The People’s Republic of Cruelty
Every now and then, when credulous Western observers aren’t fawning over China’s high-speed rail network or calculating the precise moment when its economy will become the world’s largest, a news story breaks through to remind us that the People’s Republic remains what it has always been: a place of fear and cruelty. One such story, by the Times’s Chris Buckley, is worth particular attention.
Writing from Hotan, a city in the western province of Xinjiang, Buckley describes a system of internment camps, brainwashing programs, and pervasive surveillance, all aimed at the region’s Muslim majority, mostly ethnic Uighurs. The overall approach, he writes, is “reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and ‘work teams’ assigned to ferret out dissent.”
