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Satellite images expose China's network of secret re-education camps in Xinjiang

126 points by 0xmohit 8y ago

plaguuuuuu 8y ago
related: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/mapping-chinas-re-education-camps-the-power-of-open-source-intelligence/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/mapping-chinas-re-educatio...
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
And will we abandon China's next Davos in the X conference as fast as we did Saudi?
- Leary 8y ago
  If Nixon shook hands with Mao during the Cultural Revolution, u think Trump would give a hoot about Muslims being detained in Xinjiang?
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  I mentioned this in another thread recently but I heard many companies whose CEOs abandoned the Saudi conference still sent representatives in their stead. For PR reasons they distanced themselves but they don’t really want to abandon the Saudis.
  - snorremd 8y ago
    Money rules and the CEOs have shareholders to answer to. Making it look good in public is more important than actually taking a stance.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  We didn't care that the Saudis were killing dissidents in their own country and slaughtering civilians in Yemen for years. It wasn't until they killed a US resident that anyone gave a single shit, there won't be any objection to China's acts.
  - malandrew 8y ago
    Americans won't be outraged because they aren't being told to outraged by the US media. It wasn't even because it was a US resident. It's because he was a fellow "journalist". I say "journalist" in quotes because increasingly more people working as journalists are activists and activists for a cause and intentionally distort and omit biases and don't even attempt to maintain journalistic integrity and ethics. My understanding is that this "journalist" that was killed was practicing more activism than journalism.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - boomboomsubban 8y ago
      He was a journalist, advocating reform does not remove your journalistic integrity. I can't see how pushing for reform in Saudi Arabia would somehow make his death acceptable though. And Saudi Arabia has killed plenty of journalists in the past. US residency is the unique aspect in his death.
echevil 8y ago
It’s not secret anymore. The government has explained what they are. And so called re-education camps are not uncommon in other parts of China at all
- singularity2001 8y ago
  In 1944 they were called 'work camps'. re-education does sound a bit more friendly so there is progress in propaganda.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    And ATM in the US they're called detention camps for enemy combatants.
    - adventured 8y ago
      There are 40 enemy combatants held at Guantanamo. They have public legal representation and visitation rights. China has removed all human rights for over ten million Uyghur Muslims. Including freedom of movement, freedom of religion, tight restrictions on behavior, tracking of all communication and movement, restrictions on who you can meet or talk to, tracking of all Urghar family members in China or abroad, non-existent freedoms around speech and expression, total lockdown on press investigation or discussion, forced re-education. And then for at least a million Uyghur Muslims, they're outright physically and mentally torturing them in camps through forced programs to destroy their culture and beliefs. Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo. I believe the detainment facility at Guantanamo should not exist and should have never existed. There's an important on-going debate there. There's no reasonable comparison to be had between Guantanamo and Xinjiang, whether in scale, intent, or context.
      - conistonwater 8y ago
        Nitpick: I think "please enlighten me" cheapens your otherwise fine comment, makes it personally combative where the tone of the rest of it is more factual. Just erasing the first sentence of the last paragraph would I think improve its tone. Just my opinion.
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
A previous report on this outrage https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps?fbclid=IwAR18LUvgdxBW8i1FU3Wh6mclx4VcIyUKU-d0zVLUHt1eGpLwM58MGMDFrVw https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...
- isostatic 8y ago
  You can’t read that in China. DNS is intercepted and overwitten - *.bbc.co.uk is directed to a random IP address that is typically in an AS that should be somewhere in the US, at one point it was a netblock owned by facebook, although with a 20ms response in Beijing. Same applies to many other sites. To westerners, the Internet is effectively unusable until you establish a vpn. HN works though.
  - throwawayinside 8y ago
    Can someone explain why a netblock owned by Facebook would have a 20ms response time in China? Does Facebook have Chinese servers?
    - stephen_g 8y ago
