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> In quiet, polite voices, Aysu and Lütfullah Kuçar describe the nearly 20 months they spent in state boarding schools in China's western region of Xinjiang, fo

> In quiet, polite voices, Aysu and Lütfullah Kuçar describe the nearly 20 months they spent in state boarding schools in China's western region of Xinjiang, forcibly separated from their family. > Under the watchful gaze of their father, the two ethnically Uyghur children say that their heads were shaved and that class monitors and teachers frequently hit them, locked them in dark rooms and forced them to hold stress positions as punishment for perceived transgressions. > By the time they were able to return home to Turkey in December 2019, they had become malnourished and traumatized. They had also forgotten how to speak their mother tongues, Uyghur and Turkish. (The children were being raised in Turkey but got forcibly sent to boarding school during a family visit to China.) Holy shit, that's horrifying. Literally the state just kidnapping kids and brainwashing and abusing them. It's like China's government is going out of their way to maximize evil.

tdeck 5y ago
Sounds like what the US and Canadian government did to indigenous children. That's not to excuse anything the Chinese government does but it feels like they dusted off an old playbook.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Yeah, though I’m not sure I remember the US randomly kidnapping tourists and sending them away.
- walkhour 5y ago
  > But they say the worst punishment was being sent to the school's basement. Lütfullah says the teachers told him ghosts lived there, and children including him were locked there in the dark, alone, for hours at a time. I wasn't aware the US or Canadian governments had institutionalized these kinds of punishment (or similar) to specifically indigenous people in a peaceful period. Was this really the case and were could I read more about it? In any case I don't think it's fair to compare present crimes of a country with past crimes of another, if anything, it would be fair to compare present crimes of both countries. It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage.
  - dirtyid 5y ago
    Ongoing controversies around disproportionate indigenous kids thrown in foster care and the mistreatment that occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure. It's not formal policy like residential schools, but it's essentially continuation of said practice. > It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage. Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development. Reality is countries who has capability to address restive minorities until they're merely marginalized or managable, will. That's prerequisite to internal security and domestic serenity. And there's no non-savage way of doing it, pretending we live in an enlightened age doesn't make the underlying tensions and security dilemmas go away. Just about the "best" we can expect is less bloody systems of integration (cultural genocide), that's what's happening in XJ, plenty of carrots along with the sticks. It's how most of PRC was harmonized, now it's simply XJ's turn (and other previously unreachable restive populations) because PRC has the resources to reach that far. The upside is CCP doesn't half ass these things, chances are Uyghurs will be sinicized and more integrated in PRC society before Canada solves it's Indigenous issues or US/EU their minority issues. It's the alternative to platitudes like "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". And that scares people.
    - walkhour 5y ago
      > Ongoing controversies [...] occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure Native American population jumps to largest size in modern history [0] Tribal sovereignty in the United States [1] Native American Day – September 23, 2022 [2] Whatever the crime is you're referring to, it's not comparable, are Uighurs given autonomous zones, allowed to celebrate custom holidays and are at their historical population peak? When you say Native American are undergoing a cultural erasure comparable to the one in China, where Uighurs are in concentration camps to force them lose their culture and identity, I think you'll have to bring more proof than some "ongoing controversies". [0] https://www.axios.com/census-native-american-alaska-population-surges-1be8eef6-d09f-4249-86b0-7bf8cfbfc801.html https://www.axios.com/census-native-american-alaska-populati... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Un... [2] https://nationaltoday.com/native-american-day/ https://nationaltoday.com/native-american-day/
- TaXaZ 5y ago
  You know what is wrong with this statement? This is normalization: "Yes, it's bad, but you've done it too". Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!". Anyway, this sort of rationalization are one of the tricks that authoritarian regimes do and interestingly often then recruit western journalist white wash them and with a diverse assortment of such rationalizations, and much more delicate and elaborate.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    > Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!". The next should be "if we (in the US) think this is horrible, what are we doing to try to make it right with indigenous people in our own country, where we actually have influence over the state's policies?", not "whoops, guess if we acknowledge the US did that too it can't be that bad."
    - TaXaZ 5y ago
      Agree but I'm not sure, if my comment understood correctly. 1. I didn't talk about should, I describe the problem with parent comment i.e. immorality of normalization. I have heard such justification before which goes to similar next step. That next step was what the normalizers might say. 2. It's from the point of white washers not the moral stand point that you depicts 3. As a proof, just check the comment in this section by @dirtyid which describe the 'next' I talked about: > Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development. ~~(fun fact, I didn't saw it the first time and it was delightful seeing a proof in next step above)~~ Again, If it wasn't clear originally, What I liked to bring attention to is the white-washing (normalization) of tyrannies. It has been done for Nazis and it's currently being done in western journalists and lobbyist. Look at any sort of authoritarian atrocity and you'll see a white washer in NY or DC normalizing it.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I think this sort of abuse comes naturally to humans, in combination of the broken environment they were raised in, and due to different pressures and opportunities later. So however disconnected culturally and physically, they produce similar patterns. Relating this to the current context, I don't think Chinese officials needed to study US and Canadian boarding school abuse to create an environment where they mistreat their minorities in a similar way. Rather it's because we're all humans and we behave similarly under similar circumstances.
quickthrower2 5y ago
It takes a crazy hostile country to kidnap tourists. It goes against all accepted norms of how countries should engage.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  It doesn't say they weren't PRC citizens, so I'm assuming they were resident in Turkey but weren't considered tourists by the authorities (regardless of status, not condoning their actions).
VictorPath 5y ago

