"The document stated that it was forbidden to speak with the prisoners, forbidden to laugh, forbidden to cry and forbidden to answer questions from anyone. I signed because I had no choice, and then I received a uniform and was taken to a tiny bedroom with a concrete bed and a thin plastic mattress. There were five cameras on the ceiling – one in each corner and another one in the middle. [For less privileged inmates:] There were almost 20 people in a room of 16 square meters [172 sq. ft.]... There were cameras in their rooms, too, and also in the corridor. Each room had a plastic bucket for a toilet. Every prisoner was given two minutes a day to use the toilet, and the bucket was emptied only once a day. If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day. The prisoners wore uniforms and their heads were shaved. Their hands and feet were shackled all day, except when they had to write. Even in sleep they were shackled, and they were required to sleep on their right side – anyone who turned over was punished."
From "A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here's What Really Goes on Inside/Rape, torture and human experiments. Sayragul Sauytbay offers firsthand testimony from a Xinjiang 'reeducation' camp" (Haaretz). There are much worse things in that article than what I've excerpted.
October 18, 2019
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85 comments:
Sounds like the US pro basketball players like China a lot. So, what's the problem?
Yeah, but LeBron James needs his paycheck.
Should we go to war with China over this? (Asking for a WWII vet friend)
John Henry
Every cell plays CNN.
The left drool over that kind of power over their fellow man.
Putting this next to comments and/or actions from those corporations who continue to play by China's rules, from our tech companies who help supply the Chinese with the tools to censor and monitor their people, and from our athletes, entertainers, and academics who insist that the US is the racist evil in the world, while giving cover and backing to the corrupt thugs who are the Chinese government, almost leaves me speechless.
Almost. Except that I am sure that Colin Kapernick's life was even harder. It must have been given all the to-do.
I cannot wait for the 'I stand with Hong Kong' shirts to start appearing at NBA games this year. Screw the NBA. I'm not playing. I just need to figure out how to say screw Google and Apple as well. That could be more difficult.
I guess Lebron James would call this person "misinformed".
Gut-check article. That's how Communist countries roll. I grew up during the Cold War and thankfully learned how evil and oppressive those Soviet bastards were. We played the Chinese off the Soviets to drive a wedge between those two regimes. It was necessary and helped lead to the collapse of the Soviets.
But, except for Tienneman Squate incident 30 years ago, most folks simply forgot about how bad the Gulags were in China. Hey, let's just buy cheap plastic trinkets, and stream NBA games there and not think about it.
This good article makes you think about it.
And we let this country into the WTO with favored nation trading rights, creating a monster? Leninism is still how China is governed, explicitly and without apology. Terror is integral.
Someone please forward that to the millionaire King James.
Stand for Something. Stand for Freedom.
LeBron's team at work.
Watch out. LeBron James will call you uneducated.
You mean NYT and WaPo aren't on this story?
1984 is starting to look like a how-to manual.
Trump has taken a sensible path in both cajoling and confronting the China threat in a way I doubt any other politician could, or would want to.
Nobody is surprised by any of this.
Authoritarian communist regimes always do these things.
Joe Biden and the NBA abide.
But but but.... I thought the Chinese were nice people that all Democrats, especially Bernie, wanted us to be like! Oh, they still are cause they want Trump & Co. in gulags here!
Chinese finger traps are another hazard. Keep them away from children.
If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day.
Is that biologically possible? Seems there would be some overflow incontinence happening. Especially with urine.
Reader's Digest used to run first person soviet torture articles.
Who are you to judge with your manifest whiteness and Western values?
Where is Thomas Friedman to explain this all away?
The Chinese Communist Party is fully at war with the rival religion of Islam.
It's Important; that We LISTEN to the NBA, and Hear:
That President Trump is a Horrible Ogre
And the China is are Friend,and our Role Model
President Trump tries to DESTROY America, with his Crazy "freedom" and "economic well being"
Our Friends (and Superiors), the Chinese aren't fooled by that crap! They will bring ORDER!
