Via SWJ Blog on Twitter, even if on the BBC I'd missed it.:( It is a short summary, with nothing new.
Link:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-45474279
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Via SWJ Blog on Twitter, even if on the BBC I'd missed it.:( It is a short summary, with nothing new.
Link:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-45474279
A Soufan Group commentary and a couple of passages:Link:http://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrie...d-in-xinjiang/Quote:
What most recent analysis on the subject glosses over, however, is that China has attempted to portray broad segments of the Uighur population as a potential terrorist threat while offering no evidence of tangible connections to militancy.
(Ends with) While the government feels that a draconian counter-terrorism strategy has been successful in limiting attacks on Chinese soil, many recently implemented policies may prove to be counterproductive in the long-term.
A first-hand report on the situation from a previously unheard of Russian website. Makes you think.
Link:https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/10...illion-uyghurs
Great article David, thanks for posting.
Meduza is a Russian language blog, but not a Russian State Blog. They're based in Latvia.
Anyone interested in the CPC's population control measures that leverages the latest technology along with Uighurs armed with spears who are subordinate to Chinese armed with automatic weapons should read this article. There is more and more evidence that Xi is increasingly paralleling many of Hitler's behaviors. Seeking a pure race at home, note one comment fro the article.
The communist party (CPC), like Hitler believes expansion outside their borders is essential to their survivable. Like Hitler, they seem to be borrowing the same two models, one British and one U.S. Hitler admired the way the British established their empire and used state owned enterprises like British Petroleum and the East India Company to exploit regions they colonized for financial gain at the expense of the locals. The U.S. model Hitler referred to was removing the native Americans off their land and putting them in reservations. The CPC is currently doing this in Xinjiang. They seek to expand their socialist model with CPC characteristics globally. Will they export these population control measures to authoritarian governments?Quote:
In Beijing, officials no longer claimed that the opposition was composed of a small number of extremists. “It’s impossible to tear out weeds one by one,” said one party official in Kashgar. “We need chemicals that can deal with all of them at once.”
Anyone coming into Xinjiang goes through 5 hours of customs inspections? Multiple checkpoints, X-ray machines, computer/phone scans, review all written material brought in, iris scans, other biometric data conducted, apps uploaded to computers and phones so they can monitor for dangerous material / communications later. Check points throughout the town and in the stores.
This sounds familiar, a typical form of communist surveillance.
This would be funny if it wasn't true:Quote:
New teams of “active citizens,” usually composed of police officers or members of the Communist Party along with at least one Uyghur, are another change in Xinjiang life. They regularly visit Uyghur families to ask, as my new acquaintance put it, “strange questions,” and to search houses for forbidden books and other objects. These searches can last several hours — or several days.
The author sums it up.Quote:
Iman’s reeducation took place in a cell where he was kept with 19 other Uyghurs. The prisoners were made to march in their cell and chant the slogan “Earnest training, eager learning!” and they watched propagandistic films for hours. During a post-lunch break, the prisoners were permitted to sit for a while on their plank beds, and then their marches and propaganda viewings continued until dinner. Iman befriended a 60-year-old cellmate who was accused of preaching the Koran in messages sent to his daughter through an online messenger. The man received a sentence of seven years. Iman was luckier — after 17 days, he was released, but after his time in the camp, cameras recognized him on the streets, and people began to refuse him access to public transport and local supermarkets.
Quote:
I came to Xinjiang to see life with my own eyes as it had been many centuries ago, if not millennia. Now, what you can find here is a future that exceeds the most daring fantasies of George Orwell or Evgeny Zamyatin.
This is a forthcoming volume 'Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in China: Domestic and Foreign Policy Dimensions' and the Editor is an Australian SME, Michael Clarke on the issues.
The Amazon notice refers to:Link:https://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Cou...orism+in+ChinaQuote:
Four areas of investigation are looked at: the scope and nature of terrorism in China and its connection with developments in other regions; the development of legislative measures to combat terrorism; the institutional evolution of China's counter-terrorism bureaucracy; and Beijing's counter-terrorism cooperation with international partners.
