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I don't particularly care about "free speech" and am happy to see genocide deniers probated or banned, but I think it's clear at this point that the empirical facts of Chinese (re)education and repression programs are unclear enough, and inflected enough by propaganda from either side, that it is not natively obvious what is happening over there. Therefore, it's subject to political discussion and debate, and someone raising questions about it in either direction should not be understood to be stirring poo poo in bad faith or to be doing the equivalent of holocaust denial.
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Mar 24, 2021 19:29
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I've put these two paragraphs in both the generic communism thread and the eurasia thread but i'm going to repost them here because they seem to have been useful to people. These are two posts a friend of mine made on another discussion board to criticize and contextualize what's happening in Xinjiang and also Mongolia. Sorry for the lack of caps etc:quote:it's one of those things where there's a coherent argument that the definition of genocide should include what's going on, but if you actually applied it evenly you would find that the uk did several hundred genocides and we are doing like three or four right now. what's going on in western china is bad, but mostly for more mundane reasons of cultural chauvinism, the everyday shittiness of hostile police forces, and various forms of coercing people into participating in the national wage labor market. the government is way more liberal than the public on minority issues in china, and the public in turn are somewhat more accepting of minority cultures having a place in the country than in several neighboring countries. in fact the problem is precisely that they're listening too much to the liberal stuff because they're abandoning the soviet nationalities model and want to build a western melting pot, and are trying to take the most simple liberal criticisms of how the west actually did that and apply it in naïve fashion: for example they don't want to be seen as repressing islam in general, so they try to identify a good and bad islam, and come up with various theological doctrines and ritual practices associated with each, and layer in judgments about national and separatist identity, which may or may not be defensible in theory, but then when time comes to apply in practice, it means cops and spies caring a lot about whether your mosque conducts services in arabic or some central asian language other than uighur, and getting mad if they can't quickly figure out who someone is quoting or referencing, and a dozen other situations where the details of religious life are not readily legible to the police bureaucracy, generating suspicion and hostility that they're free to take as probable cause or whatever their analogue is. like, they're basically trying to be more woke than us about it, while also doing a hell of a lot more of it and more comprehensively transformative and in everyone's face than we would (whereas the instinct of liberal interventionists when confronted with messy effects from disruptive policies is to minimize things, fiddle with edge cases, target more narrowly), and that generates extreme contradictions quote:do we know that maoist and/or bolivarian communes aren’t happening? yes I think it does a good job of squaring the circle of, on one hand, acknowledging that there is obviously state-based coercion and repression happening along ethnic and religious lines, but on the other hand understanding that the incentives of the developmentalist Chinese state are different from the incentives of the hegemonic US state and therefore alter how and why China treats with its own ethnic minorities. Trying to proletarianize your rural population in order to increase the urban labor pool is different from trying to terrorize migrants in order to maintain an easily-exploited lower stratum in the reserve army of labor. This on its own isn't meant to convince anyone (I assume this isn't actually meant to be a thread in which the debate is settled), but I'm trying to illustrate here that the "pro-China" take is a good-faith analysis coming from a particular socialist tradition and not a deliberate attempt to sweep war crimes under the rug or something.
