[Moogs]

Details are pretty sketchy right now but it seems some type of protest (maybe by the ethnic Muslims in the area, I'm not clear on that part) was joined by other citizens and the police started using cattle prods and other means to supress the crowd, at which point they started trashing storefronts, police cars the rest. Current tallies seem to be about 140 people killed, several hundred others wounded.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8135203.stm

[Swox]

Just brutal. As I'm sure regulars (have been repeatedly forced to) know, I follow the Tibetan side of this very closely, and this isn't the least surprising.

It does seem to be the Uighurs, which isn't a surprise. Their treatment has been fairly similar to that of the Tibetans.

But hey, we need cheap tube socks, so what can we do about it?

[Moogs]

Well not just toob socks. They make freaking half of everything we buy. This country and Europe needs a serious dose of "find a better way to make garments and electronics cheaply" if we ever want to put any leverage on them for real some day. People will go ape-shit if they suddenly can't buy more iPods or whatever.

[Swox]

Too bad the US owes them so much damn money. They'd be able to do a lot more, I'm guessing, if they weren't so beholden to the CPC.

[Robo]

I've been pretty sure something has been brewing in China for some time. The students at Tianamen wanted social reform, and China placated them with economic reform, but I don't think that's going to last more than a generation or so. China's current situation - glittering cities for the wealthy, when everybody outside of them is, quite literally, dirt poor - just isn't very stable. And it seems like every few years (months?) something like this bubbles to the surface, or a video of people beating an old man for his land will make its way online, or something.

Frontline had an excellent documentary on all this called "The Tank Man" a few years back. You can watch it for free on PBS.com. It's pre-Olympics, and the Shanghai skyline looks a little different now, but I don't think it has dated at all.

I feel so bad for the less fortunate people in China. I just wish the leaders of China would see that if they changed things themselves - increasing personal freedoms, eliminating information censorship, aiding the poor - they'd go down in history as being the saviors of billions of people. But governments don't seem to ever reform themselves from within, and it looks like it will take a revolution. It's not boiling, yet, but it is bubbling, I think.

1.3 billion people...fuck. It's going to make Iran look like child's play.

Originally Posted by Moogs Well not just toob socks. They make freaking half of everything we buy. This country and Europe needs a serious dose of "find a better way to make garments and electronics cheaply" if we ever want to put any leverage on them for real some day. People will go ape-shit if they suddenly can't buy more iPods or whatever.

An article in a recent BusinessWeek actually said that the advantages of manufacturing in China are eroding - it's still cheaper, but it's not as cheap (compared to manufacturing locally) as it used to be, and for an increasing number of companies, the logistics hurdles (longer shipping times, difficulty visiting factories, etc.) just aren't worth it. But China still pwns several industries, namely...garments and electronics.

I don't think it's even possible to make an electronics product that isn't at least partially made in China. Even if final assembly was completed in the US or Canada or wherever, some of the pieces - flash memory modules, LCD panels, whatever - are made in China, and practically only in China.

I don't have a problem with a global economy or anything, but I look at some of the wages people make in China, and the working conditions they're forced to endure, and it makes me feel so bad. After all, it's not like there's something magical about the continent of Asia that makes it cheap to manufacture things there - practically all of the savings are due to the lower wages and poorer working conditions. It's like they're funding our crappy materialist lifestyle, without even having a chance to have a crappy materialist lifestyle themselves. It's just not fair. I think everybody should have an equal chance at a crappy materialist life

[Moogs]

Well that's just it, the Chinese and Indians, sooner or later, will want real wages and then it's a whole new ballgame. For a time, until some other underdeveloped nation gets the bright idea of cheap manufacturing.

Meantime, seems the unrest hath spread.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8137432.stm

[Robo]

Originally Posted by Moogs Well that's just it, the Chinese and Indians, sooner or later, will want real wages and then it's a whole new ballgame. For a time, until some other underdeveloped nation gets the bright idea of cheap manufacturing.

I wouldn't call them "underdeveloped," but it seems like Mexico is apparently becoming the new hotspot for manufacturing, for products sold in the US at least. That might be due in part to their proximity, so I'm not sure if that still goes in Europe.

