A few days ago, classified documents leaked that discussed just how China runs it’s vast system of concentration camps:
A sample of classified Chinese government documents leaked to a consortium of news organizations, is displayed for a picture in New York, Friday, Nov. 22, 2019. Beijing has detained more than a million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities for what it calls voluntary job training. The confidential documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities to rewire their thoughts and even the language they speak. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there “to prevent escapes.” Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave.
“Manner education” is mandatory, but “vocational skills improvement” is offered only after a year in the camps.
Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. But a classified blueprint leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.
The classified documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.
The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.
Snip.
The documents were given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source. The ICIJ verified them by examining state media reports and public notices from the time, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.
They consist of a notice with guidelines for the camps, four bulletins on how to use technology to target people, and a court case sentencing a Uighur Communist Party member to 10 years in prison for telling colleagues not to say dirty words, watch porn or eat without praying.
The documents were issued to rank-and-file officials by the powerful Xinjiang Communist Party Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the region’s top authority overseeing police, courts and state security. They were put out under the head official at the time, Zhu Hailun, who annotated and signed some personally.
Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:
Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:
Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.
All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.
Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
“[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)
Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.
In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.
At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.
Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.
Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.
The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.
Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.
Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.
The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.
“Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]
Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.
That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.
Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]
(Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)
Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]
And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]
Reminder: Chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is not a fact witness to the Trump Ukraine call.
Taylor was not on the July 25th call and he did not read the transcript until it was publically released for the world to see.
Furthermore, Taylor doesn’t have relationships with any of the players involved. He has previously testified that he did not have direct communication with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani or Mick Mulvaney. [Pages 107-108]
Yet even worse for Democrats’, Taylor’s closed door testimony has undermined their phony narrative.
Taylor testified that at the time of President Trump’s call with Ukraine, the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold on the U.S. aid. [Page 119]
Taylor also testified that combatting corruption in Ukraine is a “constant theme” of U.S. foreign policy. [Pages 86-88]
Surprisingly, McDaniel reports that opposition to the hearings among Democrats is up 6 points. Could it be that there are still some sane members left in the Democratic Party who see this spectacle for what it is? Regardless of what new information is learned, no matter how favorably it may reflect on President Trump, there are a large number of Democrats who will not be swayed. Most Democrats hate Trump so much that, even though they’re well aware of how unfairly he’s been treated, they’re willing to go along with anything that will remove him from office. A six point shift doesn’t seem like much, but even a small move can swing an election.
This shift also makes sense in light of the recent rally data released by Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale…He reported that 27% of those who attended Trump’s Tupelo, MS rally on November 1st identified themselves as Democrats. At an October 17th rally held in Dallas, TX, 21.4% identified as Democrats. These figures are stunning.
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
At publication, Texas’ crime rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Similarly, violent crime in Texas is at a 40-year generational low with 410.8 incidents per 100,000 residents, a rate not seen since 1977. This trend follows a decades-long aggregate decrease in both violent and property crime rates. As illustrated in Figure 1, murder—the most heinous crime that can be committed using a firearm—has mimicked the decline as well with the drop in constituent subcategories of homicide. (Note that the rifle and shotgun homicide rates are reflected on the secondary vertical axis on the right in order to display the drop in these rare incidents.)
Further, the percentage of total homicides committed with a firearm in Texas has been trending downward as well. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows declines across all major categories of firearm homicide, with rifles and shotguns being displayed on the right-hand vertical axis. During the preceding two decades, a handgun has been used in an average of 46.53 percent of all homicides, while rifles and shotguns were used in 3.57 percent and 4.10 percent, respectively. For handguns, the highest use was 54.55 percent in 2005; the lowest was the most recent year, 2018, at 40.12 percent.
Also: “These trends persist in tandem with a proliferation in concealed carry permits being issued. Between 1998 and 2018, the number of concealed handgun licenses issued have increased 568 percent.”
Writer Derek Cohen examines possible solutions to violence involving guns, and finds all of them but one wanting:
The Legislature should consider implementing and funding a Texas program similar to federal initiatives, which uses a multi-pronged strategy of policing and prosecution, agency integration, and identification of violent crime hot spots. The focus would be on criminals with guns, not law-abiding Texans (Governor’s Texas Safety Action Report).