Support Communist Authority! Down With Freedom! Down with Liberty! Done With Trump!
Luke Lea observes: And we let this country into the WTO with favored nation trading rights, creating a monster? Leninism is still how China is governed, explicitly and without apology. Terror is integral.
Absolutely! There has never been a 'democratic' China. Even Chiang Kai-Shek was a tyrant, though at least an anti-Communist tyrant. But Communist China is at least as draconian as the most severe Soviet system in the treatment of its citizens. When Clinton elevated its status [as a 'quid pro quo'] he served to enrich this regime and make it acceptable. Sad.
BAG
So you want to send troops to attack China?
I ask only because that is the default assumption on this blog. The only options are supine acceptance or troops on the ground. This was made quite explicit every time I said we should even just *speak up* for the Hong Kong protesters.
Ann:
Thanks for finding and posting this. You do this country a great service with your blog.
I posted it on the Creighton basketball message board. I'm hated there because I'm conservative.
Send Peking James to tour that facility. He and Annie Leibovitz could do a photo shoot there.
"The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: “On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn’t come back to the rooms all night. The police had unlimited power. They could take whoever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment.” Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”"
"There are much worse things in that article than what I've excerpted"
And this is where the Democrats want to take us. They openly speak of eliminating the First Amendment. The veneer of "common sense gun laws" has finally worn off, with many Ds more than willing to do direct confiscation. The Scold-in-Chief, Chieftess Warren, tells us bluntly that government will control all major aspects of our lives, including confiscation of wealth. Maximized liberty from government, the Framers' ideal, like victory in war are banished from D dictionaries.
Never, ever vote Democrat.
This story needs to be spread far and wide, and we know we can't count on the MSM to do that. Send the link to everyone you can think of.
Such conditions would make it hard to NOT attempt escape. What do you have to lose, your life? What life?
The article also mentions that men and women under 35 were all raped.
I guess #metoo is taking a break.
Kampala Harris should read this for tips on how to deal with free speech and manifest whiteness.
I don't think it matters whether he signed or not. What's he gonna say? "Hey you can't hurt me; I didn't sign that thing."
But more importantly... were they allowed to watch NBA games?
"There were cameras in their rooms, too, and also in the corridor . . . Every prisoner was given two minutes a day to use the toilet, and the bucket was emptied only once a day. If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day . . . Their hands and feet were shackled all day"
Tell it to LeBron and Steve Kerr.
I published an article on China's persecution of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang just two days ago. The term "genocide" figured prominently. The asks and answers the question: why aren't Middle Eastern Muslims -- the mythical "Arab Street -- protesting Uighur persecution? So far the Street has been silent. Curious, that.
Trump's China policy is one of the very few areas of his presidency that enjoys bipartisan support. Great.
But if it's so widely supported, why is Trump the first president to push these issues? And if Trump loses in 2020 or is impeached, how confident are we that his successor will continue to promote this bipartisan approach?
Imagine my lack of surprise at Althouse's comment.
What did anybody think was happening.
There is a reason power must be dispersed if we are to remain free.
Free people.
Free markets.
Obama wanted to take a strong stance against China, but it compromised his playoff brackets.
"Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras."
(bonus points for anyone who knows the provenance of that quote)
Time to pull that phrase "Evil Empire" of the lexicological shelf and give it a good dusting off.
China is the Evil Empire.
The Chinese Communist Party is fully at war with the rival religion of Islam.
The Chinese are a war with the whole world. Their objective is world domination. The Russians are mere pikers by comparison.
A bad place run by bad people with a bad system. The less we have to do with them the better.
The Clintons in particular are culpable here. Another item on the long list of their crimes.
cameras in their rooms
camera in camera
From The Telegraph: Fears of military build-up as China secretly leases entire island in Solomons
Roughcoat said...
"Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras."
(bonus points for anyone who knows the provenance of that quote)
Dr. Strangelove.
This is why though I was raised by liberals I became and remain conservative. Most societies through history have rationalized treating "others" like animals or worse. The civilized advances that the English speaking peoples within J-C tradition nations have painstakingly made over the last 50-100 years are not the norm - they are something new, different, special and precious. Some immigrants really get this. The Chinese have no idea what it is to live like us. We have a pretty good idea what it is to live like them.
I believe the viewpoint of China has been informed by the Opium Wars, the destruction of the Summer Palace by the Brits and French, and the occupation and genocide by the Japanese prior to and during WWII, Chiang Kai-shek's non-opposition to the Japanese, and the support we gave to Chiang Kai-shek.
I believe that China is possessed with gaining strength and power so no country can ever invade them again. They are doing this with totalitarian efficiency and zeal. Xi Jinping just moved into Mao's old palace.
We traveled on our own in China 4 years ago for 3 weeks, to Beijing, Xian, Chongqing and Shanghai, and were amazed at the new infrastructure and pace of construction. I think they pose a greater threat to American freedom than Russia.
I used to be a free trade absolutist. I used to think we should lower all barriers to trade, even unilaterally, for reasons of economics and also to spread our system and ideology. I thought as we became more interconnected that other countries, like China, would have to change to be more like us. They’d have to contend with a growing middle class who watched American shows and movies and were learning about our rights and freedoms. I was wrong.
Turns out we became increasingly dependent on China and its market. Our companies don’t just need their manufacturing; they need Chinese consumers, who are more flush than before, which means they need the authoritarian Chinese government. The government maintains control. We do influence them, I’m sure, but I never really expected THEM to influence us, to cow us, as we’re seeing with the NBA.
(bonus points for anyone who knows the provenance of that quote)
said to someone, who "can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
I'm still waiting for the left to explain the 100 million people who were starved, raped, tortured and killed under the guise of socialism and the greater good.
Beto's "we'll confiscate your guns" is the first step to this. Then come the secret trials. It is a very short journey.
The Democrats and their intentional ignorance of history scare me at a profound level.
The Chinese are traditionally a slave owner's state. And their master-slave hierarchy used total cruelty. Confucius just gave them a better legal bureaucrat system to run their Slave State. The only answer they have found has been a faith that frees slaves called Christianity. The Party bosses see that a European colonial trick. But the Hong Kong folks want to keep it and the freedom it supports.
Clearly, China is not practicing *real* socialism.
The hypocrisy of the Islamic world regarding China is amazing.
Almost as bad as the NBA.
Interesting who is not criticizing China, and why.
And yet at the same time a huge firestorm of criticism of trumps action with the Kurds.
Ken B (sounding ALOT like a certain LLR): "I ask only because that is the default assumption on this blog. The only options are supine acceptance or troops on the ground."
LOLOL
You just spent several days complaining about Trump finding a middle way between your made up choice options.
But then again, you've been doing that alot lately.
I'll bet you thought history began 15 minutes ago and we would forget what you were saying just 24 hours ago!!
Yep. Very "LLR-y" of you.
Very.
Yeah, but LeBron was inconvenienced, and might possibly lose hundreds of millions of dollars, so we all should just ignore the actions of the Chinese government.
"Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras."
Spoken like a man with well balanced bodily fluids.
Dave Begley said...
Ann:
Thanks for finding and posting this. You do this country a great service with your blog.
I posted it on the Creighton basketball message board. I'm hated there because I'm conservative.
____________________
My Q: Who has posted to WhiteHouse.gov?
I am doing it now!
And also to NBA
@Ken B,
BAG
So you want to send troops to attack China?
Umm, it's hard to think of a dumber question, but it's early in the day.
I ask only because that is the default assumption on this blog.
I had a Drill Sargent who used to say, "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-up." FYI
The only options are supine acceptance or troops on the ground.
