BuzzFeed News identified 268 newly built compounds by cross-referencing blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps with images from external satellite data providers
Pretty cool. Trying to hide the facilities made them easier to find.
Very interesting. I've always wanted to tinker with satellite data for various research projects. Though one issue I generally have is that I've always found that the applications I imagine require data with more frequency than the free services like Google Maps provide.
Does anyone know of any good satellite data providers with more frequent (somewhere between bi-weekly and daily) data?
I understand much of this is dependent on the nature of the project to determine what kind of satellite imagery you would need, different spectrometers at different UV ranges, different swathes, etc. but for now we'll just say something similar to the images in the article here.
CCP always does such bad propaganda thing. Ironically Everything it tried to hide was always exposed fairly quickly, things it doesn’t hide turns out to be less known
It’s disgusting that nothing will be done because everyone is addicted to cheap goods from China. If we cannot break free from current economic arrangements even after the pandemic, we will never be able to do so.
> It’s disgusting that nothing will be done because everyone is addicted to cheap goods from China
I think it's better to shift from that, directly to not letting people (particularly those with means) to make excuses for using PRC goods when it would be almost as convenient to use goods from anywhere else.
It's a start, compared to just letting people say “oh well, guess I'll just give in completely”.
Boycotting "Made in China" labelled products is not effective enough. How would you motivate large population groups to engage globally? Politicians and democratic countries should force China to stop torturing their own citizens based on religious or ethnic affiliation.
It costs money and political capital to stop a country from doing anything, and politicians won't do anything that doesn't benefit them. As an example, nobody cared about the Kurdish genocide in Iraq until the US wanted to invade them. Ironically, while the genocide was happening, the US was allies with Iraq.
Force it how ? Countries cannot go at an all trade war. Us consumers need to reshape thw market. And most of us happend to be very pro human rights but we are just convinced into believing that nothing we as individuals do matter.
Just buy less. Western consumerism gave China it's power.
Have a leader who the world believe he acts in good faith regarding ideals, and not busy subverting ideals for game and profit.
Short version as I understand it - there was a little bit of Islamic terrorism a decade or so ago. China decided to address it by basically wiping the entire religion and culture out of existence. Thus why they call them "deradicalization" and "re-education" camps. Their PR story is that they're trying to take "suspected Islamic radicals" and reeducate them to "integrate into mainstream Chinese society".
In practice, this seems to mean that if you're the wrong religion and so much as breathe funny, off you go to the camps, where you will be basically tortured and brainwashed into adopting Han Chinese culture.
When I was traveling around Xinjiang about two years back it was obvious something was going on.
In Korla everyone getting off the train had to submit to a retinal scan, presumably so authorities know all the ingress and egress into town, going to a park involved going through a checkpoint. To get into any train station at all involved 3 levels of checkpoints, the first checkpoint started before you got to the plaza before the train station, so checking in took about 3 hours. In Kashgar the old city had checkpoints at every corner. The entire province only had 3G, the moment you cross over from neighboring Gansu your China Telecom signal dropped from 4G, so sending videos or even pictures is very difficult even on weChat, if you try to do it through a VPN the experience is even slower.
Some checkpoints were vigilant, but in my experience most were just bored. One checkpoint basically forgot to check my ID because I was seated all the at the back of a van. Young Uighur men or woman sometimes with a Han standing around or sitting at a chair with a desk in the middle of the street, writing down the names of everyone who crosses his "stand".
What surprised me the most was that most of the guards manning the checkpoints in towns, highways, at gas stations (which involved a full car search in order to pull into) were Uighurs themselves. I get the impression you basically went to jail or joined the security apparatus, a modern variation on a old Chinese strategem of using barbarian to fight barbarian I guess.
The whole experience changed my perspective on human beings in general. At the end of the day, when I got back home the only conclusion I could come to wasn't even about China or Chinese, if we look at the long span of human history the only thing I can arrive at is human beings in aggregate have a high tendency to do shitty things. Goodness exists in individuals but as soon as we have to appeal to the common denominator of a group or groups more often then not being a piece of shit is the easiest and most expedient.
