Synergy posted:I don't believe Cuba or Venezuela feels it necessary to resort to these kinds of measures
you're insinuating analysis has already been done but obviously it hasn't. you didn't answer the question you quoted... sorry if this is obnoxious:
...
1) what is the purpose of the barbed wire?
2) is the barbed wire effective for whatever its purpose is?
3) why were they able to put the barbed wire up?
4) what is the cuban or venezuelan analogue of the answer to (1), if any?
5) would barbed wire be effective for this analogue problem in cuba or venezuela?
6) does cuba or venezuela have the same capacity to emplace the barbed wire?
...
until we have the answer to (1) we can't even continue. as previously stated here, (1) wasn't even answered by vice. actually they didn't even bother asking the question. and so it was deliberately left up to your interpretation. sure they took the time to water the ideological garden so to speak, but then they left the questions of the specifics ("barbed wire" here) up to your extrapolating imagination. replace "barbed wire" with whatever you want: "surveillance cameras", "facial recognition", "security checkpoints", "police drills"... the reason you can't take any of this for granted has been repeated like 20 times in this thread.
Synergy posted:"Pol Pot Did Nothing Wrong" takes
*rising out of the crypt with a Crypt Keeper voice* this, but unironically
cars posted:Synergy posted:
"Pol Pot Did Nothing Wrong" takes
*rising out of the crypt with a Crypt Keeper voice* this, but unironically
one time when i was searching for cambodia stuff i found this really weird site that claimed to be a cambodian group who were pro pol pot but it was like a skeleton of a geocities website written in broken english and when i tried to email them it said the email wasn't valid. i was really hyped to possibly talk to an insane polpotist using google translate but i guess it wasn't meant to be
Synergy posted:marlax78 posted:You know the reason you feel like you need to have a "balanced" view of China is because, even if you think this vice video is stupid, you add up the video times a million and you get an ideology that makes you think there has to be something to it. Why are you even honing in on barbed wire around a school for instance? It's an unconscious bias (totalitarian evil dictatorship, mindless brainwashed slaves) that you're refusing to cast aside.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Cuba or Venezuela feels it necessary to resort to these kinds of measures despite also being constantly attacked by imperialism. It's easy to get stuck in an ideological bubble where you refuse to believe anything coming out of western media. Maybe only 10% of it is accurate but if you choose to throw out the plausible parts you're going to end up with blindspots. That's how you get "Pol Pot Did Nothing Wrong" takes.
this is the definition of bad faith argument. feel free to argue whatever you like about china or any country but if you want to be taken seriously you would do well to back your statements with more than a vice video and a shitty attitude
nearlyoctober posted:replace "barbed wire" with whatever you want: "surveillance cameras", "facial recognition", "security checkpoints", "police drills"... the reason you can't take any of this for granted has been repeated like 20 times in this thread.
i think you're missing the point. remove the journalists, remove the "scary" music and you still have footage of a security state (excessive police, cameras, etc). whether this is justified or not is the real discussion. there was also an article posted here a few months ago, written by someone who seemed pretty level headed (despite maybe a couple of mild racist comments). i think it's worth reexamining for those that forgot or didn't read much of it:
I must admit that I was completely paranoid about this trip. I tend to be paranoid in general, and the stories I was getting from Xinjiang weren’t helping my condition. The stories tell of widespread surveillance, foreigners being followed constantly, checkpoints everywhere, and most importantly, smartphones being checked for subversive apps. Well, I do have a lot of stuff on my smartphone, let alone my computer. So I bought a new phone just for the occasion, and used all manner of opsec best practices.
Getting In
All prepared and in good (if somewhat uneasy) spirits, we arrived at Urumqi airport. I had mentally prepared myself for an entire police department waiting for us and rummaging through all our luggage, phones, and computers. I didn’t care. I Was Prepared. I was all pumped up for the occasion, rehearsing all the stories I had prepared to tell the local police.
And nothing happened. Nothing. Not even a miserly checkpoint in the whole airport. We just left the plane, got to domestic arrivals, picked up our luggage, and off we went. Just like any other airport in the free world. What the hell?
Then we got into the city and reality started to set in. The reports aren’t fake news. It’s all quite true.
The first thing that strikes you on arrival to Xinjiang, driving from the airport into the city, is the propaganda. It’s everywhere...
