It's bad that certain groups (especially that one) will downvote/flag HN comments for political reasons, but I dare say the reason your comment got flagged was because of its emotional/aggressive tone, e.g. "so that each and every one of them can be prosecuted after China loses the third world war".
No one could disagree. My inane comment was just a distraction from the topic, sorry. I really only wanted to say that a sober suggestion could convince more people than a crudely aggressive one. Try again?
The horrible reality of humanity is that people follow orders they shouldn't, because you don't want to be the only person to say no, achieving nothing. It goes even further in the Stanford prison experiment. That's why autocratic regimes like Belarus's persist long after everyone knows they have no legitimacy.
Also, (Re: "PRC supporters and enablers") I assume the vast majority of the people working in the Chinese government are decent people and have never had to do anything immoral.
Well then the horrible reality of humanity is that we seek to punish people who play a part in these atrocities in order to seek justice, till we can come up with a better alternative. Otherwise, let's not punish some newbie in a gang who was forced to murder as part of his forced initiation even though he didn't want to.
I am very well aware of it and as I was writing it I was concious about the HN FAQ and rules of engagement.
I am deliberately making an exception. Apparently, it didn't get downvoted but I've seen similar comments getting downvoted everytime I saw it without this disclaimer.
> It is truly remarkable how many replies in that thread consist of bad analogies, denials of clear third party reporting, and whatabout-ism.
Those are the the typical tactics, and they're pretty bad at it, but it must be noted that there are several long-standing wumao accounts on here that will brigade on posts that are deemed to be anti-CCP. The jokes on them, as I couldn't possibly care less about fake internet points, but every time I talk about HK and the CCP its not long before I get into the negatives if the thread/post has high visibility.
I find my posts will dip into the negative territory while the thread is young then slowly creep back up as it ages. Pros know that only the most recent content matters.
That is correct, but the current HN guidelines state that if you suspect voting-rings or other manipulation, contact the mods out-of-band and they'll attend to it. Commenting about it and accusing people of shilling solely based on their opposition to your point of view degrades the conversation every single time. The mods have more data points to correlate and can remediate if necessary.
> Do you deny that the DRP gov't is directly or indirectly paying many thousands of people to wage a vast information war on social media?
First of all, I'm assuming by "DRP" you mean the PRC. Is DRP a non-English acronym?
The PRC definitely employs online shills, but my understanding is that they're mostly active on the Chinese language internet.
I think the people we encounter on the English internet who seem like shills actually have more in common with GamerGate than the actual government-employed 50 cent party. They even go on hamfisted GamerGate-like harassment campaigns against people they don't like.
That is why USA or the west world is losing if we believed social media has a key role in shaping opinion. You cannot go it and they can come out. And even chinese coming out with their wechat would be closed.
I am not hopeful. Whilst I believe the ccp might go, it is that asymmetric thing which is a problem.
I don't want to drive more divisive discussion here but if you understand chinese language the edits of the video is not without problems (a little sensationalist if I may say). The local guys are clearly helping the journalists, the normal citizens conversation were quite innocent and used in a way to indicate the editor's views. At the end people were chanting 'Are you chinese', while it should be clearly interpreted as 'Are you a chinese citizen'. The editor clearly wants the viewers to think they are being taught to be Han chinese.
A couple of the western Chinese vloggers I used to watch a lot recently fled China after they caught wind that the authorities were looking for them for 'illegal journalism'
This vlogger, his youtube channel is Serpentza lived in China for more than 10 years now had no choice but to leave, otherwise he wouldn’ve been inprisoned or even worse:
Yes his early videos were not political but his content changed dramatically in the last two years. He was under scrutiny by other western youtubers in China e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiOOC1Exk7o to question his recent contents. Not commenting on his opinions just to provide information from both sides.
Given the situation in HK, I find it very believable that it would not be in the best interest for a foreigner living on the mainland to get involved in political criticism — at least - until they leave the country.
Sure if you believe you're at certain risk. But these channels were talking about Serpentza and his behaviour telling untruth about other vloggers. It has nothing to do with political criticism.
From what I saw with my own eyes he and his fellow blogger were documenting inconvenient truths about China and their lives were in danger to stay any longer there. It is quite dangerous to be even in HK at the moment, the CCP’s armed forces are extremely vicious, perhaps at Xinnie the Pooh’s direct orders, his ego was severely bruised as he’s a sore looser just like our current president. Let’s hope he doesn’t turn into another Mao, thugh it could be even worse..
My comment wasn't about any political stance he has nor what might cause his journey. It was the interactions with other foreign youtubers in China. And surely the inconvenient truths were at most documented/collated material by serpentza not literally your own eyes if that's fare to say?
Their audience. If journalists are forcefully accompanied by government officials, their journalism can be influenced. This irreparably taints the integrity of their work in a way that is often unacceptable to their audience.
> > you need a license/approval before you can interview someone
> [citation needed]
So it was stated by a police officer in the video above (I'm assuming it was a real police encounter and not staged, and that the subtitles are correct as he didn't say it in English).
> Foreign journalists cannot even enter xinjiang and travel around freely without 24x7 accompaniment by a government employee escort.
It's worse than than that now, the CCP kicked out US Media out of China, and those that tried to relocate to HK were not allowed to do so. Under the security law they could be seen to be dissenters and could be held/detained/jailed for crimes against the State.
This coincides with the CCPs tactics, of even its own Citizens who dare to challenge them, this a rather sad albeit predictable story about its highest scoring soccer player who spoke out against China on Tienanmen this year [1].
This was supposedly a problem with a stealth ship designed by Lockheed’s “skunkworks”: against the choppy noise of waves and swell, a blank spot (of no radar return) stood out dramatically.
That’s where I read this. I always wondered itpfbthat was really why it was cancelled (that’s why I wrote “supposedly”) or if Lockheed simply couldn’t make an adequate ship, being an aircraft company.
This is about the Sea Shadow, right? Lockheed later got a contract for the Freedom class of litoral combat ships, with 10 of the planned 16 currently active and five more fitting out or under construction. Those are being built by a shipbuilding firm, not Lockheed directly.
When I was traveling around China a few years ago it was extremely frustrating trying to use my phone's GPS+offline map. Realtime mapping in China is purposely offset by hundreds of meters making navigation quite challenging!!
Kind of frustrating the reporting didn't compensate the pins on the map to adjust for this. Most of the dots currently point to nothing useful. I hope the data set gets released with real + compensated coordinates so people can conduct followup analysis.
They could put cartoon images of "land", like this TV show's overlay on top of a lady wearing Muslim dress: https://youtu.be/17oCQakzIl8?t=270
Interesting how the IMO Chinese "Eh, imma just half-ass it!" mentality (hopefully having visited the country and experienced half-assery, I'm allowed to comment) basically lead to this research work.
The scale was definitely a problem. The article talked about how they had millions of blanked out areas, anything of even the most minor strategic importance was blanked out. It might even be an attempt to stymie this kind of investigation by making the data too noisy.
They definitely screwed up when they made the censoring so easy to spot.
It looks like it could comfortably fit a few countries and then some.
Even when watching history documentaries there's a period where Russia is basically a thin strip at the western edge of its current territory, before suddenly and inexplicably blowing up to engulf almost half of Asia.
I wish I could find it, but there is a Wikipedia article on a railway spur in that region. If I remember correctly it was mostly built with gulag labor and it lasted a few years at most before it fell apart due to the climate and terrain (not solid ground).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik1Y88n1Uog [1] does give the impression of the sort of place where one wishes to avoid the snowmelt line in spring. And that's down in the populated region.
Also in the populated part, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family detached from their society and went foraging in the wild, but lost most of their tech tree in doing so.
A former soviet colleague told me during perestroika that they planned their taiga field work for winter, because dealing with snow was much easier than dealing with mud.
[1] This clip has "women, horses, and wide open spaces." For "steam-baths, vodka, accordion, and lox" you'll have to do your own searching.
"The boreal forest, or taiga, supports a relatively small range of animals due to the harshness of the climate. Canada's boreal forest includes 85 species of mammals, 130 species of fish, and an estimated 32,000 species of insects."
I noticed this myself on Baidu maps a couple of years ago. Browsing around Xinjiang with a friend, we discovered a weird conical structure constructed of tiles. Also found lots of roadblocks in the region (those weren't hidden).
I'm still baffled that some people, even here, think this is all made up propaganda from the West. Despite tons and tons of evidence. Kind of reminds me of how it must have been with people in denial about the early Nazi concentration camps, and Holodomor. I'm not saying this is as brutal as what the Nazis did (at least as far as we know,) just drawing parallels to the pure denialism or marking it up as pure exaggeration.
I think people are skeptical, because a lot of the people talking about these camps clearly don't care about the people in them. They only care about making China look bad. Many politicians in the US are using this as an example of why China is bad, while simultaneously pushing for similar here with our prison system or with ICE.
Plus, even if they aren't being hypocrital, it is in the United States' interest to make China look bad, even if that means making things up or exaggerating.
There is definitely a distinction between immigration policy of people coming into your country vs rounding up your own citizens.
So, we now just have to believe everything China says because the US isn't perfect? Germany and many European countries have camps for refugees from the Syrian war, but that's not even remotely the same as taking your own citizens into camps and harvesting their organs, hair, etc. Not even close. I am so tired of that comparison, it's lazy whataboutism without even thinking about the context or extent.
Not sure how you can equate these two. Iraq invasion was driven by faulty intelligence gathered in secret by a spy organization. Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.
