Blattman, Christopher and Fiala, Nathan and Martinez, Sebastian, The Long Term Impacts of Grants on Poverty: 9-Year Evidence from Uganda's Youth Opportunities Program (July 30, 2018). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3223028
Abstract: In 2008, Uganda granted hundreds of small groups $400/person to help members start individual skilled trades. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% (Blattman, Fiala, Martinez 2014). We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants acted more as a kick-start than a lift out of poverty. Grantees' investment leveled off; controls eventually increased their incomes through business and casual labor; and so both groups converged in employment, earnings, and consumption. Grants had lasting impacts on assets, skilled work, and possibly child health, but had little effect on mortality, fertility, health or education.
Keywords: Employment, Poverty, Entrepreneurship, Cash Transfers, Occupational Choice, Uganda, Field Experiment, Labor Market Programs, Health, Education, Uganda
JEL Classification: J24, O12, D13, C93
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’ / Surveillance State With Modern Technologies and Old Tricks
China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’ Chris Buckley. The New York Times, Sep 8, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html
HOTAN, China — On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.
Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.
The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.
Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.
“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”
This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. It is part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.
Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era — and the focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.
China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.
After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.
“Xinjiang is in an active period of terrorist activities, intense struggle against separatism and painful intervention to treat this,” Mr. Xi told officials, according to reports in the state news media last year.
In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the use of informers and expanded police surveillance, even installing cameras in some people’s homes. Human rights activists and experts say the campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured communities and families.
“Penetration of everyday life is almost really total now,” said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at Australian National University in Canberra. “You have ethnic identity, Uighur identity in particular, being singled out as this kind of pathology.”
China has categorically denied reports of abuses in Xinjiang. At a meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.
“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in Xinjiang policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. “There is no such thing as re-education centers.”
The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security measures were comparable to those of other countries.
The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.
The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps — usually called “transformation through education” centers — that has expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any system of appeal for those detained.
The New York Times interviewed four recent camp inmates from Xinjiang who described physical and verbal abuse by guards; grinding routines of singing, lectures and self-criticism meetings; and the gnawing anxiety of not knowing when they would be released. Their accounts were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Uighurs with relatives who were in the camps or had disappeared, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.
The Times also discovered reports online written by teams of Chinese officials who were assigned to monitor families with detained relatives, and a study published last year that said officials in some places were indiscriminately sending ethnic Uighurs to the camps to meet numerical quotas.
The study, by Qiu Yuanyuan, a scholar at the Xinjiang Party School, where officials are trained, warned that the detentions could backfire and fan radicalism. “Recklessly setting quantitative goals for transformation through education has been erroneously used” in some areas, she wrote. “The targeting is imprecise, and the scope has been expanding.”
Eradicating a ‘Virus’
The long days in the re-education camp usually began with a jog.
Nearly every morning, Mr. Muhemet recalled, he and dozens of others — college graduates, businessmen, farmers — were told to run around an assembly ground. Impatient guards sometimes slapped and shoved the older, slower inmates, he said.
Then they were made to sing rousing patriotic hymns in Chinese, such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Those who could not remember the words were denied breakfast, and they all learned the words quickly.
Mr. Muhemet, a stocky man who ran a restaurant in Hotan before fleeing China this year, said he spent seven months in a police cell and more than two months in the camp in 2015 without ever being charged with a crime. Most days, he said, the camp inmates assembled to hear long lectures by officials who warned them not to embrace Islamic radicalism, support Uighur independence or defy the Communist Party.
The officials did not ban Islam but dictated very narrow limits for how it should be practiced, including a prohibition against praying at home if there were friends or guests present, he said. In other sessions, the inmates were forced to memorize laws and write essays criticizing themselves.
“In the end, all the officials had one key point,” he said. “The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party, the backwardness of Uighur culture and the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”
After two months, Mr. Muhemet’s family was finally allowed to visit the camp, located near “New Harmony Village,” a settlement built as a symbol of friendship between ethnic Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. “I couldn’t say anything,” he recalled. “I just held my two sons and wife, and cried and cried.”
The Xinjiang government issued “deradicalization” rules last year that gave vague authorization for the camps, and many counties now run several of them, according to government documents, including requests for bids from construction companies to build them.