The other thing that is always in your field of sight is the police. Oh, the police. They are literally (literally) everywhere. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a law that mandates a police station every 250 meters. The sheer amount of policemen, police cars, police checkpoints, police stations, and security guards of all sorts is completely overwhelming. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t believe there is or ever has been. Xinjiang is a police state, and it’s open about it. Blatant. This is not a place where you worry about being watched. They watch you all the time, and they want you to know it.
While our taxi driver was cheerful, we were getting uneasy just looking through the windows. On arriving at our hotel, we stumbled upon another Xinjiang Characteristic. Shop checkpoints. The hotel had a small checkpoint with a metal detector, shields, and wooden bats in the floor. Two old men with police jackets were standing watch. They asked for our passports, took a clueless look, and waved us through. Check-in at the hotel was uneventful, the same procedure as everywhere in China.
We got our belongings ready and proceeded to go out for dinner, where we were to meet a local. One guy in our team had a business contact in Urumqi, and he offered to buy us a good Xinjiang dinner. We got in a taxi and arrived at the restaurant, where he was waiting for us in one of these booths with a couple of his friends. After the typical greetings and rounds of toasting (Chinese dinners are really tiresome), we ordered some food, and when the waiter left, he dropped this bomb on us:
“Do not, I repeat, do not talk politics, or ethnic relations stuff, or anything sensitive on the phone. Police know you’re here, your conversations are being listened to, your GPS is being recorded. If you do anything stupid on the phone, police will come in less than 30 minutes and take you away,” he said while looking me straight in the eye.
“What?”
“You heard me. Watch what you do on the phone.”
“Has this ever happened around you? You’ve seen this? Police taking people away because of what they said on the phone?”
“Oh, yes.”
I took a deep breath.
“How long has this been going on for?”
“A couple years, since the new guy came here.”
A waitress came in bringing our food. We all smiled and started eating, awkwardly changing the topic to sports. The food was great, we ate a lot, thanked our hosts profusely, and each went our own ways.
The first thing we realized is that Urumqi is actually pretty nice. It has any amenity you could wish for: coffee shops, restaurants, stores and shopping malls housing all manner of local and international chains. The people dress in stylish clothes and seem to be enjoying themselves. The city is clean and well-maintained, and the traffic, if a bit dense, is quite orderly. Far better than most provincial cities in China.
The second thing we realized is that the surveillance apparatus is hardcore. As I mentioned, there are police everywhere; standing, walking, and driving. They’re not aggressive, or intimidating, or stopping people at random. They’re just there making themselves present. They didn’t have guns; some had wooden bats, while others had fancy metal bats. There were tons of shields, too. This is the sort of anti-riot gear you see in a Western city when there’s any major gathering, or antifa are running one of their regular rituals.
Another striking element is how they control the movement of people. Entry to any public place is strictly controlled. Residential compounds, markets, mosques, hospitals, and other wider spaces all have separate entries and exits. Inside both entries and exits, there is a metal scanner, an ID card reader, and in some (not many) places a facial recognition camera. Places which expect foreigners also have more advanced passport scanners. All places have a computer and a small box which is reportedly used to download all information from smartphones, which the protocol mandates if someone can’t produce their ID card. We were never asked to produce our phones, nor did we see it done to anyone else, but we did listen to many others saying that was the case, before and during the trip.
Every entrance also had two or three security guards, again with anti-riot gear. The Xinjiang authorities want to control who gets in and out of every place at every time. The assumption seems to be that a knife-wielding terrorist may come at any time, so everyone must be ready with shields and bats, which should be enough to handle a guy with a knife until the police can bring in more serious equipment.
After too many beers, I point blank asked if it was true that police would come in 30 minutes if I talked about politics on the phone.
I got weird looks after that, but the consensus seemed to be: “Nah, never heard of anything like it. Why would you do that anyway?” The conversation turned awkward, as people perhaps thought we were asking too many questions. But the general mood was pleasant.
We got a taxi to the new Urumqi station, about 30 minutes from the city center. About 500 meters before the station itself there was a police checkpoint with a small building attached. Most people were waved through; some were made to open their car trunks and had their luggage inspected. We were completely stopped and told to get out of the car and into the building. The taxi driver looked half annoyed, half scared. Inside the buildings, police asked for our passports, took pictures of all relevant pages, and asked us, rather abruptly, what our business was. We explained, put our luggage through a scanner, and they let us go. We then got back on our taxi and went on to the station.
The same security apparatus we saw in Urumqi was there in Turpan, perhaps a bit more so. Police stations every 200 meters or so, police cars patrolling all the time, and metal scanners at every shop, manned by security guards armed with wooden bats and plastic shields. Cameras everywhere. Markets and other large venues had separate entries and exits with ID controls, etc. Same thing. All large compounds also had barbed wire above the walls to stop people from jumping in or out. No funny business in Xinjiang.
