
Xinjiang is prototype for fully totalitarian state: Taiwan minister - baylearn
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Xinjiang-is-prototype-for-fully-totalitarian-state-Taiwan-minister
======
ideals
_So I am at once digital minister, that 's my day job. But I'm also
moonlighting as a civic hacker," Tang said. "I see myself as a channel, as a
bridge, as a Lagrangian point between civic movements on one side and
government on the other."_

I wish we had people like her running things in the US.

~~~
labster
For those who don’t know, Audrey Tang wrote the first implementation of the
Raku language in Haskell back in the day. She’s really smart, and I’d put her
in charge of just about anything.

~~~
est
She also wrote a Perl6 implementation IIRC

~~~
ISL
Perl 6 is now Raku.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_\(programming_language\))

------
OliverTowers
Everyone is too afraid to even comment

~~~
throw2876534
I’m often afraid to express my skepticism that most of what we know about
Xinjiang comes from Adrian Zenz, because doing so makes people think I
actually support those policies.

~~~
pas
Aren't the checkpoints and the camps there and functioning? (BBC video
report?) Don't people have to install whatever spy apps on their phones?

Is that not totalitarian enough?

~~~
biscotti
Well Microsoft did supply the facial recognition tech to keep order in these
camps. [1]

They seem totalitarian enough to suck up all that telemetry, what makes us
think they wouldn't be totalitarian enough to sanction its use against us?

So you know the BBC has spent the last two months race baiting. They were once
a most treasured institution of my nation now they've lost respect and their
future is in jeopardy - you only have to view the hash #DefundTheBBC to see
how they're actions have sullied them.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-china-muslim-
crack...](https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-china-muslim-crackdown-ai-
partnership-complicit-2019-4?op=1&r=US&IR=T)

------
frequentnapper
She specifically warns about chinese companies inflitrating infrastructure and
the Canadian govt just handed over our embassy security to them:
[https://nationalpost.com/news/chinese-government-owned-
firm-...](https://nationalpost.com/news/chinese-government-owned-firm-
wins-6-8m-contract-to-supply-security-equipment-to-canada-
embassies#:~:text=from%20our%20team.-,Chinese%20government%2Downed%20firm%20wins%20%246.8M%20contract%20to%20supply,customs%20offices%20in%20160%20countries).

~~~
kube-system
At least they're not networked. The potential threat model seems a lot easier
to manage.

~~~
frequentnapper
still, to be handing over money to a chinese govt owned and subsidized company
at the cost of our own perfectly capable industry who can't compete with their
subsidies is just foolish.

------
usui
This article notes that Tang is a digital minister and has experience with
information technology. My impression is that Taiwan has a very healthy and
balanced demographic of politicians. I have seen Taiwanese mathematicians,
doctors, engineers, and chemists fill important government roles involving the
spotlight and advocacy. It seems that people of technical expertise in Taiwan
have an equally viable chance at entering politics and policy-making.

This is not to say that scientists, engineers, or doctors make for better
policymakers. Perhaps there is a case to be made that career politicians have
skillsets that validate the need to specialize in politics. However, the
stereotype of career politicians is that of ignorance with no understanding of
subject matter for the things that they make policies for. This impression was
cemented further after the hearing between Zuckerberg and Congress about
Facebook. This video even plays it for laughs: "Zuckerberg explains the
internet to Congress",
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbb5B85sd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbb5B85sd0).
For the government to help its people, it needs to incentivize diversity
within its ranks so that it can understand the variety of issues that it
faces. It also needs to be able to adapt to changing realities.

Regarding what Tang talks about: I frequently think that what is happening
over there are the emulations of unethical experiments (I hear the TV show
Black Mirror is similar) that the Western world would never be able to pull
off. Regardless of where one stands on this issue, I do not think it can be
denied that a lot can be learned about how these systems operate at scale or
how the machine runs. From the reports and stories that we get to hear about,
it seems like the Chinese government is implementing technology at scales that
most countries could ever dream of doing.

