thanks for weeding thru the propaganda b.... fp is another soft prop site.. sometimes their slip shows, lol.. but i suppose their funding is depend on the state apparatus.. in fact the usa has become the new ussr with it pay for propaganda approach.. everything coming out of the usa news today is suspect.. if i want a little arsenic in my reading, i know where to go..

Posted by: james | Sep 13 2018 19:15 utc | 1

How long have the CIA been planning on using the Uyghurs? How long have they been "minding" them? The first time I heard mention of their name in the msm a few years ago I knew we'd be hearing more from them. Their affiliation and location must have been irresistible for the alphabet agencies for some time, but our relationship with China may be further gone than they're admitting if we're now openly threatening sanctions to benefit one of their minorities(who just happen to live on the border of our colony Afghanistan.

Posted by: sejomoje | Sep 13 2018 19:48 utc | 2

Talking about concentration camps, isn't it funny that the guy who tries to imitate Stalin writes op-eds in US newspapers?
And that still does not say a word on why all the major Western universities are developing Chinese language departments, exchanges with China, and that the way to success for any businessman on the 5 continents is to go open a factory there and sell junk back home.

Posted by: Mina | Sep 13 2018 20:21 utc | 3

I wonder what the tie-in is with this FP article I linked to on open thread about negotiations with Taliban saying they're a "government in waiting"? Clearly, the women have a degree of freedom only dreamt of by Saudi women. The Outlaw US Empire's government better be careful or its 2.5 million strong Gulag slave labor system will find itself in global headlines along with its well documented history of raising and training death squads to overthrow left-leaning governments which are then used to terrorize the oppressed publics of the right-wing dictators they install. (IMO, this isn't done nearly enough, although Russian media has occasionally mentioned them.)

So, what is the Outlaw US Empire afraid of? Given Xi's and Putin's words, it's afraid of nations capable of doing business far better than it can, that're free from being restricted by the goals of Corporatism, and that puts forth what was once known as the American Dream. To back that assessment, I encourage people to read Putin's address to the Eastern Economic Forum, which I relink here.

Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 13 2018 20:24 utc | 4

According to this article in scmp there is a bit of a crackdown on christians as well.

https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2119699/praise-xi-jinping-not-jesus-escape-poverty-christian

Posted by: Pft | Sep 13 2018 20:26 utc | 5

There are thousands of Uighur terrorists in Idlib. If they are to be victims, they have to be declared innocent. They've had to go to Syria to live in freedom and safety because they are persecuted by the evil commies at home.

Posted by: Gesine Hammerling | Sep 13 2018 20:32 utc | 6

According to this Asia Times article (from today) the US has been supporting freedom-fighting Uighurs for a long time as a proxy force .... long ago enough that Bin Laden claimed that Uighurs were being used to carry out Cia-supported attacks on the Chinese establishment ... (probably sounds familiar?)

"We" also apparently have long supported the separatist movement (remember how we used Tibet?) as does Erdogan

After a series of 1997 bombings in Xinjiang that Beijing ascribes to Uyghur separatists, bin Laden blamed the CIA in an interview, saying, “The United States wants to incite conflict between China and the Muslims. The Muslims of Xinjiang are blamed for the bomb blasts in Beijing. But I think these explosions were sponsored by the American CIA.”

and

This perception is due to US backing of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, which aspires to revert Xinjiang to an independent East Turkistan. The first president of the Congress was Erkin Alptekin, son of Isa Alptekin, who headed the short-lived First East Turkestan Republic in Kashgar (November 12, 1933 to February 6, 1934), and also served as an advisor to the CIA while working at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich.

The Alptekin family and Xinjiang secession enjoy strong support from Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who while being mayor of Istanbul in 1995, named a section of the Blue Mosque park after Isa Alptekin and built a memorial to commemorate Eastern Turkistani martyrs who lost their lives in the “struggle for independence.”

I've noticed these handwringing articles about the Uighurs tend to avoid discussing their presence in significant numbers among the proxy anti-Assad fighters and Syria -- thousands reportedly -- and as I was reminded from the Asia Time Article they are also fighting with ISIS in Afghanistan ... why would the Chinese be alarmed?

Asia Times: After Syria’s partition, will Xinjiang be destabilized?.

(they keep recycling the same playbooks, over and over ... "ideas lying around" indeed.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 13 2018 20:37 utc | 7

another article (same author) from May 2017

The report estimated that there were around 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese Uyghurs living in Syria, especially concentrated in Zanbaq and Jisr al Shughour, thereby changing the demographics of Idlib province.[1]

(I know I also saw another estimate of "tens of thousands" elsewhere ... a long-distance treking/mobile jihadi army)

Asia Times: Chinese Uyghur colonies in Syria a challenge for Beijing.

The "roll-out" of the "Uyhur problem" has been hamfisted and -- imho -- uncompelling ... particularly as has been mentioned America's incarceration rate/prison industrial complex and our feigned innocence/ignorance wrt other countries who have genuine armed insurgent movements we, as Americans, apparently cannot in fact imagine or emphathize with (which most of the rest of the world has had some experience with, whether Palestinian acts of terrorism in the 1980's or the Irish "problem" or Chechnya or ETA or impressively militant far right skinhead types) ...get me my smelling salts.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 13 2018 20:46 utc | 8

my bad -- I misread, Bin Laden claimed the Uyghurs were being falsely blamed...
(My bias suggests that the Ugyhurs were likely recruited as the CIA often recruits "dissidents" types as proxy forces -- however, that is NOT what was written in the article -- my apologies)

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 13 2018 20:57 utc | 9

14

There is a falling away of quality on this site - wonder why ?

Posted by: ashley albanese | Sep 13 2018 22:06 utc | 10

I came across this article indirectly through linking to some of the linked articles at this MoA post and following those articles' links:

"China: Massive Numbers of Uyghurs & Other Ethnic Minorities Forced into Re-education Programs"
https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghurs-other-ethnic-minorities-forced-into-re-education-programs/

MoA regulars are welcome to read it for what it's worth. I haven't read all of it, just parts of it, and on browsing / speeding through parts, the thought occurred to me that many if not all of these "re-education camps" may be none other than boarding schools for young people living in rural areas where the population is too low to support regular day schools.

You get passages like this one:

"... One Han Chinese businessman, who has lived in Xinjiang for 20 years, told us, on condition of anonymity, that:

“Entire villages in Southern Xinjiang have been emptied of young and middle-aged people—all rounded up into ‘re-education’ classes. Only the elderly and the very docile are left in the villages.”..."

Typically the interviewee is described in vague terms who will only speak as an anonymous source and who also describes what he knows of (directly or indirectly, we do not know) in terms so vague they seem stereotypical. For all we know, the young people may have gone to school or colleges in larger towns and cities, serving in the army (or even fighting as terrorists overseas); and the adults have gone to work in offices and factories Urumqi or in other parts of China.

Or you get this from a "young Uyghur woman":

"... “My village has about 2,000 people. I estimate about 200 of them have been sent to county-level education centers, not including those who have to attend trainings at the township and village levels. There are education sessions in the township, which some villagers are forced to attend in the mornings. There are also education sessions in the villages. My mother is required to go there. The education includes simple Chinese language and relevant Chinese laws. My mother has to go every evening, from 7:30 to 9:30… I heard that the policy required that everybody between the age of 15 and 60 must attend these sessions…Outside of those attending the county-level education camp, it’s hard to calculate the number of people who have to attend the education sessions at the township and village levels.” ..."

So it's not in the interest of Uyghur people to know basic Chinese and Chinese laws that might affect them in their daily lives?

Elsewhere in the article there is mention of "re-education" camps where people are allowed to leave to eat meals and go home to sleep. Sounds a lot like they're going to school, night school or college to me.

Posted by: Jen | Sep 13 2018 22:46 utc | 11

While "re-education camps" conjures up the worst of the "Cultural Revolution" excesses, the cultural revolution (as a concept) was world's away from the concentration-camp isolation in Siberia practiced (I gather) in Russia.

There was a belief that people could learn and change and -- most importantly -- positively adapt. We saw this in the USA in the post-60's period where radicals were encouraged to work "within the system" and (notably post-Watergate) Law schools as once-radicals, now disillusioned sought to "use the system" to purge or alter the system.

This manufactured alarm about the Uguyhs stands in stark contrast with "concern" about American Native Americans (naturally) and even the Myanmar ethnic cleansing of the Rohinghya --- which "the world" watched in "horror" for a year or so, taking no action.

These "discrepancies" are -- imho -- important evidence in demonstrating the self-interest involved in so many efforts by the worst governments to use "human rights" as a launching pad for intervention...

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 13 2018 23:03 utc | 12

FFS here we go again! I don't care how 'beneficial' the UIghur indoctrination program is claimed to be the fact is that people are being made to attend them and I know how I would feel about any authoritarian gang of invaders telling me how to think and act, it would p1ss me off no end until the mask of friendliness on the invaders slipped and we got down to what always happens under any system that is confronted with non-compliance, that is violence.
Saying that amerika is sticking their nose in to use the misery of the Uighurs for their own imperialist ends does not change the horror of a culture being driven into extinction one iota. People on the brink of losing it all turn to anyone for help even low life amerikan scum. What other choice do they have - to accept their inevitable extinction?

That is an awful choice the Uighurs are confronted with, a choice that is usually the boot on the other foot. That is Amerika doing the cultural extinction and a few people from outside trying to help the indigenous population - so what? Is some oppression and cultural extinction OK? How many is OK one maybe two cultures a year? That is garbage and deep down many of you know that but you've slipped into the same sort of "my team for evah" nonsense that you rightly criticise others for.

All that has really been revealed when you decry the poor bloody Uighurs for turning to what is really the most corrupt murderous state for aid because there is nowhere else to turn to, is the absolute parlousness of the Uighurs, that and the complete hypocrisy of all political leaders.
As I said in another thread societies are the building blocks that socialism needs to thrive, any administration which sets out to deliberately destroy a society because it isn't 'culturally homogeneous' is not socialist. It is just the usual gang of thugs who are repressing Uighur to do as amerika does, that is oppress the locals and steal any resources they can grab.

It would be better if news about Uighur opposition came from committed humanists, but that isn't likely to happen since too many of those mob have adopted the same attitudes of the other side, they just blindly believe what they are told, in this case PRC = good, amerika = evil, instead of thinking for themselves and recognising a simpler truth, that the type of human who makes the acquisition of power their life's ambition is always an evil arsehole, it doesn't matter what nonsense they spout. They don't believe any of it.

