An American found a SOS message inside the Halloween decoration package, saying the SOS writer is held at concentration camp, tortured and forced to overwork.
She published the message and it was fact.
The writer fled to Jakarta. They've met.
Then, the writer was suspected to be killed by Chinese agent.
> was contacted by a suspected Chinese agent - and two months later he died of acute kidney failure. Despite a request from his ex-wife and sisters, there was no investigation into the cause of death. Leon is suspicious: "He had no kidney problems before and when I was there in Indonesia he seemed perfectly healthy."
Yes, and three more points
a.) his wife divorced him to have plausible deniability and they were going to remarry and almost got there
b.) one of his coworkers helped him and was tortured and did not give him up which is unlike anything popular media/the United States government tells us about torture
c.) 160,000 Falun Gong survived the re education/organ extraction out of how many knows whom entered, now we know roughly 1,000,000 Chinese Muslims Uyghurs have been forced into re education camps.
one of his coworkers helped him and was tortured and did not give him up which is unlike anything popular media/the United States government tells us about torture
I don’t think even the most enthusiastic proponents would argue that it always works, and surely popular media is full of protagonists on whom it was ineffective.
I don't think those Uighur camps are exactly comparable to force labor camps on prisoners. If one portrays them as such they are greatly twisting the facts.
Feels like this could well be Falun Gong propaganda. They are known for fabricating stories to discredit the Chinese gov. There are multiple such "notes from prison factory" stories floating around in the media already. It's hard to ascertain the veracity of them, especially as they appear all around the place and seem to suspiciously follow a similar pattern. There are so many coincidences in this story. For example, how would a normal middle-aged Chinese be able to write coherent English after all; how was he able to get pen and paper in the prison, if the conditions were that bad; how, if the prison guard actually found the letter, they didn't know it was penned by him: They might well be unable to read English, but they can definitely read the Pinyin which is used to spell out his name.
I'm not saying that the Chinese government are not capable of streneous labor camps on their prisoners, but Falun Gong is not anything good either. This report made it out as if they were "prosecuted" just because they were growing too large, while the simple fact is that they are essentially a cult organization that swindled millions out of retirees, and organized attacks which destroyed public TV stations and local government institutions which dared to call their bluffs (yeah, sitting in front of Tian'anmen is one thing, but locally they have been much more violent), and therefore was eventually clamped down out of existence in the mainland by the authorities. Ever since then they have been (deliberately) supported by western money to perform anti-China propaganda. Most of what they write on their pamphlets/publications are pure fabrication or at least gross mischaracterizations. Ask 10 Chinese around you and 9 out of them will tell you how laughable and unreliable Falun Gong is. They're definitely not beyond fabricating stories and creating characters just to feed the anti-China rhetoric.
The fact that the Chinese government is authoritarian doesn't automatically mean that every enemy of it is automatically "good", or that every vivid accusation against it is factual. Anti-China propaganda does exist, and unfortunately it more usual than not doesn't get distinguished in the western media.
Also the end of the article which links this incident with the internment camps in Xinjiang is unreasonable. Prison labor camps are one thing, while the main purpose of the re-education camps in Xinjiang is not to hold those youths forever and use them as cheap labor, but rather try to ensure that they don't get easily swayed by extremism. Whether the program can achieve its end and whether the format in which it's carried out is suitable, is debatable, but to equate it with brutal prison labor camps is just deliberately misleading and dishonest. Also the Chinese government doesn't deny their existence at all so to call them "secret detention camps" is just simply false.
She published the message and it was fact.
The writer fled to Jakarta. They've met.
Then, the writer was suspected to be killed by Chinese agent.
> was contacted by a suspected Chinese agent - and two months later he died of acute kidney failure. Despite a request from his ex-wife and sisters, there was no investigation into the cause of death. Leon is suspicious: "He had no kidney problems before and when I was there in Indonesia he seemed perfectly healthy."
A very good non-fiction dystopian novel.