> In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of vocational training. “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.
> The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. [...]
> Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. They were “burned,” the locals told him. “These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”
As someone unfamiliar with the situation, a question I still have is whether this is something unique or unusual for the Chinese government, or how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism.
E.g. I've heard about their efforts to shift the ethnic balance in Tibet, has that been followed-up with similar indoctrination efforts?
> ”... how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism”
Falun Gong is the blueprint for this: a homegrown spiritual practice that gained too much popularity in the ‘90s and the authorities turned against it. Human rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands are still in “re-education” camps.
Vancouver, BC / Richmond BC area here, which has a >30% Chinese-ethnicity population: Whenever Falun Gong makes the press here, there is a relatively active English language social media astroturfing campaign, and fake news campaign that has been going around for at least 15-20 years which attempts to equate Falun Gong with known harmful cults which Westerners are familiar with. I've seen it compared to Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, and Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple.
As best I can determine it's a buddhist/meditation group that disagrees with the Chinese government on principles of fundamental human rights.
Falun Gong is pretty harmless. I used to go along to mooch off the free meditation and qigong during my salad days. While there is a fundamental cult of personality around the leader, the values seemed morally sound and in accordance with your meat-and-potatoes buddhism.
Would actually recommend to fellow cheap-skates. Definitely no hard-sell from the believers to recite their scripture (which they call 'The Fa').
Falun gong is basically Scientology of the east. Whether you would call them harmless is debatable but they're definitely not just your meat-and-potatoes Buddhism.
They believe in spiritual healing, reject modern medicine, and believe that one can gain superpowers and that only the leader of Falun gong can activate them.
So Falun Gong has celebrity drop-in centers? Aggressively pursues you if you leave? Has a central structure to where people donate all of their money? I'm not sure you know what you are talking about.
No, yes, yes. Does it really answer your question though? I don't know what you're assuming but I frequently have encounters with Falun gong practitioners in China and Taiwan.
That same campaign seems pretty active in this very HN post. Lots of apologists for the communist regime here, with some not so subtle approvals of racism and genocide.
This comment breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing and bad faith, and it adds to nationalistic flamewar. Please don't post like this again. HN has plenty of users with legitimate reason to be on either side of this debate. Both sides need to respect each other, and if they can't, they can't post here.
All: if you really believe you're seeing organized manipulation on Hacker News, that's obviously a bannable offence, and you should alert us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But please don't insinuate it in comments just to take a swipe in an argument. That's offside, and also mind-numbingly tedious.
Speaking of tracking, is there a site that tracks and draws a graph of the position of a stories on the front page, their score and number of comments?
FWIW I didn't mean to imply any moderator action, just user flagging. And I know there are many reasons for that, some people don't want political things period, and so on. But just going by sheer quality of this article, I think it's sad that people who don't want to discuss it impede on the ability of those who do want to discuss it. When it went to #1 instantly I thought "this won't last" and made some screenshots... got distracted, looked again and saw it had sunk like a brick.
I made myself a little scraper, I hope it's okay to grab the front page HTML once a minute, or is that too often?
I have met and worked with Uighurs. I personally did what was probably the largest collection on their language a couple years ago in my work at the LDC. The attempts to slander them are just that.
I’ll leave the other issue aside as I don’t know anything about it.
Let's don't bring them on the table. Just like you don't bring Peoples Temple or Branch Davidians or any other cult onto the table when you talking about such topic.
I actually knew some people who was practicing Falun Gong before the crack down (And some still practicing it after). If you want to paint a portrait of those people, just image an uneducated man/woman at age around 40~50, who probably encountered some misfortunes in their life and became vulnerable enough to take anything into their head without a thought, and act upon that thought.
They're those people who would also actually believed they can receive superpower from a tinfoil hat (Well, not actually a tinfoil hat, but guess what, they have upgraded version of that [0]), meditation, or, maybe, killing themselves/others.
Oh, also, do you know the "Eastern Lightning"[1]? Don't bring them as well.
