EDIT: Wow, actually more than a decade now since the original BDS statement.
Did the Muslims in Xinjiang declare a war against China? did they blow up Chinese buses or shoot thousands of rockets at Chinese civilians ?
>In recent years, ETIM has set up bases outside China to train terrorists and has dispatched its members to China to plot and execute terrorist acts including bombing buses, cinemas, department stores, markets and hotels. ETIM has also undertaken assassinations and arson attacks and has carried out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets abroad. Among the violent acts committed by ETIM members were the blowing up of the warehouse of the Urumqi Train Station on 23 May 1998, the armed looting of 247,000 RMB Yuan in Urumqi on 4 February 1999, an explosion in Hetian City, Xinjiang, on 25 March 1999 and violent resistance against arrest in Xinhe County, Xinjiang, on 18 June 1999. These incidents resulted in the deaths of 140 people and injuries to 371.
https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_sanctio...
The Uygars have so far been a lot more peaceful in their oppression.
I also find that Israel is very good in presenting itself in the western MSM, while China seems to have the western MSM against it lately. That makes me also a bit more hesitant to accept the MSM's China critiques.
Personally I think that attack on civilians cannot justify the actions of Chinese state or of the Israeli state (massive repression against civilians and continued colonization). And while I condemn both China and Israel for such actions, the two situation are very different.
Though the CCP claim to not be doing so, it's been a trademark of their party for generations and overall, nothing new. We're just seeing a glimpse of it now, because of the dawn of the internet age.
If you want to see more there are several Chinese state sponsored English media outlets that cover it in great detail, though they like to pretend to have no affiliation. Continued development in the region is expected along with the belt and road initiatives. And a long list of other issues as well.
If you want an unbiased source of information about the ongoing event in China check out. https://www.neican.org
How do you explain Chinese Uyghurs committing terrorist acts in the rest of Asia outside of China?
China has about 1.8m Uygurs in internment camps = 14% [2]
I would call that a far cry.
Also, many other statistics of welfare, e.g. child mortality or GPD/capita in the West Bank and Gaza are about the same or better than in the neighboring countries (Jordan, Egypt). On the other hand, there seems to be quite substantial evidence for mass sterilizations and abortions forced on Uygurs in China. I have never heard of anything like that committed by Israel.
Again, I do believe that there are overreaches and overreactions on the Israeli side to actions by the Palestinians and there are innocent lives lost on both sides. I really hope, that they at some point manage to either live together peacefully or agree on a two state solution.
But there is a very substantial difference between that and the plight of the Uygurs.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/17/infographic-how-man... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Inside_internm...
The entire West Bank and Gaza Strip are effectively a giant detention camp.
Here's your problem; trying to talk about "the situation of Muslims in China" is incoherent. Islam has been an accepted (though small) part of Chinese culture for many centuries, and it still is. The Uyghurs are highly atypical Muslims in China who don't speak Chinese and don't participate in Chinese culture, instead preferring their own rival culture. That (and rebelliousness) is why they're oppressed.
Uyghurs have problems in China. Muslims don't, except to the extent that negative views of the Uyghurs start bleeding over into negative views of Muslims generally (which is indeed happening).
I've been confused for years about why the Western press seems so determined to demonstrate that it has no idea what it's talking about by representing oppression of Uyghurs as "oppressing people because of their religion". The case just can't be made. It would be trivial to call it "oppressing people because of their race"; that case is easy to make. But I guess the Western audience wouldn't see race-based oppression as being all that villainous?
Xi Jinping has cracked down on Christianity shutting down many churches. China has other ethnicities besides the Han, which don't speak Mandarin. If the Uyghurs had no faith they would be safe.
There is little room for religion unless the religion is centralized and submissive to the state. In some sense religion undermines the state.
In the 21st century, especially under the CCP, they're just competing forces more than direct adversaries, they both strive to do the same thing. And for most of History, the Church was the State.
It's parallels are quite visible, and now most wars are fought not for the deliberate imposition of deities, but rather for the new pantheon of self-declared god's: political leaders.
Would you agree that the "Party" in CCP is something entirely different from what this term means in the west, and that it's closer in its meaning to a secularised version of a centralised church?
People wash away the misdeeds of the CCP during COVID because it suits their agenda, all the while their were was dissent fomenting during lockdowns. Han Chinese have been starved in Shanghai, those make shift hospitals were a joke and they under reported the deaths etc...
No, I'm very open about my disdain about the CCP, it's a cancer on the World and it should be seen for what it is.
This is wildly false. The Church of England is about as close as things get. What historical periods are you thinking of in which the Church and the State were identified?
In short most of the impactful societies, specifically in the West have had hardcore religious zealotry.
It would be difficult for Isabella to be called the Catholic without being religiously subordinate to the Pope.
> Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well.
