The Chinese have detained a million Uighurs in Xinjiang. Recently, the Chinese government defended the Uighur detention camps by comparing them to Guantanamo.
The Guantanamo prison was a mistake or worse. Nevertheless, it is nothing like the Uighur internment camps. Guantanamo was intended to imprison non-state actors who fought Americans. Guantanamo imprisoned hundreds.
Hundreds in Guantanamo versus a million Uighurs in Xinjiang? One million out of about eleven million Uighurs in China. The Chinese are afraid of a separatist movement in Xinjiang Province. They seem to think the camps can train the Moslem Uighurs to be loyal to China and the Chinese Communist Party.
If the United States had not, long after the fact, recognized that interning Japanese Americans was wrong, was a violation of constitutional rights, the Chinese might have have claimed they were treating the Uighurs the way the United States treated Japanese Americans.
During World War II. The US interned more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. They were interned because the US was at war with Japan and feared that Japanese-Americans, citizens or not, would be disloyal to the US. Those interned were an even larger proportion of Japanese Americans than the proportion of Uighurs interned in China.
Histories and memoirs of the internment camps describe the terrible climate and boredom. They don’t describe prisoners chanting slogans about loyalty to America.
The Chinese may have an interest in stealing technology, but they did not learn about internment from the US. What they are doing to the Uighurs doesn’t look like either Guantanamo or the camps for Japanese Americans. The Chinese are attempting indoctrination. They want the Uighurs minds as well as their bodies.