I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

[dead]

I agree that if you simply replace it with faith in the party or something similar it's not an improvement. However a post-communist country where religion is increasingly irrelevant and which has a living memory of life under communism is better positioned to try for something better than either of those the next time around.

A huge caveat should be given that as this guy is currently applying for political asylum in the Netherlands, he has every motivation to severely exaggerate the experience. Outlandish claims such as forced abortion and even organ harvesting (a classic propaganda tactic by the Falun Gong cult against CCP) are being thrown around in the article with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. I think it's totally plausible that he suffered some of what he described in a secret prison during some periods of his ordeal, but it would be absurd and nonsensical if all the guards do all the time in every camp is to torture the inmates non-stop, as he described.

Also, there were indeed several terrorist attacks committed by Uyghur extremists throughout the years, each with dozens of civilian deaths (e.g. hacking people down indiscriminately in a train station, or detonating a bomb in the downtown), which the article conveniently totally ignored. If such attacks occurred in the West, they would garner a very strong response and an outpouring of support, as what happened in France. Instead, whenever the western media mention them (in passing), they needed to even add quotes around the word "terrorist attack", which is simply absurd and is double standards at its finest.

Of course the CCP's description of camps where "people can leave at any time" (if they ever claimed that) would also be a vast stretch. The camps are not nice and are most likely forced. But the truth is, as always, most likely somewhere in between. Cultural integration is a very hard problem, also for Muslims living in western Europe as we all have seen. Of course a western government could not force everybody into a camp, learn the national language well (just as many Muslims in western countries don't even speak the national language well, so do many Uyghurs not speak Mandarin, and this is related to their economic plight and ease of radicalization), and ask them to renounce extremist/jihadist thoughts, so it is understandable that the camps are an aberration in western eyes. But to describe it as some sort of Nazi-style concentration/extermination camp is also wildly inaccurate. Many people seem to fail to/refuse to recognize that. To see such a clearly distorted and sensationalized account getting so many upvotes here (many more than an Economist article a few days ago which still fiercely criticizes the camps but is at least more up to journalistic standards and objective) is quite disappointing, I have to say. I guess people like to see what they want to believe, so that the world can easily make sense to them (i.e. CCP is the embodiment of "evil", no matter what that word even means and, the reality that the world is never black-and-white), and HN is unfortunately not that different.

The results are foreign companies moving out of China. Bringing much more world attention to the aggression of China in the South China sea, and uniting foreign powers (India, Japan, Philipines, Vietnam, Australia, etc) to contain the CCP's aggressive expansion. It's been made more clear how the Belt and Road initiative can create debt trap for less developed countries and as a sort of CCP imperialism.

Under all these external pressures, the economy of China has suffered. And this is more crucial than most realize, as CCP would remain in power, and the majority of its citizens tolerate the oppression and ignore minority's human rights abuse, as long as the economy is growing. Also as a result, CCP is experiencing more internal factional struggles. This is apparent in Xi's deployment of cultural revolution style tactics such as purges (under the name of anti-corruption, as vast majority of CCP officials are corrupt), requiring study of Xi thoughts (think Mao's little red book), and demand for absolute loyalty from the military to himself (generals have spoken out against him).