> Iraq invasion was driven by faulty intelligence gathered in secret by a spy organization.
No, it was driven by politically motivated lies that the governments knew were fabrications. It wasn't intelligence driving policy, but preconceived policy driving intelligence to support the arguments that were already decided. And this was fairly evident and evidence for it fairly widely reported, though also widely of ignored, during the drive to war.
The Uighurs camps situation doesn't appear the same, but of course it's abstractly possible that the lies are just better covered and laundered through external organizations. But I don't think that's the Occam's Razor answer.
> Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.
The fact that this report is up to questioning shows that it isn't true. If you read this report thoroughly, you can find out it just shows there are this sort of buildings in Xinjiang but no logic or proof that they are concentration camps and there is no evidence at least in the report that the buildings are in use.
You’re in denial. Your country is doing this, theres incontestable evidence already. At least take in the facts and say you don’t care or that it’s your country’s business what they do internally but keeping on denying it doesn’t do anything at this point. The cat’s out of the bag already!
There are lots of accusations against China's Xinjiang practice. They are all mixed together unintentionally or intentionally to mud the water.
The accusation of concentration camp is exaggerated and there is no credible hard evidence. This report is highly questionable. That is my opinion and what we are debating now.
Human right issues in Xinjiang? Yes. I am not questioning that.
Ok, theres some progress to accept that. Sure not everything is accurate when things get reported and I don’t doubt sometimes mistakes are made. Successive takes usually filter out the chaff. If China allowed reporters and had nothing to hide we wouldn’t be discussing right now. This report may be questionable from your point of view but it’s all we’ve got for now..
And this report doesn’t look like the WMD in Iraq provided by CIA based on the secret intelligence shtick. This is an open investigation and is still ongoing. As far as I can tell it is credible but we both have the right to our opinions
You missed my point. I am not questioning the images.
> If you read this report thoroughly, you can find out it just shows there are this sort of buildings in Xinjiang but no logic or proof that they are concentration camps and there is no evidence at least in the report that the buildings are in use.
China wouldn’t allow that kind of evidence: direct footage of people being psychologically and even physically tortured, proof of organ harvesting, etc. That’s like evidence that is very hard to obtain having how tight a grip China has, but there are leaks from time to time. Once again if China had nothing to hide and reporting was allowed we wouldn’t be having this conversation
Also, a concentration camp is not defined in terms of families/women/children confined in it, there were many concentration camps in history that captured individual members of families, who were not ideologically aligned with a totalitarian regime of that time and place, the whole soviet Gulag system was built on secrecy and minimal exposure to public, when individual members of your family might not get back home from a grocery store one day and just dissappear into unknown destination.
I don't agree with you. That kind of camps should be called prisons or something else.
Now when people talk about concentration camps, they mostly refer to the camps of Nazi's or the US's for Japanese Americans during WWII.
I mean that is the most insidious side of the concentration camp accusation against China.
Reliable source means established entities like media or research institution that verify what they get. I would name New Yorker as an example, which manages to maintain very high standard of professionalism.
> I don't agree with you. That kind of camps should be called prisons or something else.
It takes more than just disagreeing to prove your point, and no - those camps shouldn't be called prisons, because prisons existed as separate entities at that time and the abbreviation "gulag" contans a word "camp" in its definition.
Next, where's your verifiable proof that New Yorker is a reliable source of information?
Well, concentration camps are what they are, places where people are brought en mass and kept there forcefully. What exactly they look like and how they compare to the Nazi camps or the soviet gulag is not relevant, plus we are more than half a century later and in a different part of the world so comparing the details isn’t relevant at this point. Ive just seen some sad footage from China with an Uygur woman who was released after 2 years and her 3-4 years old daughter who she was separated from - was holding her arms around her telling her not to cry. The woman was saying they were rushed by guards and zapped with electricity in their heads to make them move faster. Tell me what kind of danger did that poor woman pose to China and why did she have to be taken away from her daughter? Are you heartless or what? I guess you are but I don’t wish that upon you or your family, just for you to try to put yourself in her shoes. You’re on the good side of the chinese history just because you weren’t born an uygur but that’s just chance. Please do try to show some compassion for your fellow human beings.
Ive also saw some footage of non-Uygur, regular Chinese, albeit poor who were agressively being beaten by police. You Chinese are coward for letting them beat you like that. Maybe you’re well connected and untouchable is all I can think, otherwise you seem somewhat informed, you have access to the outside world and can see for yourself what is going in in your own country. Be human!
Ok now it gets personal and emotional. My last reply.
I think you got lost in feeling angry for some footage that shows injustice but forgot we were debating evidence for concentration camps.
Injustice happens everyday and everywhere. Chinese people feel the same and we have our channels and ways to address those issues, otherwise there wouldn't be a functional society, which is a fact no matter what you say about China.
And you are wrong to think Chinese people just eat up what injustice that are imposed onto them. Chinese people protest always and rebel always in the past and now. You need to teach yourself more of China's history and Chinese people before rushing emotional comments.
I guess you are heartless and as I said, well connected so that kind of injustice doesn't affect you. You are an oppressor and no matter what kind of evidence you'd find you'd still find some justification for what you do to the oppressed. You completely disregarded a poor woman's plight and called me emotional. If it leaves you cold-hearted make sure you're also not a psychopath as well.
I don't have 100% certainty but I highly suspect you're paid by the CCP to mitigate any damage to their image. If that's true then it's also very pathetic.
I'm surprised it hasn't been. Some initial reporting measured expansion of the camps by floor space which can be used to estimate internment numbers. One of the researcher is a licensed architect, this is 101 stuff in terms of occupancy/building use estimation. Source some commercial satellite service to take pictures and start counting.
That said, if the intention of the system is to indoctrinate then we can expect most of the 11M Uyghurs to be imprisoned at some time. Really the question is concurrent numbers which makes for grabbing headlines. My personal guess is if competent geospatial analysis was conducted the actual detention capacity would be far lower than the commonly cited 1-3 million Zenz estimated extrapolated from his claims of 1,200 detention centres. This study, alleged to be comprehensive, found 260 (edit 315) camps in the entire region. At least it's a good start.
There are various levels of reporting in about what's happening in Xinjiang. I'm curious which ones of the following people here on HN believe are true.
A. There is forced re-education, forced de-radicalization, and forced political assimilation (to fight separatism). Some camps are indeed for voluntary vocational education, others are for forced re-education. The number of people who are forced into camps, are a lot less than the alleged 1+ million. No killing/genocide; no erasure of Muslim religion, artefacts or buildings; any brutality in prisons are incidental rather than policy. All people who are forced into camps eventually leave them.
B. Like A, except that there are no voluntary vocational camps: all camps are forced. All people leave them after a while.
C. Like B, except that people aren't supposed to leave them. Masses of people are imprisoned indefinitely. The alleged 1+ million number is true. Erasure of Muslim religion and artefacts is true. Brutality within camps are true. But no killing/genocide.
D. Full killing/genocide ala Nazi Auschwitz, on the full population, everywhere in China.
E. None of the above. Would love to hear what you think is exactly going on.
I'd think a mix of A and C (massive amounts of both good and ill intent/practices, largely a question of who runs the particular camp). This is based on both living in China in 2009 and seeing the nature of the state apparatus at the time, and having a Uighur roommate in 2012 who spoke a bit about the political situation at that time.
It could have not been on purpose, but it doesn't come off as a good faith desire to find out what people believe. I'm not sure how you can really, effectively figure out what specifically people think on this forum, especially because it very well could be the case that most people reading and commenting on this article haven't been following the situation incredibly carefully beyond just having a sense that something really bad is happening in China concerning persecution of an ethnic and religious minority and the occasional headline with a few more specifics.
Re false dilemma: You mean I got downvoted for not providing an option "E: other, please describe"? And just by lacking such an option, it comes over as bad faith?
That seems rather excessive and cynical. Why is it so hard for people to just post a comment describing their opinion, rather than hitting downvote?
Obviously there are at least as many reasons to downvote you as the number of downvotes you got, but I don't think adding E would've saved you from any of them, since you'd still be the one preselecting A-D.
Maybe you thought it would be as simple as people replying "B" or "C", but nobody just picked one of the answers and you got a super long reply that must have taken a long time to type out. The effort for a quick vote vs. writing a comment is heavily skewed towards voting.
You got some high-effort replies to your question anyway, so maybe just ignore the low-effort votes.
That's my guess. Also, I think there are some jumps in the severity of things in your examples that probably come off as bad faith.
Your list is not quite as bad as
A. Just helping the Uighurs, but maybe not in the best way.
B. Just killing all the Uighurs.
But I think a lot of people have issue with your list not considering the fact that there may be something between full killing/genocide and only some of them being killed (perhaps the more religious? the imams? those whose blood tests show they'll make a good organ donor?) and the idea of "demographic genocide"; or with your list not mentioning the fact that the brutality may not be policy but that it may be tacitly condoned; or your list not mentioning that it doesn't take obvious destruction of artefacts, buildings, or killing of imams to erase a religion or tradition and that it can happen in more subtle ways.
Many westerners grow up learning about the potential horrors of western imperialism and colonialism, and they are worried about the sinicization of Islam (and everything else).
I realize this comment may come off as rude, but I think that it is a real explanation of the downvotes. It's also important to realize that it's a lot easier for people to vote than to converse, especially when most people know about issues like this from headlines, skimming articles, etc.