Some facilities are designed for inmates who are allowed to go home at night. Others can house thousands around the clock. One camp outside Hotan has grown in the past two years from a few small buildings to facilities on at least 36 acres, larger than Alcatraz Island, and work appears to be underway to expand it further, according to satellite photos.
In government documents, local officials sometimes liken inmates to patients requiring isolation and emergency intervention.
“Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation-through-education classes before illness arises,” a document issued by party authorities in Hotan said.
The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.
About 1.5 percent of China’s total population lives in Xinjiang. But the region accounted for more than 20 percent of arrests nationwide last year, according to official data compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group. Those figures do not include people in the re-education camps.
Residents said people have been sent to the camps for visiting relatives abroad; for possessing books about religion and Uighur culture; and even for wearing a T-shirt with a Muslim crescent. Women are sometimes detained because of transgressions by their husbands or sons.
One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of “religious extremism,” including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.
‘We Are in Trouble’
Hotan feels as if under siege by an invisible enemy. Fortified police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets every few hundred yards. Schools, kindergartens, gas stations and hospitals are garlanded in barbed wire. Surveillance cameras sprout from shops, apartment entrances and metal poles.
“It’s very tense here,” a police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”
This city of 390,000 underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress.
Now the beards and hijabs are gone, and posters warn against them. Mosques appear poorly attended; people must register to enter and worship under the watch of surveillance cameras.
The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead. Mr. Xi and his regional functionaries went further, adopting methods reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and “work teams” assigned to ferret out dissent.
They have also wired dusty towns across Xinjiang with an array of technology that has put the region on the cutting edge of programs for surveillance cameras as well as facial and voice recognition. Spending on security in Xinjiang has soared, with nearly $8.5 billion allocated for the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies last year, nearly double the previous year’s amount.
The campaign has polarized Uighur society. Many of the ground-level enforcers are Uighurs themselves, including police officers and officials who staff the camps and security checkpoints.
Ordinary Uighurs moving about Hotan sometimes shuffle on and off buses several times to pass through metal detectors, swipe their identity cards or hand over and unlock their mobile phones for inspection.
A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in Xinjiang, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.
The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.
The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.
One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.
“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. “Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”
A Uighur woman in her 20s who asked to be identified only by her surname, Gul, said she came under scrutiny after wearing an Islamic head wrap and reading books about religion and Uighur history. Local officials installed cameras at her family’s door — and inside their living room.
“We would always have to be careful what we said and what we did and what we read,” she said.
Every week, Ms. Gul added, a neighborhood official visited and spent at least two hours interrogating her. Eventually, the authorities sent her to a full-time re-education camp.
Ms. Gul, who fled China after being released, later tried to contact her brother to find out if he was in trouble. He sent a wordless reply, an emoticon face in tears.
Afterward, Ms. Gul’s mother sent her another message: “Please don’t call us again. We are in trouble.”
The Chinese government says it is winning a war against Islamic extremism and separatism, which it blames for attacks that have killed hundreds in recent years. Information about such violence is censored and incomplete, but incidents appear to have fallen off sharply since 2014, when the “deradicalization” push began.
Still, many who have emerged from the indoctrination program say it has hardened public attitudes against Beijing.
“It was of absolutely no use,” said Omurbek Eli, a Kazakh businessman, of his time held in a camp in 2017. “The outcome will be the opposite. They will become even more resistant to Chinese influence.”
For many families, the disappearance of a loved one into the camps can be devastating, both emotionally and economically — a point reflected in reports posted online by the party’s “work teams.”
Some of these reports describe Uighur families unable to harvest crops on their own because so many members have been taken away, and one mentioned a mother left to care for five children. In another report, an official near Hotan described holding a village meeting to calm distraught relatives of those sent to the camps.
The mass internments also break Uighur families by forcing members to disown their kin or by separating small children from their parents. So many parents have been detained in Kashgar, a city in western Xinjiang, that it has expanded boarding schools to take custody of older, “troubled” children.
“Whether consciously or unconsciously, authorities in Xinjiang have recognized the power of families as an alternative source of authority,” said Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who has followed the detentions. “The kind of extreme party loyalty they want has no room for that.”
