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Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip Sentenced to Death in Secret Trial
- baylearn 7y agoAccording to Amnesty International, after 2 year suspended death sentence, he could be executed in September of this year: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA1710062019ENGLISH.pdf https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA1710062019ENGL...
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoWhat else is new? They'll kill anybody and eat them. Hong Kong doesn't have a chance. Well, there is a chance.
- boreas 7y agoSomehow the scariest part was the erasure. Articles that praised Tiyip’s achievements are now being systematically deleted from the internet. His name and legacy are being erased, even from the list of presidents of Xinjiang University. Ironically, Sheng Shicai, the Guomindang leader who ruled Xinjiang from 1933-1944, who was described as one of the most evil traitors by the Communist Party, is still listed as a president of the school from 1942-1944. Yet, there is now no trace of Tashpolat Tiyip’s name. Almost a caricature of an authoritarian approach to dealing with an undesirable.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoAnd some people don't believe me when I tell them that 1984 is a reality in some parts of the world.
- hkai 7y agoIsn't it the same as in the West? When some writer, filmmaker or academic falls out of favor, he is systematically erased from history.
- baylearn 7y agoSeriously? (* citations needed.)
- SeanLuke 7y agoNo. This is an extraordinary bit of whataboutism, and requires extraordinary evidence. Please justify it with real, verifiable examples.
- adventured 7y agoThat's a pretty comical and obvious reach as a statement. Did they (the West) erase Woody Allen's films and I missed it? I can't watch Roman Polanski's films? I can't listen to Michael Jackson's music? Amazon won't rent me films with Kevin Spacey in them (and authorities are going house to house confiscating the copies of his films)? Matt Lauer has been permanently erased from all YouTube videos?
- BubRoss 7y agoWhy does every article about the Chinese government doing terrible things have someone saying 'the west is just as bad'? It not only is pure whataboutism it usually isn't even remotely true.
- polotics 7y agoBecause hacker news is visible and central enough to be of interest to all state actors.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" Timely as ever.
- robert_foss 7y agoWhat was he sentenced for?
- frogpelt 7y agoNear the end of the article it says: "I pressed them further, asking if they could think of anything that may have made him a target. After a long pause, one of his students stated: “the only thing that I can think of is that he used to begin his public statements with a brief greeting in Uyghur language, usually for less than thirty seconds, before he led school meetings in fluent Chinese. Maybe this is why (he was taken).”
- dirtyid 7y agoTrial was secret. But 2017 arrest point to "Strike Hard" campaign targeting violent terrorism. "Two-face" label was also something thrown around by state officials at the time against those who preached separatism.
- _iyig 7y ago>against those who preached separatism Or who just promoted Uyghur language and culture, or didn’t cheer the Party on loudly enough: https://thediplomat.com/2018/10/turn-in-the-two-faced-the-plight-of-uyghur-intellectuals/ https://thediplomat.com/2018/10/turn-in-the-two-faced-the-pl... EDIT: Do you think I’m exaggerating? From the link: “To be more precise, [two-faced] is a castigatory definition that Chinese politicians are using to highlight the “failure” of Uyghur intellectuals to manifest their unwavering and unambiguous allegiance to the CCP.” “In this sense, Uyghur intellectuals are forced to remain in the black and white world for their very survival; and in so doing, they are forced to abandon and denounce their own deeply rich culture against their will.“
- dirtyid 7y agoSure, definitions malleable to the whims of the state. But that typically leads to jail terms. Hundreds of Uyghur academics have been detained, some died in custody, but as far as I'm aware only Tashpolat Tiyip and Halmurat Ghopur have been formally sentenced to death. Both at around the same time in late 2017 which suggest there might be firmer evidence behind the convictions. Or out of the 13,000 arrests officially categorized as terrorists, these two were arbitrarily being made examples of. It was a year after Chen Quanguo (architect of the camps) became the Party Secretary of Xinjiang and escalated the Strike Hard campaign (there's been no terrorists attacks since he took over), and within weeks of him being promoted to the CPC central politburo. Timing certainly is interesting. E: I didn't claim you were exaggerating? It takes very loose definitions to rationalize the levels of detainment happening in Xinjiang.
