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The Xinjiang Police Files

xinjiangpolicefiles.org

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Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#271

Post by kbelder »

grapeskin wrote: post #132
simonh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In China you are a member of an ethnic minority if one of your grandparents was of that ethnicity, who themselves might only have had one grandparent of that ethnicity. There are also incentives for people to register as members of minority groups such as scholarships*, yet also stark differences in the treatment of members of minorities who are or are not integrated into Chinese culture and the communist party in pa…

> In China you are a member of an ethnic minority if one of your grandparents was of that ethnicity, who themselves might only have had one grandparent of that ethnicity. I mean, America has the one drop rule too, and you’re highly suggested to pick your most minority group any time you apply to a job, school, or basically anything. So you have people who are 1/128th Cherokee trying to game diversity benefits while p…

>I mean, America has the one drop rule too

No, they don't.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#272

Post by thaumasiotes »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #180
free-malloc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is nearly entirely wrong. It's entirely about power and god. 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 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 l…

> And for most of History, the Church was the State.

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?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#273

Post by thaumasiotes »

alisonatwork wrote: post #186
thaumasiotes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the situation of Muslims in China 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…

What does "participate in Chinese culture" mean, and why shouldn't the culture of China's Xinjiang province count as "Chinese culture", assuming we accept the official description of China as a 多民族國家 multi-ethnic country? 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 la…

> But that's more of a geographic inevitability than some kind of fundamental cultural difference

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.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#274

Post by ss108 »

ashwagary wrote: post #196
Sporktacular wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet more muslims have died fighting AQ and ISIS than any other religious group. Weird right?

>more muslims have died fighting AQ and ISIS than any other religious group 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 deradicalizat…

Muslim, and I've never heard this logic at all.

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.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#275

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #155
shellfishgene wrote: post #33

I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe…

My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups. Pakistan and Bangladesh, for example, are happy to suck up to China for the business opportunities. Similarly, the gulf states took few Syrian refugees during the recent crises: https://www.lejournalinternational.fr/Syrian-refugees-why-wo... . More generally, Arabs regard non-Arab Muslims as barely human—e.g. holding Bangladesh…

My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups

You can't write comments like this on HN. Choose better words. You're way off your game here.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#276

Post by pvg »

chitowneats wrote: post #243
aaomidi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The xenophobia in these comments is amazing. "Muslims don't care about Muslims" Yes Muslims are just completely different types of human. Who knew!

Making an observation about a group of people is not "xenophobia". Quite the opposite in fact. 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.

Neither form of that kind of sweeping generalization is ok on HN with piles of moderator commentary about it.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#277

Post by [deleted] »

shellfishgene wrote: post #33

I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe…

[deleted]

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#278

Post by DFHippie »

dillondoyle wrote: post #252
DFHippie wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're confusing Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It's the latter where sadistic guards took photos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... Ugh. The pictures in that article are horrendous. The "patriots" will say (and in fact do say -- see the linked article about Lyndie England) that the real crime is not the acts committed but making them public. The same is true of course in China w…

I am you're right ;( Sad that you can confuse those. the photos from gitmo aren't nearly as bad, probably because there aren't many. Most I've seen are just those through the fence photos, again looks too similar to China's concentration camps.

Also I think there are a lot more eyes on Gitmo. At Abu Ghraib a lot was entrusted to people with little vetting.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#279

Post by berdario »

throwaway290 wrote: post #195
berdario wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that it's difficult to trust any of these documents. It seems that in this latest dump there are some that are blatantly forged. Even if the others are genuine, this calls into question the veracity of the others https://twitter.com/Cinqscories/status/1529035490032340993

"Western lie debunkers" will absolutely jump at any chance to say this is a fake, but that particular take is pathetic and indicative of problems with CJK literacy. 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 Uni…

That's interesting, I didn't realize that IMEs would silently offer you choices in different sets/styles than the one preferred by the locale, and that OS fonts could actually hide the difference.

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)

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#280

Post by trasz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #119
oreally wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a quora: https://www.quora.com/How-credible-are-Adrian-Zenz-one-of-th... and a quote: " Zenz’ academic qualifications, much touted, don’t stand up to much scrutiny. His h-index is 12, about a quarter of the 40 that a ‘good’ academic should have, especially a mid-career 47-year old. His roles are all with anti-China think tanks, not academic positions. He’s in a bubble of anti-Communism and anti-China funding a…

Even if Adrian Zenz himself may be a person with a questionable character and ethics, the claims in the leak have all been independently verified by an international media coalition, including German private paper Spiegel, German public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, the BBC and Le Monde [1]. They used a combination of OSINT (e.g. extracting metadata from files or cross-checking photos with satellite images), old-…

The documents provided in the leak have been verified ("There are photos of almost 5000 people"), but I'm not aware of the claims commonly repeated here ("millions of prisoners") being verified.
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