If they are unable to speak about whether they are suffering, then that is also wrong.

It's only a "story planted in [your] mind" until it happens to you.

Let's talk about the current topic. I agree that if people are suffering, then it's probably wrong (I say "probably" because some people need to endure "suffering" to improve the overall happiness of other people. Think about Psychiatric hospital). But our knowledge of the suffering is from media, and media can present biased view for whatever reason. And we decide to believe in that media because we share some value with it. So seeing this news from BBC and immediately draws conclusion seems quite rash to me. The story between Uyghurs and Han Chinese is a complicated one. It dates back thousands of years. And there's human thinking fallacy involved here (I mentioned it in another reply).

Based on the footage, and even in spite of the agenda made clear from the interviewer's line of questions, it seems difficult to deny many aspects of the BBC reporting. These institutions do exist, and are targeted at the Uyghur minority. My current internal bias suggests that enrollees at these institutions would be punished for expressing anything but positivity regarding their situation. When one group of humans has power over another, history and even academic exercises [1] suggest that things get ugly.

Much of the western world is influenced by Kantian ethics [2], of which a central tenant is that the end (potentially greater societal stability, in this case) is not justified by the means. This system of thought does not seem to hold much sway by the CCP, and I believe many disagreements can be traced back to this point.

[1] Google "Stanford Prison Experiment" [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantian_ethics

I totally agree with you on this. All the disagreements comes from ideology. And the imbalance of power causes the abuse of power. The CCP uses its monopoly to maintain its control over the country. But why end is not justified by the means? How would Kant solve the trolley problem? If CCP's forcing "education" is wrong, what about forcing the Kantian ethics on CCP? Who actually is abusing power?

I don't think anyone is forcing Kantian ethics on the CCP. If they are, it's not working very well. :)

But I'm glad we can trace some disagreements regarding whether specific actions are ethical back to differing ideologies. If we can abstract some of these ideas it should be easier to have conversations that are a bit removed from emotional factors.

It's wild to me that americans point at China for this when they:

1) routinely bomb muslims to death, destroying entire nations, I guess gesturing towards vague notions that being murdered is better than being brainwashed

2) have their own immigrant concentration camps, going as far as to reuse the same infrastructure for japanese internment camps (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/migrant-...)

the main difference is that the victims of abuse in China are Chinese citizens, whereas americans draw their borders in such a way that their victims live in their "backyard" and not america proper.

American exceptionalism is alive and well!

edit: lol I'm a lily-white Canadian, for all of those claiming China is somehow "my side".

also, the completely reflexive, kneejerk way in which posters deploy accusations of "whataboutism" to avoid any critical assessment of what they're witnessing, is truly spectacular.

Re (2), there's a tiny detail: these are illegal immigrants, who often take great pains to get to the US territory, fully aware of their future illegal status. I wonder why these people make a choice like that?

This piece isn't about Americans or their reactions to this horrible situation.

so? I find it interesting to point out the double standard

I'm hardly the first Canadian to notice the insane ramp-up in anti-China sentiment from our American neighbours, especially given the stark contrast with the royal treatment given to the genocidal regime in Saudi Arabia.

Dismembered journalists, decapitated feminists and democratic activist teenagers, famine in Yemen, Senate voted to stop the war and Trump vetoed it... and yet HN is all China every day.

China isn't the only country that looks a lot like 1984 from the outside peering in.

Where do you see a double standard applied?

The way the US deals with Saudi Arabia vs. the way it deals with China.

And the disciplined way in which people here rationalize that status quo.

Lazy whataboutism. The failures of American policy don't negate the crimes of the PRC.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Whatabout those dudes over there, they also do bad shit too, ignore my bad shit amiright?!

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