5 ms·

The title is a little misleading, as it's a region of China and not the entirety. However, the implications are still ominous. I'm curious, how did China deve

The title is a little misleading, as it's a region of China and not the entirety. However, the implications are still ominous. I'm curious, how did China develop into such a police state? Anyone able to point me to some reading on the subject?

iiuuhhggff 7y ago
There were multiple terrorist attacks in that region. Once China started cracking down, there haven’t been any.
- zwaps 7y ago
  We know that putting people in concentration camps by the millions is effective. It takes a particular kind of cruelty to see the world from the eye of effectiveness only, and that thinking propagates through society. No surprise that Chinese have been found to be the least honest and least trustworthy society in many experiments and studies, e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712?ijkey=a2666030641e04320a361f0a99f5ca3cf38f4817&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/scie... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-dishonest-japanese-and-british-least-study-finds https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-... We are embedded in society, always. One should be careful thinking only about effectiveness and efficiency, and not individual dignity. There's a feedback.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for. Racial/ethnic/national slurs are particularly unwelome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we had to ask you this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989263). We ban accounts that repeatedly violate the site guidelines, so please don't do this.
pjc50 7y ago
China was never really not a police state of some sort. The ancient Imperial system broke down at the dawning of the modern era, and the Kuomintang "Republic of China" arose to replace it. It never managed to achieve either internal security or nationwide fair elections, and got into an extremely brutal fight with Communist insurgents. The communists were forced into retreat (Long March) during which most of them died - but the survivors, Mao among them, were inured to brutality. Eventually the Communists won on the mainland, leaving the Kuomintang in control of the island we now call Taiwan. The shooting stopped but the war is still officially in progress, hence all the weirdness around recognising Taiwan. The key to Communism in the Maoist approach was absolute central control and the sweeping away of all obstacles; if you stood in the way of, objected to, or even were insufficiently enthusiastic about its plans you would be murdered. Economic control was gradually loosened in the latter half of the 20th century, but political control remains tight.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > China was never really not a police state of some sort. Even ancient Imperial China was very much like this. To the point where China basically had no such thing as a legal system in the Western sense! The only kind of dispute resolution was mutually-assured destruction via criminal-like prosecution, basically "If I think you've been trying to cheat me out of something, I can get government goons to beat you up, for theft or whatever." And the government goons often beat up both disputants, for good measure. It's surprising that they even managed to build a halfway-functioning society and keep it going for thousands of years, out of such crudities.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    But that's what's interesting about China! It's an alternative civilization! The last 30 years we've seen it develop at a rate that is obviously impossible given the experience of all other countries. Yet this, very different, country does it. It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes, even from systems everyone "knows" shouldn't work.
    - 7y ago
tomatocracy 7y ago
Although it’s not specific to modern China, if you haven’t read it then (irrespective of your views on the Austrian school more broadly) I’d recommend Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on this. It’s quite prescient in describing how the path of proto communist states veers towards totalitarianism.
jandrese 7y ago
Basically China is too big and doesn't have good natural internal borders so throughout history it has only held together when the central government was especially ruthless. It's just too easy to steamroll off of some early military victories, so all insurrection needs to be quashed before it ever really gets started. This means you need a brutal police state. In modern times the traditions of the past remain even after the natural barriers of communication time and mobilization speed have been eradicated by modern technology. The rules of the past become a part of the culture, language, and customs of the people, even after they are theoretically obsolete. Finally, there is a natural fear of retribution you see when a minority oppresses the majority for a long time. The minority doesn't want to be treated as they treated the majority for so long, and are terrified that if they give an inch they'll find themselves hanging from a pole just like so many of their victims.
- xenospn 7y ago
  China is also working very hard to get rid of its minorities by simply distributing Han Chinese everywhere.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    It's basically ethnic cleansing by dilution. In Xinjiang and Tibet it appears to go beyond just dilution, but that is the primary mechanism. When I was living there, there were tons of incentives to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to both Xinjiang and Tibet to completely dilute the local minorities to the point of irrelevancy.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      In the US we called this "the melting pot". It doesn't matter what your ethnicity was before you moved here, your traditions and beliefs get integrated into American society so you are just an American. This sort of thing has had a lot of pushback lately from well meaning but IMHO misguided folks who complain about "cultural appropriation". You aren't asked to forget your cultural traditions, you're asked to bring your neighbors into them. To share the culture. But also to admit that the edges are probably going to be sanded off and you're going to see people from outside of your group participating.
scooke 7y ago
It’s almost always been like that. The surveillance 25 years ago were grannies and aunties on the first floor of buildings keeping track of who comes and goes. Gates were already installed at many living compounds, so the guards too could easily see who comes and goes. Read about the danwei system, which essentially monitored everyone’s movements and indeed life path from birth until death. Not as high tech as now, but the control and surveillance has always been there. This is probably why the escalation has occurred without too much fuss from the general populace.