      I assume the inference is that the Government is hijacking the address within China and routing it to a state-controlled server. So they could make it plausibly look like it’s coming from a foreign IP while locally censoring the content on the site. If you have control over the network, hijacking the whole site is easier to do than trying to MITM traffic between users and the site, since HTTPS would hinder your efforts. As long as you don’t start to do it too late that people have HSTS information saved in their browsers.
      - therein 8y ago
        And for that there is HSTS Preload. https://hstspreload.com/ https://hstspreload.com/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sho 8y ago
It's hard to defend China here but it's also hard to see how they are supposed to handle the Uyghur question, and articles like this certainly don't give useful suggestions. What do you do with a region full of separatist agitators who frequently resort to violence and refuse to even teach their children Mandarin? Leave them to it and tolerate the bombings? Allow them to secede? There's a long history here and after decades of failure, China is beginning to turn the screws, in typical heavy handed style. But I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is with a near-rebel province. One quote from the article which I think sums things up: > “I cannot bear keeping silent [any more] because I think there’s a genocide taking place in East Turkestan,” he said, using the name many Uighurs use to refer to their homeland. This chap has unwittingly hit the nail on the head. China cannot, and will not, allow the separatist movement in the Xinjiang region to proceed further.
- deugtniet 8y ago
  Allow them to secede. There is no excuse for genocide. It happend in former Yugoslavia. It should happen in China.
  - sho 8y ago
    Firstly, it's not "genocide" at all - that's typical hyperbole from a very politically motivated party. His next quote reveals his definition of genocide: > “They want to erase, erase, erase your identity and our culture and to melt them into Han Chinese.” That's quite different, and also accurate. They want them to learn Chinese and acknowledge they live in China. Of course. Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten, between ethnic populations of roughly equal sizes and mass displacements. This "solution" could only ever have one outcome if you're seriously suggesting China should simply fight for its land and displace the rebels. That "war" would last roughly until tea time.
    - cirgue 8y ago
      Genocide is the systematic dismantling of an ethnic identity. It doesn’t definitionally include killing.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
It's strange to see this thread full of outrage over China's acts and demanding they give the Uyghur their sovereignty when Xinjiang borders Afghanistan. Nothing they are doing is worse than the seventeen years that the US has held sovereignty of Afghanistan, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead.
- adventured 8y ago
  What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan? Did you miss the massive global marches against the Iraq invasion? It's routinely brought up in discussion threads here and everywhere, and has been for 15 years now. If you want to criticize the US on human rights, the #1 go to point in every discussion is either the Iraq/Afghanistan wars (or incarceration policies in the US). It's immediately brought up, without exception. There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries.
  - anon1252 8y ago
    > What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan? Where is the outrage right now? where is the outrage over the slaughter of children in Yemen by the Saudis using US weapons? I don't see any here or in the US mainstream media. if you are an american, your tax dollars helped created these weapons.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries. Yet the sovereignty of those countries is still in US control, thee were 10,000 civilian casualties last year just in Afghanistan, and an ever increasing amount of countries face the same fate. We should address our own atrocities if we want to shame the Chinese for theirs.
hitripley 8y ago
This is just another try to demonize that country. Do these people (especially those from CNN and BBC) really care about the fate of the prisoners?
- Krasnol 8y ago
  You make it as if it would require some creative work do paint China in a bad light when the facts are more then enough and that's what is happening here. Facts. Reality. It's interesting though that you simultaneously know that this makes China look bad but instead of blaming those who cause it (Chinese government) you chose to blame those who report it. Why is that?
_iyig 8y ago
Was this article flagged in some non-visible way? I don’t see it anywhere in the first 7 pages, despite having 123 points and a post time of just 16 hours ago. (Only noticed when I came back to it hoping for a reply to an earlier comment.)
- paraditedc 8y ago
  Because not everyone is interested in constant China bashing news on homepage, especially from abc.net.au. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=abc.net.au https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=abc.net.au

126 points by 0xmohit 8y ago

related: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/mapping-chinas-re-education-camps-the-power-of-open-source-intelligence/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/mapping-chinas-re-educatio...