I don’t think your comment is rude. It makes sense, even if I don’t agree with people who think the way you describe it. I made a best effort to describe the various possibilities that I think exist.
I just think that it’s silly when so many people condemn China for being unfree, yet at the same time throw away their free society values of encouraging discussions and respecting each others’ opinions, when it comes to discussing China topics.
I'd like to ask, do you pretty much believe your option A? If so, what do you think of the Buzzfeed News investigation and reporting? Also, do you thing the re-education of Uighurs and others is the right thing for the Communist Party to be doing?
I understand you may not want to comment publicly here, so if you want, feel free to email me (my profile has my email).
All of the reporting just indicates buildings exist. I'm not sure what to believe, lots of things are in range given the evidence, but I don't take "look, a building" to mean much of anything.
Some of the buildings are very clearly used as detention centers. They've been confirmed by journalists, for instance. Not all are proven to be camps and just look like they could be. (I don't know why China would need so many guarded prison looking areas with thick concrete walls, but I'm sure someone could come up with a reason.)
I was talking about the other two articles by Buzzfeed. They interviewed quite a few people who were arrested and then released from these centers.
Also, there is no question (meaning China has admitted it) that China has a re-education and de-radicalization program for which they are detaining Uighurs (and others) against their will. It is part of their larger plans to sinicize Islam from what I understand. What are your thoughts on this?
I agree with your facts there, although "sinicize Islam" sounds awfully grand?
In context with Western countries' reactions to militant islam, it's very different, different cultural norms, but it's hard to call it comparatively monstrous.
What if it works? What we're doing in afghanistan clearly isn't working, despite the humanitarian cost..
The phrase Sinicization of Islam is Xi Jinping's, or at least the CCP's. It does sound grand and oppressive, especially when you consider that it is about more than just a considerate plan to minimize the threat of violent sects of Islam and includes stopping Islamic finance, mosque-run schools, religious Arabic-language schools, and more much worse as we've heard reports of (bits of which are reported in the articles). Sure, these traditions may be vectors for some particular type of violent Islamic ideas to spread, but they are also important parts of many's peaceful faith.
Of course, the CCP has never really tried that hard to pretend they don't see religion as a threat. I mean, it really is a threat to the CCP's ultimate power. And if one doesn't have cultural norms respecting a person's right to peacefully practice religion and traditions, then I guess one wouldn't consider forced re-education camps monstrous. But if one did, then I don't think it would matter if it "works". I won't try and justify American wars or reason about their effectiveness in preventing violence.
Religion is a part of daily life for many, many Chinese. It's different, not Abrahamic, more of a syncretic blend of taoist, buddhist and localized icons. Monks and nuns take their roles seriously. Xi's government, in contrast to the communist governments 60 years ago, leverages it in a standard social conservative way rather than being against it on communist grounds. It's all over their propaganda.
Anti-communist talking points from the 1980s never accurately described China, and certainly not in 2020.
Here's my question: you clearly know very little about the place, yet are super invested in it. How do you square that? Why not either spend time learning about this place, or stop caring?
I understand that religion is a part of daily life for many, many Chinese. I do admit that I don't know that much about China except the little I have learned from reading and talking with people. I've been mostly asking about the things that these Buzzfeed articles articulate. I'd like to know more, hence my questions, reading about it, etc. I'm not that much more invested than the average interested person, and I've been somewhat interested in China for quite some time, but haven't had (or made, really) the opportunity to visit.
I have a Christian Chinese friend with whom I've talked about the role of the Chinese government in curtailing the free-expression and practice of religion. The 80's are certainly not the 2020's, but as is obvious to even someone who "clearly knows very little about the place" the CCP still works against religions that it sees as threats to their power. I get that this can be framed as a difference in "cultural norms" and this is something that I'd like to understand more fully.
Short of living in China, do you have any good advice, books or whatnot to read, or whatever that would be good to do/read in order to learn more?
RE: religion, the impression I've gotten is that it's specifically organization that the government sees as a threat. So, without the context of Urumqi riots or bombings, they'd probably default to seeing catholics or certainly falun gong as a bigger threat than disorganized Uyghur muslims. Protestant christians less so, if they knew enough to discriminate.
I don't have any great reading materials for 2020 daily life, there's laowhy86 and serpentza on youtube who I haven't watched much but they've been recommended.
Mao, the unknown story, fantastic original research but you've gotta discount for a LOT of bias as the author is clearly still butthurt over the civil war. Not to say that Mao was a nice guy, but if you're refusing to use pinyin in the 21st century, calling Beijing 'Peking', you've got some baggage.
Longer run of history, makes you realize all of the cultural context that they have which differs from ours and makes conversation impossible at times.
> Xi's government, in contrast to the communist governments 60 years ago, leverages it in a standard social conservative way rather than being against it on communist grounds
This is literally written on a thread about people jailed and tortured because of their religion.
> Why not either spend time learning about this place, or stop caring?
The Chinese government has made it impossible to communicate with the people in that region. How about they let reporters move freely and interview people?
Too simplistic. Based on the generally available reports, and based on prior probabilities given the way this stuff has tended to work all over the world, I tentatively believe something close to this:
There is forced re-education, forced de-radicalization, and forced political (and cultural) assimilation. One major motivation is probably to fight a (largely illusory) danger of widespread separatist violence. In fact, the policy will probably eventually provoke or exacerbate such violence from at least a significant minority. That in turn will confirm in the leader's minds that the entire populace is dangerous, leading to a heavier crackdown. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Some voluntary vocational education is available, not necessarily in "camps", but probably in somewhat less restricted residential settings as well as on an "outpatient" basis. This "education" has a significant political component, which is largely unnoticed by the people who create the curriculum. Failure to absorb the political component is failure to absorb the lessons, and is treated as such.
Some unknown, but probably not very large, number of people accept this on a truly voluntary basis. Another unknown, but probably larger, number accept it "voluntarily", because they expect full-on involuntary internment if they do not. Both of these "voluntary" groups probably do get privileges like the possibility to occasionally get a pass to leave the camp (or other facility). Neither group is probably as large as the outright involuntary group, but it's hard to tell.
Unless you can put on a good show of actually qualifying to "graduate", guitting the "voluntary" group probably has a better than even chance of getting you put into the "involuntary" group. On the other hand, if you're genuinely an enthusiastic member of the "voluntary" group, and you manage to prove it, that's a great thing and you'll get all kinds of rewards.
No genocide is intended; assimilation is intended. The goal is not so much to erase any existing cultural identity as to make it subordinate to "Chinese" identity. That includes accepting a healthy helping of Han, but the people defining the goals don't see that, and think of it as accepting "universal values and pro-social habits". The intended assimilation would have the long-term effect of erasure and might meet the UN definition of "genocide"... but that's not really the purpose.
There is no intentional genocide in the sense of planned mass extermination. Nobody is killed outright unless they resist with violence. They are, of course provoked to so resist, but that's not really intentional. Of course anything that looks like participation in or aid to rebellion counts as violent resistance.
If things escalate enough there may be more dehumanization, and a perceived need for a "final solution", but that's not what the bosses want to do, and they are probably not thinking in those terms at this point.
The intent with regard to religion is to tame it, and those in charge feel they're enlightened and lenient for not outright suppressing it. The "taming" includes bringing the practice under state supervision and control, and removing any doctrinal elements that the regime finds threatening or that might in any way tend to undermine the regime's own doctrines. Some of the altered elements are probably important to the religion as it exists and as it is presently seen by its practitioners. It's very hard to create a recognizable "socialist Islam".
The re-educators, for their part, cannot understand why anybody would be unwilling to accept the "obviously reasonable" changes they're asking for, and see any resistance as vicious intransigence.
The brutality, in or out of the camps, is neither policy nor incidental. It's just what happens when you round people up and tell your troops that they're recalcitrant and anti-social and need to be "re-educated". But Those In Charge are predisposed not to see the brutality as what it is. It's simply tough love for the recalcitrant, with the occasional rare aberration. If a guard manages to make the bosses see something as brutal, that guard is probably punished with extreme severity.
Artefacts, buildings or whatever aren't an issue unless they become rallying points or are seen as likely to be rallying points. However, "not an issue" also includes "not very important to preserve". Which may make them into rallying points.
The goal is to have everybody in the camps re-educated (or brainwashed, as we crazy outsiders would have it), and released. It's a regrettable reality that certain elements resist this reasonable re-education, and therefore must be detained for very long periods, maybe even for life. It wouldn't be appropriate to release anybody who hadn't actually been reformed. After all, it's for their own good, and don't doubt that the people at the top of this believe that it's for their own good. Of course, if somebody resists "criminally" and becomes an enemy of the state, they may be imprisoned, or, justifiably, executed judicially, or killed as imminent threats to the safety of the state, the state's agents, or the social order.
How many people they actually manage to release is hard to tell. Exactly how hard they try, or what they accept as adequate evidence of having been re-educated, is also hard to tell. It probably varies.
It's also a regrettable reality that there are many unregenerate elements in the populace. Whether it gets to a million, I don't know.
So sort of C with elements of A, but it's more complicated than that.
You would think they'd have learned about some of this from the Cultural Revolution, but apparently not.
> This "education" has a significant political component, which is largely unnoticed by the people who create the curriculum.
I am certain the people creating the curriculum are aware of the political nature. Even "normal" educational institutions in China have an internal Party committee which will review material for ideological "correctness."
For projects like this the Party cadres are surely involved.
