"communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest.
Their economy is obviously capitalist. And although Xi has been leaning towards more dictator-like behavior, they haven't been a dictatorship since Mao.
It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
I've visited Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong back in 2010 and as a Canadian I feel China is more capitalist than Canada. It had a more America feel to it where everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit
And North Korea calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but anyone with a working brain understands that NK is neither a Democracy, nor is it is government for the people.
Taking the words of totalitarian leaders literally is very naive.
It's a matter of definitions. For many, capitalism means "free market economy". Under that case, authoritarianism is indeed fundamentally opposed to capitalism. If you define capitalism as just "private ownership of the means of production", then sure, you can be authoritarian and capitalist.
Better to be more specific and mention Laissez-faire capitalism
> Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
> Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state
While I agree with everything you just said, it seems to be true that in China you can get arrested for basically arbitrary reasons if someone doesn't like you. While it's not one man saying "I am the law", there is still a group saying it, and that group is the bureaucracy.
All socialist and fascist states, even while suppressing markets was causing starvation, allowed some cronies to maintain businesses. That's where Putin got his start, for instance.
China isn't organized by any free trade principles, they've just formalized their black markets and cronyism.
> It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
You're writing this on an article titled, "China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight," with the subtext, "Around 1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come."
Yes, it's a terrible human rights disaster but that doesn't make the Chinese government a dictatorship. Running internment camps or Jim Crow didn't make the USA a dictatorship, either. Bad deeds don't change the definition of your form of government.
Dictatorship is about an individual. The chinese government has not been since Mao.
All non-western-democratic governments are not the same. They're not all some giant grab-bag of interchangeable scare words about communism, fascism, dictatorship.
Norway's a socialist state. Do they belong in your bucket too?
Their economy is the exact opposite of Capitalist in fact. It's de facto state controlled top to bottom.
1) The Chinese economy is overwhelmingly state owned or directly controlled. All the major banks are directly owned or controlled by the government. All of their major industries, such as steel, aluminum and energy, are directly owned or controlled by the government. Their largest electronics and telecom companies such as Huawei and China Mobile are directly commanded by the government.
2) No company may do anything out of lock-step with the government. Whether you're Alibaba or Baidu, you must obey at all times, no matter what the stray edict of the week is. You may not challenge the party. Ask Tencent about the government's damaging, arbitrary restrictions on gaming for example. [1]
3) There are no actual property rights. Your property may be revoked, taken from you at any time for any reason. You will not get it back, and you have no ability to challenge this in a court of law. The Chinese Government issues arbitrary rules non-stop that alter your property rights and how property may be used (including randomly choosing to restrict what's acceptable day to day; one day you may have joke apps, the next day they're illegal).
4) The entire economy operates on a system of bribes. You can't operate anything in China without paying bribes. There are no exceptions, whether you're trying to operate a small food business or put up a skyscraper. This means the rule of law is entirely lacking, which is why Transparency International ranks China #77 in the world on corruption.
5) The economy is entirely closed to normal foreign business operations. You can't just set up a business in China as a foreigner. You can't buy Chinese businesses outright, or in most cases take a majority ownership position. Contrast this with the US (which isn't even the best example): you can spend less than a thousand dollars with Stripe Atlas and set up a US corporation at any time, without permission, having never once visited the country and you own it outright.
6) Capital is locked down. You may not take your wealth and flee the country. You and your capital are held captive by their very tight capital controls. You can hardly legally get enough cash out of China to buy a middle class house these days.
7) As a Chinese business you may not operate outside of the country in any manner that the government disagrees with. They approve all large transactions and all large investments. If they don't like something you've done, you will be forced to liquidate out of that position no matter the consequences.
8) It's almost entirely illegal to privately own farm land. This contributes to China having the most backwards and low output farming industry of any major economy.
How is all of this obviously Capitalistic? The state completely controls everything. It's the exact opposite of Capitalist.
Find a Chinese person over the age of 40. Ask them if they've experienced 2 economic systems in their life, then ask them if the first one was communist, and the second one was capitalist. They'll answer yes on all 3, with maybe some elaboration about transitions, legacy effects, and the peculiarities of China.
Then break out the list and try to change their mind. Let me know your results.
But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same!
Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?
If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).
The decision making process is different and the decisions are different. It's different. Perceived lack of transparency[1] does not change that.
[1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.
To be fair China describes itself as communist and intending to bring about communism, and communism or an essential step in achieving it is a dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s actual Marxist and official Chinese state ideology. It may be popycock, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to identify a government using the labels it uses to describe itself.
