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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities.

While I fully believed this as far back as high school, I’m not sure I do anymore. Do you have any solid non-western sources for this?

I know a guy who is from Xinjiang (not a Uighur) and you literally need to present photo ID to enter a grocery store. Even if you don't get out in a camp everyday life is nothing like Britain.

Funny that. During the pandemic you had to show Id to get into grocery stores. And there were certain stores you were banned from altogether.

Clearly dumb, but you're not doing that anymore. They are still doing that in Xinjiang.

I tend to agree with you. The entire internment camp story appeared out of no where 5ish years ago and was convieniently timed with chilling western-Chinese relations.

The Muslim groups in western China that are oppressed used to be on the US list of terrorist organizations. They were quietly removed from that list a few years ago.

I imagine the Chinese apologist line is that these are Islamist extremists that have executed terroist attacks in the past. They’re surpressing them not unlike how Israel deals with Palestinians.

It’s not at all surprising that western liberals would be up in arms about this. Islamophobia is one of their pet issues.

I have no idea what really goes on in western china. But I certainly don’t think that the state department, cia, ngos, and media are telling me the whole truth. In fact we’ve seen them make up lies out of whole cloth many many times when it serves their strategic interest.

The Muslim groups in western China that are oppressed used to be on the US list of terrorist organizations. They were quietly removed from that list a few years ago.

The groups being oppressed there consist of entire ethnicities, not merely the organizations within them that commit terrorist acts. Hamas may be a terrorist organization, but Palestinians aren't, unless we are using the same logic that justified Japanese internment camps in the US.

But I certainly don’t think that the state department, cia, ngos, and media are telling me the whole truth.

The whole truth is that the communists destroyed the traditional religious order in western China, which had made its peace with the state, during the Cultural Revolution, and the vacuum was filled by Wahhabis from the Middle East who came in during the decades of economic liberalization. Newly radicalized elements of the Uyghur population advocated for independence and launched a series of terrorist attacks against Han residents and symbols of the government, after which the CCP concluded that Uyghur culture was the source of the problem and must be utterly destroyed. It was at this point that re-education camps were established, cameras were set up at every street corner, and millions of Han colonists were shipped in from the west to either displace the locals or assimilate them through intermarriage, guarded by a militarized police state that scrutinizes the minutest detail of daily behavior and social media history for signs of radicalization.

The entire internment camp story appeared out of no where 5ish years ago

Perhaps because that is when the camps were opened?

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

And see here

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

That's denying the existence of the camps. All that they're "admitting" to is owning buildings.

And note that China has not denied the existence of the camps but of course claims they are "vocational centers."

Is that a direct translation of "labor camps" from English (or perhaps German "Arbeitslager") to Mandarin and back again?

The Chinese name literally translates as the rather long-winded "Educational Center for Training of Professional Skills."

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