China Dictatorship (中国独裁统治)

7.2.1.2. Xinjiang model camps for foreign media (新疆外媒示范营)

Starting in 2019, China officially invited foreign journalists to some of their model camps to show how happy people were.

It is hard to understand why they did this, as it just made everything worse for them, because everything was so obviously fake, and it actually allowed glimpses in some of the horrors. Why would a bunch of adults be playing games and learning useless stuff rather than be with their families working to earn money?

Online commentators have compared such camps to:

Nazi model concentration camps which foreign people were invided to see, e.g. commented by the BBC itsef
- Theresienstadt Ghetto
  - allowed a Red Cross visit in 1944
  - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0194445/plotsummary 1944 Nazi propaganda film about it
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZt92quVOsg contains a soccer match scene from it
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7nAfaLlqkE shows some scenes of children eating happily
  - Paradise Camp (1986) is an Australian documentary about it
- Sonnenburg concentration camp
Potemkin village

Examples:

2018-10-24 https://mobile.twitter.com/HuXijin_GT/status/1055013584806256644 (GitHub reupload archive) 2 minute video by Hu Xijin 胡锡进, editor-in-chief of the Global Times (环球时报, CCP media), showing happy women in a concentration camp playing ping-pong and dancing in the exercise area. Notice the similarity with the Theresienstadt videos, which also show sports events.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmId2ZP3h0c "Inside China’s 'thought transformation' camps - BBC News" 2019-06-18. Accompagning article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-48667221. China gives BBC "access" to a chosen show camp where everyone claims they are happy and willing to stay. They are however clearly adults being treated like children, taking courses and even having to sing and dance for the camera. 486s is also golden, when the CCP officer Zhang Zhisheng explains how they are just preventing future crime from happening. How can they be so stupid? How can they not see that this is not what the West wants to hear? Amazing dark-comedy like stuff.

Figure 97. Man wearing traditional Xinjiang clothing and playing a traditional instrument inside a classroom setting inside a prison camp, as the CCP tries to show the world that they are happy and their culture is being respected, and only makes things worse. The man also shows on the video at: https://youtu.be/WmId2ZP3h0c?t=407 made by the BBC when they got supervised access to the camps to film, nearby segment uploaded at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/169. Source.