Oh, I hate Elon Musk now

 Activists accuse Tesla of "economic support for genocide" with new showroom in China's Xinjiang region

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Greedy and craven U.S. tech companies have helped China control the internet and police its citizens"

Defying China: The world must fight the Tiananmen legacy:

The world must stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery. ... [Tank man's] defiance is a lesson for the rest of the world, which must resolutely stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery and nurture democracy there whenever, however, it can.

If America were still a decent country, it would break ties with Saudi Arabia for this and end trade

Saudi crown prince defends China's right to put Uighur Muslims in concentration camps:

"China has the right to carry out anti-terrorism and de-extremisation work for its national security,” Prince Mohammed, who has been in China signing multi-million trade deals much to the annoyance of his Western allies, was quoted as saying on Chinese state television.

Mao's struggle sessions literally come home: Surplus Chinese communists placed in Muslim homes to convert Uighurs to Han secularism

China’s Uighurs assigned ‘relatives’ who report to the state:

The old woman was a spy, sent by the Chinese government to infiltrate his family.

There are many like her. According to the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, as of the end of September, 1.1 million local government workers have been deployed to ethnic minorities’ living rooms, dining areas and Muslim prayer spaces, not to mention at weddings, funerals and other occasions once considered intimate and private.

All this is taking place in China’s far west region of Xinjiang, home to the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have long reported discrimination at the hands of the country’s majority Han Chinese.

While government notices about the “Pair Up and Become Family” program portray it as an affectionate cultural exchange, Uighurs living in exile in Turkey said their loved ones saw the campaign as a chilling intrusion into the only place that they once felt safe.

They believe the program is aimed at coercing Uighurs into living secular lives like the Han majority. Anything diverging from the party’s prescribed lifestyle can be viewed by authorities as a sign of potential extremism — from suddenly giving up smoking or alcohol, to having an “abnormal” beard or an overly religious name.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Uighur homeland has been blanketed with stifling surveillance, from armed checkpoints on street corners to facial-recognition-equipped CCTV cameras steadily surveying passers-by. Now, Uighurs say, they must live under the watchful eye of the ruling Communist Party even inside their own homes. ...

The Xinjiang United Front Work Department said in February that government workers should live with their assigned families every two months, for five days at a time.

The United Front, a Communist Party agency, indicates in the notice that the program is mandatory for cadres. ...

A February piece on the Communist Party’s official news site said: “The vast majority of party cadres are not only living inside villagers’ homes, but also living inside the hearts of the masses.”

Overseas Uighurs said the “visits” to their relatives’ homes often lasted longer than five days, and they were closely monitored the whole time. The cadres would ask their family members where they were going and who they were meeting whenever they wanted to leave the house. ...

All government employees in the region are required to conduct such visits in order to better understand villagers’ needs, according to Gu: “Because we’re always sitting in our offices, we don’t know what they really need. Only through penetrating the masses can we truly serve them.”

Uighur woman named Mihrigul Tursun claims genocidal Chinese communists tortured her with electrocution

Woman describes torture, beatings in Chinese detention camp:

One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place.

“The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins,” Tursun said in a statement read by a translator.

“I don’t remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness,” Tursun said. “The last word I heard them saying is that you being ... Uighur is a crime.”

Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is

State capitalism.

It is the socialism of the right, despite what names people may give it. The fascist model in which business and government cooperate now more, now less was not defeated in World War II. The superior American version simply defeated the German one, and eventually also the left's inherently weaker version in Russia.

It has triumphed globally, brought to the fore in America by the libertarian resurgence under Ronald Reagan, imitated by the jealous Euro project, and notably exported to China, where it was eagerly embraced as no threat to Marxism. To the genuine Marxist, remember, free-trade is welcome because it hastens the global revolution. Belt and Road participants, take note.

The experiential groundwork for global state capitalism was laid long ago by the King and Bank of England in their joint enterprise known as the Thirteen Colonies. Everyone imitates this now in principle if not always in particulars. But everywhere it flourishes it is facilitated by the same thing, the central banking systems which coordinate their activities through rules administered under Basel III. The contemporary exemplars of state capitalism fancy that they are substantively a world away from Hitler's Germany, because, well, the Jews. We don't kill Jews, insist these experts at mass abortion and Uyghur mass re-education. 

It's the historical resonances which bother the left in using the phrase, but the underlying facts aren't different in substance. Materialism today means not having to say you're sorry for treating people like depreciated or unappreciated assets. Older workers in the West are routinely tossed aside for being too costly. Potential younger competitors are hamstrung by a culture of costly credentialing prerequisites. When such people become worthless enough, it isn't unlikely that in some places they could stop being considered people altogether (typically where atheism reigns) so that they could be slaughtered wholesale with the same relative efficiency already applied to the unborn. The tech already exists to do this. The only question is when will the people exist who are possessed of enough nerve.   

Here's Kotkin on this so-called "new, innovative approach" which looks like nothing so much as the old Soviet Union, with its hostility centered on the middle class, its dreary blocks of drab apartment buildings, the dim pall of surveillance and conformity lurking everywhere, complete with its own privileged new class in service to the party .01 percent:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support. ... [T]he tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have [sic] a far less egalitarian vision. ... [T]hey see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. ... Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. ...  They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views . . .. Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech . . .. [I]ncreased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented [slave] economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations . . ..  [T]he oligarchy, representing basically the top .01 percent of the population, are primarily interested not in lower taxes but in protecting their market shares and capital. ... The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees. ... The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

Islam silent as China continues persecution of up to 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang: Because they're on the payroll

Islamic Leaders Have Nothing to Say About China’s Internment Camps for Muslims:

Hundreds of thousands of Uighur have been detained without trial in China's western region of Xinjiang. Internment camps with up to a million prisoners. Empty neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academics jailed. A massive high-tech surveillance state that monitors and judges every movement. The future of more than 10 million Uighurs, the members of China’s Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, is looking increasingly grim.

As the Chinese authorities continue a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, the northwest region of China that’s home to the Uighur, Islam has been one of the main targets. Major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi now stand empty. Prisoners in the camps are told to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Prayers, religious education, and the Ramadan fast are increasingly restricted or banned. Even in the rest of China, Arabic text is being stripped from public buildings, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by party authorities. ...

Part of the answer is that money talks.