Ms. Gul said the camp she was in was ramshackle enough that children who lived nearby sometimes crept up to a window late at night and called out to their mothers inside. “Their children would come and say, ‘Mother, I miss you,’” she said.
“We didn’t say anything,” she added, “because there was a camera inside the cell.”
Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anti-Islam Detention Camps in China.
---
What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State. James A. Millward. TNYT, Feb 3 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html
HOTAN, China — On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.
Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.
The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.
Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.
“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”
This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. It is part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.
Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era — and the focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.
China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.
After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.
“Xinjiang is in an active period of terrorist activities, intense struggle against separatism and painful intervention to treat this,” Mr. Xi told officials, according to reports in the state news media last year.
In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the use of informers and expanded police surveillance, even installing cameras in some people’s homes. Human rights activists and experts say the campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured communities and families.
“Penetration of everyday life is almost really total now,” said Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at Australian National University in Canberra. “You have ethnic identity, Uighur identity in particular, being singled out as this kind of pathology.”
China has categorically denied reports of abuses in Xinjiang. At a meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.
“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in Xinjiang policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. “There is no such thing as re-education centers.”
The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security measures were comparable to those of other countries.
The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.
The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps — usually called “transformation through education” centers — that has expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any system of appeal for those detained.
The New York Times interviewed four recent camp inmates from Xinjiang who described physical and verbal abuse by guards; grinding routines of singing, lectures and self-criticism meetings; and the gnawing anxiety of not knowing when they would be released. Their accounts were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Uighurs with relatives who were in the camps or had disappeared, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.
The Times also discovered reports online written by teams of Chinese officials who were assigned to monitor families with detained relatives, and a study published last year that said officials in some places were indiscriminately sending ethnic Uighurs to the camps to meet numerical quotas.
The study, by Qiu Yuanyuan, a scholar at the Xinjiang Party School, where officials are trained, warned that the detentions could backfire and fan radicalism. “Recklessly setting quantitative goals for transformation through education has been erroneously used” in some areas, she wrote. “The targeting is imprecise, and the scope has been expanding.”
Eradicating a ‘Virus’
The long days in the re-education camp usually began with a jog.
Nearly every morning, Mr. Muhemet recalled, he and dozens of others — college graduates, businessmen, farmers — were told to run around an assembly ground. Impatient guards sometimes slapped and shoved the older, slower inmates, he said.
Then they were made to sing rousing patriotic hymns in Chinese, such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Those who could not remember the words were denied breakfast, and they all learned the words quickly.
Mr. Muhemet, a stocky man who ran a restaurant in Hotan before fleeing China this year, said he spent seven months in a police cell and more than two months in the camp in 2015 without ever being charged with a crime. Most days, he said, the camp inmates assembled to hear long lectures by officials who warned them not to embrace Islamic radicalism, support Uighur independence or defy the Communist Party.
The officials did not ban Islam but dictated very narrow limits for how it should be practiced, including a prohibition against praying at home if there were friends or guests present, he said. In other sessions, the inmates were forced to memorize laws and write essays criticizing themselves.
“In the end, all the officials had one key point,” he said. “The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party, the backwardness of Uighur culture and the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”
After two months, Mr. Muhemet’s family was finally allowed to visit the camp, located near “New Harmony Village,” a settlement built as a symbol of friendship between ethnic Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. “I couldn’t say anything,” he recalled. “I just held my two sons and wife, and cried and cried.”
The Xinjiang government issued “deradicalization” rules last year that gave vague authorization for the camps, and many counties now run several of them, according to government documents, including requests for bids from construction companies to build them.
Some facilities are designed for inmates who are allowed to go home at night. Others can house thousands around the clock. One camp outside Hotan has grown in the past two years from a few small buildings to facilities on at least 36 acres, larger than Alcatraz Island, and work appears to be underway to expand it further, according to satellite photos.
In government documents, local officials sometimes liken inmates to patients requiring isolation and emergency intervention.
“Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation-through-education classes before illness arises,” a document issued by party authorities in Hotan said.
The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.