(This is a minor correction of an otherwise excellent post.)
> No genocide is intended; assimilation is intended. The goal is not so much to erase any existing cultural identity as to make it subordinate to "Chinese" identity. That includes accepting a healthy helping of Han, but the people defining the goals don't see that, and think of it as accepting "universal values and pro-social habits". The intended assimilation would have the long-term effect of erasure and might meet the UN definition of "genocide"... but that's not really the purpose.
This makes me think of the Native American boarding schools in the US and Canada. They were fairly awful from a human rights perspective and did play a role in genocide, but like what you describe the idea was forced assimilation rather than explicit genocide.
This is the best post on this topic that has ever been written on Hacker News.
Only nitpick (after a bunch of brilliant conjecture that basically 'scans' as far as human behavior, chinese society, and Xi's inclinations): The cultural revolution was completely out of control once unleashed -- this seems much more 'regular' as far as how it's being administered.
Yes, and you've stripped all of the ideology and mania out of it by referencing it in this context. OP who wrote that excellent post would have known better.
Are Uyghurs being sent out into the farmlands to toil on stupid projects as part of a hyper-idealistic, "we're all workers" message? No, none of that, in any way. They're indoors, and the message has nothing to do with hammers or sickles.
I am saying that the current generation of leaders may not find the idea of camps abhorrent. Xi was himself a sent-down youth. He probably did not like it at the time but he hasn't displayed any strong resentment of it either.
It would have very little effect, which is why it's not a primary threat now. Despite China's aims, their tech giants have made little headway in pushing their core businesses far outside of China. Huawei is the primary success story in that regard (the US has obviously been aggressively targeting them across the board). Baidu was supposed to conquer the world and defeat Google, it failed miserably and is largely just a China search engine today, nearly all of their revenue comes from China, so sanctions wouldn't do much. China's tech giants are, for the most part, captives within China. ByteDance did manage to build a global phenomenon in TikTok, however that too is now under threat of being turned back.
Sanctions on most parts of China's system will have little effect, similar to how China's retaliatory sanctions on US Senators are largely meaningless.
There are three primary ways to hurt China. 1) Cut them off on technology (eg semiconductors), which is an angle the US is using to an extent. There is some question over how long China will tolerate that before they just start ignoring international rules/laws/norms and start openly steal-cloning the tech they want (I'd bet they won't tolerate it for very long). 2) Humiliate them politically, through isolation & exclusion; cut them out of the global system; that requires a widespread effort from the top several dozen economies, it can be done however. 3) Target their export machine & dollar dependency, cut them off financially from the global economy (USD, Euro and Yen combined entirely dominate the global economy, along with the connected banking & financial systems); this will work for a while, however China is aware of the weak spots and is very aggressively working to build out their domestic service economy to lessen the importance of their exports to their economy, and they're always looking to lessen their dollar dependency.
All that said, China is well beyond the point where you can really restrict them in the sense that you can most nations (like Iran or Venezuela). They've accumulated enough capability, tech, wealth, productivity, infrastructure, domestic know-how, etc. that they are fully free standing now. They have $60 trillion or so in domestic wealth. They have the world's #2 military. They have the world's largest manufacturing engine, and can increasingly manufacture at or near the highest tiers (eg jet engines & planes, semiconductors, etc). They have very few real weak points that can threaten them in a serious sense. The last time it was possible to squeeze China was before the great recession, when their economy was still far smaller than the US & EU, and back then it was hoped that wouldn't be necessary.
> cut them out of the global system; that requires a widespread effort from the top several dozen economies, it can be done however.
The problem is that many of the world's economies already depend on China - either as a source of cheap products or, and that is an increasingly successful threat, for money. China has been buying up, building or financing construction works especially in South Europe (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Serbia come to mind), and are involved across Africa.
> The problem is that many of the world's economies already depend on China
No question. On point 2, it wouldn't significantly harm China by any means. The point would be to humiliate their power aspirations, as China has an intense desire to be respected as a global superpower, to be viewed as a peer with great powers, and so on. It's nothing more than an attempt at influencing China, to exclude them from the global order that they obviously want to be part of.
Isolation is a modestly potent influence weapon, even more so today than in the past. Russia / USSR for example suffered from an intense desire to be viewed as a power peer, they desperately wanted that recognition from the US (Khrushchev sought that out with his populist visit to the US). Authoritarian systems always seek that with a great degree of desperation (they know their rule by force is illegitimate, so they seek outside sources - typically more democratic sources - to legitimize them).
> they know their rule by force is illegitimate, so they seek outside sources - typically more democratic sources - to legitimize them
China, however, unlike the USSR and Yugoslavia, has the unique advantage of a population so brainwashed that even Chinese students in foreign countries experiencing the benefits of democratic countries are feared for their loyalty to the CCP. Add to that the Great Firewall / their trend of a "Chinternet" aka Walled Garden for their citizens where the CCP controls the narrative and the informations, plus the strategy of allowing local small scale protests against corrupt public officials so that people vent... China doesn't need anyone's validation, they are too big. Unfortunately. The Western countries should have nipped that shit in the bud instead of selling out human rights for cheap crap.
In the event of conflict, there's nothing stopping those countries from seizing Chinese assets in their countries. Heck, the US did that with Merck KgaA and Merck Inc during WW2.
The problem is technology. Here's a Serbian perspective:
Huawei's Safe Cities project uses Chinese-owned and operated facial recognition technology, in cooperation with the Serbian Ministry of Interior, aggregating data from a hundred thousands of 4K security cameras around public places in Belgrade, and enabling tracking by person, and not by place and time. It is infeasible to disable this system and use a domestic one instead. China has complete remote control.
Chinese CMEC (China Machinery Engineering Corporation) and Sinomach in general produce and maintain hardware for some of Serbia's coal-powered thermoelectric power plants, and CMEC is building a new power plant block right now. The control software is provided and maintained by Chinese companies. It is infeasible to disable theses systems and use domestic ones instead. China has complete remote control.
Serbian national railway companies (it was split into multiple ones, including Serbia Train (Srbija Voz) that operates trains and Serbian Railways Infrastructure (IŽS - Infrastrukture Železnica Srbije) that operates the railway infrastructure) are partnered and deeply integrated with CCECC (China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation), CRCC (China Railway Construction Corporation) and CRI (China Railway International). The trains are being imported from China, the rail is being reconstructed by Chinese workers, there are Chinese flags next to the rail for it's whole length. The system will be reconstructed with Chinese technology and deeply integrated into proprietary systems. It is infeasible to disable theses systems and use domestic ones instead. China has complete remote control.
This is happening also to Železara Smederevo and RTB Bor, and more is on the way. Chinese military aircraft is planned to replace old Soviet and Russian planes, and Serbia has already imported Chinese UAVs and anti-aircraft weapons, as well as tanks and advanced multipurpose vehicles. Huawei equipment is installed in all cell carriers and powers intenal networks for military use as well as civil interconnections with ISPs both domestic and international, through the Internet Exchanges in Belgrade. More things are planned.
The only things that could be seized, if a conflict were to occur, are the roads and the dumb hardware. That is not useful, but in any case a conflict will never occur because it would be suicidal for a country so deeply integrated with China to try and pick a fight with such an economic and technological superpower. The problem is that this relationship is not symbiotic, it is dangerous for Serbia due to Chinese tendency to ignore environmental laws, manipulate reports and conceal information about accidents or toxic waste, as well as the planned extraction of natural resources that is one of the key points of the Belt and Road initiative.
EDIT: Oh and one thing, before someone calls me sinophobic[1]: It would be equally bad for Serbia if any other country did such a thing. But they didn't, not even Russia had ambitions to make this a puppet state of theirs.
[1] Of course, for all intents and purposes, in this context, China === Chinese Communist Party with the Paramount Leader Xi Jinping, not the Chinese citizens or people of Chinese etnicity.
I was looking at the issue from a more EU-centric perspective tbf. Not from the PoV of say Serbia or Pakistan.
For most of the aforementioned countries, such as Italy or Greece, in the event actual conflict happens (say Russian aggression with Chinese support/interference), the ties are loose enough that they can be severed with much less economic harm, than say Serbia or Pakistan which are apparently deeply integrated with the Chinese economy.
Yes, in that case it is true. But, they were never in any danger of China to begin with. I look from my own point of view, and I do not like what I see one bit.
Take a look at the number of Western European startups and companies being acquired by China already. What the Western governments don't have are bottomless pockets of cash ripe for acquisitions. Instead the only tool they have are hostile regulations against foreign acquisitions. Even then, the allure of money is strong and the Chinese seem to find ways to extract technology, one way or the other.
China dominates rare earth metal production not because they have a monopoly on extraction technology or deposits, but because rare earth extraction is an extremely polluting process that developed countries no longer do. If China did restrict exports of rare earths, they're just providing an opportunity for mines like Mountain Pass in California to start production again.
In international politics nobody cares too much as long as you are only killing your own people. No country wants to go to war to save some other country's citizens. Hitler could have finished the Holocaust with little more than an international slap on the wrist if he hadn't also invaded France and Russia.
While I get your point business is more important for many countries and going to war for repressed citizens is rare, I think this is a stain that won’t go away and might prove a mistake in the long run. Sure, nobody will go to war with China for this but the Chinese have a huge liability on their hands and might have to pay reparations at some point
Yes they should stop doing that, our country has an unbearable president (Trump) right now but, that doesn’t excuse China from anything and it is also way worse in scale and intensity and done directly against their own citizens who have a different religion.
