Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

When we show up, we win.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The lights are all blinking red.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Meanwhile, in China

Meanwhile, in China

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The Telegraph has interviewed eight former detainees from China’s Muslim concentration camps, where roughly one million Uighurs and Kazakhs are detained. This is one of the least-horrifying things described:

In order to receive a small portion of rice at noon and 6pm he, like all the others, must praise the Chinese president and shout “Long live Xi Jinping!”

Those who refuse are electrocuted with a cattle prod that causes their limbs to spasm uncontrollably.

For some reason this detail leapt out at me:

One detainee the Telegraph interviewed[…] received a receipt after being required to pay for her meals in detention – 10 yuan a day, totalling 1,800 yuan (£202.50).

The concentration camps are only the tip of the iceberg in Xinjiang, where more than a million mostly-Han Chinese have simply moved into Uighur households to spy on them. A database of facial-recognition information, GPS tracking data, and further information on more than 2.5 million Xinjiang residents was recently discovered on the open internet. Something very, very bad is happening in northern China.

You have to register with the Telegraph to read the article, so I’m going to provide some excerpts. I’m also going to put them below the fold. They are very disturbing. We should not let such evil go unnoticed, but I’m not going to subject you to it randomly.

In a facility for women when it is Amina’s turn to be on suicide watch one night, guards burst into the cell, put a black hood over the head of one of the inmates and take her away. She returns the next morning crying, barely able to speak; one morning, she doesn’t come back…

One said that a severely ill woman confided she was being regularly taken to a separate room and gang-raped…

Guards shackled Amina’s hands and feet and kicked her violently with metal-tipped boots, simply for asking what crime she had committed. She was made to swear she would never again go to a mosque, wear a headscarf or pray…

I’m not really sure what else to say.

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  3. 3.

    John Revolta

    Yep.
    Also, don’t let’s forget about Tibet. The Tibetan people and their culture are being literally absorbed. In another generation there will probably be nothing left at all.

  6. 6.

    Jay

    Lotta evil’s been normalized over the years, and few, sadly have clean hands to call it out.

    Anybody else creeped out by all the Book of Faces ads today?

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    Most sad to say, none of this as regards Uighurs is new news. The cycle of pogroms, draconian repression and forced imprisonment has spanned decades.

  11. 11.

    Sab

    @RAVEN: Remember when Jim Webb wouldn’t vote for anything that allowed Uighurs to be allowed into the US? Didn’t we send some Uighurs from Guantanamo to somewhere in the South Pacific because he was afraid to have them in Virginia? Even though there was a big well-adjusted Uighur community in Virginia.

  12. 12.

    Jay

    @NotMax:

    More than that. The Uighurs have resided on Silk Road chokepoints for hundreds of years, now the New Silk Road.

    Sometimes allies, sometimes enemies.

    The Turkish program to radicalize them, the al Quida program to radicalize them, the ISIL program to radicalize them and the terrorist attacks have the Chinese freaked out an over reacting, rather than relying on police work and IC work.

    So very American of them.

  13. 13.

    Jay

    @Sab:

    They wern’t even terrorists, just refugee cab drivers at the wrong place, wrong time, now exiled to Slovakia to restart their journey as refugees.

  18. 18.

    Jay

    @NotMax:

    You might recognize some “Cultural Revolution” effects closer to home and more recently of date,……….

  19. 19.

    OzarkHillbilly

    OK, this is…. different:

    A Bangladeshi mother has stunned doctors by giving birth to healthy twins 26 days after her first child was born. Arifa Sultana, 20, gave birth to a baby boy last month through normal delivery, but doctors missed the presence of a second uterus.

    “She didn’t realise she was still pregnant with the twins. Her waters broke again 26 days after the first baby was born and she rushed to us,” Sheila Poddar, a gynaecologist who treated the woman, told AFP.

    Podder carried out an emergency caesarean section to deliver the twins – one boy and one girl – last Friday.

    The young woman from Jessore district in southwest Bangladesh was allowed to go home with her three healthy babies on Tuesday. Podder said there were no complications.

    “I haven’t seen any case like this in my 30-year plus medical career,” Dilip Roy, chief government doctor in Jessore, said.

    Roy questioned the actions of Khulna Medical College Hospital doctors for not detecting the second pregnancy.

    I have to say, I can’t really blame the first doctors. First, being a poor woman in Bangladesh, it’s a safe bet she’d never seen an ultrasound. 2nd, how many women are there running around with 2 uteri? 3rd, what are the chances of being pregnant in both at the same time?

  20. 20.

    Amir Khalid

    China’s real ideology isn’t communism, it’s fascism: corporatism plus totalitarian rule.

  23. 23.