False choice. Several other intermediate options. Is this YOUR choice or are you falsely attributing this to your opponents?
This was made quite explicit every time I said we should even just *speak up* for the Hong Kong protesters.
We should speak up for the Hong Kong protesters. Most folks here likely agree. Don't quite follow you here.
Have a nice day!
Lots of snark about the NBA in the comments, but how many Americans are willing to say, pay an extra $50 for shoes that are made somewhere besides China. I know plenty of conservatives who do most of their shopping at Wal-Mart. Is that much different from the NBA's decision to do business in China? Maybe we're all complicit to different degrees. Depressing!
John henry said...
Yeah, but LeBron James needs his paycheck.
Should we go to war with China over this? (Asking for a WWII vet friend)
John Henry
______________________
What do you think Trump has been doing from Day One of his presidency?
Ayn Rand wrote WE THE LIVING in 1930's
that was barely acknowledged
Birkel said...
Nobody is surprised by any of this.
Authoritarian communist regimes always do these things.
Nope. Lots of people are surprised by this. There is no reason other than willful ignorance why they should be though.
If historical evidence is not enough, they could just read Marx' Capital. He explains why this is necessary in detail.
If you don't want to read the whole book, just read about the first half of Chapter 1. It's all there.
If you are going to have socialism you have to have camps. If you're going to have camps, you have to be willing to kill.
Socialism is murder all the way down.
Read Marx to see why.
John Henry
Ok. I'm horrified.
I thank God that I was born in the USA. I ponder how and if I could survive those camps. God Bless this escapee.
Hillary and Biden are agents of the Chi-coms. They profit off of dirty Chinese communist money.
This is why you hear Hillary and Biden poo-poo Chinese communist influence.
Nobel cause corruption? A means to an end justified by extraordinary rationalizations. This has been a first-order forcing of contemporary human and civil rights violations for over a century.
Noble cause corruption. Nobel, too.
I can’t believe (without confirmation from alternate sources, transcripts, pictures or videos) various sources such as: The New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, any televised news, or internet news. This has held true for many political and geo-political events in the past 15-20 years. A good example is Syria: the coverage has been unbelievably non-existent for major battles and military campaigns. And for Syria most of the coverage and reporting by MSM and elected representatives has been flat wrong or extremely politically biased.
So why should we believe this report in its entirety? I am not saying it should be discounted; the depictions are horrendous. Remember Gell-Mann effect.
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. [Lemkin]
No comment.
The Chinese Communist Party is fully at war with the rival religion of Islam.
This comment of mine is actually wrong, or perhaps rather, obsolete.
The CCP has lost its "religion," i.e. the leadership no longer believe in "socialism," though they remain "communist" in that they have the power, intend to keep it at all cost, and brutal force is what they know.
The old imperial China, the "Celestial Empire," "All under Heaven," consisted of China proper and a ring of satellite states who had to send a delegation to Beijing once a year to do the kow-tow, deliver tribute, and profess their undying loyalty to the emperor, but the Chinese government otherwise did not much interfere in their internal affairs.
This is different in modern times. All the dictatorial empires have exact borders, and everybody and everything within those borders have to march to the same music lest a spark of rebellion may arise somewhere and start a conflagration.
However, the Chinese hinterlands are truly vast with diverse populations of Turkic peoples, Mongols, Tibetans, etc. with deep-set traditions very different from the Chinese of China proper.
In the long run, I think the CCP will have to adjust to them or fall, whether violently or just crumble in place like the Soviet Union establishment.
as others have, thank you Ann for posting this.
What drives these oppressors' sense of 'right and wrong'?
Who/what do they serve? To what end?
Then come the secret trials.
Pelosi and her Democrat ilk have already started that with closed-door impeachment hearings.
Roughcoat said...
