Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses
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Chinese government saying that US is being hypocrite because they did so and so in Iraq and whatever happened after 9/11 from abuses..etc would be good. If only they did that in general while not trying to say okay don't talk about us doing it because we think you did the same.
That would be great if you stand up against oppression in general not just when you can benefit. It would be great if we can just talk about people suffering and try to help them in every possible way.
The easy present day case to back up this claim that the US does not "stand up against oppression..." is Yemen: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113852. With various slight modifications, and given enough time to explain, you can add a host of other countries to that list: Afghanistan, Syria, Israel+Palestine, etc. Go back 20-30 years and you can add Iraq. Go back a little further and add Indonesia+East Timor, Iran, most of South and Central America. It's more complicated to make the case, and there are still too many uncertainties about what actually happened, but you could probably even add "nice, Western" countries like Italy to that list.
The point is, China often uses this false talk of "moral stands" as a (mostly sarcastic) retort to the US, because the US sincerely engages in the same false talk in 90% of its communications and more importantly, in material actions that affect actual lives on the ground.
I don't think what we've done in the middle east is remotely good but it's substantially different.
But sure, if I have to pick which country to live in, on this metric I'd probably pick the US (we're smoothing over some extremely significant internal problems in the US here, but not directly comparable to Xinjiang, so OK, let's side-step them for the moment).
But that's a pretty selfish view. Good conditions at home don't justify imposing awful conditions abroad. To think so is literally imperial logic. I realize using phrases like "imperial" induces eye-rolling in some, but it's appropriate for the concept we're discussing here. The US's cold calculating cruelty is perhaps less obvious, but it undoubtedly impacts far more lives and deaths. So while I won't weigh in on whether the US is an empire (don't care), if you buy into the logic that "we're only evil abroad, at home we try to be nice", then that is imperial logic.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/15/politics/immigration-customs-...
> https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/15/politics/immigration-customs-...
The hysterectomies weren't US or ICE policy, they were the result of poor oversight of one contract doctor who was committing malpractice.
https://theintercept.com/2021/05/20/ice-irwin-hysterectomies...
> ICE stopped sending immigrant women to Amin after the allegations of nonconsensual and unnecessary procedures came to light. The FBI is currently investigating Amin for a series of unnecessary, rough, or abusive procedures, according to a report in Prism by Tina Vásquez earlier this month.
Amin is the doctor.
Well the hysterectomy thing was the one doctor (and the facility failing at its duty to properly oversee him). However, it wouldn't surprise me if there were other issues there as well.
We agree.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/21/congress-ice...:
> At least 43 women at Irwin county detention center (ICDC), in Georgia, have now alleged misconduct by Amin. He is accused of operating on migrant women without their consent or performing procedures that were medically unnecessary and potentially endangered their ability to have children.
https://www.ajc.com/news/congressmen-georgia-doctor-should-n...:
> Ogburn, who has worked as a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist for nearly three decades and who has led organizations that develop patient care standards, said Amin did a variety of tests and surgeries for patients that “did them little or no good, and potentially caused harm.”
> “In summary the care provided by Dr. Amin did not meet acceptable standards based on the review of these records,” Ogburn wrote as part of his complaint. “My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients.”
1. Less than 43 women is not "mass sterilization." It's well within the scope of damage could be expected from one incompetent doctor.
2. It's quite believable to me that the jail officials never questioned the medical activities of the doctor (let alone understood what he was doing was malpractice) and just ignored complaints they received from the detainees. For comparison, this outrageously incompetent guy (https://www.propublica.org/article/dr-death-christopher-dunt...) managed to avoid oversight for two years while he was maiming and killing people.
> Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody.
Nurse Wooten, who filed the whistleblower complaint.
That is an argument against abuse, not in favor. What are their arguments to support their actions?
However, US freezing the whole country account is bad. This doesn't just punish few bad people, but it punishes many good people. Liberation happens through development, not through revenge & suppression.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3160159/ch...
[2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-02-17/China-calls-for-return...
I found this documentary[1] by CGTN about the recent history of extremism and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang to be useful in outlining some of the context for this.