Unrelated to the article content: is there any way to “escape” from full screen maps embedded in a webpage? I scrolled down to the map of detention facilities and found that I could no longer return to reading the article because every interaction with my screen just manipulated the map.
Karl Marx on religion
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.“
A popular song:
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
The CCP is simply following a core tenant of communism. From the perspective of the ideology, they are freeing people from religion.
A much more important quote, a warning about accepting new ideas that too few heed today as always:
“Let us keep our minds open, by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out! There are still things in this world which are true and things which are false; acts which are right and acts which are wrong, even if there are statesmen who hide their designs under the cloak of high-sounding phrases.”. — Walter Kotschnig November 8, 1939
Chinese oppression of the Uighurs is not really a religious issue. Yes, the Chinese authorities would be happy to eradicate Islam because it is part of some Uighurs' identity, but China has cracked down on secular Uighur movements as well. There were even Uighur communists who were anti-religion, but still imprisoned in China or forced into exile in Turkey or Europe because they insisted on using their own language and not assimilating to the Han.
Yes, that is why Lennin and especially Stalin were made into godlike figures. Mao is a prophet/father of the china also painted as infallible. And lets not forget about North Korea... ummm Peoples Republic that is Celestial Dictatorship.
Marx was rolling in his grave when 'communism' was implemented across the world's nations.
Religion is mainly used as opium for the masses
China puting people in concentration camps is evil, but has nothing to do with religion. Also the CCP days as ideological communism are long gone. And pretty sure Marx wouldn't condone any of the stuff you are implying.
See, easy, kept my mind open, and my mind didn't fall out.
It's important to realize that Xinjiang is a colony of China. China took over Xinjiang in the past few hundred years; historically, kingdoms there were independent. Sometimes they had tributary relationships, other times they were allies of the Chinese kingdoms. Colonialism takes many forms and Europeans don't have a monopoly on it. The Uyghurs have rebelled many times and even formed short-lived states, the last before the Mao era. What was a territorial annexation has taken on ideological (the Chinese state demanded ideological adherence in art and politics just like in the rest of China ), economic (Xinjiang is rich in mineral resources), and settler-colonial (Han Chinese have been moving into Xinjiang in large numbers) aspects.
Imagine how much positive impact Bezos could have on this if Amazon led the way on identifying China’s reliance on western money to continue funding cultural genocide. He could spend have of his money on this and still have $100,000,000,000 to play with.
The CEO of Amazon doesn't have a bank account with $200B sitting in it. His net worth is his ownership of Amazon. And Amazon, minus the human rights arbitrage scheme that delivers us megatons of goods manufactured by disadvantaged people, is worth not very much.
John Oliver recently made a episode on the subject (China & Uighurs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17oCQakzIl8
The Communist Party of China (CPC) are running sinicization and antireligious campaigns of ethnic and religious minorities. The totalitarian and authoritarian countries don't make good neighbors. China will be making inroads into Taiwan soon if the world does not act.
To those that believe that they would not have turned a blind eye during WWII to the systematic extermination of Jews, the current generation has been given a similar challenge. Where is your cancel-culture now? How will our children think of us?
I don’t understand what the ‘cancel culture’ comment is supposed to mean.
There are a million tweets condemning China’s behavior... way more than the number of tweets targeting people who are ‘cancelled’
The difference is that tweets can effect a regular person’s life, and they are ‘cancelled’. China doesn’t care. A company will act to fire a single person who behaves badly because of consumer pressure; it doesn’t cost them much and is good PR. Stopping doing business with China is a lot costlier, so they don’t give in to the same consumer pressure that they would for an individual employee.
The different outcome doesn’t mean there is some hypocrisy amongst the people tweeting their support for ‘cancelling’ someone.
It just means that tweets aren’t that powerful for real change.