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Mar 24, 2021 19:58
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Flavius Aetass posted:Yeah this is essentially the root of the issue as I see it, so whether you like Rime or not I'd like this to be addressed by the people arguing in favor of less moderation. Defense or even contextualization of the CCP's policies in various ethnic autonomous regions isn't a matter of "this genocide is good, actually" or "though this genocide is regrettable, it is a price we have to pay for progress", it's "this isn't a genocide." In fact, for many, the Soviet and Chinese models autonomy and targeted economic development for ethnic minorities is precisely an alternative and antidote to the flatly genocidal policies of such liberal capitalist states as Canada.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:25
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:Is current-day China proof that communism works? Jury's still out on that one, but it's definitely proof that Deng knew what he was talking about. Rime posted:Genocide is OK here because we are ideologically pure, unlike those filthy capitalists. See, you've literally read the opposite of what I wrote. I don't think genocide is okay. You and I disagree on the facts, not the ethics. If I thought the vocational schools in China were even the loose equivalent of the residential schools in Canada, I would oppose them in the strongest possible terms. However, I don't think they're the same for a variety of reasons (taking some adults rather than a preponderance of children, for starters). To be fair to you, I might be a gleeful supporter of genocide who is simply cloaking his bloodthirst beyond technical quibbles about contemporary and historical facts. For sure, actual holocaust deniers will open with leading questions about logistical feasibility, not lay all their cards down on the table immediately. However, that's not what I'm doing. I think the CCP has contradicting forces in it, some of which genuinely want to push Han chauvinism and who complain that minorities get too many rights, and others of which want to cleave to the Soviet "each nationality gets autonomy" model. I think both communists and capitalists in the Chinese elite have a strong interest in dumping as many people into the industrial proletariat as quickly as possible, such that terrorist attacks in Xinjiang give them a good pretext to ramp up and do manually something that was just happening due to market forces before. However, no one in China actually has an incentive to commit genocide on any of its internal nationalities rather than just put all those nationalities to work. This is why the one-child policy, for instance, hit the Han the heaviest and minorities like the Uyghurs the lightest.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:43
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Hairy Marionette posted:You’re right about the one child policy. Most (all?) minorities were exempted from the policy. But I could just as easily say that nobody in America has an incentive to commit genocide on any of our minority populations. Genocide is never something that has a rational reason behind it, and yet America does a hell of a lot of it. Americans don't have an incentive to literally exterminate Black people and Mexicans, but they do have a powerful incentive to dehumanize and immiserate them because sorting people into tiers and doling out human rights proportionate to your spot on the tier list is an important element of extracting profits. The internment camps on the US's southern border are absolutely logical, because they help us to maintain an underclass to hyper-exploit. Full-on industrial extermination camps might represent an irrational excess, but you don't need those to be doing a genocide as such.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:56
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Hairy Marionette posted:I don’t follow how genocide can be rational for America and irrational for China. But then, I don’t understand why my fellow Americans are racist despite growing up in the most segregated city in the country. I would say that genocide is not rational for China yet, because China is still faced with the challenge of getting as many people as it can into the urban proletariat in order to develop its productive forces, and the wealth it's amassed thus far comes mostly from investment by stronger powers rather than the exploitation of weaker powers. That is to say, slavery and colonialism aren't (yet) major contributing factors to the Chinese economy, so the racism that greases those gears isn't really central to China's continuing function. This can certainly change depending on how China's relationship to, say, Africa develops, or when the Chinese productive forces have been built up to such an extent that they have to start figuring out how to systematically abandon and warehouse their surplus population. In that case, inventing race to determine who gets a job and who doesn't becomes useful to the point of being arguably unavoidable.
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Mar 24, 2021 21:29
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thotsky posted:some mod said C-SPAM has to be palatable to a liberal consensus elsewhere in the forums I would say it "has to" be palatable to a liberal consensus in the same way that a new enterprise "has to" be profitable. It's not good, it's just how things happen to work. The broader SA community isn't going to allow a Stormfront subforum or something, even though in theory liberal principles of free speech demand that we give the Klan its day in court. Likewise, communist apologia is constrained by the forums Overton window whether it ought to be or not. Ideally, the consensus can be moved left over time.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:03
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Nix Panicus posted:You know what? Fair. I took a few minutes to look through Homex's old posts and they were level headed about China for the most part. Take advantage of the situation to...?
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Mar 25, 2021 12:49
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Relevant Tangent posted:A ton of Americans are calling out the camps on the border, in America. Also it's wild if you can recognize that those are genocidal death camps but not that the ones in China are. The question is, what is the political purpose of genocidal death camps in China? It's obvious why the US would want to torture and dehumanize nonwhite migrants. Why would China do an about-face and start trying to exterminate the self-same ethnic group whose social reproduction they directly supported scant decades ago?
