
Tracking China's Muslim Gulag - petethomas
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-camps-china/
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dang
All: we ban accounts that foment nationalistic flamewar on HN, so please don't
do that here. If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic like this,
do so with respect for the opposing point of view. If you can't muster any
such respect, and only want to smite enemies, this is not the web site you're
looking for; please find another.

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

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eiaoa
> If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic like this, do so with
> respect for the opposing point of view. If you can't muster any such
> respect, and only want to smite enemies

So you're saying we should respect the views like:

1\. the members of particular ethnicity and religion are terrorists, and

2\. that mass-imprisonment of innocent members of an ethnicity is the correct
response to the fear of terrorism from them?

Because those are some of the views expressed in this thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565634)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565128)

Tolerance and respect of such views is shameful.

~~~
dang
This breaks the site guideline: " _Please respond to the strongest plausible
interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
criticize._" It also exemplifies what I just asked people to stop.

Since you've been using this account primarily for ideological and national
battle, I've banned it. This is in the guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

You've been creating accounts to break HN's rules with for a long time. Please
don't do that anymore, or we'll ban your main account as well.

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avar
Some quotes that stood out:

> In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva
> said the West could learn from his country’s program of vocational training.
> “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal
> with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing
> so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human
> Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.

> The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by
> shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. [...]

> Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were
> all gone. They were “burned,” the locals told him. “These items,” he said,
> “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”

As someone unfamiliar with the situation, a question I still have is whether
this is something unique or unusual for the Chinese government, or how they'd
treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they
saw as competing with their totalitarianism.

E.g. I've heard about their efforts to shift the ethnic balance in Tibet, has
that been followed-up with similar indoctrination efforts?

~~~
pavlov
_> ”... how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized
ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism”_

Falun Gong is the blueprint for this: a homegrown spiritual practice that
gained too much popularity in the ‘90s and the authorities turned against it.
Human rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands are still in “re-education”
camps.

~~~
walrus01
Vancouver, BC / Richmond BC area here, which has a >30% Chinese-ethnicity
population: Whenever Falun Gong makes the press here, there is a relatively
active English language social media astroturfing campaign, and fake news
campaign that has been going around for at least 15-20 years which attempts to
equate Falun Gong with known harmful cults which Westerners are familiar with.
I've seen it compared to Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, and Jim Jones'
Peoples' Temple.

As best I can determine it's a buddhist/meditation group that disagrees with
the Chinese government on principles of fundamental human rights.

~~~
ashelmire
That same campaign seems pretty active in this very HN post. Lots of
apologists for the communist regime here, with some not so subtle approvals of
racism and genocide.

~~~
PavlovsCat
[https://imgur.com/a/HPJgSoq](https://imgur.com/a/HPJgSoq)

Speaking of tracking, is there a site that tracks and draws a graph of the
position of a stories on the front page, their score and number of comments?

~~~
throwaway2048
I'm sure it has nothing to do with YCs new partnership in China.

~~~
dang
I can't speak for anyone else but YC's activities in China have zero to do
with how we moderate HN.

~~~
PavlovsCat
FWIW I didn't mean to imply any moderator action, just user flagging. And I
know there are many reasons for that, some people don't want political things
period, and so on. But just going by sheer quality of this article, I think
it's sad that people who don't want to discuss it impede on the ability of
those who do want to discuss it. When it went to #1 instantly I thought "this
won't last" and made some screenshots... got distracted, looked again and saw
it had sunk like a brick.

I made myself a little scraper, I hope it's okay to grab the front page HTML
once a minute, or is that too often?

~~~
dang
Once a minute is just fine. I think the robots.txt says 2 per minute.

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AWildC182
Taking a moment from the brutality here, this really makes me appreciate how
much commercial satellite photography levels the playing field against state
actors. Nobody can realistically control the space over their country and
space access is sufficiently cheap that we can affordably monitor the entire
surface of the earth for these kinds of events. Such an undertaking would have
been impossible without state level assets a few short decades ago. These
satellites are also nice because they're not capable of tracking individual
people effectively or otherwise providing a route for significant invasions of
privacy. In short, satellites let us see over the hedge without the risk of
retaliation and with a lower likelihood of abuse against private individuals.

~~~
nyolfen
wrt privacy risks: this may be true for now, but it’s a matter of resolution.
with time, satellite proliferation and camera tech advances could
realistically make it an issue.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
True that. Eventually satellites as powerful as the ones in that one Mission
Impossible movie will be available to laypeople like you and me. Scary.

------
bobx11
The topic is so brutal I feel bad pointing out how artistic they made it
render in mobile. I’m so used to short articles now that I kept getting
surprised by each step they took in actually doing research. Great job all
around.

~~~
avar
On the design / presentation: One thing that jumped out at me was the odd
choice to use the phrase "1 million square meters - roughly the size of 140
soccer fields.". Are they trying to make "one square kilometer, -
roughly[...]" sound more dramatic than it needs to?