I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.
Then you don't know the difference between Maoism and Leninism. Basically, Maoists can live with any compromise in order to bring forth their communist ideals, even if the compromise is to backstab Soviet Union and open the door to the US (which they did in 1970s).
Leninism and maoism both died the instant their namesakes died. I don't care about the difference. They were both tools to control populaces, not straightjackets restraining leaders.
Both strongmen did whatever they could and wanted to do. Don't buy the bullshit.
"obviously capitalist"? It may be a market economy, but it's certainly not capitalist. Proceeds of the investment of capital are not free to be distributed amongst the investors. Formation of enterprise is not free and voluntary. Exchange rates are not set by the market. Money transactions are strictly controlled. Businesses are not allowed to hold funds in forex. The list goes on and on. I'm not sure you are aware of how business is done in China, you may just be seeing lots of business and then be assuming it must be capitalism.
Please don't post grandiose national or ideological rhetoric to HN. It's at best flamebait and at worse trolling. Substantive discussion needs more thought than this.
People apply the word 'fact' loosely when it comes to topics they feel strongly about. The point is contentious and disputable in a bunch of ways. That's not necessarily bad, but it is when combined with a declamatory style. Just to be clear though: I'm not making a point about China. I'm making a point about how terrible Hacker News threads become when people allow themselves to post this way.
This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.
That's quite an insinuation. Fortunately I have a long history of posts to HN, and anyone bored enough to search through them will easily see that it's not true. To me the weird thing is running across a smear like this at all; it's surreal when someone is sure they know what you're thinking.
YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
I have personal and philosophical reasons for being anti socialist and anti communist. I have family that has been killed because of people supporting government actions, like China in the linked article, where they imprison and murder innocent people.
I will try to be less inflammatory in the future, but I believe in western ideals. I think watering down criticism of authoritian regimes is a bit rich coming from a website that believes in the “hacker” ethos and “news” meaning a free press.
I will make my opinions be more developed, but the underlying themes will not change.
I respect your story, as well as those of the many other people on this site whose families have been through unspeakable trauma. Nobody's asking you to "water down" criticism. On the contrary, we're asking people to make more informative comments, instead of just posting empty rhetoric.
Generic ideological comments and denunciations of entire countries are examples of empty, fiery rhetoric that we don't want on HN. Why? Because their information content is low, they provoke others into posting worse, and they lead to extremely predictable discussion. The main thing a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity needs to do is not be predictable, so HN is a bad place to fight the same fights over and over.
In case it helps, I've been asking people for years on this site not to bash each other's countries, and the countries that have come up would make a long list. There's no national bias in it.
> It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
"You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."
More seriously, though, the highbrow dismissal of very real problems as tribalism on the same site that frequently has slapfights over technology and news/advertising spam of various forms seems a little much.
Like, if the answer is just "Hey, knock it off we don't want flamewars" that's totally respectable...but the other arguments you've used come off as really smug and out-of-touch.
People are welcome to post on "very real problems" if they do so thoughtfully and substantively.
The moderation issue is garden-variety internet flamewar and requiring people to adhere to the site guidelines. That is mundane stuff, regardless of how much rhetoric people pour out on the internet.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I would agree that OP's comment did not seem likely to engender thoughtful discussion. Taking a lot at some other comments, I also understand where you're coming from as a moderator. Keep fighting the good fight; I appreciate the work you're doing.
China is a communist dictatorship where you can be arrested and possibly murdered for saying the wrong thing. This can happen in the interior and has even happened in places supposedly free from the terror of the Party, like in Hong Kong. This clearly shows that the Chinese do not have rights-based rule of law.
Given that it is a Communist Dictatorship and that it does not have rights-based rule of law, mass internment camps are not very surprising.
Have we already forgotten about the ink girl who was disappeared[0] barely a month ago? All she did was say things and now she's gone. Probably forever. This is absolutely not disputable.
>Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese
That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reeducated.
That's a breach of the HN guidelines in its own right, which rule out insinuations of astroturfing and shillage without evidence. Someone holding an opposing view or making a bad comment does not count as evidence. Please don't do this again.
>Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity. As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance.
That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
>As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance.
This overlooks the surveillance state aspect of the story. People say dumb things online when they think their communications are private. I can't imagine China being able to produce a list as big without the aid of mass surveillance. The article paints 2008 like it's the olden days. It was not. They were recording then too.
>Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable. Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.
