Basically the same thing with Taiwanese Independence. If we had done something 25 years ago, we’d be a lot better off.
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The 1990s were a wild and wooly time in Taiwan—a transition that was far from assured. Lee Teng-hui tried to steer things through with hardliners still active and around in the military and in government. Those hardliners went crazy in the 2000s when Chen was President. The compromise—keep the ROC political shell, and slowly try to transform its commitments and values to center on Taiwan—is what we had then and what we still have now, for better and for worse.
Guy
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Money over human rights
Babylon Bee satire goes after China:
“To appease China, Disney changes name of Boba Fett’s Ship from ‘Slave I’ to ‘Uighur Slave I’”
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Very insightful article about how the ethnic repression/cultural genocide has evolved .
I have no doubt this program is driven straight from the top. It shows how they are willing to use any technological resources for the purposes of control and repression. Also the racism that is at the heart of their regime.
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Of course it is. Chen Quanguo perfected this technique in Tibet, to quash Tibetan soft protests by self-immolation. He did it so well in Tibet, and drew no international criticism, that after several Uyghur armed protests since 2014, Xi put him in charge of Xinjiang to repeat what he did in Tibet in 2016.
Yes I heard it’s the same guy running the show there .
What I mean is it is under the direct orders of Xi himself. Which makes him more like Stalin. And I couldn’t help that impression being reinforced when I saw his 100 year parade and speech.
But the scale of this program seems to be a completely different level than anything they did before.
Tibetans have some, in some circles, an orientalist aura of mysticism. It remains unpopular in the west to persecute them (not that this stopped Beijing from grabbing their land and displacing their culture and political structure).
My theory is that with the widespread Islamophobia in the west, especially prominent after 9/11, the Beijing authorities thought: hey we can speed up this land grab and claim to be fighting “terrorism” too.
Another factor would be evolving technologies, including facial recognition. Beijing has weaponized these technologies without hesitation.
Guy
In the 80s and the early 90s maybe, since then the West is too busy counting money to care.
Another facet in the PRC playbook: extraterritorial detention in order to coerce Chinese nationals and Uighurs, this time in Dubai. From the Associated Press, via today’s Taipei Times:
Guy
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From Taiwan News, borrowing (as they do) from the Wall Street Journal.
Canada, btw, did the same in the 1940s after they forcibly relocated Japanese Canadians from their homes on the west coast. It was bad then, and this sort of thing remains bad now.
Guy
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Another whistleblower report
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China is systematically recruiting militarized police from other provinces with higher wages to commit genocide in East Turkestan. It’s China’s typical strategy, since people living in East Turkestan might be too soft for the job even if they are Han Chinese.
Every recruited police are giving a quota to arrest Uyghurs, and torture them with waterboarding, torture contraptions, electrocutions, stravation, and sexual abuses.
The entire Uyghur population is declared enemy of the Chinese state, and systematically wiped out while world governments have been keeping silent.
If you could link or post your source, that would be really helpful.
Guy
It’s a summary of the CNN piece posted by @slawa, and information provided by the defected Chinese police.
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The Muslim world needs to wake up and stop buying China’s shit.
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Any good books out about this yet? It gets zero airtime here now.
I listened to some educational video on Youtube the other day while doing other stuff, so I can’t remember the channel. But it was about China and the guy talked about how the situation in Xinjiang has changed significantly recently, at least on the surface, meaning less oppression of the Uighurs, less forced reeducation, less surveillance. And he says two main reasons might be that the Chinese government wants to clean up its image abroad and/or has already accomplished what they tried to achieve with the oppression.
Very difficult to find anything about that, because whatever you search in Google, you will get the stories about oppression, which of course could mean that the situation has not changed at all or that the situation has changed, but the negative stories are just more likely to show up.
Will keep digging for that video I watched…