14 ms·

China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

207 points by gok 8y ago

seibelj 8y ago
China is a communist dictatorship where you can be arrested and possibly murdered for saying the wrong thing. So this is not very surprising.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  not to be glib, but it wasn't surprising in 1934 in Dachau, either. Lack of surprise doesn't mean much of anything w/r/t what the appropriate response ought to be.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  "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".
  - izend 8y ago
    I've visited Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong back in 2010 and as a Canadian I feel China is more capitalist than Canada. It had a more America feel to it where everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit
  - seibelj 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
    - RIMR 8y ago
      And North Korea calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but anyone with a working brain understands that NK is neither a Democracy, nor is it is government for the people. Taking the words of totalitarian leaders literally is very naive.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - r00fus 8y ago
    > Their economy is obviously capitalist. Does mandated 50% local (aka party) ownership align with "obviously capitalist"? That seems a stretch (aka crony capitalist). Xi has asked for indefinitely long term of power and gotten it. Handover of power?
    - amaccuish 8y ago
      The undertone of your post seems to be that you can't possibly have authoritarian capitalism, which of course, is not true...
      - pitaj 8y ago
        It's a matter of definitions. For many, capitalism means "free market economy". Under that case, authoritarianism is indeed fundamentally opposed to capitalism. If you define capitalism as just "private ownership of the means of production", then sure, you can be authoritarian and capitalist.
        amaccuish 8y ago
        And there's your problem, capitalism means the second definition, not the first. Prime example being Pinochet.
        chillacy 8y ago
        Better to be more specific and mention Laissez-faire capitalism > Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. > Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
      - r00fus 8y ago
        By that regard, anything can be either capitalism or communism if you squint hard enough. The caveats that I mention aren't just "not like the USA" but specifically not like most other capitalist economies either.
  - BearilyHappy 8y ago
    > "communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. Describing an oligarchy as a communist dictatorship is near-equivalent. Far from dishonest. > Their economy is obviously capitalist It's capitalist at specific granularities. This is a derail, at best. > They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. So does an oligarchy.
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Thank you! It's an oligarchy! Not a dictatorship! But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same! Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - BearilyHappy 8y ago
        > But they're not near-equivalent. > Group vs individual. If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).
        yourbandsucks 8y ago
        The decision making process is different and the decisions are different. It's different. Perceived lack of transparency[1] does not change that. [1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    While I agree with everything you just said, it seems to be true that in China you can get arrested for basically arbitrary reasons if someone doesn't like you. While it's not one man saying "I am the law", there is still a group saying it, and that group is the bureaucracy.
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Sure. But words mean things. Slapping a bunch of incorrect trigger words together terminates thought.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - ben509 8y ago
    All socialist and fascist states, even while suppressing markets was causing starvation, allowed some cronies to maintain businesses. That's where Putin got his start, for instance. China isn't organized by any free trade principles, they've just formalized their black markets and cronyism. > It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law". You're writing this on an article titled, "China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight," with the subtext, "Around 1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come."
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Yes, it's a terrible human rights disaster but that doesn't make the Chinese government a dictatorship. Running internment camps or Jim Crow didn't make the USA a dictatorship, either. Bad deeds don't change the definition of your form of government. Dictatorship is about an individual. The chinese government has not been since Mao. All non-western-democratic governments are not the same. They're not all some giant grab-bag of interchangeable scare words about communism, fascism, dictatorship. Norway's a socialist state. Do they belong in your bucket too?
  - adventured 8y ago