If I had to speculate, I would say what has happened is their words online have come back to haunt them. Maybe they secretly chuckled online about the attack that left 200 dead. Now they get written up and taken off because they "stopped drinking" or some other excuse. The first rule of parallel construction is don't talk about parallel construction.
>That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
Reeducation is kinder than what we did to more than half a million Iraqis in the name of 9/11 and WMDs.
It is literally the most racist thing I have ever seen posted on HN.
The STEM world needs fewer people like this - hopefully their handle will identify who they are so they can never be put into any position where they make meaningful decisions, because they are clearly philosophically unable to coexist with American anti-discrimination laws.
>Are you aware that your comment comes across as extremely racist?
It's not racist at all. You're trying to discredit any discussion of moral upbringings by calling it that. Han Chinese and Uighurs were killed. Re-education seems like an appropriate response for people who support such violence on either side.
not an entire population. You're intentionally misreading the comment if you insist otherwise. The point is very simple. It's not okay to kill people at a protest, and re-education for people who support murder at protests seems like a reasonable option to me. Go ahead and ban me dang. My opinion is "murders at protests are bad." That's not changing.
This reads like CCP shill material and is logically absurd.
If it's not OK to attack a group of innocents (the murdered Han) in retaliation for actions committed by others (the government) which they did not participate in, then why is it OK for the government to persecute large swaths of innocent Uighurs for the crimes committed by the minority of Uighurs that attacked the Han?
Okay, so in America, African Americans commit more than 200 murders every year.
Presumably, you're on-board for an ethnic-purge because of this.
Fucking listen to yourself. You stand behind the incarceration of an entire race of millions of people, all because a handful of people of the same race committed some acts of violence.
Get a fucking grip. This is Nazi-level atrocious, and you should feel awful for allow yourself to fall into this kind of hateful worldview.
There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which don't have any official state support.
Pan-Islamism aside, there were mass protests over those Danish cartoons a few years back. I don't claim to understand other cultures and religions, but I'll be surprised if mass internment is less outrageous. So where are those people?
The folks in power don’t care about Muslim minorities (Palestinians, Rohinga, etc.). They care about browbeating the West and Israel, and spreading fundamentalist Islam as an alternative to Western secularization. Complaining about Chinese treatment of an ethnic minority does not serve that purpose.
It’s employed as a distraction or means to vent rage at a palatable target. The Danes, the Jews, Israel, Americans, that serves a dual purpose. “Oh you want more freeeom of speech? See what they do with it in Denmark! You want a democracy... like America? Like Israel?” China is a valuable trading partner and a government in the same model as the autocracies of the Middle East, so they shut up about that. There’s always been profit in turning domestic rage against Israel in general, and Jews in particular. It’s been a way of life for the house of Saud for example, even as they quietly make deals with Israel and bomb their fellow Muslims in Yemen.
Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.
You’re quite right, as far as I understand. Another example of how little political glue there is between Muslim countries is that Saudi Arabia is quietly cooperating with Israel — supposedly the enemy — while almost at war with Qatar — supposedly Arab brethren.
Best guess is that it hasn't fully reached their populations / news audiences. It's only in the last four to six months that Western media has begun to actively talk about it and pursue the truth of what's going on there.
Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp had less than a thousand total detainees over its history (currently an estimated 40 people held there), most of whom were pulled directly off of battlefields. Guantanamo became a global scandal and blackeye for the US, drawing countless mass protests across the Middle East.
Here we're talking about millions of Muslims being tortured, 're-educated,' stripped of their Islamic beliefs, and apparently many are dying or being murdered in the process. An estimated 1,300 camps and growing. All without any external access or oversight, happening under an aggressive rights-denying dictatorship.
These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
There are Uyghurs in Pakistan, and Pakistan itself borders on Xinjiang. Pakistan even plays up the whole pan-Islam message so they can stave off Pashtunistan nationalism. But Pakistan is also increasingly dependent on China, and you can bet they're fully aware and turning the other way on the current situation.
> Egyptian police have detained scores of Chinese students from the Uighur ethnic minority on Beijing's request, forcing dozens into hiding or to flee to Turkey, activists have said.
> These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population. So genocide will have been an option under consideration. On the other hand, they must know that descending to Nazi levels of evil is unlikely to improve China's image.
> Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population.
China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.
That explanation doesn’t fly, because most of these figures were imprisoned on completely trumped up charges, for example, they were accused of being members of counterrevolutionary organizations that did not even exist. The state arrested them for their cultural prominence, not because they had any inclinations towards active separatism that the Soviet Union could have known of.