One big difference with Urumqi was that, again, most people were Uyghur. But the police were Uyghur, too. The people manning the checkpoints and the “convenience police stations,” and driving the patrol cars were all Uyghur. It’s worth emphasizing that whatever is happening in Xinjiang is not just an invasion by a foreign army hell-bent on annoying the locals. The locals are quite annoyed, indeed, but it’s their fellow tribesmen doing the grunt work. Or most of it, anyway. I must say that the Uyghur police we saw were more easy-going than the Han police we saw in Urumqi. More chill. Less zealous, you could say. At any rate, they never gave us a hard time, and we got plenty of smiles and easy treatment. We also got the feeling that most “police” were just hired weeks ago. There are just too many of them to be properly trained. It’s just a job, and most of them don’t really appear to like it. But they’ll go through the motions. That’s very Chinese, too.
We did get a chance to stroll around some residential compounds. We saw the same security controls, barbed wire, and strict controls of entry and exit, in addition to lots and lots of propaganda banners and documents, announcing this or that campaign against “evil elements” which threatened the security of the people. One document cautioned against “village bullies” and “two-faced people,” among other examples of bad apples that the security apparatus has identified for capture.
We saw a Han (maybe Hui?) policeman doing guard time in front of a residential compound. A bunch of middle-aged Uyghur men were chatting with him, in bad Mandarin, but in a cordial way, laughing and all. We didn’t catch the whole conversation, but it seemed the locals were trying to tell the guy to cut them some slack, while the policeman, with a big smile, told them he was just following orders and working for the security of everyone.
We walked into a more rural area in the outskirts of the city. A big white wall was painted with scenes of ethnic harmony. One scene said in very clear terms: No Illegal Religious Activities Allowed. No religious activities at all allowed in public places. Do not interfere with marriage, family planning, or education in the name of religion. Speaking of religion, we saw a few mosques, but many looked abandoned, or taken over by “local committees,” or Communist Party branches. No call to prayer. Certainly nobody praying. Islam has been extirpated from the public space. It’s hardly visible at all.
We also saw “special police,” basically police officers who get to carry guns. All of them Uyghurs. China has no problem arming Uyghurs, or even getting them into the military. They trust their loyalty, or at the very least they trust the mechanisms they have in place to ensure their loyalty.
And so our trip ended; we all flew away from Kashgar back to our respective homes. We weren’t stopped before leaving. We had been expecting some police visit to our hotels for the whole trip; but nothing happened. Then again, we didn’t do anything suspicious, either. We did not try to explore the deepest countryside, or take pictures of the reeducation camps, or seek politically active people. The sole purpose of our trip was to visit Xinjiang, and if possible to get a feel of how it is like to live in Xinjiang today for your average person, of any ethnicity. It goes without saying that we left with mixed feelings. We saw life under a complete, multi-layered surveillance system that has basically no blind spots at all. A system which has dialed back the clock in most non-urban areas, bringing back old-school Soviet practices of social control. It is jarring and oppressive in many ways; and as foreigners we surely didn’t get to experience most of it.
Yet again, the Chinese government congratulates itself in having solved terrorism without war, and credit where it’s due, it has. Xinjiang appears to have no criminality whatsoever, and the police in the streets are unarmed. Meanwhile France has soldiers, not police, patrolling the streets of Paris. Considering his recent post-resignation declaration about radical Islam replacing the Republic, I have to wonder what the former French Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, would make of Xinjiang.
notice how this person is able to document what they're seeing without reverting to the "oh they must be hiding dead bodies in that locked room" take that fills the imagination. looking back over this thread i forgot that blinkandwheeze did a much better job of getting this point across.
blinkandwheeze posted:huey's point is outlining a total impossibility of retrieving any undistorted facts from bourgeois reporting, if we accept that then the conclusion is certainly that there is no such national oppression or chauvinism occurring. his latest post denies that we can take a critical perspective on this issue at all without simply being passive adherents to bourgeois propagandists
blinkandwheeze posted:demands for these kinds of endless rhetorical concessions before we can have a serious discussion about anything, on an irrelevant stalinist irony message board, are insufferable. it goes without saying that people here are inclined to think the prc is generally more humane and socially invested than any representatives of the vast Nazi empire we live under. that we need to explicitly declare and confess this every time we engage in any kind of critical discussion, lest we betray our hidden allegiance to imperialism, is f*cking absurd. this message board has no impact on the wider world whatsoever, there is no need to pretend we are engaging on some grand political battlefield at every moment here
Edited by Synergy ()
Synergy posted:i think you're missing the point. remove the journalists, remove the "scary" music and you still have footage of a security state (excessive police, cameras, etc). whether this is justified or not is the real discussion.