The Introduction is available to view. Not cheap at US$50, so perhaps one to suggest to your library?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources...a_hidden_campsQuote:
The first reports that China was operating a system of internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang began to emerge last year.
The satellite photograph was discovered by researchers looking for evidence of that system on the global mapping software, Google Earth. It places the site just outside the small town of Dabancheng, about an hour's drive from the provincial capital, Urumqi.
https://www.afp.com/en/news/717/insi...ks-doc-1a73p63Quote:
On state television, the vocational education centre in China's far west looked like a modern school where happy students studied Mandarin, brushed up their job skills, and pursued hobbies such as sports and folk dance.
But earlier this year, one of the local government departments in charge of such facilities in Xinjiang's Hotan prefecture made several purchases that had little to do with education: 2,768 police batons, 550 electric cattle prods, 1,367 pairs of handcuffs, and 2,792 cans of pepper spray.
The shopping list was among over a thousand procurement requests made by local governments in the Xinjiang region since early 2017 related to the construction and management of a sprawling system of "vocational education and training centres".
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8648561.htmlQuote:
Uninvited, more than one million Han Chinese people have reportedly moved into the homes of Uighur Muslim families to report on whether they display Islamic or unpatriotic beliefs.
Sent to homes in Xinjiang province by the Chinese government, American anthropologist Darren Byler said they were tasked with watching for signs that their hosts’ attachment to Islam might be “extreme”.
The informants, who describe themselves as "relatives" of the families they are staying with, are said to have received specific instructions on how to get them to let their guard down.
As devout Muslims would refuse cigarettes and alcohol. this is seen as one way of finding out whether they were extreme.
“Had a Uighur host just greeted a neighbour in Arabic with the words ‘Assalamu Alaykum’? That would need to go in the notebook,” said Dr Byler, in research published by Asia Society's Centre on US-China Relations. “Was that a copy of the Quran in the home? Was anyone praying on Friday or fasting during Ramadan? Was a little sister’s dress too long or a little brother’s beard irregular?”
A Reuters article that combines open source (now removed) Chinese documents, analysis of satellite imagery and comments - including the Chinese explanation. The scale of the effort is amazing.
Link:https://www.reuters.com/investigates...s-camps-china/
A strategy that only an authoritarian country could employ. An attempt to remove the threat by impounding all military age males, and torture them to compel them to drink alcohol, eat pork, and denounce Allah, as though that will weaken their resolve to support jihad when and if released. It is probable the vast majority didn't support jihad to begin with, but will be more likely to in the future if the opportunity presents itself, since they learned to really hate the Chinese now. Getting to the opportunity, outside the gulags the Chinese have implemented robust population control measures, and have encouraged / forced the migration of several thousand Han Chinese into the region, some of which have moved in with Muslim families to monitor their behavior. This is North Korea on steroids.
I'm think back to one of Bob's World posts where he argued cognitively that the U.S. conducted proactive COIN with our Civil Rights Bill, clearly the Chinese are taking a very different approach. They are conducting similar operations in Tibet, but not nearly as oppressive. They see religion as a mental illness, although communism proven to be failed system in similar to religion in that believers then to deny facts that counter their beliefs. In short, it is a secular religion with its own form of radicalization.
Central Asians cry out over China's secret detention camps
https://news.yahoo.com/central-asian...101732645.htmlQuote:
Last month Alymkulova and a dozen others formed a lobby group, called the Committee to Protect the Kyrgyz People in China.
The group has called for the Kyrgyz government, which depends heavily on Chinese economic assistance, to press Beijing about the camps in Xinjiang.
Chinese officials have described the camps as "vocational education centres" for people who appear to be drawn towards Islamist extremism and separatism.
