A story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday says the Chinese have finally acknowledged the use of "education centers" for the wayward Uighur population that needs to be trained out of their beliefs. There are countries that believe training and education substitute for prison time, but China is not one of them. They expect us to believe they have finally owned up to these camps so we can think of how enlightened China is. We should remember they denied having the camps to begin with, so that enlightenment is not well established.
The stories coming out of these places do not lend themselves to the belief that the education is in the form of job training, the Transformation Through Education the Chinese would say they are doing. Torture and isolation do not train many people to do better at their job. They are usually counterproductive. The latest report from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China says this about the number of people imprisoned for their beliefs:
"The Chinese government’s disregard for human rights and the rule of law most directly affects the Chinese people—as evidenced by the more than 1,300 active cases of political and religious prisoners
contained in the Commission’s far from exhaustive Political Prisoner Database. The Commission’s Annual Report painstakingly documents rights violations in ethnic minority regions, religious
freedom violations, harassment of rights defenders and lawyers,suppression of free speech, large-scale forced evictions, onerous restrictions on civil society and more—all of which are the markings
of a repressive, one-party state. " ".... tumors’’ and ‘‘spray[ing] chemicals’’ on crops to kill the ‘‘weeds.’’ In response to these developments, an international expert described the XUAR as ‘‘a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid.’’
So let's not believe that the Chinese are being benevolent when they establish camps for the Uighurs. They are doing nothing of the sort.
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