Or rather, most countries could only dream of creating technological systems
of control with the degree of acceptance by the populace, with degree of
penetration and overall dissemination. Western governments have implemented
comparable systems, like the ones that Edward Snowden pointed out. However, if
governments did not worry about hiding questionable activity, maybe it could
double down on the level of sophistication and expand on its capabilities.

~~~
lowdose
China also made the life of almost a billion Chines better by a factor of 50
in 30 years time.

> I frequently think that what is happening over there are the emulations of
> unethical experiments that the Western world would never be able to pull
> off.

Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no
Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?

I seriously cannot think of an example so Im open to the fact you know more
about my known unknowns.

~~~
usui
> China also made the life of almost a billion Chines better by a factor of 50
> in 30 years time.

I agree with you. This is why populations, no matter which population it is,
are more likely to accept the government who has substantially increased the
quality of life of the average citizen. This is a very hard position to
disagree with, I think. Many citizens in the Western world also have had
stable political systems despite the massive wrongdoings of their governments
because for the most part, governments have not overstepped their bounds in
comparison to the stability provided.

It's like having a goodness-to-shittiness ratio that each citizen
subconsciously evaluates with an accompanying flowchart. The average citizen
thinks to himself or herself: Is my government doing bad things? Yes. Is my
government doing good things? Yes. Is the government doing enough bad things
to make me care? No. If the answer is yes, then the next question is: Do I
care enough to do something about it? Most of the time, the answer is no
because society pushes me to remain being a busybody (job, life
responsibilities, etc.) or I just don't care.

> Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no
> Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?

I could have phrased that better: All governments are capable and have a
history of some kind of unethical experiment. I think that it is rarer that it
is at this level of scale and with this level of technical sophistication. My
thought was that generally, a Western government would not successfully pull
off this prototype with neither the degree of success or extent.

I personally do not know what is happening at the granular level and I do not
pretend to know. I wish I did, and for that matter, at any point in time there
will be shady things going on that we do not know. Maybe we will learn in a
few decades.

For the first time, we get to see what control through the digital lens of
information technology looks like _when combined with the capacity to enact
state-sanctioned violence_. It's like the cyberpunk genre, except privately-
owned corporations do not yet have a significant capacity to use violence.
Maybe we'll have the honor of seeing that by the end of this century.

On that note, the closest thing the USA has done in subjugating populations of
citizens in a systematic way is the internment camps of Japanese Americans for
no reason. They apologized 4 decades later. What good is an apology if you've
been waiting for most of the victims to die anyway? Nonetheless, it still
gained notoriety (eventually), and people still fought for recognition
afterward.

~~~
udue73uru
It seems like the interesting question is what happens after total
authoritarianism. I know many here find the news out of China nightmarish but
most of China is on the mainland and the mainland Chinese, while by no means
flourishing in utopia, are pretty content on average compared to where they
were in the past. This isn't meant to endorse China by any means but if the
west is going to keep espousing the uplifting effects of democracy they're
going to need some actual benefits to point to eventually since right now the
main perk is friendlier trade relations. Latin American democracy is a joke
because they love populists (no one actually studying them blames the
intervention memes), the EU is rife with corruption and the U.S. is strong but
you can be strong without being a democracy. So why should an aspiring African
government, for example, strive for Democracy rather than persuing the Chinese
model?

~~~
pasabagi
Democracy developed in a world of totalitarian regimes, and mostly thrived
because having officials vulnerable to election cuts down on corruption and
incompetence while building government legitimacy and stability.

Totalitarian states tend to have a good run, where they have a good leader and
energetic administration, then they become lethargic and dysfunctional, and
because there's no mechanism to correct this, they start falling apart.
(However, this can take centuries).