Sad to say, I did not. Many majority-Muslim nations at current have ethno-nationalist tinges to them and a general low opinion of their religious and ethnic minority groups. Many are more interested in the money the Chinese government makes available for infrastructure than in some internal issue in China.
What is wrong with ethno-nationalist? What is wrong with a people caring for their own? Or are you worried the rest of the world looks at disgust at your giant homosexual orgy in the West?
In you put yourself into CCP mindset the support from an outside Muslim power may possibly fuel the perception of support for possible separatism and that perception may escalate the situation.
A wide international, non-exclusively-Muslim, based response, on pure human rights grounds would possibly be a good thing. Unfortunately nobody in the world right now is interested/capable/etc. to respond to religious/ethnic/etc. cleansings on pure human rights grounds (of course there are responses when it comes to economic interests when it can be covered by human rights interests)
Most Muslim states are oppressive dictatorships, or have fractious ethic minorities of their own, or both. Criticising China for its treatment of the Uighurs would just draw attention to their own record and current activities. Also, most of them have trade and investment links to China.
I'm not making excuses, but what appears to be going on in China is very serious indeed, with possibly one million people being seized and interned in prison camps, breaking contact with loved ones, and never released. The increased staffing at the nearby crematoriums is especially chilling. What kind of response would you expect to see?
And they're still treated like second class citizens by the religion as a whole. I saw this all the time when I spent some time in Senegal, a black Muslim nation.
Contrary to other comments, there are responses from Muslim countries. For instance, the situation has not gone unnoticed in Turkey because the Uighurs are Muslims who speak a Turkic language. In the past Turkish nationalist groups have supported Uighar separatist movements. However, official responses are muted since China is a major investor.
so depressing.. I am inspired to create my own forum site like hackernews where I am not banned like I am here. My site would champion the individual and self-expression, and individual contribution over collective contribution.
This is extremely wrong. The official mood in China seems to be swinging ethno-nationalist, which is a recipe for human rights violations in any country, let alone one with limited juridical recourse and free speech. I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing.
Can they even know that it happened? AFAIK China is very censored and they may not even be aware that such a thing occurred at all. Even assuming they were around at the time it happened, there may also be no way for them to find out.
This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation.
In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th)
People who grew up under such regimes are fairly ingenious about getting around censorship. The more the government tries to clamp down, the more people want to know and they will find ways around the censorship.
People talk. My grandmother passed down first hand accounts of her living through the Japanese occupation during WWII. There are also stories passed down from the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Believe me, the Chinese know something happened in 1989 at Tiananmen. Hong Kong has been a torch bearer in keeping memories of those events alive.
Now the better question is if many Chinese still care in face of growing prosperity and what version of the "truth" they have.
Oh that's a pretty much accepted history in China. You can't hide that because so many people witnessed it and so many of today's leadership in China were also victims of it. Xi Junping's own family suffered greatly during that era (Edit: Cultural Revolution, not Great Leap Forward, but one followed the other because Mao was trying to salvage his legacy after the first mistake).
State censorship isn't as simple as not talking about something. The cleverer way of doing it is to spin the truth. As they say in China, Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. That's how they spun it. Sure the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions were terrible but on the whole Mao was good. Then add in some story about liberation from the Japanese and the corrupt KMT and Mao's legacy survives.
You mean TS 1989? Taylor Swift’s most recent album right? Suffice it to say, those T-shirts did not go down well in China.
People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “wrong”, but maybe not for the same reasons as the west (China has invested a lot more in riot police since then).
As a dedicated Swiftie, I feel obliged to point out that 1989 is not her most recent album, that would be Reputation, which she is performing on tour currently.
Interestingly, she performed (4 I think) concerts in China for 1989, but none are scheduled in the country this time around.
In 2007 or so, I was having a conversation in a bar with a bunch of student friends, one of whom was newly arrived from Beijing to start her graduate studies in the US.
For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about.
This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page.
The look of utter horror on her face, followed by pain and grief and rage, was a little much for a friday night out with the gang...
On the other side, I know people living in china who have known all the tricky ways to get around the censors since forever, and are totally up to speed on things.
My very limited experience with Chinese "commoners" outside China is that they view Xi Jinping as an adored celebrity, if not a god figure. "Very very great man!"
Same with some Filipinos' opinions of Rodrigo Duterte, who said all the bad news being posted about him were "American propaganda."
Have other people here asked a Chinese expat what they thought about their government back home? What kind of answers did they give?
