What you say represents about 50% of Chinese researchers in my lab. Those that immediately return to their country after the PhD and you never hear from them again. The other 50% are the complete opposite: they cannot wait to get their family out of the country and never look back, explaining that the country is ruled by a bunch of crazy psycopaths. Curiously enough, there's almost no interaction between both groups, they politely ignore each other (and they are really polite and professional towards everybody also).
Once a chinese girl was online, we chat about our countries, I explain how much I like china as a kid for martial arts, food, aesthetics, it was friendly and casual (chinese people on omegle often expressed worries about the value of their country, I wanted to make her feel at ease).
Quickly though she started to say it's not all rosey, rules are strict, internet firewall.. suddenly she stopped talking. She typed a bunch of omg omg omg i shouldn't have said that omg sorry disconnect.
It was nothing yet I felt fear in her behavior. All that for expressing very mild discontent about her country. First time I ever felt the impact of politicians on people's mind.. also a 'freedom of speech' felt different after that.
To be where they are now (outside of China receiving education, etc), the former group (or their parents/relatives) fought hard to get benefits from their relationship with CCP, while the later group (or their parents/relatives) fought hard to find a path out of this CCP madness.
And thus the contrast.
My grandfather was a minister and a proud CCP member. But he was the type who believes in doing the moral things and never took bribe. He worked crazy hours and get paid penauts. Most of my relatives saw him as foolish because he basically didn't fight to "get benefits from his relationship with CCP" and stayed poor for all his life. And most of his colleagues and superordinates don't like him because you can't help one another to climb the rank (or generate wealth) like this.
they don't like him not because of the ladder climb, but because him being a goody-two-shoe means that their corrupt activities are more likely to be shown as "wrong", and therefore, more risky for them.
it's like being a good cop in a department where the other cops are bought and paid for.
We just had an attempted fascist coup in the USA and it failed hilariously. The swamp is a good thing. It’s there to bog down tyrants in mud. Efficient government is dangerous.
But my point was not well taken.
I asked my friend from North Korea how life is.
He said he can't complain.
I don't know what that is supposed to mean / why we would assume you'd notice it ...
On HN and elsewhere people mentioned how they were happy people could travel through the area and not have to worry about "thieves" and they'd make some comparisons to travel in the west, a sort of chilling random concern considering the topic.
Often the same link was posted to a western blogger apparently paid to travel to the region. With the link the posts noted that the blogger didn't mention genocide.
Because they have a different definition of "bad". If you follow closely, the mainland Chinese or CCP have different definition of the same word for literally everything.
Why is it bad to force them learn Mandarin and forget about their old language? Where the job markets are and to help them better integrate into the society.
Why is it bad to give them birth control pills? Or reeducating them? etc. They are doing / supporting these regime with a smile on their face as they think they are doing good.
So, as a matter of intellectual honesty, I don't think it is possible to have strong opinion and to use extremely strong terms to describe the situation there as if that was fact.
That's really a common problem when information is withheld. On the one hand it obviously arouses suspicion but on the other hand it also allows over-the-top narratives and rumours to spread, and it is very difficult to separate facts from propaganda, from the other side's propaganda, from fantasy...
In the end (I don’t know if this counts as a spoiler or not) Kertész even admits to feeling nostalgia for some of the moments in the camps.
I appreciate the western style of logical thinking. You are being taught in schools how to tell the truth and bust lies, to criticize, to doubt, to ask questions no one dares to ask. You are taught definitions of fallacies, the art of debate, the wisdom of introspection.
I envy you, having been taught so many ways to learn, to listen, to ask.
You know, in China, they don't teach you those. They fill you with hard knowledge, 1+1=2 kind of knowledge. There's always only one correct answer: the answer from the textbook, from the instructor, from the authority. No question is asked unless you forgot what you should have memorized.
I envy you, having the freedom to argue 1+1=0 and discover binary.
As Chinese, we've been taught to believe, to repeat, to bow down to seniors, teachers, authorities.
It's the way of life here.
It's also the reason I came to the US.
And yet, here we are.
"You cannot trust anything reported out of China."
"No use in trying to discuss this anyone from China. They are totally brainwashed."
Do you hear the racists in these words? Do you feel the rejection of listening, the denial of communication, the blockage of thinking in those expressions?
Chinese are liars. -- is what they want to say.
Because the west has free speech and free press, so everything the western media report must be the truth. -- is what they believe.
Folks, where is your doubt? Where is your wisdom of knowledge?
Just because Chinese people were taught to remember the only answer, doesn't mean they can't think critically. Have you ever listened to them? Are you dismissing them just because of where they were born or how they were taught?
Just because you have a free press, doesn't mean your media is unbiased. Who are their sponsors? What political spectrum do they stand for? Is it economically or politically beneficial to talk trash about China?
