
Data leak reveals how China 'brainwashes' Uighurs in prison camps - asplake
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-50511063
======
heavyset_go
What I find chilling is that Uigher children are being kidnapped from their
families and sent to barbed wire enclosed camps as well[1].

There, they are subjected to CCP brainwashing[2].

[1] [https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1791](https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1791)

[2] [https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1826](https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1826)

~~~
yahwrong
It's 2019, who cares? Everyone is doing it!

------
_Microft
_The documents reveal how every aspect of a detainee 's life is monitored and
controlled: "The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue
position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it
is strictly forbidden for this to be changed.

"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll
call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating,
studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."_

Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?

~~~
ratww
> The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed
> classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly
> forbidden for this to be changed

My school was like that when I was growing up.

I'm not justifying what China is doing, and I didn't like it myself. But I
find it weird to find it quoted here like that.

~~~
reaperducer
But you chose to only select a portion of the text. The second sentence is
useful, too:

"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll
call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating,
studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth"

 _My school was like that when I was growing up._

Your school proscribed when you go to the toilet and how to close a door?

~~~
ioror93jf
Mine did, yes.

Grew up in rural Midwest US in the 80s. We walked in lines on a schedule for
bio breaks.

We had to “shut a door respectfully” basically library rules for the sake of
others.

Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that? If you
really needed to go you could and this article does not say that’s explicitly
disallowed.

I think you’re losing the forest for a tree here. The problem is the whole
kidnapping & cultural cleansing.

~~~
paulcarroty
Hiding green accounts (tons of automated pro-China posts by Chinese bots) will
be much helpful here.

~~~
burfog
Although it is true that China would make propaganda posts, there is a much
simpler explanation here. Let's go with the simple explanation. People are
creating fresh accounts to avoid the wrath of people who support Muslims.

You don't have to be generally pro-China to be fully in support of what China
is doing. You can hate the Uighers (Muslims) even if you also hate China. When
you see your enemies fighting, you can pick the side you find to be less-bad
or you can just cheer the fight in the hope that both suffer.

------
devhwrng
Maybe Tim Cook will show some "courage" now.

[Edit] Sorry for the snark. In a market economy, the only way companies like
Apple might act in the same way that compassionate human beings would, is if
it were in the interests of their bottom line. Perhaps articles like this will
hit critical mass, and Apple will put out a statement, carefully composed to
ensure that China doesn't lose face. Perhaps they'll do something tangible.

Come back 12 months later and nothing will have changed.

~~~
the_duke
We have to stop expecting moral behavior from publicly listed companies.

They will naturally trend towards short to medium term profit maximization
within the given legal constraints.

The boundaries for corporate behaviour have to be established by elected
governments.

In the case of China that could mean customs duties, sanctions and stricter
regulations for moving part of your supply chain there.

~~~
reaperducer
This is a false dilemma. There are plenty of publicly listed companies that
also engage in moral behaviors. Pretending it's an either/or situation only
serves to excuse the behavior and derail the discussion.

~~~
the_duke
We should support companies that act morally, and punish others by not buying
their products and criticizing them.

But _expecting_ them to act morally out of their own volition seems foolish to
me. Note also that I explicitly said publicly traded companies. Large ones
always have a diverse ownership structure with institutional investors. A CEO
that hurts profits by acting in the public interest will probably be replaced
pretty soon, forced to fall in line, or have to otherwise do enough to offset.

The only way to motivate them is external pressure or benefits.

Eg Apple has probably decided to focus on user privacy to provide a contrast
with Google and the Android ecosystem and maintain a good relationship with
customers, not because privacy is "good".

The situation is somewhat different with private companies, where there are
few owners that can actually have an impact.

------
whatshisface
Here is the leaked document if you want to read it:
[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6558510-China-
Cables...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6558510-China-Cables-
Telegram-English.html)

------
thruflo22
The meaning of the phrase “Made in China” has now evolved to “Do not buy”.

~~~
99chrisbard
Hard to do when it seems that China is now the world's factory...

~~~
weberc2
I wonder if there are any organizations that can certify products and brands.
From inhumane conditions to poor quality to scammy marketing and outright
fraud (especially on Amazon), I want to avoid Chinese products as much as
possible. It’s difficult to avoid completely, but there’s certainly a lot of
low hanging fruit.