    > Their economy is obviously capitalist. Their economy is the exact opposite of Capitalist in fact. It's de facto state controlled top to bottom. 1) The Chinese economy is overwhelmingly state owned or directly controlled. All the major banks are directly owned or controlled by the government. All of their major industries, such as steel, aluminum and energy, are directly owned or controlled by the government. Their largest electronics and telecom companies such as Huawei and China Mobile are directly commanded by the government. 2) No company may do anything out of lock-step with the government. Whether you're Alibaba or Baidu, you must obey at all times, no matter what the stray edict of the week is. You may not challenge the party. Ask Tencent about the government's damaging, arbitrary restrictions on gaming for example. [1] 3) There are no actual property rights. Your property may be revoked, taken from you at any time for any reason. You will not get it back, and you have no ability to challenge this in a court of law. The Chinese Government issues arbitrary rules non-stop that alter your property rights and how property may be used (including randomly choosing to restrict what's acceptable day to day; one day you may have joke apps, the next day they're illegal). 4) The entire economy operates on a system of bribes. You can't operate anything in China without paying bribes. There are no exceptions, whether you're trying to operate a small food business or put up a skyscraper. This means the rule of law is entirely lacking, which is why Transparency International ranks China #77 in the world on corruption. 5) The economy is entirely closed to normal foreign business operations. You can't just set up a business in China as a foreigner. You can't buy Chinese businesses outright, or in most cases take a majority ownership position. Contrast this with the US (which isn't even the best example): you can spend less than a thousand dollars with Stripe Atlas and set up a US corporation at any time, without permission, having never once visited the country and you own it outright. 6) Capital is locked down. You may not take your wealth and flee the country. You and your capital are held captive by their very tight capital controls. You can hardly legally get enough cash out of China to buy a middle class house these days. 7) As a Chinese business you may not operate outside of the country in any manner that the government disagrees with. They approve all large transactions and all large investments. If they don't like something you've done, you will be forced to liquidate out of that position no matter the consequences. 8) It's almost entirely illegal to privately own farm land. This contributes to China having the most backwards and low output farming industry of any major economy. How is all of this obviously Capitalistic? The state completely controls everything. It's the exact opposite of Capitalist. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-orders-tencent-to-kill-game-just-days-after-its-debut https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-ord...
  - cabalamat 8y ago
    > "communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. They are Communists even if they aren't communists.
  - simonh 8y ago
    To be fair China describes itself as communist and intending to bring about communism, and communism or an essential step in achieving it is a dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s actual Marxist and official Chinese state ideology. It may be popycock, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to identify a government using the labels it uses to describe itself. I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.
  - geoalchimista 8y ago
    Then you don't know the difference between Maoism and Leninism. Basically, Maoists can live with any compromise in order to bring forth their communist ideals, even if the compromise is to backstab Soviet Union and open the door to the US (which they did in 1970s).
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Leninism and maoism both died the instant their namesakes died. I don't care about the difference. They were both tools to control populaces, not straightjackets restraining leaders. Both strongmen did whatever they could and wanted to do. Don't buy the bullshit.
  - retrogradeorbit 8y ago
    "obviously capitalist"? It may be a market economy, but it's certainly not capitalist. Proceeds of the investment of capital are not free to be distributed amongst the investors. Formation of enterprise is not free and voluntary. Exchange rates are not set by the market. Money transactions are strictly controlled. Businesses are not allowed to hold funds in forex. The list goes on and on. I'm not sure you are aware of how business is done in China, you may just be seeing lots of business and then be assuming it must be capitalism.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post grandiose national or ideological rhetoric to HN. It's at best flamebait and at worse trolling. Substantive discussion needs more thought than this.
  - _iyig 8y ago
    Is the OP wrong? Is the point irrelevant to the discussion? In what way is the observation of an admittedly uncomfortable fact "ideological rhetoric"?
    - dang 8y ago
      People apply the word 'fact' loosely when it comes to topics they feel strongly about. The point is contentious and disputable in a bunch of ways. That's not necessarily bad, but it is when combined with a declamatory style. Just to be clear though: I'm not making a point about China. I'm making a point about how terrible Hacker News threads become when people allow themselves to post this way. This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.