Massive numbers killed in the CIA operations overthrowing governments in South America
The duplicitous and two-faced foreign policies which fund genocides and killings all over the globe while we try to put on some good face about making the world a better more democratic place
Selling arms to murderous regimes who torture and kill as we turn a blind eye to profits
Repatriating Nazis responsible for the war crimes we decry in order to get their tech/medical advancements
The extent at which Native Americans were murdered
Lots and lots of things get rose-colored glasses because the populous lives rather comfortable now...
Being the first nation on the globe to bring in eugenics based compulsory sterilisation laws, which influenced Nazi ideas. Some survived surprisingly long after the war, the last until the 1970s.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs.
My go to for this is question is the `Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male` (aka. Tuskegee Experiments). Where government clinicians withheld the diagnose and treatment of syphilis from the 'participants'. The men were instead told they had 'bad blood'. This lasted into the 1970s. Only ending due to an upstanding epidemiologist, Peter Buxtun, going to the press.
Missing context here being that this specific allegation was made, within the past few months, by a British foreign service official who was posted to Beijing at the time.
I'm not sure I'd attribute it to ethno-nationalism, in that I don't know for sure that China is applying a policy of Han supremacism. It seems to be more of a particular concern with the Uighurs in particular.
We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they are trying to build, and are trying to suppress and change this culture in a deeply authoritarian way.
Communist regimes, including China, have a history of suppressing religion and pre-existing traditional culture (e.g. the Cultural Revolution of the 60's and 70's).
What set of distinctions could we reasonably draw to say that the authoritarian imposition of norms based on the overwhelming Han ethnic majority is not fundamentally Han Chauvinist or racist?
The sinophobia in these comments always makes me uncomfortable because it’s usually underlied with overall anti-Asian sentiment. It reminds me that I don’t belong in America, we still live in a white world.
This is really the main goal of these threads. It's your standard Two Minute Hate [1]: everybody gets together and signals their own virtue by spewing fact-free nonsense (apparently China's entire 11T is run by bribes and no foreign company ever made money there). There are two goals here: signal the ingroup but more importantly signal the outgroup. It's a concerted effort to drive away Asian programmers and, as I've pointed out before, it's working.
Note that despite these highly coordinated, anti-China circlejerks (seriously look at the other thread [2], just two down, all the same people and new accounts spouting the same exact nonsense, virtually all of it baseless propaganda) the moderators are to pounce on any "meta-commentary" that tries to pushback or highlight the stupidity.
Not that I recommend it, but if you read all my comments on this issue you'll see that people are accusing us of siding with "pro-China shills" much more than "anti-China bigotry" as you have. In reality, of course, it's neither: we're just trying to prevent HN from going up in nationalistic flames. What does it matter whether those flames are red or white or blue or some combo thereof? The point is not to burn to a crisp.
We need you to stop insinuating astroturfing in the threads ("highly coordinated"). People are simply divided on this issue and it's a gross violation of the HN guidelines to insinuate otherwise. All it does is escalate the toxicity and we don't allow people to do that here.
If you think this is not a coordinated effort than you are very naive.
It's worth pointing out what is actually happening here. This story about "massive internment camps" has been pushed relentlessly on HN for the past two weeks. There's been at least five stories on it.
Actual journalists investigated the story and proved quite clearly the story has been entirely fabricated [1].
I don't see any anti-Asian sentiment in any of these comments (everything is directed at the current Chinese government) and yes, the West is a white world, whether you like it or not.
The West condemned Germany, the USSR, South Africa and even China when they did stuff like this a long time ago. Let's hope that China becoming the world's second largest economy, and the world's largest market for a lot of products, hasn't changed that.
The term concentration camps referse to any camps where you rounded up a bunch of all people belonging to some group with no due process, and typically including whole families (this is what distinguishes them from prison). By this definition they are concentration camps, as are the camps used by the US when they rounded up the Japanese americans and several other instances going back to the 1800's.
However in the eyes of most people concentration camp refers to the extermination camps where the Nazis systematically kill everyone who was brought into them. I think most people feel that it is important to distinguish between camps that lock people up without recourse, and camps and kill people. That is why we aren't referring to them as concentration camps. If you call them concentration camps people expect that means systematic mass murder, when they realize that is not what is happening you loose credibility and those people end up ignoring the real human rights crisis.
To be more precise under today's usage concentration camps include both the extermination camps, and internment camps. Internment camps is a more precise definition of what this is.
Also I think unfortunately while that while their is wide expression of the belief that extermination camps are immoral and should not happen. I don't think there nearly the same expression around internment camps.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadLack of surprise doesn't mean much of anything w/r/t what the appropriate response ought to be.