- EdibleMatrix 7y agoThe circumstances of this are very strange. What's alarming is that I don't understand why the government would take such extreme action on someone who doesn't appear to be active in any political capacity. At least not active enough to come up in any search engine. Upon further digging, I did find more information this notion of 'two-faceness' from an article in 2017, around the time he was arrested: ------- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-security/fellow-uighurs-should-beware-of-two-faced-people-in-separatism-fight-official-says-idUSKBN17C0HJ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-security/f... In a commentary published by the official Xinjiang Daily on Monday, Yasin Sidik, a senior official from Kashgar city in Xinjiang, urged fellow ethnic Uighur cadres to “bravely stand at the forefront against separatism”. “We must stand out and reveal ‘two-faced’ people, thoroughly seize bad elements out from the masses, clean them out,” he said. -------
- trickstra 7y agoThere is ArchiveBox (self-hosted web archive) for these cases when articles are disappearing.
- Leary 7y agoI thought a million Uighurs disappeared into concentration camps, so hopefully he's still alive in one of those camps
- dqonvzpa 7y agoCCP is 100 times worse than Nazis and must be eliminated ASAP.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments and breaking the site guidelines. No, that's not because we're secret communists. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- dqonvzpa 7y agoI can see who you are from your name. I wish you have a good time on the coming National Day, since it is the last one for you evils.
- harshreality 7y agoSo what's new? China sometimes murders people. What can be done? Boycott Chinese products? There aren't enough people who will give up their favorite electronics to make a difference, and most diplomatic currency is used on trade deals, Taiwan, and various disputed islands. What ultimately motivates Xi and the Party? What are their objectives? Are they simply doing whatever they think will increase China's relative power? And they think unity — suppression of multi-culturalism and dissent — will serve that interest? Or have they gamed out a strategy for 50 or 100 years that's more subtle, and this totalitarian BS is just a phase they'll outgrow?
- Leary 7y agoAccording to the former PM of Australia, Kevin Rudd: " 1. The centrality of the party, keeping the party in power for the long term, as well as Xi's power within the party; 2. Consolidating the internal unity of the country; 3. Maintaining sustainable economic growth to ensure a continued increase in Chinese living standards, breaking though the "middle-income trap," while balancing now against a parallel requirement for environmental protection now demanded by China's urban elites; 4. Keeping China's 14 bordering countries in a benign, and preferably supine state; 5. On China's maritime periphery, projecting its regional naval and air power, politically fracturing U.S. alliances in Asia, and ultimately removing the United States from the immediate region militarily; 6. Leveraging its economic power across China's vast continental periphery, causing Eurasia, and in time the Middle East and Africa to become accommodating to China's economic, foreign policy, and security interests; 7. and Reforming parts, but by no means all, of the post-war international rules-based order over time to better suit its interests, and to better reflect China's domestic values rather than those of the post-war consensus. "
- riskneutral 7y agoSo, in other words, World War III. Good luck with that y’all, I have no dog in this clown show of a fight.
- snowwindwaves 7y agoI frequently pay a premium to buy products manufactured outside of China. Usually they are higher quality.
- songco 7y agoIs it related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio... ? Xinjiang is my hometown, the riots is terrible, many people died in the event(most in the first 2 days), I was impressed becuase I know one man's two twin girls killed in the riots, and the angry man orginized many workers in the next day's riots(revenge...) It's a complex thing, as I know, there's too many media misleading, in both side.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago>Is it related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio.... ? Well, let us examine this possibility by reading the article. That was in 2009 and according to the featured article, in 2010 he was promoted to the President and Vice Secretary of the Communist Party of Xinjiang University and he only recently disappeared in 2017. So I am guessing it would be rather unlikely. >It's a complex thing, as I know, there's too many media misleading, in both side. This is also something of a problem in the commentary, it would appear.
- xwolfi 7y agoIt's a lot like the HK riots which started as a movement against a law (the very kind of law Tiyip has been taken by) but ended up as a metro station burning game. I'm in HK and a democrat, sure, but these angelic freedom fighting tales abroad are as misleading as the diabolical black hand rhetoric of the mainland media. As most human movement, there's a gaussian distribution between two extremes, and the two extremes makes the most noise (because extreme noise brings shocked readers) while most ignore and live on.
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- ncmncm 7y agoI'm guessing he refused to get involved in official corruption. Nothing is so offensive as an honest man.