Sunday, November 1, 2020

Xinjiang training center grads refute rumors from West — China Daily


State media. Make up your own mind.

China has a long history of political rehab.

Ecns.cn (China)
Xinjiang training center grads refute rumors from West
China Daily (state sponsored)

6 comments:

Peter Pan said...

You're calling it political rehabilitation... looks like you've made your mind up.

Life/work skills = good.
Political rehabilitation = bad.

Matt Franko said...

“looks like you've made your mind up.“

No... you START with the theory FIRST....

‘make your mind up” is figurative language,,,, same with “change your mind”...

Peter Pan said...

A conclusion is not figurative.

Tom Hickey said...

You're calling it political rehabilitation... looks like you've made your mind up. Life/work skills = good. Political rehabilitation = bad.

In this sense political rehab means fitting people to live in a society, in China in a socialist society, just as education and culture in the West are aimed at fitting people to live in a capitalist society. A more apt term might be cultural rehab.

Conditions in the Global East and South are very different from those in the Global West and North, and so the approach is necessarily different.The West has mostly overcome it's traditional past, for good and for ill, but that is not the case in most of the rest of the world. Many people are traditional to the degree of tribal rather than modern.

The challenge of this century is reconciling traditionalism and liberalism, and China is doing that. BTW, it's also one of the dominant factors in the West, too. America is a special case where many people are both traditionalist and modernist (liberal but not in the American political sense but in the sense of political theory) and many of them have not integrated the contradictions in their own lives. It's called cognitive dissonance and double-bind.

Peter Pan said...

Cultural is better than political.

Nevertheless, you can visit a theocracy, and people there understand what is required to function in a modern economy. The importance of education/training, holding a job, savings, budgeting, etc.
During the time of the caliphate in Syria & Iraq, services such as garbage collection were carried out. Religious fanaticism has to take a seat alongside good governance. Even people who subsist in an informal economy understand what is required to survive.

Uyghurs are being discriminated against. If China were running an equivalent to affirmative action, criticism would be muted. If Han Chinese view them as backward, that is a problem.

Radicalized young men are a threat to social stability. The strategy is usually focused on finding and killing them. War is a traditional means of disposing of male surplus.

Peter Pan said...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20749382?seq=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307744263_Affirmative_Action_in_Muslim_China_The_Impact_on_Young_Women