This is a bizarre claim. Pagan Greece and Rome didn't have organized religion at all, not in any sense we would understand. And both were riddled with mystery cults. The Church was unified with the classical Greek State only in the same sense that it was unified with the olive oil industry, or that the modern American Church is unified with the modern American State.
I do get what you mean about language, insofar as most people of the Hui ethnic group do tend to speak the dominant Sinitic language of the region in which they live and not an entirely different language family like most Uyghur people. But that's more of a geographic inevitability than some kind of fundamental cultural difference - people from Inner Mongolia don't speak a Sinitic language either, does that make them equally as un-Chinese as people from Xinjiang? And if that matters so much, why does the Chinese government insist on holding on to these provinces whose culture is apparently unacceptably divergent from what they deem to be Chinese?
In any case, even Hui face some degree of discrimination in China, documented most recently in national anti-halal actions that expanded well beyond Xinjiang[0]. Like most minority ethnicities in the country, their culture is often joked about or dismissed in ways that "mainstream" Han culture is not. While this may not be blatant bigotry, the discrimination is something that would not be considered appropriate in countries whose people are more welcoming of ethnic diversity.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-religion-islam-idUS...
No, speaking a different language is the most fundamental cultural difference there is.
> And if that matters so much, why does the Chinese government insist on holding on to these provinces whose culture is apparently unacceptably divergent from what they deem to be Chinese?
I asked this question of a Chinese high school student once. His response was that the Chinese didn't want to be conquered by the people of those regions. (Which notably happened in the 13th and 17th centuries.)
Wikipedia says that when the Qing dynasty fell, the idea was brought up that Xinjiang and similar regions should be divested from China as not being Chinese; they see the retention of non-Chinese territory as more a matter of no one being willing to take the responsibility/blame for the country getting smaller.
Responding separately to this bit of inanity, if we're going to take Chinese official descriptions at face value, the Uyghurs aren't being oppressed in any way. They're in charge of their own 自治区.
[1] I think my home country of Bangladesh is thousands of miles away from any significant population of Jews. Yet the casual antisemitism is off the charts.
EDIT: Got some anonymous hate mail from a BDS saying “the tide is turning” and threatening me for my support of the “apartheid state Israel.” Sorry for exposing the things folks say “just between us.”
The sabre rattling by the gulf states is 100% motivated by distracting their people with rage rather than by actual concern for Palestinians - but don't let that distract you from the fact that the states on Palestine's doorstep have genuinely dealt with their share of the human tragedy caused by the conflict. Close to a quarter of Jordan's citizens are now Palestinians, and the intake of refugees in Lebanon even triggered a 15 year civil war when the delicate Christian-Muslim political balance in the country was disrupted.
The relationship between Egypt and especially Jordan and the Palestinians is extremely complicated. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September
Currently Gaza is under partial blockade by Israelis, with extreme consequences on the population and the economy. And colonization continues on west bank, with many many check points... While heavy critics can certainly be made against administration of those territories by Egypt and Jordan, arguments would be welcome to support your view.
Anti-semitism went through the roof when Zionists started taking large tracts of land for a new state that wasn't recognised by its neighbours. Pan-Arabists and muslim groups, knew their land could be next if the precedent went unchallenged and stirred up bigotry in response. The hatred was initially more of the idea of Israel than of Jews.
And they were prepared to throw Palestinians under a bus too, banishing them to a multi-generational life of homelessness and refugee status rather than allow full citizenship, so as to keep pressure on Israel and prevent normalisation of the situation. Of course they don't care about Palestinians either.
Now, in the Gulf states it's about business. Outside the Gulf States it's about domestic politics. But beneath the bigotry, the principled opposition to land annexation by foreign powers still remains.
1) While antisemitism was prevalent all over (including in Muslim countries) the world before Israel existed, we've seen a shift in the Arabic world, and more generally in the Muslim population, after the creation of Israel, and the series of conflicts ensuing. e.g. Before the creation of Israel Jewish and Muslim lived in relative peace together in Morocco. So a case could be made that antisemitism is ALSO driven by how Israel was created and behaved (and let be clear, I condemn antisemitism).
2) Jerusalem is an holly city of Islam (and of Christian), so of course, any big thing happening there against Muslim bear much more weight ! This point is not necessity linked to antisemitism.
3) Israel became also the symbol of "Western imperialism" and of the humiliation of third word, and particularly of Muslims. That is a "Western country" that is seen as having stole the land of people and evicted 700.000 people. That is a country that continues colonization, evictions and repression... while being very actively supported for decades by US. This symbolic weight also explain why such attention.
4) And that is an old story, with many episodes. Just like a good TV show (with all the element above), when you've been exposed to many episodes, you are more keen to see the new episodes...
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DoughnutHole answered you about the refugees. Some countries also support(ed) financially Palestine and Palestinians (in Palestine or refugees).