Their economy is obviously capitalist. And although Xi has been leaning towards more dictator-like behavior, they haven't been a dictatorship since Mao.
It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
But also not much less absurd than that.
Taking the words of totalitarian leaders literally is very naive.
Does mandated 50% local (aka party) ownership align with "obviously capitalist"? That seems a stretch (aka crony capitalist).
Xi has asked for indefinitely long term of power and gotten it. Handover of power?
> Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
> Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
The caveats that I mention aren't just "not like the USA" but specifically not like most other capitalist economies either.
Slapping a bunch of incorrect trigger words together terminates thought.
China isn't organized by any free trade principles, they've just formalized their black markets and cronyism.
> It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law".
You're writing this on an article titled, "China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight," with the subtext, "Around 1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come."
Dictatorship is about an individual. The chinese government has not been since Mao.
All non-western-democratic governments are not the same. They're not all some giant grab-bag of interchangeable scare words about communism, fascism, dictatorship.
Norway's a socialist state. Do they belong in your bucket too?
Their economy is the exact opposite of Capitalist in fact. It's de facto state controlled top to bottom.
1) The Chinese economy is overwhelmingly state owned or directly controlled. All the major banks are directly owned or controlled by the government. All of their major industries, such as steel, aluminum and energy, are directly owned or controlled by the government. Their largest electronics and telecom companies such as Huawei and China Mobile are directly commanded by the government.
2) No company may do anything out of lock-step with the government. Whether you're Alibaba or Baidu, you must obey at all times, no matter what the stray edict of the week is. You may not challenge the party. Ask Tencent about the government's damaging, arbitrary restrictions on gaming for example. [1]
3) There are no actual property rights. Your property may be revoked, taken from you at any time for any reason. You will not get it back, and you have no ability to challenge this in a court of law. The Chinese Government issues arbitrary rules non-stop that alter your property rights and how property may be used (including randomly choosing to restrict what's acceptable day to day; one day you may have joke apps, the next day they're illegal).
4) The entire economy operates on a system of bribes. You can't operate anything in China without paying bribes. There are no exceptions, whether you're trying to operate a small food business or put up a skyscraper. This means the rule of law is entirely lacking, which is why Transparency International ranks China #77 in the world on corruption.
5) The economy is entirely closed to normal foreign business operations. You can't just set up a business in China as a foreigner. You can't buy Chinese businesses outright, or in most cases take a majority ownership position. Contrast this with the US (which isn't even the best example): you can spend less than a thousand dollars with Stripe Atlas and set up a US corporation at any time, without permission, having never once visited the country and you own it outright.
6) Capital is locked down. You may not take your wealth and flee the country. You and your capital are held captive by their very tight capital controls. You can hardly legally get enough cash out of China to buy a middle class house these days.
7) As a Chinese business you may not operate outside of the country in any manner that the government disagrees with. They approve all large transactions and all large investments. If they don't like something you've done, you will be forced to liquidate out of that position no matter the consequences.
8) It's almost entirely illegal to privately own farm land. This contributes to China having the most backwards and low output farming industry of any major economy.
How is all of this obviously Capitalistic? The state completely controls everything. It's the exact opposite of Capitalist.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-ord...
Find a Chinese person over the age of 40. Ask them if they've experienced 2 economic systems in their life, then ask them if the first one was communist, and the second one was capitalist. They'll answer yes on all 3, with maybe some elaboration about transitions, legacy effects, and the peculiarities of China.
Then break out the list and try to change their mind. Let me know your results.
Describing an oligarchy as a communist dictatorship is near-equivalent. Far from dishonest.
> Their economy is obviously capitalist
It's capitalist at specific granularities. This is a derail, at best.
> They have a process, they have regular handovers of power.
So does an oligarchy.
But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same!
Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?
> Group vs individual.
If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).
[1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.
They are Communists even if they aren't communists.
I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.
Both strongmen did whatever they could and wanted to do. Don't buy the bullshit.
This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.
YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Generic ideological comments and denunciations of entire countries are examples of empty, fiery rhetoric that we don't want on HN. Why? Because their information content is low, they provoke others into posting worse, and they lead to extremely predictable discussion. The main thing a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity needs to do is not be predictable, so HN is a bad place to fight the same fights over and over.
In case it helps, I've been asking people for years on this site not to bash each other's countries, and the countries that have come up would make a long list. There's no national bias in it.
"You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."