Now you have to ask: What's your defense for the CCP? How brainwashed are you? Do you condemn the CCP for what they alleged doing?
My answer is simple: I will stay doubtful until I have first-hand contact or undeniable evidence showing one way or the other. Until then, I can't say if those allegations are real or not. If they were real, I (and I believe most Chinese people) would condemn the practice, and would like to demand a change.
"I know people who live in Xinjiang and they say it's not that bad." -- It's a very common argument lot of Chinese people would use. Because it's relatively easy to find people living in Xinjiang or who come from Xinjiang online. Me too, had several conversations with folks from the area, some on Telegram where they were using VPN to connect, and some are friends of friends. Of course, we would talk about the headlines all over the western media. And every time, the answer I got is they are still working, living, studying as normal. There were conflicts in some areas in the southern part, but I haven't got any more detail than that.
These conversations are not proof of China not doing what it's been alleged to do. But you have to understand it's much more difficult to prove something you didn't do instead of something you did, and yet these kinds of personal encounters are the closest things we have to give us a perspective of the situation in the area.
To think back, what is the closest encounter you had to the situation in Xinjiang? Did you talk to any victim from the area? Of course, you would immediately argue that CCP wiped clean all witness and evidence, so finding a victim is almost impossible, which is another allegation that's almost impossible to prove otherwise --- how convenient of you.
But anyway, the closest encounter of yours is almost always the media stories you read, from western media, all over the places. But have you ever doubt that why all stories about China are negative? Why people are saying things to discredit every word comes out Chinese people's mouth? Doesn't it feel strange to you?
And it's not easy for someone to speak up for China either. I -- writing these words, am seriously worried about losing my job in the US just because of this. So I'm using an alias account. YouTubers that speaking up for China are constantly being depromoted, demonetized, restricted for sharing, or banned for their words. Is it free speech should look like? Is the west deliberately running some kind of campaign to discredit and disconnect China from the rest of the world?
Of course, that's an allegation without concrete proof. But you can find it is logically sound. There are many political movements and campaigns by the US and other five eye countries trying to contain the political and economical development of China - so their countries can continue to sit on top of the world's hegemony. It's not strange that these political and economical campaigns had affected public opinion and implanted negative views of China in its citizens' minds.
We can have a lot of allegations back and forth. Maybe they are all wrong - or all true. But the bottom line is, what kind of thinking you want to promote.
If you are spreading denial and racism, I would condemn you regardless if your arguments are true or not.
Please, don't let a Chinese person point out your fallacies. We were supposed to not learned that.
"You cannot trust anything reported out of China" "Not all things reported out of China can be trusted"
But the language you choose to use has its emotional implication. Ask any Chinese, which of the two sentences is more biased.
"You cannot trust anything reported out of China" = "Nothing reported out of China can be trusted",
while
"You cannot trust something reported out of China" = "Not all things reported out of China can be trusted"
I had a similar reaction back in 2010 when talking to a scientist from Libya (during the internal conflict). He was in real shock of what's been known for ages of his country in the west. Of course it doesn't mean everything in the western media is wrong. But he knew some facts that had simply not surfaced at all in people's view. I have a similar feeling now.
Most Uyghurs don't even speak your language. That generalization of well-connectivity doesn't apply at all. Unless you speak Äynu, you are likely talking mostly with Han Chinese in Xinjiang (or Uyghurs who had undergone severe Sinicization).
> It's almost impossible to hide any major events in China, even with large scale blockage
It is impossible to hide "major events" only when jounralists are free to roam around in China.
I have a jounralist friend whose grandfather was a Chinese war hero (i.e. he is a 红三代). He is now a US citizen, and works for a respectable news media. He had internal CCP connections but were denied Chinese visa when he was working on the Uighur story in 2017. This had never happened before, even when he was investigating the controversial story with Bo Xilai.
I don't see how the journalist story relates to this. I know exactly the kind of profile he has. Most people in/out of China know the limit of political freedom and the sensitivity changes according to political tides. It'll be quite strange that he pretends he didn't know the severity. But that's exactly my point: these events muddle the water and hide the real serious issues.
This struck a chord with me. I think most people who read news regularly can agree that nearly 100% of the news about China these days are negative, and never anything positive. We can all wonder why that is.
That's only relevant if you compare it to other topics and there's a discrepancy. There's very little positive content in the political news I read, even when it's about Western countries. If something works or is going well it's almost not news by definition, at least it's less likely to appear on the front page.
Of course it's political as well, but there's no way around that.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/china-uses-rape-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...
These are real people. They aren't Western "plants", and it would be a pretty big conspiracy for them to all coordinate and "lie" about the things they detail. Sure, western media is biased, but I would still trust it a lot more when reporting on such matters than Chinese media because the latter have a lot more to lose and are also single-mindedly focused on controlling the narrative when it comes to any sort of press or public release of information because ultimately they are an extension of the Chinese government in a very direct way.