Of all the recommendations made in this report, this enjoys the strongest scholarly backing. This essentially describes what is known as “focused deterrence,” a holistic public safety strategy that includes law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, and analysts. The process begins when on-the-street law enforcement describes gang conditions in the area they patrol, both in terms of geography (what is the gang’s “territory”) and identifying key members. The analysts then create a gang map as well as a relational network of the gang. Those in the gang are notified that they have been identified as such and invited to a “call-in.” During this meeting, attendees are informed of the strategy and, should violence persist associated with the gang, not only will state and federal prosecutors seek the maximum punishment for all potential criminal charges, but gang members stand to face these charges should others within the network be responsible for furthering violence. Conversely, attendees are offered the option of enrolling in relevant social services to ease the transition to a more law-abiding life.
These programs have gone by multiple names during their ascendency: Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), Operation: Ceasefire, and the like. Their efficacy has been demonstrated in individual and meta- analyses, suggesting “that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect.”
Probably should have included a link to this in my Austin homeless roundup, but there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to drunken brawls on Sixth Street, which seems to have gotten much worse in the last year or so. (Hat tip: Paul Martin of KR Training.)
Nine deaths at USC since August? That starts to seem like a startlingly high number. And, accord to feminists, there must have also been thousands of student rapes in the same period…
Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton became the first the secure his reelection in 2020. How? Within hours of the filing deadline closing, his legal team challenged false statements by his only Democratic opponent, who promptly withdrew.
ProTip: Try not to drop your four baggies filled with cocaine. Especially at the airport. Especially if you’re Democratic state representative. Texas Democratic State Representative Poncho Nevarez evidently had to learn that the hard way, and now he’s not running for reelection.
Massachusetts to seize cars of people caught with untaxed vaping products. Even by the standards of Massachusetts crazy that’s Massachusetts crazy, and likely both and Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual) and a Ninth Amendment (neither necessary nor proper) violation.
Despite the roommates’ optimism, the system began to break down soon after its establishment. To settle disputes, the roommates held weekly meetings of the “Committee of Three.”
“I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I’m, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too,” said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. “So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping.”
After weeks of complaining that he was the only one who knew how to clean “halfway decent,” Foyle began scaling back his efforts, mirroring the sort of production problems experienced in the USSR and other Soviet bloc nations.
At an Oct. 7 meeting of the Committee of Three, more duties and a point system were added. Two months later, however, the duty chart is all but forgotten and the shopping list is several pages long.
The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding.
“I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn’t cheap,” Eaves said. “So ever since, I’ve been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif.”
Narwhale the Unipuppy. Which was trending over the impeachment hearings two days ago…
In keeping with all that global warming, Austin had an unseasonably early hard freeze this week. Stay warm out there…
Here’s an interesting Romanian TV interview with former Columbia tenured acting professor Andrei Serban, who resigned over imposition of social justice warrior ideology over talent and common sense. Here’s a short interview with him (if you don’t see the subtitles, click on the Closed Caption (CC) button before watching).
Serban escaped communist-dominated Romania, and he says that Columbia is “some sort of socialist left, on its way toward full blown communism.”
If you’re not going to believe it from conservative bloggers, maybe you’ll believe it from a guy who actually grew up under communism.
Seems like we as a society have been remiss in communicating to Millennials what a horrible murderous failure communism has been.
We don’t need more “civics lessons,” we need more movies like The Killing Fields and The Lives of Others. And given how eagerly Hollywood kowtows to China, we’re not likely to get them…
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aide’s hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Here’s a very grim look inside Chinese concentration camps for Uighers and other ethnic minorities:
Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.
Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.
Snip.
The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”
Why were people tortured?
“They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”
And everyday things like these were punished with torture?
“I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”
On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”
Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”
What happened to those who did take them?
“The pills had different kinds of effects. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.” (That, at least, was a widely circulated rumor.)
On the other hand, when inmates were really sick, they didn’t get the medical care they needed. Sauytbay remembers one young woman, a diabetic, who had been a nurse before her arrest. “Her diabetes became more and more acute. She no longer was strong enough to stand. She wasn’t even able to eat. That woman did not get any help or treatment. There was another woman who had undergone brain surgery before her arrest. Even though she had a prescription for pills, she was not permitted to take them.”
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.”
