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Buzzfeed: This Is What A 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like (Xinjiang, China

Piecake

Member
You won't to know how off base most of you are?

The people that I knew in china came there because of how lax and easy it was, what were they doing? Mostly some kind of drug or pot because of how cheap their rent was and how lax it was. A lot of them come there for other reasons too that I don't really care for but there is a big difference in how the foreign men treat women and how the chinese men do. And I'd say it's often the foriegners doing then wrong 80 percent of the time imo

Yeah, I know the rules and what can go down for such a thing and no I wasn't a part of that and I have never had possession or tried any drug in my whole life, but when you see people flying there cause of that life style well, that can tell you a whole lot of things that a lot of you obviously aren't getting with this hyper fear spy stuff.

I have never had nothing but help from those in power rather it be government, airports etc They may not have always helped but they at least never were in anyway trying to be harmful or an ass about it. I never experienced that, but hell let me get pulled over in my home country and see how that could go down.

There is no doubt bad there, but no more than any other place, I think you are 100 percent safer in China than the US, minus some pollution in certain cities, but safer without a doubt when it comes to interacting with the rules and people.

I have only known of a few people that actually got in trouble and arrested in China, they were just sent back home for working illegally. Which we all know and are told very clearly when we are visiting the various offices for work or other situations. They try to be helpful, not counter productive.

If your not doing anything wrong there, you have no reason to have any issue most of the time, compared to what you may go through in other countries for being tired , having a certain look or whatever.

You do realize you are comparing your own anecdotal experience to researched articles, right?

What’s With All the Chinese Misogyny?

The contrast, while unintentional, could not have been more obvious. The image on U.S.-based search engine Google’s front page greeting search engine users on March 8, International Women’s Day, was a collage honoring women astronauts, scientists, athletes, judges, and musicians. Meanwhile, on Baidu, China’s top search engine, the front page featured a princess doll wearing a dainty, pale pink dress while twirling in a music box. The image may have been intended to celebrate the popular holiday, but to many young Chinese women, the Baidu illustration depicting them as a delicate plaything was just the latest symptom of a peculiar disease plaguing Chinese society: zhi nan ai, meaning “straight guy cancer.”

It’s a new Internet term for men who exhibit the misogynist attitudes that seem all too prevalent in modern China. The term appears to have originated around the same time on two social networks: Douban, a book and film review site popular with Chinese hipsters, and Weibo, a large microblogging platform. As of March 10, a search for the term generated more than 1.9 million Weibo results. According to a post on the women’s section of Sohu, a large Internet portal, symptoms of the so-called cancer include conceitedness, chauvinism, homophobia, poor fashion sense, and wife-beating, according to a long post in Douban that explains the term. The post explains that those afflicted with the condition tend to work in IT or construction industries and make statements like “women are for procreation” or “you are only a girl; why read so much?”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/10/china-misogyny-international-womens-day/

The painful search for China’s missing children slowly gains momentum (WaPo)

It was around noon one October day 12 years ago, and 5-year-old Cheng Ying was waiting for her mother to collect her from primary school and take her home for lunch.

But her mom was a few minutes late, so Ying decided to start walking home herself. After all, it wasn’t far, just the distance of one bus stop, and she figured her mother was probably busy preparing for a family party planned for later that day.

She didn’t get far. Just 100 yards from the school gates, the young girl was grabbed by strangers and bundled into a taxi.

And so began an ordeal that was to last the rest of her childhood, robbing her of an entire decade of her life.

Ying was one of hundreds of thousands of children in China thought to have gone missing over the past four decades, a problem that the country is slowly beginning to wake up to thanks to public pressure expressed through the Internet and social media.

There are no reliable figures for how many children go missing in China every year, with academics estimating it could be anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000. Even given the country’s huge population, that’s a human tragedy on frightening scale.

Definitions vary from country to country, and a large number of “missing” children around the world are involved in custody fights between parents. But China appears unusual in facing child abduction and trafficking on such a massive scale.

Indeed, in June, the State Department said China was “not making significant efforts” to prevent human trafficking generally, downgrading it to the ranks of the worst offenders in the world along with places like North Korea, Iran and Syria.

In his journey around China, Zhu was sometimes joined by Wu Xinghu, whose 1-year-old son was snatched from the family bed the night of Dec. 19, 2008.

“It was a day just like any other,” he said. “I came home from work, Jiacheng raised his hands — he wanted to cuddle with me. He was too young to talk, but I remember his every gesture and expression.”

Hours later, he was gone.

Like Zhu, Wu met official resistance everywhere he turned; his social media accounts were closed down. To the authorities, he was a nuisance, a threat to “social stability,” a man who gathered other families together to search and complain.

“Local police will never register cases until they are solved,” he said. “Cases of missing children need to be covered up,” he said, or they will reflect badly on the performance of the police.

