Data leak reveals how China 'brainwashes' Uighurs in prison camps | Hacker News Reader

Data leak reveals how China 'brainwashes' Uighurs in prison camps

bbc.co.uk

329 pointsasplake148 comments

What I find chilling is that Uigher children are being kidnapped from their families and sent to barbed wire enclosed camps as well[1].

There, they are subjected to CCP brainwashing[2].

[1] https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1791

[2] https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1826

It's 2019, who cares? Everyone is doing it!

The documents reveal how every aspect of a detainee's life is monitored and controlled: "The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed.

"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."

Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?

> The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed

My school was like that when I was growing up.

I'm not justifying what China is doing, and I didn't like it myself. But I find it weird to find it quoted here like that.

But you chose to only select a portion of the text. The second sentence is useful, too:

My school was like that when I was growing up.

Your school proscribed when you go to the toilet and how to close a door?

> But you chose to only select a portion of the text. The second sentence is useful, too:

Then what's the point of quoting the the first portion?

We had things from the second part too, we were also forced to pray and sing the national anthem (otherwise we'd be disciplined and punished), but the first quoted part was exactly like that.

Mine did, yes.

Grew up in rural Midwest US in the 80s. We walked in lines on a schedule for bio breaks.

We had to “shut a door respectfully” basically library rules for the sake of others.

Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that? If you really needed to go you could and this article does not say that’s explicitly disallowed.

I think you’re losing the forest for a tree here. The problem is the whole kidnapping & cultural cleansing.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Stop shadow banning them and I’ll stop creating them.

I keep noticing from other browsers that comments never show up so I start over.

Also apparently my home IP is on some list and so I hop on LTE.

Your own enforcement efforts seem to at least partly responsible for pushing me into this behavior.

Sure, happy to do that. Can you email hn@ycombinator.com so we can figure the details?

Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that?

Dunno. The teachers (nuns, priests, and monks) in my East Coast elementary school had 30-45 students per class, and somehow we didn't run amok.

(Yes, 45 was not an uncommon number. When your performance in class is publicly ranked weekly you become acutely aware of how many students are in the class.)

Don’t a lot of schools have classes that big? There was no standing in line for the bathroom as some regular thing. I know it’s not just my memory lying to me. I have a tape where my whole day was recorded. I watch it every once in a while. There’s no standing in line for the bathroom as a class.

Hiding green accounts (tons of automated pro-China posts by Chinese bots) will be much helpful here.

Although it is true that China would make propaganda posts, there is a much simpler explanation here. Let's go with the simple explanation. People are creating fresh accounts to avoid the wrath of people who support Muslims.

You don't have to be generally pro-China to be fully in support of what China is doing. You can hate the Uighers (Muslims) even if you also hate China. When you see your enemies fighting, you can pick the side you find to be less-bad or you can just cheer the fight in the hope that both suffer.

Sounds like a military boot camp.

The difference is that you got to go home every day. Take a look at the full leaked document for details, the BBC quotes make it sound like a smaller deal than it really is.

I think you're reading too much into my commentary.

I'm not talking about China or comparing myself to them. There are much bigger issues than what was quoted.

But I just find it funny that someone would say "Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?" about something that happened to me, in a western school.

I guess it's an interesting question to wonder how broken elementary students are ending up. We wouldn't probably notice anything wrong because everyone would be broken.

My schooling was very similar and I didn’t get to go home. Australian private boarding school. Toilet time was scheduled, you had your designated bed, designated desk, designated table at mealtimes. Timetables handed out at the beginning of each fortnight telling you which building to be in at which time. Alarm for waking up, showering, chapel service, national anthem, first session, cleaning duty, etc same time each day. Didn’t leave the school grounds for two years.

But the reality is this: you had the option to leave, they don’t. You survived, they probably won’t.

You really don’t have an option to leave without being disciplined. Both systems are using similar tactics to create obedient factory workers; which is exactly the point. The work camp will use just more of that.

I like how mentioned this fact. K12 education, church, prison, and re-education through labor are all systems that hold certain people 'captive'.

