I'm hearing about this genocide on the Uighur people, yet cannot figure out how many people have gotten killed in this genocide? I'm finding conflicting results from millions to "no one of course, it's not that kind of genocide".
From what I can research it's one German professor Adrian Zens, that is the sole source for all the Uighur genocide claims. And when pressed on his sources, he says he just reads official Chinese press statements, but he "reads between the lines". Encouraging.
Is there any real evidence or is this just it? Is the claim that "everybody is in agreement" enough to persuade the majority of people of any nonsense?
From what I can tell the Uighur people in reeducation camps are the islamic fighters returning from Afghanistan. The kinds of people the US locks up in Guantanamo Bay. Also most sources seem to state that the Uighurs aren't getting killed per-se, but rather that their culture is being wiped out. And here I was thinking we were all in agreement that extreme islamism is a culture worthy of wiping out. No?
I'm going to assume best intentions despite your snark. This is certainly not one person making up stuff. Sterilisation is not in any world acceptable to be forced on people. Nor is rape. Here's one decent and disturbing article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55794071
Even your implication that I have ulterior motives shows the sad state of public debate on such topics. I am also curious as to what you perceived as "snark"?
I have now fully read the article. Two Chinese US citizens claim they have escaped China where they were tortured for having too many babies. An alleged ex-guard corroborates their story, but cannot prove he was ever actually a guard. This case does seem like completely devoid of any proof. Are you seriously claiming this is sufficient evidence for genocide? But before anyone bites my head off for asking questions, please define genocide for me as you understand the word. It's extremely unclear what people are talking about in this case, as it continues to seem that no one claims any deaths.
The Uighur genocide and other hugely determinant ambiguous events are endemic to modern life. It almost seems like a feature than a bug.
There are so many iterations of this same phenomena- some hugely impactful moral question is poised, but the basic facts are never clearly established, just the allegations. Was Epstein controlling global elites with sex trafficking? Did the CIA kill JFK? Are aliens real and on Earth? Are there DNA targeted bioweapons in Ukraine? Is China genociding the Uighur? All of these questions are of huge moral import, but seemingly unanswerable. Rather, the fact that officials could answer them definitively, but do not, makes it appear as if the answer is 'yes'. However, I think the point of the questions themselves isn't to establish truth. Instead, the implications of the questions themselves further control, whatever the answer is. Either the CIA really did kill JFK, or they want the question to remain open, to increase the perception of their power. Either way, they don't want the question answered, they want it open.
Your question about the status of the Uighurs is rational and earnest, but the question itself might be purely instrumental for governmental control. That's why there's always commenters that will abuse the request for proof. The reality isn't the point, the point is to angry at China.
>The reality isn't the point, the point is to angry at China.
Only because the mass media have used anti-China sentiments to generate clicks and fear and politicians have fed on that to acquire votes.
The fact that we can't have a honest, fact based discussion about China, even on HN, is sad. Let's just be angry at China because "China" is literally what you're suggesting.
Let's not ignore the fact that Muslim Uyghur were/are causing terrorist acts on innocent people. This never gets brought up for some reason.
China has to deal with domestic Islamic extremists. It deals with it by mass re-education camps. This idea isn't unpopular in the West and if Western governments could muster up the will power, they'd do it too. At least it's far better than going to war, like what the US has mostly done against Islamic extremists. The west labels these camps as genocide to paint it as "China bad".
Nothing is ever black and white.
PS. Don't use personal attacks. You don't know me. I don't know you.
I wasn't trying to attack you, I was merely curious whether you specifically picked the username to clearly signal your stance or whether it was a coincidence.
>fact that Muslim Uyghur were/are causing terrorist acts on innocent people.
Bring the facts, don’t claim something is a fact without backing that up.
