Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
This is the real danger, not a has been world power like Russia.
See:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-hidden-totalitarianism-29992
There's nothing "hidden" about it.
"Much of this expenditure has been absorbed by the development of a pervasive, hi-tech “security state” in the region, including: use of facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material .This system is not only reliant on technology but also significant manpower to monitor, analyse and respond to the data it collects. Its rollout has thus coincided with the recruitment of an estimated 90,000 new public security personnel in the region.
This is consistent with the Party’s move toward tech-driven ‘ social management ’ throughout the rest of China. However, in Xinjiang it has become defined by a racialized conception of “threat” in which the Uyghur population is conceived of as a “virtual biological threat to the body of society.”
From government officials describing Uyghur “extremism” as a “tumour” to equating religious observance with a virus , the Party’s discourse frames key elements of Uyghur identity as pathologies to be “cured.”
The Party’s “cure” for such pathologies is a programme of mass internment of Uyghurs—perhaps up to one million people according to some estimates— in prison-like “re-education” centres based on analysis of the data harvested through its system of “predictive policing.”
Here, receiving a phone call from a relative studying or travelling overseas or attendance at a mosque can result in an almost immediate visit from local police and indefinite detention in a “re-education” centre .
The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy—while divergent ideologically were united by their drive to make a “total claim” on the individual. “They were not content,” as historian Ian Kershaw reminds us , “simply to use repression as means of control, but sought to mobilize behind an exclusive ideology to ‘educate’ people into becoming committed believers, to claim them soul as well as body.”
The goal of China’s “re-education” of Uyghurs, according to a Xinjiang CCP Youth League official, is to “treat and cleanse the virus [of “extremism”] from their brain” and “restore their normal mind” so that they may “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China is thus arguably pursuing a “total claim” on the bodies and minds of the Uyghur people via a twenty-first century, technologically-enabled version of this—a “totalitarianism 2.0.”
See:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-hidden-totalitarianism-29992
There's nothing "hidden" about it.
"Much of this expenditure has been absorbed by the development of a pervasive, hi-tech “security state” in the region, including: use of facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material .This system is not only reliant on technology but also significant manpower to monitor, analyse and respond to the data it collects. Its rollout has thus coincided with the recruitment of an estimated 90,000 new public security personnel in the region.
This is consistent with the Party’s move toward tech-driven ‘ social management ’ throughout the rest of China. However, in Xinjiang it has become defined by a racialized conception of “threat” in which the Uyghur population is conceived of as a “virtual biological threat to the body of society.”
From government officials describing Uyghur “extremism” as a “tumour” to equating religious observance with a virus , the Party’s discourse frames key elements of Uyghur identity as pathologies to be “cured.”
Here, receiving a phone call from a relative studying or travelling overseas or attendance at a mosque can result in an almost immediate visit from local police and indefinite detention in a “re-education” centre .
The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy—while divergent ideologically were united by their drive to make a “total claim” on the individual. “They were not content,” as historian Ian Kershaw reminds us , “simply to use repression as means of control, but sought to mobilize behind an exclusive ideology to ‘educate’ people into becoming committed believers, to claim them soul as well as body.”
The goal of China’s “re-education” of Uyghurs, according to a Xinjiang CCP Youth League official, is to “treat and cleanse the virus [of “extremism”] from their brain” and “restore their normal mind” so that they may “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China is thus arguably pursuing a “total claim” on the bodies and minds of the Uyghur people via a twenty-first century, technologically-enabled version of this—a “totalitarianism 2.0.”