There's limited set of countermeasures we can impose on China. I joined "Boycott Made in China" initiative, I promote it in my LinkedIn, and I literally check "Made in" tags in the mall during shopping, and I do not buy any Apple products, until I see them implementing their project on moving production from China to India and Vietnam. However, I understand how terribly it is "not enough". Countless politicians and businessmen without moral compass keep dealing with China. Harward President cancelled human rights conference to please Comrade Xi during their meeting. Greed and cowardice rule the world, and nothing drastically changed since pre-WWII times.
What else we, the people, can do to confront the evil, in the world where life of a nation, reputation of the whole country and principles of people who supposed to maintain peace all have a price?
Well, US greed gave China this power. Cancel culture have nothing to do with this.
There were a lot of left leaning voices in the ninetees warning against the trajectory of globalism.
The sell out of US manufacturing was done by people with money, not the people who dislike racism (and show it in a weird and harmful way).
As evident from my other comments I don't like CCP one bit. But while we criticize oppression, Muslim extremism which triggered this oopression shouldn't be pushed aside either.
Tibet is equally oppressed under CCP's boots for many decades now but nobody seems to be bothered.
I genuinely believe this is getting less publicity because it's impossible to cover in the traditional way: there are very few first person sources and it's impossible to go there and film. Whereas unlimited media from the US domestic conflict is available.
I would be more concerned about challenges like these in my local area, i.e. the west (millions refugees living in tents as a result of western wars, for profit prisons, children refugees in border camps, etc). if we can't solve it in our own countries, what chance is there to solve it in china through twitter.
Some of us don't have much power. I denounced it online several times, that's all I can do.
People like Lebron James, who thinks of himself like a freedom fighter, when he criticized China he ended up saying he was misinformed and he wasn't educated about the issue.
He loves the money coming from China more than anything else. I want him to be reminded by this. He put his millions before human lives, just like some nazi collaborators did.
How is that comparable to Jews? jews were tortured killed and their personal properties were robbed. Do you see anyone in this article got the same result? Where does you sense of self righteous coming from?
I can't believe this isn't something people are rallying for. Nor can I believe the mainstream media is hardly talking about it. The lessons from WWII aren't stories that we should memorise as fun trivia facts.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24292962
[+] [-] jaggirs|5 years ago|reply
Pretty cool. Trying to hide the facilities made them easier to find.
[+] [-] jon_barrett|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone know of any good satellite data providers with more frequent (somewhere between bi-weekly and daily) data? I understand much of this is dependent on the nature of the project to determine what kind of satellite imagery you would need, different spectrometers at different UV ranges, different swathes, etc. but for now we'll just say something similar to the images in the article here.
[+] [-] whoevercares|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
This is something we can actually fight for.
[+] [-] microcolonel|5 years ago|reply
I think it's better to shift from that, directly to not letting people (particularly those with means) to make excuses for using PRC goods when it would be almost as convenient to use goods from anywhere else.
It's a start, compared to just letting people say “oh well, guess I'll just give in completely”.
[+] [-] apta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nedsma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arvigeus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thecleaner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mola|5 years ago|reply
But no, you'll choose power and war.
[+] [-] mrfusion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufmace|5 years ago|reply
In practice, this seems to mean that if you're the wrong religion and so much as breathe funny, off you go to the camps, where you will be basically tortured and brainwashed into adopting Han Chinese culture.
[+] [-] Draw_Daw|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] euix|5 years ago|reply
In Korla everyone getting off the train had to submit to a retinal scan, presumably so authorities know all the ingress and egress into town, going to a park involved going through a checkpoint. To get into any train station at all involved 3 levels of checkpoints, the first checkpoint started before you got to the plaza before the train station, so checking in took about 3 hours. In Kashgar the old city had checkpoints at every corner. The entire province only had 3G, the moment you cross over from neighboring Gansu your China Telecom signal dropped from 4G, so sending videos or even pictures is very difficult even on weChat, if you try to do it through a VPN the experience is even slower.
