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Comment by alphabetting | Hacker News Reader

>If you start with the assumption that Chinese government is trying to do good for its citizens

Why would anyone do that given treatment of Uyghurs?

It's a difficult topic, I don't think any country has found a humane way to deal with terrorist organizations.

US chose to bomb Afghanistan into the ground, China chose to establish very strict social controls. Both are terribly inhumane to innocent people in those regions, but what are real alternatives?

Nobody is talking about terrorist organizations.

Terrorism was the reason given for the initial escalation towards the Uighurs around 2014. There were several domestic terrorism incidents involving a handful of Uighurs around, the most notable (to me) being there was a car-fire/bomb in Tian'anmen Square late 2013 and a knife attack at Kunming Train station.

Wikipedia lists a steady stream of domestic terrorism incidents involving Uighurs [0]. It seems like the Chinese government only has one tool in their toolbox--control--so apparently their solution is to eliminate the entire ethnicity, although my prediction is that ultimately that will increase the amount of attacks, because now the entire population has a (concrete) grievance as opposed to a few radicalized ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Chronology_...

It seems in China it’s only considered terrorism if it’s committed by an ethnic minority. Han Chinese have committed far more terrorist attacks yet you don’t see the government putting innocent Han Chinese in concentration camps.

It's a mental exercise similar to watching a movie."Willing suspension of disbelief", it's called. Why would you care whether Mr. Big Muscles is winning or not given that he's just pretending to be the hero of the universe?

From the Chinese perspective, what their government is doing to the Uyghurs is justified because terrorist separatist muslims. And anyway, from the Chinese perspective, nothing really bad is happening to the Uyghurs anyway, they're just being reformed into good citizens.

If you're American I'm sure you can relate to the Chinese here. I almost never think about the millions of dead Iraqi people my tax money contributed to

The major difference is in America you can criticize what America did to Iraqis at the top of your lungs and work to get different leaders elected. Can't do the same in China without consequences.

I can complain all I want and work for as much change as I'd like.

Completely without any sort of consequences in the world.

can't criticize the govt in effort to elect new leaders in China which was my point.

I presume you understood mine.

Is that a major difference? to who? us? makes absolutely no difference to the victims

It's true you can't undo the past but it's still a major difference. A population having the ability to speak freely and change elected leaders can effect change and prevent governments from continuing bad policies. Is it really that difficult to see how different that is from a continual status quo?

In what way do we not have a continuous status quo since world war 2? the US continues invading countries and expanding the empire regardless of protests or people's writings. That's my point, none of it has made a difference

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