I've always felt arguments like "the parents can choose not to send their kid to their" or "the captor's intention was good" to be insufficient. No matter how that changes, the information/data flows from the captors to the 'captive' person's mind does not change much.

At the same time, it might not be possible to eliminate 'captive' information systems, especially if we loosen the definition of 'captive'. For example, you can pretty much only consume news in the language you know so you are held captive. However if you consume only English news, then you're worldview will be biased. English news only covers the more sensational international stories and journalists, who mostly have good intentions, are biased as well.

I ended up rambling a bit, but the main point is that axiomatic arguments don't solve the problem and the lines between good/bad are too 'fuzzy'. Practical solutions around info/data flow and a good understanding of how it makes the lives of 'captives' and others in the world might have more potential

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor

Boot camp would be another example, when they want to rebuild recruits as soldiers. There is actually a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable brain washing techniques, I’m not sure what it is.

Also, it's a known (but apparently not widely discussed) "security measure" for schools to chain exits shut, in blatant violation of fire code requirements [1] [2].

[1] http://old.seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2002050731_startz01...

[2] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2010/02/23/chainin...

It is an option, chosen by the parents. They weren't forced to attend that school based on their ethnicity.

For a kid, their parents are often unaware or unsympathetic to their struggles. And just to be clear, the same tactics are applied to Han Chinese (well, the high schools are more harsh, but the Chinese work camp model was already well developed before they decided to do this en masse in Xinjiang). It is horrible, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to defend it, but I also hope it instills a bit more awareness in our own shortcomings (as well as that of China in general).

> For a kid, their parents are often unaware or unsympathetic to their struggles

So you're just going to generalize on all parents like that? Believe it or not, there are actually some parents out there who are interested in their child's well-being and involved in their life.

> I’m not going to defend it

It seems to me like you're grasping at straws to do precisely that.

“Often” is not a generalization, only an existential of some significant commonality.

Having spent 10 years in China and having actually visited Xinjiang before, I can assure you I’m not grasping at any straws.

I really didn't, as I was a minor.

And the fact I survived while they might not has nothing to do with the things I quoted.

But the purpose of your school was education in standard subjects, not ideological transformation. Your teachers did not assume the students were all followers of a dangerous radical ideology.

> Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?

Which then “justifies” harsh, potentially fatal, punishment.

So like military service except the dancing

This is exactly how American education is structured. What are we doing to our children?

Teach them that they live in a society, and so they have certain responsibilities, limits, and roles, as opposed to being mere individuals that can do whatever they please, others be damned?

Sorry, but the Chinese have camps for ethnic (or religious) targeted detention and/or brainwashing.

This is nothing like "what we do" in education, American or otherwise, and the similarities (the students having a specific desk, queues to eat, etc) are irrelevant and superficial...

I do think that GP made a gross overstatement, but I don't think the similarities are irrelevant and/or superficial. These are the same tactics being used (to a lesser extent and in a different context) towards a similar behavioral end. Reflecting on that might be worthwhile. Even if you decide that they are worth using to some extent to bring about whatever ends you desire, you should at least know the devil you're dancing with.

Your reasoning has always been the justification for the horrors of re-education camps.

Nonsense. It's like saying "arguments in favor of industrial production have always been the justification for the horrors of labour camps". Or "arguments in favor of the rule of law have always been the justification for the horrors of police abuse". There's a superficial similarity, but totally different scopes, methods, and outcomes.

In this case, I'm against things like the e.g. Native American re-education camps, because I believe that they have the right to their own culture (plus, they were there first).

But I'm in favor of mere education camps, also known as schools.

And guess what? Populations that was sent to "re-education camps" also are in favor of such things. They also have schools (or similar processes and teachings for their youth).

There's a whole lot of difference between a society teaching its children (which is how we're not animals merely grazing grass but have culture, technology, science, etc), and to be taken from your family for forced re-education to a different culture you don't belong to (and who is even adversarial to your people).

