but still a terrible policy made by bigots
At its peak Xinjiang was seeing a terror attack in the form of a mass bombing or mass shooting (often at train stations) twice a month. 15-30 people would die in each of these attacks.
This has nothing to do with islamophobia. It has everything to do with extremist islam that was imported by CIA operating over the border in Afghanistan.
Before you get in a spin over what the Chinese did in this region it is essential to look at why they approached the problem in this region in this way by familiarising yourself with the history, the conditions and the threat they were facing.
You can not make this kind of claim with no sourcing and also this one
People that were following events at the time can remember it. I will try to provide some perspective on this, but my list will not include everything, I don't have an existing list of events that is exhaustive and I hope you can understand that searches for anything about Xinjiang and China are completely polluted by utter garbage to the point that searching for this shit is near impossible. With that said I think I can cover enough to make it visible how serious things were getting at the start of crackdowns.
January 2014, 11 militants dead in attempt to cross Kyrgyzstan border gone wrong
March 2014Multiple attackers with knives. 29 dead at a train station. 137 injured
April 20147 killed in shootout attempting to cross the border with weapons.
April 2014 (2 weeks later) Bombing and knife attack at railway station in Xinjiang. 3 killed, 79 injured.
May 2014 A few weeks later, 2 car bombings on markets, killed 43, injured 90
July 2014 37 killed by gang with knives and axes in Xinjiang
September 2014 50 killed in series of multiple attacks (archive link for RFA fed written articles, unfortunately the best I can find with the shit way google works)
October 2014 22 farmers killed in attack (this article also talks about some other attacks 2 days beforehand, gives some idea of what kind of things I've missed or not been able to find dedicated articles for, this stuff was easier to follow in real-time than it is to research now)
November 2014 15 killed in another attack
This is far from exhaustive. This is a mentally exhausting topic to research and I hope you'll forgive me for not really going the full length to show just how fucking bad things were. Consider these some of the big ones, the easiest to find in each month, but there were many more peppered in between them.
This is what caused China to go into a mega crackdown on the region. Roadblocks, mass surveillance and police-state shit. Fuck loads of people were dying and the CIA work to pour these islamic fundamentalist separatists over the border from Afghanistan was genuinely causing an enormous issue.
What followed this was several years of increasing their infrastructure to crack down on the region very hard. Followed by the final re-education program that involved some 1-2 million people undergoing the compulsory education programs 5 days per week (allowed to go home on weekends).
This is what put a stop to the violence, and it was this final program that led to America no longer having any purpose for being in Afghanistan anymore, their ability to stoke extremism in the region had finally been completely eliminated. It took considerable time to build up to that though, the important year that began the process was the enormous violence of 2014.
If someone wanted there is definitely at least twice this from the same year but would require wrestling with the nightmare that is our currently awful search engines.
I miss when they were all incredibly good for a brief few years.
It's not reckless. It's a pretty fair assessment in my opinion. If I were willing I could back it up but I'm afraid I'm simply not, it was tiring enough to quickly go through this and pull up these horrible events for each month.
I want to clear up that I'm not saying that any of this is good. The process was definitely a highly repressive one and that is inarguable. What I am getting at here is that it is important to understand what was going on and where these terror attacks were coming from (CIA operating in afghanistan) to understand why China responded the way it did.
Where am I getting the "it was the CIA in afghanistan" part from? Watch Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State at the time, he talks about it from 20:53 to 23:12 (just 2 minutes).
You can say this, but I don’t know if that’s even remotely true, not that things stopped happening, but that it was casual
It wasn't casual lol. It was compulsory and there was resistance from some to begin with. Staying at the facility Monday to Friday was mandatory which certainly wasn't something people were happy about, but they were allowed to go home at weekends. There are some tourist interviews where this is discussed, I seem to remember and Israeli tourist who did a lot of content on his visit to Xinjiang but finding the exact video and part I would be looking for is a needle in a haystack.
You keep acting like it's unfair that people aren't providing you with sourcing in every disagreeing reply that informs you of context you were clearly unaware of before posting a problematic NGO's speculative media campaign.
