S7 E19: China & Uyhgurs & Portland: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Protests in Portland

• The city of Portland has been in the news due to shocking images of unidentified, camouflaged federal agents arresting protesters, putting them into unmarked cars, and using excessive force, including beating a Navy veteran with batons and dousing him with pepper spray (1m8s).
• The US Attorney in Oregon is seeking an investigation into the actions of these federal agents in Portland (1m11s).
• The protests in Portland have been ongoing for nearly two months, since the killing of George Floyd, but the deployment of federal agents marked a sharp escalation of questionable legality (1m57s).
• The President claims that the federal agents were called in to Portland, but Oregon's Governor and Portland's Mayor, Ted Wheeler, have stated that they did not want the agents there and have asked them to leave (2m37s).
• The situation in Portland has been described as a rapid decline of American civil liberties, with the federal agents' actions being seen as an overreaction and an escalation of the situation (1m50s).
• The local police force in Portland, under the leadership of Mayor Ted Wheeler, has also been criticized for overreacting to the protests, using tear gas and other crowd control tactics (3m32s).
• The justification for these tactics has been questioned, with the police releasing photos of allegedly threatening items, including a can of White Claw and a half-eaten apple (3m50s).
• The situation in Portland is being portrayed differently by those on the ground and by the Trump administration, with the latter describing it as chaotic and violent, while those on the ground say it's not entirely what's being portrayed (4m4s).
• The epicenter of the protests is about one city block, and the number of confrontations between protesters and police was decreasing before federal agents moved in (4m33s).
• Fox News has been portraying the situation in Portland as a war on the streets, with radical leftist mobs intent on destroying everything America stands for, and has reported on 50 straight days of left-wing violence (4m57s).
• However, the tone used by Fox News does not reflect the conditions on the ground, and the firebombing of the Hatfield Courthouse was actually a small fire or a firework, not as dramatic as it was made to sound (5m32s).
• The list of incidents reported by Fox News, including vandalism and police being attacked with lasers, is mostly graffiti, and the headline "violence in Portland" is an overstatement (5m49s).
• Portland seems to be being used as a staging ground by the president to put on an authoritarian show of force, which could end badly, especially as he's now threatening to use federal force in other cities (6m8s).
• The use of federal troops to crush the constitutional right to assemble is outrageous, and those who support it are being challenged to a basic cognitive test (6m25s).

