The Global Implications of “Re-education” Technologies in Northwest China | Hacker News Reader

The Global Implications of “Re-education” Technologies in Northwest China

cgpolicy.org

I am amazed that this isn't a bigger political issue for discussion leading into the U.S. election.

This is truly horrifying stuff. Anyone who tries to equivocate this with what is happening in the United States is not only wrong but morally bankrupt. This isn't even in the same ballpark as GITMO or illegal immigrant detention. This is orders of magnitude bigger and far more disturbingly intrusive and arbitrary.

We have to do more to show China that this is not OK.

As the article says, China learned it from the US. In the past, they have justified it by saying that they're just doing the same thing that the US did in its War on Terror. I wish the US could lead on this with moral authority, but in order to credibly do so I think it will have to reckon with its own actions. If we instead simply redouble sanctions enforcement, that _could_ work but from the Chinese perspective it would be humiliating capitulation to force. More likely it would just strengthen the resolve of the CCP to continue on its path in Xinjiang.

>I wish the US could lead on this with moral authority, but in order to credibly do so I think it will have to reckon with its own actions

How does that work? Is there a global arbiter of moral authority? Is there an international court that can say "you now have moral authority; go forth and use it wisely"? Why can't China just say, no matter what..."no, we don't think you have moral authority"? Sincerely or not. Why wouldn't the Chinese government think it is the authority?

I was just reading some of George Orwell's letters from the 1940s, and it's amazing to read his observations of the politics in Britain without the benefit of hindsight. Germany certainly didn't recognize Britain's moral authority to criticize them, in the context of their crumbling empire. I can't remember where I read an anecdote, but supposedly a Brit in one of their colonies was explaining to a draftee why the war was worth fighting, and they said something like "Each country should be ruled by its own people; Britons should rule Britain; Germans should rule Germany; but Germany has been upsetting the normal order of things..." And the African draftee went (it was implied) hmmm...

> How does that work? Is there a global arbiter of moral authority?

In a sense, yes there is a collective global arbitration process among many countries, consisting of international opinion, persuasiveness, respect, influence, trade relations, diplomacy, and generally all the things called "soft power".

It's not a formal system, yet has considerable power to influence events inside countries nonetheless.

Persuasiveness and respect are part of the mechanism by which such influence has an effect, and that's where percieved moral authority comes in.

Rather than posit some judge that decides if a country does or does not have actual moral authority, perhaps it's more accurate to say the perception of moral authority is key component of effective influence.

Interesting observation about Orwell's letters, btw.

Gitmo was part of a larger war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is estimated to have caused millions of deaths. Torture and arbitrary detainment have been widespread. One of the very few flagrant criminals to face prosecution in these war crimes was recently pardoned.

A larger war on terror that has included China to a degree I was unaware of until recently.

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

“War on terror” was the marketing term the government used. “war for enhanced funding for military contractors” would be a better name.

Naming things in insulting ways to make them look worse generally isn't better, even if the insults are true.

Naming things with false claims to make them look better is worse.

I think complaining about China has been associated with Trump and his supporters, so a huge portion of the US population is highly critical of any anti-China sentiment because of the upcoming election.

It hasn't been. Recent polls show a strong bipartisan supermajority - 73% of the population and 68% of Democrats - have a negative view of China. And Biden hasn't been any more positive about China than Trump has.

(https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/30/americans-faul...)

That's still a pretty huge discrepancy across party lines.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the Democratic party is pro-China by any stretch of the imagination. I just think these elections tend to drive people on both sides towards extreme opinions as they seek to invalidate the opposition. It is common to see people marginalize issues that their opposition is campaigning on. Both sides are very guilty of it and there are plenty of high-profile examples in recent history.

And I'm not trying to paint with broad strokes here. I think this is only a significant problem with the most extreme ends of the political spectrum. However, those ends tend to be the most vocal and they have a strong influence on how political issues get discussed.

It's a phenomenon to be aware of, but it doesn't seem to be happening here. Democratic leaders have generally been in reasonably open favor of anti-China measures, even ones as controversial as the TikTok ban.

I think there are multiple factors that will prevent the US from ever taking a united stance on it:

1) Republicans are probably louder about criticizing China but lose credibility when they don't speak up about (less severe, but still serious) issues such as police here brutalizing protesters. There also needs to be a reckoning with our own national overreaches after terrorist attacks such as the Patriot Act -- the Uighur camps were built in response to some attacks in the Xinjiang region, and I don't think Republicans have set a good example for how governments should respond to that.

2) Leftists and sympathizers who deflect with "But America..." with absolutely no sense of relative scale. This happens so much that it's a trope[1], and China is more than happy to feed this[2].

3) In higher education and tech, sheer numbers of moderately patriotic Chinese citizens mean there can never be consensus. See what happened at Warwick [3] earlier this year with a student vote about Hong Kong. CSSA is at every large university here and they know how to organize. For an example re: Uighurs, some Chinese who have been fed a steady diet of state media since birth actually consider this story fake news (blind discussion [4]).

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

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868566978/in-george-floyd-pro...