    Sab

    @Jay: That is probably different Uighurs. I still remember Uighurs sent to South Pacific. Same thing, shouldn’t have been at Guantnamo at all.

    We used to be good at accepting and assimilating refugees. My little city has a couple of thousand Nepali/Bhutanese who have come in the last ten years. Before that we had a couple of thousand from the former Yugoslavia ( they have been coming here in big numbers for at least a hundred years.)

    This whole idea that everyone in America used to be white, English-speaking , Christian and from NW Europe is completely nuts and also not even faintly true.

    I grew up in Florida. My family had just moved there. I had neighbors who were 14th generation Floridians of Minorcan ancestry. Nearly a hundred years before the Mayflower landed.

    Pat Buchanan is proudly Scotch-Irish but also Catholic. Huh? The Scotch-Irish were Protestant settlers in Ireland. That’s what they were. He can be descended from both (I am) but you can’t revere the traditions of both, since they each kind of wanted to destroy the other side.

    That’s what used to be amazing about America: people coming from elsewhere building communities together because once they got to this country they realized that they had more in common than not.

  25. 25.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Sab:

    Pat Buchanan is proudly Scotch-Irish but also Catholic. Huh? The Scotch-Irish were Protestant settlers in Ireland.

    I would guess that one of his ancestors fell hard for a Catholic and as condition of marriage converted.

  30. 30.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Amir Khalid: IF the woman had seen a doctor previously, it probably would have been at a local clinic with the most rudimentary of equipment (she is very poor) Exactly how she ended up at that hospital for delivery of the first child, I do not know, but why would doctors give an ultrasound to a women who had just had a very normal vaginal delivery of a healthy baby boy? With a placenta following as normal?

  31. 31.

    Sab

    @OzarkHillbilly: Yeah. In my family the Catholics went Protestant and sortofProtestant. In my husband’s family the Lutherans went Catholic. Whichever way they went, it’s nuts to (in a tribal way) buy into the old categories that your own ancestors strayed from.

  35. 35.

    Sab

    @Jay: Don’t tell me. You are a Canadian Scot? My Pennsylvania Scots were quite fierce with their kids. We are still recovering.

  36. 36.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Sab: My mother converted to Catholicism when she married my father, a great disappointment to her Southern Baptist mother who had threatened to disown her if she married that “papist”.

    @Jay: What ongoing symptoms? I’m not a woman who has given birth so I don’t know what it’s like, but all the signs of pregnancy do not just disappear immediately after birth (for instance, it takes a while for their hormones to return to normal). The woman herself had no idea she was still pregnant until her water broke.

  39. 39.

    Sab

    @Jay: Don’t tell me. You are a Canadian Scot? My Pennsylvania Scots were quite fierce with their kids. We are still recovering.@OzarkHillbilly: My Irish immigrant great great grandmother left three dollars in dimes (thirty pieces of silver, like Judas got from the Roman) to each of her three sons who had married Protestants or Jews. She didn’t disown the kid who never married and had an ongoing adulterous affair for thirty years with a married woman, because he never married a Protestant. 19th century America was a weird world.

  40. 40.

    Jay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    There’s a crapload of symptoms that go away after birth,

    A bunch that remain when you are still pregnant,

    Keep in mind, that the woman was still creating a whole baby, while nuturing a born baby.

    Triple X

    Weird.

  42. 42.

    Sab

    Back on topic of China. Previous Chinese governments were fiercely “Chinese” dealing with the outside world, but very aware of how huge and ethnically diverse their country is. The current government seems to be Han Chinese all the way. Scary for the locals.

  45. 45.

    Sab

    @Jay: @Jay: So they sold their souls for not much?I am completely and unutterably shocked and also very very surprised. Are you sre about your facts?

  46. 46.

    Amir Khalid

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    My guess is that she saw an obstetrician at the hospital’s maternity clinic, and that was how come she gave birth at the hospital rather than at home.

  47. 47.

    Big Mango

    I spent a few weeks in Urumqi and Kashgar summer of 2017…heavy police presence, literally hundreds of thousands of HAN were relocated (imported from eastern China) to overwhelm the Uyghers…
    I found real warmth from many and deep weariness…It is a facsinating region and worth a visit

  51. 51.

    goblue72

    And we granted this country MFN status under GATT and exported our industrial base for what fucking reason exactly?

  52. 52.

    Brachiator

    Very sad stuff

    For some reason this detail leapt out at me:

    One detainee the Telegraph interviewed[…] received a receipt after being required to pay for her meals in detention – 10 yuan a day, totalling 1,800 yuan (£202.50).

    Yeh. adds a level of absurdity to be forced to pay to be degraded.

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