I must inform you that this post is very detached from reality. First of all, what is a genocide? I always thought it was the killing (-cide) of a people (geno-), and usually involves the murder of hundreds of thousands. Like Germany killing Jews, or Rwanda killing Tutsis, or Turkey killing Armenians.
On the other hand, China is not trying to eradicate Uighurs. They’re not even trying to deny their existence as a distinct ethnic minority. China has dozens of officially recognized minorities, and I think the Uighurs would be in the top ten as far as population is concerned.
If you actually want to do some good, the first thing you need to do is to find out what is actually taking place in Xinjiang. But here you will need to be aware that China has enemies with rival geopolitical goals and billions of dollars to spend on propaganda campaigns, campaigns which will often be covert in the sense that they won’t openly say “this newspaper or this researcher or this defector is funded by intelligence agency of country X”.
It has been noted that Uighurs are Muslims, and the reeducation camps (or whatever they are) are largely aimed at eradicating religious extremism (along with ethnic separatism), and yet the countries that are complaining about their situation are the post-Christian countries of the American bloc, not the Muslim countries of the OIC.
If you actually want to do some good, you should probably also try, as hard as possible, to understand the thinking of the people who are in charge of whatever it is that you want to change. Though there may be some difficulties for an American, in understanding the thinking of nationalistic bureaucrats and social scientists from a quasi-Marxist one-party state, that’s the latest expression of a distinct 5000-year-old civilizational tradition.
Maybe you can understand it a bit, by thinking in terms of how the American establishment responds to white nationalism. Many of the attitudes of white nationalism were commonplace a century ago, but now it is considered a threat to the cohesion of a multiracial society with high immigration. Also, thinking in terms of nation-building and realpolitik may help you: Xinjiang is a key nexus in plans for a “new silk road” that will be a global economic network under the sway of China, something that China’s enemies are trying to undermine.
There is no genocide in Xinjiang. As far as I am concerned, to use that word to name what you’re opposing, already means your rhetoric, and probably your understanding, is unmoored from reality. What’s happening in Xinjiang isn’t even ethnic cleansing, in the sense of a race being expelled from its homeland. At best, you could perhaps call it colonization by Han Chinese; except that Xinjiang has been part of the People’s Republic from its beginning. So it’s more like, mass settlement by members of the national ethnic majority, in an area formerly dominated by a minority. (If there’s a short name for that, it’s not coming to mind.)
As for the proposal to use the NBA to change Chinese internal policy, it’s about as meaningful as K-pop fans fighting conservative populism in America, by booking tickets to a Trump rally so there will be empty seats. Or even less meaningful than that. And didn’t “South Park” do an episode on the NBA kowtowing to China to something? Indeed, I’ve just checked that a team manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong protests, China was angry, and so the NBA apologized. I assure you that even if the NBA as a whole was somehow persuaded to become part of the new cold war against China, it would be about as effective, as Putin’s pleas for America to stay in the arms control treaties.
We can debate which label is most proper to apply, but I think the article is more concerned about what actually happens, no matter how we choose to label it. And how mostly no one gives a fuck.
I’m with Viliam-happy to debate terms/use less hyperbole, but very bad things are happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang right now. The purpose of this post is to encourage people to think of solutions outside of what is currently being done because none of it seems to be working.
This might not be the correct solution, but at the very least folks need to know that it is possible to stop, the terrible things happening right now to people in Xinjiang.
If you believe you can make a positive change in the world, you have some shot at making it happen. If you don’t believe you have a chance, you have no shot.
This is by no means a high percentage play, but when you’re down 25 in the 3rd quarter you better believe and start throwing some deep balls. And sometimes, you’re able to make it happen.
Let’s compare this goal of “stopping genocide in Xinjiang” with, say, the goal of “stopping famine in Yemen”. The Uighurs are governed by a state which is not within the American sphere of influence. Famine in Yemen is the product of a Saudi blockade that is strategically supported by the United States, because it opposes the expansion of the Iranian sphere of influence. It would make slightly more sense to use the NBA to prevent famine in Yemen, since the United States really does have political leverage there. But nothing would actually change unless some faction of America’s powerbrokers decided to change the policy.