Also, according to leaked documents, the whole community, incl kids women and innocents, were subject to these actions, assuming there were some “terrorist acts” -still need your citation, preferably not from CCP backed media-, you go only after who committed these acts, legally persecuted through a fair court, but documents showed otherwise [1] and you can read summary of these here [2], according to these leaks, you are religious extremist if you are “Telling others not to swear”, “Not allowing officials to sleep in your bed, eat your food and live in your house”, “Not letting officials scan your irises” ,”Wailing, publicly grieving or otherwise acting sad when your parents die” and worse of all “Being related to anyone who has done any of the above”, that among other atrocities were committed like rape or harvesting the organs (see articles in my previous reply). When the government say “extremists” you need to look carefully what were these actions, grieving on family definitely isn’t one, but those are all usually the stages of genocides [3] and it seems it’s already on the 10th stage. These all go under the assumption there were no false flags [4] to start with, a way to justify the genocides later.
Bringing other countries atrocities as an excuse is even worse, and I don’t think I need to explain why.
Sounds extremely like a false flag like I said, an exaggerated car crash followed by a pre-recorded message, nonetheless if true, whoever did it and pleaded guilty, should be punished, obviously not a genocide for a whole province.
There's about 100 attacks attributed to Uyghur seperatists over the years. This is 101 information. One would need to be mentally challenged to think PRC false flag 100s of terrorists attacks killing 1000s in their own territory over past 20 years as setup for XJ securitization. The reality is XJ is a poor, frontier region with restive minority that got radicalized during era where PRC had poor infra to XJ and couldn't assert control over population. 100 attacks (that western DB can indentify) doesn't happen without support base, either in sympathies/affiliation/funding. So entire region/minority gets the boot, punish those who needs to be punished, reeducate those who needs to be reeducated, even if behaviourly remotely adjacent to seperatism, and a few years later, zero terrorism attacks.
False positive excessive? Yes. Even in 2019/20 PRC estimates 5 years of strike hard caught ~13k terrorists in ~1500 organized gangs, ~30k people for ~5000 illegal religious activities. All of which is to say, even if you take CCP official figures, magnitude more people were wrapped up in securitization than the 40k attributed to terrorism problem. But that overbroad dragnet ensures you don't replace 1 terrorist with 2, and targetting 0.1% of the population to prevent future attacks is basically no shit correct political decision for domestic serenity. Which makse the entire genocide narrative even more retarded. PRC could trivially actually genocide, as in destroy, 100% of Ugyhurs in a few weekends with pocket change, but chose laborious/expensive reeducation system and securitization architecture that will need to be put in place for decades precisely because it doesn't want to genocide. If only because it would look bad on Xi's hagiography to reduce 55 minorities to 54.
The fact is, if Xi was Obama, he'd be collecting his Nobel Peace prize by now.
Judging from the current international situation, articles related to China will bring a certain amount of traffic and click-through rates, and most of them are negative, making it difficult to tell the truth from the fake. I am already a little tired of such articles.
Most people by now watched a thousand online lynchings of people who pointed out the propaganda. They're either afraid or they themselves enjoy a good lynching. There is also very little risk of it backfiring as censorship takes care of any successful counter arguments.
It's easier to understand through the lens of history, specifically pre-ww2 Germany. The first Germans to turn NAZI were the stereotypical ones : fat, lazy, single, unemployed. Giving these people "ein Feindsbild" and a reason to be proud, without having to move a finger, resonated with these groups.
How did they get the rest of the population in line you ask? There's an old German joke from that time: "Four Germans and a nazi walk into a bar. Five nazis are now drinking beer together happily."
So to answer your question: No, they're not aware, even though it's this obvious. Reaching these people would mean them having to first admit they were wrong. And that's been pretty much out of style lately.
When I first started using HN, I expected posters here to view China through the lens of history and understanding. For example, I expected people here to see through the propaganda that politicians and the mass media spout. I expected people to see issues as grey, and not black and white, good vs evil. I was wrong.
The reason why I had originally thought so is because most engineers like history and are reasonably educated.