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Mar 25, 2021 15:15
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Relevant Tangent posted:I don't know. I think being willing to call them what they are is probably an important first step to figuring it out. Your problem is that you aren't being cynical enough. There isn't some kind of universal human urge to commit genocide that all world leaders are secretly restraining. States do things to advance their material interests, not just because. Follow the money! Per quotes I posted earlier, there's a solid argument to be made that the CCP is engaged in, if not a cultural genocide per se, at least a sort of cultural bed of Procrustes - sanding off all the rough or potentially-destabilizing edges of Uyghur culture in order to leave something behind which is conducive to A) entering the labor force and B) driving tourism. These are both things which will enrich and strengthen the state, and which Middle Eastern terrorism gives the Chinese government the pretext to do with state-backed coercion rather than simply waiting for it to happen through market forces. The cultural and economic position of Uyghurs in China just isn't the same as the cultural and economic position of Mexicans or Hondurans in the US, so China has no incentive to treat them like we treat Mexicans and Hondurans. To be sure, China will subject them to coercive force in accordance with its interests, but you need to have some grasp of what those interests actually are.
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Mar 25, 2021 15:26
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Serf posted:for me it was realizing that authoritarianism is fake Boy, can you believe that socialist states constitute a class dictatorship? Thank goodness that's not true for literally all other states by definition- (touches earpiece, frowns)
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Mar 25, 2021 15:35
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Dolphin posted:yes they are. Why would the Chinese government attempt to exterminate an ethnic group whose development and reproduction it had been deliberately supporting mere decades ago?
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Mar 25, 2021 16:11
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Dolphin posted:actually i equated them directly to something the us did so this is some bad faith bullshit The equation doesn't make sense, is your problem here. Maybe if the US government was specifically arresting Mexicans who were found to be particularly faithful Catholics on suspicion of promoting child abuse?
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Mar 25, 2021 16:19
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Dolphin posted:no, that's also not how burden of proof works. there appears to be widespread consensus that this is a thing that is occurring so it's incumbent on you to prove that it isn't. kinda like how everyone says gravity is a thing and if i say it's been wrong all along i have to provide the evidence. There is not a widespread consensus. It only seems to you that there is because of your immersion into a particular slice of the western media sphere. The appearance of consensus is manufactured in part by taking a few extremely specious sources and having a multiplicity of publications, front groups, etc all cite those few sources in slightly different ways. That's why all the stuff you're posting - which, doubtless, seems to you to be a galaxy of evidence - keeps turning out to stem from the same two or three guys.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:38
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Dolphin posted:word? Yes. There is actually nothing resembling a worldwide consensus on this - it only seems that way to you because like three sources, all with incredibly shoddy or outright specious research (like that famous sampling of eight (8) people to determine that over a million were in custody) have been multiplied across dozens or hundreds news website, twitter threads, TV bulletins, etcetera. I think you're too deeply immersed to ever be convinced, but you do serve as a very useful example of the dangers of lacking a materialist analysis. Since you've consciously and repeatedly ignored any attempt to suss out an economic or even cultural basis for why China would cage or murder millions of its own people, you're just left bouncing around the discourse, seizing onto anything that sounds spectacular while boasting the barest veneer of professionalism, even though each individual source you put forth never, ever stands up to scrutiny. It doesn't matter, because it feels like they're a dozen others, even though behind the curtain they're all copying off each other's homework.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:28
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A funny story is that this also happened with the Ukrainian famine, like they had their own Adrien Zenz-equivalent. "Thomas Walker", a literal wanted criminal and con man who hadn't been anywhere near the region at the time of the famine, ended up the frequently-cited and re-cited basis for an entire Victims of Communism cottage industry, and of course a bunch of Nazis, but I repeat myself.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:29