An article by a long time expert visitor to Xinjiang who is able to catalogue the changes. Near the start:She ends with:Quote:
I witnessed the most abject sense of fear and trauma I have encountered in 27 years of researching identity and religion among its Uighur communities. Mosques were deserted and cloaked in razor wire, restaurants were stripped of their halal signage, and local people carefully avoided any expression of religious piety.
Link:http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-o...t-talk-anymoreQuote:
I felt compelled to read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four when I returned home. The parallels between that masterpiece and a Xinjiang now in the grip of “de-extremification” and “thought liberation” are astonishing. In the book’s final part, the protagonist’s government torturer reveals that the state does not “merely destroy our enemies, we change them. . . [So] long as [the heretic] resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. . . You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Hat tip to WoTR for this article by Dr Jerome Doyon, a SME @ Oxford University.
Unlike most active Western CT policies the PRC:Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/co...orism-tactics/Quote:
it targets the community rather than individuals.
(Ends with)...Xinjiang can be seen as a laboratory for the Chinese party-state’s social engineering policies.
Hat tip to WoTR for this article, with both details on law enforcement cooperation - not always working - and whether there are many fighters.
Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/ch...hters-problem/
Another China expert accepts the unpleasant truth of China's trajectory towards deepening totalitarianism at home and abroad. The author goes into sufficient detail to show the clear linkage of how Xi's ideology deliberately aligns with Stalin, and why Xi thinks deviating from it would pose an existential threat the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The language in the previous posts describe how Xi leverages technology to revitalize Mao's Mass Line concept, and condition people to think along party lines. As the author in the article points out, ideology is the critical component of Mao's, and now Xi's totalitarianism.
https://nb.sinocism.com/p/engineers-...ul-ideology-inQuote:
Mao’s discursive advantage was Marxist-Leninist ideology. Language was not just a tool of moral judgment. It was an instrument for shaping acceptable behaviour and a weapon for distinguishing enemies and friends. This is the subtext of Mao’s most famous poem, Snow. Communist ideology enabled him to “weaponise” culture in a way his imperial predecessors had never managed.
Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut
Stalin described artists and authors as "engineers of the human soul." They simply served for promoting the party and its views. In other words, art and writing was purely propaganda intended to as means to facilitate cultural and ideological security.Quote:
Some now say he has become a China hawk, but I see it as more the evolution of a sophisticated China watcher who believes in seeking truth from facts, no matter how difficult it may be to accept the reality of the direction Xi and the CCP appear to be taking China. This is a trajectory I have found myself on, along with many of the most experienced foreign China watchers I know.
Combine the findings in this article, with the insights from the previous article, "The CCP Vision and Future of Chinese History," you'll gain a greater appreciation of incidious threat the CCP poses.Quote:
Xi uses the same ideological template to describe the role of “media workers”. And school teachers. And university scholars. They are all engineers of ideological conformity and cogs in the revolutionary machine.
Among the many things that China’s modern leaders did – including overseeing the greatest burst of market liberalisation and poverty alleviation the world has ever seen – those who won the internal political battles have retained the totalitarian aspiration of engineering the human soul in order to lead them towards the ever-receding and ever-changing utopian destination.
Yet another article on China's use of technology for mass surveillance, this time exposed to view by accident. So via The Soufan Group's briefing and BLUF:Quote:
- A Dutch cybersecurity researcher reported that Chinese company SenseNets exposed millions of people’s facial recognition information.
- China has used facial recognition to target Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
- Venezuela is also adopting an identification card system similar to the Chinese model to track and collect information about their citizens.
- Personal information collected by states and their corporate partners is valuable to criminals and its exposure could place citizens at greater risk.
Link:https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbri...ently-exposed/
There is a wider application of this technology.
A 'long read' which appeared a week ago:https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...ce-recognition
A 'long read' on WoTR on re-education camps and the policies involved. With a note that open source information can be gathered in support. It ends with:Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/ch...itarians-past/Quote:
It is rather a regime that has developed an innovative set of “governmental technologies” that proactively seeks to mold and direct the behavior of citizens.