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Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

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Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#91

Post by adventured »

floatboth wrote: post #84
fortythirteen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing is happening in the US. Apologist nonsense. Have any of your neighbors been sent to reeducation camps? Statements like this minimize the plight of these people. Are authorities overstepping the bounds of the fourth amendment? Yes, and we should continue to fight them every step of the way. But we are still the country with the highest level of individual liberty in the whole world.

Wasn't New Zealand the country with the highest level of liberty? Also, yeah, no reeducation camps, but cops getting away with murder all the time…

> Also, yeah, no reeducation camps, but cops getting away with murder all the time

You mean like how the Chinese State has executed 50,000 to 60,000 people since 2000? Have you read about how those crimes are applied to the people being executed? Typically there is an unsolved batch of crimes, they tag random people with them at will, then execute the supposed criminals by the hundreds to wipe away all the unsolved crimes. It wasn't more than a dozen years ago that China was still executing people as a public sport in stadiums, where you could go and watch the state executions.

The US still has capital punishment in some states of course, it executes about two dozen people per year by contrast.

The law enforcement systems in the US deserve a lot of criticism. Cops killing people in the US is a serious problem. The scale of it however simply does not compare to abuses that go on in China. For example, China still tortures thousands of homosexual people each year, attempting to force-change their sexuality with things like electroshock and drugs.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#92

Post by Simon_says »

Simon_says wrote: post #56
kelnos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions. If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people go…

The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without…

I'm honestly a little surprised this comment is so unpopular. My understanding is that this is the rationale behind the USA's second amendment, not personal safety, and not hunting.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#93

Post by jhedwards »

jruthers wrote: post #86

I'd really like to read more Chinese-from-China views on this kind of article. Although the content of the article scares me personally, it would be interesting to have more of a discourse about more plausible reasons why this kind of surveillance is "good" from a genuine different perspective. One mistake the Chinese govt makes is never explaining themselves in a plausible way so it always comes across as Orwellian.…

I am a non-Chinese who lived in China and I would talk about this subject with a retired businessman from Beijing who lived next door to me in Sunnyvale. His view was basically what you described: there are a ton of people in China and the vast majority of them were only recently raised out of abject poverty, and on top of that the cultural revolution had a dramatic impact on public education. So the feeling is that there is a massive potential for chaos and that the iron grip of the government prevents that chaos from emerging. I don't know how true that is, but it did feel pretty safe when I lived there, and there _is_ a history of massive riots in China which seems to validate the theory of potential chaos. At any rate, he thought that as China develops and education improves the need for the government to have an iron grip will be lessened and the country will gradually become more free. Time will tell I guess.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#94

Post by ksk »

nova22033 wrote: post #88
crdb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

> ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal? It's his job to figure that out without holding up the line. >the thought of a traffic stop by a bored cop "degenerating" Did that happen to you or is that something you'd imagine happening to you? Most encounters with the police for t…

>Immigration agents aren't the most polite people in the world but how does the immigration agent know you are not a criminal?

I assume he already has a visa to enter the country. It would be easier to conduct the criminal check before granting the visa, and it can be done offline. They can take as long as they like. Or maybe the person came from a country with a visa-waiver program with the US. In which case, I'd agree that the questions could be warranted.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#95

Post by [deleted] »

floatboth wrote: post #84
fortythirteen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing is happening in the US. Apologist nonsense. Have any of your neighbors been sent to reeducation camps? Statements like this minimize the plight of these people. Are authorities overstepping the bounds of the fourth amendment? Yes, and we should continue to fight them every step of the way. But we are still the country with the highest level of individual liberty in the whole world.

Wasn't New Zealand the country with the highest level of liberty? Also, yeah, no reeducation camps, but cops getting away with murder all the time…

[deleted]

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#96

Post by Miredly »

Jyaif wrote: post #48
sgt101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others. Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing! Privacy breeches can, and do, kill…

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.