For example, it's not "surprising hypocrisy" that Israel has a problem with racism towards some Jewish ethnic groups (Mizrahi, Ethiopian), despite Israel's supposedly deeply-held identity as a homeland where all Jews are welcome.
Note that this isn't a criticism of Israel! Just an acknowledgement that everywhere, people are people, and most people happen to be monsters. The fact that Arab countries care more about Arabs than a Muslim group halfway across the world seems almost tautological to me.
Only a little over 30 years ago China rolled out its military and crushed its own citizens beneath tank treads, then denied the whole thing happened.
Public condemnation against China will do nothing, so Islamic countries don't even try. Plus I would throw in a bit of geopolitcal posturing in that 1) going against China might look a little too much aligning with the US and 2) not pissing off China keeps some sort of partnership with China and it's deep pockets open in the future.
So, yeah, while the Western people can certainly voice their opinion, it's often because their opinion doesn't matter.
("According to an article in The Lancet, between 1980 and 2018, more than 30,000 were killed by the police", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...)
Can you please list all of the acts of restitution that the Chinese government has done since 1989?
Oh, and ignoring all that, you're posting an awful lot of whataboutisms. I count about 9 of them so far.
What game are you playing?
The broader point I think GP tries to make is: the west should not be so quick to point fingers, especially not while it's own fingers are covered in blood.
The US likes to same "human rights violations" about other nations, but then commits many themselves every year, and claims to be above the The Hague court.
I also believe the US has not right to use those terms while it is still misbahaving on such a large scale.
I think that's absurd.
There isn't a country on this planet who hasn't committed some human rights violation in its past.
By your logic, nobody should ever call out human rights violations...ever.
A far better approach is to judge a country by its actions in totality. Yes the US commits human rights violations, but it also has courts where victims can seek restitution, a free press to talk about such violations, free elections where voters can choose leaders who work against human rights violations.
To compare the US and China and say "well they're both guilty of the same sins" is, frankly, bizarre.
Even a person fully invested in talking about U.S. human rights abuses and categorically disagrees with the idea that China has ever done anything wrong, you would hope that such a person wouldn't try to use the one topic to derail the other.
But, I don't believe I was wrong, I believe you're just confidently incorrect. You entered a thread about one subject, changed the subject to something else, and unless you were offering it as a complete non-sequitur (which you should be clear about), you were suggesting an appropriate response to criticism of China was to ask people follow you on an academic detour to a vague and largely nonresponsive point that left behind most of the previous subject, presumably because you believed that such an exercise represented forward motion in the conversation. So I do think you really are doing the "ignore that, what about this" exercise, and that is what people mean by whataboutism.
Moreover, while USA did in fact committed crimes either on own soil or internationally, claiming that it is exactly the same as China or Russia is just wrong. America has its own authoritarians trying to destroy its own democracy. It is has its own sociopaths in leadership too. And still, it is not currently commuting genocide, unlike China or Russia. And whatever wrong America did does not mean it is ok for China or Russia to be imperial or genocidal until America fills itself with angels only.
Not at all. Please read my comment in its context: it's a response to parent's claim that this can only happen in China, because in the West the public has the right to speak out and fix it - while in reality it happens too, and simply gets ignored, sometimes without even bothering to cover it up.
Also - ever seen the racial stats for US prisons, or for police shooting victims? Doesn't it look like a genocide to you? If it doesn't - perhaps it's because you've been told your entire life that it's actually normal, same way Chinese are taught their government crimes are ok. And even if it does - do you believe you can realistically do anything about it?
On the other hand in US it's at least properly documented. China does have a terrible problem with transparency, and I'm afraid it might be a cultural thing, because it's not just China.
You’ve still failed to explain why China’s actions against Uyghur population shouldn’t be condemned.
> it's a response to parent's claim that this can only happen in China, because in the West the public has the right to speak out and fix it
Not true. The parent said that in the Western countries can be pressured and the public has right and possibility to speak about issue. The implication is that therefore public pressure can be used to change the things. It was not that nothing bad in west ever happens.
> Also - ever seen the racial stats for US prisons, or for police shooting victims? Doesn't it look like a genocide to you?
Yes and actually no it does not look like genocide at all. It does look like racial bias and imprisonment rates are absurdly high. Nevertheless, it is not nearly genocide.
So, in USA there are literally entire law chapters designed to eliminate specific racial group (and hippies, that's what delegalisation of drugs was about). Yet you don't consider this a genocide. Ever wondered why?
Yeah, because if there was bad-faith definition of genocide or bad faith argument, this is the one.
But, given that article is about genocide performed by China, lets focus on that, shall we? Surely Chinese victims deserve some attention, surely we don't need to make USA center of everything. I dont know whether this is "I am American and cant handle when they talk about somebody else" issue or "I am Chinese and cant handle my country is seen as bad here" issue, but it is absurd regardless.
