Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

More data here [1] I'd encourage having a look.

I don't like the recent hyperbole in the press about the 'world resembling 1930's', it's overstated - but this artifact absolutely is worth comparison.

We have possibly a million people in concentration camps due entirely to their ethnicity and nobody will publicly say anything about it let alone do something.

Where are government leaders making this issue public?

The level of complicity by large Western brands is utterly shocking, to say the least, it lays the entirety of their ridiculous empathetic marketing attempts bare.

Building-sized pictures of Colin Kaepernick quotes, with shoes made by literal slaves (?) it's beyond hypocritical.

The other issue relates to the extent to which China will push for the suppression of this information. Any Western outlet that dares raise the issue, faces the wrath of China. Everyone unless otherwise under the protection of some kind as only some journalists may be accustomed to ... can be pressured to shut up.

The popular silence on this issue is shocking.

[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

My hunch is that this is just one of the many consequences of our filter bubble culture. It’s just so easy to see the horrible news and choose to focus on something else instead.

I remember experiencing this myself a couple months ago after reading an absolutely terrifying account of sexual violence from a survivor of one of the camps. I almost threw up reading the piece, which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before, and it took days for me to get the visceral images of the described events out of my head. I just couldn’t keep reading about the camps after that because it was just soul-crushing to read. I can’t begin to imagine what they’re going through, but attempting to made me sick to my stomach.

Unfortunately, I think it’s going to take images or video footage to get the public’s attention on this, just as we’ve seen with police brutality cases. The effort to read about what’s happening is just too much effort for most people.

We would need actual investigators to get this out into the media the exact same way the Abu Gharib scandal got exposed. That was something society handled swiftly. I don’t know, it seems like the Chinese people can barely fight for open Internet, so what hope does that society have.

Abu Ghraib was a perfect example of a scandal that blew up because someone found the pictures. Contrast that against the CIA torture report, which documented numerous cases of the CIA torturing suspected terrorists using techniques from water boarding to anal hydration.

One of the leaders of that program now runs the CIA, and no criminal charges were ever filed against the intelligence community.

Your link is an extremely thorough investigation into prison labor in China. Thanks for sharing it.

It doesn’t justify China’s actions, but note that the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r...

and many (most, I think) of them are forced to work:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

We are much smaller than China, so as a percentage, a much larger percentage of our population is forced labor.

You could argue that the people in these prisons are all convicted criminals, but enforcement and sentencing in the US varies widely by race, especially for non-violent drug offenses.

It is likely that approximately a million of the blacks and hispanics currently in the prison population would be free if they were white (either due to lax sentencing, or lack of police enforcement).

It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US. Ignoring the ethical issues, forced prison laborers are paid a tiny fraction of the minimum wage, stealing paid jobs from unskilled workers outside of the system.

Given the recent populist turn in national politics, I’d think that there would be bipartisan support for reforming the system, but for some reason there is not.

"that the US is not much better, at least in terms of raw numbers. We have over two million people in prison:"

There cannot be any comparison of people who are in jail for crimes, and people who are in jail simply for being a part of an ethnic group.

That the US system is not a perfect form of justice is a fair criticism, but it misses the most important point, and more importantly, the evidence for racial unfairness and not just disparity, isn't always as good as people think it is.

FYI the Chinese 'regular' judicial system is effectively completely corrupt and entirely politicized.

The justice system in the US is not perfect but the people who are in US prisons had access to defense attorneys, hearings about bail, trials where the prosecution had to publicly present evidence and testimonies to explain why the defendant should go to jail ("they are a muslim" is not enough), and also a process for appeal. And International observers are allowed to thoroughly investigate US prisons, and when they publish scathing criticism of the US prison system it's not cracked down by jailing the reporters or diplomatic pressure.

That is, by any resonable definition of the word "better", much better.

And this statement is just categorically false:

"It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US."

I can name five news segments or documentaries about the US prison systems role in structural racism on National television off the top of my head. Try pitching a segment about the CCP's human rights violations to Chinese television where you have full editorial control and you'll get laughed out of the room, at best.

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