About 1.5 percent of China’s total population lives in Xinjiang. But the region accounted for more than 20 percent of arrests nationwide last year, according to official data compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group. Those figures do not include people in the re-education camps.
Residents said people have been sent to the camps for visiting relatives abroad; for possessing books about religion and Uighur culture; and even for wearing a T-shirt with a Muslim crescent. Women are sometimes detained because of transgressions by their husbands or sons.
One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of “religious extremism,” including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.
‘We Are in Trouble’
Hotan feels as if under siege by an invisible enemy. Fortified police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets every few hundred yards. Schools, kindergartens, gas stations and hospitals are garlanded in barbed wire. Surveillance cameras sprout from shops, apartment entrances and metal poles.
“It’s very tense here,” a police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”
This city of 390,000 underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress.
Now the beards and hijabs are gone, and posters warn against them. Mosques appear poorly attended; people must register to enter and worship under the watch of surveillance cameras.
The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead. Mr. Xi and his regional functionaries went further, adopting methods reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and “work teams” assigned to ferret out dissent.
They have also wired dusty towns across Xinjiang with an array of technology that has put the region on the cutting edge of programs for surveillance cameras as well as facial and voice recognition. Spending on security in Xinjiang has soared, with nearly $8.5 billion allocated for the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies last year, nearly double the previous year’s amount.
The campaign has polarized Uighur society. Many of the ground-level enforcers are Uighurs themselves, including police officers and officials who staff the camps and security checkpoints.
Ordinary Uighurs moving about Hotan sometimes shuffle on and off buses several times to pass through metal detectors, swipe their identity cards or hand over and unlock their mobile phones for inspection.
A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in Xinjiang, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.
The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.
The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.
One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.
“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. “Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”
A Uighur woman in her 20s who asked to be identified only by her surname, Gul, said she came under scrutiny after wearing an Islamic head wrap and reading books about religion and Uighur history. Local officials installed cameras at her family’s door — and inside their living room.
“We would always have to be careful what we said and what we did and what we read,” she said.
Every week, Ms. Gul added, a neighborhood official visited and spent at least two hours interrogating her. Eventually, the authorities sent her to a full-time re-education camp.
Ms. Gul, who fled China after being released, later tried to contact her brother to find out if he was in trouble. He sent a wordless reply, an emoticon face in tears.
Afterward, Ms. Gul’s mother sent her another message: “Please don’t call us again. We are in trouble.”
The Chinese government says it is winning a war against Islamic extremism and separatism, which it blames for attacks that have killed hundreds in recent years. Information about such violence is censored and incomplete, but incidents appear to have fallen off sharply since 2014, when the “deradicalization” push began.
Still, many who have emerged from the indoctrination program say it has hardened public attitudes against Beijing.
“It was of absolutely no use,” said Omurbek Eli, a Kazakh businessman, of his time held in a camp in 2017. “The outcome will be the opposite. They will become even more resistant to Chinese influence.”
For many families, the disappearance of a loved one into the camps can be devastating, both emotionally and economically — a point reflected in reports posted online by the party’s “work teams.”
Some of these reports describe Uighur families unable to harvest crops on their own because so many members have been taken away, and one mentioned a mother left to care for five children. In another report, an official near Hotan described holding a village meeting to calm distraught relatives of those sent to the camps.
The mass internments also break Uighur families by forcing members to disown their kin or by separating small children from their parents. So many parents have been detained in Kashgar, a city in western Xinjiang, that it has expanded boarding schools to take custody of older, “troubled” children.
“Whether consciously or unconsciously, authorities in Xinjiang have recognized the power of families as an alternative source of authority,” said Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who has followed the detentions. “The kind of extreme party loyalty they want has no room for that.”
Ms. Gul said the camp she was in was ramshackle enough that children who lived nearby sometimes crept up to a window late at night and called out to their mothers inside. “Their children would come and say, ‘Mother, I miss you,’” she said.
“We didn’t say anything,” she added, “because there was a camera inside the cell.”
Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anti-Islam Detention Camps in China.
