It’s difficult to argue CCP rule hasn’t been a blessing for most Chinese citizens. There are major blemishes, and signs point to Xi having taken advantage of the popular complacency. But Beijing has delivered on its mandate to date. I’m a China hawk, and I can recognise that.
US prisons are not concentration camps. The majority of people in US prisons have committed usually dozens of crimes and the plurality of inmates have committed violent crimes[1]. No one is in a US prison for praying, teaching their children a language the state disapproves of, or similar non-crimes. There are no forced sterilizations in US prisons.
Many people in US prisons are there for drug related offenses, which were invented precisely to jail the black population. And while you probably can’t be jailed for praying, you definitely can be put there for rough sleeping or many other non-crimes invented for that specific purpose.
But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
If you had looked at the link I shared you see that only 20% of US prisoners are there for any charge related to drugs and most of them have multiple priors. The policies were not invented to "ail the black population" this is patently false. The war on drugs was championed among others by figures like Jesse Jackson and the whole of the Congressional Black Caucus in the 1980s.
> But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
Again you're engaged fully in whataboutism here. I get that you have a giant hate boner for the US, but you're spewing nonsense. I'm not here to justify the war in Iraq, it was wrong. But locking up 3 million people in your own territory for no reason and surveilling a whole population around the clock is pure evil. Its gross that you're trying to defend it.
Not the guy you're replying to, but I take issue with "it's gross that you're trying to defend it".
"Locking up 3 million people" is a false claim. If you look into the source of the claim that "1 million people" are locked up then you'll see that that's based on interviewing around 10 people, and then extrapolating their villages' figures to the whole of Xinjiang. The quality is evidence is so bad that even the Uyghur Tribunal failed to provide any evidence for the "1 million people" figure, but they still concluded "genocide" despite lack of evidence.
This "3 million people" figure that you cite now is absolutely without evidence. It's just the media taking the "1 million" figure and then sensationally inflating it, until finally people like you take "3 million" as a fact.
Calling it "[genocide] denial" (sic) is a way to shut down conversation and to dismiss counter-evidence and criticism out of hand.
Was the poster defending Chinese crimes? I see it entirely differently: he's pointing out double standards which is completely legit, even necessary. Let's say that China and the US are both bad. But only one of them is painted as a genocidal fascist expansionist existential threat. There can be no honest conversation about China until double standards are destroyed.
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You invoke whataboutism, but mentioning the US here is absolutely relevant because US officials have admitted on video that an important reason why they were in Afghanistan was to encourage Uyghur extremism, forcing China to respond with anti-terrorism measures.
Imagine your neighbor funding your enemies to harass you. You take measures against the harassers, but you had to resort to some dirty tricks and had to overrespond to make them stop. Your neighbor then reports you for those dirty tricks and overresponse in which you violated some laws. Yes you were absolutely wrong for violating laws, but you are also right in pointing out that your neighbor instigated the situation. Calling out your neighbor is not whataboutism, it's essential context. I don't think you think will appreciate people who deliberately ignore your neighbor's contribution and only focus on you.
... In these camps, do they pull kids from their parents by the thousands, make them drink water out of the toilet, give them tin foil blankets to sleep under - and then "lose track" of them completely? All contracted out at ridiculous rates to private companies, which can't be inspected even by government officials?
China has prisons (for convicted criminals/terrorists) as well as compulsary rehabilitation and vocational training camps to combat terrorism. Western media puts both of them in the same bucket and calls them "concentration camps". A heavy-handed, quite possibly overload broad, anti-terrorism response where there are two different kinds of facilities is not at all the same as "putting innocent people in concentration camps for no reason" and certainly not "they're only doing it to ethnically cleanse". A heavy-handed anti-terrorism response deserves criticism, but is not at all the same as "genocide". The fact that media does so anyway is disingenuous.
Besides, most of the compulsory rehabilitation/training facilities have already been dismantled a couple of years ago when they concluded that the terrorism threat is gone. See this very biased AP article where they try to make you feel like something sinister is going on, but when you read the content then they essentially admit that many security measures are already gone: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
Earlier in this thread it is said that China uniquely deserves punishment for its actions in Xinjiang, implying that India doesn't have any problems with minority group abuse, but you really should read into Kashmir and why nobody makes a fuss about that. Even if China's Xinjiang response deserves legit criticism, the fact that Kashmir is given a free pass means that western governments, media and public don't really care about Xinjiang human rights, but merely use Xinjiang as a club to beat China. Not to mention that e.g. France also has an anti-terrorism response on which the Xinjiang response is partially inspired, but nobody talks about that as being some sort of mortal sin. This sort of double standards is a huge abuse of the concept of "human rights".
Look, I support genuine efforts to help China improve in the area of human rights. But current efforts are not genuine, they're just geopolitical attacks hidden behind the guise of human rights, and the public even can't see through this bullshit even though it's apparent if you research things up close, so I do not support them.