cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57662436
“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.”
German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s observation on the political apathy that engulfed Germany in the 1930s resonates with 21st century survivors of the Chinese state’s war against Uyghurs in its northwestern heartland, known by exiles as East Turkestan.
Germany’s slide into fascism brought book burnings and arrests of “undesirables.” It lead step by step to antisemitism, concentration camps, torture, and death. That brutal history echoes today in Beijing’s campaign against the Turkic peoples of its western regions – and in the silence of a deaf world. Only those who have experienced the terror first-hand and survived to tell the tale can hope to describe its full horrors.
Kalbinur Sidik (formerly Romanized as Qelbinur Sidik) is one such rare eyewitness to what many nations have termed a genocide. Her ordeal as a teacher inside the camps drove her to the brink of collapse. She escaped in 2019 ostensibly for medical treatment, hoping to reunite with her daughter in the Netherlands and seek asylum. Speaking out became her path to healing.
She told The Diplomat that “silence is not an option.” The faces of captives in her class have haunted her to this day. Since leaving, her mission has been to give voice to their silent cries.
[…]
Her memoir, “Heart Full of Light” – a title reflecting the meaning of her name, Kalbinur – is full of horror and sadness but also memory, dignity and resistance. It is a cry against erasure and a wake-up call to a world that has not been listening.
[…]
Every inch of the compound was monitored. If someone moved, a screen flashed red and zoomed in. “It was impossible not to compare them to animals in cages,” Sidik wrote of her students. “There was nowhere to hide. For them, or for me.”
The specter of organ harvesting hung over everything. Healthy young prisoners disappeared. Across Xinjiang authorities collected biodata from everyone aged 16-65. Mandatory DNA tests, bloods, iris scans, voice and gait recordings filled vast data banks, many believed for organ matching. Research later identified Saudis and Gulf Arabs traveling to eastern China for halal organs.
“Alive we were worthless, dead, and cut up, our organs were worth a ransom,” Sidik wrote.
[…]
What holds you and the majority of ‘tankies’ back then? Why aren’t they emigrating to China or Russia? I heard the latter they are desperately looking for new citizens of late.
Edit: Btw, China’s Xi Jinping has frequently confirmed that he rejects social welfare as it would make people ‘lazy’. Both wealth and income inequality have been sharply rising in China over the last decade and have now reached U.S. levels.
What we call a social safety net including healthcare, education, elderly care comes mainly from the wider family in China and sometimes from local villages in the rural areas. The Chinese Communist Party’s widely proclaimed “socialism with Chinese characteristics” exists at best on paper, as the state never developed a system for social welfare and workers’s rights that comes even remotely to the high standards in many Western democracies.
China’s hukou system of residency compounds many social problems, stopping many rural migrants from obtaining urban residency and thus preventing them from accessing higher quality urban social services (Hukou is sort of a registration, but also classification system, employed to assign urban or specific rural residency status and, with it, an individual’s eligibility to obtain services).
The workers in China are represented by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). It is the only trade union that is allowed in China - and it is led by Chinese Communist Party. China’s ‘996 working culture’ is legendary, and something that is prohibited by Western labour laws.
The 996 working culture that has been illegal for years in china?
I know many people who are forced to work 80 hour weeks to make ends meet in the west, and fail to even do that. Wtf are you talking about lol?
“Oh one bad system exists so the other similar bad system must be good.”
If 996 being ‘illegal’ matters why is it still such a big problem? Maybe capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ is the problem, much like everywhere else?
Centralized power is inherently corrupt and dangerous. It doesn’t matter what colour flag you drape over it.
Source on it still being a big problem?
I’d love to take off. Easier said than done.
You’re a western disinformation machine. Probably a fed. This seems to be your favorite past time. Strange.