Post by rmarks1 on Jun 27, 2019 14:54:26 GMT -5
Given the recent fight over whether US refugee-detention centers are “concentration camps,” the Trump administration might want to borrow a page from the Chinese and simply call them “vocational-skills-education-training centers.” That way, no one would really care at all.
That’s what the Chinese call their gulag archipelago of internment and re-education camps in Xinjiang province, where an estimated 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic people are being held. The Uighurs are a traditionally Muslim minority, and Beijing says they pose a major threat because of Islamic terrorism. The reality is that the Chinese fear separatist movements, Islamic or otherwise, in a resource-rich region three times the size of France.
As a result, the regime is pursuing the largest attempt at cultural annihilation in the 21st century. Religion is heavily regulated throughout China, but it is brutally policed in Xinjiang.
According to an analysis of satellite imagery by Agence France-Presse, “30 religious sites were completely demolished while six had their domes and corner spires removed.” Ancient cemeteries are being erased, turned into parking lots. In the southern city of Kashgar, once a jewel of the Silk Road, and closer to Baghdad than to Beijing, morning calls to prayer have been silenced.
The evil deeds in Xinjiang are merely the most egregious examples of what The Economist has called “apartheid with Chinese characteristics” and what I think of as a high-tech Asian version of Jim Crow.
What is both intriguing and infuriating to me is that American politicians refuse to talk about any of this. After all, we are in the midst of a trade war with China. Whatever the merits of this economic confrontation may or may not be, you would think the nature of the Chinese regime itself would play a larger part in debate.
The nature of the South African regime was the entire reason for the sanctions and boycotts pushed by progressives and Democrats in the 1980s. The nature of the Soviet Union was the rhetorical centerpiece of the economic warfare pushed by Republicans during the Cold War.
Today, repression meted out by the mullahs and their export of terrorism aren’t the main driver of sanctions against the Iranian regime — that would be its nuclear program — but they are a major part of the rhetoric accompanying such policies.
But among both Democrats and Republicans, Chinese authoritarianism often goes unmentioned, save perhaps as an afterthought. Countless conservatives, particularly of the new nationalist bent, want to take a hard line with China because they make widgets at a lower price than we do or because they rip off Hollywood. The fact that the Chinese government has put a million Muslims in re-education camps and persecuted Christians, too, is rarely part of the conversation.
nypost.com/2019/06/26/the-real-concentration-camps-are-in-china-but-us-leaders-are-silent/
That’s what the Chinese call their gulag archipelago of internment and re-education camps in Xinjiang province, where an estimated 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic people are being held. The Uighurs are a traditionally Muslim minority, and Beijing says they pose a major threat because of Islamic terrorism. The reality is that the Chinese fear separatist movements, Islamic or otherwise, in a resource-rich region three times the size of France.
As a result, the regime is pursuing the largest attempt at cultural annihilation in the 21st century. Religion is heavily regulated throughout China, but it is brutally policed in Xinjiang.
According to an analysis of satellite imagery by Agence France-Presse, “30 religious sites were completely demolished while six had their domes and corner spires removed.” Ancient cemeteries are being erased, turned into parking lots. In the southern city of Kashgar, once a jewel of the Silk Road, and closer to Baghdad than to Beijing, morning calls to prayer have been silenced.
The evil deeds in Xinjiang are merely the most egregious examples of what The Economist has called “apartheid with Chinese characteristics” and what I think of as a high-tech Asian version of Jim Crow.
What is both intriguing and infuriating to me is that American politicians refuse to talk about any of this. After all, we are in the midst of a trade war with China. Whatever the merits of this economic confrontation may or may not be, you would think the nature of the Chinese regime itself would play a larger part in debate.
The nature of the South African regime was the entire reason for the sanctions and boycotts pushed by progressives and Democrats in the 1980s. The nature of the Soviet Union was the rhetorical centerpiece of the economic warfare pushed by Republicans during the Cold War.
Today, repression meted out by the mullahs and their export of terrorism aren’t the main driver of sanctions against the Iranian regime — that would be its nuclear program — but they are a major part of the rhetoric accompanying such policies.
But among both Democrats and Republicans, Chinese authoritarianism often goes unmentioned, save perhaps as an afterthought. Countless conservatives, particularly of the new nationalist bent, want to take a hard line with China because they make widgets at a lower price than we do or because they rip off Hollywood. The fact that the Chinese government has put a million Muslims in re-education camps and persecuted Christians, too, is rarely part of the conversation.
nypost.com/2019/06/26/the-real-concentration-camps-are-in-china-but-us-leaders-are-silent/
Bob