I published an article on China's persecution of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang just two days ago. The term "genocide" figured prominently. The asks and answers the question: why aren't Middle Eastern Muslims -- the mythical "Arab Street -- protesting Uighur persecution? So far the Street has been silent. Curious, that.
10/18/19, 10:06 AM
Roughcoat, there's a fellow on Insty Disqus, I don't think he's a troll, who defends the Kurds (wide statement) against your accusations. I don't feel qualified to play telephone between the two of you. Could I provide you a link to the thread and question and you respond here and or there?
https://disq.us/url?impression=f84887cc-f1b0-11e9-b6e3-002590f3108a&thread=7680922790&forum=4235850&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Finstapundit%2F345594%2F%23comment-4657044053%3AsabxXSWVXvhth-21jVdyujgXI3k&variant=active&experiment=digests&behavior=click&post=4657044053&type=notification.post.registered&event=email
Blogger Sydney said...
If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day.
Is that biologically possible? Seems there would be some overflow incontinence happening. Especially with urine.
Sydney, you're a woman, right?
Imagine that if you make a mess, that the worst thing that has ever happened to you will happem to you, squared. Imagine that licking it up is only the beginning. That they don't care about your excuses. That the WHOLE POINT of this exercise is to degrade you and to find excuses to punish you. To use your own biology against you.
What would you do? I'd suggest you start by drinking very little water.
Blogger Ken B said...
BAG
So you want to send troops to attack China?
So you would put 50, or 1000 or 2000, US troops (none named Ken B) in HK or Xinjiang as human shields/tripwires, so that the Chinese would spare the people for fear of hitting them?
Me, I would 1) destroy their nuclear deterrent, 2) drop forty nuclear warheads on Beijing, bombing them not back to the Stone Age, but to the Warring States period. You in?
brylun said...
I believe the viewpoint of China has been informed by the Opium Wars, the destruction of the Summer Palace by the Brits and French, and the occupation and genocide by the Japanese prior to and during WWII, Chiang Kai-shek's non-opposition to the Japanese, and the support we gave to Chiang Kai-shek.
Self-serving, self-pitying, ahistoric, communistic bullshit, but certainly that doesn't mean that you're wrong about that being their basis.
Re: Bay Area Guy:
Gut-check article. That's how Communist countries roll.
Eh. When they're still in full-on Communist mode, they're usually a lot worse. That's when you get the mass famines, show trials, summary executions, book burnings, wanton destruction of historical artifacts, and all the usual stuff that vile propagandists in the West gloss over. That's not sustainable, though. You wouldn't just run out of "other people's money." You'd literally run out of people if you kept on going full-tilt Communist. The Communists in Cambodia killed a quarter of their population! North Korea is constantly flirting with this problem too.
In the second and third generation, Communist regimes that don't burn themselves to ash tend to evolve into governments that are basically fascist and thus more-or-less sustainable. Modern China, for example, is basically not "communist" in any meaningful sense anymore. They're closer to the governments of Mussolini, Franco, Park Chunghee, or even their old enemy Chiang Kaishek than they are to the demented nightmare-world created by Mao and that first generation of Communist madmen. All those governments eventually democratised, which is perhaps a hopeful sign for "Communist" China. But we're decades away from democratisation if it ever comes at all.
Locking up an inconvenient minority in concentration camps is not all that unusual for a fascist regime, although the scale is larger than anything since the Third Reich.
Re: brylun:
I believe the viewpoint of China has been informed by the Opium Wars, the destruction of the Summer Palace by the Brits and French, and the occupation and genocide by the Japanese prior to and during WWII, Chiang Kai-shek's non-opposition to the Japanese, and the support we gave to Chiang Kai-shek.
Wait, Chaing Kai-shek's non-opposition to the Japanese? Are you sure you don't mean that wretched weasel Mao? There were some leaders among the Communists who actually wanted to assist Chiang in the desperate fight against the Japanese. People like Peng Dehuai, for example. Mao prevented them from providing more than token assistance, and put Peng through a struggle session for daring to use Communist forces (the Hundred Regiments Offensive) to attack the Japanese.