This is Reddit brain. This exact thing right here. Look at it, criticize it, and consider that we are comrades, not walking Wikipedias or servants or enemies. In a normal conversation, what would you expect from a person disagreeing with you? Do they need to remember the book and page number where Lenin said X or Y? Where Goldman said A or B? Where imperialists supported a given genocide?
I will also point out that when it comes to posting propaganda against the empire's primary targets, it's really your job, not anyone else's, to know the context and meaning behind it. If you don't want to put in the work to understand, you can always just not post the propaganda. It's a good rule of thumb to not post such things until you're ready for a well-grounded criticism session and know exactly what the goal of it is. By default, Westerners will tend to be chauvinists and hypocrites, so the most likely outcome of a poorly-supported criticism will be them agreeing to violence against the empire's designated enemies and to feed the ongoing escalatory public sphere towards those designated enemies.
I've seen you ask two people for sources in this way and be generally combative waaay too early with several folks. This is not comradely behavior, particularly given the premise of this post.
And again, this is not Reddit and we are not your enemies. These are fellow comrades who are knowledgeable and informed on this topic.
I strongly disagree that you weren't rude to anyone. The original issues I pointed out would count as rude. I'd say you're taking comrades here for granted and overall they have been very patient. I'd also invite you to ask yourself what you think anyone is getting out of these negative interactions, including yourself.
I don't know anything about your prior interactions with the other user but I do empathize if there were toxic interactions.
None of that is responsive to what I said.
Your responses to me and others are overly defensive to the point that they communicate bad faith. Please consider taking a short break or rest so that you can engage with and treat others here like comrades.
Not lie entirely on you? You haven't accepted any fault whatsoever, let alone any of my criticisms or advice.
Trying to point the finger at others to deflect from self-crit is unhelpful, avoidant, and a good example of the defensiveness I'm talking about.
You are not making any sense, are now acting childish and sarcastic towards me, and you need to take a break. Your behavior here is self-destructive. It's as if you want people to have good reason to write you off.
Again, and I mean this in the best of ways, take a fucking break.
"Cite your sources" requires a level of trust that most people haven't earned with me. If I do go to the work of citing widely known facts, I had better not get a knee-jerk rejection when I come back with points.
I've cited sources when I got similar requests. I've sometimes crafted detailed responses detailing them point by point. And I've been burned again and again. Unless I already trust you, or you have made a good argument refuting the claims as a better and more complete version, I don't feel obligated to do as you say.
People who demand evidence for things they already know to be true are usually arguing in bad faith. Would you demand somebody send you a peer reviewed study proving that not everyone likes chocolate chip cookies?
Does anyone find it weird that this genocide narrative has walked back from imprisoning 13 million people to illegal phone searches?
it did report on the UN claiming it was
"The UN" made no such claim, a commitee within the UN headed by a Brit made the claim, but the UN in general did not even nominally sign on to it.
You'll notice I don't remember the committee's name either, and yet that didn't lead me to parrot the wildly distorted characterization that "the UN" said such-and-such like I was reading off of a Yahoo News article.
You remember that interaction better than I do.
Don't worry, even if I never saw the username I would have responded the same way, because my contempt is for what you are saying now, not whatever it was that you said before.
I am saying that you are being uncritical of the reporting as though all the past bullshit reports taught you nothing. Yes, if HRW was known to be giving us the best representation of what happened, that would reflect a very serious problem. We do not know that they are.
I haven't even read the whole thing yet. What I am saying is that we shouldn't simply accept its characterizations uncritically. Is media criticism such a wild idea?
You're just assuming bias because it's more convenient for you. When something makes strong claims, you must hold it to high standards.
Even if you were right and I only exercise basic media literacy for sources critical of China, that would not make my criticisms of those sources incorrect. It would make my defense of other sources incorrect.
You are literally arguing that we shouldn't criticize something that could plainly be atrocity propaganda because maybe we don't criticize if Für Elise is replicating German chauvinism. It's a joke of an argument.
Again you are begging the question wrt the accuracy of the report. Furthermore, what you actually said was:
Okay then do that for every single piece of media about anything, I think you only want to do it for things that you disagree with though
Emphasis:
do that for every single piece of media about anything
You are free to disavow this argument, but it's the one you made.
Yeah, I read reddit, a lot of people thought that it was straight up killing all Uyghers. I had someone earnestly claim to me that it was worse than anything the Romans did in my personal sphere.