I think it's ironic that lots of "Jap" (!) cars are made in the US, and lots of "Amer'kin" cars are hecho en Mexico. It kind of puts a dent in all the protectionist "gotta buy Amer'kin!" bullshit. (I believe in buying locally, but only when you're actually...buying locally. )

[Moogs]

Yah ideally, every country would manufacture those things it does better than everyone else at the same or lower price but we're a long ways from having any sort of balance there IMO. Anyway back on-topic... hopefully we don't see larger and larger uprisings. The people in China have it bad enough already. This sort of thing probably only makes the government crack down harder on human rights, freedom of expression, etc. China seems to me to be a country that doesn't react well to rapid change but is open to it when it happens slowly and in the context of increasing prosperity.

[billybobsky]

Actually, that's not the way it works Moogs... We buy things from countries that want/buy things that we produce.

[Moogs]

I understand that; I was talking in terms of an ideal global economy where you don't have a few countries badly undercutting prices for goods traditionally made in many other countries, etc. Anyway it's all beside the point.

Looks like there is a very strong ethnic angle to this that I wasn't really understanding yesterday. Apparently this is as much about two ethnic groups protesting against one another, and the police trying to subdue the tensions (not helping, obviously) between them. Not surprisingly, one of the ethnic groups is Muslim (Uighurs). Can't have a 21st century conflict or period of unrest without a group of Muslims at the heart of it, it seems... I'm beginning to think it's they who can't get along with the rest of us, not the other way around. England, Israel (of course), India, now China... maybe the Koran needs to be re-written in a more "peaceful civil disobedience" kind of mindset.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8137824.stm

Officials say 156 people - mostly ethnic Han Chinese - died in Sunday's violence. Uighur groups say many more have died, claiming 90% of the dead were Uighurs. The unrest erupted when Uighur protesters attacked vehicles before turning on local Han Chinese and battling security forces in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. They had initially been protesting over a brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese several weeks earlier in a toy factory thousands of miles away in Guangdong province. On Tuesday about 200 Uighurs - mostly women - faced off against riot police to appeal for more than 1,400 people arrested over Sunday's violence to be freed.

[Swox]

This really has nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with CPC policies toward ethnic minorities. They are taking classic colonial tactics and applying it to these areas - making their languages obsolete, favoring Han Chinese economically over the dominant ethnic group, not allowing complete cultural and religious freedom, flooding these areas with Han immigrants, etc.

As much as we seem to like knocking Islam, it's basically the same thing that's going on in Tibet. Tibetans have only been holding back because the Dalai Lama has been telling them it will just make things worse (which is true). Once he dies, things are likely to get ugly very quickly. There is a huge built up resentment toward Han Chinese people and the CPC in Tibet for the reasons I listed above. I just pray that His Holiness lives for a long time...

[Moogs]

Fair enough. I really don't know much about ethnic toil in China... was surprising to me that there even was a Muslim sect of their society.

[Swox]

There's pretty much everything you can think of in China, thanks in large part to the Silk Road, and to their imperialist exploits.

Tibet also had a significant Muslim population. Lhasa had a large mosque in it, etc. Don't forget that the country with the most Muslims in it in the world is Indonesia, so it got around.

China also has a significant number of Christians, and a Jewish city (I'm not sure if it still exists, but it does - the ROM here in Toronto has wall hangings from their Temple; pretty wild to see the Torah written out in Chinese characters!).

But anyway, these things tend to be more about economic and general cultural grievances than about religion.

[Moogs]

Interesting. We'll have to see how this all plays out / if it spreads across other parts of China.

[stevegong]

I visited that region 4 years ago and it was a pretty fascinating trip. I've seen a pretty big spike in website hits on my Xinjiang page due to this incident. If you guys are interested, here it is.

I've been wanting to go back but clearly now is not the right time.

[@_@ Artman]

The Big Picture from the Boston Globe has just released a series of photos from there and around the world on these riots.

Warning: Some are extremely graphic.