[3] https://www.axios.com/hong-kong-british-university-chinese-s...

[4] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Did-you-know-about-China-and-...

Regarding your point 2), yes: whataboutism is a real problem and an impediment to productive discourse. But in questions of moral authority, the "But America" whiners have a certain point. America's internal conflict and state-sanctioned misconduct is not a secret to the world. If our citizens cannot be seen making good-faith efforts (and progress!) towards justice and equality on our own soil, who would follow our example? With what credibility?

I view it as less "But America killed George Floyd, so let's give up on other oppressed people in the world," and more "But America killed George Floyd, and then peaceful Americans withdrew their consent from the violence conducted in their name." It is a way of leading by example in the spheres where we actually have influence. We can chew gum and stand in solidarity with Uighurs, at the same time.

> Leftists and sympathizers who deflect with "But America..." with absolutely no sense of relative scale.

Are you sure? I looked into the prison population in the US and it's on par with the number of Uyghurs in these camps. And that's absolute numbers, not per capita.

A bad comparison.

Bad comparison because of ? Because I have the same question, and it seems pretty much fair to compare

Americans are generally sentenced to prison for committing specific crimes. Sure there may be some things you think the law should decriminalize (do vote), and also, sometimes innocents are imprisoned, which absolutely should not happen. But our prison system as a whole is not comparable to the indefinite detainment and reeducation of people purely due to their ethnicity or religion, which is happening with Uighurs.

A better comparison would be Japanese internment camps - I don't think anyone is defending those anymore.

You say "committing specific crimes" like popular support for the war on drugs wasn't fueled by racist propaganda. You say "sometimes innocents are imprisoned" as if overburdened public defenders don't recommend a guilty plea because it's "safer" than attempting to establish innocence in a racist judicial system, biased again certain races in arrests, extrajudicial killing, in prosecution, in sentencing, in the jury supposedly of peers. Indigenous women are still being sterilized against their will, a continuation of centuries of genocide.

No, it's not a perfect comparison, in large part because responsibility doesn't rest on a single central entity. But it's awfully similar. The US has more prisoners per capita than any country in the world. The "scale" of it is atrocious (as is the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, just to be clear) and America's lack of moral standing on this issue is a big deal because until recently, we've been both a military superpower and the vanguard for human rights.

>Anyone who tries to equivocate this with what is happening in the United States is not only wrong but morally bankrupt.

Xinjiang shares a land border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is a significant Uyghur separatist movement active in Xinjiang, backed by Al-Qaeda, Hizb Ut-Tahrir and the Pakistani Taliban. America might not commit human rights abuses on this scale domestically, but they certainly do it overseas. Would America be this restrained in the same circumstances?

We haven’t wholesale imprisoned all Pashtuns and Arabs within the US. We also haven’t attempted to control their ability to have children. That would be genocide, which is what China is doing.

Unequivocally. Emphatically. Yes, America has been more constrained.

Probably? There are lots of separatist movements in the US; I've never seen anyone propose that e.g. the Calexit campaigners need to be put in re-education camps, even though some polls have suggested up to a quarter of the state might support it. The government just kinda says "come on this is silly".

Between cheap GPS and facial recognition tracking people is basically free now. The technology will come to the rest of the world by virtue of simple economics.

It raises an interesting question of what types of political dissent will even be possible in this century. The incumbent advantage to the police is huge.

Something I've noticed is that since around the turn of the century is it is now technically possible for governments to enforce all laws. That wasn't the case even as recently as the 90s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I remember taking a class where the professor claimed the framework above as the basis for understanding interactions between people and their governments. People ultimately have two actions they can take, to use their voice/dissent, or leave the country.

In a world where dissent isn't possible, leaving will be the only response to poor governance. How seriously a government takes emigration will also depend on the people emigrating as a highly skilled engineer is far more valuable to the national economy and military than a fast food cashier, and this would skew political influence away from one person one voice towards one dollar one voice even more. In the event even leaving isn't possible due to an emigration ban, the only response may be to refuse to work on new technologies and let the country stagnate economically until the government is weak enough where dissent/rebellion is possible again.

At the end of the day, power games form the foundation for most large-scale human interactions, and you only have power over someone if you can give them something they want, or do something to them they don't want. Governments want their people to not rebel and overthrow them, and to be economically and technologically productive so they don't fall behind and get conquered. In a world where rebellion isn't possible, not giving governments the economic production they want is the only way to exercise power.

"In a world where rebellion isn't possible, not giving governments the economic production they want is the only way to exercise power."

Made me think of "Atlas Shrugged" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

> leaving will be the only response to poor governance

There are an awful lot of people around the world who want to leave their country but can't.

When I visited China ~15 years ago, I met several people who told me they wished they could leave and see where I lived, but they didn't think they would ever be able to.

I assured them I thought they could someday, but I'm not so sure about that now. Last I heard you need to take care of your social credit score to travel at all. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china-bans-23m...

> it is now technically possible for governments to enforce all laws

This change is underappreciated. As enforcement gets stronger it's becoming feasible to make stronger and more specific laws. I don't believe this is a good thing for society in general. It's also possible for governments to hold power with less and less public support by quashing opposition and shutting down protests more effectively with overpowered police and militaries.

