The forgotten Americans who ended in the gulag | Hacker News Reader

The forgotten Americans who ended in the gulag

nysun.com

15 pointspeakok7 comments

Sad stories. It's interesting, that similarly how Western media painted a distorted picture of Soviet communist regime, they now paint a distorted picture of China communist regime. The same deception tactics still works, the existence of forced labors camps (gulags) is very rarely mentioned, horrible human rights abuses go unreported in mainstream media, etc.

When will mankind learn their lessons?

Is your argument that conditions in China are comparable to those in Stalinist Russia, and, if so, can you support that argument with evidence?

The Soviet regime ran a large system of forced labor camps. China currently runs a large system of forced labor camps. Horrible human rights violations occurred under the Soviet system and are currently occurring in China.

Here's a recent, quite representative, example of the sort of thing that can happen to someone in China:

"Chinese teacher sent to labour camp for earthquake photos" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/30/chinaearthquake....

Excerpt:

  A Chinese teacher has been sent to a labour camp over his   
  internet photographs of schools that collapsed in the 
  Sichuan earthquake, a rights group said today.

  Liu Shaokun was ordered to serve a year of "re-education   
  through labour", according to Human Rights in China. The 
  system does not require a formal charge or criminal trial 
  and there is no appeal.

This quote doesn't capture the main reason for his jailing. When looking at superficial reasons, it seems unrelated (taking a photo, reading a book, eating ice cream, joining a religion, etc), but the root reason is "causing social unrest". He was taking pictures to expose possible government corruption in the building of the school. This would have caused people to protest and blame the local government for the students' deaths.

Likewise with Falun Gong. Suppressing religion isn't the end goal. It's the fear of someone having influence over a large number of people, and thereby possibly causing social unrest.

Don't read this as a defense of the Chinese government. I'm just trying to clarify the quote to prevent the "how can they jail someone for THAT?" response.

Yes, the conditions are comparable for those citizens, who were labeled as enemies of the regime. I don't know what you will accept as an evidence, but here are a few links:

http://laogai.org - research of the laogai, so called "Chinese gulags". China has more than 1,000 of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong_and_live_organ_harve... - Organ harvesting from living people

There are also other reports by United Nations or Amnesty international about that.

The Chinese equivalent to the Soviet-era gulag is the laogai ("reform through labor") camp:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai

I guess "One Day in the Life of John Smith" didn't sound as interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com