---
What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State. James A. Millward. TNYT, Feb 3 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html
No evidence of a general increase in the public’s affective polarization in 2014-2017; despite a campaign with elevated elite hostility & rampant discord after the 2016 election, the limits on partisan prejudice identified in prior research remain in place
Are There Still Limits on Partisan Prejudice? Sean J. Westwood, Erik
Peterson and Yphtach Lelkes. Dartmouth College & University of
Pennsylvania.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~seanjwestwood/papers/stillLimits.pdf
Abstract: Partisan affective polarization is believed, by some, to result from hostility in elite political discourse. We explore this account by replicating a 2014 study that examines partisan prejudice. This extensive replication offers no evidence of a general increase in the public’s affective polarization between 2014 and 2017. Divides in feeling thermometer ratings of the two political parties remained stable and there was no overall increase in measures of partisan prejudice between periods. We document this in our original data and using the 2012 and 2016 ANES. Moreover, the most affectively polarized members of the public became no more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes towards the other party. Despite an intervening campaign with elevated elite hostility and rampant discord after the 2016 election, the limits on partisan prejudice identified in prior research remain in place. This stability is important for understanding the nature and malleability of partisan affect.
Abstract: Partisan affective polarization is believed, by some, to result from hostility in elite political discourse. We explore this account by replicating a 2014 study that examines partisan prejudice. This extensive replication offers no evidence of a general increase in the public’s affective polarization between 2014 and 2017. Divides in feeling thermometer ratings of the two political parties remained stable and there was no overall increase in measures of partisan prejudice between periods. We document this in our original data and using the 2012 and 2016 ANES. Moreover, the most affectively polarized members of the public became no more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes towards the other party. Despite an intervening campaign with elevated elite hostility and rampant discord after the 2016 election, the limits on partisan prejudice identified in prior research remain in place. This stability is important for understanding the nature and malleability of partisan affect.
Democrats & Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group; Republicans were more likely to believe & want to share apolitical fake news
Pereira, Andrea, and Jay Van Bavel. 2018. “Identity Concerns Drive Belief in Fake News.” PsyArXiv. September 11. psyarxiv.com/7vc5d
Abstract: Political misinformation, often called “fake news”, represents a threat to our democracies because it impedes citizens from being appropriately informed. Evidence suggests that fake news spreads more rapidly than real news—especially when it contains political content. The present article tests three competing theoretical accounts that have been proposed to explain the rise and spread of political (fake) news: (1) the ideology hypothesis— people prefer news that bolsters their values and worldviews; (2) the confirmation bias hypothesis—people prefer news that fits their pre-existing stereotypical knowledge; and (3) the political identity hypothesis—people prefer news that allows their political in-group to fulfill certain social goals. We conducted three experiments in which American participants read news that concerned behaviors perpetrated by their political in-group or out-group and measured the extent to which they believed the news (Exp. 1, Exp. 2, Exp. 3), and were willing to share the news on social media (Exp. 2 and 3). Results revealed that Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group, supporting a political identity hypothesis. However, although belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, we also found that Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share apolitical fake new. We discuss the implications for theoretical explanations of political beliefs and application of these concepts in in polarized political system.
Abstract: Political misinformation, often called “fake news”, represents a threat to our democracies because it impedes citizens from being appropriately informed. Evidence suggests that fake news spreads more rapidly than real news—especially when it contains political content. The present article tests three competing theoretical accounts that have been proposed to explain the rise and spread of political (fake) news: (1) the ideology hypothesis— people prefer news that bolsters their values and worldviews; (2) the confirmation bias hypothesis—people prefer news that fits their pre-existing stereotypical knowledge; and (3) the political identity hypothesis—people prefer news that allows their political in-group to fulfill certain social goals. We conducted three experiments in which American participants read news that concerned behaviors perpetrated by their political in-group or out-group and measured the extent to which they believed the news (Exp. 1, Exp. 2, Exp. 3), and were willing to share the news on social media (Exp. 2 and 3). Results revealed that Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their in-group or the value-undermining behavior of their out-group, supporting a political identity hypothesis. However, although belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, we also found that Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share apolitical fake new. We discuss the implications for theoretical explanations of political beliefs and application of these concepts in in polarized political system.
