I mentioned this in another thread recently but I heard many companies whose CEOs abandoned the Saudi conference still sent representatives in their stead. For PR reasons they distanced themselves but they don’t really want to abandon the Saudis.
We didn't care that the Saudis were killing dissidents in their own country and slaughtering civilians in Yemen for years. It wasn't until they killed a US resident that anyone gave a single shit, there won't be any objection to China's acts.
Americans won't be outraged because they aren't being told to outraged by the US media. It wasn't even because it was a US resident. It's because he was a fellow "journalist". I say "journalist" in quotes because increasingly more people working as journalists are activists and activists for a cause and intentionally distort and omit biases and don't even attempt to maintain journalistic integrity and ethics. My understanding is that this "journalist" that was killed was practicing more activism than journalism.
He was a journalist, advocating reform does not remove your journalistic integrity. I can't see how pushing for reform in Saudi Arabia would somehow make his death acceptable though.
And Saudi Arabia has killed plenty of journalists in the past. US residency is the unique aspect in his death.
There are 40 enemy combatants held at Guantanamo. They have public legal representation and visitation rights.
China has removed all human rights for over ten million Uyghur Muslims. Including freedom of movement, freedom of religion, tight restrictions on behavior, tracking of all communication and movement, restrictions on who you can meet or talk to, tracking of all Urghar family members in China or abroad, non-existent freedoms around speech and expression, total lockdown on press investigation or discussion, forced re-education.
And then for at least a million Uyghur Muslims, they're outright physically and mentally torturing them in camps through forced programs to destroy their culture and beliefs.
Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo. I believe the detainment facility at Guantanamo should not exist and should have never existed. There's an important on-going debate there. There's no reasonable comparison to be had between Guantanamo and Xinjiang, whether in scale, intent, or context.
Nitpick: I think "please enlighten me" cheapens your otherwise fine comment, makes it personally combative where the tone of the rest of it is more factual. Just erasing the first sentence of the last paragraph would I think improve its tone. Just my opinion.
> There are 40 enemy combatants held at Guantanamo. They have public legal representation and visitation rights.
They are being held there without a trial. They have not been tried before being sent there.
> Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo.
Because the basic human rights of these prisoners are not respected. Some have been jailed there for more than 10 years without any form of trial or justice. If they committed a crime they belong to a US prison, not some shady oversea jail ran by US. And let's not get started on how they were brought there. US just delegated torture to people like Egyptian or Turkish authorities. Black sites are not a legend.
While it doesn't excuse what China is doing, let's not pretend that there is nothing wrong with the situation in Guantanamo.
Your "whataboutism" comment is an obvious troll and is unwelcome. No one is pretending there is nothing wrong with Guantanamo, so please stop throwing up strawmen to derail this topic.
My high school physics teacher escaped from the region fearing for her children's safety and future. I have to disappoint you that the story is not about a Uygur woman escaping from the horrible CCP re-education camp, it is the complete opposite - my high school physics teacher is a talented Han Chinese woman who escaped from endless Uygur terrorist bombings on Han Chinese civilians.
She told me that a full bus of students from her school were killed in a Uygur terrorist attack. Sadly, they didn't have access to any guns to defend for themselves. There was no government intervention under the banner of autonomy. For people like my physics teacher, the only viable choice was to leave the region and reallocate the whole family to Han majority places.
To be frankly honest with you, CCP has probably 95% support from we Han Chinese on those re-education camps - the other 5% are probably asking for even tougher policies. You can paint Muslim as a peaceful religion or whatever you want, Han Chinese don't buy political correctness. Your attack on the Chinese government on matters like those re-education camps are being considered as the proof that CCP is working its ass off protecting the interests of all those non-Muslim Chinese citizens.