I don't think the right to bear arms helps much with the growing power imbalance. It just doesn't make sense anymore for civilians to be armed with the same weapons as governments, now that government weapons are so powerful.

Technology is only accelerating these trends, especially AI. The governments of the future will hold unprecedented power over their populations. Democracy is supposed to ensure that power isn't used against the people, but I think current political systems won't be able to prevent it. We need much better implementations of democracy to handle the power that is coming to governments in the next century.

I often wonder if these advancements in information processing now allow for centrally planned economies to compete with free market ones. What would have happened if the USSR had all the tools we have today for monitoring and computation?

The problem with centrally planned economies wasn't one of processing power, it was one of information. The market is essentially based on "actions speak louder than words": if someone is willing to spend their hard-earned money on something, this reveals their preference for this thing. The market aggregates these preferences, incentivising production that meets this demand.

Without a system for people to express such preferences, it's impossible to determine what to produce, no matter how much processing power is available, because one cannot know what people want. If people were given some allocation of credits that they could spend to indicate what they'd like, then that's just a market under another name.

I am not sure preferences are as inscrutable as you imply when you can monitor every conversation, every social media interaction, every email exchange, every Baidu search. In fact I am pretty sure they aren't.

Important piece, every American/western HN reader should read.

The relationship between the policies and practices described here and those created by the US post 9/11 is alluded to but not sufficiently explored.

Also insufficiently explored, and I say this with trepidation, having no knowledge or background in the actual conflict in these territories, is the extent to which the practices described here, enabled by tech, are framed by authorities with power as "more humane" than the alternative without technology, which would likely be extermination.

I don't think the alternative would be extermination, as the CCP has been very consistent at using the politically incorrect for slave labor.

The reasoning is given at [1]:

> Mao Zedong's order given in 1957 in one of his speeches, in which Mao explained why political prisoners must not be executed:

> 1st: If one was executed, then more would have to be executed for the same crime later on for equality, and it would difficult to spare the lives of future prisoners who committed the same crime, because justice system would be criticized as unequal, giving preferential treatments

> 2nd: Wrong people and even innocent people might be executed by mistake

> 3rd: Executing prisoners could mean the vanishing of evidence

> 4th: When prisoners were executed, it could not increase production output, could not improve scientific research, could not strengthen national defense, and could not liberate Taiwan

> 5th: You (the Communist regime) would be accused of excessive killings

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qincheng_Prison#Labour

Tracking down the source hit a dead end because I can't justify spending $44 for a speech from 1957. So this quote may not be accurate, but it is pretty consistent with the CCP's behavior.

Much of "The Selected Work of Mao Zedong" is freely available online at [1]. Looking through the speeches readily available, I can't find any 1957 speech containing the content quoted above.

It looks the the only English language reference to the texted quoted above originates from a single Wikipedia edit from 2007 [2]. Neither the articles on "Re-education through labor" nor "Laogai" reference this quote.

It is my belief that this is likely a specious quotation. Mao likely did not say the text quoted.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Qincheng_Prison&o...

Thank you for the references and the analysis! That's very helpful.

Thank you very much for those references.

What's the best way to support the fight against this? Boycott the companies linked to the labor from these camps? Boycott all Made in China goods?

The disturbing thing is how these technologies which could be used to benefit all of us are being used by the CCP (China Communist Party) to perfect the vision of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others to completely crush individuality. All aspects of an individual's life can now be monitored, controlled, and punished.

I wonder how that impact the structure of society going forward. It's one to use the technology, it's another to lead to the collapse of society.

This is genocide happening in real time. Systematic reduction and elimination of a people and culture. Technology can really be a Pandora’s box of sorts.

"center for global policy" sounds like some globalist lobby.

"The Center for Global Policy (CGP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. CGP is the first independent, non-partisan American think tank working exclusively on issues at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and the geopolitics of Muslim-majority countries. We aim to enhance U.S. security and global stability by empowering our foreign policy decisionmakers with pragmatic recommendations grounded in informed and nuanced analysis.

Amid a dramatic increase in anti-Muslim sentiment throughout the United States and Europe and a simultaneous increase in anti-American sentiment in many Muslim countries, CGP addresses the underlying root causes and conflict drivers that perpetuate tension.

CGP’s nuanced and informed analyses aim to serve our country’s best interests in mitigating, transforming and providing solutions to many global conflicts."

https://cgpolicy.org/about-cgp/

Has “globalist” as a term been relegated to a pejorative?

I’m not sure if you’re aware but globalist is an anti Semite dog whistle for “the Jews trying to control the world” and has been for decades.

Some background -

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-ori...

That reasoning is absurd. Obama talked about being "on the right side of history." Does that make him a Stalinist, just because Stalinists used that phrase 75 years earlier? I don't think so.

"Globalism" is a legitimate term used by proponents, critics, and neutral parties. It is not a dog whistle.

Who funds these guys? The principals appear to be mostly from southwest Asia: https://cgpolicy.org/experts/our-people/

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