These terrorist attacks were a real problem and have resulted in the deaths of over 1000 civilians (including Uyghurs). China's argument is basically their re-education "camps" are an attempt to address the underlying causes of this, which is basically economic under-development, lack of education and job opportunities. So China basically identified the people who were involved in these groups and susceptible to radicalisation by them, and set up these schools for them which would teach them skills, including Mandarin, that would help find decent jobs that could provide for them and their families, which eliminates the underlying material basis of the support from some parts of the population that the terrorists may have had.
Having said that, there is still a huge discrepancy in what China says it's doing and what the west claims it's doing. Western sources claim that these are actually "concentration camps" and that there are as many as one or even two million Uyghurs interred there. These allegations are dubious for a number of reasons, but that's a topic for a different post.
Like I said, your question is the right question: what is the Chinese justification for this? And I think it's fair to say their answer is at least plausible on the surface of things and internally consistent. But it leads us to another question: if the claims of western sources of one million plus Uyghurs in "concentration camps" are true, then how does the west explain China's motive for that? China isn't stupid. Why would it put 10% of the population of an entire province in a concentration camp? Are they just that cartoonishly evil? It doesn't really add up to me.
Even the most pessimistic Zenz estimates of XJ internment at 1/12 of population is roughly lifetime incarceration level of US blacks. And the hit job articles on XJ vocational/reeducational "slave" labour programs still have "inmates" paid dramatically better than US prison labour in absolute terms and substantially better in regional terms. Exceeding ~40% of 600M Han Chinese subsisting on informal wage economy. Han Chinese would lose their shit if they find out the amount of subsidies going into XJ securitization and sinicization. If they the the choice between spending trillions to "tame the savage" in XJ versus 12M bullets for an actual genocide, the amount that would pick the latter would be disturbing.
US tried to nation build and spread western values in Afghanistan - PRC is nation building in XJ and spreading PRC values. Just with less bombs and more infrastructure.
Zenz is literally _the_ source of anti-Chinese propaganda. He's the main person behind "Chinese Tribunal", which... well, a private NGO, operating without any legal basis or oversight, calling themselves a "tribunal", think what you will.
Talk all you want, PRC's position is the hypocrisy is moving beyond talk into sanctions and other actions that undermine XJ development for counter-insurgency actions. Same reason rest of world is annoyed into being pressured to sanction RU over invading UKR when US/west did not. It's about weaponizing morality for geopolitics.
There is greater incentive for those 3 countries to care what China is doing to fellow Muslims and they don't oppose it.
Dictators dig dictators, it's that simple
Formally they actively support it - they endorse PRC "deradicalization" policy since they suffer from extremist problems themselves. This isn't complicated, plurality of the world does not buy US/western genocide framing - they see PRC policy as relatively peaceful counter-insurgency and actual nation building effort for restive peoples which these regions have to deal with in spades. It's absolutely in their interest for XJ model to work, and perhaps be adoptable through a neat package like Huawei smart cities. West exports democracy that ultimately destabilize vs PRC exports security for serenity. Of course latter is preferable.
The USA just spent 20 years in the middle east 'deradicalizing' or at least that's the going claim from both these regimes. The USA doubts China because they know they were oh so wrong about that claim, not that they admit it.
99 terrorists on the wall, drone strike one, 105 terrorists on the wall.
>This isn't complicated, plurality of the world does not buy US/western genocide framing - they see PRC policy as relatively peaceful counter-insurgency and actual nation building effort for restive peoples which these regions have to deal with in spades.
I wonder how much the US/western biased media is really the one at fault here.
>It's absolutely in their interest for XJ model to work, and perhaps be adoptable through a neat package like Huawei smart cities. West exports democracy that ultimately destabilize vs PRC exports security for serenity. Of course latter is preferable.
This is interesting to me. I feel like you're saying something different. In a way you're saying democracy is unstable and PRC communist control with security is serenity.
This shanghai situation... brink of a peasant's revolt. Some crazy stuff going on there and the government decided to flipflop on an ultralockdown. The original reason for ultralockdown has actually only gotten worse. This is far from serenity in my books.