      - angersock 8y ago
        You're doing a lot of damage control on China stuff since that partnership thing was announced.
        dang 8y ago
        That's quite an insinuation. Fortunately I have a long history of posts to HN, and anyone bored enough to search through them will easily see that it's not true. To me the weird thing is running across a smear like this at all; it's surreal when someone is sure they know what you're thinking. YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
danjoc 8y ago
>Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reeducated.
- perlpimp 8y ago
  Took no time for 50cent troops to show up
  - dang 8y ago
    That's a breach of the HN guidelines in its own right, which rule out insinuations of astroturfing and shillage without evidence. Someone holding an opposing view or making a bad comment does not count as evidence. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- aaronblohowiak 8y ago
  >Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity. As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
  - danjoc 8y ago
    >As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. This overlooks the surveillance state aspect of the story. People say dumb things online when they think their communications are private. I can't imagine China being able to produce a list as big without the aid of mass surveillance. The article paints 2008 like it's the olden days. It was not. They were recording then too. >Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable. Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common. If I had to speculate, I would say what has happened is their words online have come back to haunt them. Maybe they secretly chuckled online about the attack that left 200 dead. Now they get written up and taken off because they "stopped drinking" or some other excuse. The first rule of parallel construction is don't talk about parallel construction. >That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are. Reeducation is kinder than what we did to more than half a million Iraqis in the name of 9/11 and WMDs.
Leary 8y ago
Where are the responses from Muslim countries?
- simonh 8y ago
  Most Muslim states are oppressive dictatorships, or have fractious ethic minorities of their own, or both. Criticising China for its treatment of the Uighurs would just draw attention to their own record and current activities. Also, most of them have trade and investment links to China.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which don't have any official state support.
  - emiliobumachar 8y ago
    Pan-Islamism aside, there were mass protests over those Danish cartoons a few years back. I don't claim to understand other cultures and religions, but I'll be surprised if mass internment is less outrageous. So where are those people?
    - rayiner 8y ago
      The folks in power don’t care about Muslim minorities (Palestinians, Rohinga, etc.). They care about browbeating the West and Israel, and spreading fundamentalist Islam as an alternative to Western secularization. Complaining about Chinese treatment of an ethnic minority does not serve that purpose.
    - DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
      It’s employed as a distraction or means to vent rage at a palatable target. The Danes, the Jews, Israel, Americans, that serves a dual purpose. “Oh you want more freeeom of speech? See what they do with it in Denmark! You want a democracy... like America? Like Israel?” China is a valuable trading partner and a government in the same model as the autocracies of the Middle East, so they shut up about that. There’s always been profit in turning domestic rage against Israel in general, and Jews in particular. It’s been a way of life for the house of Saud for example, even as they quietly make deals with Israel and bomb their fellow Muslims in Yemen. Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.
nu-world-odor 8y ago
so depressing.. I am inspired to create my own forum site like hackernews where I am not banned like I am here. My site would champion the individual and self-expression, and individual contribution over collective contribution.
pnathan 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
  - Someguywhatever 8y ago
    Can they even know that it happened? AFAIK China is very censored and they may not even be aware that such a thing occurred at all. Even assuming they were around at the time it happened, there may also be no way for them to find out.
    - KennyCason 8y ago
      People talk. In China I've also heard people say that even if they don't know all the details, they know something happened.
    - Razengan 8y ago
      > Can they even know that it happened? This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation. In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th) https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censored-words-relating-tiananmen-square-anniversary https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...
    - 8y ago
ptenk 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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-china-internment-camps-uighur-muslims/ https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...
pimmen 8y ago
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 8y ago
Why not just call them concentration camps?
- lotu 8y ago
  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.