Age differences in implicit theories about willpower: Why older people endorse a nonlimited theory
Job, V., Sieber, V., Rothermund, K., & Nikitin, J. (2018). Age differences in implicit theories about willpower: Why older people endorse a nonlimited theory. Psychology and Aging, 33(6), 940-952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000285
Abstract: What people believe about their capacity to exert self-control (willpower), whether it is a limited or a nonlimited resource, affects their self-regulation and well-being. The present research investigated age-related differences in people’s beliefs—called implicit theories—about willpower. Study 1 (n = 802, age range 18–83 years) showed that with higher age people are more likely to believe that willpower is a nonlimited resource. Study 2 (n = 423) with younger (age 18–35 years) and older adults (age 60–98 years) replicated this finding and showed that age and a nonlimited willpower theory are related to perceived autonomy on demanding tasks (i.e., sense of self-determination), which might explain the age-related differences in willpower theories. Finally, experimental Studies 3a (n = 302) and 3b (n = 497) manipulated an autonomous mindset in younger (age 18–35 years) and older adults (age 60–87 years) and provided evidence for a causal effect of perceived autonomy on self-control-beliefs, supporting the proposed developmental mechanism
Abstract: What people believe about their capacity to exert self-control (willpower), whether it is a limited or a nonlimited resource, affects their self-regulation and well-being. The present research investigated age-related differences in people’s beliefs—called implicit theories—about willpower. Study 1 (n = 802, age range 18–83 years) showed that with higher age people are more likely to believe that willpower is a nonlimited resource. Study 2 (n = 423) with younger (age 18–35 years) and older adults (age 60–98 years) replicated this finding and showed that age and a nonlimited willpower theory are related to perceived autonomy on demanding tasks (i.e., sense of self-determination), which might explain the age-related differences in willpower theories. Finally, experimental Studies 3a (n = 302) and 3b (n = 497) manipulated an autonomous mindset in younger (age 18–35 years) and older adults (age 60–87 years) and provided evidence for a causal effect of perceived autonomy on self-control-beliefs, supporting the proposed developmental mechanism
Moderate intake of beer (traditional and alcohol-free) does not exert vascular detrimental effects nor increases body weight in obese healthy individuals; it increases the anti-oxidative properties of HDL & facilitates cholesterol efflux
Moderate Beer Intake and Cardiovascular Health in Overweight Individuals. Teresa Padro et al. Nutrients 2018, 10(9), 1237; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10091237
Abstract: Consistent epidemiological evidence indicates that low-to-moderate alcohol consumption is inversely associated with cardiovascular event presentation, while high levels of alcohol intake are associated to increased cardiovascular risk. Little is known on the effects of moderate beer intake in the metabolic syndrome. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of moderate and regular daily intake of beer with meals in overweight (body mass index (BMI) of 28–29.9 kg/m2) or obese class 1 (BMI of 30–35 kg/m2) individuals without other cardiovascular risk factors (dyslipidemia, type 2-diabetes, hypertension) focusing on the effects related to changes in weight, in lipoproteins and vascular endothelial function. We have performed an open, prospective two-arms longitudinal crossover study to investigate the effects associated with regular consumption (four week) of alcohol-free-beer (0 g alcohol/day) or traditional-beer (30 g alcohol/day in men and 15 g alcohol/day in women) on anthropometrical and biochemical parameters, liver and kidney function biomarkers, and vascular endothelial function. After four-week intervention with traditional and/or alcohol-free beer, BMI did not show any significant change and values for liver and kidney functions were within the normal levels. Moderate traditional beer intake did not affect lipid levels—however it significantly increased the antioxidant capacity of high density lipoprotein (HDL). In addition, apoB-depleted serum (after the four-week intervention period) showed a higher potential to promote cholesterol efflux from macrophages. Beer consumption did not induce vascular endothelial dysfunction or stiffness. In summary, our results based on a 12-week prospective study provide evidence that moderate intake of beer (traditional and alcohol-free) does not exert vascular detrimental effects nor increases body weight in obese healthy individuals. In contrast, moderate intake of beer increases the anti-oxidative properties of HDL and facilitates cholesterol efflux, which may prevent lipid deposition in the vessel wall.
