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Comment by newen | Hacker News Reader

Great, yet another China bad article that paints what is probably a jobs and reeducation program to modernize Tibet as something much more sinister.

Edit: Reeducation might be something as normal as going from an agricultural society to a modern one. Reeducation sounds very sinister, I'm sure, but Tibet was a feudal society just 60 years ago.

Also "reeducation" is entirely my phrasing and has connotations different from say "job training" or "education", which I could have easily used.

You can make almost any government program sound super sinister, especially when there are translation complications thrown into the mix.

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Please show me a "reeducation program" that was ever not a euphemism for something much more sinister.

> A report released in January by the Tibetan arm of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a high-profile advisory body to the government, describes internal discussions on strategies to tackle the “mental poverty” of rural laborers, including sending teams of officials into villages to carry out education and “guide the masses to create a happy life with their hardworking hands.”

I mean, we don't have to look elsewhere, direct quotes about this program sound super sinister

Like in any country with a working social care system, which includes free skills training?

What is a "reeducation program"? What are they being "re-educated about"?

Being alive, eventually.

It appears it’s mostly the language, interaction with various services and institutions, and skills necessary to get a job.

What language? If they have their own language, wouldn't there be plenty of jobs where they can just use their own language?

Are you pretending not to see how a language outside your tribe opens up more opportunities. The entire tribes of Africa and South America underwent the same massive foreign language reeducation now being demonized

No, I just want to understand. What opportunities exactly?

Plenty of nineteenth-century type jobs. Anything modern - anything that actually improves their standards of living - requires the ability to read and write Chinese.

The glories of Xi, presumably.

That their old culture, and its old power structures, are bad, and that the new culture, and the new power structures (with Han at the top) are good. New is good. Old is a bad look.

Tbh the power structures in Tibet [0] weren't that great.

[0]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951)#/Socie...

This article is about the power structures in 1951. That's history, not current affairs.

I'm not certain I agree with OP, but you could call workplace diveristy seminars or code bootcamps reeducation programs.

(Not that I think either of those are bad things)

The words "reeducation program" don't frighten me on their own. I'd like to know more about it.

So, in other words, it sounds like changing the culture?

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