Prez Xi used to whine about the evils of so called re-education camps when his family was tossed into one during the cultural revolution. His dad had been actively spouting classist & bourgeois nonsense so the red guards told them to report for re education. It obviously didn't take (the re-education that is) since he now spouts the same sh1t as his dad did. Nevertheless instead of maybe learning that trying to force people how to think isn't a goer, now he's doing the same to others who stand in the way of him and his mates doing what they want, proving what a creep he really is. This isn't even about 'helping Uighurs how to think', at it's heart it is punishment "do as we say or you'll be back here for a very long time and that time the gloves will be off"

I am appalled at the ready acceptance of this stuff by people, merely because those committing this evil are allegedly 'un-amerikan'.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Sep 13 2018 23:42 utc | 13

Many thanks for that does of common sense. Readers who want to see just how our media actively distort even architectural and engineering coverage of Xinjiang will enjoy this charming and thoughtful article in The Diplomat. "Western Journalistic Confirmation Bias: Reporting on Kashgar’s Old Town Renewal Project". Sept 19, 2016

https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/western-journalistic-confirmation-bias-reporting-on-kashgars-old-town-renewal-project/

Posted by: Godfree Roberts | Sep 13 2018 23:45 utc | 14

Today (13sept2018) was very proficuous for the Global Times Op-ed. Six very good ones in a row (I missed the sixth one link, also about Venezuela).

In them, China shed a rare light about geopolitics from their point of view.

Here they are (can't use the HREF tool because the last obligatory / will invalidate the links), in order of importance:

China-Venezuela ties take a positive step: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119532.shtml

US fiscal and government debt woes fuelling fears of the making of new financial crisis: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119559.shtml
(curiosity: the guy who commented in this piece stated that "The level of the government debt does not mean anything when the USD is the world reserve currency, and when international payments are made in USD." Well, that is partially true: the USD is the standard fiat currency because 1) the USA is the biggest economy 2) because it dominates the Seven Seas (military might) and 3) it owns the financial infrastructure [SWIFT]. We already have a new financial system in construction [in Russia and in China], and the USN lost dominance with the Russian new hypersonic weapons. If the USA begins to register economic recessions, its allies can change sides quickly, and the USD era of dominance is over).

Capital reigns supreme in US electoral politics: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119536.shtml

How to read N.Korea’s signals in military parade:
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119340.shtml
(there's one mistake in this op-piece: the author states that "Pyongyang seems to have recognized that nuclear weapons are becoming a burden for the nation." That's not true: it is the war, not the nuclear weapons, that are a "burden")

BoE governor fails to look at China’s economy, risks objectively: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119521.shtml
(an answer to one more chapter for the "China will collapse soon(tm)" compendium; Westerners didn't even wait for the fake news of the "falling retail sales in July" corpse to cool down)

Posted by: vk | Sep 13 2018 23:45 utc | 15

@ Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 13, 2018 7:03:39 PM | 17

Props to you for saying "Russia" instead of "USSR".

Fact is, many thing that happened in the USSR were not communist inventions, but reuse of already existing habits from the times of the czarist empire: the camps in Siberia being one of them.

Stalin himself was condemned four times to these camps by the czar.

The Russian Empire had a curious system for penal punishment: the fist time you commited a crime, you went to a camp near Moscow, the second time, a little bit further east (and north); in the fourth time, you went to the infamous camp in northern Siberia, which, given the conditions of the time, was the same as a death sentence. It was in this fourth time that Stalin finally scaped and forever became an outlaw. Irony of destiny, he would return as the government a few years later, the Romanovs rotting in an unmarked ditch in the middle of nowhere.

Posted by: vk | Sep 13 2018 23:53 utc | 16

Susan Sunflower @17 may be interested to see that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_novel)

envisaged a showdown between the ruling blocs on Earth in the area around Xinjiang...

A follow-up to the classic “The Space Merchants” - with Kornbluth - describing the world ruled by giant corporations.

Posted by: Cortes | Sep 14 2018 0:37 utc | 17

This is my first post on MoA. Just because of the comments from @so_hipocrisy_rules_here_too
Everything looks reasonable to any body but only if the claims are true. What if they are totally false? The story about China in west media are always full of fabrication and half truth. They seldom do that in their own countries. It's a mysterious thing that they much more very deceitful than propaganda. So a lot of debates are based on beliefs but not fact.

Here's my belief: all the stories are fabricated. Then you will ask: why I also use belief to debate? Because there's no way to get facts. Then why my belief is better than your belief? Here's the explanation: I'm from China but live in the West for 20+ years. I've witness how West MSM lies and how most audience naively believe their lies. But that's not the reason I assume the stories are false: I have more knowledge about Chinese government. The current Chinese government (Not the people) is much smarter to deal with many issues than most western media journalist can image. The policy of what the stories show is very stupid one. It's very unlikely from the same government.

Without any approach to get the fact, we have depend on Bayesian inference. But discuss anything without facts but not realizing the situation would be not intelligent. Such as show conscience and humanity to the Uighur people. A lot of West MSM Journalist fabricate their stories might based on the same fake humanity reason. Ironically that's hypocrisy.

Posted by: jjcc | Sep 14 2018 0:57 utc | 18

".. I don't care how 'beneficial' the Uighur indoctrination program is claimed to be the fact is that people are being made to attend them.."

That 'fact' is precisely what is at issue.
What evidence do you have that there is a 're-education camp' in any sense other than that in which all schools everywhere are devoted to re-education and normally teaching curricula determined by the state.
As to 'camp'- is this a day camp, a summer camp, a Concentration Camp or what? Do people stay overnight? And for what periods? Are there guards? To keep people in? Or out?

There is a deliberate attempt, not surprisingly given 'Foreign Policy's' antecedents and funding, to conflate an official objection to salafi teaching with islamic culture. There is nothing surprising in the objection of the state to wahhabi propaganda, especially given the relationship between wahhabis , the CIA and armed uprisings- many states either officially or unofficially have the same objection.
As to the 'poor bloody Uighurs" is there any evidence that the great mass of the population do not support the 1949 Revolution and the changes that it has brought? I suspect that the Uighurs are about as persecuted in China as the Ukrainians are in Russia and white business people are in the State of Alabama. Which may be why the Uighur militias take their militants to Bosnia, Chechenya, Syria and Serbia- where guerrilla fighting does not depend on the goodwill of the surrounding population but on the bounty of the CIA.

Posted by: bevin | Sep 14 2018 1:02 utc | 19

Posted by: jjcc | Sep 13, 2018 8:57:19 PM | 25

Posted by: bevin | Sep 13, 2018 9:02:03 PM | 26

So the Uighurs have no cause to be pissed off and upset they are just pissed off and upset eh?
Bulldust. The few available hard facts tell us that the Uighurs population as a percentage of the total population in the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang has plummeted as people from the dominant Han culture of China have been shifted in, some voluntarily, but many thanks to deliberate central government policy of transmigration just like Marcos did into Mindanao. Or how Suharto shifted Javanese into the outlying communities of Indonesia. There will be thousands of tales of confiscation and injustice in Xinjiang as there are inany society that has been deliberately exterminated.
There are many posts at MoA about how neoliberal policies in western europe are 'swamping' the euro population thanks to Ms Merkel's policy of allowing people in from the ME. People, who I might add are driven from their homes by violent amerikan, nato enabled imperialism, yet we cannot claim that is a cause of Xi's neoliberal policies since afaik traditional Han population centers are not warzones.

The reality is that Uighurs have been shat upon from a great height by Beijing and they have pushing back for a long time.
I find it sickening to read the same ridiculous excuses about propaganda and wahabi extremism being spouted outta MoA posters as the neolibs and their neocon enablers spiel when taken to task about the spcial destruction they wreak.

All because it is 'their team' doing the evil act. Even among those Uighurs in Syria I wouldn't be surprised if many don't go for the amerikan/mbs designed tosh. They are there because the pigs have told them that 'help' is a two way street. Yep they are in for the same sort of rude awakening that the kurds, who incidentally have a good case underneath the bulldust their leaders spout, and I find alleged humanists cheering for Uighur destruction while denying the reality to be absolutely disgraceful.

Uighurs are just normal human beings confronted with an abnormal inhuman situation and given that much of sociopathy is a learned condition more prevalent in corrupt dog eat dog societies, I'd doubt that one in a thousand Uighurs support that wahabi dingbattery, but I betcha 999 in a thousand are upset and angry about their treatment from the dominant Han culture.
The islamic clerics and their preaching as been monitored since 1990 at least, so how are all these people getting brainwashed? The only way that could occur is if Uighurs personal experience supports the wahabi case.

As I have said before I know that many will choose to take the easy road of 'its all just western propaganda' but I'm afraid that does not explain why so many ordinary Uighurs are angry about what has been done to their community. Believe the nonsense - it sure is more comfortable if you do and I know from previous examples that even if some mass grave turned up chocka with dead Uighur citizens or someone smuggled out footage of ill treatment at a 'camp' most of you would refuse to accept it making you no different than the other mob.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Sep 14 2018 2:50 utc | 20

T. Greer, the author, is a Taiwan independence advocate that doesn't care so much about xinjiang or uighers as agitating against china and extracting a political cost from them whenever there is an opportunity. It's just agitprop and he knows it himself. As for the content of the article, a person's professed reason for being arrested and the government's reason for arresting them are not going to be the same.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 14 2018 3:30 utc | 21

China watchers have had a half-chub for a decade about the coming insurrection in Xinjiang. They're surprise now seems almost genuine, which surprises me. Did they really think the situation was going to devolve into a state of endemic warfare without an intervention? This is inside of China's borders!

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 14 2018 3:47 utc | 22

I gotta wonder what the goal is-- first, what if it turns out re-education actually works? Second, by highlighting this as a Muslim persecution help the cause of freeing them or does it inflame anti-Muslim sentiment world wide? Why are our China watches such useless morons?

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 14 2018 3:50 utc | 23

My team@27

I tend to agree with you. For many, including myself at times, we have a tendency to confirmation bias even to the extent of cognitive dissonance. The war is East va West according to some, with the East being the good guys led by Putin and Xi who will save us from US and the evils of neoliberalism. So we swallow Eastern propaganda and ignore western propaganda, just like Americans who follow Fox ridicule anything from CNN as Fake News and vice versa. The interesting thing is sometimes the other side speaks some truth.