indeed, and i put it to you that block quoting blog posts or otherwise linking to third party reports about spooky stuff outsiders have seen while visiting xinjiang does not constitute a 'discussion'.
xinjiang is a security state - so, to a lesser extent, is greater china. okay, and so what? we are not libertarians or anarchists. a state under attack from without and within must take steps to secure itself. the security concerns in xinjiang are both genuine and unique thanks to its geopolitical importance and a legacy of decades of unrest and proxy wars in central asia. there is a persistent separatist terrorist threat in the region that has attempted to embed itself within the uyghur identity. at the same time, the response has been at times as clumsy as it is heavy. many uyghurs are at best subject to discrimination and lack of opportunity, as worst detained without cause. the situation is opaque and the state is defensive, a stance worsened by disgusting western propaganda efforts to cast this as a modern holocaust of muslims for the crime of being muslim (oh, the irony). and that's the rub: the politicisation of human rights is entirely counterproductive to resolving genuine human rights problems.
and you have the gall to come in here, post a bunch of inflammatory nonsense with zero original, productive discussion, and sneer that anyone dismissing the literal CIA propaganda machine that is vice is a hop skip and jump away from defending pol pot. your posts are bad and you should feel bad.
Petrol posted:xinjiang is a security state - so, to a lesser extent, is greater china. okay, and so what?
your position is loud and clear. i didn't expect to see support for a developing police state but here we are. hopefully some of you will have the decency to reexamine this topic when enough time passes.
Edited by karphead ()
Synergy posted:Petrol posted:xinjiang is a security state - so, to a lesser extent, is greater china. okay, and so what?
your position is loud and clear. i didn't expect to see support for a developing police state but here we are. hopefully some of you will have the decency to reexamine this topic when enough time passes.
throwing around meaningless catchphrases like "police state" and huffing about "decency" might pass for political discussion in an american high school but it won't fly with me, pal.
Synergy posted:Petrol posted:xinjiang is a security state - so, to a lesser extent, is greater china. okay, and so what?
your position is loud and clear. i didn't expect to see support for a developing police state but here we are. hopefully some of you will have the decency to reexamine this topic when enough time passes.
You have to be trolling at this point.
Petrol posted:I hate to invoke poe's law, but aren't trolls meant to be funny?
You have to be producing excrement with your mouth
Now I'm happy to engage you on this issue that you raised, to that end I've been sharing my thoughts hoping to prompt you or anyone else interested to have an actual discussion. You've studiously ignored all of that apart from cherry picking a line to be outraged by. Now you want to stop talking about it, which is fine too, nobody is obliged to post! But it's a bit rich to act like you're backing off for the sake of left unity, being the bigger person and all that. If you don't know how to express your opinion productively or no longer want to try that's fine, but acting like you've been bullied out of the conversation for having the temerity to disagree is churlish.
Synergy posted:i also wanted to say that despite disagreeing with the majority of Zoners on this issue, i'm not the type of person to hold a grudge over anyone just because of one topic. i probably agree with 95% of the positions that are held here and i would imagine everyone has their own contrarian topics. moreover, i respect the in-depth knowledge of a lot of people on this forum (especially the people posting above me) even when things get silly like hurling insults or calling each other fascists (lol). i'd rather move on to other discussions and avoid further infighting which is so common on the left. anyway, that's my plan, you guys/gals can do what you want.
lurk more
Synergy posted:babyhueypnewton posted:
I only went to China briefly but all the security she went through is no different than Tiananmen square or Beijing airport, both of which were much less intrusive and obviously racist than Ronald Reagan National Airport (a name we are free to protest and yet still persists). Meanwhile in Manila they don't only have cameras, there are private security with shotguns at every entrance to a place not made of scrap metal...
Like, go to anywhere in the third world, you will find that there is far more security everywhere but it is privatized and heavily armed.
"it's actually pretty normal and worse in other areas" is not a great argument, it's just moving the goalposts because apparently this is the best we can do
what's remarkable about that video is that city doesn't look anything like the slums of Rio nor is it a paradise for western pedophiles like Bangkok.