tdeck 5y ago

Sounds like what the US and Canadian government did to indigenous children. That's not to excuse anything the Chinese government does but it feels like they dusted off an old playbook.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
Yeah, though I’m not sure I remember the US randomly kidnapping tourists and sending them away.
walkhour 5y ago
> But they say the worst punishment was being sent to the school's basement. Lütfullah says the teachers told him ghosts lived there, and children including him were locked there in the dark, alone, for hours at a time. I wasn't aware the US or Canadian governments had institutionalized these kinds of punishment (or similar) to specifically indigenous people in a peaceful period. Was this really the case and were could I read more about it? In any case I don't think it's fair to compare present crimes of a country with past crimes of another, if anything, it would be fair to compare present crimes of both countries. It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  Ongoing controversies around disproportionate indigenous kids thrown in foster care and the mistreatment that occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure. It's not formal policy like residential schools, but it's essentially continuation of said practice. > It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage. Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development. Reality is countries who has capability to address restive minorities until they're merely marginalized or managable, will. That's prerequisite to internal security and domestic serenity. And there's no non-savage way of doing it, pretending we live in an enlightened age doesn't make the underlying tensions and security dilemmas go away. Just about the "best" we can expect is less bloody systems of integration (cultural genocide), that's what's happening in XJ, plenty of carrots along with the sticks. It's how most of PRC was harmonized, now it's simply XJ's turn (and other previously unreachable restive populations) because PRC has the resources to reach that far. The upside is CCP doesn't half ass these things, chances are Uyghurs will be sinicized and more integrated in PRC society before Canada solves it's Indigenous issues or US/EU their minority issues. It's the alternative to platitudes like "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". And that scares people.
  - walkhour 5y ago
    > Ongoing controversies [...] occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure Native American population jumps to largest size in modern history [0] Tribal sovereignty in the United States [1] Native American Day – September 23, 2022 [2] Whatever the crime is you're referring to, it's not comparable, are Uighurs given autonomous zones, allowed to celebrate custom holidays and are at their historical population peak? When you say Native American are undergoing a cultural erasure comparable to the one in China, where Uighurs are in concentration camps to force them lose their culture and identity, I think you'll have to bring more proof than some "ongoing controversies". [0] https://www.axios.com/census-native-american-alaska-population-surges-1be8eef6-d09f-4249-86b0-7bf8cfbfc801.html https://www.axios.com/census-native-american-alaska-populati... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_Un... [2] https://nationaltoday.com/native-american-day/ https://nationaltoday.com/native-american-day/
TaXaZ 5y ago
You know what is wrong with this statement? This is normalization: "Yes, it's bad, but you've done it too". Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!". Anyway, this sort of rationalization are one of the tricks that authoritarian regimes do and interestingly often then recruit western journalist white wash them and with a diverse assortment of such rationalizations, and much more delicate and elaborate.
- tdeck 5y ago
  > Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!". The next should be "if we (in the US) think this is horrible, what are we doing to try to make it right with indigenous people in our own country, where we actually have influence over the state's policies?", not "whoops, guess if we acknowledge the US did that too it can't be that bad."
  - TaXaZ 5y ago
    Agree but I'm not sure, if my comment understood correctly. 1. I didn't talk about should, I describe the problem with parent comment i.e. immorality of normalization. I have heard such justification before which goes to similar next step. That next step was what the normalizers might say. 2. It's from the point of white washers not the moral stand point that you depicts 3. As a proof, just check the comment in this section by @dirtyid which describe the 'next' I talked about: > Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development. ~~(fun fact, I didn't saw it the first time and it was delightful seeing a proof in next step above)~~ Again, If it wasn't clear originally, What I liked to bring attention to is the white-washing (normalization) of tyrannies. It has been done for Nazis and it's currently being done in western journalists and lobbyist. Look at any sort of authoritarian atrocity and you'll see a white washer in NY or DC normalizing it.
npteljes 5y ago
I think this sort of abuse comes naturally to humans, in combination of the broken environment they were raised in, and due to different pressures and opportunities later. So however disconnected culturally and physically, they produce similar patterns. Relating this to the current context, I don't think Chinese officials needed to study US and Canadian boarding school abuse to create an environment where they mistreat their minorities in a similar way. Rather it's because we're all humans and we behave similarly under similar circumstances.

quickthrower2 5y ago

It takes a crazy hostile country to kidnap tourists. It goes against all accepted norms of how countries should engage.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
It doesn't say they weren't PRC citizens, so I'm assuming they were resident in Turkey but weren't considered tourists by the authorities (regardless of status, not condoning their actions).

VictorPath 5y ago