It looks like 周月明 (Vera Yueming Zhou) was sent to a Chinese concentration camp mostly because she was part of a religious minority and not necessarily for using a VPN to access the University of Washington’s website.
> Vera was living in her hometown of Kuytun (Kuitun) in Ili Prefecture, an area directly north of the Tian Shan mountains that borders Kazakhstan. She had been trapped there since 2017, when—in the middle of her junior year at the University of Washington, where I was an instructor—she had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip back home to see her boyfriend, a former elementary school classmate. Using digital surveillance tools, the Kuytun police had noticed that Vera had used a Virtual Private Network in order to access websites such as her university Gmail account. Given her status as a member of a Muslim minority group, this could be deemed a “sign of religious extremism.”
That's the thing about "illegal but everyone does it"...it's nothing to worry about until the government decides it's convenient to enforce (against an individual or group), and then it's definitely something to worry about and it becomes a low barrier pretext for all sorts of oppression.
She did commit a crime by travelling to Russia with an illegal substance, for which she got roughly the same sentence as a typical Russian would get if caught with a similar amount of drugs. This case doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary, except for the "criminal" being a famous foreigner.
“Young tourist is now facing death by firing squad in Bali after cocaine was found in her luggage: Here are the Indonesian rules everyone needs to know”
This is a headline from this year.
It turns out that when you break the law in other countries, you might get punished for it.
Anyone who believes themselves exempt from the laws of a country they travel to because of a little booklet they carry isn't just unaware, they are foolish, and dangerously so because they not only endanger themselves, but everyone else they convince to adopt this attitude. Better they receive the scorn they deserve now than for them or anybody else to face the same consequences Griner or Warmbier faced.
Thanks for this elaboration. Upon reading original comment, it felt very strange that she was "encamped" for using VPN to access her school homework. Immediately I knew there was more than it meets the eye.
The best bit is that we're enacting very similar laws in the West [0]. As much as China is often deplorable I do wonder how much of a blind spot we have here to our own sins.
Exactly. This is the period when Muslim ethnic groups like the Uigurs were being rounded up on any pretense to be reeducated into not wanting to be separatists anymore (often with no indication that they had anything to do with separatism other than their ethnicity.) Seeing the VPN pop up was more than enough of an excuse. Calling it a "genocide" is 99% propaganda, but it was obviously a sinofication meant to get rid of separatist identities and cultures, and a horrible injustice. In the beginning, they were inspired and immunized by the US's anti-Muslim fervor during the GWB invasions (we were not only not criticizing, but probably even sharing intelligence with China.)
> In the beginning, they were inspired and immunized by the US's anti-Muslim fervor during the GWB invasions (we were not only not criticizing, but probably even sharing intelligence with China.)
Yeah, seems to be overlooked quite a lot since it's convenient for the US narrative lately.
> Starting in 2002, the American government detained 22 Uyghurs in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. The last 3 Uyghur detainees, Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghupur and Saidullah Khalik, were released from Guantanamo on December 29, 2013, and later transferred to Slovakia.
> None of the Uyghurs wanted to be returned to China. The United States declined to grant the Uyghurs political asylum, or to allow them parole, or even freedom on the Naval Base.
> A May 2008 report by the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice claimed that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to enact sleep deprivation of the Uyghur detainees.
"sinofication" sounds a lot like "eliminating the existing culture" which sounds a lot like genocide. Genocide is more than just murdering everyone like in some of the most well known cases like the Holocaust -- it includes elimination of an ethnic group by any means possible, including "nativification"
Not the person you're responding to, but it is an accurate description of genocide under its current meaning as defined by the UN (probably the most authoritative body on this kind of matter).
What the Chinese are doing there is covered under Article II, c.
If you are being pedantic by holding fast to the literal Greek translation of "geno" and "cide" then, well, this is simply not the complete modern meaning of the term.
There is no authoritative body on the definitions of words. More generally, if genocide can mean "not killling, but very bad" then it is not much use except as an epithet - a negatively-loaded bomb to be lobbed in partisan debates at people who you think are doing something very bad. Virtually every controversial policy could be described as, "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to" some group.
> There is no authoritative body on the definitions of words.
false: there are a few. They aren't always correct, but they're more correct than you personally
> More generally, if genocide can mean...
there is no question what it means, you simply personally disagree with it
and since you definitely aren't an authoritative body on the definition of words, your personal pedantic insistence that the word mean only what the strict etymological roots imply, rather than how people actually use it, is irrelevant
> a negatively-loaded bomb to be lobbed in partisan debates
it's quite telling that you seem to view usage of the term "cultural genocide" to refer to cultural genocide as a bigger issue than actual cultural genocide
don't like people using the correct term to refer to the action? maybe get those perpetrating the action to stop, instead of telling everyone we're using the wrong words to describe it.