Keywords: cardiovascular-risk-factors; overweight; obesity; fermented-beverage; lipoprotein-oxidation; HDL-antioxidant-capacity; cholesterol-efflux; endothelial-function
Abstract: Consistent epidemiological evidence indicates that low-to-moderate alcohol consumption is inversely associated with cardiovascular event presentation, while high levels of alcohol intake are associated to increased cardiovascular risk. Little is known on the effects of moderate beer intake in the metabolic syndrome. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of moderate and regular daily intake of beer with meals in overweight (body mass index (BMI) of 28–29.9 kg/m2) or obese class 1 (BMI of 30–35 kg/m2) individuals without other cardiovascular risk factors (dyslipidemia, type 2-diabetes, hypertension) focusing on the effects related to changes in weight, in lipoproteins and vascular endothelial function. We have performed an open, prospective two-arms longitudinal crossover study to investigate the effects associated with regular consumption (four week) of alcohol-free-beer (0 g alcohol/day) or traditional-beer (30 g alcohol/day in men and 15 g alcohol/day in women) on anthropometrical and biochemical parameters, liver and kidney function biomarkers, and vascular endothelial function. After four-week intervention with traditional and/or alcohol-free beer, BMI did not show any significant change and values for liver and kidney functions were within the normal levels. Moderate traditional beer intake did not affect lipid levels—however it significantly increased the antioxidant capacity of high density lipoprotein (HDL). In addition, apoB-depleted serum (after the four-week intervention period) showed a higher potential to promote cholesterol efflux from macrophages. Beer consumption did not induce vascular endothelial dysfunction or stiffness. In summary, our results based on a 12-week prospective study provide evidence that moderate intake of beer (traditional and alcohol-free) does not exert vascular detrimental effects nor increases body weight in obese healthy individuals. In contrast, moderate intake of beer increases the anti-oxidative properties of HDL and facilitates cholesterol efflux, which may prevent lipid deposition in the vessel wall.
Keywords: cardiovascular-risk-factors; overweight; obesity; fermented-beverage; lipoprotein-oxidation; HDL-antioxidant-capacity; cholesterol-efflux; endothelial-function
Why are conversations limited to about four people? A theoretical exploration of the conversation size constraint
Why are conversations limited to about four people? A theoretical exploration of the conversation size constraint. Jaimie Aron, Kremsa Jason Wilkes. Evolution and Human Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.09.004
Abstract: It is genuinely difficult to sustain a casual conversation that includes more than four speakers. Add a fifth speaker, and the conversation often quickly fissions into smaller groups. Termed ‘the dinner party problem,’ this four-person conversation size limit is believed to be caused by evolved cognitive constraints on human mentalizing capacities. In this view, people can mentally manage three other minds at any one time, leading to four-person conversations. But whereas existing work has posited and empirically tested alternative accounts of what drives the conversation size constraint, to our knowledge, no work has explored the question of why this capacity is specifically four? In this theoretical paper, we (a) review research demonstrating this cognitive constraint in sociality, (b) review the relevant working memory literature, which has explored the “why four” question at some length, and (c) we begin to pose possible answers to our specific social “why four” question. Using simple mathematical models of small-scale sociality, which we imbue with evolutionarily-relevant content, we present one novel possible explanation for the four-person conversation size constraint.
Abstract: It is genuinely difficult to sustain a casual conversation that includes more than four speakers. Add a fifth speaker, and the conversation often quickly fissions into smaller groups. Termed ‘the dinner party problem,’ this four-person conversation size limit is believed to be caused by evolved cognitive constraints on human mentalizing capacities. In this view, people can mentally manage three other minds at any one time, leading to four-person conversations. But whereas existing work has posited and empirically tested alternative accounts of what drives the conversation size constraint, to our knowledge, no work has explored the question of why this capacity is specifically four? In this theoretical paper, we (a) review research demonstrating this cognitive constraint in sociality, (b) review the relevant working memory literature, which has explored the “why four” question at some length, and (c) we begin to pose possible answers to our specific social “why four” question. Using simple mathematical models of small-scale sociality, which we imbue with evolutionarily-relevant content, we present one novel possible explanation for the four-person conversation size constraint.
