> Certainly all the ones they've put in concentration camps are never going to love China after what's happened. If they let them out, their stories will only spread discontent among the rest of the population.
China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.
That explanation doesn’t fly, because most of these figures were imprisoned on completely trumped up charges, for example, they were accused of being members of counterrevolutionary organizations that did not even exist. The state arrested them for their cultural prominence, not because they had any inclinations towards active separatism that the Soviet Union could have known of.
China might be looking at how this played out in Russia in the Soviet era. In the 1930s and 1940s, loads of indigenous minority cultural figures within Russia were either shot or sent to the GULAG. While certainly traumatic for individual families, this crackdown did not spur those minorities to rise up in any meaningful way. Indeed, many of the men who had been sent to camps, came back home a decade or two later as pretty typical Soviet citizens who sought in no way to rock the boat ethnically speaking.