Xinjiang is prototype for fully totalitarian state: Taiwan minister
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
I wish we had people like her running things in the US.
Now Zenz is an evangelical fundamentalist who once wrote he's on a crusade against the CPC. His studies often times don't really follow scientific standards.
For example, for his claim that 2 million Uighurs are held in concentration camps, he interviewed 8 Uighur refugees, and extrapolated from the numbers they believe to be detained from their villages to the whole region.
Both ASPI and Zenz when accusing the chinese government of genocide via forced sterilization completely glared over the fact that it is the enforcement of the two-child-policy. And they do so knowingly, because if you read between the lines of their reports, it is quite obvious that all the women interviewed already had 2 or more children.
It is extremely difficult to get an accurate picture of what is going on there. - Security is definetely extremely tight in the whole region, and "brainwashing camps" are admitted to exist by the government. Many international Xinjiang without an obvious agenda think something very fishy is going on, but the exact scale, method and goal are completely obfuscated by lies and propaganda from both sides.
[1] https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the...
Actual journalistic sources, based on interviews with former detainees, etc, validate the claim that China is undertaking a campaign of demographic genocide against predominantly Muslim minorities: https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
And BTW, your sources include a Medium post, a YouTube video, and Chinese govt controlled media. These are hardly reputable journalistic sources.
- Multiple citations from Zenz (+Pompeo for bonus points)
- Entire article revolves around testimony of those with 2+ children being subjected to family planning policies (IUD / sterilizations etc).
- Mentions "now-abandoned ‘one child’ policy" without providing context of that new "Two-Child" policy is in affect for everyone, with no minority exemptions.
- Claims 30 interviews reveals how wide spread the practice is. Hint: you can interview 1.3 billion Han Chinese to see how wide spread family planning program was for the last 40 years.
We already know from leaked internal papers the purpose of these camps, the reality is, the camps themselves are boring techno authoritarian reeducation camps (like in France), but the threshold for manufacturing consent requires something meatier like literal genocide. There's sufficient state-level intelligence capability to actually verify the scope of the camps, but western media insists on quoting the same few unsubstantiated sources + Pompeo musings while conveniently omitting facts that goes against the narrative. I.e. recently ASPI "slave labour" study, casually glosses over that the minimum hourly wage from contracts was equivalent to basic salary at Foxconn and 2x annual GDP of prefecture the workers are from. Because the mental image for a prisoner stamping license plates for 50c an hour is different than $20 an hour.
The greater context is, Islamic attacks in multicultural European societies in the past 10 years (particularly in England + France) informed internal decision making in China regarding XJ. I remember French banlieue / ethnic enclaves where radicalization was happening were part of conversation on policy debates to revise minority policy in China a few years ago. The position being multicultural "salad bowl", classic soviet oblast model where minorities had relative cultural autonomy had failed to reign in extremism (and separatism in China's case), so now everyone gets sinicized and the Han treatment, aka blending into the US melting pot model.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20180223-france-deradicalisation...
Is that not totalitarian enough?
They seem totalitarian enough to suck up all that telemetry, what makes us think they wouldn't be totalitarian enough to sanction its use against us?
So you know the BBC has spent the last two months race baiting. They were once a most treasured institution of my nation now they've lost respect and their future is in jeopardy - you only have to view the hash #DefundTheBBC to see how they're actions have sullied them.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-china-muslim-crack...
This is not to say that scientists, engineers, or doctors make for better policymakers. Perhaps there is a case to be made that career politicians have skillsets that validate the need to specialize in politics. However, the stereotype of career politicians is that of ignorance with no understanding of subject matter for the things that they make policies for. This impression was cemented further after the hearing between Zuckerberg and Congress about Facebook. This video even plays it for laughs: "Zuckerberg explains the internet to Congress", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbb5B85sd0. For the government to help its people, it needs to incentivize diversity within its ranks so that it can understand the variety of issues that it faces. It also needs to be able to adapt to changing realities.
Regarding what Tang talks about: I frequently think that what is happening over there are the emulations of unethical experiments (I hear the TV show Black Mirror is similar) that the Western world would never be able to pull off. Regardless of where one stands on this issue, I do not think it can be denied that a lot can be learned about how these systems operate at scale or how the machine runs. From the reports and stories that we get to hear about, it seems like the Chinese government is implementing technology at scales that most countries could ever dream of doing.
Or rather, most countries could only dream of creating technological systems of control with the degree of acceptance by the populace, with degree of penetration and overall dissemination. Western governments have implemented comparable systems, like the ones that Edward Snowden pointed out. However, if governments did not worry about hiding questionable activity, maybe it could double down on the level of sophistication and expand on its capabilities.
> I frequently think that what is happening over there are the emulations of unethical experiments that the Western world would never be able to pull off.
Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?
I seriously cannot think of an example so Im open to the fact you know more about my known unknowns.
Are you justifying unethical experiments on Uighurs by the chinese government ?