207 points by gok 8y ago

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

hprotagonist 8y ago
not to be glib, but it wasn't surprising in 1934 in Dachau, either. Lack of surprise doesn't mean much of anything w/r/t what the appropriate response ought to be.
yourbandsucks 8y ago
"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".
- izend 8y ago
  I've visited Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong back in 2010 and as a Canadian I feel China is more capitalist than Canada. It had a more America feel to it where everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit
- seibelj 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - RIMR 8y ago
    And North Korea calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but anyone with a working brain understands that NK is neither a Democracy, nor is it is government for the people. Taking the words of totalitarian leaders literally is very naive.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- r00fus 8y ago
  > Their economy is obviously capitalist. Does mandated 50% local (aka party) ownership align with "obviously capitalist"? That seems a stretch (aka crony capitalist). Xi has asked for indefinitely long term of power and gotten it. Handover of power?
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    The undertone of your post seems to be that you can't possibly have authoritarian capitalism, which of course, is not true...
    - pitaj 8y ago
      It's a matter of definitions. For many, capitalism means "free market economy". Under that case, authoritarianism is indeed fundamentally opposed to capitalism. If you define capitalism as just "private ownership of the means of production", then sure, you can be authoritarian and capitalist.
      - amaccuish 8y ago
        And there's your problem, capitalism means the second definition, not the first. Prime example being Pinochet.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        Better to be more specific and mention Laissez-faire capitalism > Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. > Economists, political economists, sociologists and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism and state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
    - r00fus 8y ago
      By that regard, anything can be either capitalism or communism if you squint hard enough. The caveats that I mention aren't just "not like the USA" but specifically not like most other capitalist economies either.
- BearilyHappy 8y ago
  > "communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. Describing an oligarchy as a communist dictatorship is near-equivalent. Far from dishonest. > Their economy is obviously capitalist It's capitalist at specific granularities. This is a derail, at best. > They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. So does an oligarchy.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Thank you! It's an oligarchy! Not a dictatorship! But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same! Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - BearilyHappy 8y ago
      > But they're not near-equivalent. > Group vs individual. If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).
      - yourbandsucks 8y ago
        The decision making process is different and the decisions are different. It's different. Perceived lack of transparency[1] does not change that. [1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.
- Thriptic 8y ago
  While I agree with everything you just said, it seems to be true that in China you can get arrested for basically arbitrary reasons if someone doesn't like you. While it's not one man saying "I am the law", there is still a group saying it, and that group is the bureaucracy.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Sure. But words mean things. Slapping a bunch of incorrect trigger words together terminates thought.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- ben509 8y ago
  All socialist and fascist states, even while suppressing markets was causing starvation, allowed some cronies to maintain businesses. That's where Putin got his start, for instance. China isn't organized by any free trade principles, they've just formalized their black markets and cronyism. > It's more like a giant bureaucracy. They have a process, they have regular handovers of power. It's not "I am the law". You're writing this on an article titled, "China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight," with the subtext, "Around 1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come."
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Yes, it's a terrible human rights disaster but that doesn't make the Chinese government a dictatorship. Running internment camps or Jim Crow didn't make the USA a dictatorship, either. Bad deeds don't change the definition of your form of government. Dictatorship is about an individual. The chinese government has not been since Mao. All non-western-democratic governments are not the same. They're not all some giant grab-bag of interchangeable scare words about communism, fascism, dictatorship. Norway's a socialist state. Do they belong in your bucket too?
- adventured 8y ago