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Grapplejack posted:We know that the camps exist, and we know that they're "re-education camps" designed to "prevent terrorism" by "eradicating dangerous beliefs". That's straight from the chinese government. Yes, absolutely, and I've seen some scathing criticisms of them by, for instance, Indian Maoists who work purely off China's own words and (some leaked) internal documents: https://www.cpiml.net/liberation/2020/08/chinas-concentration-camps-for-uyghurs-in-chinas-own-words There's no question that, using the threat of terrorism as a pretext, the Chinese government is taking coercive measures to shape the religious practice and general training and education of some slice of Xinjiang's Uyghur population. The Uyghurs aren't the only ethnic group which is facing pressures to assimilate (I referenced earlier the way that Mongolian-primary schools are giving way to Mandarin-primary schools in which Mongolian is an elective course) but they might be facing the greatest and most direct pressure as a result of instability in the region. The thing is, this is exactly where specific details, starting with but not limited to actual numbers, become important. There's a big difference between mandatory schooling for some adults who get to go home on weekends and for all children who board there for months, for instance. The former, more mild-sounding case still represents a top-down attempt to sculpt a population's cultural and religious beliefs to be friendlier to the state, obviously, but it's a far cry from trying to annihilate a culture outright, and as I've said before there's a sharp divide between trying to forcibly drive minorities into the workforce and trying to forcibly push minorities out of the workforce even if you use cops and holding facilities to do either job.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:46
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Dolphin posted:my point is that "anti-terrorism" is a very popular euphemism for doing unconscionable poo poo I agree, and definitely think there's a self-serving element to the CCP's policies in Xinjiang for which counter-terrorism just serves as a pretext or excuse. The question is not whether Pres. Xi's heart weighs less than a feather, but what the self-serving element is. How is China cynically, materialistically advancing its own interests by repressing certain kinds of Islamic practice in Xinjiang? The best answer is that it is speeding up the rate at which certain rural or marginal populations enter the urban workforce.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:54
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Grapplejack posted:There's a lot of ways you can frame things using museums to notate traditional culture as being 'outdated and archaic' and reinforce whatever modern beliefs are, and you can do similar things with textbooks in order to reinforce a specific narrative that you're looking to build. The US did it by starving out these groups, but also used framing to enforce their systems on these groups. Again, I think your read is correct here - although traditional communism places a huge premium on national/ethnic autonomy, it's generally conceived of in an instrumentalist way, like once these various nationalities find their footing and get proper support for their languages, schooling, etc. they will naturally want to fold themselves into our greater project of socialist construction as the next step. The CCP's ideal outcome is almost certainly that Uyghur culture remains as charming local flavor but loses any and all aspects that interfere with proletarianization and participation in nation-building. However, I don't think that's at all the reasoning behind things like Canadian residential schools or American migrant internment facilities, because the US and Canada actually do need to destroy all remnants of indigenous peoples and systematically deny the humanity of people of color for their economies to work. The US doesn't actually want an open border or a closed border, and it doesn't want Mexicans to either fully assimilate or stay out entirely. Instead, they need to be present in the margins as an easily-exploited underclass.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:07
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Dolphin posted:My issue is not with people saying "we don't know for certain what's happening over there" because I totally agree with that. As I'm sure most people agree (I think) the CCP like other governments tightly controls their state secrets and a lot of this info is nigh impossible to accurately estimate barring the CCP releasing it. The only people who could possibly have access to that info is the CCP, or possibly other states' intelligence communities. You say "multitude" but in fact all your non-academic sourced keep collapsing back to the same several individuals or think tanks and unless I skimmed too aggressively you haven't posted any academic sources yet. Even the narratives of psychos like Zenz, when actually read rather than imagined and generalized from, end up describing this empty business like... there are boarding schools. There are cops. Etc. You've studiously ignored every attempt to examine how and why the Chinese state would enact repressive measures because a materialist analysis just doesn't go the way you want it to. So, instead, there's just handful after handful of pocket sand, and somehow each particular source getting traced back to RFA or outright debunked never seems to have any bearing on how seriously we should take the next dozen.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:02