So, as often happens in China, the victim of injustice became a suspect, a threat to the state if he or she dares to protest that injustice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...dae94ed3eb7_story.html?utm_term=.a89d572f0639

Hostage-Taking Is China’s Small-Claims Court (Foreign Policy)

In China, where it’s utterly unremarkable for one side to take hostages when financial disputes crop up, the story was no more interesting than a civil lawsuit. Given how reticent the authorities are to intervene, taking hostages is frequently seen as a better route than appealing to the courts. In fact, the courts are sympathetic to certain types of hostage taking: When debt is involved, the law considers it a lesser offense than taking hostages for ransom, and it is classed as “unlawful detention” instead. In practice, police often don’t even consider it to be an offense at all.

In 2010, one government hospital even refused to hand over a newborn baby to his parents so they would pay up for the birth costs. The baby was kept in the hospital for more than three months.

Often, precious little can be done to protect alleged debtors from thugs, and the courts and the police are of little help. This helplessness was on full display when two Indian businessmen were taken hostage for 20 days in the Chinese trading hub of Yiwu in 2012. The case came to a head when a court ordered that the two businessmen — who had been taken to court by the angry locals who had seized them — be released. The enraged mob proceeded to ignore the ruling. Authorities later managed to spirit the two men to Shanghai while the case was processed.

The case, of course, stirred up alarm in India — not least because an Indian diplomat sent to try to resolve the situation became caught in a violent fracas and was subsequently hospitalized. But Chinese authorities were, and still are, ill-equipped to understand the foreign perspective on these cases. Nationalistic Chinese tabloid the Global Times was oblivious to the root cause of Indians’ distress and was instead content to chalk it up to nationalism. The editors couldn’t grasp that most countries don’t see kidnapping as a legitimate response to debt.

The lack of police involvement in these debt-hostage situations, coupled with the economic downturn, makes China a ripe environment for loan sharks. One case that occupied headlines this year involved a debt collector who hired a gang of thugs to terrorize a 23-year-old man named Yu Huan and his mother to get a debt repaid. The police did not intervene, and Yu ended up grabbing a knife and killing one of the attackers after they pushed his mother’s head into the toilet.

Yu was initially sentenced to a life sentence, though this was reduced to just five years after a public outcry. The Southern Weekly newspaper suggested at the time that the death had only occurred after police had left the scene of the scuffle, leaving Yu desperate. Yu’s attorney indicated during the proceedings that they were considering suing the police for dereliction of duty.

This, it would seem, was finally enough to spur police action.

The authorities examined the case and exonerated all the police involved, saying they had only left to call for backup.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/08/chinas-police-think-hostages-arent-their-problem/

The Chinese Activists Fighting for Sexual Abuse Accountability

On the island of Hainan in China, a horrific sex abuse case involving a school principal who allegedly raped six young girls has spurred intense backlash from activists. Police declined to charge the principal, citing a lack of evidence, and a group of Chinese women is taking action. In this excerpt from the documentary Hooligan Sparrow, the filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows Ye Haiyan (who goes by Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues as they protest the case. The women have been marked as enemies of the state and are under constant surveillance.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/504353/hooligan-sparrow/

China migration: Dying for land: Urbanisation is leading to violent clashes between developers and farmers amid a fight for control of the land

To the people, it looked like an invasion. For three years farmers in Fuyou village had been fighting the government-backed developer who turned their land into a giant construction site. Thugs circled after dark, threatening and sometimes beating the residents. Villagers armed with hoes and scythes had taken shifts guarding the entrance to their narrow streets.

Now, truck after truck packed with men in hard hats labelled “police” and carrying long staves, electric prods and riot shields rolled down the highway. Relatives working in a nearby town say they called ahead to warn that the convoy was on its way. The villagers grabbed steel rods from the construction site, and waited.

The two forces clashed on the wide roads between half-finished buildings under the bright southern sun in China’s Yunnan province — more than 2,000km from Beijing. The crowd overturned three silver Chevrolets. Small running battles left men bloodied and beaten on the ground.

Villagers captured eight of the “police”, bound them with packing tape and plastic twine, and held them in the village function hall. On closer inspection, the outsiders had the same weathered peasant faces as the villagers. Their dark blue uniforms turned out to be ill-fitting security guard outfits pulled on over normal clothes. One woman called the real police repeatedly.

Late in the afternoon with tensions high, the villagers dragged four of the hostages out to the road, bound them together with a red cloth banner, and splashed them with petrol, demanding that the other side withdraw. Instead, they surged forward.
When the smoke cleared on October 14 last year, the charred and bloody bodies of the hostages lay still bound on the pavement. At least two villagers and two outsiders were found dead in nearby fields.