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

And will we abandon China's next Davos in the X conference as fast as we did Saudi?

Leary 8y ago
If Nixon shook hands with Mao during the Cultural Revolution, u think Trump would give a hoot about Muslims being detained in Xinjiang?
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I mentioned this in another thread recently but I heard many companies whose CEOs abandoned the Saudi conference still sent representatives in their stead. For PR reasons they distanced themselves but they don’t really want to abandon the Saudis.
- snorremd 8y ago
  Money rules and the CEOs have shareholders to answer to. Making it look good in public is more important than actually taking a stance.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
We didn't care that the Saudis were killing dissidents in their own country and slaughtering civilians in Yemen for years. It wasn't until they killed a US resident that anyone gave a single shit, there won't be any objection to China's acts.
- malandrew 8y ago
  Americans won't be outraged because they aren't being told to outraged by the US media. It wasn't even because it was a US resident. It's because he was a fellow "journalist". I say "journalist" in quotes because increasingly more people working as journalists are activists and activists for a cause and intentionally distort and omit biases and don't even attempt to maintain journalistic integrity and ethics. My understanding is that this "journalist" that was killed was practicing more activism than journalism.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    He was a journalist, advocating reform does not remove your journalistic integrity. I can't see how pushing for reform in Saudi Arabia would somehow make his death acceptable though. And Saudi Arabia has killed plenty of journalists in the past. US residency is the unique aspect in his death.

echevil 8y ago

It’s not secret anymore. The government has explained what they are. And so called re-education camps are not uncommon in other parts of China at all

singularity2001 8y ago
In 1944 they were called 'work camps'. re-education does sound a bit more friendly so there is progress in propaganda.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  And ATM in the US they're called detention camps for enemy combatants.
  - adventured 8y ago
    There are 40 enemy combatants held at Guantanamo. They have public legal representation and visitation rights. China has removed all human rights for over ten million Uyghur Muslims. Including freedom of movement, freedom of religion, tight restrictions on behavior, tracking of all communication and movement, restrictions on who you can meet or talk to, tracking of all Urghar family members in China or abroad, non-existent freedoms around speech and expression, total lockdown on press investigation or discussion, forced re-education. And then for at least a million Uyghur Muslims, they're outright physically and mentally torturing them in camps through forced programs to destroy their culture and beliefs. Please enlighten me as to how that compares to what the US is currently doing with Guantanamo. I believe the detainment facility at Guantanamo should not exist and should have never existed. There's an important on-going debate there. There's no reasonable comparison to be had between Guantanamo and Xinjiang, whether in scale, intent, or context.
    - conistonwater 8y ago
      Nitpick: I think "please enlighten me" cheapens your otherwise fine comment, makes it personally combative where the tone of the rest of it is more factual. Just erasing the first sentence of the last paragraph would I think improve its tone. Just my opinion.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

A previous report on this outrage https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps?fbclid=IwAR18LUvgdxBW8i1FU3Wh6mclx4VcIyUKU-d0zVLUHt1eGpLwM58MGMDFrVw https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...

isostatic 8y ago
You can’t read that in China. DNS is intercepted and overwitten - *.bbc.co.uk is directed to a random IP address that is typically in an AS that should be somewhere in the US, at one point it was a netblock owned by facebook, although with a 20ms response in Beijing. Same applies to many other sites. To westerners, the Internet is effectively unusable until you establish a vpn. HN works though.
- throwawayinside 8y ago
  Can someone explain why a netblock owned by Facebook would have a 20ms response time in China? Does Facebook have Chinese servers?
  - stephen_g 8y ago
    I assume the inference is that the Government is hijacking the address within China and routing it to a state-controlled server. So they could make it plausibly look like it’s coming from a foreign IP while locally censoring the content on the site. If you have control over the network, hijacking the whole site is easier to do than trying to MITM traffic between users and the site, since HTTPS would hinder your efforts. As long as you don’t start to do it too late that people have HSTS information saved in their browsers.
    - therein 8y ago
      And for that there is HSTS Preload. https://hstspreload.com/ https://hstspreload.com/