The thing is that here in the US nearly half of the citizens are opposed. In China nobody gives a damn, they don’t know and don’t care. Big difference!!
Curious how the YC involvement in China has panned out. I know they had divested somehow a couple of years ago, or at least they had started using another legal entity to do their bidding over there (maybe I'm mistaken on this).
Also, it was my impression that people directly involved with YC at the time (such as Sam Altman) were pretty "blinded" by what was happening elsewhere in China and their were focusing instead only on the potential monetary gains. Granted, they weren't alone in this, as much bigger fish such as Apple, MS, FB and even Google wanted a piece of the tasty pie and as such were ready to make huge compromises to get to it. Even so, for me at least it was a little disappointing, YC could have afforded to act on principles alone, its owners/founders are already pretty rich, plus they're not listed so don't have to battle with the tyranny of the shareholders.
There’s no “using another legal entity to do their bidding over there”. It’s just closed.
That said, it’s not clear that it’s unequivocally morally superior to deny a service to all 1B+ Chinese people, many of whom could have been founders of great companies or customers/beneficiaries of those companies, just because of the actions of a government, particularly one that was not elected by those citizens.
As the announcement mentions, Qi Lu continues to be active in the VC space with a new company, MiraclePlus, which calls itself "formerly YC China" on their website: https://www.miracleplus.com/
Presumably he calls it that because he’s using the same business strategy/model he was building for YC. But it seems quite clear that it’s not YC. The new entity is a standalone VC fund [1], and YC is a recipient of LP funds, not an LP in other VC funds. And besides, it would be hard for YC to keep any involvement quiet after making this kind of announcement.
I'd suggest that this is less black versus white than it appears.
In buying products made in China, you're helping to raise a huge number of people out of crushing poverty. I've traveled through China across 25 years, and seen how their lives have improved, yet some are still trying to eke out subsistence, farming what looked like a 1-acre plot with an ox.
Yes, the CCP is evil. But the moral calculus is never simple, I don't think we can simply assume that the net effect of purchasing from China is morally bad. It does enable some bad things, but it also helps quite a lot of people.
We're funding the upliftment of Chinese citizens, at the cost of the millions of unemployed in our own home countries. And that according to you is still a good thing?
I'm a firm believer in free trade and all that, as long as trade partners are of the same ideological bend, even if flawed. Not the country that's actively looking to rivalldestabilize every other Western democracy through backroom dealings.
As a start, you can buy goods from non-Chinese owned companies, even if they're manufactured in China. Also, you can start paying attention to the manufacturing location, so at least you are able to make a conscious choice. It's not easy, but possible.
For example, I'm planning on building a computer. I'm going to aim for components from Taiwanese and U.S. companies as much as possible. In terms of laptops, I won't buy a Lenovo, but would consider an Apple or HP, even though they're all at least partially made in China.
You should stop buying all goods or services from those who do serious business with China: large US farming corporations, Microsoft, GE, GM, McDonald's, KFC, Boeing, Nike and Apple.
This is where you can actually make a difference as much as many people don't want to hear it.
A bit of an exaggeration. It does not take much research, google of course is useful, and looking at product websites they must disclose country of origin. Certain big names are obvious skips, seriously don't buy Apple. Avoid certain car brands and yes this includes Tesla but Volvo also exports from China as does Buick and others. A lot of brands have US based manufacturing but to be honest, if you are avoiding China related items you must hold the company accountable across all territories.
for consumer electronics its pretty easy to find sites dedicated to popular models and from there you can easily see where something is made
if you are looking for house hold goods, furniture, dinner ware, and the like, consider buying used from thrift shops, donation centers, garage sales, and even ebay; all my dinner and glass ware is vintage anchor hocking and morgantown glass.
the other option is to consume less. most often people buy stuff when what they have already does quite well. it is also a leading reason why many don't have sufficient savings
It will get easier - there has been a significant shift of manufacturing away from China to other countries, primarily India.
That is the case for tech and some of the more crucial imports - cheap less important items will probably always be manufactured in China in high volume though.
1. Resolve to not care if anyone is hurt in the process of providing you with consumables. Come up with excuses why it's not your responsibility, avoid learning more about it, ignore it, live in denial. The moral dread is gone.
2. Acquire your goods somewhere else, which may involve more cost and difficulty. The moral dread may not be gone if you realize that simply not supporting the oppression does not stop the oppression (avoiding German products does not stop the Holocaust)
3. Consume less. Same issue as #2 though.
4. Actively work towards ending the oppression which is giving you moral dread. This may end the moral dread, even if you continue to consume their products.
The only way to avoid your moral dread is to change your belief system. Anything that legitimately hurts the CCP a little would disproportionately devastate the residents there. If you boycott all factories that employ Uighurs, for example, that means that many of them will be laid off and sent back to reeducation camp.
Start by self reflection on your hypocrisy. Do you feel bad about regularly using services from a country which has committed and supported some of the worst war crimes and genocide in history? (if not obvious, I am referring to the US)
I'm pretty sure he didn't. The US has the notable distinction of performing genocide on an entire continent of peoples and cultures in the process of replacing its population with settlers. I'm sure more then a few people in China justify ethnic cleansing with "The US did it and now they're the most powerful nation in the world. Maybe they were on to something. Well, better late then never."
I am not American, but I assume you are referring to native americans, it is my understanding that the displacement of the native population occured before the federation of the US states, which would mean the perpetrators of this crime would be the colonizing countries, which would be Spain/France/England, surely?
> it is my understanding that the displacement of the native population occured before the federation of the US states,
It started before that, sure. It very much continued after (into the 20th Century), and was a major feature of the post-independence westward expansion of the US.
USA's Pacific Ocean imperialism was never really distinguishable from its Western America colonialism. The same racist bastards (as in, the same actual army personnel: Jacob Hurd Smith, Leonard Wood, Blackjack Pershing, etc.) who killed lots of indigenous Americans also killed lots of indigenous Filipinos. The Bud Dajo Massacre was similar to that at Wounded Knee sixteen years earlier, except probably more diabolical.
Of course, the imperial conquest of Philippines presaged more USA imperial conquest elsewhere.
Disproportionately purchase items made in your own country. Encourage others to do the same. Vote for government officials who encourage similar policies, write to government official who do not. Start/join action groups, engage in political debate at all levels. Start / invest in a local manufacturing company, run for local office, run for president, get rich and invest in local brands.
These are excellent suggestions. I've been wishing for some kind of "made in democracy" stamp, or a "produced humanly" if that would also shut out other more moderate manufacturing centres, similar to fair trade chocolate.
Many countries have a fake democracy cover. Even Hitler won an election with like the 99% of the votes (I wonder if the other 1% survived for too long.)
Also, does this label apply to the United Kingdom or Canada?
So my main worry was the possible controversy over what some consider pseudo-democracies, like Russia or outright not democracies but generally considered within the tolerable realm of citizen freedoms, like Vietnam, but I think your instant response over the UK and Canada indicates that a "made in democracy" would be tricky and that it would possibly have to be a more neutral term.
The intent would be a feelgood symbol manufacturers could attach to their products that would essentially give them a very slight competitive marketing edge - like the fair trade symbol, or the regionalities for cheese and wine, or the nintendo seal of approval, etc. This would be run through some kind of tiny registration fee for the symbol, which would then fund the central body of a few people checking the supply chains, dealing with the applications, and sorting out the advertising/branding.
If anyone has good ideas about this, post here. If anyone wants the idea and wants to do it, do it.
> Also, does this label apply to the United Kingdom or Canada?
Why would it not?
It's not like the head of state wields power in a parliamentary democracy. We cut the head off the last monarch to try that 1649, more than 100 years before either the French or US revolutions.
Why is the Queen involved at all in regards to Parliament? The spectacle with Boris Johnson and the Queen was quite a sad joke on supposed British democracy.
So long as the Queen (royal family) has any political capabilities, Britain is a partial democracy at best. Realistically they're still a mixture of monarchy and democracy, as they have been for a long time. Although people certainly likely to pretend the royal family has no tangible role or political power (because they want to pretend to be a modern democracy, while retaining the monarchy which they culturally have affection for; which is another way of saying they want to have their cake and eat it too).
That's not the case. The Nazi party won only 37% of the vote in the last arguably free election (1932). They also didn't win a majority in the 1933 election, which the Communists were barred from and which was post-Reichstag fire and suspension of civil liberties.
So? The issue isn't satellite/aerial imagery being censored, it's that it's being censored to cover up unsavory things. The equivalent in the US would be ICE/CBP detention camps being covered up on maps, but it doesn't look like that's happening: https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities
During the months in 2018 where Child Separation was official US policy, there were absolutely attempts made by the government to prevent reporting on the known facilities, discovery of which facilities held separated children, or even reporting on accounting data of how many children were being held.
It's true that this sort of thing works poorly in the US (e.g. eventually someone on the cleaning staff gets upset and calls a journalist). But the impetus was absolutely identical.
The US government tries to hide its crimes too, basically. We're just bad at it. (And Child Separation proved a PR disaster, and officially ended even though lots of those kids will probably never see their parents again).
In France, many military and nuclear facilities are also smoothed out in google maps. It seems a bit ridiculous since you can easily see public (free and paid) satellite images of the same places.