It is an extremely potent tool for propaganda as it shows a monolithical opinion on every critical topic. They achieve this through basic censorship, shadowbans and the enabling of dogpiling. This gives people the illusion that everyone agrees that "china is bad", for example.
A couple of years of this treatment and most will adjust to this opinion, one way or another.
Remember how for the past 15 years everyone was saying how China is going to overtake the US economically? Well now that it's happening, everyone is in panic mode and talking war. If you're in the US and have balls of steel, ask people what they think the average Chinese salary is, then tell them the actual number and see the reaction (that's one youtube video no one dares to make). Also notice how extremely out of whack their perception of China is. Any American can try it on themselves by writing down the number, then looking it up. But with the main problem being denial, this probably won't achieve anything.
Am I paranoid for feeling unsafe for writing these words?
Not at all, Im not advocating for anything. In the same way the GP was as attacked for even asking about the validity of the Uighur genocide claim, you're now misrepresenting my statement. Why? Because the facts aren't the point, division and outrage are the point. You're demonstrating my point, not addressing it.
> the Uighur people in reeducation camps are the islamic fighters returning from Afghanistan
How many fighters do you think there were?
> he says he just reads official Chinese press statements, but he "reads between the lines". Encouraging.
Yes, it's a great technique. For example, the government didn't publish arrest statistics for 2017, but did publish them for 2013-2017 in aggregate, so by reading between the lines and subtracting the numbers of previous years, one can infer the magnitude of the wave of mass arrests in 2017 in Xinjiang (227882 people, 21% of all arrests in China) https://web.archive.org/web/20180725042225/https://www.nchrd...
(Incidentally, the group of researchers here doesn't include Zenz. Lots of people can do this kind of analysis of public information. But if you want more of the same, reading Zenz' articles and the sources he cites is a good start.)
Reading between the lines of official Chinese government statements is a great technique for finding secret dirt (like a genocide) on the Chinese government. Do you stand behind this statement you just made?
> How many fighters do you think there were?
I too read Zens stating there are millions in reeducation camps. You're using circular logic.
> the group of researchers here doesn't include Zenz
What group of researchers? If there's so many, you shouldn't have trouble naming someone besides Zens.
> Do you stand behind this statement you just made?
I stand behind the statements I made and went to the trouble to provide you with an easily checked example, but it seems you ignored it completely? Did you overlook the archive.org link?
> I too read Zens stating there are millions in reeducation camps.
I was asking you how many fighters you think there were. If you believe that everyone arrested was a fighter, and also Zenz' claim that millions were arrested, that implies you think there were millions of fighters. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like you believe him, so you probably think the number of fighters is less. So how many were there?
But my point was that you don't have to believe Zenz, you can just skim his writing for links to citations and read those instead.
> You're using circular logic.
Where is the cycle in my reasoning?
> What group of researchers? If there's so many, you shouldn't have trouble naming someone besides Zens.
If you read the article I linked, you wouldn't have trouble finding the list of names at the end: Renee Xia, Victor Clemens, Frances Eve
Reposting a previous post with some articles you might want to read
“Uyghur have concentration camps built for them in the last 5 years [1], women were sterilized [2] cultural destruction and forced labor [3] or rape [4] or even selling their organs like hair [5] or tracking Uyghur outside China [6]”
From what I can research it's one German professor Adrian Zens, that is the sole source for all the Uighur genocide claims. And when pressed on his sources, he says he just reads official Chinese press statements, but he "reads between the lines". Encouraging.
Is there any real evidence or is this just it? Is the claim that "everybody is in agreement" enough to persuade the majority of people of any nonsense?
From what I can tell the Uighur people in reeducation camps are the islamic fighters returning from Afghanistan. The kinds of people the US locks up in Guantanamo Bay. Also most sources seem to state that the Uighurs aren't getting killed per-se, but rather that their culture is being wiped out. And here I was thinking we were all in agreement that extreme islamism is a culture worthy of wiping out. No?