~~~
blotter_paper
In fact, _any_ organization can do this. In the vegan/vegetarian/organic/non-
GMO food space there are multiple competing certification programs. The LSD
Avengers used to fulfill this role on the old Silk Road. It seems there is at
least one NGO that specifically certifies goods as made in the USA, though I
have no idea how legit they are:
[https://madeinusacertified.wordpress.com/](https://madeinusacertified.wordpress.com/)

~~~
weberc2
I agree that any organization can, but I don't know of any. I'm vaguely aware
of orgs that certify organic/non-GMO/etc and presumably someone certifies
kosher food and conflict free diamonds and the like, but I'm not sure of any
that certify labor conditions or that a given company operates with some
baseline of ethics and is subject to accountability.

~~~
blotter_paper
Aaah, I thought you were going for a made-in-America production certification,
not a generally-good-people production certification. The term you're looking
for is "fair trade." Here's one example of such an organization:
[https://www.fairtradecertified.org/](https://www.fairtradecertified.org/)

~~~
weberc2
Thanks for pointing me to fair trade; I'll have a look. There are a lot of
things I'm interested in, but mostly they fall into one of a few groups. For
any given product, I want to know:

1\. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor
conditions

2\. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through
disposal)

3\. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product
cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local
alternative)

4\. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is
fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership)
will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme?
This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from
low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.

There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns
seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e.,
not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while
Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some
certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some
certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of
course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues
with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).

~~~
blotter_paper
Labor conditions and pay are theoretically covered under fair trade.

> How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through
> disposal)

This one is more in line with Cradle 2 Cradle:
[https://www.c2ccertified.org/](https://www.c2ccertified.org/)

> Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised.

I'm unfamiliar with this organization, but a search popped up the Trustworthy
Accountability Group: [https://www.tagtoday.net/certified-against-fraud-
program/](https://www.tagtoday.net/certified-against-fraud-program/)

I didn't find anything on my first page of results for certificates of non-
subsidisation.

~~~
weberc2
Wow, thanks very much. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning googling
around for something like that last one. I’ll look into all of these.

EDIT: TAG seems to focus on eliminating fraudulent Internet advertising; it's
a much narrower scope than I had in mind.

------
paulcarroty
It looks like improvement version of Soviet Russia camps. They also kidnapped
kids from "bad" people, plus used mass hunger as weapon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)

------
reaperducer
Completely off topic, but can someone provide a layman's pronunciation of
"Uigher?" As someone who is not a linguist, the pronunciation squiggles in the
Wikipedia entry are entirely unhelpful.

~~~
Fuzzwah
Wee Gah

------
simonblack
I always get skeptical about stories that suddenly show up on scores of MSM
websites, rather than the slower spread over a day or two or three that
usually happens with 'real' news.

I've been fooled too many times by stories about 'weapons of mass
destruction', 'gas attacks', 'Trump's pee tapes', 'Tonkin Gulf incidents',
etc, etc that I withhold judgement for some time till the bulk of the back-
story arrives.

~~~
blotter_paper
> Tonkin Gulf incidents

Why did you include such a well documented false flag in your list of
potentially fake news? [Edit: the document discussed in the following quote is
from the NSA itself, so the government has admitted (39 years later) that this
was a hoax.] From the NYT:

> The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian
> argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the
> evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that
> North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.

> Based on the assertion that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B.
> Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad
> resolution authorizing military action.

> The historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote the article in an internal
> publication and it was classified top secret despite the fact that it dealt
> with events in 1964. Word of Mr. Hanyok's findings leaked to historians
> outside the agency, who requested the article under the Freedom of
> Information Act in 2003.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20081211090233/http://www.nytime...](https://web.archive.org/web/20081211090233/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/politics/02tonkin.html?pagewanted=print)

------
sys_64738
These are concentration camps.

------
mbar84
If I were in such a camp, I imagine I would be very eager to learn Mandarin in
an attempt to please the system.

------
tomohawk
I was looking at two items in the store today and trying to decide which one
to buy. As soon as I saw one was not made in China, the decision was simple.

It's unfortunate that China is controlled by the CCP.

------
rayiner
Powered by Google (R). [https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/tsinghua-
university-plans...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/tsinghua-university-
plans-to-open-ai-research-center-in-china-names-googles-ai-chief-as-advisor/)

------
Causality1
China's behavior is a good illustration of the fact that if Nazi Germany had
kept the Holocaust restricted to its own borders and not invaded other
countries we would have happily sat back and let them do it.