I wont pretend to be an expert of the Uighurs situation but I do know something about Chinas authoritarian controls and wealth inequality. That matches anything in the West. In Putins Russia there is an academic has been arrested for questioning an aspect of the holocaust and retirement age is being increased which has the Koch Brothers smiling. Wealth inequality is equally high there.

The battle is fought between the 1% global elites in East and West against the bottom 90% who are unaware of who the enemy is, looking left and right and easy and west, divided by race, religion, gender, age ,nationality and immigrant status.

Its pretty much a one sided battle.

Posted by: Pft | Sep 14 2018 4:03 utc | 24

My suspicion is that the Ugyhars are sort of the **new** Kurds -- (a pet minority that Erdogan doesn't loathe and hasn't vowed to decimate). They are being elevated as a Muslim human rights cause celebre for their value as a playing card as some disposition for the jihadis of Ibdil is required (and the American public needs to be "educated" as to their plight as we were educated about the Kurds and Yazidis and the Hazaras of Afghanistan. I don't doubt that as a minority population both ethnically and religiously they suffer discrimination, increasing particularly as they are seen as wannabe separatists, and/or terrorists.

The intercept has run at least 2 articles on this "crisis" and I've seen a couple other in the last 6-8 weeks. We spent millions resetting 2 (irrc) Gitmo Ughyars on some pacific island having been absolutely unable to convince anyone else to take them and being unable to return them to China (too dangerous).

There has also been talk about the Uighur's threat to one-belt-one-road plans which is likely also positioning or "foundation laying" -- meet our new "freedom fighters"

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 14 2018 4:12 utc | 25

Dear B: Could you please scrub out DineroDProfit's trolling @ 12 - 14? The racist language posted @ 14 is bound to attract Google censors to this site. Thank you.

Posted by: Jen | Sep 14 2018 4:32 utc | 26

It is hard to know what is really going on by reading articles and looking at pictures. It takes boots on the ground from multiple trustworthy sources and that is nowhere to be found. Certainly a radical branch of Islam would be looked on as a threat by Chinese authorities. There are many good sources on the ongoing Christian persecution in China that they would certainly be seen as a threat. Imagine a large of right wing Christian Zionists growing in your country. OK, if you live in the US that requires no imagination. China is on track to have the largest Christian population in the world.

We see this spreading in Central and South America as Catholicism falls to US style evangelicalism. It would be be viewed as an exploitable power base by the West in establishing is goals. The Chinese are very able in handling any perceived threat to their power. I doubt if most Uighurs are a threat but a large band of them radicalized could cause a headache for the whole and there has been an upswing of radical Islam in Asia and Africa funded by some parties little known.

Posted by: dltravers | Sep 14 2018 4:33 utc | 27

@Susan Sunflower it's not a model situation for a number of reasons. They're have been massacres of Han people and peacemakers kidnapped and killed. China isn't struggling with bookchnities, the problem is jihadists who have been trained and armed in MENA conflicts for the last 20 years. I'm sure Ken Roth can and will ignore it, but these terrorisms havent been confined to China, and attacks have happened further into Central Asia than anyone in the West cares to learn about.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 14 2018 4:39 utc | 28

I see in this strategy by China with the radical factions as representative of their strong separation of church and state policy.

China is very clear that any religion is subservient to the state rules and conflicts between them are resolved in favor of the state. This is contrasted with America that was founded on separation of church and state but now has a 1950's revised motto that puts the church at the center of policy...In God We Trust......

America's founding fathers tried to place reason higher than faith and I see China doing the same now in managing the religious zealots and foreign conspirators.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Sep 14 2018 4:44 utc | 29

@sejomoje, #2:

>>>How long have the CIA been planning on using the Uyghurs? How long have they been "minding" them?

Since the late 90s.

Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | Sep 14 2018 4:52 utc | 30

Bernhard. You are dead wrong on this. The situation in Xinjiang is utterly horrible. It doesn´t only concern Uighurs but members of the other Turkic language minorities as well. What is happening to them is very well documented as the Chinese crackdown is overwhelming.Up to a 1000 persons with dual nationality have simply disappeared when they visited relatives in China. (Kasakh and Kirgis) Relatives of the disappeared congregate every day in the center of Astana and want their loved ones back. It is a huge, huge problem for Nasarbayev who would dearly like to ignore the whole problem and go on with his profitable relationship with China.
But he can´t. There are one and a half million Kasakhs in China and 200 000 emigrated to Kasakhstan in the last 20 years. That means there are hundreds of thousand with relatives over the border and they know what is going on. Everything you can read about in the NYT and and worse.
The result is total hatred and an enmity towards China that is hard to believe unless you have witnessed it yourself. I was just in Alma Ata and although the Kasakh government is doing everything to censor the news everybody talks about Xinjiang. The crackdown is in fact endangering China´s Belt and Road initiative.

Bernhard I am afraid you are doing a Chomsky. (Remember how Chomsky thought the news about the Khmer Rouge was just propaganda?)

Posted by: Tom | Sep 14 2018 5:19 utc | 31

"48 ways to get sent to a Chinese concentration camp"

And how many ways are there to get sent to a US concentration camp (prison)?

The US of course long has been the world leader in incarceration. And last I heard China didn't have for-profit prisons. So we see how FP, in addition to being wrong and mendacious, is nothing but a Goebbels-type propaganda rag.

Posted by: Russ | Sep 14 2018 5:19 utc | 32

@Tom Xinjiang is more important than BRI. Bottom line. These mass arrests are not the first option for China either. But also, China does envision an end to them.

Posted by: Dad | Sep 14 2018 5:29 utc | 33

@Russ if the US could do this they would have in Afganistan. Instead we get MOABs. A different kind of crime, but a decidedly pointless mass murder.

Posted by: Dad | Sep 14 2018 5:35 utc | 34

It's difficult to really know what the true policy is. The foreign press is the opposite of helpful. Are they targeting Turkic minorities of Muslims? Where in XJ? In the south? In the villages? And genuinely why? These are basic questions one has to know to begin to derive a political or diplomatic lever to end mass detentions. I don't understand why we seem to have given up on this idea.

Posted by: far_ | Sep 14 2018 5:50 utc | 35

We are looking at one of the first serious attempts by a national government to counter a movement of sedition that is relatively new in our history, or at least as we understand it.

The CIA has shown a remarkable tenderness in infiltrating and then co-opting, and then suborning, movements of the genuine heart. This demonstrated fact alone should be a topic in its own right. How can a bunch of "spooks" manage to get alongside and inside movements that undoubtedly arise from authentic causes of justice?

Nonetheless, it is so. And China has had to face this artificially fueled insurrection, and decide how to deal with it.

To me, the issue is not the cause of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Everywhere you go there is an issue and a group, and I have some myself that I identify with. But if no one interfered it would sort itself out to the satisfaction of the government and the locals and the neighbors, over time.

But someone does interfere. How then, to deal with this?

I like this article describing what China has done. It probably came from here, gratitude to the original linker: How Xi Jinping tackled radicalism in Xinjiang

It describes in technical terms how the insurrection spurred by foreigners was countered. It seems crucial to accept that whatever the original cause was when it arose authentically, all of this became compromised once it was - unwittingly by the authentic actors - co-opted by the CIA.

China mandated reeducation and accompanied this with a measurable increased prosperity of the local populace. It strikes me as an elegant approach, and one that would not have been undertaken by the capitalist west. You make the people happy, and you offer a counter-narrative. Whatever is left after that must be real. And if nothing's left, okay, then the method works. Everything is authentic again, and the problem has resolved itself.

The problem has resolved itself, just as if no filth - filth - from the west had come in the first place to preach sedition and insurrection, like it was some kind of sport, and not at all a case of playing with people's lives, and messing with their minds, and for god knows what possible gains to the world.

Posted by: Grieved | Sep 14 2018 5:54 utc | 36

Well, here in the "free" USSA we have millions of prisoners. Many of them are in supermax. These exist in little boxes with no windows, for years and years. They cannot focus their eyes upon distant objects if they are "released."

The land of the free. The 1% who are free aristocrats, that is.

China has issues. America has 99% helpless subjects. The CIA runs it all with their deep state-controlled media.

Posted by: blues | Sep 14 2018 6:06 utc | 37

@Dad You don´t know what you are talking about. The Chinese attempt amounts to nothing less than the erasure of a separate Turkic, Muslim identity. All schools teaching those languages (Kasakh, Kirgiz, Uzbek, Uighur) have been closed down. People are forced to eat during Ramadan. They must publicly drink alclohol and eat pork. People in those camps are only allowed to talk Chinese with each other. If not people are tortured. There´s a credit system in place that evaluates people according to religious belief and clothing. Beards make you liable for ending in such a camp or even wearing long frocks.
You must understand that until march 2017 the Chinese government went only after Uighurs who were outspoken. (Ilham Tohti for instance who was a lecturer at peoples university in Beijing). Now all Turkic muslims are targeted. Completely normal people who just happen to have grown up in a non Han Chinese environment. All Kazakhs are targeted although the Kazakhs have never ever showed any separatist sentiments. The number seem so crazy (ten percent of the population in camps in horrible conditions) that of course it is hard to believe. But this is definately true. One knows the size of these camps and the everyday torture there from Kazakhs with Kazakh citizenship who the Chinese had had to let go. Although the Kazakh government does everything to suppress news about Xinjiang the problem is so great and the number so large that things constantly pop up in social media. About belt and road: somehow the Chinese government seems to think that they can ignore (with the help of Kasakh, Kirgiz, Tajik and Uzbek goverments) the backlash among ordinary people. They are very wrong. There is tremendous anger and the backlash will only grow.

Posted by: Tom | Sep 14 2018 7:04 utc | 38

CIA up to no good again. The anti China smear campaign is a washington creation done via its fake NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

>How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often **does exactly the opposite of what its name implies.** The **NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA** in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period.

[looong copy of linked piece deleted - b.]

>**Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."**

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy – William Blum

https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy

Remember, all these lying shills who claim China is horrible bla bla bla have ZERO PROOF. Ask them for the proof and inevitably they cite western propagandists like Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and other FAKE grass roots groups.

Posted by: informant | Sep 14 2018 7:45 utc | 39

Americans and their Western attack dogs should never be trusted. They have lied for decades about their so-called "good intentions" while butchering innocents across the world.