Yes indeed, practically worldwide. As Larken Rose writes in "The most dangerous superstition":

"The purported purpose of schools is to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic ﬁelds of thought. But the message that institutions of “education” actually teach, far more effectively than any useful knowledge or skills, is the idea that subservience and blind obedience to “authority” are virtues. The “grades” the student receives, the way he is treated, the signals he is sent — written, verbal, and otherwise — all depend upon one factor: his ability and willingness to unquestioningly subvert his own desires, judgment and decisions to those of “authority.” If he does that, he is deemed “good.” If he does not, he is deemed “bad.” This method of indoctrination was not accidental. Schooling in the United States, and in fact in much of the world, was deliberately modeled after the Prussian system of “education,” which was designed with the express purpose of training people to be obedient tools of the ruling class, easy to manage and quick to unthinkingly obey, especially for military purposes. As it was explained by Johann Fichte, one of the designers of the Prussian system, the goal of this method was to “fashion” the student in such a way that he “simply cannot will otherwise” than what those in “authority” want him to will. At the time, the system was openly admitted to be a means of psychologically enslaving the general populace to the will of the ruling class. And it continues to accomplish exactly that, all over the world, including in the United States."

Not all countries are equal at this. Some push police country level obedience, like with "detentions" modeling jails.

That kind of harsh routine along with sleep deprivation, repetition, and calorie restriction are bog standard cult mind control techniques, and yes they do work. All appear to be present in these camps.

Maybe Tim Cook will show some "courage" now.

[Edit] Sorry for the snark. In a market economy, the only way companies like Apple might act in the same way that compassionate human beings would, is if it were in the interests of their bottom line. Perhaps articles like this will hit critical mass, and Apple will put out a statement, carefully composed to ensure that China doesn't lose face. Perhaps they'll do something tangible.

Come back 12 months later and nothing will have changed.

It's only smart to be "woke" when it's profitable.

We have to stop expecting moral behavior from publicly listed companies.

They will naturally trend towards short to medium term profit maximization within the given legal constraints.

The boundaries for corporate behaviour have to be established by elected governments.

In the case of China that could mean customs duties, sanctions and stricter regulations for moving part of your supply chain there.

This is a false dilemma. There are plenty of publicly listed companies that also engage in moral behaviors. Pretending it's an either/or situation only serves to excuse the behavior and derail the discussion.

We should support companies that act morally, and punish others by not buying their products and criticizing them.

But expecting them to act morally out of their own volition seems foolish to me. Note also that I explicitly said publicly traded companies. Large ones always have a diverse ownership structure with institutional investors. A CEO that hurts profits by acting in the public interest will probably be replaced pretty soon, forced to fall in line, or have to otherwise do enough to offset.

The only way to motivate them is external pressure or benefits.

Eg Apple has probably decided to focus on user privacy to provide a contrast with Google and the Android ecosystem and maintain a good relationship with customers, not because privacy is "good".

The situation is somewhat different with private companies, where there are few owners that can actually have an impact.

Care to share some hard evidence to support that? Privately held companies certainly have some more freedom in their actions, but public corpos are a slave to the shareholder.

Public corpos only incentive is to create value for their shareholders.

Your elected government is illegally recording my calls, unless you believe the post-Snowden claim that they stopped (and there isn't any reason to). Why should I expect ethical behavior from this entity? I'd rather choose which software I route my data through than have the government "regulate" all of my options to include Clipper chips. I don't want the government to have any say about what I do with my data.

Here is the leaked document if you want to read it: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6558510-China-Cables...

The meaning of the phrase “Made in China” has now evolved to “Do not buy”.

Hard to do when it seems that China is now the world's factory...

Not if you live economically comfortably. There are definitely products that are same but made elsewhere. Even reducing usage from 100% Chinese products to 50% Chinese products makes a difference.

Time to reverse this then.

I wonder if there are any organizations that can certify products and brands. From inhumane conditions to poor quality to scammy marketing and outright fraud (especially on Amazon), I want to avoid Chinese products as much as possible. It’s difficult to avoid completely, but there’s certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.

Where do we buy mobile phones with no Chinese components?