I do find official sources to be less bloodthirsty than your average Australian. Most Australians believe the 10k Tiananmen square number, even though official sources have walked it back.
The year is 2023 and you're doing the Chinese slamophobia bit but you don't realize you're at least 4 years late to the party and that this isn't reddit and nobody is going to applaud you and clutch their pearls over their "rreedoms" right?
You are literaly quote one of if not the most infamous NGO on the planet on this site for this audience?
Before you even begin to talk about Xinjiang please watch (CW:NSFL) this report entirely, actualy look at the number and severity of the attacks, actualy watch the interviews with many of the attackers.
The US suffered one terrorist attack
which they almost certainly could've stopped but didn'tin history and then they started a war that killed and injured millions. :so-true:The Chinese suffered dozens of attacks from 1990-2015 and they checks notes built schools and prisons to re-educate and de-radicalize the terrorists. :wojak-nooo:
Its a documentary from China's own CGTN. Unless you are actualy willing to watch the actual terrorists attacks you are just trolling.
Are you fucking kidding me right now? Watch the damn video you fucking coward. Do you need a source for the literal video of the 2014 or the 2015 attacks in Urumqi?
This is the shittiest and lowest effort trolling since the Silver legion clown shit lol.
Here is your article Now watch the video of those same people getting run over you absolute clown shit coward.
the patriot act was the exact same justification, but this is somehow justified
This is the last and only thing I think should be mentioned. You miss or should I say refuse to acknowledge, right at the start, the fact that this isn't the only thing China's doing to counter extremism in Xinjiang.
If China did literally nothing else but pass a major surveillance law that achieves literaly nothing like the Patriot act then yes you'd have a point. But no, in the US case is not at all similar. The extremism isn't native to Xinjiang, it was imported from groups like ETIM and then also exported to others through ISIS.
You said you were familiar with the details, this realy looks like you didn't even know the basic facts about terrorism in Xinjiang. Congrats you got me to actualy link you an article
A literal reddit clown.
"I wont watch the documentary that shows the real videos from the attacks, with interviews from Muslim leaders from Xinjiang and the terrorists in prison."
"I wont read your article because its too old."
I regret ever engaging with this shit. Wait until you find out the first attacks in Xinjiang started in 90s rofl.
You can't stick your fingers in your ears and expect people to engage with you or anything you're saying.
It is justified because it worked to save lives. We aren't mad at the patriot act because it violated liberal values. We are mad because it kills people. It is kinda wild to me that you can see a good outcome and a bad outcome and not be able to tell which is better
Accept we don't know what any of these terms mean. Tell me what could it have been? How do you know it would have worked? You admit you didn't have the basic facts of the matter earlier and now you want me to consider you analysis? No, I dismiss you out of hand. You have made very many assumptions and there is no need for me to consider them.
I really don't know why you feel like checking if phones had a Koran on them was a huge invasion of privacy. They are Muslim of corse they had a koran. What of the information misused? Do you have any reason to belive it was misused? What if they only searched for copies of the Koran you get from US backed groups? Do you know? You do not. We can't know from the available data.
The data we can observe is that the US funds terrorism in the same region in the same way it has in the 80s. Then also that you feel like a group trying to make this better is suspect because they didn'tuse methods US liberals would condone? You are unserious.
Not gonna act like I am super educated on the situation in Xinjiang, but I do know the PRC line is that Muslims in that region were being radicalized and there were terrorist attacks and such. Also heard things about CIA “help” for this radicalization. So what I am getting at, what do you think can be done about it? Just let it ride?
Oh yea I mean I don’t like anything like this happening and I can imagine there is a better way. At the same time, I also believe that if the US government was good it would be doing this to the tens of millions of wild christofash in this country soooo I don’t know honestly its fucked.
they allow wahabists to open mosques as long as they are not Uyghur
You've been doing a lot of asking for sources in this thread. My turn. Source?
fair - I managed to find it, fair point, although the Pulitzer Center doesn't exactly pass a gut check with flying colors
Was it specifically profiling people based on ethnicity? How did it make such a determination?
The Human Rights Watch searches found a total over 1,000 unique files on about 1,400 Urumqi residents’ phones that matched those on the police master list.
