China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by danjoc » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #7

danjoc wrote: post #5

>Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reedu…

>Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity. As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have becom…

>As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance.

This overlooks the surveillance state aspect of the story. People say dumb things online when they think their communications are private. I can't imagine China being able to produce a list as big without the aid of mass surveillance. The article paints 2008 like it's the olden days. It was not. They were recording then too.

>Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable. Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.

If I had to speculate, I would say what has happened is their words online have come back to haunt them. Maybe they secretly chuckled online about the attack that left 200 dead. Now they get written up and taken off because they "stopped drinking" or some other excuse. The first rule of parallel construction is don't talk about parallel construction.

>That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.

Reeducation is kinder than what we did to more than half a million Iraqis in the name of 9/11 and WMDs.

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

#42

Post by simonh » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

yourbandsucks wrote: post #11

seibelj wrote: post #2

China is a communist dictatorship where you can be arrested and possibly murdered for saying the wrong thing. So this is not very surprising.

"communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. Their economy is obviously capitalist. And although Xi has been leaning towards more dictator-like behavior, they haven't been a dictatorship since Mao. It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".

To be fair China describes itself as communist and intending to bring about communism, and communism or an essential step in achieving it is a dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s actual Marxist and official Chinese state ideology. It may be popycock, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to identify a government using the labels it uses to describe itself.

I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.

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

#43

Post by howard941 » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #37

Analemma_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which…

You’re quite right, as far as I understand. Another example of how little political glue there is between Muslim countries is that Saudi Arabia is quietly cooperating with Israel — supposedly the enemy — while almost at war with Qatar — supposedly Arab brethren.

Interestingly enough Egypt reportedly brokered a deal between Qatar, Hamas and Israel for a one year ceasefire. https://www.jns.org/report-israel-hamas-deal-to-include-one-... https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/10/08/2018/Hamas-says-...

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

#44

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

yourbandsucks wrote: post #32

BearilyHappy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. Describing an oligarchy as a communist dictatorship is near-equivalent. Far from dishonest. > Their economy is obviously capitalist It's capitalist at specific granularities. This is a derail, at best. > They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. So does an oligarchy.

Thank you! It's an oligarchy! Not a dictatorship! But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same! Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by danjoc » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

chrisBob wrote: post #8

danjoc wrote: post #5

>Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reedu…

Are you aware that your comment comes across as extremely racist? Punishing an entire ethnic group for a riot can't possibly be a good idea.

>Are you aware that your comment comes across as extremely racist?

It's not racist at all. You're trying to discredit any discussion of moral upbringings by calling it that. Han Chinese and Uighurs were killed. Re-education seems like an appropriate response for people who support such violence on either side.

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

#46

Post by amaccuish » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:14 PM UTC

pitaj wrote: post #33

amaccuish wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The undertone of your post seems to be that you can't possibly have authoritarian capitalism, which of course, is not true...

It's a matter of definitions. For many, capitalism means "free market economy". Under that case, authoritarianism is indeed fundamentally opposed to capitalism. If you define capitalism as just "private ownership of the means of production", then sure, you can be authoritarian and capitalist.

And there's your problem, capitalism means the second definition, not the first. Prime example being Pinochet.

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

#47

Post by tboyd47 » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:30 PM UTC

Leary wrote: post #10

Where are the responses from Muslim countries?

I'm not making excuses, but what appears to be going on in China is very serious indeed, with possibly one million people being seized and interned in prison camps, breaking contact with loved ones, and never released. The increased staffing at the nearby crematoriums is especially chilling. What kind of response would you expect to see?

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

#48

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #36

adventured wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found this very strange as well. Best guess is that it hasn't fully reached their populations / news audiences. It's only in the last four to six months that Western media has begun to actively talk about it and pursue the truth of what's going on there. Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp had less than a thousand total detainees over its hi…

> Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good. One Muslim country at least, Egypt, is doing China's bidding on Uighurs https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/fear-panic-egypt-arre... : > Egyptian police have detained scores of Chinese students from the Uighur ethnic minority on Beijing's request, forcing dozens into hiding or to flee to Turkey, activists have said. > These millions of Mus…

> Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population.

China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.

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

#49

Post by rayiner » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:35 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #34

Analemma_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which…

Pan-Islamism aside, there were mass protests over those Danish cartoons a few years back. I don't claim to understand other cultures and religions, but I'll be surprised if mass internment is less outrageous. So where are those people?

The folks in power don’t care about Muslim minorities (Palestinians, Rohinga, etc.). They care about browbeating the West and Israel, and spreading fundamentalist Islam as an alternative to Western secularization. Complaining about Chinese treatment of an ethnic minority does not serve that purpose.

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

#50

Post by DmenshunlAnlsis » Wed, Aug 22, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #34

Analemma_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which…

Pan-Islamism aside, there were mass protests over those Danish cartoons a few years back. I don't claim to understand other cultures and religions, but I'll be surprised if mass internment is less outrageous. So where are those people?

It’s employed as a distraction or means to vent rage at a palatable target. The Danes, the Jews, Israel, Americans, that serves a dual purpose. “Oh you want more freeeom of speech? See what they do with it in Denmark! You want a democracy... like America? Like Israel?” China is a valuable trading partner and a government in the same model as the autocracies of the Middle East, so they shut up about that. There’s always been profit in turning domestic rage against Israel in general, and Jews in particular. It’s been a way of life for the house of Saud for example, even as they quietly make deals with Israel and bomb their fellow Muslims in Yemen.

Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.