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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Post subject: Chinese concentration camps |  |
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I presume most people here are aware by now of China's involuntary, indefinite detention of over 1 million Uyghur people in re-education camps (and the topic has already been cropping up in various threads), but I thought I'd start a dedicated thread on it.
Here's a recent run-down for people who want to know more about it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50511063
We all know that there are ample mechanisms available to deal with weak countries that commit human rights abuses (including but not limited to censure, sanctions and ICC prosecution for officials). But such institutions become pretty toothless the minute that a major global power starts doing this stuff, and thus we have the, in my view, pathetic spectacle of major Liberal and Labor Party politicians waffling about "nuance" and "complexity" whenever the topic arises. Their reticence to criticise has, of course, a cast-iron logic behind it: China holds the purse strings to our economy, and any overt criticism or attempt to push back may be met with significant economic impacts, which is another way to say that our silence is paid for.
The Xinjiang camps aren't Auschwitz (not yet, anyway; worth keeping in mind that deportations and concentration camps in Nazi-controlled territory were in operation for years before the mass exterminations started). But one can't shake the feeling that there are echoes of past failures in our country's bipartisan cowardice, and that realpolitik must surely have its limits somewhere. And while the right (with the exception of a few Liberal Party backbenchers like Andrew Hastie, whose politics I generally loathe but who seems to be a rare voice of principle on this stuff) is just as culpable in that silence as the left, it's also worth investigating why otherwise globally-minded local progressives – who may express daily outrage about quotidian Donald Trump–devised irregularities – don't seem overly exercised by something far, far worse happening in our region.
I think Guy Rundle's article on this situation captures much of my unease:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/11/21/china-abuse-left-response/
| Quote: | The left needs to take a stand on China
Guy Rundle
Well, looks like we’re going to have to talk about China. Really talk about China. Much of the world, of Australia, and of the left respectively have avoided the conversation for years. But we could can’t do so anymore.
At the same time, we have to avoid being stampeded by a propaganda push by other interests. The bad China stories have come too suspiciously simultaneously to be accepted uninterrogated.
The two core charges that have surfaced are inter-related. Firstly, that a mass incarceration system in Xinjiang is racially based — around the Uyghurs — and extended to the virtual imprisonment of the entire population.
Secondly, that China’s oft-reported practice of taking transplant organs from executed criminals has been extended and reversed, so that religious and other minorities — the Uyghurs, Falun Gong, “house Christians” — are now being executed to supply both a private organ market and the needs of the elite.
Both accusations are ghastly enough. If they are in fact combined processes, we’re in another world entirely. The mass detention of Uyghurs and the hyper-control of everyday life in Xinjiang is so widely reported it seems impossible to deny, or believe that it has been wholly manufactured. Whatever spin there might be put on it seems irrelevant, given what is documented.
Recent stories have portrayed it as a product of President Xi Jinping’s reaction to a series of terrorist knife attacks, including one in 2014 that left more than 30 people dead. But the transformation of Xinjiang had been going on long before that, with millions of Han Chinese moved in there, such that Uyghurs are now a minority community.
That process points to another inconvenient fact, for both left and right: the internationalism of China’s Maoism and Marxism — once genuine enough — is yielding not merely to a national supremacism, but to one based around Han Chinese ethnicity. That is combined with a state-led push towards post-capitalism, combining mass renewable energy rollout, additive/3D manufacturing, robotics and new materials, to jump forward to non-market systems of allocation for infrastructure and other production.
With a private sector situated within that frame, the nationwide “social credit” system subsumes wages as a social control and allocation device. Export-import then runs through countries strung along the Belt and Road Initiative, in hock to China for their development (which, unlike Western IMF development, actually delivered infrastructure).
The system is thus, through various transformations, multiple, to put it mildly. Retro Cold War ideologues like Chris Uhlmann in today’s Nein papers can call the lifting of 700 million people out of poverty a “canard”, but the fact remains that China’s totalitarian control has been successful because provision has been successful; its post-1979 Marxist mixed system has delivered most of the world’s growth out of poverty, while India, west Asia and Africa have stagnated in the net of the neoliberal system.
