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

foreignpolicy.com

71–80 of 144 posts

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

#71
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their economy is obviously capitalist. Does mandated 50% local (aka party) ownership align with "obviously capitalist"? That seems a stretch (aka crony capitalist). Xi has asked for indefinitely long term of power and gotten it. Handover of power?

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

By that regard, anything can be either capitalism or communism if you squint hard enough.

The caveats that I mention aren't just "not like the USA" but specifically not like most other capitalist economies either.

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

#72
post #58
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.

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"?

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

#73
post #58
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.

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.

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

#74
post #52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Racist or not, it's a breach of civility to slur an entire population. It's also massive trolling, in effect if not intent. If you post like that again we will ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I specifically limited it to

>People who are this violent

not an entire population. You're intentionally misreading the comment if you insist otherwise. The point is very simple. It's not okay to kill people at a protest, and re-education for people who support murder at protests seems like a reasonable option to me. Go ahead and ban me dang. My opinion is "murders at protests are bad." That's not changing.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 certa…

A very simple explanation: Soviets worked out ways to find those who would. And after they did so, they killed them.

Because everybody who was capable of putting up a riot was killed, nobody put up a riot.

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

#76
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 are trying to build, and are trying to suppress and change this culture in a deeply authoritarian way.

Communist regimes, including China, have a history of suppressing religion and pre-existing traditional culture (e.g. the Cultural Revolution of the 60's and 70's).

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

#77
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...

Or for that matter Mao's Great Leap Forward.

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

#78
post #10

Where are the responses from Muslim countries?

Contrary to other comments, there are responses from Muslim countries. For instance, the situation has not gone unnoticed in Turkey because the Uighurs are Muslims who speak a Turkic language. In the past Turkish nationalist groups have supported Uighar separatist movements. However, official responses are muted since China is a major investor.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h...

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

#79

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.

> Can they even know that it happened?

This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation.

In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th)

https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...

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

#80
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...

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 “wrong”, but maybe not for the same reasons as the west (China has invested a lot more in riot police since then).

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