Or the Nayirah case: "In her emotional testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die." Which was all a lie, but a convenient argument for the Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
I certainly think it is possible that these atrocities actually happen in China, OTOH it fits all too well into the anti-China warmongering in the US.
She isn't an actor. She's a bit of a conspiracy theorist type from Hong Kong on the Wuhan lab leak stuff. I'm not sure how that's relevant to anything much here beyond that it pays to check your sources.
You know, even average schools in China looks more like a prison than actual prisons in the west. (Which remind me of this: https://www.schoolprison.com/ )
You will often find 8-12 students packed in a small 10-20m^2 room with thousands of students in each building. Many schools would also have fences or walls all around to prevent students from escaping. Some photos:
https://ss1.bdstatic.com/70cFvXSh_Q1YnxGkpoWK1HF6hhy/it/u=41... https://ss3.bdstatic.com/70cFv8Sh_Q1YnxGkpoWK1HF6hhy/it/u=17...
These re-education camps/concentration camps (whatever you call them) are surely a downgrade from average schools because they are completely out of the government's pocket and constructed in a short period.
Only that, can seem inhumane to many people in developed country, even exaggerated by some BBC documentary, but it's just a reflection of average living condition in China.
It's not difficult to realize part of the CCP's narrative must hold some truth -- the Xinjiang situation was mostly a response to the non-stopping terror attacks in the region for the last couple of decades. And depending on the "radicalization level" of the people being contained, the security level of these camps must be ranging from a lot more usual to heavily guarded.
So yes, there will be prison-level camps and many near-prison-level camps.
I believe most of these incidents reported by western media are conducted independently by the officials in the camps under stricter lock-down, which provided an out-lawed environment for them to conduct the crimes. However, I don't believe any of these are systematically orchestrated and oversaw by the CCP from the top down. If you argue otherwise, you better provide some strong proof, i.e. recording of high-rank CCP officials admitting such an evil plan. Because it's a very, very serious allegation.
Those individuals who conducted these crimes are directly responsible for what they did and must be held responsible. There also must be regulations on these camps to make sure incidents like these never happen again.
Then where's the justice held? You must then ask. I don't have a solid answer to it. I hope those responsible already got what they deserve. But those verdicts probably won't be made public. You surely can understand why given the heat on all of this.
But I'm more confident that the CCP has placed better regulation on all the camps to prevent such incidents from happening again. The reason is CCP has invited western reporters to visit and investigate on the ground. Of course, they probably won't find any evidence that those incidents ever happened, but they will be shown with all the regulations of these places to a degree that no problem can be found. Surely western reporters also understand that very well -- most haven't responded to the invitation because they know they won't be able to dig more dirt on this.
Another level of discussion is whether it's humane to force/mandate people to attend re-education camps. If you want we can get into that as well.
I think if you really want to help people in those camps, you should start talking about donations, improving their living conditions, providing educational resources, even collaboration on education projects, help them graduate/get out of there, and get a job sooner.
I want to show some folks on HN, even with Chinese people, you can have a civil and reasonable conversation on controversial topics. We are not liars, nor monsters without compassion. We are also normal people, just like you. It's completely up to you to listen or deny.
Regulations are not worth much without enforcement. Enforcement requires inspections to verify regulations are being followed and punishment if they're not. But if the regulations are not being followed, then cheating the inspections is another way to avoid punishment. It's much cheaper to put on a show for the inspectors than to make permanent improvements. So a lot of cheating is to be expected.
The Chinese crackdown on Xinjiang goes back well beyond the terror attacks. There used to be a secular, non-violent Uighur movement for their rights, including Uighur communists who simply wanted the right to use their own language at all times and not Chinese, like the laws ostensibly allow. However, in the 1980s and 1990s the Beijing regime imprisoned many of those activists or sent them into exile. At the same time, Han settlers were entering the area even though it was clear that this would change the region’s demographics.
Once the secular and non-violent activism was shut down, there arose out of desperation new trends that were violent and/or Islamist. But that doesn’t mean the CCP’s policy of Uighur assimilation and Han settlement didn’t come first.
Another observation I have is that there's little mention of the history of Xinjiang itself. The long-standing threat from Russian influence starting from before Republic of China (ROC) period. And the autonomous Muslim defense against russian puppet gov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_rebellion_in_Xinjiang_... and even the later alliance with the communist party. Sure you could argue from one-side that all that is happening is wrong but unfortunately a lot of the evidence today are from anti-china alliance such as epoch times, which in my opinion really hides the real issues of the chinese society.