As an aside, I don't think the West has ever been particularly keen on
democracy. I think Israel is the only democracy that has ever received
substantial military and economic support. For dictatorships, this kind of
support is basically routine (see Egypt, for a typical example).

~~~
udue73uru
Those democracies didn't just emerge in spite of totalitarians though, they
emerged because of them and the stability they established. Stable conditions
historically lead to democracy but democracy in uncertain circumstances segues
into stability much more rarely. Yes corruption is a problem for totalitarians
but cracking down on corruption has been a growing aspect of the Chinese model
for exactly that reason (whether or not they'll succeed is another matter but
it's incorrect to automatically assume that a totalitarian state will be blind
to the problem by default). Further, those democracies emerged in a wildly
different power climate. A modernized military operating without any rules of
engagement is not going to get overthrown by its people when over half the
population is content.

~~~
pasabagi
I think the precondition for stability is a strong civil society, and clear
traditions about what constitutes legitimacy. Democracy fosters both of these.
Dictatorship can foster both in the case of an 'enlightened despot', but it's
often the case that the despot is incompetent, or worse.

If you look at transitions like the english civil war, or the french
revolution, the clear precondition of revolution is not 'stability', as you
think, but rather systemic dysfunction compounded by incompetent leadership.
This kind of situation is one which democracies, in theory, should be much
less vulnerable to.

Your ideas about the relative balance of power between state and people make
some sense, I think, but they only matter when the threat is internal dissent.
Most of the states in modern europe had a form of republicanism enforced on
them by the French, who were able to invade all their neighbors because their
republican government was (while very dysfunctional) more efficient and able
to field talented officers and large armies.

A modernised military, moreover, consists of normal people - and they will
also feel the disillusionment and apathy that grips really dysfunctional
regimes. Saudi Arabia, for example, fields armies of terrible soldiers, using
the most advanced weapons available.

China is an interesting and very weird state, because it's a very old
civilization with deep roots, with very different basic ideas to the west, and
they have turned marxism into a kind of managerial culture for an extremely
capitalist society. I don't know if they will follow any of the typical
patterns that totalitarian states follow. You can't really use the USSR as a
point of comparison, because the USSR was a very European project, coming
directly out of the enlightenment, and the western political tradition. Nor
would Korea make sense, since they were colonized, and both North and South
represent different reactions to colonial subjugation.

~~~
biscotti
Well that's certainly one take. Charles had a bit of a complex sure but you
have to understand the context of the time in that Cromwells foreign co-
conspirators were demanding nothing less than his head.

The precondition of the English civil war in my opinion was more the funds
that facilitated it promised by financiers from Amsterdam who ultimately went
on to be granted charter to found the BoE.

As you know the result of this civil war was to wreck the fine castles,
history and heritage of the English. Destroy many a dynasty and teach the
Irish to hate the Brits for all eternity.

Issac D'Israeli produced a worthwhile read on Charles [1] if you'd like to
know more on his character and quarry.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/commentariesonli03disruoft/page/...](https://archive.org/details/commentariesonli03disruoft/page/n5/mode/2up)

------
galaxyLogic
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan) :

"In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ROC transitioned from a one-party
military dictatorship to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential
system."

------
amai
Clockwork Mandarin:

Russian original: [https://les.media/articles/863622-zavodnoy-
mandarin](https://les.media/articles/863622-zavodnoy-mandarin)

Englisch translation: [https://bylinetimes.com/2019/11/18/beyond-orwells-
worst-nigh...](https://bylinetimes.com/2019/11/18/beyond-orwells-worst-
nightmares-how-china-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-commit-genocide/)

German translation: [https://www.dekoder.org/de/article/uiguren-kasachen-
china-xi...](https://www.dekoder.org/de/article/uiguren-kasachen-china-
xinjiang)

------
winrid
Didn't read article yet, but when I was in Xinjiang it was an area with very
high security (more cameras, more police with guns, giant vehicle barricades
around elementary schools).

If you ask the locals, they'll tell you it's to protect them from the Uighurs.
It seems the conflict there is (was?) a real problem, with Han Chinese being
murdered regularly with some communities having to put the men on watch at
night.

~~~
pas
You had not talked to the locals, as they are in the concentration camps. You
talked to those that the CCP transplanted there to slowly (meaning rapidly)
dilute and replace the population with good comrades.

~~~
winrid
Poor word choice. You're correct.

