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A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags (haaretz.com)
19 points by jajag on Oct 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



How many are in US ones? We should be talking about those too.

(This is not what-aboutism. Two evils are worse than one.)


And when we talk about that, someone asks "but what about China", rinse, repeat.

A million evils are worse than several ten thousand. And last time I checked, companies aren't folding to pressure by the US govt left and right to silence any mention of the ICE camps and other things, which isn't a minor detail, either.

From the article: (click the "print article" icon to get the full thing)

> Why were people tortured?

> “They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”

> And everyday things like these were punished with torture?

> “I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”

> On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”

> Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”

But (in addition to it getting penalized by flags apparently) even when a witness gives such details, we can't talk about this before we talked about the ICE camps, about which there are many reports? What can I say, I disagree, I think such discussions are orthogonal.




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