  > Their economy is obviously capitalist. Their economy is the exact opposite of Capitalist in fact. It's de facto state controlled top to bottom. 1) The Chinese economy is overwhelmingly state owned or directly controlled. All the major banks are directly owned or controlled by the government. All of their major industries, such as steel, aluminum and energy, are directly owned or controlled by the government. Their largest electronics and telecom companies such as Huawei and China Mobile are directly commanded by the government. 2) No company may do anything out of lock-step with the government. Whether you're Alibaba or Baidu, you must obey at all times, no matter what the stray edict of the week is. You may not challenge the party. Ask Tencent about the government's damaging, arbitrary restrictions on gaming for example. [1] 3) There are no actual property rights. Your property may be revoked, taken from you at any time for any reason. You will not get it back, and you have no ability to challenge this in a court of law. The Chinese Government issues arbitrary rules non-stop that alter your property rights and how property may be used (including randomly choosing to restrict what's acceptable day to day; one day you may have joke apps, the next day they're illegal). 4) The entire economy operates on a system of bribes. You can't operate anything in China without paying bribes. There are no exceptions, whether you're trying to operate a small food business or put up a skyscraper. This means the rule of law is entirely lacking, which is why Transparency International ranks China #77 in the world on corruption. 5) The economy is entirely closed to normal foreign business operations. You can't just set up a business in China as a foreigner. You can't buy Chinese businesses outright, or in most cases take a majority ownership position. Contrast this with the US (which isn't even the best example): you can spend less than a thousand dollars with Stripe Atlas and set up a US corporation at any time, without permission, having never once visited the country and you own it outright. 6) Capital is locked down. You may not take your wealth and flee the country. You and your capital are held captive by their very tight capital controls. You can hardly legally get enough cash out of China to buy a middle class house these days. 7) As a Chinese business you may not operate outside of the country in any manner that the government disagrees with. They approve all large transactions and all large investments. If they don't like something you've done, you will be forced to liquidate out of that position no matter the consequences. 8) It's almost entirely illegal to privately own farm land. This contributes to China having the most backwards and low output farming industry of any major economy. How is all of this obviously Capitalistic? The state completely controls everything. It's the exact opposite of Capitalist. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-orders-tencent-to-kill-game-just-days-after-its-debut https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/china-ord...
- cabalamat 8y ago
  > "communist dictatorship" is inexact enough to be outright dishonest. They are Communists even if they aren't communists.
- simonh 8y ago
  To be fair China describes itself as communist and intending to bring about communism, and communism or an essential step in achieving it is a dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s actual Marxist and official Chinese state ideology. It may be popycock, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to identify a government using the labels it uses to describe itself. I see in a later post you say a dictatorship is about individuals. Not in Marxist theory.
- geoalchimista 8y ago
  Then you don't know the difference between Maoism and Leninism. Basically, Maoists can live with any compromise in order to bring forth their communist ideals, even if the compromise is to backstab Soviet Union and open the door to the US (which they did in 1970s).
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Leninism and maoism both died the instant their namesakes died. I don't care about the difference. They were both tools to control populaces, not straightjackets restraining leaders. Both strongmen did whatever they could and wanted to do. Don't buy the bullshit.
- retrogradeorbit 8y ago
  "obviously capitalist"? It may be a market economy, but it's certainly not capitalist. Proceeds of the investment of capital are not free to be distributed amongst the investors. Formation of enterprise is not free and voluntary. Exchange rates are not set by the market. Money transactions are strictly controlled. Businesses are not allowed to hold funds in forex. The list goes on and on. I'm not sure you are aware of how business is done in China, you may just be seeing lots of business and then be assuming it must be capitalism.
dang 8y ago
Please don't post grandiose national or ideological rhetoric to HN. It's at best flamebait and at worse trolling. Substantive discussion needs more thought than this.
- _iyig 8y ago
  Is the OP wrong? Is the point irrelevant to the discussion? In what way is the observation of an admittedly uncomfortable fact "ideological rhetoric"?
  - dang 8y ago
    People apply the word 'fact' loosely when it comes to topics they feel strongly about. The point is contentious and disputable in a bunch of ways. That's not necessarily bad, but it is when combined with a declamatory style. Just to be clear though: I'm not making a point about China. I'm making a point about how terrible Hacker News threads become when people allow themselves to post this way. This problem is getting worse as nationalistic feelings are heating up all over. If we're going to keep HN alive as a place for thoughtful discussion, we need users to control their rhetorical impulses and consciously respect opposing points of view. HN is a large for a single internet community (5M readers a month), highly international, and replete with opposing points of view. That ought to be a good thing if we don't tear ourselves apart with them.
    - angersock 8y ago
      You're doing a lot of damage control on China stuff since that partnership thing was announced.
      - dang 8y ago
        That's quite an insinuation. Fortunately I have a long history of posts to HN, and anyone bored enough to search through them will easily see that it's not true. To me the weird thing is running across a smear like this at all; it's surreal when someone is sure they know what you're thinking. YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