In fact, any organization can do this. In the vegan/vegetarian/organic/non-GMO food space there are multiple competing certification programs. The LSD Avengers used to fulfill this role on the old Silk Road. It seems there is at least one NGO that specifically certifies goods as made in the USA, though I have no idea how legit they are: https://madeinusacertified.wordpress.com/

I agree that any organization can, but I don't know of any. I'm vaguely aware of orgs that certify organic/non-GMO/etc and presumably someone certifies kosher food and conflict free diamonds and the like, but I'm not sure of any that certify labor conditions or that a given company operates with some baseline of ethics and is subject to accountability.

Aaah, I thought you were going for a made-in-America production certification, not a generally-good-people production certification. The term you're looking for is "fair trade." Here's one example of such an organization: https://www.fairtradecertified.org/

Thanks for pointing me to fair trade; I'll have a look. There are a lot of things I'm interested in, but mostly they fall into one of a few groups. For any given product, I want to know:

1. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor conditions

2. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)

3. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local alternative)

4. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership) will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme? This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.

There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e., not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).

Labor conditions and pay are theoretically covered under fair trade.

> How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)

This one is more in line with Cradle 2 Cradle: https://www.c2ccertified.org/

> Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised.

I'm unfamiliar with this organization, but a search popped up the Trustworthy Accountability Group: https://www.tagtoday.net/certified-against-fraud-program/

I didn't find anything on my first page of results for certificates of non-subsidisation.

Wow, thanks very much. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning googling around for something like that last one. I’ll look into all of these.

EDIT: TAG seems to focus on eliminating fraudulent Internet advertising; it's a much narrower scope than I had in mind.

Then become your own factory.

Save a uighur save the planet

It looks like improvement version of Soviet Russia camps. They also kidnapped kids from "bad" people, plus used mass hunger as weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Completely off topic, but can someone provide a layman's pronunciation of "Uigher?" As someone who is not a linguist, the pronunciation squiggles in the Wikipedia entry are entirely unhelpful.

Wee Gah

Forvo is great for this.

https://forvo.com/word/uyghur/

I always get skeptical about stories that suddenly show up on scores of MSM websites, rather than the slower spread over a day or two or three that usually happens with 'real' news.

I've been fooled too many times by stories about 'weapons of mass destruction', 'gas attacks', 'Trump's pee tapes', 'Tonkin Gulf incidents', etc, etc that I withhold judgement for some time till the bulk of the back-story arrives.

> Tonkin Gulf incidents

Why did you include such a well documented false flag in your list of potentially fake news? [Edit: the document discussed in the following quote is from the NSA itself, so the government has admitted (39 years later) that this was a hoax.] From the NYT:

> The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.

> Based on the assertion that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.

> The historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote the article in an internal publication and it was classified top secret despite the fact that it dealt with events in 1964. Word of Mr. Hanyok's findings leaked to historians outside the agency, who requested the article under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081211090233/http://www.nytime...

These are concentration camps.

If I were in such a camp, I imagine I would be very eager to learn Mandarin in an attempt to please the system.

I was looking at two items in the store today and trying to decide which one to buy. As soon as I saw one was not made in China, the decision was simple.

It's unfortunate that China is controlled by the CCP.

[flagged]

Soviet Union did exactly that - they had gulags.

North Korea is doing exactly that as we speak.

Most of today's elite countries have unspeakable atrocities under their belt, even if you only consider the post-1900 modern era.

As do plenty of non-elite countries. What's your point? The Aztecs, for example, were practising human sacrifice until the Europeans pitched up. And in Papua New Guinea they were still eating people within living memory. I could also mention Cambodia, Rwanda - but I suppose that's all the West's fault as well.

Eat a couple of “enemies” is way better than mass incarceration in my opinion. I mean it’s just meat and only a few dozen people were killed...

i think about this too. hell, if hitler hadn't invaded russia / western europe the nazi's might still hold central europe

I realize this might be wrong and based on not reading enough history about it, but I’ve always understood that the Holocaust was not well documented until after the war.