IMO misplaced doubt since forceful integration is as old has human civilization. US/west did it with indigenous peoples, and modern CCP has done it with fragmented post civil war China. People criticize cultural revolution / reeducation but forgets it works, almost always with proper application of force and commitment. Which US lacked in Afghanistan but PRC doing in spades with XJ securitization. There's been 0 terrorist attacks since. It's time tested instrument of control.
>biased media
The entire XJ genocide initiative is spearheaded under lying Pompeo, using host of US funded NGOs to launder fabricated narratives with hundreds of millions of propaganda funding directed to manufactured consent. So at least that much.
>democracy is unstable and PRC communist control with security is serenity.
No I'm saying PRC approach to COIN/deradicalization with mass monitoring and securitization infra has so far proven to be more effective for maintaining peace than haphazardly blowing people up while dumping money into corrupt reconstruction efforts. It's just a more serious and systematic approach because by all accounts US gave up rebuilding politically and was shovelling resources into a hole for maintenance mode due to politics.
>brink of a peasant's revolt
Same was said about Wuhan and other PRC chernobyl moments. I'll wager there will be less upheaval than antimask/vax protests. Citing "flipflop" as if western epidemiological responses haven't had massive same week changes according to development. A privileged Tier1 city of 25m lockdown with expected logistic hiccups and so far it's mostly people moaning on social media with very little "revolt" bleeding in real life - hasn't even escalated to tier of drama at end of Hubei lock down when adjacent provinces were trying to block cross border travel. It's milder than anything experienced in the west so far for lockdown more severe than anything west have implemented. There's nothing unanticipated about public outrage over inconveniences from lockdowns - that's how humans lash out everywhere regardless of severity. But seeing "peasants revolt" and "far from serenity" because western media reposted some weibo complaints is how PRC collapsists have been consistently wrong.
Couple month from now, if SH trends the way of Jilin or Shenzheng then CCP could be bragging about system defeating infectious covid strain that broke every other system (including soon to live with virus TW). The ability to mobilize and logistically supply 25M people with some initial blunders will also be massive propaganda win - everyone blunders, state capacity is about who blunders least and self corrects quickest.
There needs to be a better response to pointing out hypocrisy. If you care about China's abuses but not ours and our allies, you do not have the moral high ground, and morality is a political tool to you.
It's more of a chant, a mantra, a trigger word you are conditioned to bring up when some kind of obvious hypocrisy or double standard is being pointed out that you cannot otherwise refute.
[edit] Also, "whataboutism" the word, sounds like from 2ndgrader vocabulary
You're replying to an expression of shock at the behavior on display (specifically, people claiming - in a thread about Chinese torture camps - that we should not talk about them, because we weren't talking about American torture camps, so it would be hypocritical to talk about the Chinese ones).
I'm generally in agreement that this isn't great behavior.
Complaining that a word sounds childish while displaying your ignorance of its meaning is not the slam dunk you think it is.
The post could have been "torture camps are bad" piece. It is instead focuses on "China is bad" propaganda
Yes, to an audience who have read nothing else on the topic. The people here for this discussion are - by definition - people who read about and/or discuss these topics.
As a discussion thread for a news story (and not, say a textbook for an introduction to world powers and their deeds), discussing tangentially-related events draws diminishing returns.
"Torture camps are bad" is an essay you could ask a high-schooler to write. It's neither news nor informative.
"We are obtaining new evidence that the government of China is running torture camps" manages to be both news and informative.
"US government runs torture camps" is neither news (has something changed?) nor informative (it's been well known for years).
Publishing a comparative treatment of national misdeeds might also manage to be informative; statistical modeling of the harms done by various governments, for instance.
I don't think it does, and I don't think it's a good idea to attribute meaning when there is no one if you want to keep an open, good faith debate. At any point in time there are lots of terrible things being done in the world, to a various degree and to a various number of people. You can't talk about all of them every time you want to talk about one of them.
No it doesn't.
> It would be fair to mention other countries involved in similar behavior.
That would be exceedingly impractical. Must every discussion anything contain mention of every thing someone things is similar? No of course not, that's pure distraction.
How fair do you think it is to the Uyghurs that any discussion of their plight must turn into an obsessive digression about the US?