Going to War: Unraveling the Tangled Web of American Pretext Stratagems (1846-1989) | http://coat.ncf.ca/articles/links/how_to_start_a_war.htm

A BRIEFING ON THE HISTORY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS By Zoltán Grossman, October 2001

Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, ...

[looooong copy of linked piece deleted - b.]

Posted by: informant | Sep 14 2018 7:46 utc | 40

Since the US loves the Uyghurs so much, the US should open its doors and allow 4 - 5 million Uyghurs to migrate to the US and treat according to US standards of human rights. China can learn from this example and apply it to Xinjiang but please do not build a wall and dump the Uyghurs within the wall.

US is now engaging in full spectrum attack on China including trade war and military threats like sailing warships and flying bombers close to China's borders.

Posted by: chan pooi hoong | Sep 14 2018 7:56 utc | 41

@Tom Then what would you say is the reason for the change following 2017?

Posted by: Dad | Sep 14 2018 7:58 utc | 42

Here's a peek to the reality on what's really happening in Xinjiang which is completely different to idiotic, fact-less western big media propaganda which is also popularized by fake "alternative" websites such as zerohedge :

https://dailytimes.com.pk/238763/how-xi-jinping-tackled-radicalism-in-xinjiang

https://www.eurasiafuture.com/2018/08/20/china-should-work-with-pakistan-to-stop-disinformation-about-xinjiangs-uighur-population/

Posted by: Face The Fact | Sep 14 2018 11:17 utc | 43

@Dad Good question. Lot´s of people have asked themselves that. Why not let things go on as they have before? I think that China has given up. Basically the hope has been that somehow they can incorporate Xinjiangs indigineous population into China. But the gulf is to big. It is hard to explain unless you have lived in China and one of the stans. I will try an analogy: if you have ever met Muslims from the near East you sure would have noticed a civilisational gap. Take my word that the gap between a European and an Uighur is smaller than between a Han and a Uighur. That is really so. From the perspective of Han security a Uighur or Kasakh is inpenetrable. Han social control has evolved over millenia and doesn´t involve religion but "shame". What is inside is not important. All important is outward appearance. The famous "face" and not losing it. Combine that with Wittvogels Asian means of production and you get a system of social control that is completely different than the one in an oasis society that is based on the believe in an after life.
When I studied in Beijing in the eighties I would get my hashish from Uighur dealers. Even back then it was very clear that Han social controls didn´t work with Uighurs.
What changed in the last years is an upswing in Han chauvinism (just as deadly as European racism) and a tightening of the screws in all of China. I feel the leadership of China is sensing troubled times ahead and they want to eliminate any kind of disturbance caused by economic troubles ahead of the fact.
What is so amazing is that they really believe they can remold a civilisation and a people by mass brain washing. It is furthermore amazing that they think that they can still go ahead with their belt and road initiative whilst they antagonize the very people with whom they want to trade.
The stans are dictatorships of varying degrees of severity. Kasakhstan is the most harmless and Uzbekistan the most repressive. Each of those governments tries to keep the lid on news coming out about Xinjiang.
But things have completely gotten out of hand. A friend of mine who buys books for one of the biggest German research libraries travels regularly to Central Asia. He is fluent in all the major local languages and also knows lesser ones like Oirat. (A mongolian tongue). He just came back from Kirgistan and Mongolia and he was truly shocked at the amount of hatred towards China and things Chinese which he encountered. Just imagine all Hispanics in New Mexico were first graded according to loyalty to the US. Then about every tenth adult is found to be lacking and put into a "reeducation" camp were they are only allowed to speak English and have to praise Trump from morning to evening. Anybody who uses Spanish is tortured.
Furthermore imagine that Mexico is wholly dependent on the US for infrastructure building and foreign exchange. So all news about what happens in New Mexico is suppressed. Very soon the government of Mexico would find itself between a rock and a hard place. Between the US on one side and its people on the other side. That is exactly what is happening now in the Stans.

Posted by: Tom | Sep 14 2018 11:19 utc | 44

@all -
Just weeded out a bunch of trollish comments. The numbering will be effected.

@Debs is dead -
No, I do not censor your comments. Yours were for whatever reason stuck in the spam queue and waited for liberation.

You wasted a half hour of my time by posting the same comment more than 10 times including under different names. It is real hassle to sort out such a mess. If a comment does not go through please just wait until I wake up and release it.

Posted by: b | Sep 14 2018 11:38 utc | 45

I can't claim to be an expert on China, but I did travel around the country some thirty years ago and it left a deep impression on me. One of things that intrigued me was the chance to see a communist system working. Deng Xiao Ping's 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' policy had just begun, there were little pockets and pilot projects of free enterprise but essentially it was still a centralised economic system. However, after just a few weeks I realised that whatever was on the surface (over half the people were still wearing Mao suits) actually it was not a communist state but a Confucian one.
Confucianism could be described as applied philosophy, it sets out how to equitably run a large and complex society. The individual citizen has a responsibility to practice 'ren' - a respect for the order, meeting responsibilities to family and community - being a solid citizen in other words. The structure is strictly hierarchical but meritocratic. Confucius himself introduced the civil service exams which meant that a son of a peasant could rise to minister of state if able enough. Respect for one's elders is also a deep part of Chinese culture.
The system has a very strong centre - in the past the emperor today the party, power radiates from there. But, the considerable authority of the centre is only legitimate if it is virtuous, the concept of 'zhou'. The prime function of the centre is to maintain order: "Order is contentment" said the sage. To see your child leave home in the morning to walk a mile to school and come home again safe in the afternoon. Not to have bandits raiding your village, killing your family, destroying your world. China has experienced many periods of 'luan': chaos, total breakdown of order, and it is etched deep in their racial memory. "All things under one heaven", an injustice to one is an injustice to all. Of course these are ideals, the reality doesn't match such lofty ambitions, but in Xi Xinping I see a real Confucian - his 'Win win" policy approach for example. The serious purge of corruption, particularly at the highest levels is also testament to the desire to practise virtue in the leadership.
In Xinjiang, they will look at the emergence of terrorist groups with the utmost gravity - such organisations exist precisely to attack order and as such are anathema. The Chinese system does not sit easily with Western liberal sentiment. Historically rebellion carried a sentence of "Death to the Ninth Degree" (basically they kill you and your entire family and pretty much everyone you know) but today the fallen corrupt official on the short drive to the execution ground and the bullet in the back of the head knows this is how they deal with such things.
I've no doubt some will label this as an apologia for autocracy, but of all the million things I learned in China the realisation that everything I thought, all my ideals and concepts were those of a western liberal mind, they are not universal values (however much we like to pretend they are). The Chinese mind and mindset is fundamentally different and I have no right to tell them how they should do what they have been doing for millennia. Autocracy? Sure, if you want to call it that, but to my mind it is just the Chinese way and my time spent there taught me to respect that.

Posted by: Ross | Sep 14 2018 12:10 utc | 46

Sounds quaint the claim Uighurs are being are being brain washed in schools. In the United States we gladly set in front of our televisions and watch Main Stream Media......

Posted by: ger | Sep 14 2018 13:09 utc | 47

Bernhard

According to the Intercept (One million muslim Uighurs have been detained by China, the U.N. says. Where’s the global outrage? https://interc.pt/2MHsHPw by @mehdirhasan):

".......On Friday, a panel of U.N. human rights experts said Uighurs in Xinjiang were being treated as “enemies of the state” and announced that it had received credible reports about the “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” in “counter-extremism centers.”........."

How many Uyghurs do you believe are currently being held in "reeducation" camps?

Posted by: craigsummers | Sep 14 2018 13:28 utc | 48

Guardian: 'My soul, where are you?': families of Muslims missing in China meet wall of silence.

Guardian article provides color and some context ... reliant on anecdotes mostly from Kazakhstan with mention of a "repatriatioon" and likely (afaict) an attempt to control/harden a longstanding previously porous/open border. (part of the toxic "sharpening of contradictions" seen in response to terrorism, not unique to China or the "Chinese")... interesting article, raises more questions than answers, particularly given Amnesty's involvement on the ground.

In Kazakhstan, where many have family in China or grew up there before moving across the border as part of a repatriation programme, the situation in Xinjiang is nothing short of a crisis.

Atazhurt, a local organisation that advocates for ethnic Kazakhs detained in China, says it gets between 20-30 requests for help every day from people whose relatives have been detained, arrested, or barred from leaving China. The group is dealing with more than 1,000 cases.

During recent interviews with researchers from Amnesty International, more than 100 people showed up clutching documents and photos of their missing relatives. Those detained include parents, grandparents, siblings, children and partners.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 14 2018 13:47 utc | 49

@47 Ross

Thanks for that excellent comment. We walked a mile in Chinese shoes. And came home safe in the afternoon.

You must be familiar with the things written by Jeff Brown, Godfree Roberts and lately Ramin Mazaheri about how modern-day China works. What is most clear to me from reading a few real facts about China and how its social, economic and political systems work, is that the western narratives are completely useless. Worse than useless because they're actually totally misleading, some innocently and ignorantly so, and some of course as pure propaganda.

I think you are correct in your take on the nation and its underlying philosophies and the overarching respect paid to harmony in all things.

Posted by: Grieved | Sep 14 2018 14:02 utc | 50

Debisdead.....

first, how can you accuse others of not accepting a "genocide pit" before it even happens? nice skepticism.

999 out of 1000 would means 999k out of 1million or 9 out of 10 pple so i'll take your bet.... what you wagering? emotions? or the fact this wager can't even be confirmed? or can i walk in all the district in urumqi at the least and ask and average it out.

or maybe i am just another it's all western propaganda bs robot. you got it all covered man. no sense persuading you.

you would think someone would of smuggled out footage of this "massacre pit" or reeducation camp, since 999k out of 1million gives good chances that someone saw this and knows where it is.but kind of hard to condemn it if someone already accuses you of refusing to condemn it. even before there is evidence. ridiculous.

serious question. how would you like china to deal with chicago and antifa the way usa has been? milking it and causing as much division as possible? how would you like usa to deal with uighur? the similarities are striking.

Posted by: jason | Sep 14 2018 16:01 utc | 51

@ Ross # 47

Thanks for the perspective. MoA and the world need more of it.

