
China’s hidden camps - clouddrover
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps
======
saagarjha
> The government denies the claims, saying people are willingly attending
> special “vocational schools” which combat “terrorism and religious
> extremism”.

This is from the opening lines of the article. Every excuse the government
provides seems to provide is similarly transparent. Roads close because
they've "melted". Filming is not allowed, because of "military exercises". I
don't know who they think they're fooling.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
It's not meant to fool you. It's meant to make it harder to object and report
on. If they say, "you can't go there," that opens avenues of progress. You can
say "great, show me the rule" or write a story about how the military forbid
them from going to see. But if "the road melted," you can only comply or
accuse them of being liars, and you can only write a story that says "their
excuse was dubious." It also allows the reporter a face-saving out if they
wish to take it. Nobody ever believes there is a melted road or is meant to
believe it.

~~~
candiodari
You assume a level of intelligence on the part of these government operatives
that just isn't there.

They're just saying anything at all. Their orders did not include what to tell
reporters (and if those orders did, they didn't bother to read them)

------
rl3
> _The satellite photograph was discovered by researchers looking for evidence
> of that system on the global mapping software, Google Earth._

Presumably the NRO and NGA also knew about this place, likely as it was being
built. It's a shame that imagery backing up human rights violations never
comes out of the IC unless it's congruent with American foreign policy of the
day.

Independent organizations then end up relying on Google Maps of all things,
which can be downright glacial in its update frequency. It's promising that
some NGOs are striking partnerships directly with commercial providers now:

[https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/30/new-satellite-imagery-
pa...](https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/30/new-satellite-imagery-partnership)

~~~
lostlogin
Wonder what will happen with it as Google try to gain more of a presence in
China. Judging by the reports on how search is being handled, I’d bet there is
flexibility in Googles position.

------
mycelium
Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite
journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed on
the front page a few weeks ago.

~~~
394549
> Why was this article hidden from the front page? A similar satellite
> journalism article from the BBC about a killing in west Africa was allowed
> on the front page a few weeks ago.

Because it's about China, and information about Chinese human rights abuses is
apparently considered "nationalistic flamebait."

Also, I speculate that giving articles like this prominence is bad for Y
Combinator's business: it operates a startup incubator in China:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820654)
[https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-
lu/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17763426)

It's also worth noting that China human rights stories are censored in a way
that gives the mods some deniability:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185123)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634964)

~~~
dang
HN moderation has nothing to do with what YC is doing in China, as anyone can
see by looking back through the many years' worth of comments I've posted. The
macro political climate has changed; HN moderation hasn't. The standards are a
flatline, to the point of janitorial tedium.

------
rl3
> _“Yes, that 's a re-education school,” another shopkeeper agreed._

> _“There are tens of thousands of people there now. They have some problems
> with their thoughts.”_

That reads like fictional prose, but it unfortunately isn't.

------
GreenToad5
Sad that American greed is funding this... It is only the beginning though. Us
or our children will be in those camps (or ones like them) someday. All funded
by our dollars for a bunch of materialistic crap that now (or soon) will be
sitting in our landfills and oceans...

------
pimmen
When will the US and the EU strongly condemn these human rights abuses? I
mean, we condemned the Soviet Union strongly again and again even though it
was the world's second largest economy with the world'a largest military and
nuclear arsenal, why does China get a free pass?

... it's the trade, isn't it?

~~~
GreenToad5
It's not just the money from trade. It's the political power and blind self
destructive yet predictable force of pride (saving face). Traditionally, the
mainstream media and academia would be the rallying force behind this nation
and it's citizens denouncing something like this. Both of these entities are
now heavily partisan globalists whose ideals (along with greedy crony
capitalists) have perpetuated this reality. To condemn this short sighted
consequence would be admitting a flaw in their ideology which would cost them
political power and even worse, to have to admit they were wrong. (Where is my
progressive utopia hiding this time around?)