(By the way, I don’t actually know that “famine in Yemen” is any more real than “genocide in Xinjiang”. I’m sure they’re having food shortages, but is it actual starvation? I haven’t done the research.)
The “genocide in Xinjiang” is nonexistent, it’s a propagandistic construct manufactured by the enemies of China. To speak of “human rights violations” would at least have some truth, but it still evades the question of why they are occurring. Xinjiang has a history of separatist movements, and in this generation, that includes some jihadists. This is an era of Islamic militance, as events in France and Austria have just reminded us. And Xinjiang is also a crucial node in the development of economic ties between China and the Islamic world; hostile powers like America and India want this to fail. So of course China’s social engineers are there in force, trying to make the troublesome 10% into patriotic consumers or whatever, while police and spies crack down on the real resistance and on foreign subversion.
You may not want to hear this, but the quickest way for repression to end is for Uighur resistance to end. Maybe Turkey and the OIC can negotiate a culturally sensitive compromise. But what role does America have in this situation? Trump had an advisor (Carter Page) who counselled economic and strategic cooperation among Russia, China, and America, but he was an early victim of “Russiagate”. American strategists think promotion of democracy and human rights is a way for the US to gain strategic advantage. America is ideologically opposed to the Chinese system, and strategically opposed to Eurasian integration. You might better spend your time in reforming your own country’s panopticon, while you still can.
It has been noted that Uighurs are Muslims, and the reeducation camps (or whatever they are) are largely aimed at eradicating religious extremism (along with ethnic separatism), and yet the countries that are complaining about their situation are the post-Christian countries of the American bloc, not the Muslim countries of the OIC.
I agree that OP’s plan is unlikely to do much good, but I strongly disagree with both the direct meaning and implications of the above sentence. My understanding is that “eradicating religious extremism” is simply the CCP party line and nobody really believes it. Also, whatever the aims of the CCP, we have nearly incontrovertible evidence that their actions include severe human rights violations on a large scale. I’ve also heard that the fact that the OIC supports China’s actions in Xinjiang is response to Chinese bullying, not a reflection that they think such actions are good.
I’m downvoting this comment because it either (a) shows a lack of caring about human rights, or more likely (b) is needlessly unhelpful because it doesn’t start the brainstorm of ways to do good that realistically mesh with the CCP’s strategic concerns.
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.
I must inform you that this post is very detached from reality. First of all, what is a genocide? I always thought it was the killing (-cide) of a people (geno-), and usually involves the murder of hundreds of thousands. Like Germany killing Jews, or Rwanda killing Tutsis, or Turkey killing Armenians.
On the other hand, China is not trying to eradicate Uighurs. They’re not even trying to deny their existence as a distinct ethnic minority. China has dozens of officially recognized minorities, and I think the Uighurs would be in the top ten as far as population is concerned.
If you actually want to do some good, the first thing you need to do is to find out what is actually taking place in Xinjiang. But here you will need to be aware that China has enemies with rival geopolitical goals and billions of dollars to spend on propaganda campaigns, campaigns which will often be covert in the sense that they won’t openly say “this newspaper or this researcher or this defector is funded by intelligence agency of country X”.
It has been noted that Uighurs are Muslims, and the reeducation camps (or whatever they are) are largely aimed at eradicating religious extremism (along with ethnic separatism), and yet the countries that are complaining about their situation are the post-Christian countries of the American bloc, not the Muslim countries of the OIC.
If you actually want to do some good, you should probably also try, as hard as possible, to understand the thinking of the people who are in charge of whatever it is that you want to change. Though there may be some difficulties for an American, in understanding the thinking of nationalistic bureaucrats and social scientists from a quasi-Marxist one-party state, that’s the latest expression of a distinct 5000-year-old civilizational tradition.
Maybe you can understand it a bit, by thinking in terms of how the American establishment responds to white nationalism. Many of the attitudes of white nationalism were commonplace a century ago, but now it is considered a threat to the cohesion of a multiracial society with high immigration. Also, thinking in terms of nation-building and realpolitik may help you: Xinjiang is a key nexus in plans for a “new silk road” that will be a global economic network under the sway of China, something that China’s enemies are trying to undermine.