If you look at the historical imagery in Google Earth, it'll show your the 2015 imagery fine: https://i.imgur.com/Jk8Kn1r.png
It's noticeably lower resolution than the surrounding 2017 imagery, but it doesn't appear to be censored in the same way (it's of the same quality as the surrounding areas when imaged in 2015).
It does the same for what appears to be a large circular antenna installation just to the west of here.
"Alison Killing conducted this reporting with a grant and further assistance from the Open Technology Fund."
From wikipedia: "As of November 2019, the Open Technology Fund became an independent nonprofit corporation and a grantee of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.[7] Until its formation as an independent entity, it had operated as a program of Radio Free Asia."
Radio Free Asia ... founded by the CIA and a today well oiled propaganda arm for whatever is on the US government's foreign policy agenda.
> RFA is the only station outside China that broadcasts in the Uygur-language.[32] It has been recognized for played a vital role in exposing Xinjiang re-education camps.[33][34][35] The New York Times regards RFA as one of the few reliable sources of information about Xinjiang.
My understanding is that RFA, RFE, VOA, etc. are basically meant to promote the idea free independent press in areas where only heavy-handed propaganda is available, and the propaganda value is in undermining blatant propaganda.
I think it is fair to call it propaganda. It is funded by U.S. Agency for Global Media [0], their first principle is to "Be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States" [1]. That means they cannot be considered free independent press since they won't be able to take a stance that goes against the US government.
> That means they cannot be considered free independent press since they won't be able to take a stance that goes against the US government.
I don't think it means that. Sure, they're not going to run strongly anti-American editorials, but we're talking about news reporting here, and they don't seem to finch at reporting news that doesn't make the US look good. For instance:
This article repeats criticisms of US police actions against journalism and carries this gem: "“Abuse of power against journalism is really as old as America itself,” Wheaton said. “It’s an eternal struggle between journalists trying to expose and power trying to hide.”": https://www.voanews.com/press-freedom/police-response-press-...:
This article (republished from the AFP) is actually not too different from a certain type of subtle anti-democracy propaganda you'd see on CCTV (i.e. selectively emphasize foreign unrest to make Chinese authoritarianism look good): https://www.voanews.com/usa/timeline-us-race-riots-1965
They have an entire category dedicated covering one of the biggest American domestic problems (which, IMHO, doesn't make the US look good): https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-in-america
This article (from a US conservative website) criticizes VoA for not being pro-government enough, and carries another gem: "The viewpoints generally expressed in these Voice of America articles are those of demonstrators, protesters, and rioters, and indistinguishable from coverage in The New York Times or The Washington Post.": https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/the-voice-...
And the Comintern was merely meant to promote workers rights?
It's definitionally a propaganda arm of the government. If you think that we're the good guys, then they're the good guys, but they're still propaganda.
> It's definitionally a propaganda arm of the government. If you think that we're the good guys, then they're the good guys, but they're still propaganda.
If it's propaganda, it's propaganda for western-style journalism and liberal values.
The question shouldn't be "is it state sponsored or not;" it should be "is its reporting reliable or not." On that question, RFA's reporting on this topic has gotten the endorsement of the news pages of at least one top-tier American paper. I'd put it in a similar space as the BBC or AFP.
> On that question, RFA's reporting on this topic has gotten the endorsement of the news pages of at least one top-tier American paper.
While we like to consider the mainstream press as completely free and unbiased, I think it's fair to remind everyone that in the early 2000s all publications were parroting the US lie that Iraq was hiding WMDs. Something similar happened last year with the election in Bolivia and subsequent coup.
"...I think it's fair to remind everyone that in the early 2000s all publications were parroting the US lie that Iraq was hiding WMDs."
Afair most news organisations were pretty sceptical about those claims. There were also a few leaks from the intelligence community that were sceptical and complained about the pressure from the administration.
> While we like to consider the mainstream press as completely free and unbiased, I think it's fair to remind everyone that in the early 2000s all publications were parroting the US lie that Iraq was hiding WMDs. Something similar happened last year with the election in Bolivia and subsequent coup.
That's true, taking that observation too far leads to a quagmire or cynicism, paranoia, and/or ignorance.
If RFA basically has the problems of the mainstream press, then it's actually pretty good, since the mainstream press, despite its issues, is the best press we have. It definitely compares favorably to outlets like RT and Xinhua.
It's propaganda for liberal values as long as they serve the interests of the US. Allies get a pass, and liberal enemies of our allies will be criticized.
Bin Laden was a good guy when he was fighting the Soviets.
I wouldn’t consider NYT approval a great validation metric. Their reporting on Xinjiang in particular really made it sound to me like someone has an axe to grind and they know they’re preaching to a choir over here. There was one massive “Xinjiang expose” they published a couple years ago that hung on allegations by a few individuals who the reporters claimed were putting their lives at risk by talking, but who the reporters nonetheless identified by name and face.
There are tons and tons of Chinese immigrants in our industry. It's not a stretch at all to assume that some read hacker news and are nationalistic. Assume good faith.
It's obvious that the US is trying to emphasize what's going on in Xinjiang for political benefit. That said, it's pretty clear it is happening. Its important to draw attention to how powerful institutions influence media narratives, but that doesn't mean that we should disregard anything these institutions push. Rather, the narratives they propagate should be given increased scrutiny. IMO, There's enough evidence from both biased and unbiased sources that there's a cultural, if not literal, genocide happening in Xinjiang.
If you want anecdata, I'm friends with a Han Chinese - who is overall pretty supportive of
the CCP, mind - who was born and raised in Xinjiang. When they return to visit their family, they have relatively few restrictions compared to foreign journalists or tourists. They've told me that mass relocations - and deaths in the camps - are clearly happening, based on what they hear from local Uyghurs and from things they just see around their hometown.
Buzzfeed does a lot of fluff ("You won't believe these 87 talking cats") plus decent, fairly well-regarded journalism (paid for by the fluff). This actually isn't that different to how normal papers operate; sports, gossip (called 'society' if the paper is sufficiently fancy) etc, bring in the money, with investigative journalism not exactly being a big earner. The difference is that Buzzfeed had the fluff before it did journalism.
Due to the travails of the news industry, there are currently a lot of good journalists and not a lot of jobs for them, so this sort of non-traditional route works. Teen Vogue is another example, arguably, though a less dramatic one; surprisingly good journalism in an outlet where you wouldn't traditionally expect journalism at all.
Buzzfeed News has a lot of excellent journalism. Even in its non US editions, like India for example. They cover a lot of important stories that the mainstream outlets refuse to touch.
Like other comments have already mentioned Buzzfeed (not Buzzfeed News) is the low effort listicle / clickbait part of the business which is unfortunately better known (mostly for pioneering the entire "10 things... you won't believe number 7" genre)
> In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads.
Translation: we looked at satellite photos of random buildings and determined that they were "camps" because of unspecified "hallmarks".
This is literally a Buzzfeed article. One of the people they cite once tried to do something similar by claiming an 800 year old mosque was demolished when it was actually the building next door built in the 90s(by his own admission[0]). In fact it seems they seemed to have been expanding/renovating the mosque[1][2].
> Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu,
They "correlated" that out of 6 "camps" 5 of them had missing tiles, which gives you the chance of a blanked out tile give a "camp", but not the chance of a "camp" given blanked out tile.
There is a Canadian named Jerry Grey, who went on a bicycle ride in China. He literally rode hundreds of kilometers in Xinjiang, away from mainstream tourist attractions, to remote places he himself is interested in. He was able to do that without government supervision; all the government checkpoints let him pass without much scrutiny. What he reports on is very different from mainstream media reports.
Does anyone know why his report is so different, and why the government would just let him go whereever, unsupervised? Do people here believe that his report is genuine, or do people here believe that it's fake?
As someone who lives in SEA and used to live in China, he's able to move around because he lives in China and I assume has a long term visa and speaks Mandarin. And he is going with the blessing of the Chinese state media:
Didn't Global Times report on him long after he had already made the trip and blogged about it? Or are you saying: it's all one big scheme, planned way up front?
Given his Twitter feed looks like a Chinese diplomat's[1], I would assume he is part of the pro-Beijing influence network. I mean, why would someone dedicate 6 months of their life to convincing the world that something isn't happening which is reported on widely (even by some limited Chinese media)?
I have no idea if he is scheming with the the government or if he is simply trying to curry favour, but if you are a gwai lo (westerner) in China and want to get ahead for any reason (visas, job whatever), this is precisely what you would do. Whether its voluntary propaganda or paid propaganda, it's still propaganda.
> But I have issue with you saying “that which is reported widely”, as if the other side is entirely honest and truthful. In reality, both sides are distributing propaganda. I fear that, although you are skeptical of Chinese propaganda, you fail to recognize or be skeptical of Western propaganda at the same time.
You're making a false equivalence by oversimplifying things into symmetrical "sides." The Chinese state-owned media and propaganda apparatus have an established history of frequently spreading false or misleading claims for propaganda purposes. While Western media sometimes does get a story wrong or sometimes gets misled by their sources, they make a far greater effort to ensure objective accuracy, and are thus far more trustworthy.
Thanks, I was going to mention this too. I think there's an important skill that people fail to develop when they fall for propaganda, and it's the inability to calibrate appropriately for degrees of bias. Instead, all sources are 'biased' and regarded as equally untrue as one another. In my experience, if you try and communicate this, you can't get anywhere.