~~~
pimmen
I have a problem seeing how globalist media have perpetuated Chinese human
rights abuses towards Muslims. I would say the Chinese Communist Party is not
globalist, and I see the media and academia rallying against China more than
politicians do. I can't name a politician vehemently against globalism being
against what the CCP is doing to these Muslims.

And why do globalists have no qualms about condemning Myanmar's persecution of
Muslims? Aung San Suu Kyi enjoyed a lot of Western support for decades before
the genocidal acts.

------
jakeogh
Oct 4th 2018; USA VP called China out on the camps:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYAHPPXmcts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYAHPPXmcts)

------
GreenToad5
Strange how so many of us in the US that seem so compassionate toward
immigrants (legal and illegal) and refugees and denounce any opposition in the
name of compassion and love for all, the people who protest and boycott anyone
that opposes their views. These are the same people who are buying iPhones and
other things from China whose sales basically sponsor massive human rights
violations like this.

Do we not realize what hypocrites we are? We are funding the very actions and
ideals that we vehemently oppose. All of us Silicon Valley residents who are
so supportive of inclusion, acceptance and rights... Many of us work for the
very companies that sponsor the exact opposite values on over a billion
people. And we claim that we aren't tribal nationalists? What are we then? Why
are our strong moral convictions so geographically limited?

We should ask ourselves and anyone around us who claims to believe in a cause
for freedom, rights and equality to please explain why our beliefs don't go
beyond the boundaries of the United States (or other western countries). Is it
fake virtue? Is it blind apathy created by materialism and greed? It is
nationalism, stateism, racism ETC? What is it? Shouldn't there be stories
about things like this in the liberal media on a daily bases. Liberal ideas
don't apply to China apparently. I dare to think how China may be different
today if for the last 18 months, the Mainstream media covered stories like
this one in place of all the millions of largely fluff partition anti Trump
ones. My opinion is that at the very least least a large amount of pressure
would have been put on China to address at least some of this trend. Perhaps
our country country would have found some common ground and actually moved
toward a center on a least something. All the while helping millions of
Chinese citizens at the same time.

How is ignoring this situation and actually sponsoring it financially ok with
the average American citizen (regardless of party affiliation)?

------
newnewpdro
I understand why they're doing this, but that doesn't make how they're going
about it any less upsetting.

~~~
hazz99
Why are they doing it?

~~~
newnewpdro
The TL;DR: Fear of islam, fear of it breeding radical muslim terrorists in
their lands, fear.

Read the article and form your own views.

~~~
akabaka777
[TLDR: not the fear of the religion. If you can't control people's thoughts,
you can't control people.] People should really learn religion is just a
political tool. replace the word 'muslim' with any other religion and you will
find many examples of the same- which may give you a clue why totalitarian
states do this. Not certainly to fight "terrorism"

------
forkLding
The camps, and BBC mentions this too, is less about Uyghur identity but about
imprisoning Muslim followers to stop following Islam, you can tell because
they've taken in Kazakh Chinese too and likely devout Muslim Hui who are
basically Muslim Han Chinese

------
zwaps
This situation is absolutely disgusting. China will stamp out the Muslim
religion, and anyone not preemtively converting will be destroyed. Indeed
probably a lot more than that. Where does it end?

I have made the decision to support the Chinese as little as I can, and fight
the regime where I can. In my field, academia, this can actually matter a lot.
I encourage you to do the same.

Muslims arent the most popular people right now, but the parallels to another
religious ethnicity in history are too strong. Dont be the one, years from
now, having to claim that we did not know. We know. We see. We know where this
ends, it is not the first time. Do what you can.

~~~
cmroanirgo
I agree that it's rather appalling, but it's not just an 'anti-Muslim'. They
have been making claims and asserting themselves wherever and whenever they
can. They have a proven track record of incarcerating or killing anyone
(dissident or otherwise) that doesn't fit into their mould of chinese
ideology.