Not sure if you've noticed, but Zenz inferred genocide from improving contraceptives usage statistics. Double standards much?
So can we set the other argument aside just for a moment and get clarity on whether you think people in this thread are right to express concern re Xinjiang? That would disabuse everyone reading your comments of the concern that you're just purposely derailing them, and should be easy to clarify. We can have both discussions, without using one to shut down the other, and surely you want that. Right?
What matters is that nobody - not a single one of perpetrators of a bombing organised by police, which killed five random kids, and this is ignoring reports of police shooting at survivors fleeing the fire - got punished. "The city" paid some (public) money, that's all. It's not whataboutism, it's showing that the claim that "public condemnation against China will do nothing" because of Tienanmen is terribly misleading: those same things happen everywhere, you're just assuming they are somehow fundamentally different there. Sometimes they are, but mostly not.
As for the Chinese government: Chinese prime minister responsible for Tienanmen spent the rest of his life in house arrest. Can you imagine this happening in the land of the free?
Are you seriously arguing that response is better than the US?
Never mind crushing a democratic protest and killing thousands is in no way comparable to police trying to execute an arrest of a small group.
It never ceases to amaze me how people still believe things like this.
https://www.quora.com/What-do-Chinese-citizens-particularly-...
> Are you seriously arguing that response is better than the US?
Are you seriously not realising that you're making a huge assumption here? But please, tell me how putting the prime minister in house arrest for the rest of his life is a worse response than ignoring the whole thing altogether and not even pretending to prosecute.
(Also: thousands? Estimates, eg Amnesty International, say few hundred up to a thousand; funny how those numbers somehow keep growing when it's about China and not US, isn't it?)
But your telling me your quora link tells me all is fine?
Come on, your spending an awful lot of time defending a brutal dictatorship.
How is that different from Eastern Europe countries removing Soviet statues?
>Come on, your spending an awful lot of time defending a brutal dictatorship.
Do you know the political preferences of the people who actually live there? And if you do, why do you believe you know better?
It's the same reason most "Muslims" don't "care" about Al Qaeda and ISIS. Many Muslim populations, just like the Chinese, are negatively affected by Uighur terrorist and extremist groups.
"Southeast Asia is witnessing evolving security risks from Chinese Uyghurs' involvement in military activities in the region."
I think we are making the same point.
Some of the largest muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan) don't have sympathy for many Chinese Uyghur groups because once they leave China, they train with ISIS/Al Qaeda then plan and commit terrorist acts around Asia.
Many believe the Chinese are doing them a favor with their detention and deradicalization programs.
Low sympathy due to a few Uyghur terrorists has nothing to do with it. There is no international political solidarity among Muslims based on faith, Palestine has proven that. That's just business and realpolitik.
As for their treatment, who cares what beliefs/excuses the Chinese people have/give? Oppressors always have some BS reason for what they'll support.
That statement may be true among some of the political class but it sure isn't true among the general population.
Muslims generally also dislike terrorist groups like Al Qeada, ISIS, Al Shabaab, etc. If the Chinese started locking up those groups, most muslims wouldn't "care" either.
It's really more about hypocrisy and self-interest.
I really discourage people from taking the above post as an accurate representation of Muslim views.
For example people (and media) in France don't care about violence between groups in Africa. We quite never heard about the Congo Wars, about Ethiopia, about the Lord's Resistance Army... But heard a lot about Jihadist movements in Africa or Muslim Nigerians killing Christians, because it resonate with our "experience", and resonate with the world view of some people (Islam vs Christianity).(note that France have a good history of supporting dodgy groups and activities in Africa).
Muslim are like us all.
as you say, proximity. I went to school with people from Ukraine, I went to uni with people from Ukraine, I work with people in Ukraine right now. It's happening in weekend-holiday range from me. Makes it a lot less abstract.
"Muslims don't care about Muslims"
Yes Muslims are just completely different types of human. Who knew!
If you read the comment more closely, it's not "muslims don't care about muslims", it's, "arabs don't care about southeast asians", which... well, there's a ton of evidence for this unfortunately.
You can't write comments like this on HN. Choose better words. You're way off your game here.
As a South Asian with a virtually identical vantage point, I can assure you that rayiner has been repeatedly painting a false picture of south Asians in general and south asian muslims in particular.
This is about Gender but it applies to people applying this on ethnic groups as well.