Thank you for honestly sharing your perspective. Unfortunately a fear-based approach reliably creates what it fears. If the proponents of a culture want others to do adopt their culture, they may do so by inspiring others through their compassion, generosity and self-sacrifice. This is the trust-based approach. Unfortunately it is rarely done because it is counter-intuitive and requires systematically setting aside all anger, forgiving when forgiveness is not deserved and making oneself vulnerable. Both approaches often result in casualties, but while one results in people dying attempting to enforce their will on others, the other involves people dying in an attempt to show compassion. The latter is profoundly persuasive in favour of the giver of compassion while the former incites profound hatred.
Except it’s not a fear based approach. The re-education camp are - like it’s name - for re-education. The Chinese government want these Muslim extremists to learn enough skills to live a normal life. If they can make a living like everyone else, they’ll be much likely to become a terrorist. It’s a better outcome for everyone
To be fair the people you’re talking about are Muslim extremists - they are not too different from people causing terrorism in Middle East and they are what the Chinese government need to deal with.
There are also tons of regular Xinjiang Muslims living peacefully, both in Xinjiang and major cities in the east. There are also tons of Muslim restaurants everywhere in China, and they are quite popular
You can’t read that in China. DNS is intercepted and overwitten - *.bbc.co.uk is directed to a random IP address that is typically in an AS that should be somewhere in the US, at one point it was a netblock owned by facebook, although with a 20ms response in Beijing.
Same applies to many other sites. To westerners, the Internet is effectively unusable until you establish a vpn.
I assume the inference is that the Government is hijacking the address within China and routing it to a state-controlled server.
So they could make it plausibly look like it’s coming from a foreign IP while locally censoring the content on the site.
If you have control over the network, hijacking the whole site is easier to do than trying to MITM traffic between users and the site, since HTTPS would hinder your efforts. As long as you don’t start to do it too late that people have HSTS information saved in their browsers.
It's hard to defend China here but it's also hard to see how they are supposed to handle the Uyghur question, and articles like this certainly don't give useful suggestions. What do you do with a region full of separatist agitators who frequently resort to violence and refuse to even teach their children Mandarin? Leave them to it and tolerate the bombings? Allow them to secede?
There's a long history here and after decades of failure, China is beginning to turn the screws, in typical heavy handed style. But I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is with a near-rebel province.
One quote from the article which I think sums things up:
> “I cannot bear keeping silent [any more] because I think there’s a genocide taking place in East Turkestan,” he said, using the name many Uighurs use to refer to their homeland.
This chap has unwittingly hit the nail on the head. China cannot, and will not, allow the separatist movement in the Xinjiang region to proceed further.
Firstly, it's not "genocide" at all - that's typical hyperbole from a very politically motivated party. His next quote reveals his definition of genocide:
> “They want to erase, erase, erase your identity and our culture and to melt them into Han Chinese.”
That's quite different, and also accurate. They want them to learn Chinese and acknowledge they live in China. Of course.
Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten, between ethnic populations of roughly equal sizes and mass displacements. This "solution" could only ever have one outcome if you're seriously suggesting China should simply fight for its land and displace the rebels. That "war" would last roughly until tea time.
That's a rather liberal definition of the word. From brittanica, "Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race."
I don't think "dismantling of an ethnic identity" at all fits into "deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people" unless you weaken "destruction" to mean almost nothing.
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide), "it has been applied to the Holocaust, and many other mass killings including the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the Indonesian genocide,[6] the Guatemalan genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and after 1980 the Bosnian genocide, the Kurdish genocide, the Darfur genocide, and the Rwandan genocide." All of those examples are actual killings of people, not this new age definition of changing people's opinions about things.
> They want them to learn Chinese and acknowledge they live in China. Of course.
Why "of course"? Those people aren't Chinese culturally. They were conquered.
> Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten
It only required a bloody war because the (by then dominated by Serbian nationalists) central government insisted on there being one. In all the Yugoslav republics, secession was peaceful once Belgrade left them in peace. The only exception was Bosnia, and even there it's not a given that it would have blown up the way it did, if Serbia and Croatia weren't already fighting elsewhere.
