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Xinjiang — ethnic minorities — “transformation through education.”

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  1. #161

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    Even if we put aside the entire forced-sinicization-through-cattleprods-or-worse aspect of CCP's programs of premeditated cultural genocide in the homelands of Uighurs and Tibetans, the Han Chinese state's policies at all levels of education are designed to rewire the "minorities" for the role CCP has designed for them. Do the "minorities" have any say in their own curriculum? Well no, and those who protest find themselves serving a long and generally unpleasant sentence in a "knitting camp" or some other euphemism.

    These so-called minorities have the priviledge of using their own language for the first few years of education at best, much of which is spent on adopting the Party's own sino-centric views and of course the one true language of the Han. Only in token handful of cases is higher education available in their native language, but even then Party propaganda and Pekingese remain key subjects. The CCP wants to be absolutely certain that any hopeful "minority" elites are loyal to the Chinese regime.

    Roads and railways are great for moving Han settlers and military around the "autonomous regions" and for shipping out the various natural resources where the CCP wants them. What proportion of the reported GDP growth can be accounted to the "minorities'" own economic activity versus the Chinese state, Chinese industries and the Han settlers?

    If the actual Tibetans and Uighurs are so damn happy with the progress the Chinese Communist Party is handing down, why the fsck aren't journalists or even UN human rights observers allowed to visit their homelands? Why all the all-encompassing mass surveillance and intimidation?

    If this was happening in my country and to my people, people would be horrified even by any single program imposed, let alone the entire totalitarian sinicization package.

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  2. #162

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    Quote Originally Posted by civil_servant:
    That's not true.

    For the past 15 years there has been enormous investment in minority education. In fact, many minorities enjoy extra benefits that are not available to the majority Han population. There's also affirmative action for University and Civil service admissions. Ironically, some Han Chinese are now complaining of reverse discrimination due to these policies. That's very different from the narrative you present here.

    Beyond that anyone familiar with China will know that minorities live in geographically extreme areas. Whether in the deserts of Xinjiang, the high plateaus of Tibet, or the rugged countryside in Yunnan and Guizhou. These areas are landlocked territories that require massive investments in order to support GDP growth and being able to deliver education effectively. Wasn't there just a program that indicated that some kids in China have to climb an 800m cliff in order to get to school? Those kind of barriers should not be neglected.

    Massive investment has occurred in the last decade and these provinces now enjoy above-average GDP growth. Beyond that, there are massive efforts to reduce extreme poverty in those regions. Education is very much part of that.
    Spending and outcomes are not always highly aligned. Abject poverty and the % of ethnic minorities in university is the same now as 20 years ago. A cynic might suggest the extra spending is on recent Han immigrants and infrastructure for extractive industries. But you could be right the spending has been effective and there would be no need to take extreme measures such as mass internment...

  3. #163

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    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/w...r-muslims.html
    There have been no violent episodes in Xinjiang for 22 consecutive months, he said, and the people he described as “attendees” of the camps “never thought life could be so colorful and meaningful.”
    China director for Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview that “China did not earn itself a shred of credibility today.”
    “China has failed utterly to respond to factual questions about why people are being held against their will in huge numbers and how long they are being held for,” she said.
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  4. #164

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    Quote Originally Posted by civil_servant:
    Home schooling, if done appropriately, is very different from no schooling or teaching of religious doctrine and extremism.
    [..]

    But yeah, go on. Pretend it's harmless homeschooling.

    Less reported than the million uighurs sent into barbed wire re-education camps to "learn knitting" as the resident Party Servant so eloquently euphemized is the Maoist-era type forced cultural revolution campaign where a million Chinese civil servants and "volunteers" have been inserted into Uighur homes to observe, report and re-educate.

    It would be interesting to poll the enforcing Han supremacist parties if they have ever considered the Golden Rule.
    Confucianism

    己所不欲,勿施於人。
    "What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others."

    子貢問曰:"有一言而可以終身行之者 "?子曰:"其恕乎!己所不欲、勿施 人。"
    Zi gong (a disciple of Confucius) asked: "Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?"
    The Master replied: "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?"

    --Confucius, Analects XV.24, tr. David Hinton (another translation is in the online Chinese Text Project)[54]




    Chinafile: China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes. Here’s What They Think They’re Doing

    The “relatives” have been essentially conscripted into service in three separate waves. The first campaign started in 2014, dispatching some 200,000 Party members, including minority Party members, to “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People” (fang minqing, hui minsheng, ju minxin, 访民情、惠民生、聚民心)—through long-term stays in Uighur villages. In 2016, a second wave of 110,000 civil servants were sent into Uighur villages as part of a “United as One Family” (jie dui renqin, 结对认亲) campaign which focused on placing “relatives” in the homes of Uighurs whose family members had been imprisoned or killed by the police.