"China also employs diplomatic pressure and financial incentives to secure foreign assistance in its efforts to persecute Uighurs abroad. Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan—one of China’s principal allies and the recipient of billions of dollars in loans as part of the Belt and Road Initiative—has said he accepts China’s explanation of the events in Xinjiang, despite frequently speaking out against Islamophobia elsewhere. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, which is China’s largest oil supplier, defended the CCP’s “right” to carry out “anti-terrorism and de-extremization work” during a 2019 trip to Beijing, where he signed a multibillion-dollar trade deal. The kingdom was one of the thirty-seven nations that signed on to a letter to the UN Human Rights Council praising China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights.” Saudi Arabia, along with other countries such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, have extradited Uighurs at China’s request, and the Associated Press reported last year on the alleged existence of a secret Chinese-run black site in Dubai, where abducted Uighurs had been detained. After an injection of Chinese funds into Turkey’s crisis-hit economy and shipments of vaccines during the height of the pandemic, even Erdoğan appears to have muted his once-strident criticism. Over the past two years, Turkish police have detained over one hundred Uighurs, including a number of activists, and deported several others."
Seems unbelievable considering Uighurs are, well, Turkic. Due in no small part to Genghis Khan of course.
[1] For a contemporary example in that region, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio... [2] https://ecfr.eu/publication/china_great_game_middle_east/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Turkey_relations...
Narrator: its not
There are some other comments here on it
Of course, the CCP is very averse to any power structures they don't completely control and thus regularly cracks down on all sorts of organized religion (Christian churches, Falun Gong, etc).
So yeah, this is not directed at Muslims so much as it's directed at people of Uyghur ethnicity very specifically. It almost looks like CCP would like to keep the territory, but without the inconvenient indigenous people.
And they use a mix of apartheid (which just by itself is already an internationally recognized crime against humanity) and a bunch of activities at least adjacent to genocide to get there.
Two other hot button 'types' that you refer to are:
1 - Explicit derogatory attacks on Islam.
2 - Resisting a colonization effort that has had brutally adverse and tragic consequences for both Muslim and Christian populations of the contested colonial grounds.
Uighurs are not the only Muslim populace of China. The largest Muslim populace is the Hui Chinese Muslims.
They are adherent of Islam, but they fully conform to Chinese culture and language, and they are devoid of religio-political goals.
The activity against the Uighurs is not anti-Muslim, it is anti-non-Chinese, and anti-potential-separatists.
See more:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people
[2]: https://time.com/3099950/china-muslim-hui-xinjiang-uighur-is...
[3]: https://thediplomat.com/2014/08/a-tale-of-two-chinese-muslim...
I am sure most of you haven’t heard the word "Hui" before.
They are 10.5 million strong, and they practice Sufism, a much softer and non-radical version of Islam.
They face no re-education camps at all.
What China doing is wrong. Period. But it is not anti-Islam.
Even if the others are genuine, this calls into question the veracity of the others
For instance, I don't know what to make of the significance of a cursor being visible in a document that is dumped (it might be a big deal, or it might not be at all) and I don't know how motivated the party is here to use that to prove a particular argument, or what it should or shouldn't prove.
In this case, you apparently have to be already bought in with the idea that BBC and Le Monde have a history of using fabricated info from the U.N., and that a reporter is untrustworthy for reasons explained at length in an entirely different twitter thread that you'd have to read to understand. After being that bought in, the fact that BBC, Le Monde, and/or this reporter are involved is treated as evidence in and of itself that the new info is unreliable. You have to agree with all that to even start in the middle and begin going through this analysis.
To state it plainly, whenever I see something like this that starts so deep in the middle of unexplained context, I treat it like an "indicator" (in the sense of an economic indicator) against the argument, because it feels like I'm being asked to skip critical steps.
But then again you wonder why such blatant mistakes would be made in the first place, if this was done by someone at least halfway professional.
1) software renders not Unicode characters but font glyphs
2) which font glyphs are chosen depends on many factors like installed fonts, OS, language/region settings, and so on
3) people author (and read) characters by how they look on their systems, what codepoints are used is not on anyone's mind
A differently configured system can uncover incorrect codepoint choices or rendering differences across machines, exactly what happened with the author of that tweet (supposedly living in Europe and not having the same old Windows machine as ones used in CCP apparat).
In fact, this happens all the time and is a routine headache for anyone building CJK sites viewed from different countries in the region (for example, I see some traditional Japanese characters, instead of their simplified Chinese versions, on http://cs.mfa.gov.cn/wgrlh/. Is there a hidden meaning? Is the site fake?). When it comes to MS Word and IME in old Windows versions, things are even wilder. I doubt the tweeter didn't know this, most likely it's a stall tactic.
CJK is a hot mess, but it is what it is.
Setting aside all other assumptions you make about the soundness of their setup overall, consistency of their input methods, newness of their inventory, etc., do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for? Remember, this applies to the system as a whole. A character would be shown as simplified by the system even during input.
Again, I tried it and I got different results in different software (even on a Mac), with Pages in particular showing only simplified characters and straight layout (in contrast to Quick Look, which is what the tweeter must have used). Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points? If not, how they would even know what code points are there, if all they ever see is simplified?