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Dolphin posted:not giving the guy any credit, as I said I don't even know much about zenz but is there a specific reason other than him being a religious idiot that he's blacklisted? I see the evangelical leanings as the cherry on top the incredibly shoddy statistics done to produce the initial "over a million" figure and membership in the Victims of Communism foundation (which plays incredibly disingenuous numbers games of its own on the reg). I'm sure Zenz is sincere in his allegations and joined VoC because they honestly reflect and support his beliefs, but I don't know what else but motivated reasoning could compel him to stick with his terrible numbers. The real problem, though, isn't him so much as the fact that like two sources out of three always end up leading back to him. If this joker constitutes so much of the genocide accusers' arsenal it indicates to me that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:15
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MY INEVITABLE DEBT posted:look i dunno about you guys but im ready to believe a capitalist country is doing terrible things to its citizens The thing is that China is in a different stage of capitalist development and therefore has different economic incentives that it will use state repression to pursue. 18th century England wasn't concerned over much with the immiseration of internal ethnic minorities because it was still trying to get as many of its own people out of subsistence farming or handicraft and into wage labor as possible, and to extend the length of the workweek from like four days to six.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:23
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Admiral Ray posted:This isn't true. So this is a single example, but for me is one of the big reasons I simply accept that China is committing cultural genocide (the distinction between genocide and cultural genocide is quite slim): In Zenz's report "Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control" (PDF) he makes the claim that 80% of net IUD placements are taking place in Xinjiang (calculated as placements minus removals). Chinadaily attempts to rebut that claim here, but they get the claim wrong: It looks like you're right that China Daily hosed up or even lied when it came to representing Zenz's claim here. However, the measure of "net IUD insertions" itself is extremely weird. Offhand I can't find population studies anywhere else that attempt to make that comparison, probably because if you don't know who is actually installing versus removing birth control devices and why the number gives you almost no information. If all women were to get an IUD at age 20 and then remove that IUD at age 40, for instance, then net IUD insertions would be zero, but there would nevertheless be a very strict birth control regime in place. If, 20 years later, only half of the next cohort of 20 year old women were to get IUDs, while the entirety of the original, now-40 cohort got theirs removed, then "net IUDs installed" would be negative... and yet, we're talking about a situation in which half of all young women are prevented from having children! When I was talking about Zenz's dodgy math I wasn't actually thinking of his birth control math but rather the survey of eight random people to arrive at the "million or more" figure in the first place. Basically, the conclusions he draws from really-existing numbers are not credible.
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Mar 25, 2021 23:36
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OK baizuo posted:Cya all on bread & roses I'm told that bread & roses summarily banned a very informative Chinese poster for having the wrong opinion on Xinjiang. Admiral Ray posted:The issue with the IUD's is that one of the common claims by women is that they are tricked into or otherwise forced to get an IUD, so this kind of extreme overrepresentation of IUD's in a province that doesn't have that many people lends credence to there being a sterilization program and backs up their claims. I don't believe that China Daily is engaged in obfuscation there because their error is just too easy to point out. Zenz may think he has a mission from god, but he isn't flatly incompetent; he's not going to literally punch numbers wrong into his calculator or something. I think they were excited to catch an unusually egregious error and failed to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyway, even if they are deliberately misrepresenting that one claim of Zenz's, and even if we're willing to disregard Zenz's other bullshit, is CD also lying that installations have either held steady or gone down in recent years?
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Mar 26, 2021 00:00
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I think the best way for Westerners to oppose coercive measures by the CCP in Xinjiang is to oppose US imperialism in the Middle East. The less hellish the US is making that part of the world, the less pretext the Chinese state has to police minority cultures in the name of preventing terrorism, and more sway those forces in the party that oppose or at least want to ramp down what's going on in Xinjiang will have. Unfortunately, it is very hard to stop the US from just sending its army wherever it wants.