~~~
walrus01
Outside of the USA, floor space of buildings is typically measured in square
meters. If you have a 15 floor office tower its gross and rentable square feet
will be listed in square meters. This allows for comparison to other known
structures.

~~~
A2017U1
Humans are terrible with evaluating large numbers though. A square kilometre
is far easier to visualise than 1 million square metres.

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gammateam
out of curiosity, what do you think it'll take for anyone to do something?

the marginalized groups in the 1940s examples weren't popular anywhere, until
stumbling upon the true nature of the camps for other reasons and liberation,
so I see some parallels here

~~~
castle-bravo
Well, Mike Pence denounced china on October 3 while speaking at the Hudson
Institute[0]. He specifically mentioned the million people in detention in
Xinjiang. I've provided a link to the video in case you want to watch.

[0] [https://youtu.be/aeVrMniBjSc](https://youtu.be/aeVrMniBjSc)

~~~
bduerst
Is this the same Mike Pence that supports the Muslim country travel ban ?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#/media/F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#/media/File:Trump_signing_order_January_27.jpg)

~~~
grej
No fan of the current administration, but there’s a massive difference between
locking up and torturing millions of Muslims, and denying travel entry to
citizens from certain majority-Muslim countries. Comparisons to the Japanese
interment camps set up by FDR during WW2 would make more sense.

~~~
bduerst
You're right, but it's still hypocritical to morally condemn a prejudicial
action against a people while you're acting out of prejudice against the same
people. Especially since this moral condemnation seems conveniently timed and
aligned with an active trade war.

This Muslim ban came before the immigrant camps and migrant child detention
centers, which Pence also supported. If we don't hold him accountable for
hypocrisy, then who will?

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ngcc_hk
I read someone not sure what one can. In fact there is something Americans can
do instead of just reading this news:

Write to your congressman/woman and senator about this and support the motion
(forget his name) to sanction the chinese officials and frozen of their assets
in America. And promote this sanction to uk, a/Nz, Eu.

Better but may be too ambitious not allow their family and they go come to
study or live.

That hurts. Really hurt.

Sanction anyone support any electronic survillence work ...

Support HONG kong and Taiwan for its democracy drive and enforce both us-hk
and us-t rigourously.

~~~
tw04
>uk, a/Nz, Eu.

Do you seriously think, given the way he's been treating them, that ANY of
those countries/groups would go out of their way to help Trump? 0 chance.

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nafizh
Now, out of desperation, if some Uighurs take arms, and try to fight back
militarily, everyone would say, oh, it's the Muslims doing their terrorism
thing again. China was right all along.

~~~
taobility
I think you are totally flipped the excuse and consequence.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict)
If Uighurs is a peaceful land, Chinese gov would never deploy so many military
there. And also to be clear, China has zero tolerance for the separation,
either it's Taiwan, HongKong, Macau, Uighur or Tibet, and China is not a
liberal land, so the government's policy get the majority support.

------
ummonk
Being a freedom and justice loving classical liberal, it pains me every time I
read details of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs.

What I fear though is that any treatment that I would approve of would be
ineffective in preventing radicalization. Is there any example of ethical and
tolerant treatment that manages to prevent the spread of Salafi radicalism
once it has taken root? In adjacent Pakistan we are seeing millions of people
throwing a fit because a Christian woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to
death was finally ruled innocent and released after 10 years in prison. How
can China avoid ending up like this and avoid having to deal with its own
version of the Taliban? Is there any country that has pulled it off without
resorting to brutal totalitarianism?

~~~
bzbarsky
Indonesia seems to be doing OK. Though arguably Suharto did some of the
"brutal totalitarianism" bit.... That said, that's over 20 years in the past,
and I'm not sure radicalism has really been spreading that much in Indonesia.
It exists, of course; it's just not clear to me that it's getting stronger.

Until the last few years, I would have said Turkey was doing OK, even with the
various military coups it's had; whether those count as "brutal" is an
interesting question. The last few years, Turkey has definitely turned in a
totalitarian direction, though I don't think combating radical islam was the
cause.

I _think_ Bangladesh has done more or less ok. But I don't know much about it,
to be honest.

Malaysia I think has done ok. So has Morocco.

Again, none of these completely lack radical Islamists. But that would be a
pretty high bar to clear (e.g. the US probably doesn't clear it, and
definitely doesn't clear it if you replace "Islamists" with "Christians", but
keep the radicalness).

------
ssvss
This article doesn't mention about another related activity which I found
interesting, is that Chinese government makes its Han employees to go stay in
Uighur homes to monitor their activities. [http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-
opinion/postcard/million-...](http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-
opinion/postcard/million-citizens-occupy-uighur-homes-xinjiang)

Reading some comments in r/China, makes it seem like it is not an
exaggeration.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_govern...](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_government_has_ordered_a_million_citizens/)

~~~
chillacy
Might be true but I’ll throw out the fact that /r/China is (perhaps
confusingly) pretty biased against China, how it got that way I don’t know.

~~~
Markoff
living in China makes it to you

i was also very naive my first year there, many people won't get even past
that period, many people just enjoy pubs and don't care about the rest too
muchmuch

and most of the people have no clue at all with zero first hand experience

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fipple
China is an ends justify the means country. They will violate as many human
rights as necessary to avoid growing their own _banlieues_.

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anon2775
Satellite imagery from a BBC investigation

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-
sh/China_hidden_cam...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-
sh/China_hidden_camps)

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40acres
The scariest thing about China's authoritarian tendencies is that they are
more powerful than the USSR or Nazi Germany ever imagined; not to say that
this is where I think China will end up... but we're dealing with a completely
different beast.

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golem14
Highly recommend the detective novels by van Gulik (detective dee series).