The definition, US propaganda under Pompeo as head of State tried (and failed to meet), was UN's convention on genocide, which would trigger legal responses on member states. The TLDR is Pompeo laundered very tortured legal analysis through Zenz and some Gulanist Saudi think tank (IIRC) to try insinuate PRC met the definition when most credible international lawyers saw through the bullshit, but noted PRC actions closer to cultural genocide, which does NOT have definition at UN, and hence not prosecutable. The result is PRC actions merely labelled as potential human rights abuses at UN, aka business as usual, and a bunch of useful idiots who ate Pompeo's bait thinking PRC actually met the definition of genocide when it manifestly did not. And buy business as usual, of human rights abuses / cultural genocide, it puts PRC XJ actions in league with behaviours of the west. Hence you don't hear much about the XJ campaign anymore from western propaganda, because the propaganda was mostly useful if the genocide label stuck at UN, and made PRC actions more nefarious not equal to west. Now it's mostly used by US to justify XJ sanctions and trying to partners onboard to cripple XJ industry like solar, cotton, agriculture.
It's absolutely not. There's a reason US propaganda under Pompeo had to manufacture and launder reports with tortured legal interpretation to try to get the genocide label to stick but couldn't because there's no intent to destroy, hence useful idiots trying to be pedantic and argue how enforcing family planning reflect intention even though that applied to Han majority, or mass (temporary) internment / inflicting "pain" somehow equivalent to physical destruction while population continues to grow.
Modern definition of genocide at UN explicitly wouldn't categorize what PRC is doing in XJ - cultural genocide - because members, especially west went out of their way to ensure cultural genocide would have little legal ramifications, otherwise Canada would have been sanctioned to death for self professed cultural genocide a few years ago. Incidentally the entire reason Pompeo tried to propagandize genocide label was because it would trigger diplomatic ramifications at UN. What the PRC is doing in XJ is cultural genocide, and bluntly that’s permissible thanks to lobbying from the west.
The entire manufactured genocide narrative is so retarded because if PRC wanted to, they could just... commit genocide. At PRC scale they can wipe out the 12M Uyghurs in a few weekends on the cheap instead of wasting trillions of RMB trying to sinicize them.
Would you say the common, accurate usage of the term "cultural genocide" to refer to what the term refers to, is a bigger or smaller problem than the actual cultural genocide itself?
It comes from the Latin word "caedo," which means "to kill." The phrase "cultural genocide" is not the same as "genocide," and indeed the legal definition of "genocide" expliticly says that destruction of a culture is not genocide.
Using the word "genocide" to refer to something other than mass murder - and then falling back to the claim that "genocide" doesn't mean mass murder - is just playing rhetorical games.
Travel according to the most common version comes from tripalium, a torture device.
If you assume that genocide must be about killing because it comes from a Latin word for killing, then being nice should be about being ignorant because it comes from a Latin word for ignorant.
Didn’t know that about that messy complexity surrounding the word nice but I’ll just say that feels like a false equivalence in terms of recency of the words. Apparently that word is much older and went through the sloppy unfortunate conversion it has. Good to know about these etymological minefields though, you can’t just blindly consult etymology especially on old words where language has shifted. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31368/what-are-t...
Those examples I’m guessing have no record of those who coined them, genocide however appears to have such a record.
Interesting, so I think you're trying to draw attention to Article II yes?
"""
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
"""
I wouldn't recognize this as a dictionary definition but rather a legal document outlaying its premises and defining its terms. All but item b I'd argue are a form of killing, the ending of the demographic line either immediately or incrementally. You have to look at all these definitions in terms of the ultimate end being sought after by the perpetrators and these five categories are all means of doing so. The only stretch definition is b which I imagine is a much slower form of destruction. It's still a necessary clause though because imagine a dictator amputating the hands of all members of some group and claiming they didn't kill them therefore they didn't commit genocide. That would be a fraudulent claim because they effectively severely debilitated their ability to provide for themselves and function, they severely wounded that group so that one wouldn't be surprised if they did wind up dying and not thriving some time later on account of that action through indirect causes directly tied to that original offense.
It's not an ancient word however, apparently it's a 20th century construction coined by Raphael Lemkin.
"""
He decided to create a name for the crime without a name. He came up with genocide, which he defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he created the word by combining the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).
"""
https://www.facinghistory.org/ideas-week/where-did-word-geno....
The book he coined the word was authored in 1944, the UN convention was signed in 1948 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention..., very close in time and I'd say complimentary but still a legal document meant to get in writing specific means of destruction for that genos. So it's a emphasis on the means, not the end, and I'd say an equivalent definition is intentionally causing the end of a collective bloodline however that end may be accomplished.
you seem interested in the history of the term, it seems like it would behoove you to continue researching such history until you get to the point where said history explains how the term is currently, commonly used, e.g. to refer to cultural genocide, for example the cultural genocide china is perpetrating on Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang
→ https://www.chinafile.com/extensive-surveillance-china
→ https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/student-01272020075256.ht...
It looks like 周月明 (Vera Yueming Zhou) was sent to a Chinese concentration camp mostly because she was part of a religious minority and not necessarily for using a VPN to access the University of Washington’s website.
> Vera was living in her hometown of Kuytun (Kuitun) in Ili Prefecture, an area directly north of the Tian Shan mountains that borders Kazakhstan. She had been trapped there since 2017, when—in the middle of her junior year at the University of Washington, where I was an instructor—she had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip back home to see her boyfriend, a former elementary school classmate. Using digital surveillance tools, the Kuytun police had noticed that Vera had used a Virtual Private Network in order to access websites such as her university Gmail account. Given her status as a member of a Muslim minority group, this could be deemed a “sign of religious extremism.”