Ross wrote: "....Confucianism could be described as applied philosophy, it sets out how to equitably run a large and complex society. The individual citizen has a responsibility to practice 'ren' - a respect for the order, meeting responsibilities to family and community - being a solid citizen in other words. The structure is strictly hierarchical but meritocratic. Confucius himself introduced the civil service exams which meant that a son of a peasant could rise to minister of state if able enough...........But, the considerable authority of the centre is only legitimate if it is virtuous, the concept of 'zhou'. ...."

I would like to understand more about how this fits with the new China social ranking system that I have been reading about. It sounds like a transparent and above board management of society as contrasted with the Western antithesis of such. I predict that the West will attack China on its system because "freedom".

Posted by: psychohistorian | Sep 14 2018 16:20 utc | 52

According to Tom @ 39, “@Dad You don´t know what you are talking about. The Chinese attempt amounts to nothing less than the erasure of a separate Turkic, Muslim identity. All schools teaching those languages (Kasakh, Kirgiz, Uzbek, Uighur) have been closed down. People are forced to eat during Ramadan. They must publicly drink alclohol and eat pork. People in those camps are only allowed to talk Chinese with each other. If not people are tortured. There´s a credit system in place that evaluates people according to religious belief and clothing. Beards make you liable for ending in such a camp or even wearing long frocks.”
I haven’t lived in China but I visited Xinjiang this summer, specifically Ürümqi, Kashgar, and Turpan (the latter I visited at the end of Ramadan). I also spoke to two activists who told me about the detentions which are becoming stricter, given that – according to one of the activists - Chen Quanguo, the former Tibet Party Secretary recently became Xinjiang Party Secretary. A lot of what one activist told me coincides with the information provided by Jessica Batke, who served as a U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Analyst, in THIS article. The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research is well known for competence at gathering information, but that doesn’t dispel the accusation that they have ulterior motives (ie. Fomenting a “color” or any other type of revolution). The activist however also told me that the vast majority of those Uyghurs undergoing “re-education” are released after several months, once said “re-education” is finished. It isn’t unreasonable to believe that those individuals held indefinitely or allegedly tortured likely have links to groups that have been involved in violence or have travelled to Syria to join ISIS (something which is also thoroughly documented).
Now, to address what Tom@39 says (and I quoted) above, I seriously have to dispute the very vague claims he makes that “People are forced to eat during Ramadan.” And that “They must publicly drink alcohol and eat pork.” Who is forced to eat during Ramadan? How are they “forced to eat” during Ramadan? As I said, I was in Xinjiang during Ramadan, and specifically was in the city of Turpan at the close of that Muslim holiday where the masses take to the streets to break fast. The mood was celebratory and actually quite impressive, and I didn’t witness any police nor army personnel patrolling or hindering access to Mosques or otherwise stifling gatherings, much less doing anything as ridiculous as forcing anyone to publicly drink alcohol and eat pork.
The final point I would like to make is that if you were to go into Id Kah Mosque, reportedly China’s largest Mosque, as I did in Kashgar, you will see a large photo of Xi Jinping greeting the Imam. In a communist system, photos are meant to convey a message. I would post the photo here if I could and ask what you would think the message being conveyed is. IMO it is a message of acceptance. All present are smiling and Xi Jinping is shaking the hand of the Imam as an obvious gesture of greeting. All indications are of recognition and acceptance, despite the obvious implication that the Chinese leader is the Head of State and is in charge. I don’t see anything that would lead me to think there is a repudiation of Islam being conveyed in said photo. Similarly, in the renovated Old City of Kashgar, one can see several tributes to the Uyghur people’s traditions and abilities (and which are on full display for tourists). Although a little too touristy for my likes, I interpret all of this as a recognition (and celebration) of the value of Uyghur culture, a far cry from wiping out or “erasing” their identity.

Posted by: Maracatu | Sep 14 2018 16:38 utc | 53

Maracatu @54--

Thanks for your report! Lots of swine slop being flung about on this thread. The effort shown reveals the trepidation within those running the Outlaw US Empire at the ongoing success of BRI planning and accelerating Eurasian integration. And as their smear-based BigLies continue to fail to change the views of other nations about China, the more outrageous and shrill the smears will become--just look at anti-Russian campaign for a preview.

Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 14 2018 16:53 utc | 54

@Susan Sunflower:

Interesting article.
1.Curious though, how did the first interviewee's wife manage to keep her mobile phone while in detention over a month, and even text him?
Didn't she send him pictures to show the environment she was in, the state of her physical and mental state?
2.The journalist then describes a hijab-clad woman who was taken away for praying - not inside a mosque?.
I believe there are places (France?) that forbid women from full hijab in public.
Dress is the most visible symbol of identity. In Turkey, Ataturk outlawed the fez because it was a sign of Muslim feudalism and backwardness.
Ditto the hijab, imo. It is not Kazakh or Uyghur; it is about Islamic fundamentalism and Arabism.
Too often, it is not individual choice, but peer pressure that starts with a minority of religious nuts and the peer pressure just snowballs for everyone to dress, think and behave same.
So, if China is `brainwashing' the Muslims, it is trying to reverse what has been done.
They are free to be Kazakh, Ugyhur, and practise Islam, but their loyalty is to the country. TBH, that can be quite hard, because Islam is an all-encompassing way of life, and Saudi Arabia is the main custodian of its holiest.
3.Cleverly, all these articles leave out the separatism factor and cast the campaign against Islamic radicalism as unalloyed suppression.
4. If Western societies feel such high compassion, why not take all the Muslim Kazakhs and Uyghurs then, as someone has said?
And the middle Eastern ones as well.
As Deng Xiaoping famously told Jimmy Carter who urged China to allow free movement for its citizens: how many Chinese do you want? Five million? 10 million?
Sweden is having second thoughts about Muslim refugees, I hear.
A friend of mine relates the story of a busload of newbies who were allocated to a remote provincial town.
When they arrived, they decided they didn't like it and demanded a new location.
5. Not all cases are genuine. Pleading `human rights' abuse and political persecution are the quickest exit ticket to the `wealthy' West.
Where I live, there are many cases where people arrive as tourists, throw away their passports and go to the UNHCR to claim refugee status. Many get through. I was stuck with two, don't ask me the details.
5. Bottom line: the six-digit figures are likely fake - one or two million Uyghurs means at least a quarter of the population. I speak to the Muslim drivers when I use my ride-hailing app.
They question the logistics and manpower of such a sweeping campaign. Western propaganda doesn't work on everyone. Not me and my drivers, at least.
You have a good evening.

Posted by: LittleWhiteCabbage | Sep 14 2018 17:13 utc | 55

tom, dad and maracatu... thanks for sharing your perspective.. maracatu's comments are especially enlightening..

Posted by: james | Sep 14 2018 17:21 utc | 56

yes, I was impressed by the contradictions and the lack of backgrounding ... a woman detailed for 2 weeks for not carrying identification. Is that a law? was it her first offense, even was it adjudicated (seems like a minor ticketing offense unless there's a law and/or there's more to the story) One man mentioned had been in detention for 10 years with no indication of his offense... others reportedly "hope to be released in 2 years" --- why do they hope 2 years? again for what?

This sort of compilation of anecdotes is notoriously unreliable in field work (even with people giving their names and identifiers) ... people tell other people's stories as their own in their eagerness to get "on the record"; everyone in a village knows someone (possibly the same someone) who has been detained, etc. things may be exaggerated but almost never minimized. Even the descriptions of various reeducation facilities sounded a lot like schools or barracks. And many of the stories were Kazakstan, yes, Muslim, perhaps not singling out Uighurs except as they are Chinese citizens.

After the spectacle of the Rohingya purge/ethnic cleansing/massacres/charges of potential attempted genocide, this uproar seems out of place (likely politically motivated). Issues of sovereignty are waved away in some instances R2P and in so many other instances there's no "will" to intervene and little discussion of anything but sanctions and/or use of force. We've learned nothing since the days of handwringing over the Taliban pre-09/11.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 14 2018 17:34 utc | 57

The trolls have come to moon of alabama. Notice how the efficiency of the comments section goes way down - before there were different viewpoints. sometimes valid or criticisms of the article. many I didn't agree with but easily moved on to other more pertinent points. now one has to read several by the same person before one realizes this is just a troll. Other people reply spending good energy and creating even more verbiage before the sincere commenters can be read. In some ways it is an official compliment for moon's articles. They are worthy of attention and are picked up by other blogs - so the comments section needs to be destroyed for its value.

Posted by: gepay | Sep 14 2018 18:23 utc | 58

pft 24
\
In an earlier thread you posted this bizarre comment....

*Dont ditch the USA, everybody should ditch their own elites...*

To begin with, this sounds very condescending.
How do you know the Chinese wanna ditch their 'elites', when even western polls shows CCP enjoys mass approving rate from the people ?

Ditto for Russia, Iran, Venesuala.....

How about the murikkans start the ball rolling
by ditching their elites first ?

Getting rid of the Washington cesspool should be a top priority for the simple reason that it poses the gravest threat to world peace.
A veritable hq for international terrorism.

Besides, Shouldn't charity starts at home ?

---------------------

------------------------------------------

tom 39

*during Ramadan. They must publicly drink alclohol and eat pork*

The trouble with yoU AND your ilks , you
dont seem to be able to differentiate bet
an accusation and a fact.

Can you substantiate this accusation ?
Dont think so.
just farting in the wind ?

When I read this nonsense the first time
while browsing the web, I curse out loud,
WTF !

I smell B.S. right away, CUZ such measures
sounds highly improbable, its In direct contradiction to known CCP preferential
policies for minorities in Tibet. ,
Xinjiang, designed to appease , not to antagonise..
Viz,...Exemption from one child rule, mass subsidization in economy, exemption from
tax, lower entrance barrier in uNi..
In murikka they'd sniff
'ah, those AA idiocies..!

For all I know, there might well be
re-education camps to de-program radicalised jihadists.
BUt trampling on muslim core sensitivities
by 'forcing them to eat pork' etc ?
FFS, This is an invitation for trouble,
which the CCP has been bending over backwards
to avoid/

Since there aint no sign of CCP going bonkers,
I suspect those who conjures up such nonsense and those who believe it ought to have their heads examined.

----------------------

Comment is free, facts are sacred.....

Lets talk about the facts and only the facts.

First off some theoroms...
1] fukus are liars in chief of the 5lies
2] fukus are rabid anti chinese.
Ergo..
Swallow fukus propaganda at your own risk !