One needs to look at vocabulary, word choices and such. That is something that could actually point to fakery. Nothing like that was claimed yet, of course.
Because of the han unification, you can tell the font renderer which language context you're in and want things to be rendered. MSWord shows you the language in the status bar at the bottom, which is not only used for spell checking. In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.
> do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for?
Because ever since Vista, these come pre-installed regardless of your locale.
> Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points?
I don't believe anything in particular, just adding technical context. The documents could also have been leaked through Taiwan or Hong Kong and then mangled there resulting in this.
Well, you can visit probably any official Chinese government department website right now and see traditional Japanese characters instead of their simplified equivalents, if your machine happens to be configured that way. (Or at least the first one I stumbled across was like that, I pasted link somewhere in another comment. And I most certainly have Chinese fonts installed; in fact I see only simplified characters when I open the tweeted document in Pages.)
So they clearly do not make that effort even with documents actually crafted with foreign readers in mind. Presumably things can't be expected to be better if we are discussing secret documents intended for internal CCP consumption.
I genuinely don't understand where the mistake is, even in in your paraphrased version which is intended to caricature. Yes, I really do think that missing context is a good reason to refrain from believing something, and you should too. I find it bizarre that that is disputed.
I actually went into a fair amount of detail about what specifically was contextually inadequate here, all of which you didn't engage with.
It's hard to understand what the tweet is suggesting unless you read the entire thread, one related twitter thread, and chase down an implied history of allegedly questionable BBC reportage the UN is complicit in, and join the author in making assumptions about what it all means. I stated all of this already.
And in additional to all the previous stuff I said, it's not obvious that a difference between traditional and simplified characters prove what you're asked to believe it proves, that it must have come from Taiwan. I'm assuming there's another thread somewhere that goes into detail about how Taiwan uses different characters in other documents, which is the basis for believing different characters here prove that its a forgery?
It's not about the effort involved in comparing the characters, it's about the underlying logic for the argument, which is assumed to have been proven elsewhere but not referenced.
You linked to one tweet, which directly started talking about the traditional vs simplified characters. I don't see how there is much context missing.
I don't know if you're confusing me for somebody else, but I didn't link to any tweets. And as I've now said twice, which has been ignored twice, the thread alludes to numerous unmade arguments about the reliability of the BBC, the UN, Le Monde, and a reporter as background to motivate the inference that their reporting is unreliable.
And it makes an assumption about what is proved or not proved by traditional vs simplified characters (different = Taiwan), and that underlying assumption isn't backed up with an argument, and there's no reason to agree with that assumption without further context. A reader is supposed to already agree that that's how it works or else go scrolling through twitter timelines and searches to find where that argument is made.
Perhaps when you ignore all of this in your reply, and remind me that it's "directly started talking about [sic]" traditional vs. simplified characters, I can repeat this all again and hope the fourth time is the charm?
sigh.. Correction: the link to the tweet form the guy you replied to that you seemed to refer to.
> And as I've now said twice, which has been ignored twice, the thread alludes to numerous unmade arguments about the reliability of the BBC, the UN, Le Monde, and a reporter as background to motivate the inference that their reporting is unreliable.
I clicked the link again. I don't see any of that. It starts with claims about 1) a cursor (which I ignored) and 2) the issue with the characters, which is further elaborated on in a couple follow-up tweets. Then your comment mentions all these news outlets and I don't understand how that connects to the claims about the characters, or makes them taken out of context. It looks like a pretty stand-alone claim/issue that should be something to quickly do research on if you care about the topic, nothing taken wildly out of context.
> I can repeat this all again and hope the fourth time is the charm?
Sure, if that makes you feel better.
Unicode points and font glyphs are not the same thing, leading to situations where one Unicode character can be rendered as a different one (but similar) depending on OS and setup* -- and people enter and read characters by how they look, not by their Unicode points.
So the document can easily end up with 置's Unicode entity in the source without anyone finding out, even the person who entered it, if it always renders as a simplified version (without the left-bottom vertical line). And it will always render as a simplified version, because everyone involved is obviously using a simplified setup.
(If you have a Big Sur set up the same way as mine, you can observe for yourself by opening the same doc, such as the "Response Plan and Procedure for Escape and Disturbance Prevention During Class Times", in Quick Look and Pages and looking at the end of text following the first Arabic numeral "1" on the first page. Quick Look will show you a traditional/Japanese character at the end, while Pages will have a much better layout and consistently show simplified characters.)
The sad thing is that this initial stalling tactic is effective. Some will be swayed by his simple tweets and not have patience for the subsequent "debunking of the debunk" let alone their own research. This takes away the initial impact of the release.
* Software chooses a different glyph, the font provides a different glyph than required by Unicode standard, and so on. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54212157/. There was an in-depth article on CJK posted on HN some time ago, can't remember what it was called.