    In 2017, the third wave of visits began as part of an extension of the 2016 campaign. This third phase of the campaign assigned more than one million civilians to Muslim “relatives” in villages for a series of week-long homestays—often focusing on the extended family of those who had been detained in the drastically-expanded “transformation through education” program.


    In general, five Uighurs who spoke to me about the arrival of the “relatives” described them with a mixture of contempt and fear. They described themselves as feeling infantilized and stripped of their dignity. Many of them told me every aspect of their life felt like a political test. None of them seemed to have any hope that the “relatives” would notice the sadness and difficulty of their lives, and therefore refuse to carry out their orders to reengineer Uighur society.

    During their visits, the civil servants spent a great deal of time ensuring that the education of Uighur children was conducted in Chinese and that it contained patriotic elements about New China and deemphasized their difference as minorities. The manual that was posted online specifically encouraged the targeting of Uighur children as a way of getting to the truth of the situation.

    In many of the ongoing human engineering projects in the Uighur homeland, it appears that the state is attempting to separate Uighur children from their parents and from Uighur language education by radically increasing the number of Chinese-speaking teachers, and using the system of penal centers to reduce the influence of Uighur cultural values and norms in the lives of children.

    Many of the sent-down “relatives,” both “Old Xinjiang” locals and more recent Han settlers, that I spoke to did not have a clear sense of what life in the “transformation through reeducation” centers was like. Both groups described the places where Muslims were sent as “schools” where Muslims were educated in modern Chinese life.

    When I pressed further, one of the “New Xinjiang” settlers, the young man from Guangdong, told me that the “schools” were like rehabilitation centers for drug users. He said they knew that it must be hard on people who were sent there and on their families, but that the cost of not intervening was too high. Echoing a frequent trope in Chinese state-media reports, he described extremist ideology as a disease. It had to be “cured.” The young man from Guangdong told me, “These Uighurs are being treated like drug addicts who are going through rehab.”

    Sent-down workers who identified as “Old Xinjiang” locals had a less sanguine view of the camps. They said that when Uighurs were sent to a “reeducation center,” it was probably because there was no one to protect them. This was how the system worked. And it was also why “locals” like them had to participate. “There is nothing we can do to protect Uighurs,” a middle-aged Han woman who grew up with Uighur classmates in Urumchi told me, “so we have to try to protect ourselves.”

    Several Han workers said that politics in Xinjiang were polarized to a degree that recalled the Cultural Revolution. Everyone had to agree with the Party line or be ostracized and face time in prison. Of course, they said the primary target of the current human engineering project was Uighurs and Kazakhs. If they, as Han, kept their heads down, they thought they would be fine.

    They worried, however, about the future. One elderly “Old Xinjiang” woman said, “I don’t know what will happen if we ever let the Uighurs out.”

    The tyranny that is being realized in Northwest China pits groups of Chinese citizens against each other in a totalitarian process that seeks to dominate every aspect of life. It calls Han “relatives” into coercive relations with their Uighur and Kazakh hosts, producing an epidemic of individualized isolation and loneliness as families, friends, and communities are pulled apart. As new levels of unfreedom are introduced, the project produces new standards of what counts as normal and banal. The “relatives” I spoke to, who did the state’s work of tearing families apart and sending them into the camp system, saw themselves as simply “doing their jobs.”

    Citizens of totalitarian states are nearly always compelled to act in ways that deny their ethical obligations. In order for a grass-roots politics of Han civilian refusal of Chinese state oppression of Muslims to even be imaginable, what is taking place in Northwest China needs first to be accurately described. As Hannah Arendt observed decades ago, systems like this one work in part because those who participate in them are not permitted to think about what they are doing. Because they are not permitted to think about it, they are not able to fully imagine what life is like from the position of those whose lives they are destroying.
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  5. #165

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    The highly aligned mass postings in the comments sections promoting the glorious benefits of these camps in the SCMP for articles on Xinjiang internment camps have dropped off as they have on this thread. Seems like the imprisonment of people for no reason is becoming less defensible.


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  8. #168

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    https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/14/a...ntl/index.html
    "What really concerns me is that, if it's really the last chance to try to transform Uyghurs, what's the next step if they decide that the Uyghurs can't be transformed into a passive benign minority that's loyal to the state?"
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  9. #169

  10. #170

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