~~~
bluejekyll
I realize this might be wrong and based on not reading enough history about
it, but I’ve always understood that the Holocaust was not well documented
until after the war.

Obviously many people fleeing Germany and the occupied countries during that
period, knew something bad was happening, but overall, it’s my understanding
that before and during the war, the rest of the world really wasn’t aware, or
at least not aware about how bad it was.

It was the invasion of other countries that was cause to fight Germany. It was
much less of a humanitarian act, though after the war it’s easy to paint it as
one.

~~~
acdha
It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at
least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by
allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the
UN, and covered in major newspapers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews_in_German_Occupied_Poland)

[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/02/13/852...](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/02/13/85259194.html?pageNumber=12)

The catch, of course, is that governments don’t act with a single voice:
during war time intelligence agencies would be loathe to confirm anything if
it revealed information about their sources, and there were enough anti-
semites and Nazi sympathizers that all but the most conclusive evidence might
be downplayed or lead to consequences (reportedly, concern losing support in
Hungary was a factor in not leading with what was happening to the Jews).

~~~
pferde
There were rumours of the atrocities, but probably the first public
testimonies were the Auschwitz Protocols, based on first-hand experiences of a
few concentration camp escapees.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Protocols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Protocols))

~~~
acdha
Read the document which was the subject of my first link and ask whether rumor
was an appropriate word to describe an official report to the UN with
eyewitness accounts:

[https://archive.org/details/TheMassExterminationOfJewsInGerm...](https://archive.org/details/TheMassExterminationOfJewsInGermanOccupiedPoland)

~~~
pferde
Thanks, I was not aware of this document. However, its wikipedia page mentions
that it was not widely believed at the time. Heck, even Auschwitz Protocols
after it did not seem to have much success in reaching the audience (western
world) for quite a while.

------
bransonf
China wants the Uighur‘s gone, period. I don’t think anything short of
military action is going to stop that.

And frankly I don’t think that is ever going to happen, because of the world
powers that would be capable, they too hold resentment for Islamic religions.

~~~
slimed
It has nothing to do with that. If they were doing this to a Christian
minority we still wouldn't be doing anything.

Mutually assured destruction is a powerful force.

------
tristram_shandy
One might imagine China wants Xinjiang to remain Chinese, just as the US wants
Texas to remain American.

Let us construct a hypothetical situation where our geopolitical adversaries
(Russia, China, parts of South America) had spent the better part of the 20th
century backing equally hypothetical Jihadist (or even Reconquista)
separatists in Texas.

Perhaps the situation in Texas deteriorates when separatist Texans return from
jihad in Syria, and some more violent fringes, armed and trained by Russia and
China through proxies, begin widely-publicized attacks on civilians in
California.

Perhaps the most ethical response by the US would be to deploy prisons and
security services to Texas, and use technology to monitor potential separatist
action within the state. Certainly there would be human rights abuses.

Now who is at fault, truly? The US? The separatists? No, of course not. One
could place moral blame at the feet of our geopolitical enemies for
encouraging this in the first place, but this is simply the reality of
political action.

Just to be clear, what is happening to the Uighur people is horrific and
inhumane and absolutely disgusting, but I will not allow this humanist
sentiment to be perverted by propagandists to manipulate otherwise
intelligent, compassionade liberals into nationalists and xenophobes in the
name of maintaining the Western hegemon.

The anti-Chinese sentiment that has invaded the internet over the past several
months has gone well beyond 'legitimate criticism of the Chinese government',
and now sounds more like a racist, imperialist drumbeat for war. We should all
be suspicious when fascists and libertarian capitalists find common ground and
call it humanitarian.

~~~
jessaustin
Dude, no. They can have Texas.