Uyghur Crisis in China

• The situation in Portland is being used to distract from other issues, and the show is moving on to its main story, which concerns the treatment of Uyghurs in China (7m41s).
• A social media influencer went from discussing lash curlers to concentration camps in China, specifically mentioning the treatment of Muslims in just 12 seconds (8m35s).
• The ethnic group in question is the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region of China, who are being systematically surveilled and imprisoned by the Chinese government (9m2s).
• A UN panel has described the region as resembling a massive internment camp, where over 1 million Muslim minorities have been rounded up, detained, and forcibly indoctrinated by the Chinese regime (9m13s).
• The imprisonment of people based on their religion is the largest since the Holocaust, with witness accounts, satellite imagery, and Communist Party documents revealing the extent of the issue (9m34s).
• Many people are unaware of the situation due to China's efforts to keep it under wraps, but it may be getting harder to ignore, especially with the discovery of Uyghurs being forced to work in factories producing PPE, including face masks (10m11s).
• Some of these face masks have been shipped to consumers in the US and around the world, highlighting the personal connection many people may have to the issue without realizing it (10m49s).
• The Uyghurs have an uncomfortable relationship with the authorities in Beijing, with their own language and cultural distinctness from the rest of China's population, which is over 90% Han Chinese (11m31s).
• The Chinese government is aggressively secular, which has contributed to the tensions with the Muslim Uyghur population (11m45s).
• The situation in Xinjiang is particularly appalling, with the Chinese government's actions being described as an attempt to essentially wipe the Uyghur culture off the map (8m52s).
• A Chinese reality show that filmed in Dubai censored a woman wearing a headscarf by covering her with a cartoon helmet, a ghost, and a cactus in a Santa hat, even in reflections, to avoid depicting her hijab (11m56s).
• Some Han Chinese have held bigoted views about the Uyghurs, with some describing them as "not very good robbers and thieves" in a 2008 interview (13m2s).
• The Chinese government encouraged Han people to migrate to Xinjiang, often favoring them for top jobs, which exacerbated tensions and resentments among the Uyghurs (13m46s).
• The 2009 riots in the capital of Xinjiang, which killed 200 people, mostly Han Chinese, were attributed to religious terrorism by the Chinese government, leading to a decade-long crackdown (13m58s).
• The "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" launched in 2014 by President Xi Jinping treated all Uyghurs as potential terrorists, leading to heavy policing and surveillance in Xinjiang (14m19s).
• The authorities in Xinjiang surveil Uyghur neighborhoods, monitoring activities such as socializing with neighbors, putting gas in someone else's car, and entering or leaving a house through the front or back door (14m41s).
• The government has a list of 75 behavioral indications of religious extremism, including storing large amounts of food, quitting smoking and drinking suddenly, and buying or storing equipment like dumbbells without obvious reasons (15m7s).
• The collected information is fed into a predictive policing system that monitors Uyghurs, indicating a low bar for being highlighted by the system (15m51s).
• Chinese officials have argued that they are being proactive in detaining people before they commit crimes, with 24,000 people flagged as potential threats in one week, 15,000 of whom were sent to re-education camps (15m53s).
• This logic has been compared to the plot of the movie Minority Report, where murders are stopped before they happen through the use of precogs who can visualize future crimes (16m21s).
• In the movie, the main character John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, is the chief of Washington DC's pre-crime Police Department, but he is accused of a future murder and must clear his name (16m29s).
• The movie raises questions about the ethics of pre-crime systems, including whether it is possible to be sure that an individual will commit a crime (16m36s).
• In the real world, people in Xinjiang have been arrested and thrown into camps despite having committed no crimes, with many being held extrajudicially for acts such as growing a beard or applying for a passport (17m36s).
• The Chinese government initially denied the existence of the camps, but later claimed that they were vocational training facilities, despite evidence suggesting that their primary purpose may be something else (17m57s).
• Detainees have reported that the camps are used for re-education, with one saying that they were taught that they had something wrong with themselves and that the communist party and government offered them a "school" to correct this (18m19s).
• Leaked classified documents have shown that staff at the facilities were told to prevent students from freely contacting the outside world and to strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes (19m4s).
• The use of language such as "prevent escapes" in employee handbooks has been cited as evidence that the facilities are more like prisons than vocational training centers (19m15s).
• A former Uyghur detainee described her experience in a camp, where women were given only two minutes to use the toilet and were shocked with an electric baton if they were not quick enough, and even after being shocked, they had to thank their abusers (19m42s).
• Reports of forced abortions and sterilizations of Uyghur women have been made, which are considered horrific (20m16s).
• China claims that the camps are for economic opportunity and assimilation, but forced assimilation is considered cultural erasure (20m25s).
• Rules have been implemented to break the chain of cultural and faith transmission across generations, including laws preventing kids from going to mosques and a ban on baby names considered too Islamic (20m45s).
• Uyghur cemeteries have been destroyed, including one that was turned into a theme park called "Happiness Park" (20m58s).
• As criticism of the camps has intensified, the government has closed some of them, but has shifted to staging sham trials and transferring many Uyghurs to prisons (21m39s).
• A system of mass labor transfers has been created, sending Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to factory and service jobs, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from home (21m50s).
• Chinese state media presents this as a positive development, showing Uyghur workers arriving at a train station and being taken to their new accommodations (22m10s).
• The labor transfer program has been estimated to have transferred over 880,000 Uyghurs to work in factories across China, with over 80 companies, including big international brands like Nike, benefiting from Uyghur labor in their supply chain (22m59s).
• Workers in China were forced to attend patriotic education and Mandarin classes, live in dormitories under constant supervision, and were not allowed to leave without permission (23m22s).
• Nike claimed that the factory in question no longer employs Uyghur workers and takes reports of forced labor seriously, but their policy on oversight seems to be lacking (23m31s).
• Volkswagen was also found to have ties to forced labor in their supply chain, despite claiming to have found no indications of it (23m55s).
• The CEO of Volkswagen was questioned about China's treatment of Uyghurs, but seemed to be unaware of the issue, despite it being a well-documented human rights crisis (24m3s).
• The Chinese government has been accused of running "re-education camps" in the western region of Xinjiang, where an estimated one million Uyghurs have been detained (24m32s).
• Companies and governments have been criticized for turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, with some even using whataboutism to deflect criticism (25m47s).
• The US has taken some steps to address the issue, including imposing sanctions on top Chinese officials and passing the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (26m28s).
• However, more needs to be done, and the global community should come together to condemn the human rights abuses in Xinjiang and push for independent investigations (27m0s).
• Multinational companies, such as Nike and VW, should work to clean up their supply chains and use their financial leverage to pressure the Chinese government to end human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, but this will only happen if people pay attention to the issue (27m12s).
• Raising awareness about the treatment of Uyghurs is a necessary precondition for action, and even if it comes through unconventional means, such as a TikTok makeup tutorial, it can have a real benefit (27m34s).
• The treatment of Uyghurs should be a concern for people, alongside other pressing issues like the pandemic and the presidential election, and continued attention is necessary to prevent cultural erasure (27m58s).

The "Great Mass Debate"

• The "Great Mass Debate" is a humorous, unrelated topic that has been intensifying, with people being very passionate on both sides, and has been covered by various news outlets and businesses (28m33s).
• The "Great Mass Debate" is a lighthearted issue that has been taken to various stages, including local restaurants and pet stores, and has been discussed by individuals, including Bishop David Zubik (29m5s).