Do you still believe that “China is not trying to eradicate Uighurs” and that the camps are “largely aimed at eradicating religious extremism”? Am I to believe the BBC (along with its named sources) has flat-out lied about all of this?
I cannot improve on the words of redditor @TurkicWarrior: “I think they’re trying to tame the Uyghur people, break their national aspiration and be loyal to China. I don’t think they will take the Uyghur culture away, it’s impractical.”
Your response to the first-hand claims of forced sterilization, forced “re-education”, and banned language is that an anonymous Reddit commenter thinks it’s “impractical”?
I interpret the Reddit commenter to be saying that whatever the Chinese policy in Xinjiang is, it’s not complete deracination. Possibly it’s a mix of surveillance for the majority, and intense sinification for the minority considered most at risk ideologically.
I do not regard the depiction of events in Xinjiang by US State Department, BBC, etc, as particularly objective or reliable. I believe the moral and factual claims made are made in service of political and geopolitical agendas.
edit: Let me say more about this… The west has been militarily intervening in the Muslim world for over a century. For a generation we’ve been fighting a “war on terror”, in which we kill who knows how many hundreds or thousands of Muslim civilians, outside our own borders, every year.
These are the same societies in which elite politicians, media, and lawyers (or at least a significant faction thereof), are meanwhile shaping western public opinion towards the view that geopolitical rival China is committing genocide, the greatest sin in our holocaust-influenced political ethics. In the case of China, the alleged genocide turns out to be some combination of “cultural genocide” and a decrease in birth rates. But we’ll go on just calling it genocide, with all of that word’s connotations of mass murder.
Westerners think that Muslim governments don’t join the western denunciation because of Chinese money, or anticolonial sentiment. But there’s another dimension too. Many Muslim countries are preoccupied with managing their own radicals. A lot of the post-9/11 war on terror has consisted of western advisors working with Muslim governments, in complex deals whereby weapons and intelligence and other assistance are provided, in return for aligning with the western bloc in other ways. China now offers, not just an alternative model of economic development, but an alternative model of governance and regime security.
Some of these claims have not aged well.
Do you still believe that “China is not trying to eradicate Uighurs” and that the camps are “largely aimed at eradicating religious extremism”? Am I to believe the BBC (along with its named sources) has flat-out lied about all of this?
I cannot improve on the words of redditor @TurkicWarrior: “I think they’re trying to tame the Uyghur people, break their national aspiration and be loyal to China. I don’t think they will take the Uyghur culture away, it’s impractical.”
Your response to the first-hand claims of forced sterilization, forced “re-education”, and banned language is that an anonymous Reddit commenter thinks it’s “impractical”?
I interpret the Reddit commenter to be saying that whatever the Chinese policy in Xinjiang is, it’s not complete deracination. Possibly it’s a mix of surveillance for the majority, and intense sinification for the minority considered most at risk ideologically.
I do not regard the depiction of events in Xinjiang by US State Department, BBC, etc, as particularly objective or reliable. I believe the moral and factual claims made are made in service of political and geopolitical agendas.
edit: Let me say more about this… The west has been militarily intervening in the Muslim world for over a century. For a generation we’ve been fighting a “war on terror”, in which we kill who knows how many hundreds or thousands of Muslim civilians, outside our own borders, every year.
These are the same societies in which elite politicians, media, and lawyers (or at least a significant faction thereof), are meanwhile shaping western public opinion towards the view that geopolitical rival China is committing genocide, the greatest sin in our holocaust-influenced political ethics. In the case of China, the alleged genocide turns out to be some combination of “cultural genocide” and a decrease in birth rates. But we’ll go on just calling it genocide, with all of that word’s connotations of mass murder.
Westerners think that Muslim governments don’t join the western denunciation because of Chinese money, or anticolonial sentiment. But there’s another dimension too. Many Muslim countries are preoccupied with managing their own radicals. A lot of the post-9/11 war on terror has consisted of western advisors working with Muslim governments, in complex deals whereby weapons and intelligence and other assistance are provided, in return for aligning with the western bloc in other ways. China now offers, not just an alternative model of economic development, but an alternative model of governance and regime security.