danjoc 8y ago

>Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese That's like murdering my entire high school. The internment camp idea seems like a good one. People who are this violent are the result of bad upbringing. They need to understand that murdering someone because of some perceived insult, transgression, or disagreement is not acceptable in a civil society. These people will be better off when they've been reeducated.

perlpimp 8y ago
Took no time for 50cent troops to show up
- dang 8y ago
  That's a breach of the HN guidelines in its own right, which rule out insinuations of astroturfing and shillage without evidence. Someone holding an opposing view or making a bad comment does not count as evidence. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
aaronblohowiak 8y ago
>Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity. As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are.
- danjoc 8y ago
  >As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. This overlooks the surveillance state aspect of the story. People say dumb things online when they think their communications are private. I can't imagine China being able to produce a list as big without the aid of mass surveillance. The article paints 2008 like it's the olden days. It was not. They were recording then too. >Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable. Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common. If I had to speculate, I would say what has happened is their words online have come back to haunt them. Maybe they secretly chuckled online about the attack that left 200 dead. Now they get written up and taken off because they "stopped drinking" or some other excuse. The first rule of parallel construction is don't talk about parallel construction. >That is a very very far cry from a prison, which is what you seem to be implying these camps are. Reeducation is kinder than what we did to more than half a million Iraqis in the name of 9/11 and WMDs.

Leary 8y ago

Where are the responses from Muslim countries?

simonh 8y ago
Most Muslim states are oppressive dictatorships, or have fractious ethic minorities of their own, or both. Criticising China for its treatment of the Uighurs would just draw attention to their own record and current activities. Also, most of them have trade and investment links to China.
Analemma_ 8y ago
There probably aren't any. Ever since Pan-Arabism died with Nasser, leaders of Muslim countries are mostly concerned with keeping themselves in power and keeping things stable in their own borders, which means a) downplaying if not actively suppressing supranational ideologies and b) playing nice with countries like China to keep the money flowing. And the only real Pan-Islamic movements are the extremist ones, which don't have any official state support.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  Pan-Islamism aside, there were mass protests over those Danish cartoons a few years back. I don't claim to understand other cultures and religions, but I'll be surprised if mass internment is less outrageous. So where are those people?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The folks in power don’t care about Muslim minorities (Palestinians, Rohinga, etc.). They care about browbeating the West and Israel, and spreading fundamentalist Islam as an alternative to Western secularization. Complaining about Chinese treatment of an ethnic minority does not serve that purpose.
  - DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
    It’s employed as a distraction or means to vent rage at a palatable target. The Danes, the Jews, Israel, Americans, that serves a dual purpose. “Oh you want more freeeom of speech? See what they do with it in Denmark! You want a democracy... like America? Like Israel?” China is a valuable trading partner and a government in the same model as the autocracies of the Middle East, so they shut up about that. There’s always been profit in turning domestic rage against Israel in general, and Jews in particular. It’s been a way of life for the house of Saud for example, even as they quietly make deals with Israel and bomb their fellow Muslims in Yemen. Mind you, that’s the governments, out of over a billion Muslims worldwide no doubt many individuals are outraged over China’s treatment of their co-religionists, but they don’t have an effective platform. They also have to be careful depending on where they live about whether or not to even try to voice it.

nu-world-odor 8y ago

so depressing.. I am inspired to create my own forum site like hackernews where I am not banned like I am here. My site would champion the individual and self-expression, and individual contribution over collective contribution.

pnathan 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  Can they even know that it happened? AFAIK China is very censored and they may not even be aware that such a thing occurred at all. Even assuming they were around at the time it happened, there may also be no way for them to find out.
  - KennyCason 8y ago
    People talk. In China I've also heard people say that even if they don't know all the details, they know something happened.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    > Can they even know that it happened? This is exactly the most chilling aspect of such regimes: They can carry out any atrocities they want, then erase all records of it from their history within a single generation. In China apparently you can't even search for certain numbers, like 1989 or even "workarounds" like 535! (May 35th = June 4th) https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censored-words-relating-tiananmen-square-anniversary https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...
  - 8y ago

ptenk 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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-china-internment-camps-uighur-muslims/ https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...

pimmen 8y ago

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 8y ago

Why not just call them concentration camps?

lotu 8y ago
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.