There is no genocide in Xinjiang. As far as I am concerned, to use that word to name what you’re opposing, already means your rhetoric, and probably your understanding, is unmoored from reality. What’s happening in Xinjiang isn’t even ethnic cleansing, in the sense of a race being expelled from its homeland. At best, you could perhaps call it colonization by Han Chinese; except that Xinjiang has been part of the People’s Republic from its beginning. So it’s more like, mass settlement by members of the national ethnic majority, in an area formerly dominated by a minority. (If there’s a short name for that, it’s not coming to mind.)
As for the proposal to use the NBA to change Chinese internal policy, it’s about as meaningful as K-pop fans fighting conservative populism in America, by booking tickets to a Trump rally so there will be empty seats. Or even less meaningful than that. And didn’t “South Park” do an episode on the NBA kowtowing to China to something? Indeed, I’ve just checked that a team manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong protests, China was angry, and so the NBA apologized. I assure you that even if the NBA as a whole was somehow persuaded to become part of the new cold war against China, it would be about as effective, as Putin’s pleas for America to stay in the arms control treaties.
We can debate which label is most proper to apply, but I think the article is more concerned about what actually happens, no matter how we choose to label it. And how mostly no one gives a fuck.
Viliam/Mitchell-thank you both for reading!
I’m with Viliam-happy to debate terms/use less hyperbole, but very bad things are happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang right now. The purpose of this post is to encourage people to think of solutions outside of what is currently being done because none of it seems to be working.
This might not be the correct solution, but at the very least folks need to know that it is possible to stop, the terrible things happening right now to people in Xinjiang.
If you believe you can make a positive change in the world, you have some shot at making it happen. If you don’t believe you have a chance, you have no shot.
This is by no means a high percentage play, but when you’re down 25 in the 3rd quarter you better believe and start throwing some deep balls. And sometimes, you’re able to make it happen.
Let’s compare this goal of “stopping genocide in Xinjiang” with, say, the goal of “stopping famine in Yemen”. The Uighurs are governed by a state which is not within the American sphere of influence. Famine in Yemen is the product of a Saudi blockade that is strategically supported by the United States, because it opposes the expansion of the Iranian sphere of influence. It would make slightly more sense to use the NBA to prevent famine in Yemen, since the United States really does have political leverage there. But nothing would actually change unless some faction of America’s powerbrokers decided to change the policy.
(By the way, I don’t actually know that “famine in Yemen” is any more real than “genocide in Xinjiang”. I’m sure they’re having food shortages, but is it actual starvation? I haven’t done the research.)
The “genocide in Xinjiang” is nonexistent, it’s a propagandistic construct manufactured by the enemies of China. To speak of “human rights violations” would at least have some truth, but it still evades the question of why they are occurring. Xinjiang has a history of separatist movements, and in this generation, that includes some jihadists. This is an era of Islamic militance, as events in France and Austria have just reminded us. And Xinjiang is also a crucial node in the development of economic ties between China and the Islamic world; hostile powers like America and India want this to fail. So of course China’s social engineers are there in force, trying to make the troublesome 10% into patriotic consumers or whatever, while police and spies crack down on the real resistance and on foreign subversion.
You may not want to hear this, but the quickest way for repression to end is for Uighur resistance to end. Maybe Turkey and the OIC can negotiate a culturally sensitive compromise. But what role does America have in this situation? Trump had an advisor (Carter Page) who counselled economic and strategic cooperation among Russia, China, and America, but he was an early victim of “Russiagate”. American strategists think promotion of democracy and human rights is a way for the US to gain strategic advantage. America is ideologically opposed to the Chinese system, and strategically opposed to Eurasian integration. You might better spend your time in reforming your own country’s panopticon, while you still can.
I agree that OP’s plan is unlikely to do much good, but I strongly disagree with both the direct meaning and implications of the above sentence. My understanding is that “eradicating religious extremism” is simply the CCP party line and nobody really believes it. Also, whatever the aims of the CCP, we have nearly incontrovertible evidence that their actions include severe human rights violations on a large scale. I’ve also heard that the fact that the OIC supports China’s actions in Xinjiang is response to Chinese bullying, not a reflection that they think such actions are good.
I’m downvoting this comment because it either (a) shows a lack of caring about human rights, or more likely (b) is needlessly unhelpful because it doesn’t start the brainstorm of ways to do good that realistically mesh with the CCP’s strategic concerns.
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.