That only doesn’t matter to people who care less about human betterment than about scoring a cheap political point. That is also a clue to the sudden and collective attacks on China from Tony Abbott and Eric Abetz. Doubtless these two gentlemen have no concern other than freedom, but it certainly doesn’t hurt the anti-China push. The international groups pushing the lethal organ harvesting charge appear to be created around that specific issue, which gives pause.
But even if it were a question of the Uyghur mass detention alone, no one on the left can pass by this any longer without a collective deep investigation. If it is as said, then we are the equivalent of the UK, offshore from Dachau. It’s worth remembering that a lot of anti-Nazi criticism in the 1930s was muted because it was seen to be coddling British imperialism. And it’s sadly predictable that Paul Keating — who reveres Churchill as the politician of the century — fails the Churchill test when actual concentration camps are presented to him.
If there really is a supply-by-execution of transplant organs, with or without a tie-in to Uyghur camps, that is simply Treblinka. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
If — if — it is true, then Jinping’s neo-Stalinism has evolved into something that combines the annihilating worst of the three major systems of modernity. The right can do what it likes; the global left needs to establish an international, independent commission to assess the evidence of what is occurring in these two areas, and their intertwining.
And if it proves to be the case then we must simply recognise the presence of radical evil on a mass scale and curse our prior lassitude — but not let it distract us from present action. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I have read about the "re-education" camps. From what I've read they aren't as much racially based as religion based. These people follow some form of Islam so they're using the excuse of potential for terrorism to detain and re-educate.
Regardless, it's bullshit that they're doing it and that it's being tip toed around. These people (from what I've read) are totally peaceful, but they don't align with the Chinese way of life that's being forced from above, so they get forcefully "re-educated"
It's what you'd expect in North Korea or an Orwell or Huxley novel.
I hadn't read or heard of the organ harvesting. If that's happening that is seriously farked up. eastern society has had a somewhat different view of the value of human life to Western, but that's next level.
The thing is, because of China's economic power every country tiptoes around them, careful not to offend. Public criticism is smoothed over with other means. Like when we ban Huwawei from being part of the 5G rollout, no doubt there's some payback behind the scenes
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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This, I thought, is a really good article about China. I started a thread a while back about teaching your kids to speak a Chinese dialect so when they take over, your kids will be prepared.
This is just a part.
| Quote: | Fundamentally, the Chinese Communist Party cannot cope with liberty. At home or abroad. It has grave difficulty with anything – cultural identity, religion, speech – that it is not wholly confident that it can control. Not content to massacre its students in Tiananmen Square and control its population through a police state, Beijing is imposing the techno-surveillance of a "social credit" system for population micro-management.
Not content to annexe Tibet, the Chinese authorities crushed its people's cultural and religious freedom long ago. Not content to subdue the Uighur people of China's Xinjiang "autonomous" region, Xi is committing cultural genocide through mass detention and brainwashing.
Not content to be the dominant trading partner for more than 120 of the world's countries, Beijing wants to control their internal debates about China, stifle free enquiry in their universities and cement governments worldwide into the China-funded patronage network of its Belt and Road.
And, not content to have Australia fawning all over it in pursuit of easy economic gain, China's government wants to take control of its political system for good measure. "The West has a simple and naive view of the Chinese Communist Party," says Chan. "It's very pervasive and it has relentless machinery and tentacles. I don't think they will stop. For liberal democracies everywhere, are you prepared to see your values supplanted by those of mainland China?" |
https://www.theage.com.au/world/asia/china-s-overreach-is-testing-australia-in-four-key-ways-20191125-p53dsh.html
It's not specifically about the Uyghur 's but shows the mindset that's enabling that behaviour.
If you're under 35, start learning Mandarin.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^This is why economic development is critical. The Korean Peninsula at large once had this sort of classical "pure blood" racism. Now, it's on the decline in South Korea, although still not be taken lightly by any means.