I'm glad it doesn't look like Rio, and it's nice to see a reduction in poverty throughout China, a turn towards energy efficiency, and other positive developments, but that doesn't mean I'm just going to ignore revisionism like billionaires existing. I've said this many times before and I'll say it again, it's possible to have a balanced view of a socialist/hybrid country. You don't need to have rose tinted glasses to be a supporter of a country's overall trajectory. When I watch videos on the DPRK I can see that the people are happy, they have their needs meet, they have control over their lives, etc. But I also recognize that there's an unhealthy emphasis on the Kim family and on Pyongyang. Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
wow you're like super nuanced. how does he do it?
serafiym posted:glad to see there's some sort of weird psychotic intellectualization of all the possible different reasons why there's barbed wire around a school in a country which has not been unclear about their commitment to regimenting sectors of the population.
go on..
Synergy posted:your position is loud and clear. i didn't expect to see support for a developing police state but here we are. hopefully some of you will have the decency to reexamine this topic when enough time passes.
smh infantile disorder
serafiym posted:a country which has not been unclear about their commitment to regimenting sectors of the population.
???
quick to call fellow posters weird and psychotic, slow to explain your own position. guess i'll keep waiting!
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1UZ2HK
It’d be great to see the exploited and abused Filipino et al. domestic workers, sex workers, and others protest the barbaric Hong Kong neocolonial caste society rather than these reactionary neocolonialists waving American flags. Maybe there’s a way for the Hong Kong proles to subvert or hijack this obvious US machination?
codywilson posted:It’d be great to see the exploited and abused Filipino et al. domestic workers, sex workers, and others protest the barbaric Hong Kong neocolonial caste society rather than these reactionary neocolonialists waving American flags. Maybe there’s a way for the Hong Kong proles to subvert or hijack this obvious US machination?
This is unfortunately a perennial problem whenever there's political conflict in Hong Kong. If you're a precarious or itinerant worker trying to join up or protest alongside State Department colour revolution projects you will get you none of the press, sympathy, resources or protection afforded to middle class students by State Department hustlers, and a disproportionate amount of backlash, some of it from the students. And if a riot or scuffle kicks off they're the ones most likely to get hurt. The US knows their target demographic and can be incredibly callous about pruning out elements that threaten to dilute or derail their message. This is all hearsay I guess but last time around a few years ago I heard bits and pieces about this stuff from a daisy chain of contacts, they made it very clear that the student movement (particularly leadership and organizers) absolutely did not give a single shit about helping marginalized labour and didn't want them around. It sucks!
That doesn’t make every such protest a creature of the U.S. State Department (though some are). It just means the message that reaches global news outlets is usually written, boosted and finessed after the fact by agents of the United States government and its allies.
The “cleaner” recipients of their aid are quick to capitalize on local dissatisfaction and will redirect the aim of the protests within weeks or even days, while their grungier counterparts do things like import foreign fighters and carry out assassinations during an early period of “peaceful” protest. Then the U.S. condemns the local government for the state of emergency it creates itself and calls for intervention, as was done in Syria.
The second part is unlikely to emerge in China right now, so for whatever it’s worth, I think U.S. provocation in Hong Kong is probably just another fire-and-forget stage in a program aiming at constant low-level instability. Soon enough, the Western operatives involved will pose the multi-million-dollar funding question in Foreign Policy and The Economist: Why Did We Abandon Hong Kong? And no one writing those articles will mention that just a few months earlier, they’d denounced the entire idea of U.S. involvement as baseless conspiracy theory.
Synergy posted:Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
there's a school right down from my office that has high fences and barbed wire. it's extremely common all over the country.
Edited by aerdil ()
Synergy posted:Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
When I was growing up my cousin tore his ballsack open hopping a barbed wire fence behind the school. The downtown school I attended growing up in a bucolic little canadian city even had razor wire at the top of its fences, which only went halfway around the grounds to block off the alley and street, anyone could just stroll through any of 5 gateless openings. It was stupid and bizarre and ultimately meaningless, some PTA tryhard really didn't want kids running into traffic and overcompensated. Just a forgotten remnant of someone's bad idea that never mattered much at all. But you sure as shit could point a camera at a section of that fence, put on some eerie tunes and tell the world about the twisted inhuman crimes of the totalitarian Red Deer Public School District.