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Mar 26, 2021 01:28
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Admiral Ray posted:I would agree, but I've seen the same rebuttal done again and again (not here, but elsewhere). This is one of the few things that is easily checked because the statistics Zenz used aren't free to the public (which, imo, makes his claims weaker since he could have at least provided a loving table). If that Chinadaily article didn't post the actual scanned page from the Health and Hygiene Statistics Yearbook I never would have even been able to check the math. After having taken some time to think about it, I am increasingly convinced that the reason China Daily refuted an imagined claim about raw number of IUDs added, rather than the actual claim about net number of IUDs added, is that "net IUDs added" is an insane statistic which communicates nothing. The people getting IUDs are different from the people removing IUDs! There might be a lot of young people entering the workforce who want to put off childbirth while, at the same time, the fact that IUDs weren't in widespread use prior (due to poverty, medical access, culture, whatever) means that there's no matching cohort of aging people who either feel ready to have children or who simply no longer have the need to bother. An article linked a few pages ago goes into the statistic in a little more depth: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/ quote:When Zenz attempted to defend himself against accusations of cooking statistics on birth control surgeries in Xinjiang, he ultimately cast further doubt on the quality of his research. Responding to a Chinese academic critic, he claimed that he had calculated Xinjiang’s 239,457 new net IUD insertions (devices added minus those removed) as 80% of the national total in 2018. The bolding is mine (it's italics in the article); I want to draw attention to it because I think the weird "per capita" graph you post is actually Zenz's, not China's. As I say, I think that article is being too kind to Zenz because net insertions is, itself, a statistic of practically no utility; he's clearly gesturing at it and trying to get us to think that it indicates some sort of reproductive crackdown, but even a few moments' thought reveals that positive, neutral, or negative "net insertions" could all be associated with increased reproductive freedom or increased reproductive repression in different ways. This is why I don't trust Zenz, and neither should you; he uses really-existing numbers, but tries to bullshit you about their implications. This is classic Victims of Communism fare; for example, in the course of totaling people killed by Stalin, they include the difference between Ukrainians born before the famine and after the famine, as though each potential person not conceived was actually a casualty of the Soviet state. Agenda first, numbers second.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:08
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Dolphin posted:can you think of another time a superpower sabotaged its own supply chain over anxiety? The waxing power of monopoly and finance capitalism results in imperialism, and the uneven development of different regions of the world combined with the division and redivision of imperial spoils results in war. Kautsky theorized a "super-imperialism" in which all capitalist states merged into one gigantic extractive power that smoothly cooperated to exploit everything and everyone, but that just doesn't happen. Instead, you get the last hundred years of history.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:18
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Admiral Ray posted:Yeah I have to back off a bit on saying they were being deliberate in that. I don't tend to give media sources, especially state backed ones (eg, NYT to a large degree, Chinadaily), much slack on things like this since it's their entire job, but it is a bizarre metric that I can't say they were being purposeful in lying about after thinking about it for a while. I checked the numbers on the other provinces and since there's net negative removals in some provinces the "80%" is a lot more menacing than it seems. Xinjiang is still over-represented in the IUD stats, but it's not to the degree stated by Zenz. Rather, it is to the degree we might expect from a crackdown on a group that was previously allowed to flout the child policy in China. It's still horrific, and leads to cultural repression and erasure, but honestly going through Zenz's bullshit so closely makes me want to do the same to the other sources for this, because right now the nonsense he put out there makes me doubt the strength of my previous conclusion. I'm actually glad you brought it up, because I feel like I've seen at least a couple other pro-China sources that have uncritically reposted the 80%->8.7% correction; it looks just enough like a stupid mistake (haw haw, he moved the decimal point! whatta maroon!) than the bizarre octopus ink it actually is that whoever wrote that China Daily article took the easy way out, and people inclined to believe China Daily just reposted it without question. I certainly was! It's good to actually spot this stuff, in part because it underscores how the Inception style use and reuse of what's honestly a small number of sources doesn't represent some kind of conspiracy on the anyone's part, on either side - just confirmation bias and a tendency not to look a gift horse in the mouth. This is also why the prime movers of either side of the debate are so important to dig into and verify, since they'll pop up everywhere. The fact that a place with ~1.3% of the population sees ~8.7% of the use of a particular kind of birth control is significant, Zenz's legerdemain aside. As you say, it squares with the results of an ethnic group no longer getting to ignore nationwide birth control standards and therefore being subject to pressure to get their stats in gear. However, it also squares with just... increased availability of birth control plus reduced poverty, and as the article I linked points out the Uyghur population is still growing and indeed growing faster than the Han population. Pressure to conform can manifest as both threats and incentives, and most governments use a mix of both.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:37