“We had no choice but to defend ourselves,” says one villager who asks not to be named for fear of retaliation. “If we hadn’t killed them they would have killed more of ours.”
The battle of Fuyou was remarkable for its savagery, but not for the fact that it happened. Land grabs are the top cause of unrest in the Chinese countryside and in the sprawling villages-turned-slums surrounding every city.

But there is an uglier “push” factor too. One-fifth of China’s migrants have had no choice but to hit the road, because their land is gone.

Their numbers are staggering. A 2011 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that between 40m and 50m Chinese migrants, from a total of 250m, were landless due to expropriation. Another 3m people would lose their land every year, CASS estimated.
Across China, the number of violent clashes rose sharply after 2009, as debt-strapped local governments began selling land pledged as collateral to real estate developers. This has put local authorities, and the full weight of the security forces, squarely on the side of the developers.

In 2010, at least 16 land grabs or forced demolitions across China involved the death of at least one person, according to a “blood house map” compiled from state media, compared with only a handful of cases in the rest of the decade. More recently, a villager guarding his fields was burnt alive in Shandong province last year, when demolition crews set fire to his tent.

Farm land in China belongs to the state or the village collective, while the families who have farmed it for centuries legally only hold a 30-year title. Villagers have no say when the government sells the land to a developer, but those who put up a tougher fight can often wrestle a greater share of the revenues. When local governments are in desperate need, however, the face-off can get ugly.

After the battle, paramilitary teams locked down Fuyou for two months. Villagers were detained in turns until they named those responsible for the murders. Nine months later, some families have no idea where their men are.

Even today at a checkpoint at the village entrance, guards monitor everyone who comes and goes. Cell phones are tapped.

“We live in such a remote and tiny place, I can’t believe that something like this would happen here,” says a townswoman in Jincheng who witnessed the Fuyou killings. “I used to believe this society was good, but now every time I hear the term ‘the nation’ I feel afraid.”

https://www.ft.com/content/33ae0866-3098-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff#axzz3i5KaaNy0

China's toxic harvest: Growing tainted food in "cancer villages"

The hill of chemical waste beside Farmer Wu Shuliang’s rice paddy began to take shape in the 1990s.

“It was yellow and green and it smelled terrible," says Wu, standing on the edge of his rice paddy in rural Yunnan, in China's southwest. The waste was from a factory next door, a byproduct from making chemicals used for tanning leather.

Each day for 20 years, workers dumped more of it, making the hill bigger and bigger. Last year, an estimated 300 million pounds of chemical sludge towered over Wu’s land and the river below.

"Whenever it rained, our rice paddy and the river would suddenly turn bright yellow," Wu says. "Much of my rice died. It killed everything in its path."

At the time, the environmental NGO Greenpeace had traveled to Wu’s village here in rural Yunnan province to test the water in the rice paddies and wells surrounding the hill. The samples were high in Chromium-6, a known carcinogen. One water sample from Wu’s land showed the level of Chromium-6 was 240 times higher than what China and the U.S. allows in their drinking water.

Wu Wenyong was in eighth grade when he was diagnosed with two types of cancer: leukemia and thymoma.

The doctor handed over the diagnosis report to the 14-year-old. Neither his father nor his mother can read.

“We didn’t understand what was going on, but as my son read the diagnosis, he seemed to understand how severe his cancer was," says Qi Xianying through tears. "I felt so guilty and so sad, but he had the strength to smile. He told me ‘Mom, don’t cry. I won’t be around to help farm the land anymore, but dad will help you. It’ll be all right.’”

"It didn’t work. He would wake up with foam all over his mouth and he couldn’t settle down," says Qi, sobbing. "He was in so much pain. He finally asked me to open the window. He said ‘Just let me jump, mom.’”

On Feb. 16, 2012, Wu Wenyong died in his hospital bed. He was 15

https://www.marketplace.org/2013/04...-harvest-growing-tainted-food-cancer-villages

8 million acres of Chinese Farmland (size of Belgium) too polluted to grow crops

Tests recently conducted on rice sold in Hong Kong found that grain imports from mainland China contained excessive levels of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that can cause cancer and other health problems. Cadmium can originate from the slurry of waste materials that leaches into the ground from open dumps.

And for China, Hong Kong's rice is just one food crisis among many.

Recently, a slew of reports has examined the relationship between China's pollution and the food it farms. In the latest, the government issued a statement that 8 million acres of China's farmland is so contaminated that growing food crops there will be prohibited until it can be properly rehabilitated. That's an area of arable land the size of Belgium that is now closed to farming.

That number comes out of China's second national land survey, released last month and now fueling public anxiety about food safety. Though 8 million is just a fraction of the 334.6 million acres of total arable land in China at the end of 2012=

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/01/chinas-pollution-problem-also-food-safety-crisis/8122/

And these are just articles that I have posted on Neogaf about China that completely contradicts your ridiculous claim that you are safer in China because the government leaves you alone.