\- China will decide who the next Dalai Lama will be:
[http://time.com/3743742/dalai-lama-china-reincarnation-
tibet...](http://time.com/3743742/dalai-lama-china-reincarnation-tibet-
buddhism/)

\- Building an island in the South China Sea (after claiming an atoll as their
own): [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-34641131](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34641131)

\- Genocide in Tibet: [http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/outlook/opinions-and-
columns/...](http://www.thetibetpost.com/en/outlook/opinions-and-
columns/4533-genocide-in-the-20th-century-massacres-in-tibet-1966-76)

\- Outlawing Falun Gong (a meditation group):
[https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-14/why-china-fears-
falun...](https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-14/why-china-fears-falun-gong)

\- Incursion into Bhutan: [https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/03/asia/bhutan-
india-border-...](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/03/asia/bhutan-india-border-
dispute/index.html)

What they can do in a subversive way, they can, and where it doesn't work,
they're overt.

------
archibaldJ
I feel really sorry for these people in Xinjiang. A friend of mine (American
Chinese born in China and left in the 1980s) is working on a similar story
about Xinjiang (he works for Buzzfeed which has an office in Beijing) and he
has been denied the renewal of his Work Visa just a few months back so he is
back in New York now still figuring out a way to get into China. In China
people outside of Xinjiang in general have no idea what is going on in
Xinjiang except that it has become "peaceful". And many Han people in China
actually like the idea that the government is doing something about Xinjiang
because of the incidents happened in Kunming, etc. In Xinjiang they even have
a separate security-check channel (a much faster one e.g. without checking the
luggages, etc) for you if you are Han Chinese v.s. if you are Uyghur. This
further reinforces the reality bubbles for the Han Chinese where Uyghurs are
viewed as potentially dangerous, and they deserve the current treatment
because they oppose the Central Government, and reinforces the reality bubbles
for the Uyghurs that the Han Chinese are more superior and this is what
happens when there are people in your community opposing the Central
Government (i.e. the extremists). Now that I have lived in China for a while I
can see that reality bubbles are extremely ubiquitous here (one example: so
many tech conferences here are branded as "international" so for the none-tech
Chinese people they were surprised when I, coming from Singapore, told them I
had never heard of the "X International Conference" took place in some Tier 2
city; I had the chance to visit one before and it was just filled with Chinese
people and bad English translations). I'm starting to believe the main
function of the Central Government in China is to mass-control the reality
bubbles of its citizens. Economy and everything else actually come second.

And since I saw a lot of comments about Trump here, I just want to point out
that if Trump runs for president as a Democrat, which he will certainly do in
order to maximise his chances in the case that the previous president is a
Republican (also, if he were to do so he will do everything he could to appear
extremely left-wing and liberal), as a President from the Democratic Party he
will certainly use Xinjiang as among the many main reasons to start a trade
war with China (which we will soon see that he and his friends will benefit
hugely from). The main difference would be that everyone on the Internet will
cheer for him when he starts the trade war, and there won't be as many people
as there are now who had experienced the bursting of their reality bubbles
back in 2016. Reality bubbles are ubiquitous in the west too. The difference
here is that no central system is trying to control these reality bubbles.
Instead, the problem in the west is that there are platforms like Facebook
which, for the sole purpose of their business interest (e.g. user retention),
reinforce people's reality bubbles to be more monochrome with views on things
that is very one-sided. But given the rapid advancement in technologies and an
increasingly larger proportion of the human population becoming more
intelligent and intellectual, eventually platforms like Facebook will collapse
as everything becomes more decentralised.

And I'm looking forwards to something like this happening in China too in the
next 30 years. I heard from friends working in AliCloud that they are doing
some experimental projects to build an AI for decentralised governance for the
Central Government. Sounds ironic but this may just be the best way to combat
corruption and improve the Chinese economics and for Xi to make sure him and
his friends continue to stay in power. The Central Government will be
rebranded as an organisation in charge of these decentralised AI governments
for cities designed to serve its citizens' needs and there will be no need to
mass-control the reality bubbles of Chinese citizens. And there will be no
need to resort to doing horrible things to places like Xinjiang and Tibet too.