Obviously many people fleeing Germany and the occupied countries during that period, knew something bad was happening, but overall, it’s my understanding that before and during the war, the rest of the world really wasn’t aware, or at least not aware about how bad it was.

It was the invasion of other countries that was cause to fight Germany. It was much less of a humanitarian act, though after the war it’s easy to paint it as one.

We knew. FDR is even on record making statements about how we weren't there to save the Jews. The US had opportunities to bomb the train system being used to transport the Jews and didn't. I can't provide links right now (I'll try to circle back later), but we absolutely knew what was going on. We just didn't want to believe it.

A lot of intel was from ULTRA

It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:

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

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/02/13/852...

The catch, of course, is that governments don’t act with a single voice: during war time intelligence agencies would be loathe to confirm anything if it revealed information about their sources, and there were enough anti-semites and Nazi sympathizers that all but the most conclusive evidence might be downplayed or lead to consequences (reportedly, concern losing support in Hungary was a factor in not leading with what was happening to the Jews).

There were rumours of the atrocities, but probably the first public testimonies were the Auschwitz Protocols, based on first-hand experiences of a few concentration camp escapees. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Protocols)

Read the document which was the subject of my first link and ask whether rumor was an appropriate word to describe an official report to the UN with eyewitness accounts:

https://archive.org/details/TheMassExterminationOfJewsInGerm...

Thanks, I was not aware of this document. However, its wikipedia page mentions that it was not widely believed at the time. Heck, even Auschwitz Protocols after it did not seem to have much success in reaching the audience (western world) for quite a while.

> It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:

I had no idea that the "United Nations" was a thing during WWII (though it appears to be more of a synonym for the allies than the body we're familiar with today).

There’s more truth to this statement than I am comfortable with.

That is unfortunately most likely true. Stalin is a case in point.

yep, what Stalin did in Ukraine was comparable, while helpful idiots in Western press were praising him for education and healthcare

At least during Nazi Germany there was some interest in helping Jews escape. Yes, instances when ships of Jewish refugees were turned away from e.g. the USA have gone down in infamy, but there were still things like the Kindertransport. When it comes to the plight of the Uighurs, even fellow Muslim countries are loathe to provide any big public help due to the fear of alienating China.

If there's no support for Uighurs, who leaked the documents?

China wants the Uighur‘s gone, period. I don’t think anything short of military action is going to stop that.

And frankly I don’t think that is ever going to happen, because of the world powers that would be capable, they too hold resentment for Islamic religions.

It has nothing to do with that. If they were doing this to a Christian minority we still wouldn't be doing anything.

Mutually assured destruction is a powerful force.

One might imagine China wants Xinjiang to remain Chinese, just as the US wants Texas to remain American.

Let us construct a hypothetical situation where our geopolitical adversaries (Russia, China, parts of South America) had spent the better part of the 20th century backing equally hypothetical Jihadist (or even Reconquista) separatists in Texas.

Perhaps the situation in Texas deteriorates when separatist Texans return from jihad in Syria, and some more violent fringes, armed and trained by Russia and China through proxies, begin widely-publicized attacks on civilians in California.

Perhaps the most ethical response by the US would be to deploy prisons and security services to Texas, and use technology to monitor potential separatist action within the state. Certainly there would be human rights abuses.

Now who is at fault, truly? The US? The separatists? No, of course not. One could place moral blame at the feet of our geopolitical enemies for encouraging this in the first place, but this is simply the reality of political action.

Just to be clear, what is happening to the Uighur people is horrific and inhumane and absolutely disgusting, but I will not allow this humanist sentiment to be perverted by propagandists to manipulate otherwise intelligent, compassionade liberals into nationalists and xenophobes in the name of maintaining the Western hegemon.

The anti-Chinese sentiment that has invaded the internet over the past several months has gone well beyond 'legitimate criticism of the Chinese government', and now sounds more like a racist, imperialist drumbeat for war. We should all be suspicious when fascists and libertarian capitalists find common ground and call it humanitarian.

Dude, no. They can have Texas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com