So was HRW like surveilling people's phones or something? lol.
Some of the numbers in this reporting have been rounded up so that the authorities cannot identify the source of the leak.
LMAO. "We're making up numbers to protect our sources".
The analysis of the metadata of this master list reveals photo, audio, and video files that contain violent content, but also other material that has no evident connection to violence.
Are violent or gruesome, including content depicting beheadings or forms of torture that appear to have been carried out by armed groups such as Mexican and other drug cartels, Chechen fighters, or the Islamic State (ISIS);
Involve foreign organizations, including the East Turkistan Independence Movement, which the Chinese government labels a separatist group; the World Uyghur Congress, a group run by Uyghur exiles; and a Uyghur-language broadcasts by Radio Free Asia, a US government-funded media outlet;
Human Rights Watch further analyzed those 1,400 phones that were flagged by police:
Nearly 42 percent of phones contained violent or gruesome material; 12 percent of phones contained common Islamic religious material;
The Chinese government outrageously yet dangerously conflates Islam with violent extremism
Pretty sure this is what YOU'RE doing, HRW.
And to top it all off, they only have evidence that this happened for 9 months from 2017 to 2018.
Funny how being conscientious leads to the same tactics as being alarmist :thonk:
No way they could just round to the nearest value and say "about" or "at least".
If I was talking to someone purporting to be a victim or otherwise traumatized by this, I would be sensitive (and probably keep my mouth shut for the most part because I am bad at being sensitive). We however are just spectators to news reports afaik and I have nothing but disdain for the idea that we need to practice "sensitivity" instead of actually interrogating the reporting on this subject that has already seen wildly distorted reporting in the past.
It's literally a core element of atrocity propaganda that it is deeply uncomfortable and socially stigmatized to question it. If we were receiving testimony from Nayirah, we should be gentle and reserved. If we are reading about the hearings and you tell me to be sensitive when it's just uninvolved people talking amongst each other, I would call you a useful idiot and a mark.
Calling "idiot" ableist and insinuating that it is a slur is completely ridiculous. Do you mean because of, like, 1920s IQ testing that used such terms to describe low scorers? "Useful idiot" is essentially a politically-specific version of calling someone a "dupe", it has nothing to do with mental disability except on an etymological level.
Anyway, I consider false and slanted accusations coming from the west about its greatest opponent to be something that it does with purpose and therefore something we should be wary of being duped by.
I could say you are being insensitive for spending energy thinking about a mass surveillance campaign when there is a very obvious campaign by a certain other country that has killed five or more Muslims for every one China has surveiled. The vast majority of us agree that China's campaign in Xinjiang isn't exactly squeaky clean but every minute spent fixating on that past plain acknowledgement is a minute spent apologizing for US genocide.
Why post it in /c/acab if your intent was to share and discuss news? The comm choice is definitely a deliberate insinuation.
How did they calculate 11 million from metadata?
And obviously china should be better :shrux:
They do this wirelessly in America. I'm sure everyone here is being monitored and has been hacked and doxed by the Gov't by now. At least China did it in broad daylight and gave a good justification (religious proliferation is dangerous and can destabilize societies. See: America).
And before the question comes, yeah I'd be against the police in America searching people's phones. They're not to be trusted. I really hope I dont need to explain that one.
I feel like this ought to be a dunk takn post.
China had problem, worked hard to not be a bastard and fixed it mostly. What are we mad about here?
Consider the impact of the information. Information condemning the NYPD is used to encourage resistance. Information condemning China is used to support US military ventures and undermine global peace and cooperation.
Literally almost every Muslim nation including Iran and Saudi, and muslim orgs in Indonesia (largest muslim population in the world) have stated that China is just deradicalizing the extreme terrorist groups. Y'know not just being a regular reactionary asshole, but also being separatist who litrrally wants to establish an ethnostate.Like besides deradicalization, China also clearly trying to adress the root causes being poverty. Meanwhile all the Western nations who literally bombed Muslims and treats every single brown skinned person with suspiciosly decide they care very much about muslim rights in China.
"Ohhh but they got bribed by China's economy" well then how the fuck they are still saying mean things about USA and Israel, like America is still the second largest economy in the world.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