iiuuhhggff 7y ago

There were multiple terrorist attacks in that region. Once China started cracking down, there haven’t been any.

zwaps 7y ago
We know that putting people in concentration camps by the millions is effective. It takes a particular kind of cruelty to see the world from the eye of effectiveness only, and that thinking propagates through society. No surprise that Chinese have been found to be the least honest and least trustworthy society in many experiments and studies, e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712?ijkey=a2666030641e04320a361f0a99f5ca3cf38f4817&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/scie... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-dishonest-japanese-and-british-least-study-finds https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-... We are embedded in society, always. One should be careful thinking only about effectiveness and efficiency, and not individual dignity. There's a feedback.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for. Racial/ethnic/national slurs are particularly unwelome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we had to ask you this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989263). We ban accounts that repeatedly violate the site guidelines, so please don't do this.

pjc50 7y ago

China was never really not a police state of some sort. The ancient Imperial system broke down at the dawning of the modern era, and the Kuomintang "Republic of China" arose to replace it. It never managed to achieve either internal security or nationwide fair elections, and got into an extremely brutal fight with Communist insurgents. The communists were forced into retreat (Long March) during which most of them died - but the survivors, Mao among them, were inured to brutality. Eventually the Communists won on the mainland, leaving the Kuomintang in control of the island we now call Taiwan. The shooting stopped but the war is still officially in progress, hence all the weirdness around recognising Taiwan. The key to Communism in the Maoist approach was absolute central control and the sweeping away of all obstacles; if you stood in the way of, objected to, or even were insufficiently enthusiastic about its plans you would be murdered. Economic control was gradually loosened in the latter half of the 20th century, but political control remains tight.

0815test 7y ago
> China was never really not a police state of some sort. Even ancient Imperial China was very much like this. To the point where China basically had no such thing as a legal system in the Western sense! The only kind of dispute resolution was mutually-assured destruction via criminal-like prosecution, basically "If I think you've been trying to cheat me out of something, I can get government goons to beat you up, for theft or whatever." And the government goons often beat up both disputants, for good measure. It's surprising that they even managed to build a halfway-functioning society and keep it going for thousands of years, out of such crudities.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  But that's what's interesting about China! It's an alternative civilization! The last 30 years we've seen it develop at a rate that is obviously impossible given the experience of all other countries. Yet this, very different, country does it. It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes, even from systems everyone "knows" shouldn't work.
  - 7y ago

tomatocracy 7y ago

Although it’s not specific to modern China, if you haven’t read it then (irrespective of your views on the Austrian school more broadly) I’d recommend Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on this. It’s quite prescient in describing how the path of proto communist states veers towards totalitarianism.

jandrese 7y ago

Basically China is too big and doesn't have good natural internal borders so throughout history it has only held together when the central government was especially ruthless. It's just too easy to steamroll off of some early military victories, so all insurrection needs to be quashed before it ever really gets started. This means you need a brutal police state. In modern times the traditions of the past remain even after the natural barriers of communication time and mobilization speed have been eradicated by modern technology. The rules of the past become a part of the culture, language, and customs of the people, even after they are theoretically obsolete. Finally, there is a natural fear of retribution you see when a minority oppresses the majority for a long time. The minority doesn't want to be treated as they treated the majority for so long, and are terrified that if they give an inch they'll find themselves hanging from a pole just like so many of their victims.

xenospn 7y ago
China is also working very hard to get rid of its minorities by simply distributing Han Chinese everywhere.
- malandrew 7y ago
  It's basically ethnic cleansing by dilution. In Xinjiang and Tibet it appears to go beyond just dilution, but that is the primary mechanism. When I was living there, there were tons of incentives to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to both Xinjiang and Tibet to completely dilute the local minorities to the point of irrelevancy.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    In the US we called this "the melting pot". It doesn't matter what your ethnicity was before you moved here, your traditions and beliefs get integrated into American society so you are just an American. This sort of thing has had a lot of pushback lately from well meaning but IMHO misguided folks who complain about "cultural appropriation". You aren't asked to forget your cultural traditions, you're asked to bring your neighbors into them. To share the culture. But also to admit that the edges are probably going to be sanded off and you're going to see people from outside of your group participating.

scooke 7y ago

It’s almost always been like that. The surveillance 25 years ago were grannies and aunties on the first floor of buildings keeping track of who comes and goes. Gates were already installed at many living compounds, so the guards too could easily see who comes and goes. Read about the danwei system, which essentially monitored everyone’s movements and indeed life path from birth until death. Not as high tech as now, but the control and surveillance has always been there. This is probably why the escalation has occurred without too much fuss from the general populace.