The Uighur want nothing to do with the Chinese. Historically the only reason they wanted to be a part of China was because other Central Asians were oppressing them and the Chinese gave them a better deal. China's real claim to this province is simply about resource extraction... and maybe sovereignty. What's the solution, leave them alone to do as they wish. It should be its own country without Han Chinese invading all parts of it.
That being said, the reality is that the Uighur are generally screwed just like the Tibetans were/are screwed. Empire does not compromise.
Partial independence.
Let them govern themselves. The dependency of the rest of China would have led to an automatic alignment...at some point in the past.
But we're talking about China so this is not even imaginable. They'll try to put pressure until they break further, justifying even more pressure and so on.
As far as I've heard they even have a special version of that credit system so there isn't even a viable escape route for those who want to align themselves to the rest of China.
Is that a serious question? If a people no longer wants to be part of a country they should be allowed to secede. The Scottish tried it via a democratic route - which would have succeeded with a wide margin post-Brexit. Actually, the British voted to secede from the EU. The Catalans want to secede from Spain.
But that's besides the point - you're almost implying that it's OK to put people in concentration camps.
> Is that a serious question? If a people no longer wants to be part of a country they should be allowed to secede.
While I am not defending China whatsoever in this specific case it’s worth noting that premise is highly debatable — essentially the definition of a serious question.
That depends on the democracy. You mentioned Scotland already (and there's nothing particularly unique about it). Then there's Canada, where the Supreme Court has specifically outlined the rules for Quebec (or any other province) to secede - but acknowledged that there is a basic right to do so. One could argue that ability to handle peaceful secession is simply the next stage in evolution of liberal democracy, and those that allow for it are more advanced than those that do not.
What if you reversed this question, and asked it from the Uyghar perspective.
What do you think the solution to the china/ccp problem is? What do you do when you're ruled by a country that hates your language and religion, actively tries to extinguish your culture and frequently resorts to violence in order achieve this goal?
Should they leave them to it? Allow them to imprison millions of your people and end your culture?
I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is to near-fascist rule?
In conflict, it's always easiest to ask your questions in a way that leaves no alternative but bloodshed, a way that justifies anything.
Do you think of this as a genuine concern? Yes, in nineties some militants managed to effectively take control of the South Xinjiang with Kashgar and mop the floor with PLA for a few months. PLA can only blame itself for letting itself fail so spectacularly.
Few bombings a year? That is not enough to normally set off reaction of a district police office, let alone on a nation level. Chinese oligarchs are waging wars on streets of Chinese cities against each others with private armies, blowing each others up every day, and the party does nothing about that.
Where I'm leading here?: the real reason for the recent crackdown.
Today, the party is being ran by a generation of people with no nerve or temper what so ever. Them pressing the, "big red button," is the only response to any issue their level of emotional and intellectual finesse avails them.
Xi himself is said to be a man with very weak personality "ready to pull out a gun" on the most minor suspicion of anybody having personal animosity with him. I want to say that for the readers to not to base your opinion of him on the popular sentiment. The popular opinion in the West have no idea who he really is, just like as with the rest of political establishment here.
>Chinese oligarchs are waging wars on streets of Chinese cities against each others with private armies, blowing each others up every day, and the party does nothing about that.
Wait, what? Do you have a source to back up that extraordinary claim?
It's strange to see this thread full of outrage over China's acts and demanding they give the Uyghur their sovereignty when Xinjiang borders Afghanistan. Nothing they are doing is worse than the seventeen years that the US has held sovereignty of Afghanistan, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead.
What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan? Did you miss the massive global marches against the Iraq invasion? It's routinely brought up in discussion threads here and everywhere, and has been for 15 years now. If you want to criticize the US on human rights, the #1 go to point in every discussion is either the Iraq/Afghanistan wars (or incarceration policies in the US). It's immediately brought up, without exception. There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries.
> What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan?
Where is the outrage right now? where is the outrage over the slaughter of children in Yemen by the Saudis using US weapons? I don't see any here or in the US mainstream media. if you are an american, your tax dollars helped created these weapons.
