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xinjiang, prc lab for repression

Yeah. Unfortunately. Money is all that matters.

No one truly gives a shit.

The West has put its arsehole in the air for China. Ready, n loobed.

Now, they are fucking us. We don't like like the girth.
 
Sasaferrato said:
And the international, or even national, response will be?

I tried for a while to buy nothing that was made in China. Very very difficult.
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The other issue that comes up if you want to boycott China is that Chinese interests are buying up foreign assets. The main pork supplier in the US is Chinese owned. I think people around here were pretty dismayed when the pandemic cut the supply of meat here. There was still meat being processed, but it was mostly being shipped to China, instead of being put on US shelves. I always try to know who owns a company before buying their products. I don't necessarily boycott Chinese goods, but just anyone who does business in an especially evil manner.
 
This isn't likely to make it through the senate:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday to ban imports from China’s Xinjiang region over concerns about forced labor, one of three measures backed overwhelmingly as Washington continues its pushback against Beijing's treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority.

The House backed the "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act" by an overwhelming 428-1. To become law, it must also pass the Senate and be signed by President Joe Biden.

The Uyghur measure would create a "rebuttable presumption" that all goods from Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has set up a vast network of detention camps for Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, were made with forced labor.

China denies abuses in Xinjiang, but the U.S. government and many rights groups say Beijing is carrying out genocide there.
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If Beijing doesn't like the diplomatic boycott of the Olympic, they sure aren't going to like it if this does manage to pass.
 
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NoXion said:
What makes you say that? What makes the Senate so different from the House?
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The Senate has been a sticking point for a lot of legislation and is evenly divided by party, and they can't afford to lose one vote. They also Sen Joe Manchin and Sen Kyrsten Sinema who have shown a propensity for voting against the Democratic party line.
 
interesting talk next week:

Dear colleagues,

Please join us in conversation with anthropologist Dr. Darren Byler to discuss his book In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony.

Wednesday 15 December | 5pm CET (4pm GMT)

For registration: Book Talk with Darren Byler

The event is hosted by The Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR) in collaboration with the Uyghur Colloquium at Palacký University Olomouc, as part of our ANSUR Network quarterly event series, Under Surveillance.

Follow ANSUR on Twitter here.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
The Senate has been a sticking point for a lot of legislation and is evenly divided by party, and they can't afford to lose one vote. They also Sen Joe Manchin and Sen Kyrsten Sinema who have shown a propensity for voting against the Democratic party line.
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But the Democrats want to clamp down on China? Don't the Republicans dislike China too? Seems like it could be an easy way for the Dems to paint the Repubs as soft on China.
 
NoXion said:
But the Democrats want to clamp down on China? Don't the Republicans dislike China too? Seems like it could be an easy way for the Dems to paint the Repubs as soft on China.
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I'm pretty sure the Republicans think the Democrats are the real threat and aren't willing to give them a single win if they can help it.

The other reason I'm not so sure it will pass in Senate, is that our House and Senate were designed to be something like the House of Commons and the House or Lords. You get more corporatists in the Senate, although there's a fair number in the House too.
 
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not-bono-ever said:
Hui muslims are getting a hard time at the minute. Seem to have fallen out of favour as the preferred islamic option for central command. Now that Xinjiang has been such a success , they are apparently rolling out the restrictions to the formerly best mates & mandarin speaking Hui.
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Wow.

This is a major, major development in my book. The Hui are, in a certain sense, a core part of the Chinese population (also ethnically very close if not in most cases identical with Han Chinese) while also being a definite minority. Very, very different situation from the Uyghurs. Also no real recent record of discord there either.

This would be a major step up in state oppression. Also notable how little reporting there is in the West on what is happening to the Han Chinese majority as well. There have been an amazingly litany of restrictions recently. A friend in Hong Kong is v depressed about it all, noting that many of his mainland contacts, who are wealthier, are all for the aggressive nationalism and state discipline (or, at least, they say they are..).
 
It also makes me wonder about something else that it was hard not to notice if you spent time in China and that is the constant propaganda around the 55 ethnic minorities.