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sho 8y ago

It's hard to defend China here but it's also hard to see how they are supposed to handle the Uyghur question, and articles like this certainly don't give useful suggestions. What do you do with a region full of separatist agitators who frequently resort to violence and refuse to even teach their children Mandarin? Leave them to it and tolerate the bombings? Allow them to secede? There's a long history here and after decades of failure, China is beginning to turn the screws, in typical heavy handed style. But I'd genuinely like to know what people think the alternative is with a near-rebel province. One quote from the article which I think sums things up: > “I cannot bear keeping silent [any more] because I think there’s a genocide taking place in East Turkestan,” he said, using the name many Uighurs use to refer to their homeland. This chap has unwittingly hit the nail on the head. China cannot, and will not, allow the separatist movement in the Xinjiang region to proceed further.

deugtniet 8y ago
Allow them to secede. There is no excuse for genocide. It happend in former Yugoslavia. It should happen in China.
- sho 8y ago
  Firstly, it's not "genocide" at all - that's typical hyperbole from a very politically motivated party. His next quote reveals his definition of genocide: > “They want to erase, erase, erase your identity and our culture and to melt them into Han Chinese.” That's quite different, and also accurate. They want them to learn Chinese and acknowledge they live in China. Of course. Interesting that you suggested the Yugoslavian "solution" which required a bloody war, in case you'd forgotten, between ethnic populations of roughly equal sizes and mass displacements. This "solution" could only ever have one outcome if you're seriously suggesting China should simply fight for its land and displace the rebels. That "war" would last roughly until tea time.
  - cirgue 8y ago
    Genocide is the systematic dismantling of an ethnic identity. It doesn’t definitionally include killing.

boomboomsubban 8y ago

It's strange to see this thread full of outrage over China's acts and demanding they give the Uyghur their sovereignty when Xinjiang borders Afghanistan. Nothing they are doing is worse than the seventeen years that the US has held sovereignty of Afghanistan, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead.

adventured 8y ago
What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan? Did you miss the massive global marches against the Iraq invasion? It's routinely brought up in discussion threads here and everywhere, and has been for 15 years now. If you want to criticize the US on human rights, the #1 go to point in every discussion is either the Iraq/Afghanistan wars (or incarceration policies in the US). It's immediately brought up, without exception. There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries.
- anon1252 8y ago
  > What would make you think there's a lack of outrage related to the US and Iraq + Afghanistan? Where is the outrage right now? where is the outrage over the slaughter of children in Yemen by the Saudis using US weapons? I don't see any here or in the US mainstream media. if you are an american, your tax dollars helped created these weapons.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >There has never been a lack of outrage about the US involvement in those countries. Yet the sovereignty of those countries is still in US control, thee were 10,000 civilian casualties last year just in Afghanistan, and an ever increasing amount of countries face the same fate. We should address our own atrocities if we want to shame the Chinese for theirs.

hitripley 8y ago

This is just another try to demonize that country. Do these people (especially those from CNN and BBC) really care about the fate of the prisoners?

Krasnol 8y ago
You make it as if it would require some creative work do paint China in a bad light when the facts are more then enough and that's what is happening here. Facts. Reality. It's interesting though that you simultaneously know that this makes China look bad but instead of blaming those who cause it (Chinese government) you chose to blame those who report it. Why is that?

_iyig 8y ago

Was this article flagged in some non-visible way? I don’t see it anywhere in the first 7 pages, despite having 123 points and a post time of just 16 hours ago. (Only noticed when I came back to it hoping for a reply to an earlier comment.)

paraditedc 8y ago
Because not everyone is interested in constant China bashing news on homepage, especially from abc.net.au. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=abc.net.au https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=abc.net.au