TL;DR yes, documents authored by CCP officials can easily have traditional Unicode points in them, because it is completely routine for software to be set up in a way that always renders those in simplified way.
If you're saying that an innocent error is what happened, you'd expect to see these weird traditional-in-simplified-context characters to appear across all sections of the documents, and not clustered together in a single paragraph (since that would be evidence that a single paragraph has been written by a different author than the rest of the document)
That different authors could have written/rewritten/edited different parts of a document at different points in time is natural, what are reasons to think otherwise?
Not really.
Islam has been present in China for over a thousand years, and the Uyghurs do not represent the majority of muslims in the country, which are actually the Hui (ethnic Chinese who converted) and outside of Xinjiang.
For the Chinese government this is a question of national unity against separatist movements, which is a more ethnic than religious problem, and political control. I'm thinking that they actually prefer Islam, which is unstructured, to the Catholic Church (hence action they regularly take against it) although, obviously from a communist stand-point no religion at all is the best option, and so Islam is not really singled out.
Many muslim countries also have strategic interests in having good relations with China, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, and thus abstain from raising any issues, not least since China has also the advantage of not being involved in the Middle East and of keeping a neutral stance there. Now, there are anti-Chinese terrorist attacks in Pakistan but everyone tries hard to keep a lid of them for these reasons.
If anything, and cynically, the West would very much like muslim extremists to turn their attention more towards China because obviously that would be destabilising for China, and so the anti-islam narrative is pushed at every turn.
The West gets attacked because of its military occupations in Mesopotamia. That is the criteria for Jihad. Any random teenage edgelord that happens to be Muslim can always take the pedantic “its my duty” approach at any time. The vast majority do not, any slight provocation from then on encourages that sentiment. China’s approach avoids this because they have no military occupation of traditionally muslim lands. That approach has worked better for China’s national security while operating in islamic areas, they invest and have been masterful at it. The Western/US approach never factored in its own national security, or any attempt at understanding Islam, and its been a disaster for its people and a boon to its defense contractors. The key point is that its never been about “rising up on behalf of all muslims being oppressed” its always been about “excising a cancer from traditionally islamic lands”. And that makes inaction towards Xinjiang and the plight of the Uighurs make way more sense, than the fundamentally rocky assumption that action from some unspecified Muslim people is expected to occur.
Secondly, some Uighars have already done the terror attacks within China, over “small things”. Long before the massive dragnet and crackdown. This is where China’s identity politics come into play, that some other commenters have pointed out. China’s domestic stance and behavior isn't really about Muslims, its about “territorial unity” with an undercurrent of ethnic discrimination. But ultimately the Uighers are on their own, and East Turkistan isn't going to be a thing.
Over the last 20 years, the US has waged war in predominantly Muslim countries. A conservative estimate is that the US is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians over the last 20 years, in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and many other countries. Add to that US support for Israel, and US support for Saudi Arabia's horrific war in Yemen, and the US has essentially no credibility when it claims to be oh so concerned with the rights of Muslims in China.
In this light, the US' accusations against China over Xinjiang look like cynical political posturing. The obviously hyperbolic nature of the accusations (including deploying the word "genocide," despite the complete lack of evidence that any mass killing is occurring) just make the US' posture on this issue look even more cynical and crass.
What international muslim community? And if one existed, why would the international muslim community care about US/European funded anti-china propaganda which has nothing to do with islam and everything to do with ethnic separatism.
We hate muslims. Killed millions of muslims. We hate chinese people. Killed millions of chinese people. But somehow we care about chinese muslims? How does that work? Why is it we are trying to pit chinese and muslims against each other?
> The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region
Did china become zionist all of a sudden? Also, I thought it was a genocide? What happened to the millions of uyghurs that was "exterminated"? What happened to the death camps? What happened to the millions of organs? They are trying to extinguish separatism.
> But maybe any reactions just don't make mainstream news.
Because it's literally manufactured propaganda that nobody believes. There are vlogs of muslims traveling to china all over social media.
First it was a genocide. Millions dead. Death camps all over china. That proved to be nonsense. Then it was cultural genocide. That proved to be nonsense. Now it's religious genocide. Which is even more laughable. The ughyurs aren't even the largest muslim ethnic group in china.
If you ever doubted that the media/news/etc were truly propaganda, just look into the uyghur "genocide". The media with the government agencies invented a genocide.
You're not imagining this — Muslim countries support China. See this map of a UN vote to condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang[1]. You'll notice that every Muslim country that didn't abstain defended China. In fact the only countries that condemned China are countries that are militarily allied with the United States.
If you look at any of the "NGOs" that push the narrative that China is oppressing Muslims in Xinjiang, every single one of them is funded either by the National Endowment for Democracy[2][3][4] (an arm of the US State Department notorious for pushing regime change in countries the US doesn't like) or the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative, which in turn is sponsored by several US arms manufacturers[5], such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc. — all of whom would profit massively from a war with China, for which this narrative is manufacturing consent.