For an example I recently experienced, I was confidently informed by a redditor that Infowars and Common Dreams are equally biased sources, and there's a deficit of critical thinking there that I just don't know how to communicate to someone. It's also common with believers in the fake news trope - it's not wrong that there's media bias, but that gets used as an excuse to equate mainstream media outlets to those that traffic in conspiracy theories.
No I’m not making a false equivalence at all. I never said anything about whether the propaganda of sides are equal. I just said propaganda exists at both sides, implying that it’s up to you to decide in what quality/quantity they exist. Don’t put words in my mouth.
> While Western media sometimes does get a story wrong or sometimes gets misled by their sources, they make a far greater effort to ensure objective accuracy, and are thus far more trustworthy.
I find this is too simplistic a view. The media often falls in with the government's foreign policy objectives, playing up foreign enemies, presenting their own government's interests as completely reasonable but "adversarial" countries' interests as illegitimate.
If you were to go by American media, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake based on faulty intelligence, while Russia's annexation of Crimea was a grave attack on the international order. Never mind that the invasion of Iraq caused an incomparable amount of human suffering, violated a central principle of international law (the illegality of wars of aggression), and was provably based on lies. The New York Times itself played a key role in pushing the WMD story and promoting the case for war.
I've been to China numerous times, my Mandarin sucks, I stand out, and I went wherever I wanted. Didn't try to go to Xinjiang, admittedly.
There's paperwork that says you have to check in with local authorities wherever you go, tell them what hotel you're staying at, and all this other stuff, but nobody actually does it. If you caused trouble, it'd probably be held against you after the fact is all.
There's no reason to assume this guy is some kind of agent because he had freedom of motion. He probably liked all the people he met, sees lots of ignorant anti-China commentary on the English internet, and is pushing back (perhaps too strongly).
> There's paperwork that says you have to check in with local authorities wherever you go, tell them what hotel you're staying at, and all this other stuff, but nobody actually does it.
That's wrong: if you're staying in a hotel, they're doing the paperwork for you. You only have to do it yourself if you're staying in a private residence.
The section on separatism is unadulterated pro-authoritarianism. Examples of regions that have peacefully seceded from a nation abound. Norway from Sweden, Greenland and Iceland from Denmark, multiple states from the former Soviet Union. Scotland had a referendum on independence recently and though they chose to stay part of the UK, there was no threat or chance of violence. Freedom to seceded, or coerced union are both choices and 'everybody does it' is the worst excuse ever. Pure whataboutism.
The fact that the US has indivisibility in it's constitution is a weird historical wrinkle, and one I find hard to reconcile given that they chose to separate from Britain. How they didn't recognise a general right for self determination is beyond me. But then I am a Brit.
I'm married to a former Chinese citizen and have family in China, and while Ive not lived there I've been many times. It's oppressive enough of minorities just in the relatively peaceful areas I've visited. There's a superficial respect for ethnicities, but that's coupled with a sustained campaign of cultural suppression, dilution and colonisation.
For example there's no smallness of degree of ethnic blood too thin to count as part of that ethnicity, and ethnic groups get privileges Han don't, encouraging registration as minority members. Plus registration is just a matter of getting 'notorised', which is an unbelievably corrupt system. The result is that the vast majority of official members of 'ethnic minorities' have virtually, or actually no connection with the ethnic culture, but get full say in how their 'minority' is represented and treated. All the people who get an official say in minority relations are functionally 100% Han, and party members to boot.
>The fact that the US has indivisibility in it's constitution is a weird historical wrinkle, and one I find hard to reconcile given that they chose to separate from Britain. How they didn't recognise a general right for self determination is beyond me. But then I am a Brit.
This is incorrect. The US Constitution doesn't mention indivisibility [1]. The Tenth amendment provides some Rights to self determination:
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
---
So while the constitution doesn't address succession by a state, the historical context of our Civil War, and court cases in its aftermath ended most of the debate on if and how states could succeed from the Union.
From Texas v. White [2]:
>When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.
That establishes that succession must have the consent of the States, which is a similar bar to amending the Constitution. But its interesting that the case cited pre-constitutional law, i.e. the Articles of Confederation.
> Examples of regions that have peacefully seceded from a nation abound. Norway from Sweden, Greenland and Iceland from Denmark, multiple states from the former Soviet Union.
> The result is that the vast majority of official members of 'ethnic minorities' have virtually, or actually no connection with the ethnic culture, but get full say in how their 'minority' is represented and treated
Your whole last paragraph was genuinely interesting and not something I've heard of before. Do you have a source I could read for more information?
This phenomenon is certainly not limited to China. Elizabeth Warren is the public example who comes to mind, although I suspect that many of us know people who claim particular backgrounds for their personal advantage.
Warrens actions were misguided, but it’s a stretch to read malice into it. To me the line not to cross is marginalising the voices or representation of those genuinely culturally indigenous, or of a minority.
When I first went to China I read up on my wife’s home town online and found out about a native book store trying to preserve their culture so I though I’d check it out. When I visited it had been raided by the police ‘to prevent copyright violations’ and closed down. The shops everywhere were chock full of ripped off CDs and movies, but here this one time they decide to enforce that?
My wife is native Han but about a third of her relatives are officially minorities. None of them speak the minority language or read the script or have anything to do with minority culture. Minority script is used all over the place, but I talked to a university lecturer that’s a friend of the family, he told me most of the signs are gibberish, and told me how to spot ones that had been put up upside down. It’s a farce.
Do we feel like someone riding a bicycle through a region would necessarily discover something about such camps?
If I randomly traveled in any country would I know about these things? Would I know if I was "without government supervision"?
I'm not inclined to believe that any given rando foreigner would somehow provide a good view of what is going on locally.
I've traveled plenty, there's a ton I could not see / know.
I've actually seen this concept put forth a lot, especially when it comes to China that rando traveler didn't see something so we should doubt it (often put forth with stories about how little crime there is). I don't really understand why anyone would think that makes sense... particularly with all the rest of the information we have on this topic.
Neither my point, nor his point, is "this guy didn't see it while cycling, so they don't exist". In fact, he has stated multiple times that he isn't denying existance of camps.
As for what his point is: you should read the full article, it's nuanced.
I'm less concerned with the article than this strange idea that someone on a bike not seeing a thing ... means something relative to all the other information we have.
He repeatedly mentions Arabic as the local language instead of the various Turkic languages of the region, indicating that he most likely doesn't speak any of them, so he probably didn't have much interaction with less-educated people, who'd be the major targets of forced Mandarin education etc. So when he talks about people feeling safer now, is that representative of everyone in Xinjiang or just the people he chose to associate with?
It's not unlike a European visiting the US when they were busy killing natives and enslaving blacks, but being thoroughly enamored by their egalitarian democracy.
The written language should be Standard Mandarin in combination with one or more of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Xibe etc. depending on the composition of the local population. They're written in scripts related to the Arabic script, but the languages themselves are very different.
Also, it's interesting that on Twitter of sharing related articles you'll have Asian people with accounts commenting with very short messages simply saying "you're stupid" or similar without explaining themselves nor actually engaging with the comments - their replies getting 4+ Likes from near bot-looking accounts.
It seems the CCP is working hard to craft the narrative worldwide.
I think no one is doubting that, but I have yet to see any tweets from these bots are having any effect at all to turn the topic around (usually it's very one-sided against China). Do you have any examples that it might corrupt the discussion?
I think those would be easy to find. Most of the accounts will have locations of Chinese mainland and only post good things about China and bad thing about others. Some of them will post funny/beautiful photos/videos to gain following as well. Since Twitter is banned in PRC, why would people be constantly on VPN just to post this stuff. All you need to do is, find state sponsored account, see the users retweeting/liking their tweets like this account: https://mobile.twitter.com/eaglet_CH
There are accounts at a higher level than this, who would make more sense in countering and spread positivity as well.
Because he was a schmuck on a bicycle exploring a region more than twice the size of Texas, and not an actual journalist? Seriously, the OP was from freaking buzzfeed and it still listed the research team. These are not equally valuable accounts.
> Does anyone know why his report is so different, and why the government would just let him go whereever, unsupervised? Do people here believe that his report is genuine, or do people here believe that it's fake?
Honestly, I would expect the report of a tourist to be genuine but not reliable, especially when it comes to political stuff short of a devastating war. They'll probably be honest about what they saw directly, but probably won't find themselves "where the action is." They'd also lack the context and are poorly equipped to understand the larger situation, and are more vulnerable to being mislead. I'm reminded of all the times in my travel journals where I overgeneralized from a small experience or uncritically reported what some tour guide or random person said about something. They could have been lying, mistaken, or leaving something important out, but I lack the ability to tell.
Also, IIRC, the restrictions in Xinjiang are more around journalists and diplomats (that have different visas that subject them to more scrutiny).
I think individual experience is going to vary depending on how much you are trusted. SerpentZa was a vlogger who was there in China for a long time. In contrast to your example, he has mentioned about being stopped at various places and CCP trying to honeytrap him. Even though his wife is Chinese, he moved out of China eventually[1]
But I would agree to the sentiment that American/European media might not be giving the complete picture. If you read local sources or wire feeds you will realize the partisan reporting they do. This is not just true for China, take one more big Asian country India, it has a lot of English media press, you can see the bias easily in reporting of even big names like NyTimes, Guardian. They like to report on mostly negative stuff, skipping reports which connect events as well, so you might end up with a perspective that things are worse than they might be. I can link reports to show how coverage gets omitted from even wire feeds but that is offtopic.