What is more shocking is you fucking said that in a thread about China setting up a police state in Xinjiang where they are carrying out cultural genocide against a group of their own citizens for being "tired , having a certain look or whatever"

Now, I am not claiming that the US or any other nation is perfect, far from it. But you certainly need to take off those rose-colored glasses and realize that there is a reality beyond your own personal experience. A reality that you aren't going to see by reading the Chinese newspaper because it is all government controlled.

One of the major differences between China and democracies is that most of the nasty shit that happens in democracies is out there for everyone to see. China? Well, you can't have those nasty stories upset the nation's 'social stability'
 
You won't to know how off base most of you are?

The people that I knew in china came there because of how lax and easy it was, what were they doing? Mostly some kind of drug or pot because of how cheap their rent was and how lax it was. A lot of them come there for other reasons too that I don't really care for but there is a big difference in how the foreign men treat women and how the chinese men do. And I'd say it's often the foriegners doing then wrong 80 percent of the time imo

Yeah, I know the rules and what can go down for such a thing and no I wasn't a part of that and I have never had possession or tried any drug in my whole life, but when you see people flying there cause of that life style well, that can tell you a whole lot of things that a lot of you obviously aren't getting with this hyper fear spy stuff.

I have never had nothing but help from those in power rather it be government, airports etc They may not have always helped but they at least never were in anyway trying to be harmful or an ass about it. I never experienced that, but hell let me get pulled over in my home country and see how that could go down.

There is no doubt bad there, but no more than any other place, I think you are 100 percent safer in China than the US, minus some pollution in certain cities, but safer without a doubt when it comes to interacting with the rules and people.

I have only known of a few people that actually got in trouble and arrested in China, they were just sent back home for working illegally. Which we all know and are told very clearly when we are visiting the various offices for work or other situations. They try to be helpful, not counter productive.

If your not doing anything wrong there, you have no reason to have any issue most of the time, compared to what you may go through in other countries for being tired , having a certain look or whatever.
I seriously cannot believe that you're fucking astroturfing for China in a thread about how they fucking lock people up for and I quote "having a certain look or whatever". You're either a paid shill or a privilaged drive-by shitposter.

(No wait, I can believe it)
 
The US would vote against living like this probably overwhelmingly. Communism is still a fringe ideology here. Socialism is only just now becoming a not-so-bad word.

People want measures to be taken, but not as drastically as the picture painted here.

i dunno, man. So long as the brunt of it were directed against minorities and the destitute? Can totally see quite a few countries, not just the US, going for it.
 

vern

Member
Qft, on this forum China can basically do no wrong.. threads like this reaffirm that I'm glad I don't live there

I think you'll find that for the most part, posters on this forum who have spent a lot of time in China won't necessarily "defend" it (though I can see how it comes across to someone who doesn't understand China and hasn't spent a lot of time there), but will offer a different perspective that is perhaps a little more nuanced than what a lot of people think. For example:


Yeah...even though China has over a billion people, I wonder if a concentrated effort of half the population would be enough to overthrow the government? Or maybe at this point, being raised in a society like theirs, they just accept humans rights abuses as every day life?

The vast majority of the billion+ people that live here in China don't have to deal with any human rights abuses and enjoy a happy, peaceful, "free" and relatively prosperous life. Why would they overthrow their government?
 
The vast majority of the billion+ people that live here in China don't have to deal with any human rights abuses and enjoy a happy, peaceful, "free" and relatively prosperous life. Why would they overthrow their government?

That's true and that's what the government count on. Give the people continuous economic growth and opportunity and they won't argue about who has the power, and won't care as much about corruption etc.

But also perhaps the attitude that it isn't my problem what the government do to anyone else raising a contrary opinion is just a little risky? Long term I mean.
 

vern

Member
That's true and that's what the government count on. Give the people continuous economic growth and opportunity and they won't argue about who has the power, and won't care as much about corruption etc.

But also perhaps the attitude that it isn't my problem what the government do to anyone else raising a contrary opinion is just a little risky? Long term I mean.

Maybe. But who thinks long term?
 

leroidys

Member
Sounds incredibly similar to what the NSA, Homeland Security, TSA, and the rest of the security apparatus in the US are already doing and have been doing for a long time.

No, it really doesn't. You don't even get a sarcastic "nice try".
 

IISANDERII

Member
I bet Trump gets a boner when he reads this kind of stuff.

Scary as hell.



Yeah, it sucks having to go through that checkpoint when I want to go to the mall. /s

They are not equivalent.
With cameras and facial recognition tech, the NSA effectively have checkpoints almost everywhere.
 
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