More seriously, though, the highbrow dismissal of very real problems as tribalism on the same site that frequently has slapfights over technology and news/advertising spam of various forms seems a little much.
Like, if the answer is just "Hey, knock it off we don't want flamewars" that's totally respectable...but the other arguments you've used come off as really smug and out-of-touch.
The moderation issue is garden-variety internet flamewar and requiring people to adhere to the site guidelines. That is mundane stuff, regardless of how much rhetoric people pour out on the internet.
Given that it is a Communist Dictatorship and that it does not have rights-based rule of law, mass internment camps are not very surprising.
[0]: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3478513
That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reeducated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
This overlooks the surveillance state aspect of the story. People say dumb things online when they think their communications are private. I can't imagine China being able to produce a list as big without the aid of mass surveillance. The article paints 2008 like it's the olden days. It was not. They were recording then too.
>Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable. Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.
If I had to speculate, I would say what has happened is their words online have come back to haunt them. Maybe they secretly chuckled online about the attack that left 200 dead. Now they get written up and taken off because they "stopped drinking" or some other excuse. The first rule of parallel construction is don't talk about parallel construction.
>That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
Reeducation is kinder than what we did to more than half a million Iraqis in the name of 9/11 and WMDs.
It is literally the most racist thing I have ever seen posted on HN.
The STEM world needs fewer people like this - hopefully their handle will identify who they are so they can never be put into any position where they make meaningful decisions, because they are clearly philosophically unable to coexist with American anti-discrimination laws.
It's not racist at all. You're trying to discredit any discussion of moral upbringings by calling it that. Han Chinese and Uighurs were killed. Re-education seems like an appropriate response for people who support such violence on either side.
If you post like that again we will ban you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>People who are this violent
not an entire population. You're intentionally misreading the comment if you insist otherwise. The point is very simple. It's not okay to kill people at a protest, and re-education for people who support murder at protests seems like a reasonable option to me. Go ahead and ban me dang. My opinion is "murders at protests are bad." That's not changing.
If it's not OK to attack a group of innocents (the murdered Han) in retaliation for actions committed by others (the government) which they did not participate in, then why is it OK for the government to persecute large swaths of innocent Uighurs for the crimes committed by the minority of Uighurs that attacked the Han?
Presumably, you're on-board for an ethnic-purge because of this.
Fucking listen to yourself. You stand behind the incarceration of an entire race of millions of people, all because a handful of people of the same race committed some acts of violence.
Get a fucking grip. This is Nazi-level atrocious, and you should feel awful for allow yourself to fall into this kind of hateful worldview.
If you'd read the rules, you'd know that they ask you to flag egregious comments and not feed them by replying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820916 and marked it off-topic.
Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.
Best guess is that it hasn't fully reached their populations / news audiences. It's only in the last four to six months that Western media has begun to actively talk about it and pursue the truth of what's going on there.
Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp had less than a thousand total detainees over its history (currently an estimated 40 people held there), most of whom were pulled directly off of battlefields. Guantanamo became a global scandal and blackeye for the US, drawing countless mass protests across the Middle East.
Here we're talking about millions of Muslims being tortured, 're-educated,' stripped of their Islamic beliefs, and apparently many are dying or being murdered in the process. An estimated 1,300 camps and growing. All without any external access or oversight, happening under an aggressive rights-denying dictatorship.
These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
One Muslim country at least, Egypt, is doing China's bidding on Uighurs https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/fear-panic-egypt-arre... :
> Egyptian police have detained scores of Chinese students from the Uighur ethnic minority on Beijing's request, forcing dozens into hiding or to flee to Turkey, activists have said.
> These millions of Muslims are not just going to give up their beliefs willingly, so what is China's next step? Vast genocide has to be the concern going forward.
Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population. So genocide will have been an option under consideration. On the other hand, they must know that descending to Nazi levels of evil is unlikely to improve China's image.
China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.
Because everybody who was capable of putting up a riot was killed, nobody put up a riot.
Sad to say, I did not. Many majority-Muslim nations at current have ethno-nationalist tinges to them and a general low opinion of their religious and ethnic minority groups. Many are more interested in the money the Chinese government makes available for infrastructure than in some internal issue in China.
A wide international, non-exclusively-Muslim, based response, on pure human rights grounds would possibly be a good thing. Unfortunately nobody in the world right now is interested/capable/etc. to respond to religious/ethnic/etc. cleansings on pure human rights grounds (of course there are responses when it comes to economic interests when it can be covered by human rights interests)
The rest of the world is sick of your filth! You couldn't do anything even if you tried! WE ARE THE FUTURE AND WE STOMP ON YOUR DEAD NATION
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics/chinas-xi-...
Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
As always, follow the money -- and power (authoritarian governments).
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&tl=en&u=h...
Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation.
In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th)
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...
People talk. My grandmother passed down first hand accounts of her living through the Japanese occupation during WWII. There are also stories passed down from the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Believe me, the Chinese know something happened in 1989 at Tiananmen. Hong Kong has been a torch bearer in keeping memories of those events alive.
Now the better question is if many Chinese still care in face of growing prosperity and what version of the "truth" they have.
State censorship isn't as simple as not talking about something. The cleverer way of doing it is to spin the truth. As they say in China, Mao is 70% correct and 30% wrong. That's how they spun it. Sure the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions were terrible but on the whole Mao was good. Then add in some story about liberation from the Japanese and the corrupt KMT and Mao's legacy survives.
People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “wrong”, but maybe not for the same reasons as the west (China has invested a lot more in riot police since then).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album)
Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.
Interestingly, she performed (4 I think) concerts in China for 1989, but none are scheduled in the country this time around.
For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about.
This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page.
The look of utter horror on her face, followed by pain and grief and rage, was a little much for a friday night out with the gang...
On the other side, I know people living in china who have known all the tricky ways to get around the censors since forever, and are totally up to speed on things.
So it's probably a mixed bag.
Same with some Filipinos' opinions of Rodrigo Duterte, who said all the bad news being posted about him were "American propaganda."
Have other people here asked a Chinese expat what they thought about their government back home? What kind of answers did they give?
Bombing the shit out of Laos
Massive numbers killed in the CIA operations overthrowing governments in South America
The duplicitous and two-faced foreign policies which fund genocides and killings all over the globe while we try to put on some good face about making the world a better more democratic place
Selling arms to murderous regimes who torture and kill as we turn a blind eye to profits
Repatriating Nazis responsible for the war crimes we decry in order to get their tech/medical advancements
The extent at which Native Americans were murdered
Lots and lots of things get rose-colored glasses because the populous lives rather comfortable now...
This is the only one you gave that actually was committed against Americans in the US.
• Plans to nuke the Moon [2].
are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Not sure if they count as "that most of us don't know about."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119
The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buxtun
Mind your business and we'll mind ours, smug hypocrites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
https://warpardons.wordpress.com/unit-731/
We've seen similar instances before, with Tibet and the Falun Gong. China probably decided that traditional, conservative Islamic religious practices were incompatible with the modern, developed country they are trying to build, and are trying to suppress and change this culture in a deeply authoritarian way.
Communist regimes, including China, have a history of suppressing religion and pre-existing traditional culture (e.g. the Cultural Revolution of the 60's and 70's).
Note that despite these highly coordinated, anti-China circlejerks (seriously look at the other thread [2], just two down, all the same people and new accounts spouting the same exact nonsense, virtually all of it baseless propaganda) the moderators are to pounce on any "meta-commentary" that tries to pushback or highlight the stupidity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820157
We need you to stop insinuating astroturfing in the threads ("highly coordinated"). People are simply divided on this issue and it's a gross violation of the HN guidelines to insinuate otherwise. All it does is escalate the toxicity and we don't allow people to do that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's worth pointing out what is actually happening here. This story about "massive internment camps" has been pushed relentlessly on HN for the past two weeks. There's been at least five stories on it.
Actual journalists investigated the story and proved quite clearly the story has been entirely fabricated [1].
Post the results of this story on HN and it is immediately flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846148
At this point I think it pretty fair to say there is a highly coordinated effort to push a wholly fake anti-China story.
> In reality, of course, it's neither: we're just trying to prevent HN from going up in nationalistic flames.
Somehow you think being "neutral" is the right strategy when one side is invested in a deliberate propaganda effort.
[1] https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...
However in the eyes of most people concentration camp refers to the extermination camps where the Nazis systematically kill everyone who was brought into them. I think most people feel that it is important to distinguish between camps that lock people up without recourse, and camps and kill people. That is why we aren't referring to them as concentration camps. If you call them concentration camps people expect that means systematic mass murder, when they realize that is not what is happening you loose credibility and those people end up ignoring the real human rights crisis.
To be more precise under today's usage concentration camps include both the extermination camps, and internment camps. Internment camps is a more precise definition of what this is.
Also I think unfortunately while that while their is wide expression of the belief that extermination camps are immoral and should not happen. I don't think there nearly the same expression around internment camps.