It's the scale difference between the US blowing up a wedding party by accident as a moral crime and Russia raping and murdering their way through Bucha or Mariupol. The emotionalist mob would proclaim they're the same thing.
No, it's not the same scale of evil as wiping out a city, but... pretending it's less than it was is an ugly look.
Now we know what you are. I reference the on-going vast war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, and you talk about it being a self-inflicted, pretend photo-op.
The scale of destruction in Afghanistan? This is how I know you're flailing. The US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan. The US paid for more schools and hospitals to be built in Afghanistan than the rest of the world combined fifty times over throughout all of Afghanistan's history.
Now Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, which was their situation before the US went in. The Taliban are promptly tearing down civilization, instead of trying to build it up.
> US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan
I wonder where all this money end up, then.
It really shows how the US failed in the Afganistan -- when the Afgan people prefer the Taliban over US occupation.
Btw, did you know Taliban banned poppy cultivation and opium production promptly after the US evac? Why did drug trade flourished under the US rule? (dont bother, I know the "approved" answer is that there was nothing else for the population to do)
I am an American, not a “global citizen”. My responsibility is to America. Let the people of other countries take moral responsibility for their governments. To pretend that America has some unique moral insights that need to be imposed on the rest of the world is both deeply racist and contradicted by history.
A particularly egregious example of this was the US condemnation of Russia at the UN for using cluster bombs in Ukraine, when the US has directly used some cluster bombs in Yemen in the last few years, and continues to supply massive quantities to Saudi Arabia. This claim is often "disputed" by saying that the US stopped manufacturing these weapons years ago, but with stockpiles as high as the US has, that is no refutation at all.
Focusing primarily on these US failings is exactly what a US person should do.
The problem is that these allegations and institutions are not trustworthy.
Institutions that are controlled by the west and are applied only against the enemies of the west. Immigrants who speak out against their motherland under the promise of a better life in the west. Groups that once were terrorists, and killed by our military en masse, are now freedom fighters with a just cause.
Just ten years ago, the US was bombing Uyghurs in Afghanistan based on Chinese intelligence.
Now this issue is used to ban Chinese clothing and solar cells.
Do people realize that the British Empire was the thing that most opposed Hitler?
Seems like people know no history…
I long for the day when US war crimes are treated the same way as war crimes by non-western countries. Instead they pull off shit like the Hague Invasion Act.
In all of the other wars you mention the US acted alongside broad coalitions. If you're going to criticize the US you should also criticize Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, Australia and Germany.
Might be because its the US drones who are bombing marriages, not Spains or Italys.
[Removed. Thank you commented below for the reminder to keep my background out of it]
I have watched the democracy, WMD, and human rights theatrics deployed before. There are always people saying "let's be a little skeptical" and they are always called treasonous and unpatriotic. Yet we find and time again that there is wisdom in heeding their warnings.
So please keep in mind that some of us are under the proverbial boot and so we have a good reason to remember how this play goes.
Where are you from?
It takes a pro-Western stance to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine under false pretense but celebrate America invading Iraq under false pretenses (a war in which literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War).
Sure if there was an article talking about what a great job the US is doing with foreign policy it's fair game to bring up times when the US had bad foreign policy.
I know the US has interrupted the Grammy's broadcast to denounce Russia, or started the Saturday Night Live broadcast denouncing Russia, or fired various opera singers or pushed Russians out of sports federations so I guess tech is just another base to cover. After weeks of Russia bashing I guess it's time to get back to bashing the Chinaman's yellow peril.
In my opinion, it's perfectly OK for commenters to compare issues in Russia or China with issues in Europe or the US. And I can also relate that people in the US have a stronger opinion on fixing US issues than on fixing issues in China. If someone writes: "Let's fix discrimination close to where I live first!", that is not necessarily a bad thing or trying to distract or whataboutism. They are merely using this related topic to point out their own priorities.
I believe we should give them the benefit of doubt, especially if they mention real issues, and not just made up stuff. And in my opinion, faith-, color- or gender-based discrimination can sadly still be an issue in the west, too.
Also there's the issue of reciprocity: We wouldn't want China to intervene in the US. That makes it fair to ask why the US should be allowed to intervene in China / Russia. "We're the good guys" tends to be a lot more messy in practice.