And you can tell from the disposition of Japanese forces that they viewed Chiang as the meaningful opponent in China. Basically, the Communists were active in the north and in Manchuria, behind Japanese lines. The Nationalists held Sichuan and much of the south, and the front lines between 1938-1945 varied throughout much of the south of China. There were four major battles fought for control of Changsha, for example, in 1939, 1941, 1942, and 1944 (the last as part of the titanic "Operation Punch-Through the Continent," 大陸打通作戦, that involved mobilisation of over a million troops). Overall the Japanese not only committed the vast majority of their troops in China to fighting Chiang, they also "hollowed out" the Kwantung Army (in Manchuria) to transfer the best trained and equipped troops to the fronts in the South. They delegated the task of fighting the Communists to fresh cadets, old men, and their proxy forces, like the Imperial Manchurian Army, or the troops controlled by Wang Jingwei's government in Nanking. The Communists weren't treated like a serious military threat -- they were basically just bandits.
I think it's widely believed in the US that Chiang didn't fight, and that the Communist "Eighth-Route Army" did, because of propaganda uncritically passed on by Western journalists -- some evil, some merely gullible -- but this is almost the opposite of the truth. And I think it had real and unfortunate consequences for China. If only we had supported Chiang!
But it would have been very difficult. In their struggle to keep up the fight against the Japanese, the Nationalists did commit terrible atrocities. The Communists didn't have to do any of that, because they weren't fighting. They saved their atrocities for after they had consolidated power.
Blogger narayanan said...
Should we go to war with China over this? (Asking for a WWII vet friend)
John Henry
______________________
What do you think Trump has been doing from Day One of his presidency?
Not sure what you mean by this but I probably was no very clear my own self. My point was that we have gone to war where there was little or no national interest because someone was treating someone else badly. Iraq, Afghanistan (Thanks Ms Leno) Libya, Vietnam, Korea, WWII (Europe) and more.
This is horrible treatment, we have known it for some time (couple years at least) and paying it little or no attention. But should we go to war with China over it? (Military war with guns and bombs and people getting killed)
NO, NO and NO!!! We should not.
There may be other things we can do. Publicize it, talk about it, maybe release some high rez satellite imagry of the camps. Maybe wage economic war with sanctions and tariffs and such. That would be hard to do alone though.
As for what I think PDJT has been doing since Jan 2017, I think he has been working hard to keep us out of wars. I think he has been doing a generally, if imperfect, job at that. The world is a more peaceful place than it was 4 years ago.
And I'll join other commenters in thanking Ann for posting about this and bringing the horrors to the front of our consciousness.
John Henry
You forgot honquing and the taiping rebellion of the 1840s, Charles cummings, a successor to le carre, outlined the uighurs case in cyclone, he involved in a revenge plot relating to the 2008 Olympics,
Blogger Balfegor said...
Locking up an inconvenient minority in concentration camps is not all that unusual for a fascist regime, although the scale is larger than anything since the Third Reich.
I am generally in agreement with your comment and don't think we should try to quantify this kind of horror.
When it comes to locking up inconvenient groups of people in horrifying conditions, I think China in the 50s and then again under the Red Guards, and USSR under Stalin in the 40s and 50's locked up far more people than the third reich.
John Henry
Teddy White was one of the worst in mainstream journalism, of course then there was the ring around the Amerasia magazine, almost the entire foreign policy establishment was willing to throw our largest ally in the East under the bus, except for the so called China Lobby,
about 20 years the same crew repeated that tale about Vietnam
that was the low hanging fruit, that david Halberstam, picked the work of chubb, stewart service, carter Vincent, who thought mao was an agrarian reformer,
Fox butterfield, who comes in for justified mockery, re criminal justice policy, was fairly good at describing the regime from say 1949-69,
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