Even the site that spawned this discussion seems to be associated with Adrian Zenz. A lot of the claims in Xinjiang can be traced back to his "work". He's a fundamentalist Christian bigot, is a fellow at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation" and claims to have been sent on a mission by God himself to destroy the Communist Party of China. His "work" has been thoroughly debunked many times over.[6]
Frankly, the narrative is bullshit. The Muslim world that has suffered massively at the hands of US imperialism can see right through it and votes accordingly. China has never invaded or bombed any Muslim country. The US has no credibility in the Muslim world.
[1]: https://graphics.axios.com/2020-10-06-china-uyghur-statement...
[2]: https://www.ned.org/region/asia/xinjiang-east-turkestan-chin...
[3]: https://www.ned.org/2019-democracy-award/world-uyghur-congre...
[4]: https://www.ned.org/uyghur-human-rights-policy-act-builds-on...
[5]: https://www.aspi.org.au/sponsors
[6]: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/30/WS608c1286a31024ad...
What can they do, specifically?
As someone firm in belief in Humanism and Liberalism, i consider it a crime against humanity. It is not an east/west issue and not a religious issue to be of concern only for people of the same religion. China does this because they want the border to be more than a line on the map, to be a border of their socialist nation, a border of thought, culture, language, of national identity. Their central government hates that people in Xinjiang have family in Kazhakstan, Pakistan and Kashmir, that they speak with those people, share traditions and religion and history with them, instead of identifying first and foremost with the nationality of the capital city. For them that is a weakness of their nation, a discrepancy from their ideal, a problem for their central bureaucracy in need of a solution, and the authoritarian-nationalist solution is to destroy the very concept of an Uyghur using violence to the point where it becomes a genocide. This is not a problem of uyghur ethnicity, religion or culture, it is a problem of chinese national-socialism.
And that China subscribes to such an ideology is very much our problem as westerners as well, not only because humanitarianism calls for solidarity with the oppressed, not only because liberalism must oppose such ideologies on principle, but because the world is unifying and the Chinese Government will throw in a billion rigged votes while holding a gun to the head of all those unwilling to agree. Ignoring the chinese governments abuse of the people living inside their borders is like ignoring some rich neighbor beating their kids and shouting they will kill anyone looking funny at them, while they run for major, saying it will all be fine as long as you keep looking away.
(This maybe changing though.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Terrorist_i...
Things are never 100% the same, so people can always argue "When _I_ do it it's different." For instance, people in Xinjiang are Chinese citizens, and when they leave the camps they can go anywhere in China, and have the same legal rights. People in Gaza, conversely, are supposed to be members for life, with restricted rights, and this is to be a generational condition (many children are stuck in Gaza as well).
So if you believe something, then you get invited to see what's going on, and you refuse, what does that say about you? It's the makings of a thought bubble.
Edit: Wow downvotes! Looks like I might have spoken to some of your hearts
Famously, the Red Cross inspected one Nazi concentration camp and gave it the thumbs up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto_and_the_...
Needless to say, there was nothing good about that camp, or any of the other ones.
Second, I agree there's a capability of falsification from either side, be it china or a news outlet. But neither does it translate to guilt on either side.
In the absence of such you'll have to consider from the first principles, and you'll find the US/west/people involve have a lot more incentive to keep china down. As such the better entities to trust are the third parties, ala the muslim states.
If something has no value as evidence, then you should disregard it. If China is a murderous totalitarian state, it will show beautiful, pristine "reeducation camps" to outsiders. If it is not a murderous totalitarian state, it will also show beautiful, pristine "reeducation camps".
You can totally learn about something without physically going there. Satellite imagery, intelligence-gathering... in fact for sure you can learn a lot more from document caches or finding insiders willing to talk than seeing some kind of "micro" insight into these camps. If I find a small handful of victims, well who knows, maybe they were unlucky. If I find a document specifying how to torment those incarcerated en masse, that's a smoking gun.
And you can make mistakes with that learning too. And this isn't the first time - I recall the CIA claiming some farm buildings being missile silos. This is why you get closer to see if there are any mistakes. Otherwise you're just taking a single narrative and running with it, and repeating it. Multiple perspectives HELP.
Regarding evidence - do consider that it has a potential to be tainted too, similar to the claims about China and camp tours. News outlets don't verify these studies thoroughly and already present it as truth for outrage points.
So going/not going on such trips, and any authority rejecting or accepting this as evidence are meaningless.
Just following the lines of thought. Essentially they've already accepted that the china trip is tainted and meaningless, even before taking the chance to opening their perspective on whether they could be wrong.
If life is suffering why not give up then?
This goes counter to the values of being 'open'. For someone of the free world this isn't very free.