Xinjiang’s situation didn’t start in a day, and neither did Hong Kong’s. We’ve been watching HK boiling for the past year and things have finally overflowed. It’ll only get worse from here. America is following a similar course. Massive detention camps for citizens aren’t a problem yet because they haven’t been built. But people are being picked up and who knows what’s happening, journalists are being arrested just for reporting the facts, people are being shot and permanently injured or killed just for standing by the protests. And while not intended for citizens, America already has detention camps in use, but we’re exempt from them for the moment (although some citizens are being rounded up [1]). It’s not impossible or even difficult for the feds to decide to take problem A and solution B and say, hey, we can apply this method here.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/23/us/u...

There is no recent history of the US interning and torturing parts of their own population because of their religion or ethnicity. That is in a totally different category than foreign policy or stuff they did while Mao’s policies starved 20 million+ people to death or student protests were suppressed by rolling tanks over them.

No, people just get detained and disappeared in China, with families sent to labor camps if you're Uighur minority. That doesn't happen in the United States.

Does the United States have problems? Yes. Are those problems on the same level as China? No.

If we are going to allow law enforcement to behave like this, you don't really have a check on people being disappeared. Even if the secret police are absolutely perfectly 100% scrupulous in only taking "bad guys" off the street for good reason, anybody could impersonate them, because they don't have identification or keep records.

For the sake of argument, stipulate the US is not right now on the same level as some despotic states. What is going to tell us that we've arrived, next week or next year, if anonymous security forces can grab people off the street with no accountability? What sounds the alarm, that the feds are not doing things correctly, or that someone is pretending to be the feds, who kidnap people?

Sure, specifically detention of people in the US isn't as big of an issue as in the PRC.

However, the US has absolutely huge issues that are much worse than anything comparable in China. Such as, I don't know, fabricating intelligence and feeding it to propaga- I mean corporate media in order to justify a war to kill over a million innocents.

The US is not better than China as far as human rights. There are some things that the Chinese do much worse than America, such as due process, in general - not in extreme cases, where both don't hesitate to extraordinarily rendition you into a black site. However, China also doesn't have the habit of turning a few million innocents into pink mist every decade or so, so there's really no argument of moral superiority you can make here. US problems are certainly on the same level as China.

And as far as detention, the direction the US is going certainly isn't the right one, either.

China right now has little power projection ability, and invading anywhere would likely start a very costly war with the US. If China had the same global military dominance as the US does now, it would be much, much more aggressive. It openly wants to outright conquer Taiwan, just for starters. There's a whole Wikipedia category on Chinese border disputes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Territorial_disputes_...

Now we're getting somewhere. I agree, China likely isn't doing so because they lack the power. Same way, the USG isn't putting people into re-education camps largely because the people won't let it do so.

If you want to limit the ability of superpowers to kill millions with impunity, then really the best solution is to have a bipolar world.

It doesn't happen for entire families, but black people in the US are also detained in large numbers for minor charges and sent to prison where they become forced laborers. It's not as openly targeted, and it's happening to lots of non-black people as well, but it's not nothing. It is an important part of US manufacturing at this point.

I think if this would happen in any country the US was not friendly with it would be "labour camps" and slavery in the US press.