10 ms·
Tracking China's Muslim Gulag
- bobx11 8y agoThe 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 8y agoOn 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 8y agoOutside 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 8y agoHumans are terrible with evaluating large numbers though. A square kilometre is far easier to visualise than 1 million square metres.
- tlow 8y agoIt really is a fantastic webpage. Any details on the team producing such content, anyone?
- Markoff 8y agoit's pretty jerky/clunky on Firefox on android, BBC has these galleries/interactive articles more optimized
- anon2775 8y agoSatellite imagery from a BBC investigation https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_camps https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...
- gammateam 8y agoout 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
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- castle-bravo 8y agoWell, 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
- 3into10power5 8y agoThe cynic in me think public denouncing of countries or its leaders means nothing. Its just meant to pacify us commoners? Am I wrong to think so?
- krapp 8y ago> Its just meant to pacify us commoners? Am I wrong to think so? I think so, but only because I think governments know how little "us commoners" actually care, beyond wanting to virtue signal and wanting to see politicians raise a stink about things.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 8y agoIs this the same Mike Pence that supports the Muslim country travel ban ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#/media/File:Trump_signing_order_January_27.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#/media/F...
- monocasa 8y agoUighurs have a extremism problem on the scale of the Taliban. Literally the Taliban was training Uighurs in the same camps, right across the border (western Afganistan shares a border with Xinjiang). What would the US have done if the Taliban was in, say, West Virginia? Because that's what China is dealing with in Xinjiang.
- kevin_b_er 8y agoThe US already did this in an earlier era and its called the American Indian Wars as the natives were quelled and cleansed by the majority race government. Only this one is a Communist Chinese version of it.
- MrZongle2 8y agoWell, if there are any individuals alive today responsible for those atrocities, then they should be called out. Otherwise, it's about as relevant as Roman atrocities in Gaul.
- changchuming 8y agoI'm pretty sure it'll be called out in 50 years when it's over and done with.
- monocasa 8y agoFine, let's call them out. Forced sterilization of Native Americans continued through the 1970s in the US. Victims and perpetrators are still alive.
- mabbo 8y agoOne would hope that a free country would arrest people who commit crimes and not people who share a religion or race as people who commit crimes. If your brother commits murder, should the police arrest you?
- monocasa 8y ago
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoThe US has already showed what they would do, wage a war that ends in genocide. Long term this will turn out to be the more effective and peaceful path. Poverty and lack of ability to integrate is pretty much a permanent purgatory for many populations in the west. A reasonable government would fix that as soon as possible with training and development.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoTaliban in the USA get arrested and afforded due process.
- ArchTypical 8y agoSo do individual killers...which is about as relevant. If the US government was threatened, the plan is the same as it always was. Lock everyone up who is tacitly related to the "others" eg American Indians, Japanese internment, McCarthy.
- whoelse9209 8y agoI (and many people I know) would stand against this internment and join protests in the streets to put pressure on the government to reverse such a ridiculous blanket action. Regardless of what the government does to preserve their self interests and power, these actions are wrong and I will do what I can in my power to oppose them.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoYou realize that there is no blanket action and 95% of Muslims and Uyghurs aren't arrested? Don't just listen to propaganda. Millions of Uyghurs are living regular lives. The current top actress in China is a Uyghur, an Uyghur just won the Rap of China, the situation is nowhere close to Japanese internment. The people targeted are the ones who had suspected contact with Wahhabist extremists. The process is non-transparent and probably incompetently executed but that's a function of China's immature and authoritarian justice system.
- fipple 8y agoChina is an ends justify the means country. They will violate as many human rights as necessary to avoid growing their own banlieues.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- avar 8y agoSome 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?
- forkLding 8y agoWell until now minority groups got preferential treatment as compared to Han Chinese. You will notice that the ethnic Uyghur Xinjiang governor actually supporting the camps. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China Otherwise now the Party is treating the same way they treat normal Han Chinese who have different thoughts on the CCP. However not everyone in Xinjiang is affected, mostly the religious.
- nyolfen 8y agonormal han have been getting sent to camps for things like growing a beard or having a family member who talked to somebody in a different country?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 8y ago
- nafizh 8y agoNow, 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 8y agoI 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.
- 40acres 8y agoThe 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.
- AWildC182 8y agoTaking 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 8y agowrt 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 8y agoTrue that. Eventually satellites as powerful as the ones in that one Mission Impossible movie will be available to laypeople like you and me. Scary.
- ummonk 8y agoBeing 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 8y agoIndonesia 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 8y agoThis 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-citizens-occupy-uighur-homes-xinjiang http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/million-... Reading some comments in r/China, makes it seem like it is not an exaggeration. https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_government_has_ordered_a_million_citizens/ https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/9r8vgf/chinas_govern...
- chillacy 8y agoMight 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 8y agoliving 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
- ngcc_hk 8y agoI 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 8y ago>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.
- golem14 8y agoHighly recommend the detective novels by van Gulik (detective dee series).
- dang 8y agoAll: 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
- mattigames 8y agoWhy are you commenting this now? The post is already out of the front page...
- dang 8y agoBecause I just saw it and we try not to let flamewars fester.
- eiaoa 8y ago> 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 8y agoThis 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.
- lyrachord 8y agoTrump will say what? There is always someone who post China problem on HN? He feels HN readers fool?