
China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight - gok
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/22/chinas-mass-internment-camps-have-no-clear-end-in-sight/
======
pnathan
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_.

~~~
Razengan
> _I don 't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we
> did the right thing._

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989)

~~~
clamprecht
My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most
of us don't know about?

~~~
mhh__
MKULTRA? Difficult to guess how many americans/Chinese know about a topic,
however.

~~~
jamiepenney
MKULTRA is my go to, because it sounds just like a crazy conspiracy theory
(down to the wacky name), but it actually happened.

------
Leary
Where are the responses from Muslim countries?

~~~
adventured
I've found this very strange as well.

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.

~~~
cabalamat
> Alternatively they don't protest China because they know it does no good.

One Muslim country at least, Egypt, is doing China's bidding on Uighurs
[https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/fear-panic-egypt-
arre...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/fear-panic-egypt-arrests-
chinese-uighur-students-170707051922204.html) :

> 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.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> 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.

~~~
baybal2
A very simple explanation: Soviets worked out ways to find those who would.
And after they did so, they killed them.

Because everybody who was capable of putting up a riot was killed, nobody put
up a riot.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
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.

------
pimmen
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.

------
betterworldb
Why not just call them concentration camps?

~~~
lotu
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.

------
seibelj
China is a communist dictatorship where you can be arrested and possibly
murdered for saying the wrong thing. So this is not very surprising.

~~~
yourbandsucks
"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".

~~~
seibelj
OK, well, communist is in the name of the only political party allowed to
exist in China, so it’s not that absurd to say.

~~~
dragonwriter
It's no more absurd than calling North Korea “democratic” because that's
literally the first word of the official name.

But also not much _less_ absurd than that.

------
ptenk
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.

~~~
dnomad
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820157)

~~~
dang
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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
dnomad
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].

Post the results of this story on HN and it is immediately flagged:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846148](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...](https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-china-
internment-camps-uighur-muslims/)