This isn't about saying "China can do no wrong," which is its own kind of condescending racism and bad materialist practice. It's about not getting conned by the trivial things that we walk past without noticing every single day in own neighborhoods that have been reframed into The Smoking Gun Evidence That China Is Truly The Evil Bad Land. China is a real place with real problems and sometimes the people of China are going to do better at dealing with them and sometimes they'll really fuck it up, but we need to think carefully about whether what the news barfs out at us is showing actual evidence of wrongdoing. And not only that, we need to assess our own relationship to the bloody legacy of colonial capitalism, our own relationship to power and public discourse, and what we can or can't realistically affect. The Uyghur situation is clearly an awful problem, but the smothering blanket of surveillance the US has draped around the globe doesn't leave much ambiguous, if there was a genocide going on I really do believe we would know it and that information wouldn't be couched in a bunch of weasel words, threatening conjecture, and Bellingcat tier wikipedia "analysis." From the little we do actually know the government of China is trying to figure out a way to deal with the recent serious violence in the region in a way that will protect the public and hopefully reconciliate some alienated and angry people instead of having a fucking ISIS insurgency. Are they doing a good job of that? No idea, what even would be the best approach in that kind of shitty situation. There's a good Radio War Nerd episode on it that establishes what we do and don't know about the situation (not very much,) and in the absence of further information from actual journalists I'm sure as fuck not going resort to wasting my time trying to sort wheat from chaff watching state department propaganda.
And if it becomes clear in the future that there actually is a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region, I'll have made a bad call using imperfect information and it will be awful and I'll have to seriously reassess how I think about these things because that's not something that is acceptable to be wrong about. But ultimately I'm just one pasty ass tankie, and instead of handwringing about whether or not China is good or bad, whether barbed wire fences are really necessary around a school on the other side of the planet in a city I'll never visit, whether the Communist Party of China is genuinely socialist or a bureaucratic state capitalist failure, I'm going to put my energy into dismantling the genocidal settler state that I already live in, the political system that I'm actually a part of and have the most power to affect. And when people talk about China around me, I'm going to think about who benefits from these conversations and choose my words carefully before I open my mouth. If I'm trying to further the cause of socialism in my own city, how is badmouthing and nitpicking contemporary socialist states going to help that? If I'm fighting to end the ravages of colonial capitalism, what message does it send if I align myself with a political movement resisting the reintegration of Hong Kong, the iconic centerpiece of British colonialism? It's seductively easy to get into the news junkie mindset of being Involved in events by just reading about them and having the best opinions, but that doesn't do a god damn thing unless you are using that information to direct your time and effort into concrete political action. And if we talk about the news uncritically, we are directing that time and effort into circulating the dominant narrative of a murderous white supremacist empire. As our comrade Christ would say, "How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
Wikipedia also has paragraphs and paragraphs discussing the unusual treatment of the massacre in both Chinese and Western media ("terrorists" in quote marks, accusing China of scapegoating the Uyghur people, etc, some strange silences, ...) and so maybe it's not that weird that I don't remember it. My friend has quite solid links to the area and I (rudely) asked a lot of questions about the veracity of the story, and I believe them that it certainly did happen. The common belief and Chinese reporting is that these were Uyghur Muslim separatists/jihadists.
It looks like this has been shoved down the memory hole in the West, since it would be such an obvious explanation for tension (at least!) and a change of policy in Xinjiang. I can't imagine what would happen in most countries after an event like this. It would be horrifically traumatic in a Western country.
It also looks like there was an attempt to keep media attention quiet about this in China as well, but I believe the line that this is in order to try and reduce the risks of anti-Uyghur pogroms (though some did happen, I remember now Carl Zha on RWN talking about some of this? My memory is rusty on that though.)
In any case. I thought my friend was remarkably sanguine about the people of Xinjiang considering that I would expect a typical American with the same experience to be filled with homicidal anger at whatever ethnic group.
Violent terrorist actions by an ethnic minority insurrection movement have to be one of the most visceral challenges to a state (if not the most) -- I don't know what would bring out your worst, if not this.
...
Just to be clear I'm not saying something dumb like "so their bad actions are excused". I think in light of the actual situation, I would not be very comfortable calling them obviously bad actions. I don't think I would have any better ideas.
I'm probably one of the rhizzoners least comfortable with the state (I am thinking through a lot of things these recent years) but if you take the existence and necessity of the state as a given, then you have no choice but to act to ensure mass violence doesn't reoccur, and the most intelligent way to combat this is at the roots, growing the feeling of belonging in society, in the community.
I guess we'll find out in another 30 years whether the right choice for large multiethnic and multicultural states is "I'll ignore you if you ignore me" or this kind of attempt at an integrative whole that sacrifices some difference. Not feelin too hot about the former at the moment though
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