A person of 40-50 at the time of the height of tha Falun Gong had been through some serious shit in their lifetime. Their childhood and formative years would have consisted of Mao's self-genocidal economic policies and then the cultural revolution, then a complete repudiation of those communist ideals in the subsequent opening to the west.
> been through some serious shit in their lifetime
That's for sure. Somebody actually hoping Falun Gong can be the cure for their cancer.
It's not actually a problem about economic policies and cultural revolution, I think the main problem was the government has failed to develop the infrastructure needed to educate and help those people. No, government was just let those people wander around by themselves without give them enough help, no wonder why they found such way to "help" themselves.
> Their childhood and formative years would have consisted of Mao's self-genocidal economic policies and then the cultural revolution, then a complete repudiation of those communist ideals in the subsequent opening to the west.
I don't think this is a thing, because I don't believe many people in China was that obsessed with communism to begin with. Lots of bad thing actually happened during cultural revolution and the great leap, enough for most of people to have realized.
There is a misconception many (if not most) westerners have, that is China and Chinese people are communist. WRONG. In reality, most Chinese people are just normal people who lives under the communist ruling, and that's all.
CCP of course always trying to push their ideology to the public (by education and censorship etc), but isn't that's an indication of "Not everyone believes communism in China"?
A good predictor of whether the Chinese government would react to a group is the threat that group poses on the national integrity of China. Any separatist/ independence movement will be harshly treated. You can find many examples of this. There is nothing the West that says or do that will change this policy.
> A good predictor of whether the Chinese government would react to a group is the threat that group poses on the national integrity of China.
I think the more accurate interpretation, which applies to authoritarian or totalitarian power, is that they don't tolerate competing power structures. A competing power structure, whether a political group, a labor union, a spiritual organization, can easily become a political organization and therefore a threat to the power of the government. If they are organized and independent, they are a threat. The government's motive is to protect and enhance its own power.
Think about the Falun Gong: Certainly they were no threat to the "national integrity" (whatever that means precisely) of China. Also consider labor and human rights movements, who have no interest in separatism. In fact, democracies are much more stable governments in general, and are more likely to preserve "national integrity".
Think also about the Chinese military, which IIRC is under control of the Communist Party, not the government. They are careful to not allow it to be an independent power structure - an independent military has been the downfall of many authoritarian governments (usually replacing them with another authoritarian government).
The part about incentivizing / cooking up other ways to relocate Han majority citizens is not unique or unusual. According to many reports, it's been going on in Hong Kong and Taiwan for a long time.
It's not unique or unusual for dictatorships in general. The Soviet Union, for example, worked hard at indoctrination, as did Mao. Arguably, any propaganda is indoctrination.
Xinjiang is an autonomous region, too. Tibet has been thoroughly “Hanified,” though you’re right that it hasn’t been as dramatic as in Xinjiang. The same is true for other ethnic minorities, too. Traditional costumes are kept to pay lip service to plurality, and there are some parks that feel more like Epcot Center exhibits. It’s not all due to government intervention, but China’s ethnic minorities are disappearing.
I would guess that the Chinese government is worried (rightly or wrongly) about outside (armed) support for Muslims in Xinjiang, and less concerned about the Tibetans tapping into international support, which to date has been fairly ineffectual. To my eye they are making such foreign involvement more likely, not less, with this overt campaign of imprisonment and mistreatment.
Well until now minority groups got preferential treatment as compared to Han Chinese. You will notice that the ethnic Uyghur Xinjiang governor actually supporting the camps.
Otherwise now the Party is treating the same way they treat normal Han Chinese who have different thoughts on the CCP. However not everyone in Xinjiang is affected, mostly the religious.
> In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of vocational training. “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.
> The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. [...]
> Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. They were “burned,” the locals told him. “These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”
As someone unfamiliar with the situation, a question I still have is whether this is something unique or unusual for the Chinese government, or how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism.
E.g. I've heard about their efforts to shift the ethnic balance in Tibet, has that been followed-up with similar indoctrination efforts?