ON HYPOCRISY

For those who cry hypocrisy on b & co.
Pleeeze, the real hypocrites are of course
fukus, the convicted mass murderers of muslims, now posing as judge, prosecutor and executioner over alleged repression of muslims in China !

A glaring omission here is the known repressions in Kashmir.
not a peep from the 'international communities' , aka the 5lies.
In fact India is hailed as a 'shinning light on the hill' in Asia and rewarded with enhanced collaboration in trade and hi tech/military transfer.

Go figures .

Then there'r those murikkans in this thread.

I've come across quite a number of yank tourists who initially pose as Cannucks etc., after a
few drinks when they started to loosen up they confess their true identity.

See. , they'r so ashamed for what fukus have
been doing in their names that they have to hide their identity to avoid embarrassing questions .!

I'd do exactly the same if I were yank.
Sheeesh, If I cant even fix my own cesspool,
I'll be damned to poke my nose into others latrines.
But like they say, it take all kinds in this world.
hhhhh

ON CIA

This is obviously the latest CIA/NED op to incite jihad , or at the very least disruption to derail the BRI project, of which Xin is a vital node.

fukus engineered bloodbath in 2009, where CIA backed Uighurs head choppers slain Hans /Huis
etc like sacrificial lambs in violent riots, followed with a media blitz to spin it as
'brutal crackdown on unarmed protestors'
exactly like what they did in Tibet in 2008.

The presstitudes moaned disapprovingly,
'why no outrage of muslims' !
We hear the same cry now, 'why such silence from the muslim world' ? [sic]

Those who murdered millions of muslims in ME
by saturation bombings and drones executions
aint content that they've been getting away
scot free,...
No, they want to incite an international jihad against the Hans, whose preferential policies on the minorities would put the likes of Indon/India/Turkey/USA to shame. !

They dont call them fukus for nuthin you know

Posted by: denk | Sep 14 2018 18:26 utc | 59

For those crying about the death of certain aspects of Uyghur culture, please understand that some culture really does deserve to die. Some culture is not compatible with modern human existence. For extreme examples think cannibalism or slavery. But aspects of culture need not be so extreme to be justifiable candidates for consigning to the dustbin of history. One of the Han Chinese cultural traits that was not so extreme but was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution with nobody crying for its loss is the practice of foot binding, so generalized crying about lost culture is obviously not warranted in all, or even most circumstances. In the West (and a good portion of the rest of the world) we have destroyed the cultural trait of child labor and introduced compulsory education, generally up to the age of sixteen or thereabouts.

While some might think of people living in mud huts and warming their hands over fires of burning dried camel dung as charmingly bucolic, the reality of living that culture is anything but. In fact, expecting children to grow up in that kind of environment when more contemporary alternatives abound can be considered a kind of child abuse.

What cultural treasures do you believe are being destroyed by China in this case? Uyghur cuisine, perhaps? Nope, Uyghurs are NOT being forced to eat McDonald's lardburgers or anything like that. On the contrary, Uyghur cuisine is appreciated all across China and every major city has authentic Uyghur restaurants staffed by Uyghurs. Uyghur handicrafts? Sadly, traditional folk crafts always suffer when they have to compete with products produced with modern industrial processes, but that said, the Chinese government is subsidizing artisans to keep some crafts alive. To be certain, it is in Disneyized settings and for the benefit of tourists, but how else would you go about keeping traditional crafts using obsolete production techniques alive?

Compulsory education does destroy some culture, and that is every bit as true in the USA as in China. It also prepares children to be better citizens and to lead better and more enjoyable lives. The better aspects of Uyghur culture will definitely be preserved, while the aspects that don't fit with modern society will eventually die out, even if the Chinese government doesn't hurry the process along. In fact, the only reason the Chinese government is actively modernizing the culture in Xinjiang is to counter very aggressive efforts by the Saudis, Turkey, and the USA to bend a portion of the population there towards barbaric wahhabism. Without this aggressive negative influence the regressive aspects of Uyghur culture would die out naturally with no state intervention necessary.

Posted by: William Gruff | Sep 14 2018 19:06 utc | 60

@Grieved:

Do you know where I can find Godfree Roberts' website or blog, if he has one? And do you know where I can find the book China 2020: Everything You Know Is Wrong by Godfree Roberts? I can't find it on Amazon.

Does anyone know anybody else like Godfree Roberts who I can perhaps listen to or read? Also, would anyone recommend listening to Carl Zha?

Posted by: TruthFinder | Sep 14 2018 19:57 utc | 61

Recently the NED has been focusing on Xinjiang, and as a consequence there has been many negative reports about the situation there in Western newspapers and on global TV.

For documentation see:

https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2018/09/03/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-and-china/

Posted by: Rolf | Sep 14 2018 21:17 utc | 62

Since history of culture is my field of research, I feel a little more freedom to comment about it in general terms.

First of all, "Culture" is a very modern concept. Anything from before UNESCO did not have a concept of culture as we understand today. Same thing for "race", which is a 18th/19th (any date from Linaeus is valid) concept and didn't exist before then.

If we take a very broad concept of "culture", and analyse objectivelly what happens to them in History since Antiquity, we can comfortably say the the modification and extinction of "cultures" is the rule, not the exception. "Cultures" are faded to clash, mix, and extinguish one another. Preservation of "culture" over a very long period of time is the exception, not the rule.

100 years from now on, everything we take for granted today (e.g. division of "races" between whites, blacks and yellows, and the respective stereotypes between them will probably be just dust of History. They possibly (I said "possibly" because we live in the first period ever that has universal standardized education and electronic dictionaries and orthographic correctors) won't speak the same languages at all too.

Posted by: vk | Sep 14 2018 21:20 utc | 63

Debisdead @ 20:

I'd be wary of quoting anything from Britannica.com. Its Encyclopaedia Britannica forerunner has been a US publication for decades.

The Britannica.com article says little about the history of the Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang. The impression given is that Uyghurs have lived in Xinjiang for a long time and the Han Chinese started settling there only since the mid-20th century.

Even a little research into the history of Xinjiang (Wikipedia, for all its biases, is a decent enough start) reveals that the Han Chinese, the Uyghurs and other ethnic groups living there - and the region itself was defined physically by the Chinese - were settled there after the 1750s by the Manchu emperor Qianlong, after the Manchus wiped out the Dzungaria state in that area.

In addition the genocide of the Buddhist Mongol people of Dzungaria was carried out by the Chinese and Uyghur allies, along with disease epidemics caused by the chaos that war brought. The Dzungarian survivors fled into Mongolia or deep into the Russian empire (in the latter, ending up along the lower reaches of the Volga River northwest of the Caspian Sea, where they are known as Kalmyks).

Chinese settlement in Xinjiang, especially in northwest Xinjiang, dates back at least to the 1760s as a result of Manchu Qing resettlement policies favouring Turkic groups and Islam, and at the same time, and perhaps deliberately, separating Tibet and Mongolia (both followers of Lamaist Buddhism).

https://infogalactic.com/info/East_Turkestan_under_Qing_rule

Posted by: Jen | Sep 14 2018 21:53 utc | 64

@51 Grieved

Thank you. Yep, the Chinese have been learning how to be Chinese for a couple of millennia and more and have just about cracked it I reckon.

@53 psychohistorian

Thank you. A couple of anecdotes you will enjoy. On two occasions in the PRC I found myself being chased after by a local. The first time was in Beijing. I had just sunk a pitcher or two of the excellent (and very cheap) Chinese beer in a cafe with a Swiss guy, and left the establishment. A man rushed out of the cafe and came charging up the road after us, and after 100 yards or so caught up. It turned out the price of the beer had included a returnable deposit for the pitcher, and rather than just let the stupid foreigner walk away and pocket the cash he chased us down to give me back what was mine.
The second occasion was actually in Xinjiang, Turfan to be exact. I was at a market and bought a snack, while unknowingly dropping a small denomination note at the same time. An elderly gentleman in tribal garb came shoving his way through the throng, tapped me on the shoulder, and with a smile and polite nod of his head handed the money back to me. A couple of travellers' tales cannot extrapolate out to a billion and more people, but there did seem to be a strong moral sense amongst the populous.

@60 denk

A point you touch on is worth repeating. The one child policy was never applied to any of the tribal regions. The Beijing government recognised that the smaller ethnic groups needed higher replacement rates than the Han Chinese to remain viable, so they were actually discriminating in favour of the Uighurs and the other minorities.

Posted by: Ross | Sep 14 2018 22:52 utc | 65

Denk@60

*Dont ditch the USA, everybody should ditch their own elites...*

Thats not an exact quote unless my identity or comment was hacked

Western polls? How many Chinese feel free to answer a poll question on their satisfaction with the party elite?

Internet and social media are heavily censored because anonymous posters express discontent. No voting right for high level of government. Only 6% of population are accepted as party members

Corruption and wealth inequality is a big source of discontent. China has more billionaires than the US, most of whom are party members. 102 members of the NPC are billionaires (US congress has none). Poverty, a poor social welfare system, air pollution, worker exploitation are all issues, as is debt and unaffordability of housing in the cities.

Not to say improvements have not been made there but its not paradise and the lack of freedom of expression make polls meaningless

As for Venezuela, its the elites who are attacking their socialist government and people. Russia of course is famous for the oligarchs who looted nationsl assets. Iran-no idea. The saker series suggest its not as much of a problem as it may be religious elites are more fair better than economic elites

Posted by: Pft | Sep 15 2018 1:12 utc | 66

@ Pft who wrote: "...The saker series suggest its not as much of a problem as it may be religious elites are more fair better than economic elites"

I do not agree for the monotheistic religious elites. If the monotheistic religious elites were more fair they would have called out the cancer of Western private finance by now.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Sep 15 2018 2:33 utc | 67

Pft @ 67:

In many Western countries, some of the biggest property owners are religious organisations (both local religious organisations and those with overseas headquarters) which also get tax exemptions on account of their operating charitable organisations. These charities can also operate as money laundering funds to help reduce tax reporting obligations.

How did the Roman Catholic Church come to be powerful in the first place? Among other things, the Church accumulated a lot of property in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the dominant form of Christianity.

Posted by: Jen | Sep 15 2018 6:07 utc | 68

What rubbish propaganda. I fact checked one claim from the article against the linked HRW report. The report says the person who attempted suicide in the facility, when caught, was told: "We're going to sentence you for another seven years for having attempted suicide."