Back in 2007, a very great deal was made of it. And the message was one of a state with a massive multiplicity of ethnicities all living in perfect harmony (one couldn't help but wonder whether it was some kind of counter-reaction to fashionable Western talk of multiculturalism).

It would be interesting to know what has happened to that message now.
 
Diamond said:
It also makes me wonder about something else that it was hard not to notice if you spent time in China and that is the constant propaganda around the 55 ethnic minorities.

Back in 2007, a very great deal was made of it. And the message was one of a state with a massive multiplicity of ethnicities all living in perfect harmony (one couldn't help but wonder whether it was some kind of counter-reaction to fashionable Western talk of multiculturalism).

It would be interesting to know what has happened to that message now.
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I think there is definitely less of it, and what remains of it tends to have taken on the twist of emphasising "ethnic unity" 民族团结 instead. Which of course means, assimilation or submission to a standardised identity.

习近平总书记两下团组强调“民族团结”

www.qstheory.cn www.qstheory.cn

From the Communist Party theoretical journal:

General Secretary Xi Jinping's two delegations stress "ethnic unity"

Editor's note: On March 5, 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized the need to "do detailed work in promoting ethnic unity" when he participated in the deliberation of the Inner Mongolia delegation at the Fourth Session of the Thirteenth National People's Congress. When participating in the deliberation of the Qinghai delegation, he once again emphasized the need to "promote the common prosperity of the people of all ethnic groups and promote the great unity of the people of all ethnic groups". Looking back at the National People's Congress and the National People's Congress in previous years, national unity is a theme that General Secretary Xi Jinping often emphasizes. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping has visited ethnic minority areas many times, and communicated face-to-face with people of all ethnic groups, emphasizing that the cause of ethnic unity and progress should be taken as a basic cause. We have sorted out General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions on national unity, and reviewed and studied together!

Adhere to the leadership of the party, unite and lead the people of all ethnic groups to firmly follow the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics

We must always adhere to the party's leadership and improve the party's leadership system. It is necessary to adhere to the correct path of solving ethnic problems with Chinese characteristics, comprehensively, in-depth and persistently carry out the establishment of ethnic unity and progress, and lay a solid ideological foundation for the community of the Chinese nation. ——Speech during investigation and investigation in Yunnan from January 19 to 21, 2020

Practice has proved that only the Communist Party of China can realize the great unity of the Chinese nation, and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can unite, develop and prosper all ethnic groups. ——Speech at the National National Unity and Progress Commendation Conference on September 27, 2019

The system of regional ethnic autonomy is the basic political system of our country. We must conscientiously summarize the theory and practical experience of regional ethnic autonomy, uphold and improve this system, promote ethnic unity and integration, and encourage all ethnic groups to stick together like pomegranate seeds. ——Speech when inspecting and guiding the theme education of "not forgetting the original intention and remembering the mission" in Inner Mongolia from July 15th to 16th, 2019

Strengthening ethnic unity lies in upholding and improving the system of regional ethnic autonomy. It is necessary to hold high the banner of great unity of all ethnic groups, fully implement the party's ethnic policies, and make the theoretical root of the system of ethnic regional autonomy go deeper and deeper and the practical foundation more firmly established. ——Speech at the deliberation of the Inner Mongolia delegation at the First Session of the Thirteenth National People's Congress on March 5, 2018
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And so on and so on. You can kind of see that there is a bit of an Orwelliam doublethink in the "improving the system of regional ethnic autonomy requires holding high the banner of great unity of all ethnic groups." Which apparently means eradicating the language of minority groups from schools.

You may be onto something about it being a response to fashionable western multiculturalism. I also got the impression that the change towards a much more repressive stance was influenced by a perception that multiculturalism in the west was failing - BLM protests, refugee crisis, and ISIS terrorism were all used heavily by Chinese media to create a narrative that the world outside was in turmoil and only China was safe, as well as a story of western liberal decline against the backdrop of rising realist, pragmatist Chinese authoritarianism. Their state media has even suggested that France should learn from Chinese policy in Xinjiang and they went so far as to invite European academics on a potemkin style tour to try and promote and export Chinese policies in Xinjiang to Europe. It seems that this shift in rhetoric happened around the same time as repressive measures in Xinjiang started accelerating.
 