My first post here on BattleSwarm was October 14, 2009, following Dwight’s lead, and only a day after my non-political blog. (Funny how Dwight and I and Borepatch all started blogging within a year of each other. Almost as if something happened around that time that compelled us to jump in…)
Here’s a quick Whitman sampler/greatest hits list from those halcyon days of yore:
Between that South Park episode and the NBA, awareness of China forcing corporate entities to silence its critics has exploded into the mainstream, so let’s do a roundup of Chinese news:
I watch with unease as the People’s Republic of China turns 70 amid great fanfare about its growing economic and political heft, the longest-running nation state to ever fly a flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, surpassing even the former Soviet Union. Ever since it embarked on its modernization program, China has been subtly cultivating and influencing the Chinese diaspora to its cause.
At an overseas Chinese conference just shortly before President Xi Jinping consolidated power and was reelected at the 19th Party Congress, Xi noted that the realization of the ‘great rejuvenation’ of the Chinese nation ‘requires the joint efforts of the Chinese people at home and abroad’, saying that he hoped that those who have Chinese descent outside of China — up to 60 million ethnic Chinese in more than 180 countries — can work hard for and share in the ‘Chinese dream’.
The word ‘Chinese’ can refer to the citizenry of a country, a race, a language, and even a culture, ambiguities that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits in order to appeal to the diaspora via the sentimental heartstrings of heritage via ‘flesh and blood’. It exports and reinforces the concept that there is only one politically-correct way of being Chinese: loyalty to the party first and foremost, above all else. In effect, it’s like the ummah, an Arabic term that describes the supra-national global community that unites all Muslims as one. Only this one is based not on religion but on ethnicity, where Tibetans, Uigher Muslims, Chinese dissenters, Hong Kong protesters, are excluded and marginalized like infidels.
Almost nothing embodies the scope of China’s attempts at a global soft power offensive more as the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, where there are 480 branches operating on six continents around the world (watch out, Antarctica!). These institutes ostensibly offer language classes and promote cultural education and diplomacy, but in reality they are de facto fronts for generating good Public Relations and patriotism to the CCP. In 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a report urging colleges to close the institutes or renegotiate their mutual agreements to guarantee a certain degree of academic freedom and control.
The report asserted that ‘most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China. Specifically, North American universities permit Confucius Institutes (CIs) to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.’ As these centers draw scrutiny from the FBI, the Pentagon and even Congress, many CIs on US campuses have been closing.
The rhetoric between pro-Beijing factions and critics of the Chinese regime has been heating up, especially in light of the current conflict with Hong Kong protesters spilling over at pro-democracy rallies in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. There are roughly 1.5 million Chinese students studying overseas — roughly 300,000 in the United States alone — and increasingly, they are getting caught up in the crossfire of the escalating tensions and heightened scrutiny for ties to Beijing.
Making China part of the world trade system was supposed to lead to China liberalizing and adopting democracy. It was a beautiful theory with a lot of supporting evidence behind it. One tiny problem: It turned out not to be true:
Back in May, I went back to the arguments American policymakers had with themselves in the 1990s as they contemplated extending “most-favored-nation” status to China, and then “permanent normal trade relations.” Something weird happened when chief executives of American companies discussed China back then. They kept describing a market of a billion new customers, as if the average Chinese citizen was awash in disposable income. They pictured a China full of people eating American soybeans, drinking Coke, wearing blue jeans made with American cotton, celebrating with American bourbon and riding on Boeing airplanes.
America’s policymakers, by and large, agreed. Here’s Bill Clinton describing America’s future relationship with China in 2000, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed Permanent Normal Trade Relations:
With more than a billion people, China is the largest new market in the world. Our administration has negotiated an agreement that will open China’s markets to American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.
Bringing China into the WTO and normalizing trade will strengthen those who fight for the environment, for labor standards, for human rights, for the rule of law . . . At this stage in China’s development, we will have a more positive influence with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist.
Clinton hailed the deal as a step to “a China that is more open to our products and more respectful of the rule of law at home and abroad.” And from that year on, America’s trade relationship with China was “normal.”
Except . . . China wasn’t a “normal” country, and it never was one. Only a few decades earlier, the Chinese regime had perpetrated some of the greatest horrors of the century upon its people — the Great Chinese Famine — which killed tens of millions! — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. The Tiananmen Square massacre had just been a few years earlier. It still had political prisoners and a police state, it was slowly but steadily building up its military, it still harvested organs from prisoners in its jails. And yet most of America’s political and business leaders looked across the Pacific, averted their eyes from the draconian human rights abuses, focused relentlessly on that growing economy and potential billion customers and declared, “we can do business with these people.” And they told the rest of us to trust them. Oh, and Bill Clinton assured us that money donated by Chinese citizens in his reelection campaign had never influenced his thinking about China. Even though in 1992, he had campaigned as a tough critic of China and called George H. W. Bush as too soft on the regime.