As a high-income economy Japan is the exception to the rule, still being extremely inward-focussed. But China is actually more diverse as a country, so the dynamics are hopefully more favourable. That said, communism loves wielding nationalism, so that will act as a brake on accepting diversity, although economic development is presumably the best way to deal with the authoritarian state, as well.
I would argue that beyond sensible defence, military budgets need to be redirected to helping countries move beyond dangerous levels of racism and xenophobia. Racial animosity is the biggest threat to us all outside nuclear or disease apocalypse. But this is a difficult sell when politics is addicted to the electoral free kick that comes with rewarding xenophobes and fanatics back home.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| Australia has similar, it's called Manus Island. We love pointing the finger at others yet do the same. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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We certainly have no moral high ground, that's for sure – Manus and Nauru were themselves concentration camps and, while numerically nowhere near the scope of the Xinjiang re-education centres, just as efficient at breaking minds and bodies (I say "were" as the remaining 40 or so men on Manus have since been quietly transferred to some dingy complex in Port Moresby, which means that Australia has more or less completely washed their hands of them). But we should be cautious not to use our own country's crimes to minimise others; as Rundle said in the comments of the piece above, responding to that equivalence:
| Quote: | | If the lethal organ harvesting process exists – if – then it is of an order utterly beyond anything on Manus and Nauru. And you know it. Ridiculous whataboutery. |
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I know some will disagree but I don't consider Manus or Nauru to be "concentration camps" and even without the organ harvesting, they're not comparable to what China is doing.
On one hand you have a group of people with no identification papers trying to enter the country after paying people smugglers to bring them in. They were detained off shore with access to all the basics that people in UN resettlement camps didn't have while their claims were assessed with freedom of movement within the camp and often outside.
On the other hand you have a group of people peacfully living in their native country who's beliefs don't align with the strict government line so they are randomly and force ably arrested and sentenced to "re-education" which is code for psychologically and potentially physically tortured until they toe the party line or die.
Absolute apples and coconuts.
As an aside, I stumbled on an Uyghur restaurant today in the Melbourne CBD, down a lane near the corner of Lonsdale and Russell.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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This is an interesting article that ranges from Hong Hong to the Uyghur's and around the block a bit.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-30/why-many-in-china-support-beijings-xinjiang-and-hongkong-policy/11749148
Couple of extracts.
| Quote: | At a reunion dinner with my best friends from university last month, we got into a heated discussion on Beijing's mass repression in Xinjiang and the protests in Hong Kong.
My friend Adrian, who was born and raised in Xinjiang, said he didn't feel any sympathy for the Uyghurs detained in camps there.
It shocked us that he said it just like he was talking about something ordinary.
"None of you ever lived in Xinjiang, and most of the Western reporters who write about Xinjiang have never been there in person," he said.
Of course, you can imagine how badly my other friends criticised his view. He eventually left earlier than us.
He wondered why everyone thought they knew the place better than him. |
I've seen two different views of how Western Media portrays what happens in China.
View 1 is that we present a sanitised version so as not to upset China and what's actully happening is worse.
View 2 is that we overstate things trying to undermine China, which they're fairly sensitive about.
I have NFI what the truth is, maybe it varies and it's in the middle?
| Quote: | Recent violence in Xinjiang, and the resulting sense of insecurity, is at the core of why many people across China support Beijing's policies there.
Adrian said Han Chinese, the ethnic group that make up the vast majority of mainland China's population, used to have a very close relationship with ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
But he said everything changed after riots in the regional capital Urumqi in 2009, where nearly 200 people — most of them Han Chinese — were killed after a mob of more than 1,000 Uyghurs took to the streets. |
No chance of ever knowing what actually happened here, but smells like an excuse for the Chinese Government to crack an egg with a sledgehammer to me
| Quote: | Over an uncountable number of official statements and state media news reports, Beijing has described both Uyghurs and the demonstrators in Hong Kong as "separatists", who are seeking to "undermine China's sovereignty".
This has created a huge stir in mainland China, where people take the subject of the country's sovereignty very seriously. |
The Government media is good at their job
| Quote: | Chinese human rights lawyer Qiushi Chen attended a couple of the protests in Hong Kong this August, in a bid to separate fact from fiction in regards to the mainland news coverage of the unrest.