Travel in Xinjiang isn't restricted for foreigners at least a year ago. There are a lot of security checkpoints, but they will just ignore you if you're not brown.
In August and September 2019, when I was in Xinjiang, we went through several checkpoints every day. the locals were in and through in about 20 seconds, I was with my Chinese wife, she could pass through in seconds too, but myself and an Australian friend were processed manually every time, it too between 20 minutes and 90 minutes, depending on the staff there. The Uyghurs got much better service than we did. However, I will point out that, at all times, they were polite.
Also, at no time did anyone ever ask to see my phone, my cameras (I had three) or ask where we had been the previous night - we slept several nights in unregistered locations, once in a culvert under the road, once behind a service station, once on the floor of a shed next to a service station and once, in Dabancheng in a cemetery just off the road. No one ever questioned us or asked for anything other than usual passport details
> but they will just ignore you if you're not brown.
It's not Xinjiang, but, as an obviously foreign Westerner, I was waved through the security checkpoints around Tiananmen Square. The setup was geared towards Chinese National ID cards, and the guards didn't want to bother with my passport. The main reason for that was probably laziness, but maybe a secondary reason was the goal of the security was mainly to control the domestic population for political reasons, and foreigners don't figure into that goal.
... crossing the border from Kazakhstan. It's not surprising for border checkpoints to have heightened security. If they had traveled by plane like actual tourists, it would've been less of a hassle.
>You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
I trust journalists more than some rando for starters. But even besides that, I have a much harder time believing statements made on a blog by someone with very obvious opinions over direct visual evidence of a clear ramping up of detention centers.
Blog post that casts doubt on Adrian Zenz - likely CCP propaganda. I've noticed this a trend in the last few months on Reddit and other forums where random people are trying to smear the guy. If you browse through his other posts, its clear this Jerry Grey is anti-US, pro-China and pandering.
And, if you prefer to believe Adrian Zenz, then please feel free to do so. But before quoting him in public, please inform yourself as to his background and credentials - I don't attempt to smear him, I simply point people to his medieval beliefs. Let them judge for themselves - if you're a religious zealot then you might believe what he says, I don't think sensible people, even believers will be too enamoured by his writings.
Thank you for taking the time to read it. The documentary lacked any clear evidence. I've written to the ABC several times but they won't reply to me. The Host of the Documentary was the person who sent it to me and I gave her the opportunity to review and reject for 48 hours before I posted it. She didn't even reply to me. So far, I've had absolutely no contact with the ABC except for the one DM on Twitter, where Sophie, the host, personally reached out to send me a link to the Yt site
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9AyqT6RC4E
Here's a link to an interview with a British Journalist who tried everything she knew to get me to say the things she wanted me to say, then disregarded what I did say and wrote a whole bunch of lies.
I am the guy who rode the bike and I am the guy who is being persecuted by people for having an opinion that differs from theirs - I simply say to all who read this, if you don't believe it, please get on with your life because discussing it with me further will only make you more angry - I don't lie about what I saw I have nothing to gain from doing so. I've read through the thread here and would like to put my own position on the record...
I live happily in China and I like it but I don't love everything about it. I have issues that I don't like but generally, it's nicer here than the other places I've lived, so I choose to stay. I don't get any benefit, payment, visa or other bonus from China, Chinese people, the Chinese government, I'm simply a cyclist who saw things that didn't add up. I'm retired from work, so no professional gain there for me and I'm not connected in any way to any department in the government here. I do speak some mandarin but the only reason I was allowed to travel in Xinjiang is that everybody is allowed to travel there, there aren't as far as I know any restrictions. I don't know if journalists, with a visa that identifies them as journalists would have a problem because I've never asked a journalist, in fact, I've never yet met one who has been there, online or in person. Which is part of the reason for my skepticism
I don't hate America or Americans, I've never been there, I have no intention of visiting but that's only because I have more important places I want to go and need to go with family in the UK and in Australia, the USA isn't on my radar. I want to correct a mistake which labelled me as a Canadian, a simple mistake ,I'm not, I'm British Born Australian citizen.
I don't like politics either Chinese or otherwise and so, I don't get into this because of politics, I simply posted a few nice pictures a few months ago and people started to ask questions - when it was apparent that my travels were considered by many to be either illegal or propaganda, I became a little more vocal. Hence Global Times and CGTN both wanted to talk to me.
It seems the world is full of people willing to believe everything they read in the news and if someone speaks out against it, they are immediately shot down as liars, CPC bots, paid propagandists or something else, I've been called a lot of names.
The fact is, there are problems in Xinjiang, I never deny this. There are prisons and camps there too, I never deny this but there are also world recognised terrorists there (ETIM the East Turkestan Islamic Movement funded initially by the CIA and then by Al-Qaeda but declared a terrorist organisation by the US Department of State) and these need to be handled. I am no expert on politics, terrorism or anything like that, I simply say, what I saw, doesn't match what I hear in the news. You want to believe what you see and read in news reports, I can't control that, but if you want to really know what's going on in Xinjiang, then stop reading reports from US government sources because they have openly admitted that China is their enemy and their propaganda war is far more than I, a simple cyclist can compete with.
Believe or don't believe what I say, it's up to you - I only want people to question what is being said and if that means challenging me, then so be it, but please don't blindly challenge me because I disagree with CNN or Fox news - challenge me with something real.
So far, every piece of information I have heard about Xinjiang has come from one of three sources: Adrian Zenz, a religious fruitcake (please don't challenge me on this, read his own books) Satellite imagery which has been analysed mostly by one man Nathan Ruser, who works for ASPI, an Australian think tank funded by weapons manufacturers and Uyghur dissidents who are attempting to gain independence from China and are mostly funded by the CIA through the National Endowment for Democracy. Now, if those three sources don't get you questioning the narrative, then you are simply being blindly lead by the hand into a conflict which may be what you want. It certainly isn't what I want - I would like everyone and anyone to go to Xinjiang and see for themselves - the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has been, has looked and hasn't found anything wrong with what's going on there - perhaps they don't like Uyghurs, I don't know but I would have thought an organisation representing 57 countries with Muslim majorities would have found something wrong, yet they didn't. The World Bank has also visited and didn't find anything wrong with what they saw - they did however reduce funding because they weren't able to visit everywhere they wanted, not because China wouldn't let them, but because they ran out of time. And finally, the UN Chief of Counter-Terrorism has visited too, (Vladimir Voronkov is his name, you can google it) and made positive reports.
I ask everyone here - please don't believe me, but please don't accuse me of anything other than raising awareness that another "WMD story" appears to be in the making. Something I would dearly love to avoid.
Thanks for reading
Because he doesn't work for the open technology fund/radio free asia/CIA. Or Adrian Zenz, referenced here, one of the only 2 primary sources they started the whole Xinjiang media episode in the first place. The other one being another NED/CIA shop like this article.
If they were actual camps, can someone explain why they were all empty? No cars, no trucks, no detainees, no guards at all?
To supply and run a crowded camp, you need guards and logistics. Nothing there.
Nowadays, researchers could easily obtain satellites images showing actual activities with all those clues.
Just by looking at the images, it not possible to draw conclusion they were concentration camps. They could be barracks under construction and that would also explain why blanket at Baidu map. The report didn't explain its logic to conclude they were concentration camps. And they didn't even consider other possibilities at all.
It is not serious research.
Remember the satellite image analysis of Wuhan's hospitals' parking lots that was supposed to reveal the true scale of covid19 outbreak in Wuhan? High resolution images with all the details. Still lots of flaws and no one takes it seriously now.
New York Times obtained some leaked confidential documents of China's Xinjiang policies. Nothing even close to concentration camp was revealed. It actually did CCP some favor.
The BuzzFeed articles don't show hardly any current pictures of the camps. And it doesn't seem that hard to believe that the detainees would most of the time remain indoors being de-radicalized and re-educated. The guards would be in the towers, or in the buildings, or looking at the camera feeds. I'm sure that people with better images than the few we saw here are working to figure out exactly what's going on in these camps and as best as possible following all the logistics. At least I'd hope so as China is being very secretive about them.
The authors and their teams clearly took into consideration that these could be military bases and they talk about it to some extant. I'm sure it could still be the case that some of these are barracks and the Chinese make their barracks look like detention centers. Some of the locations they found have been verified by other sources though.
We also have that drone footage of detainees being transported, right?
Also, the leaked document from the NYTimes talked an awful lot about security, not letting people escape, and not letting images or information of the camps be leaked for a normal vocational school.
The Wuhan hospital parking lot study was pretty bad, but worse things have come out of Harvard Medical School in recent months.
It's a tough issue because it's hard to give the Chinese government credit for lack of evidence when they're not letting journalists in in the first place.
I looked into it a year ago and the strongest evidence I found at that point was two dudes drove around and took pictures of a bunch of facilities that looked like re-education camps. They guesstimated 100k-1M, one news article wrote "a million", then the rest of them started writing "millions", and hacker news commenters write "genocide".
It matters it it's mandatory job and language training vs ethnic cleansing or genocide. There's evidence for the former, none for the latter. And a paternalistic "we'll end this unrest by educating them" attitude would be pretty on-brand for the Chinese Government.
Also, yes, quantity matters. How many do we have in jail on bullshit charges? It would be nice to be less, right?
Exactly, every image they say are from concentration camps only shows construction sites and factories, like thousand others all around China. There is no credibility in a claim when you just point to random images and say unsubstantiated things about them.
https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000
edit: was used in creating this two part story:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...