That obviously is a very rational basis for the rhetorical propaganda: "How can "Trying to kill yourself when in the education camps" be a reason to be send into an education camp?"? They were not sent there for that, but their sentence extended.

If you are into Leftist thinking, obviously attempting suicide is a mental disease, for which rehabilitation (re-education) is the prescribed medicine. Do an internet search for "involuntary commitment attempted suicide".

Posted by: CalDre | Sep 15 2018 7:30 utc | 69

Truthfinder @ 62:

Dr Godfree Roberts' blog at this link: https://godfreeroberts.blogspot.com/

Dr Godfree Roberts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GodfreeTRH

And well, whattaya know, here's the first thing Dr Roberts retweeted: a link to Ben Norton and Ajit Singh's article "No, the UN Did Not Report That China has 'Massive Internment Camps' for Uighur Muslims" at Grayzone Project:
https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-china-internment-camps-uighur-muslims/

Posted by: Jen | Sep 15 2018 11:34 utc | 70

pft 67

*Maybe folks would be better off focusing on ditching their own elites than ditching the US and jumping from the oven into the fire.*

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/08/trump-ties-north-korea-talks-to-trade-deal-with-china.html

Everybody , stop worrying about fukus ,hit the streets and bring down your own 'elites' ,,,problem solved !

This must be fukus's wet dream, it has been trying its damndest to regime change China since 1949 without success...!

what a brilliant concept, everybody doing DIY regime change, putting CIA assholes
out of job. ;-)

*China is not a paradise, *

Nobody says it's.
THE people are satisfied with the vast progress since 1949.

https://www.businessinsider.com/pew-research-global-satisfaction-map-2014-2/?IR=T

http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/3/country/45/response/Dissatisfied/

Who'r you to tell them to do a regime change ?

Posted by: denk | Sep 15 2018 13:44 utc | 71

Video from the WSJ about the surveillance state in Xinjang is interesting as it treats a *specific* aspect and some of the pix etc. => informative. It does strike me that such vids. attribute characteristics to China that actually might applicable to "Home."

https://youtu.be/OQ5LnY21Hgc 8 mins. 2017

China's problems with the Uyghurs.

Doc is 100% sympathetic to Ouighours. I enjoyed watching it - views, good photog, ppl, etc. and it brings up a lot of points, such as oil and energy, gives a view on tourism, etc.

https://youtu.be/sJ3fG-tnzCk 50 mins HD 2014

No rating of these on a scale from thruthiness to propaganda from me.

(grieved thx for the link to vid about moscow on other thread)

Posted by: Noirette | Sep 15 2018 15:01 utc | 72

Ross 66

*A point you touch on is worth repeating. The one child policy was never applied to any of the tribal regions. The Beijing government recognised that the smaller ethnic groups needed higher replacement rates than the Han Chinese to remain viable, so they were actually discriminating in favour of the Uighurs and the other minorities.*

Exactly.

I have been challenging China bashers to name me one country with a more enlightened minority policies than China, so far no takers ;-)

during the 2008 Tibet destabilisation, I proposed in GUardian that actually 'China ought to be awarded the Nobel peace prize for its exemplary minority policies',
I was immediately pounced on by dozens of fukusIndians posters, one Brit was livid with rage, calling me 'crazy' !
poor dears, the anglos dont realise they'r the ones getting brainwashed !

Posted by: denk | Sep 15 2018 15:30 utc | 73

@ Posted by: Pft | Sep 14, 2018 9:12:43 PM | 67

China has more billionaires than the US, most of whom are party members

The USA has the biggest number of billionaires if you account for ratio of population (571/325 million to 819/1.5 billion). The difference is even more obscene if you consider the American richest billionaire is more than two and a half times richer than the richest Chinese billionaire. So, yes, even among them, they are not equal: e.g. Trump is technically a billionaire, but he's a "poor" billionaire.

And I would like to know your source about CCP members who are also billionaires. I'm curious.

Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2018 17:18 utc | 74

here is an article on this topic from today at strategic-culture...

Is Langley Unleashing Jihad Against China in Xinjiang?

quote from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerso August 18, 2018 on why the usa is in afganistan..

THIRD, WE WANT TO BE ABLE TO MOUNT AND COVER WITH HARDPOWER CIA OPERATIONS IN XINJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA’S WESTERNMOST SECTION. THESE WOULD BE OPERATIONS AIMED AT USING THE SOME 20 MILLION UIGHURS IN THAT PROVINCE TO DESTABLIZE THE GOVERNMENT IN BEIJING SHOULD WE SUDDENLY FIND OURSELVES AT WAR WITH THAT COUNTRY.

Posted by: james | Sep 15 2018 18:45 utc | 75

ps - the article @76 quotes moa! thought b might to know about that..

Posted by: james | Sep 15 2018 18:57 utc | 76

China has a dictatorial government, so some persistent abuse is a given, but

They have some principles, and I would like to have decent verification about abuses that go outright against their own principles. For example, ethnic minorities have a number of rights, like education in their own language (but the proportion between classes in the native language and state language can vary and that can cause tension in different places, like Poland vs Lithuania), the right to cultivate their ethnic dress than surely includes the headgear, as in the photo that illustrates this article etc.).

Quantification of the abuses come from anecdotes extrapolated by bias AND innumerate journalists, and we know examples how the can transmute several hundreds of refugees, Venezuelans on Equadorian borders or Syrians at Jordanian border, into hundreds of thousands.

Re-education seems like a pragmatic and rather mild measure if applied as, say, evening studies. This may be weird to Westerners, but American have their own weird stuff. Pragmatic and mild measures may go out of hands because of some incidents and periodic campaigns, unfortunately, Western reporting is bias and unreliable, so hard to tell the dimensions of the problem.

Treatment of minorities in border regions is substandard in a lot of places, especially in Asia that has more of that problem than, say, Oceania and even Africa. Kurds, Baluchis, Kashmiris, folks in India near Myammar border, Rohingas in Myammar, Malays in Thailand, Vietnamese in Cambodia, and assorted folks in Indonesia, this is the list that I can produce from memory, they cause problems to their countries and are subjected to abuse. China has strategic and security issues in Xinjiang and Tibet. How China compares with Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Myammar, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia?

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 15 2018 22:10 utc | 77

Nice bit of Orientalism Piotr @78.

Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2018 22:57 utc | 78

Two items:
- China is reported as refusing visa to German nationals with Turkish names. ("China soll Deutsche mit türkischem Namen diskriminieren", Welt, 10.11.2017)

- Enter a Chinese airport wearing a "salafist" type beard and police are more likely to ask you questions.

Seems to me China does whatever is needed for law and order, and does not care whether that's politically correct or not. China has 3000 years experience with how to run a country, give or take a century.

Posted by: Passerby | Sep 16 2018 14:47 utc | 79

'THIRD, WE WANT TO BE ABLE TO MOUNT AND COVER WITH HARDPOWER CIA OPERATIONS IN XINJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA’S WESTERNMOST SECTION. THESE WOULD BE OPERATIONS AIMED AT USING THE SOME 20 MILLION UIGHURS IN THAT PROVINCE TO DESTABLIZE THE GOVERNMENT IN BEIJING SHOULD WE SUDDENLY FIND OURSELVES AT WAR WITH THAT COUNTRY'

If someone broadcast his plan to commit murder, he'd immediatley get a visit from the police.

In international politics, where aggression on states could kill up to millions, one'd have thought there'r very stringent international laws in place to deter aggressor states.
In reality, the world under 'rule based' pax murikka is a disastrous anarchy !

See, fukus can openly discuss how its gonna attack any sovereign country as if they'r discussing the weather, no consequences...not a peep from the 'world community'.
Imagine the hue and cry if China/Russia disclose similar plan to attack fukus ?

But these aint just idle talks, fukus has actually carried out its plan to attack hundreds of countries since ww2....
with no consequences/ !

murikkans , left and right, keep sneering that there aint no freedom under 'communism'.

The license to commit genocides must be the ultimate in freedom...!

Aint democrazy wonderful ?

Posted by: denk | Sep 17 2018 16:50 utc | 80

This hysteria over Uighurs in China is a clumsy media psyops that the Anglo Americans are peddling. It reeks of geopolitical desperation, as the Anglo Americans feel their global dominance ambitions faltering in general and China's New Silk Road projects proceeding apace in particular.

The surest sign of a coordinated propaganda campaign is when the Anglo-controlled “free press” (both mainstream and even Alt-Media) starts regurgitating half-truths and allegations from American-backed “dissidents” of a targeted country. In this case, these Uighur claims are evocative of the dubious assertions spewed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights regarding Syria.

No, The UN Did Not Report China Has ‘Massive Internment Camps’ For Uighur Muslims
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50123.htm

In general, the Anglo Americans seek to destabilize Xinjiang so as to sabotage China's Silk Road project and more broadly destroy any chance of Eurasian integration in general, which is the bete noire of the Anglo Americans from the British Empire to the Anglo-American Empire today.

America has been covertly backing and arming Uighur insurgents and similar “moderate” terrorists for years. This includes American sponsorship of Al-Queda and a delightful chap named Usama Bin Laden even right up to little event called the September 11th attacks. American state terrorism has also been executed through proxy countries like Turkey as well as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Bombshell: Bin Laden Worked for US Until 9/11
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bombshell-bin-laden-worked-for-us-until-9-11/14595

Uighur Nationalism, Turkey, and the CIA
http://www.conspiracyschool.com/blog/uighur-nationalism-turkey-and-cia

This is corroborated by the Eric Margolis, who has written significantly on Central/South Asia.

US trained Uighur terrorists
http://lukery.blogspot.com/2009/07/us-trained-uighur-terrorists.html

Overall, the Anglo Americans instinctively resort to "human rights" propaganda for their destabilization/terror campaigns and attendant infowars.

Thus, the Anglo American wars against Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria were also pimped through very similar infowar tactics by shedding crocodile tears about supposed repression of ethnic/religious minorities in the targeted country.

This is designed to give a "moralistic" mask for the Anglo American "divide-and-conquer" destruction of a country that is a geopolitical obstacle to American world supremacy.

Like the Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syrian cases, the role of Anglo American Progressives or Leftists is revealing for how they support these destabilization campaigns/wars or regurgitate the propaganda used to justify them. While the American Right Wingers will predictably support whatever Two Minutes of Hate that the USA is pushing against its enemy du jour of the moment, the American Left likes to masquerade as antiwar or human rights crusaders.