The title of this thread is, appropriately, prc lab for repression. And that is indeed what Xinjiang is.

I'm starting to wonder about the link between Zero Covid Quarantine Camps and the Xinjiang Re-education camps. A lot of the methodologies of control developed in Xinjiang are now being rolled out country-wide - e.g. the health code and constant surveillance on your smart phone (I heard of students being punished for leaving their phones at home) is a little bit similar to the system used in Xinjiang to determine if someone has behaved too suspiciously.

I might make a longer post about this later, but I'm reminded a lot of what Arendt wrote about concentration camps - the purpose is not for extermination but as "drill grounds" in which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS; to inspire terror and obedience among the wider populace; and to perfect and experiment with means of total control which reduce humanity to a bundle of predictable reactions to stimuli. It seems to me that the Zero Covid policy functions in a very similar way.

It clearly isn't about saving lives because many elderly people in Shanghai have died after being forcibly relocated to unsanitary quarantine camps with inadequate supplies of food and medicine. And there is zero sign of any attempt to vaccinate the elderly, who in any case were not prioritised in the earlier Sinovac programmes and there has been no progress in approving effective foreign vaccines. It also seems tied with other expanding policies of control unrelated to Covid - the crackdown on all education services not directly controlled by the Party syllabus (e.g. online tutoring and after-school private tutoring) and also reports of Chinese returning to China having their passports cut and invalidated, and no longer renewing passports for "non-essential travel." The propaganda emphasis on the world outside China being unspeakably dangerous pre-dates Covid by several years so I don't think fear of Covid alone is an adequate explanation for this.
 
Rimbaud said:
The title of this thread is, appropriately, prc lab for repression. And that is indeed what Xinjiang is.

I'm starting to wonder about the link between Zero Covid Quarantine Camps and the Xinjiang Re-education camps. A lot of the methodologies of control developed in Xinjiang are now being rolled out country-wide - e.g. the health code and constant surveillance on your smart phone (I heard of students being punished for leaving their phones at home) is a little bit similar to the system used in Xinjiang to determine if someone has behaved too suspiciously.

I might make a longer post about this later, but I'm reminded a lot of what Arendt wrote about concentration camps - the purpose is not for extermination but as "drill grounds" in which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS; to inspire terror and obedience among the wider populace; and to perfect and experiment with means of total control which reduce humanity to a bundle of predictable reactions to stimuli. It seems to me that the Zero Covid policy functions in a very similar way.

It clearly isn't about saving lives because many elderly people in Shanghai have died after being forcibly relocated to unsanitary quarantine camps with inadequate supplies of food and medicine. And there is zero sign of any attempt to vaccinate the elderly, who in any case were not prioritised in the earlier Sinovac programmes and there has been no progress in approving effective foreign vaccines. It also seems tied with other expanding policies of control unrelated to Covid - the crackdown on all education services not directly controlled by the Party syllabus (e.g. online tutoring and after-school private tutoring) and also reports of Chinese returning to China having their passports cut and invalidated, and no longer renewing passports for "non-essential travel." The propaganda emphasis on the world outside China being unspeakably dangerous pre-dates Covid by several years so I don't think fear of Covid alone is an adequate explanation for this.
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All of which will hasten rather than prevent revolution.
 
The British government has been funding partnerships with police trainers in China, at least one of which is linked to Xinjiang.

Freedom from Torture's investigation found that the UK has been giving money to London Policing College, a private company with close ties to the UK police service, which has provided police training for China.

We’ve also found that China's top policing university, which trains and supplies police to Xinjiang, boasts of the counter-terrorism training it received in the UK from the London Policing College.

There is no evidence that London Policing College conducts human rights checks on its work in China- even though the world knows torture is happening in Xinjiang.

We are concerned that the UK partnership is being used in China to fuel propaganda that paints a false picture of horrific abuses carried out in Xinjiang as “counter-terrorism” and that the UK should not be allowing this to happen.
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petition here:

Tell Boris Johnson: stop supporting torture in China
 
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