Thanks for bringing it up, I was also just thinking, this needs posting! I think Darren Byler’s excellent piece is important, and has gotten a lot of praise. And actually, Darren Byler has written previously on the forced cultural assimilation campaign in Xinjiang, on his excellent blog: https://livingotherwise.com/2018/02/23/images-red-han-culture-uyghur-performers-chinese-new-year/
And, here is yesterday’s 5 min. radio interview with Byler, on this same topic: https://www.pri.org/file/2018-10-25/chinese-civilians-occupy-uighur-homes
How do we talk about these things? Words like “paternalistic”, “patronizing”, “intrusive,” etc. do not seem to be enough to capture the revolting we-know-best attitude that animates these Chinese settler-colonist home-spies as they carry out their sorting of which families to break up, which children will lose their parents and go to brainwashing school, and so on. In Sweden we use the German word Besserwisser, but, it usually refers to an eccentric who’s annoying but not really consequential. It can’t quite capture Chinese Communist agents who put you behind barbed wire for being who you are. I don’t know what words would suffice to describe this campaign.
The same goes for Byler’s own use of “patriotic” to describe what these settler-colonist home-spies want to be and want their target victims to become — unless one wants to paint “patriotism” as a disgusting thing? This whole campaign to “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins” (https://www.afp.com/en/news/717/inside-chinas-internment-camps-tear-gas-tasers-and-textbooks-doc-1a73p63), including the forced teaching of Chinese and the forced singing of Chinese Communist songs (on pain of getting nothing to eat, as an inmate), is certainly dragging the name of China the country, Chinese culture, and Chinese language teaching, deep into the muck, and all that does not seem very “patriotic” to me (that is, if “patriotism” can still be something positive in our new era of ultranationalism). What would Confucius say?
We need new research and new theorizing, on what the Chinese regime is doing now.
Can anyone think of similar gross “paternalism” in the history of European/American colonialism, as a historical comparison? (Maybe in the Philippines, Vietnam, in Africa somewhere, there were colonists who “nannied the colonized” in similar ways, to select those to send off to concentration camps? I can’t think of any cases yet).
In my other piece published 2 days ago, I proposed we also need the psychology of violence to understand the Chinese regime’s actions:
http://theasiadialogue.com/2018/10/24/the-xinjiang-camps-as-a-stanford-prison-experiment/
I’m also recently beginning to link my research on the forced confessions in China to what’s happening with the camps: It seems that a big part of the prisoner’s day is self-confession/self-criticism, so the fundamentals seem to be the same across China.
Also, this weekend I have an illustrated piece coming out in Hong Kong Free Press, on how the current Chinese propaganda effort compares with the Nazis — who also tried to present their concentration camps as vocational-correctionary rather than as the punitive & death camps that they really were.
Finally, I think in the midst of this crisis, it is important to remember that even with the tsunami of brainwashing now released by the regime, not all Han Chinese get brainwashed but can still think for themselves. Former culture minister Wang Meng’s brave protest against the stereotyping of all uighurs is legendary. But that was a couple years ago. However, even in the new climate of state terror, there may be passive resistance among Han Chinese. For example, there was a brief unconfirmed report on Twitter that a Han Chinese person had tried to quit his job in Xinjiang and was told he could not. He then just left, went back to interior China. But, was captured there, and sent back to Xinjiang, to round out the ranks of settlers! No-one can leave!?
yrs. Magnus Fiskesjö