The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Teen and the Clueless Senior Citizen: Revisiting Technology-Based Victimization Over the Life Course
The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Teen and the Clueless Senior Citizen: Revisiting Technology-Based Victimization Over the Life Course. Travis C. Pratt. Criminal Justice Review, https://doi.org/10.1177/0734016818763245
Abstract: It is a popular idea that younger people are more technology-savvy than their older counterparts. It is an equally popular idea that our oldest generation—senior citizens—is so clueless about new technological developments that they are the most vulnerable to technology-based forms of victimization. The present article, however, demonstrates that these ideas are myths and that it is the young—not the old—who are most at risk of victimization when technology is involved. This should come as no surprise since the age–victimization curve mirrors rather closely the age–crime curve, where the risk of victimization typically peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood and follows a steady decline thereafter. The risks associated with technologically based forms of victimization—at least in general—are no different. The implications of dispelling these myths for criminological research as we move forward are discussed in the context of the nature of “risky” behaviors at different stages of the life course.
Keywords: technology, victimization, life course
Abstract: It is a popular idea that younger people are more technology-savvy than their older counterparts. It is an equally popular idea that our oldest generation—senior citizens—is so clueless about new technological developments that they are the most vulnerable to technology-based forms of victimization. The present article, however, demonstrates that these ideas are myths and that it is the young—not the old—who are most at risk of victimization when technology is involved. This should come as no surprise since the age–victimization curve mirrors rather closely the age–crime curve, where the risk of victimization typically peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood and follows a steady decline thereafter. The risks associated with technologically based forms of victimization—at least in general—are no different. The implications of dispelling these myths for criminological research as we move forward are discussed in the context of the nature of “risky” behaviors at different stages of the life course.
Keywords: technology, victimization, life course
Why Too Many Political Science Findings Cannot Be Trusted and What We Can Do About It: Assessing, Explaining and Improving the Credibility of Our Discipline’s Evidence Base
Wuttke, Alexander. 2018. “Why Too Many Political Science Findings Cannot Be Trusted and What We Can Do About It: Assessing, Explaining and Improving the Credibility of Our Discipline’s Evidence Base.” SocArXiv. September 11. doi:10.31235/osf.io/dq87w
Abstract
While other scientific disciplines are currently undergoing “credibility revolutions”, political science should also face the uncomfortable question of how much we can trust the findings published in the discipline’s journals and presses. Theoretically, this commentary uses the concept of social dilemmas to show how scientists ¬in academia’s current incentive system work against their self-interest if they prioritize research credibility. Empirically, this article conducts a comprehensive review of meta-scientific research with a focus on quantitative political science, demonstrating that threats to the credibility of political science findings are systematic and real. Building on a framework to assess the credibility of scientific literatures, the review shows that a large fraction of the published literature makes itself inaccessible for intersubjective credibility assessments, fails tests of analytical robustness or shows patterns of systematic deviation from true population estimates. Still, the review also highlights the notable progress the discipline has made in recent years to secure research credibility. This commentary urges further steps toward this direction and proposes concrete institutional measures to better align individual researcher rationality with the collective good of verifiable, robust and valid scientific results, such as dedicated verification procedures and the implementation of pre-registration and results-blind peer reviewing.
Abstract
While other scientific disciplines are currently undergoing “credibility revolutions”, political science should also face the uncomfortable question of how much we can trust the findings published in the discipline’s journals and presses. Theoretically, this commentary uses the concept of social dilemmas to show how scientists ¬in academia’s current incentive system work against their self-interest if they prioritize research credibility. Empirically, this article conducts a comprehensive review of meta-scientific research with a focus on quantitative political science, demonstrating that threats to the credibility of political science findings are systematic and real. Building on a framework to assess the credibility of scientific literatures, the review shows that a large fraction of the published literature makes itself inaccessible for intersubjective credibility assessments, fails tests of analytical robustness or shows patterns of systematic deviation from true population estimates. Still, the review also highlights the notable progress the discipline has made in recent years to secure research credibility. This commentary urges further steps toward this direction and proposes concrete institutional measures to better align individual researcher rationality with the collective good of verifiable, robust and valid scientific results, such as dedicated verification procedures and the implementation of pre-registration and results-blind peer reviewing.
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