Some checkpoints were vigilant, but in my experience most were just bored. One checkpoint basically forgot to check my ID because I was seated all the at the back of a van. Young Uighur men or woman sometimes with a Han standing around or sitting at a chair with a desk in the middle of the street, writing down the names of everyone who crosses his "stand".
What surprised me the most was that most of the guards manning the checkpoints in towns, highways, at gas stations (which involved a full car search in order to pull into) were Uighurs themselves. I get the impression you basically went to jail or joined the security apparatus, a modern variation on a old Chinese strategem of using barbarian to fight barbarian I guess.
The whole experience changed my perspective on human beings in general. At the end of the day, when I got back home the only conclusion I could come to wasn't even about China or Chinese, if we look at the long span of human history the only thing I can arrive at is human beings in aggregate have a high tendency to do shitty things. Goodness exists in individuals but as soon as we have to appeal to the common denominator of a group or groups more often then not being a piece of shit is the easiest and most expedient.
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newen|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/_tchiek/status/1299386623390617601?s=20
Sorry for not getting caught in this anti-China craziness that has gotten Americans into a frenzy very very recently.
[+] [-] mcji|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dade_|5 years ago|reply
A popular song: Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too
The CCP is simply following a core tenant of communism. From the perspective of the ideology, they are freeing people from religion.
A much more important quote, a warning about accepting new ideas that too few heed today as always: “Let us keep our minds open, by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out! There are still things in this world which are true and things which are false; acts which are right and acts which are wrong, even if there are statesmen who hide their designs under the cloak of high-sounding phrases.”. — Walter Kotschnig November 8, 1939
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_me_me|5 years ago|reply
Yes, that is why Lennin and especially Stalin were made into godlike figures. Mao is a prophet/father of the china also painted as infallible. And lets not forget about North Korea... ummm Peoples Republic that is Celestial Dictatorship.
Marx was rolling in his grave when 'communism' was implemented across the world's nations.
[+] [-] aberseti|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mola|5 years ago|reply
See, easy, kept my mind open, and my mind didn't fall out.
[+] [-] OneGuy123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pradn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pototo666|5 years ago|reply
My wife is from Xin Jiang. She is not Uighurs. I have been to Xin Jiang. I don't think non-Uighurs in Xin Jiang knows the details about these.
They are like secrets. You know something is happening. But you don't know what exactly is happening.
[+] [-] hajile|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhaskara2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corey_moncure|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nedsma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheUndead96|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
There are a million tweets condemning China’s behavior... way more than the number of tweets targeting people who are ‘cancelled’
The difference is that tweets can effect a regular person’s life, and they are ‘cancelled’. China doesn’t care. A company will act to fire a single person who behaves badly because of consumer pressure; it doesn’t cost them much and is good PR. Stopping doing business with China is a lot costlier, so they don’t give in to the same consumer pressure that they would for an individual employee.
The different outcome doesn’t mean there is some hypocrisy amongst the people tweeting their support for ‘cancelling’ someone.
It just means that tweets aren’t that powerful for real change.
[+] [-] Nginx487|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mola|5 years ago|reply
The sell out of US manufacturing was done by people with money, not the people who dislike racism (and show it in a weird and harmful way).
[+] [-] pixxel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PoissonVache|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drieddust|5 years ago|reply
Tibet is equally oppressed under CCP's boots for many decades now but nobody seems to be bothered.
I don't like this selective outrage of west.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supergirl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Darmody|5 years ago|reply
People like Lebron James, who thinks of himself like a freedom fighter, when he criticized China he ended up saying he was misinformed and he wasn't educated about the issue.
He loves the money coming from China more than anything else. I want him to be reminded by this. He put his millions before human lives, just like some nazi collaborators did.
[+] [-] erik_landerholm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blindspot557|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krm01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T3RMINATED|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] carierx1|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fakeslimshady|5 years ago|reply
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