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Dolphin posted:more like it doesn't make any sense, it doesn't serve us strategic interests. Under capitalism, everyone more or less acts rationally based on their personal incentives and resources, but this all adds up to an insane apocalyptic death cult. Just because the outcome of all the world's nations pursuing their individual interests will probably lead to global ruin doesn't mean they won't do it.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:41
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THS posted:barbarism and the mutual ruin of all, as the saying goes Barbarism equals oligarch power plus the Jokerfication of the countryside.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:51
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Herstory Begins Now posted:The suggestion that cracking down and arresting and sending to re-education camps a significant fraction of the entire muslim population in xinjiang is popular among the muslim population in xinjiang is frankly comical It's not that wild a claim. American policing is objectively monstrous, and yet despite recent protests and general shifts of the discourse I can still safely say that, among Americans, police enjoy widespread support. Obviously, race plays the decisive role here, but when the police DO brutalize or kill white people the victims are largely assumed to have deserved it or at least acted stupidly such that cop overreaction is at least a little their own fault. Uyghurs are like 45% of Xinjiang's population (with the runner up clocking in at 40 or so) and longstanding policies of, basically, statewide affirmative action means that they are highly placed in the local government, judiciary, etc. The people getting invited or ordered into reeducation camps are probably the poorest and most rural slice of the region's population, because on one hand they're the most "at risk" of radicalization and on the other hand are the farthest from, and therefore most of need of integration into, the urban labor pool. Between those poor bastards and the actual elite (who you might accuse of being compradors, traitors to their countrymen, whatever) are surely a broad swathe of people who just go to work every day and might feel any which way about how the government treats the poorest and least educated among them. That is to say, people often approve of policing even if the policing itself causes massive harm to those actually subject to it.
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Mar 26, 2021 04:49
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Dolphin posted:That's not what happened. I posted a random list of sources that I intentionally didn't read and ya'll pick and chose the ones you responded to, which happened to be the ones associated with people you didn't like. You attacked a list of alleged victims because the guy compiling the list said he didn't purport to its accuracy. There was one or two that you had logical objections to, like the study with 8 respondents. This is extremely misleading. You make it sound like of your giant list of sources, a few were associated with Zenz et all, and people only responded to those. But this implies a pile of legitimate, untainted sources that China defenders deliberately didn't engage with because they had no good answer to them. Where are these other sources?
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Mar 26, 2021 16:43
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Dolphin posted:I think it's about time people started denying the genocide without mention of the United States in their arguments. It isn't a sound argument and makes you all look unreasonable, your entire argument is based on character assassination and some variation of the genetic fallacy. Like no one is arguing we have conclusive info but then to turn around and say you have conclusive proof that all the people alleging rape and other forms of abuse are lying because the United States is bad is pretty There's unquestionably abuse happening because that's an inevitable side effect of basically any kind of policing. "No one is being mistreated" is a different claim from "a genocide is not being carried out".
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Mar 26, 2021 16:47
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Dolphin posted:More reading of this law: That's not quite what it says. The actual vocational schools/internment centers are only one part of what's going on in Xinjiang, and "criticism or education or legal education" also encompasses, like, a guy coming to your house to lecture you. "Criticism and education" are actually regular parts of Chinese administration way beyond this specific policy; it goes on a lot in the military, for instance. That said, the "irregular beard" and burqa regulations are clearly there to allow for broad "I know it when I see it" justification for stopping people on the street or going on to harass or arrest them in the tradition of cops everywhere. Fortunately, Chinese cops are on the whole less feral and murderous than ours.