>There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries.
Yet the sovereignty of those countries is still in US control, thee were 10,000 civilian casualties last year just in Afghanistan, and an ever increasing amount of countries face the same fate.
We should address our own atrocities if we want to shame the Chinese for theirs.
You make it as if it would require some creative work do paint China in a bad light when the facts are more then enough and that's what is happening here. Facts. Reality.
It's interesting though that you simultaneously know that this makes China look bad but instead of blaming those who cause it (Chinese government) you chose to blame those who report it. Why is that?
Was this article flagged in some non-visible way? I don’t see it anywhere in the first 7 pages, despite having 123 points and a post time of just 16 hours ago. (Only noticed when I came back to it hoping for a reply to an earlier comment.)
56 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadAnd Saudi Arabia has killed plenty of journalists in the past. US residency is the unique aspect in his death.
China has removed all human rights for over ten million Uyghur Muslims. Including freedom of movement, freedom of religion, tight restrictions on behavior, tracking of all communication and movement, restrictions on who you can meet or talk to, tracking of all Urghar family members in China or abroad, non-existent freedoms around speech and expression, total lockdown on press investigation or discussion, forced re-education.
And then for at least a million Uyghur Muslims, they're outright physically and mentally torturing them in camps through forced programs to destroy their culture and beliefs.
Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo. I believe the detainment facility at Guantanamo should not exist and should have never existed. There's an important on-going debate there. There's no reasonable comparison to be had between Guantanamo and Xinjiang, whether in scale, intent, or context.
They are being held there without a trial. They have not been tried before being sent there.
> Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo.
Because the basic human rights of these prisoners are not respected. Some have been jailed there for more than 10 years without any form of trial or justice. If they committed a crime they belong to a US prison, not some shady oversea jail ran by US. And let's not get started on how they were brought there. US just delegated torture to people like Egyptian or Turkish authorities. Black sites are not a legend.
While it doesn't excuse what China is doing, let's not pretend that there is nothing wrong with the situation in Guantanamo.
She told me that a full bus of students from her school were killed in a Uygur terrorist attack. Sadly, they didn't have access to any guns to defend for themselves. There was no government intervention under the banner of autonomy. For people like my physics teacher, the only viable choice was to leave the region and reallocate the whole family to Han majority places.
To be frankly honest with you, CCP has probably 95% support from we Han Chinese on those re-education camps - the other 5% are probably asking for even tougher policies. You can paint Muslim as a peaceful religion or whatever you want, Han Chinese don't buy political correctness. Your attack on the Chinese government on matters like those re-education camps are being considered as the proof that CCP is working its ass off protecting the interests of all those non-Muslim Chinese citizens.
There are also tons of regular Xinjiang Muslims living peacefully, both in Xinjiang and major cities in the east. There are also tons of Muslim restaurants everywhere in China, and they are quite popular
That can’t be more false
Same applies to many other sites. To westerners, the Internet is effectively unusable until you establish a vpn.
HN works though.
So they could make it plausibly look like it’s coming from a foreign IP while locally censoring the content on the site.
If you have control over the network, hijacking the whole site is easier to do than trying to MITM traffic between users and the site, since HTTPS would hinder your efforts. As long as you don’t start to do it too late that people have HSTS information saved in their browsers.
https://hstspreload.com/
There's a long history here and after decades of failure, China is beginning to turn the screws, in typical heavy handed style. But I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is with a near-rebel province.
One quote from the article which I think sums things up:
> “I cannot bear keeping silent [any more] because I think there’s a genocide taking place in East Turkestan,” he said, using the name many Uighurs use to refer to their homeland.
This chap has unwittingly hit the nail on the head. China cannot, and will not, allow the separatist movement in the Xinjiang region to proceed further.
> “They want to erase, erase, erase your identity and our culture and to melt them into Han Chinese.”
That's quite different, and also accurate. They want them to learn Chinese and acknowledge they live in China. Of course.
Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten, between ethnic populations of roughly equal sizes and mass displacements. This "solution" could only ever have one outcome if you're seriously suggesting China should simply fight for its land and displace the rebels. That "war" would last roughly until tea time.
I don't think "dismantling of an ethnic identity" at all fits into "deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people" unless you weaken "destruction" to mean almost nothing.
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide), "it has been applied to the Holocaust, and many other mass killings including the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the Indonesian genocide,[6] the Guatemalan genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and after 1980 the Bosnian genocide, the Kurdish genocide, the Darfur genocide, and the Rwandan genocide." All of those examples are actual killings of people, not this new age definition of changing people's opinions about things.
We know what's happening roughly, and it's a terrible thing regardless if what you call it.
Why "of course"? Those people aren't Chinese culturally. They were conquered.
> Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten
It only required a bloody war because the (by then dominated by Serbian nationalists) central government insisted on there being one. In all the Yugoslav republics, secession was peaceful once Belgrade left them in peace. The only exception was Bosnia, and even there it's not a given that it would have blown up the way it did, if Serbia and Croatia weren't already fighting elsewhere.
That being said, the reality is that the Uighur are generally screwed just like the Tibetans were/are screwed. Empire does not compromise.
But we're talking about China so this is not even imaginable. They'll try to put pressure until they break further, justifying even more pressure and so on.
As far as I've heard they even have a special version of that credit system so there isn't even a viable escape route for those who want to align themselves to the rest of China.
Is that a serious question? If a people no longer wants to be part of a country they should be allowed to secede. The Scottish tried it via a democratic route - which would have succeeded with a wide margin post-Brexit. Actually, the British voted to secede from the EU. The Catalans want to secede from Spain.
But that's besides the point - you're almost implying that it's OK to put people in concentration camps.
While I am not defending China whatsoever in this specific case it’s worth noting that premise is highly debatable — essentially the definition of a serious question.
Scotland has a very unique history in this
Catalunya is not gaining independence and the central Madrid government has declared their referendum illegitimate and illegal.
People cannot vote their way to secession, even in democracies.
Crimea people did :)
What do you think the solution to the china/ccp problem is? What do you do when you're ruled by a country that hates your language and religion, actively tries to extinguish your culture and frequently resorts to violence in order achieve this goal?
Should they leave them to it? Allow them to imprison millions of your people and end your culture?
I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is to near-fascist rule?
In conflict, it's always easiest to ask your questions in a way that leaves no alternative but bloodshed, a way that justifies anything.
The way to peace is asking different questions.
Few bombings a year? That is not enough to normally set off reaction of a district police office, let alone on a nation level. Chinese oligarchs are waging wars on streets of Chinese cities against each others with private armies, blowing each others up every day, and the party does nothing about that.
Where I'm leading here?: the real reason for the recent crackdown.
Today, the party is being ran by a generation of people with no nerve or temper what so ever. Them pressing the, "big red button," is the only response to any issue their level of emotional and intellectual finesse avails them.
Xi himself is said to be a man with very weak personality "ready to pull out a gun" on the most minor suspicion of anybody having personal animosity with him. I want to say that for the readers to not to base your opinion of him on the popular sentiment. The popular opinion in the West have no idea who he really is, just like as with the rest of political establishment here.
Wait, what? Do you have a source to back up that extraordinary claim?
Where is the outrage right now? where is the outrage over the slaughter of children in Yemen by the Saudis using US weapons? I don't see any here or in the US mainstream media. if you are an american, your tax dollars helped created these weapons.
Yet the sovereignty of those countries is still in US control, thee were 10,000 civilian casualties last year just in Afghanistan, and an ever increasing amount of countries face the same fate.
We should address our own atrocities if we want to shame the Chinese for theirs.
It's interesting though that you simultaneously know that this makes China look bad but instead of blaming those who cause it (Chinese government) you chose to blame those who report it. Why is that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=abc.net.au