However I do agree with you, for the opposite it might well see han population as a threat, probably right from the early dynasties. I have by no means implied Russian influence is 'evil', it is simply the historical narrative. It is only natural that from 1900s the powers around that area want to take control in the geopolitics. Same situation today.
My point is that if you understand the situation better (which is hard because of language / culture barriers, similar to middle east crisis), you might be able to know more nuances of the issue.
How does CCP define terrorists? Do they show you how do they investigate then decide they are terrorists?
CCP can define any attacks as terrorist. In case it's a revolt against inhumane treatment, can they say they are under terroristic attack from CCP?
The whole site is very good - and the independent journalist speaks Chinese and is fairly unbiased (excerpt from site "the US makes a big deal out of the treatment of Muslims in China while underwriting genocide in Yemen"). Especially the analysis on the leaked documents [2].
[1] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/aac16063149c4e37a8e3ee58066c4837...
[2] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/c227d529f6f0469392edbe07980f9f70
> Surely western reporters also understand that very well -- most haven't responded to the invitation because they know they won't be able to dig more dirt on this.
Here's another view point. CCP is anti democracy. Any Chinese citizen who oppose the authority of CCP must be encouraged in the interest to promote democracy.
That doesn't mean there isn't a strong correlation with the country and it's political leaders. In my opinion, a country may be judged by it's leaders.
Do you think the authorities could be more transparent about what is happening in these regions?
But that doesn't mean they will ignore the problem, but on the contrary, they always take care the situation swiftly and always show off their results one way or the other. If you know China enough you should be familiar with how they operate.
What matters is they are giving all the resources to the people in the camp, and implementing strict regulation and accountability for all the activities in the camp, to make sure everything is running humanely and lawfully.
And yet you trust them to do the right thing. I think that's where most of the disagreement comes from. A politician in the Western world who would try to avoid transparency would be suspect, we would think they did something wrong. I think westerners tend to judge the CCP on the same basis, but apparently you trust them.
What have they done to earn your trust?
How do you make sure that they don't abuse this trust (especially without transparency)?
Surely it would be possible for them to lose your trust, if they abused it. What kind of situation would that be?
I think it's more a question of having bad medias (that can and did lie) is probably easier to trust than having no medias. Big communist countries (and other non communist, like Tunisia or some middle east ones) had a history of removing journalists.
https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...
And of course Weibo search doesn't work for Uyghur content. Try finding this post using any of the words in it: https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4606432605644442 I found it by searching for Uyghur words in Latin script to find someone posting in Uyghur, then looking through their posting history.
I think Weibo is pretty much useless as a source of unfiltered information, unless you're already a heavy Weibo user and can just stumble across things instead of having to rely on search.
How so? Its ability to expand its control beyond its current reach is pretty limited. It is surrounded by the lands and military forces of Russia, India, and the US and its client states like Japan and South Korea.
Americans aren't very interested in defending human rights, but they're deeply invested in defending the lie that they are interested in defending human rights.
Not saying I have any clue about Xinjiang or that the CCP is positive for the country, but I feel uneasy everyone switched from prisoner camps to genocide - it seems to distract away from the actual issue to move into borderline hysteria.
A bit like the HK situation moved from an extradition issue over a taiwan murder to a large "save Hong Kong" hysteria... But whatever, you used the racist card, what can we say ...
The Chinese gov doesn't care and doesn't want to care, they are being bamboozled by the true winners of the situation: the DAB party using the communist paranoia to consolidate their local power acting as good little patriots (when every law they passed is anti-communist, really, and pro-status quo).
So the DAB suspended the legislative election after they lost the district one, for one year. They can act like that with the blame being directed at China by constantly looking the other way when asked to give an opinion about China and acting as if they were under order. But it serves 0 chinese interest, it makes the entire population hate China and China hate the population, with the DAB cementing itself into the only barrier still there before the army intervenes.
It's so obvious yet so missed by everyone that it's painful to watch. I hope there's a masterplan in Beijing, but I doubt they even understand what people think in Beijing, let alone in Hong Kong, so ...
And the DAB represents a large class of the population, too: the elders, the rent-owners, the large corporations, the traditional post-colonial Hong Kong. That's the people you see on the sideline shaking their head and taking picture in mass when the kids burn a metro station. The journalists don't film it, but I'm there with everyone just commenting at the monkeys while the western media stream them with a close angle as if they were fighting China or for freedom... While nobody is communist in Hong Kong, not even the metro station they hate so much !
I saw my entire family switch to the DAB during the protests so maybe I'm under bias thinking this produced exactly the opposite effect all sides looked for: Hong Kong is not more independent, Hong Kong is not more Chinese, but the DAB sure is more powerful - we'll see what happens if they restore the election, but at this point they can get away with not doing it and say "oh but without us it's the PLA so calm down"