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Mar 26, 2021 16:59
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Dolphin posted:You're right, but he is extremely sensationalist so of course they're going to. But just using mention of his name to dismiss an article that contains other information is bad. And I still haven't heard a decent explanation why Zenz, despite being a wackjob, has to automatically be wrong 100% of the time. He's often not wrong, just disingenuous and making ultimately meaningless albeit sensationalist claims; see the "net IUD insertions" discussion we had a few pages ago for an example.
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Mar 26, 2021 17:00
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Some Guy TT posted:so has anyone been able to quantify this xinjiang forced labor thing i ask because that talking points been making a big comeback but last time i tried to investigate the sourcing all i could find was an australian paper whose main bit of evidence was i poo poo you not a deleted personal ad where someone said they were looking to sell ughyur labor but did not explicitly say that the ughyurs themselves were also expecting to be paid It doesn't make sense on its face because prison labor is extremely inefficient and unproductive compared to wage labor, especially wage labor that requires some sort of training and resource investment like electrical work or whatever. Wage labor is obviously still coercive - either you fix my wiring, or the wiring of whoever else buys your labor-power, or you don't get to eat! - but there's no chance in hell the Chinese government is looking to enslave rather than train and indoctrinate the rural populations it's drawing into training centers.
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Mar 26, 2021 17:36
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:beep boop persecution and punitive labour are irrational therefore China's perfect government would not do them "Irrational" isn't the same as "contrary to existing incentives". There is a sense in which racism is irrational, but the US state does not uphold white supremacy because it's just so goddamn crazy. Rather, white supremacy is a critical precondition for capitalist exploitation in the US, so our police gleefully butcher members of minority groups in order to discipline the reserve army of labor, instill terror at anyone thinking of resisting, etc. If it didn't benefit us in the short to medium term, we wouldn't do it. Similarly, the Chinese state derives certain obvious material benefits from the reeducation and indoctrination of previously-marginal populations in Xinjiang, and the spate of terrorism in the region gives China an excuse to ramp up that reeducation and indoctrination from the "natural" way it was happening before (i.e. poverty drives people to learn Mandarin and get jobs in the city on their own, thereby contributing to capitalist profits and to development of the productive forces). However, no one actually benefits from Uyghurs being enslaved or murdered en masse. Furthermore, because Chinese industry is still developing, China doesn't benefit from certain slices of its population to be excluded from waged labor on racial grounds (while the US, which actually has a surplus, does), and unlike America, China didn't premise its development on racial difference in the first place.
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Mar 26, 2021 17:58
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Gringostar posted:on thing that's been bothering me is that while everyone here 100% acknowledges that most (all) western reporting are at minimum tainted by adrian zenz and the us state department and should be looked at with a poo poo load of skepticism no one has talked about how chinese media isn't also tainted as hell when it comes to reporting on issues inside their own boarder as well There's a lot of criticism of China's Xinjiang policies based purely off Chinese media, such as an article by an Indian Maoist group that I posted a few pages back. It's just that that criticism largely doesn't allege death camps, mass enslavement, etc, so it just doesn't do it any more for your average China watcher.
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Mar 26, 2021 21:48
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THS posted:i tend to frontload “whataboutism” to slap down any notion of “we have to DO something about this” - maybe im not giving people here enough credit but for americans, every discussion about the abuses of another state needs to begin with the absolute understanding that the US is the great monstrous evil empire of the world, should never be encouraged to sanction or otherwise take action on an issue, and is absolutely notorious for making up poo poo and funding disinformation The funny thing is we actually CAN do something about this, but it's opposing Western intervention in the Middle East, which, oops, isn't the conclusion we're supposed to draw!
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Mar 26, 2021 22:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I only post in the Doomsday econ thread so I hope it's okay if I share my two cents here. IS China adopting a stance of aggressive stonewalling? I know that UN inspectors are formally allowed in, though they complain of being followed by police. It's not really true that the region is a black box. Separately, does China has a long history of genocide against the Han people, who have long been subject to childbirth restrictions?
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Mar 26, 2021 23:10
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