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China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#81

Post by Razengan »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #80
Razengan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

You mean TS 1989? Taylor Swift’s most recent album right? Suffice it to say, those T-shirts did not go down well in China. People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “…

Strange, how come there's no mention of the name's allusion to the protests on Wikipedia, if it was deliberate? (genuinely curious.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album)

Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#83

Post by hangonhn »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #66
Razengan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

Can they even know that it happened? AFAIK China is very censored and they may not even be aware that such a thing occurred at all. Even assuming they were around at the time it happened, there may also be no way for them to find out.

People who grew up under such regimes are fairly ingenious about getting around censorship. The more the government tries to clamp down, the more people want to know and they will find ways around the censorship.

People talk. My grandmother passed down first hand accounts of her living through the Japanese occupation during WWII. There are also stories passed down from the Cultural Revolution, etc.

Believe me, the Chinese know something happened in 1989 at Tiananmen. Hong Kong has been a torch bearer in keeping memories of those events alive.

Now the better question is if many Chinese still care in face of growing prosperity and what version of the "truth" they have.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#84

Post by hangonhn »

devoply wrote: post #77
Razengan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

Or for that matter Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Oh that's a pretty much accepted history in China. You can't hide that because so many people witnessed it and so many of today's leadership in China were also victims of it. Xi Junping's own family suffered greatly during that era (Edit: Cultural Revolution, not Great Leap Forward, but one followed the other because Mao was trying to salvage his legacy after the first mistake).

State censorship isn't as simple as not talking about something. The cleverer way of doing it is to spin the truth. As they say in China, Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. That's how they spun it. Sure the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions were terrible but on the whole Mao was good. Then add in some story about liberation from the Japanese and the corrupt KMT and Mao's legacy survives.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#85

Post by zhengyi13 »

philwelch wrote: post #76
pnathan wrote: post #60

This is extremely wrong. The official mood in China seems to be swinging ethno-nationalist, which is a recipe for human rights violations in any country, let alone one with limited juridical recourse and free speech. I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing .

I'm not sure I'd attribute it to ethno-nationalism, in that I don't know for sure that China is applying a policy of Han supremacism. It seems to be more of a particular concern with the Uighurs in particular. We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they ar…

What set of distinctions could we reasonably draw to say that the authoritarian imposition of norms based on the overwhelming Han ethnic majority is not fundamentally Han Chauvinist or racist?

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#86

Post by hprotagonist »

Razengan wrote: post #63
pnathan wrote: post #60

This is extremely wrong. The official mood in China seems to be swinging ethno-nationalist, which is a recipe for human rights violations in any country, let alone one with limited juridical recourse and free speech. I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing .

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

In 2007 or so, I was having a conversation in a bar with a bunch of student friends, one of whom was newly arrived from Beijing to start her graduate studies in the US.

For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about.

This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page.

The look of utter horror on her face, followed by pain and grief and rage, was a little much for a friday night out with the gang...

On the other side, I know people living in china who have known all the tricky ways to get around the censors since forever, and are totally up to speed on things.

So it's probably a mixed bag.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#87

Post by dang »

_iyig wrote: post #72
dang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post grandiose national or ideological rhetoric to HN. It's at best flamebait and at worse trolling. Substantive discussion needs more thought than this.

Is the OP wrong? Is the point irrelevant to the discussion? In what way is the observation of an admittedly uncomfortable fact "ideological rhetoric"?

People apply the word 'fact' loosely when it comes to topics they feel strongly about. The point is contentious and disputable in a bunch of ways. That's not necessarily bad, but it is when combined with a declamatory style. Just to be clear though: I'm not making a point about China. I'm making a point about how terrible Hacker News threads become when people allow themselves to post this way.

This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#88

Post by dang »

seibelj wrote: post #73
dang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post grandiose national or ideological rhetoric to HN. It's at best flamebait and at worse trolling. Substantive discussion needs more thought than this.

In the future I will surround such criticism in more flowery language, I was too blunt.

Flowery is not what we're looking for. Thoughtful would be more like it.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#89

Post by philwelch »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #85
philwelch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd attribute it to ethno-nationalism, in that I don't know for sure that China is applying a policy of Han supremacism. It seems to be more of a particular concern with the Uighurs in particular. We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they ar…

What set of distinctions could we reasonably draw to say that the authoritarian imposition of norms based on the overwhelming Han ethnic majority is not fundamentally Han Chauvinist or racist?

The fact that China has a history of authoritarian imposition of cultural reforms on the Han ethnic majority themselves.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#90

Post by clamprecht »

Razengan wrote: post #63
pnathan wrote: post #60

This is extremely wrong. The official mood in China seems to be swinging ethno-nationalist, which is a recipe for human rights violations in any country, let alone one with limited juridical recourse and free speech. I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing .

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?
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