People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#97

Post by Tyrek »

bryananderson wrote: post #51
Jyaif wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same? We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother m…

How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#98

Post by gumby »

jruthers wrote: post #86

I'd really like to read more Chinese-from-China views on this kind of article. Although the content of the article scares me personally, it would be interesting to have more of a discourse about more plausible reasons why this kind of surveillance is "good" from a genuine different perspective. One mistake the Chinese govt makes is never explaining themselves in a plausible way so it always comes across as Orwellian.…

> I'd really like to read more Chinese-from-China views on this kind of article.

Note that this level of surveillance is not pervasive throughout the rest of China; this is about a region populated by non-Han Chinese (Uyghurs, a who are Muslim and speak a Turkic language); most han residents are colonists. The Chinese language is the official one but is not spoken at home by most people there. The central government promotes Han migration/colonization of Xinjiang as they do with Tibet.

So I suspect you'd find most Chinese people outside Xinjiang very supportive of this: the government and newspapers describe it as an integral part of China with a terrorist separatist movement no different from, for example, how the government of Spain used to describe ETA, or, without the violence, the Catalonian independence movement).

In addition, every time a western politician claims that "all muslims are evil terrorists" it gets printed in China as support for the narrative that these "security" measures are justified (Uyghur separatists have bombed Beijing and other han cities).

I expect this to be routine in OECD countries within the next 20 years. Hell, I remember dystopian movies always had bizarre, pointless "security" announcements as a way of showing how creepy the future had become and how the future didn't believe in people having time to think...and now that happens in every airport and train station in the world! ===

My second paragraph is simply the situation on the ground. The territory around Xinjiang has been under Chinese control for over 250 years; in the preceding millennia it sometimes has; at other times, as part of various Khanates it's been part of empires that controlled China (just as Tibet has at various times been independent; been under the control of China; and been in control of the emperor of China) So depending on what time point you pick you can justify an argument that Beijing's control of the area is "legitimate" or "illegitimate". I have zero connection to any side (not Chinese, not turkic, not muslim, buddhist, whatever).

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#99

Post by avmich »

jhedwards wrote: post #93
jruthers wrote: post #86

I'd really like to read more Chinese-from-China views on this kind of article. Although the content of the article scares me personally, it would be interesting to have more of a discourse about more plausible reasons why this kind of surveillance is "good" from a genuine different perspective. One mistake the Chinese govt makes is never explaining themselves in a plausible way so it always comes across as Orwellian.…

I am a non-Chinese who lived in China and I would talk about this subject with a retired businessman from Beijing who lived next door to me in Sunnyvale. His view was basically what you described: there are a ton of people in China and the vast majority of them were only recently raised out of abject poverty, and on top of that the cultural revolution had a dramatic impact on public education. So the feeling is that…

> the feeling is that there is a massive potential for chaos and that the iron grip of the government prevents that chaos from emerging

This is similar to how Russian government presents the situation in Russia, and lots of people getting the information from government channels tend to agree with that.

The difference is that China is moving ahead economically much faster than Russia today. As soon as advancement stops, subsequent talks about maintaining stability are met with slowly growing scepticism. Stability is only good when it a stable advancement or if the state of affairs is perceived as good (i.e., after recent raising out of abject poverty). As soon as stability is preserving the undeserving status quo, it's not as good.

This change of view may not necessarily happen soon after slowdown though.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#100

Post by nyolfen »

hux_ wrote: post #52
jimmies wrote: post #5

I think one of the few really, really good things we have left in the US is that I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing. I was in Singapore, a rich, orderly state for an internship a couple of years ago. There were cameras everywhere: Cameras on the sidewalks, cameras on the staircases, cameras in residential apartments, cameras in the subway, cameras at the workplace. There were very few places I feel not…

American beliefs about their freedom are just that - BELIEFS. The underlying implication ALWAYS is the Chinese and Singaporeans or whoever can't think for themselves about what is good for their societies and therefore need American moral guidance and leadership. This is the same tactic the British/French/Spanish etc used to justify colonization. They needed a reason cause by the 18th century, most of the local popul…

>This is the same tactic the British/French/Spanish etc used to justify colonization.

this is a little tired. you can say this to literally any criticism of a developing nation.

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