The forced reeducation prisons were built after I was there. I did spend some time talking to locals, and they were justifiably paranoid. There had been some re

The forced reeducation prisons were built after I was there. I did spend some time talking to locals, and they were justifiably paranoid. There had been some recent terrorism and they sensed blowback was coming to ordinary citizens. There was also a sense that Chinese gentrification was unlikely to benefit them. I think it would have been better if the autonomous regions had been left alone, but that option disappeared in the west due to natural resources, and from the Chinese perspective “Free Tibet” means NATO weapons in Tibet. That is why they built an absurdly expensive railway to Lhasa. The CCP is incomprehensible from an American perspective, but painfully practical and predictable from a Chinese perspective.