I agree with you. This is why populations, no matter which population it is, are more likely to accept the government who has substantially increased the quality of life of the average citizen. This is a very hard position to disagree with, I think. Many citizens in the Western world also have had stable political systems despite the massive wrongdoings of their governments because for the most part, governments have not overstepped their bounds in comparison to the stability provided.
It's like having a goodness-to-shittiness ratio that each citizen subconsciously evaluates with an accompanying flowchart. The average citizen thinks to himself or herself: Is my government doing bad things? Yes. Is my government doing good things? Yes. Is the government doing enough bad things to make me care? No. If the answer is yes, then the next question is: Do I care enough to do something about it? Most of the time, the answer is no because society pushes me to remain being a busybody (job, life responsibilities, etc.) or I just don't care.
> Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?
I could have phrased that better: All governments are capable and have a history of some kind of unethical experiment. I think that it is rarer that it is at this level of scale and with this level of technical sophistication. My thought was that generally, a Western government would not successfully pull off this prototype with neither the degree of success or extent.
I personally do not know what is happening at the granular level and I do not pretend to know. I wish I did, and for that matter, at any point in time there will be shady things going on that we do not know. Maybe we will learn in a few decades.
For the first time, we get to see what control through the digital lens of information technology looks like when combined with the capacity to enact state-sanctioned violence. It's like the cyberpunk genre, except privately-owned corporations do not yet have a significant capacity to use violence. Maybe we'll have the honor of seeing that by the end of this century.
On that note, the closest thing the USA has done in subjugating populations of citizens in a systematic way is the internment camps of Japanese Americans for no reason. They apologized 4 decades later. What good is an apology if you've been waiting for most of the victims to die anyway? Nonetheless, it still gained notoriety (eventually), and people still fought for recognition afterward.
Totalitarian states tend to have a good run, where they have a good leader and energetic administration, then they become lethargic and dysfunctional, and because there's no mechanism to correct this, they start falling apart. (However, this can take centuries).
As an aside, I don't think the West has ever been particularly keen on democracy. I think Israel is the only democracy that has ever received substantial military and economic support. For dictatorships, this kind of support is basically routine (see Egypt, for a typical example).
If you look at transitions like the english civil war, or the french revolution, the clear precondition of revolution is not 'stability', as you think, but rather systemic dysfunction compounded by incompetent leadership. This kind of situation is one which democracies, in theory, should be much less vulnerable to.
Your ideas about the relative balance of power between state and people make some sense, I think, but they only matter when the threat is internal dissent. Most of the states in modern europe had a form of republicanism enforced on them by the French, who were able to invade all their neighbors because their republican government was (while very dysfunctional) more efficient and able to field talented officers and large armies.
A modernised military, moreover, consists of normal people - and they will also feel the disillusionment and apathy that grips really dysfunctional regimes. Saudi Arabia, for example, fields armies of terrible soldiers, using the most advanced weapons available.
China is an interesting and very weird state, because it's a very old civilization with deep roots, with very different basic ideas to the west, and they have turned marxism into a kind of managerial culture for an extremely capitalist society. I don't know if they will follow any of the typical patterns that totalitarian states follow. You can't really use the USSR as a point of comparison, because the USSR was a very European project, coming directly out of the enlightenment, and the western political tradition. Nor would Korea make sense, since they were colonized, and both North and South represent different reactions to colonial subjugation.
The precondition of the English civil war in my opinion was more the funds that facilitated it promised by financiers from Amsterdam who ultimately went on to be granted charter to found the BoE.
As you know the result of this civil war was to wreck the fine castles, history and heritage of the English. Destroy many a dynasty and teach the Irish to hate the Brits for all eternity.
Issac D'Israeli produced a worthwhile read on Charles [1] if you'd like to know more on his character and quarry.
[1] https://archive.org/details/commentariesonli03disruoft/page/...
The teeth was taken from all monarchies, or BDFLs, after Bolsheviks were sent from Germany to murder Tsar Nicholas and his family in an act that ultimately condemned 66m Russians.
In my opinion if you want a stable democracy you enfranchise those who would look to a future beyond their own. e.g. one vote per family. If you franchise those who live for today with not a stake in the future democracy becomes not a viable form of governance.
As for unethical experiments, Mao's certainly top the charts.
"In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ROC transitioned from a one-party military dictatorship to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system."
Russian original: https://les.media/articles/863622-zavodnoy-mandarin
Englisch translation: https://bylinetimes.com/2019/11/18/beyond-orwells-worst-nigh...
German translation: https://www.dekoder.org/de/article/uiguren-kasachen-china-xi...
If you ask the locals, they'll tell you it's to protect them from the Uighurs. It seems the conflict there is (was?) a real problem, with Han Chinese being murdered regularly with some communities having to put the men on watch at night.
The schools for example had officers with submachine guns when it was time to let out, and giant vehicle barricades. I suppose this could be to scare people. But that's what's there.