He live-streamed the protests to his more than 1 million followers on Weibo and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to raise awareness of the pro-democracy movement inside China's Great Firewall.
"Most people were demonstrating in a peaceful manner, and most of them understood how biased media reports in China shaped people's perceptions of the movement," Mr Chen told the ABC.
Soon his accounts were permanently banned, and he was called back to the mainland by authorities. He was later disqualified from practicing as a lawyer. |
And also good at pulling people who stray from the line, into line. I suppose he was lucky he wasn't sent in for re-education
| Quote: | Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai fled mainland China as a child, reaching the island territory as a stowaway on a fishing boat.
At the age of 12, he went to work in a garment factory for around $4.5 a month — by the age of 27, he had purchased his own factory, and by his mid-30s, he had created the international fashion label Giordano.
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WTF? Someone rising from nothing to being wealthy? And he didn't even have inherited money we can blame? That would put a crimp in the undershorts of every socialist / communist.
| Quote: |
He later founded the pro-democracy Next Magazine in 1990. After the magazine published criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party, officials threatened to close Giordano stores on the mainland.
Mr Lai subsequently sold out his shares in the fashion company and founded a second publication, Apple Daily, in 1995.
"Many mainland Chinese people cannot understand the feeling of having freedom, because they had never really lived in a free society," Mr Lai told the ABC.
Since the protests kicked off in Hong Kong this year, Mr Lai has been at the forefront of the movement.
"They don't understand what Hong Kong people are fighting for. They are confused: 'If I could live my life in China like this, why can't you,'" he said |
For me that last part in my uneducated view is basically the take out.
China controls the media like Nth Korea does, but they're a shitpile smarter about it. For one, in recent years they've pushed hard to improve the quality of living, creating a pretty well to do middle class and a lot of seriously wealthy people.
When you've got a population with disposable income, able to not just have the necessities but the luxury items as well and still have cash left over, they aren't going to challenge the status quo. They've grown up knowing no different, the media is the media, life is good, people who criticise things are bad.
While they have a shitpile of people earning 9/10's of jack shit, they still buy into it. And they also have a shitpile of students who go overseas to study, who they keep a very close watch on. They have their tentacles into most international Uni's who take Chinese students.
Shades of Orwell here.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Got to keep presenting the good, the bad and the ugly and hold them in tension.
Think old England/Great Britain with its combination of dire squalor, imperialism, economic advancement, rigid social hierarchy, slave trade, science and discovery, etc. It's hope and menace all at once.
China just has to succeed.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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They're planning big. Have you looked into their "Belt and Road" strategy? There's a serious chance they'll succeed where Russia failed.
Europe is rapidly moving toward irrelevance on the world stage, a toothless geriatric in a nursing homer mumbling about past glories. the USA is moonwalking on thin ice, the stage is set for Asia.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| Colonizing Africa too. The blacks will be harking back to the days when the nice white Europeans built shit for them compared to what they'll cop from the CCP. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Because due to their moral inferiority Chinese folk can dream up even worse than colonial Europeans? Is that an attempt to revive colonial anthropology or just comedy?
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I think it’s a totally wrong conclusion, in any case. China wants client states and is undoubtedly happy to make it worth African nations’ while by providing economic assistance in return for diplomatic deference. The days of old-school European-style plundering are over; this kind of imperialism is all about co-opted hegemony.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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China wants to rip resources out of Africa as fast and efficiently as possible. European imperialism wanted to build successful vassal state allies while ripping resources as fast as barely industrial tech of the late 19th century would let them, China wants exploitation.
Takes a simple mind to equate what I said with race considering I specifically mentioned the CCP. I'm sure if it was Taiwan involved then they'd be far more humanistic and egalitarian in dealing with Africa. Do some research on Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa, it's some pretty disturbing stuff. To think they'd be genetically cleansing Tibet and the Uyghur but for some reason playing nice in Africa is insane. |
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