Ultimately, what they really are is a Cruise Missile Left and Human Rights Imperialists.

The “Cruise Missile Left” Now Cheerleading NATO’s Next Wars
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-cruise-missile-left-now-cheerleading-natos-next-wars/241157/

Posted by: AK74 | Sep 19 2018 0:33 utc | 81

Confucianism could be described as applied philosophy, it sets out how to equitably run a large and complex society. The individual citizen has a responsibility to practice 'ren' - a respect for the order, meeting responsibilities to family and community - being a solid citizen in other words. The structure is strictly hierarchical but meritocratic. Confucius himself introduced the civil service exams which meant that a son of a peasant could rise to minister of state if able enough. Respect for one's elders is also a deep part of Chinese culture.
Posted by: Ross | Sep 14, 2018 8:10:29 AM | 47

I think that there is a nomenclature mistake here. "Ren" (also "zhen"?) seems to have a small overlap at best with Confucian virtues related to obedience, it is more like fairness and compassion, an innate good characteristic of a human as opposed to learned good characteristics like filial duty etc. And in Confucian political theory, Ren imposes duties on the ruler rather than the subjects. Wikipedia:

Ren also has a political dimension. Confucianism says that if the ruler lacks ren, it will be difficult for his subjects to behave humanely. Ren is the basis of Confucian political theory; the ruler is exhorted to refrain from acting inhumanely towards his subjects. An inhumane ruler runs the risk of losing the Mandate of Heaven or, in other words, the right to rule. A ruler lacking such a mandate need not be obeyed, but a ruler who reigns humanely and takes care of the people is to be obeyed, for the benevolence of his dominion shows that he has been mandated by heaven.

-----

Note that this doctrine is truly a two sided sword, and with some differences, it is adopted by Western establishment. It explains "why we have the Mandate of Heaven -- we are humane, we give rights and protection EVEN to LGTB, and whey they do not -- not only they are not humane, but also do not love us". So Uighur issue can be an exhibit why PRC does not have Mandate of Heaven. Tibet issue used to serve that purpose, and perhaps because of my sloth, but I did not read lately anything on that.

Despicably, regimes that should loose the Mandate of Heaven but somehow seem to be in full control attempt to discredit humanness of USA by PRESENTING ISOLATED INCIDENTS AS IF THEY WERE SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS, e.g. RT stories on police killing in USA (while there is mere 1000 or so of such killings per year).

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 19 2018 23:37 utc | 82

No, the issue with Black Lives Matter is not the raw number of police shootings, it's the willingness/eagerness to use lethal force, particularly against unarmed young black males, serving as judge-jury-executioner for black males (in particular) who fail to submit (even when it's apparent that the person is in full psychotic break, naked and unarmed).

Ultimately, given the circumstances, I understood how the cop who shot Michael Brown genuinely believed that he was in mortal danger (even if the shooting properly should have been investigated and the officer reprimanded). Brown should have submitted to the demand he "assume the position" (on the ground) -- instead, he charged at the officer who was clearly prepared to shoot.

People generally accept that police officers have a right to defend themselves and largely assume the dead "musta done something" ... the problem is the number of unarmed young black men blown away by apparently trigger-happy police officers for whom ... black lives don't matter much ... whereas white "suspects" are less likely to be simply executed for noncompliance.

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 20 2018 0:40 utc | 83

As a minor point, Susan, the problem of killing by police is wider than "Black lives", and wider than police. Cooperation of "strangely inept" prosecution and coroner work, and in rather rare cases with indictment, amazingly lenient judges and utterly bizarre standards of proof make it next to impossible to sentence killer cops. Actually, cops beating a person to death seem to be less at risk of being sentenced than cops who beat a person non-lethally. One of the "standards" for cops is if they followed the guidelines, and writing guidelines that would be weird in other countries and which have lethal consequences enjoys full immunity.

A major point is that our Mandate of Heaven is quite frayed.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 20 2018 2:36 utc | 84

yes, there are many flaws with "Black Lives Matter" which is such a sacred cow that one is not "allowed" to criticize it ... the focus on this tiny subset of police brutality and abuse of power. Part of why Rodney King's case was so exciting was that there was video and the bastards weren't going to get away with it ... but they did (largely, even with the federal civil rights re-trial)

The LAPD (I grew up in LA) had been "enforcing" a reign of terror in the black community with just.such.beatings for decades ... it was part of keeping "compliance" up because folks knew well enough that lack-of-coooperation led to beatings and worse (disappearances too).

The systemic policing by (racist) intimidation is in effect in many places ... and even after 4 years of BLM, young men are killed with no obvious "exigent circumstances" like the case on trial in Chicago ...

It's a tragedy, imho, that BLM never evolved beyond a "banner" or "slogan" even if it has been a banner under which other genuine grassroots organizations have gathered, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Sacramento. If only BLM had taken on the issue of "use of force" more generally and "if only" Obama had pressed for the mandatory national (or even state) reporting standards. If only, there had been a mobilization for civilian police review boards (as followed both the Watts Riots and the later MLK riots). There are/were solutions but it was all too dowdy, "respectability politics" for the younger generation in love with no-strings social media activism

Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Sep 20 2018 3:39 utc | 85

Susan Sunflower @7 & 8

Thanks for the links. Regarding the numbers of the Uyghur jihadists in Syria and Afghanistan, Al Arabiya: a few thousand Uighur fighters with their families

“Their journey was very costly, an Uighur fighter told me he sold his house to afford the trip here with his family members. How could he think of returning?”

This corroborates what I read from Chinese media that some of these Uyghurs sold their houses, lands and/or business to go to Syria believing they were doing "Hijrah" after Prophet after the Wahhabism brainwashing.

Longwarjournal has some detailed articles about Uyghur jihadists, such as Uighur jihadist fought in Afghanistan, killed in Syria, Analysis: The Turkistan Islamic Party’s jihad in Syria

Godfree Roberts @14

Thanks for the article. It's so hard to get some balanced reports from MSM on Xinjiang and Tibet.

Posted by: MALI | Sep 23 2018 18:07 utc | 86

Maracatu @54, Ross @47&66

Thanks for sharing your personal experience and observation in China.

Some Westerners just lose any critical thinking and logic when come to propaganda against China spewed by BigLie MSM (as karlof1 fittly called).

95% of posters at MOA are fully aware and critical about the LIES told by MSM in regards to:

- RussiaGate
- White Helmet
- Assad chemical attacks in Douma and Idlib (in preparation)
- Trummp Election

Why some of them yet believe these sh!t stories:

- To force Uyghurs to ear pork!

(To believe CPC force Uyghurs to eat pork is just as ridiculous as to believe Assad is going to chemical weapons in Idlib so as to give iFUKUS the excuse to smear/kill them.)

- To send one tenth Uyghurs into re-education aka concentration camps.

(How is it logistically and physically possible for CPC to round up 1 million people?)

According to max Blumthal Inside Americas Meddling Machine The US Funded Group That Interferes In Elections Around The Globe, "at the ceremony, I met Omer Kanat, chairman of the World Uyghur Congress — a group funded almost entirely by the NED.

“The Chinese authorities have put more than one million Uyghurs in re-education camps, it is very similar to concentration camps,” Kanat claimed to me.

He said that his organization, a top NED grantee, had supplied much of the information the US government and Western media rely on about the alleged camps.

Kanat himself conceded that he did not know how many people were in the alleged camps, and that he was relying on “Western media estimates” to make his claim of one million.

BigLie MSM is preconditioning people in FUKUS to be prepared for another potential R2P initiated by FUKUS.

Posted by: MALI | Sep 23 2018 19:05 utc | 87

Piotr Berman @83

The "Ren"(rén: 仁 ) you and Ross@47 (rěn：忍) was talking about are two different Chinese charaters, though they may sound similar to you.

The "Ren" you mentioned @83 is in fact should be pronounced with 2nd intonation rén, written as 仁 (the left side with the symbol of "people"), the right with the word of "two", meaning more people not just oneself).

仁 in English means benevolence, humanity, kernel, sensitive.

You are right 仁(rén) is one of the fundamental concepts of Chinese Culture, one the key principles of Confucian. Rulers should be 仁(rén) i.e. benevolent, humane, sensitive towards his subjects/people, virtuous required himself and diligent towards his work. If he lost 仁(rén), people should and would throw him off.

Mandate of Heaven is based on this principle. Good governance in Chinese has always been called 仁(rén)政zhèng since thousands of years.

"Ren" Ross@47 mentioned should be pronounced in 3rd intonation rěn: 忍, which means to "bear, endure，have the heart to tolerate“.

The structure of this Chinese character reflects its meaning: top part is "刀" (dāo，knife)，bottom part is “心” (xīn, heart), which means even if a knife is struck in your heart, you have to endure it.

As Ross rightly interpreted 忍(rěn) requires individuals to endure difficulties and set-backs, to obey the rules and orders, and take responsibilities for one's family and community.

Btw, A little bit information on Chinese Intonation. Have some fun.:)

Posted by: Mali | Sep 23 2018 20:16 utc | 88

Re: Mali @89

Thanks for explanation. I still think that in the hierarchy of principle of Confucian "political theory", "humanity" is one of the prime principles, and "obedience" is a derived principle (from five relationships?). In practice, obedience may be enforced by the society more vigorously than the humanity, that said, the rulers will go to some lengths so the order is enforced with humane methods.

Re-education in afternoon classes fits this "benevolent" pattern, while banning minority dress and dietary constraints does not. Thus barring serious reporting, I would be inclined to think that either such reports are false, or describe relatively isolated cases of some local overzealous officials and not a nationwide or provincewide policy.

Concerning the scale of involuntary re-education camps, camps for one million people could be easily documented with satelite photos. If the scale of the problem is 100 times smaller, then it would be a much smaller problem, proportionally, than excessive incarceration in USA. Something is happening there, but is is still better to be Xinjian Uighur than, say, Shia in the eastern province of KSA.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 24 2018 0:12 utc | 89

folks in India near Myammar border, Rohingas in Myammar, ... India, Myammar, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia?

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 15, 2018 6:10:18 PM | 78

I am curious if you don't mind Piotr, where you get the spelling "Myammar" from? (It is actually linked to a very ancient spelling!)

Posted by: BM | Sep 25 2018 15:21 utc | 90