Nothing could seem to dissuade America’s business leaders when it came to their vision of an endlessly mutually profitable relationship with the regime. We kept being told how absolutely ruthless and relentless the Chinese efforts at corporate espionage were, and how brazenly and defiantly they stole patents, blueprints, and intellectual property. I don’t know about you, but when somebody steals from me, I don’t want to keep doing business with them. Yet America’s business leaders never seemed to experience anything that made them conclude the regime is so bad that it’s not worth doing business with them. There was this consistently weird disconnect in the comments from American business leaders, as they kept saying their Chinese competitors were overtly or secretly state-subsided, or would complain about corruption . . . but no one wanted to stop putting more resources there.
Whereas the Soviet Union largely walled itself off from its greatest adversary, literally and figuratively, China’s leaders have sought to exploit America across the board for decades. China profits from U.S. financial markets; purchases cutting-edge U.S. firms; pilfers trade secrets and technology from U.S. companies, including defense contractors; and promotes a massive misinformation campaign on U.S. soil to sway policy and public opinion in its favor. Yet far from being a source of strength, Communist China’s dependence on America is one of its primary weakness.
Like the Soviet Union before it, China’s tyranny stifles the creativity of its people. While Beijing grants some few a small amount of economic autonomy, it refuses to let the average Chinese citizen fully pursue her dreams, apply her talents, or realize her potential, preventing untold advances across every field of endeavor. There’s a reason Chinese parents send their children to American universities and their cash to Western banks. China’s seemingly inexorable rise requires continued access to America and the fruits of our system of free enterprise and the rule of law.
This reality is coming into focus under President Trump. The administration has started to disentangle Communist China from America’s economy and institutions. China’s stock markets are suffering and its economy is growing at the slowest rate in nearly three decades. Additional unraveling of U.S.–China ties will likely further demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Communist economic model, and its need for external support.
Beijing knows this, hence its relentless focus on tamping down trade tensions, but not national security or human-rights issues. It also benefits from the widespread belief that Communist China is here to stay, so we might as well deal with it rather than hope for a better, more democratic regime. In our organization’s discussions with government leaders, prominent academics, and corporations, we have found an overwhelming belief that a change in China’s government would be catastrophic. They prefer to work with the devil they know, not hope for a devil they don’t.
Yet the lessons of history are worth remembering. The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of freedom, prosperity, and peace in its former lands, and far beyond. A collapse of red rule in China will surely be more complicated, given its greater interaction with the world, but it stands to reason that the Communist party’s loss will be the Chinese people’s gain. Many others, America included, will benefit, too.
Communist China is weaker than it appears. However, it’s unlikely to fall unless the United States, and the rest of the free world, continue to ratchet up the pressure. The Communist ideology is a parasite that cannot survive for long on its own.
It is outrageous that the Chinese Communist Party is using its economic power to suppress the speech of Americans inside the United States: https://t.co/9t04p1jxuP
Imagine living in a world in which not just entertainers & athletes but non-public figures can be fired by employer or kicked out of sporting event by a team, here in America, for condemning the actions of the govt of #China
China has a message for “South Park”: You will respect their authoritah!
After Comedy Central aired an episode of the animated series that chided Hollywood for fearing Chinese censors, that country responded by stripping any mention of the show from internet providers and streaming services there.
Last week’s Season 23 episode, cheekily titled “Band in China,” depicts Randy in a Chinese work camp — alongside Winnie the Pooh, the Disney character often compared to China President Xi Jinping — for attempting to smuggle pot into the country to expand his weed-selling enterprise.
In a parallel storyline, a rock band made up of Stan, Jimmy, Kenny and Butters is on the verge of having a movie made about them, but Chinese censors keep wanting to water down the script. “Now I know how Hollywood writers feel,” Stan declares when he’s forced to endure changes. Disney is even part of the takedown, with Mickey Mouse depicted as supporting censors’ work.
Life imitating art imitating life…
Edited to add: The twitter “apology” is just the cherry on top:
