For the record you only mentioned ethnic cleansing in your original comment and nothing about cultural genocide until now. Let me be really clear - what they’re doing is both wrong & terrible - I don’t disagree with anyone on that, but specific words mean something. This is HN and not reddit. Ethnic cleansing is not the same thing as cultural or reverse genocide. Ethnic cleansing is much worse and it involves stuff like gas chambers instead of re-education camps. Don’t mistake my attempt at providing more info about the subject as condoning it.
Also I think you mixed up my comment with someone else’s. I did not mention either Hu or Xi
Then let’s clear up this whole debate. I meant to type cultural genocide, but it was late and I was sleepy so I said “ethnic” instead of “cultural.”
It’s trivial compared to the Communist Party’s ongoing cultural genocide against numerous ethnic minorities, involving imprisonment, slave labor, forced sterilization, “re-education,” family separation, forced marriages to Han Chinese men, and many other abhorrent conditions, but still terrifying that Chinese diplomats in another country think it’s okay to gate crash a party, photograph attendees (presumably for identification and retribution), and then start a fistfight because they were “provoked” by a “false national flag.”
I don’t need to take some of the distaste we have for the holocaust and apply it to this. It’s shameful and terrifying enough on its own.
I'm gobsmacked that you do not know what the holocaust was, then.
China is not trying (and never has) to physically and systematically eradicate an entire ethnicity, nor are they trying to drive them out through ethnic cleansing. In fact under the 'one child policy' ethnic minorities have the right to have more children than ethnic Han.
I urge people to really learn history and to make appropriate comparisons.
So your argument here is that their concentration camps aren't that bad because it's actually only a million people that are in them, instead of two million people?
Yeah China has a record of harvesting organs and running concentration camps for the purposes of ethnic cleansing. People probably aren't going to stop repeating that fact any time soon.
As I said, a Chinese style cultural genocide. Stealing the women, locking up the men, taking their jobs and scarce resources, banning religion -- what could go wrong?
But it now has aspects more familiar from the Cultural Revolution, like re-education camps, sending the cadres out to enforce correct thought (this time readings of Xi instead of Mao!). Though there seems to be little zeal in the cadres, and the Han population of Zinjiang sticks to their heavily patrolled enclaves in the north.
Are you suggesting China is on track to commit genocide against an ethnic minority because they established reeducation camps? A better example of the next tier is the gulags, you know, actual work camps... mass murder is quite the leap.
I know it's popular today to call everyone Nazis whenever they show the slightest signs of analogous behaviour...but isn't re-education bad enough as it is? Shouldn't we focus on the issue at hand and challenge it's merits? Just saying "hurr-durr China = Nazis" is a big distraction that ignores the context of how this came about (ie, under a pretext of suppressing terrorism) and glosses over the countless other ways this is distinct from historical death camps.
Oh weird... then why are there thousands of articles from the west and several NATO countries calling it genocide? It meets the definition of genocide. Are you a Chinese state actor or just a brainwashed college student?
Nowhere have I seen evidence that Uighurs are actually being systematically put to death. Rather, they're being incarcerated and their cultural and social structures systematically dismembered. But the use of the term genocide as inclusive of cultural annihilation is a recent development. This is proven by the fact that Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term and diligently worked after WWII to construct international legal frameworks prohibiting genocide, always lamented that the international community deliberatelyrejected his argument that genocide should encompass cultural destruction. That was a bridge too far for Western powers and morality.
Now, maybe times are changing and some nations and groups are adopting the broader definition. But that is nonetheless a significant change arguably worthy of air quotes. It's certainly not a definition China ever signed onto; not even perfunctorily. However disingenuous, one can understand China bristling against such accusations and taking offense at people equivocating their domestic policies with, e.g, the butchering of Rwandan Tutsi. If the liberal anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism crowd weren't so incoherent and hypocritical they'd see the double standard for what it is.
Not everything has to be adorned with the label genocide, fascist, or some label du jour to be wrong and criticized. Attempts to label Mao's and Stalin's purges as genocide have always fallen flat and yet in the West few question the physical and moral enormity of those tragedies.
Well if you go by UN (aka diplomatically actionable) definitions, by formally extending family planning uniformly to minorities which previously disproportionately targeted Han, China did not start genociding Uyghurs but effectively stopped genociding Han. Unless the argument is family planning is genociding everyone, in which case the primary victims are still urban Han. The verbiage trying to define Cultural Genocide makes more sense:
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
"Trying" because there's no official definition of cultural genocide at UN, hence the game by certain interests attempting to fit XJ into literal genocide box. If the matter is intention then no need to conflate sinicization with destroy, if only for the reason reducing 56 official minorities to 55 would ruin Xi's legacy. If PRC actually wanted to destroy / genocide Uyghurs, it could do so much faster and cheaper than spending 5+ years and trillions in resources. Enough time has passed that even warn torn Germany's rudimentary death camp infrastructure applied to XJ would have reached final solution by now. China is capable of doing what Nazi's did over years in weeks, but hasn't for the exceedingly simple reason that the goal is not to genocide.
But not at odds about the "crimes against humanity" part, right? Basically everyone except the CCP's PR department agrees that China is engaging in an ethnic cleansing.
This article isn't disagreeing with that, it's not debating that the State department over-exaggerated or misrepresented the extent of the problem. Instead, it's arguing a semantic point that "cultural" genocide is harder to pin down than overt WW2-style death camps. It argues that if we call this genocide, then nobody will care about a bigger issue down the road. But given that the United States and other allies have been shockingly derelict in holding China to account over what is widely agreed to be an ethnic cleansing, the decay of the word "genocide" as an accurate descriptor of a coordinated effort to eliminate a culture should not be our top worry right now.
I do not buy the article's concerns. It is wild to me that people can argue we're being too aggressive talking about China right now. We are not being aggressive enough. International courts are not pursuing China strongly enough right now. The CCP is being ignored even though the actual facts of the case are agreed on by almost everyone even in this article -- that China is attempting to eliminate an entire culture, and they are deploying horrifying methods in the pursuit of that goal.
There was a whole series of ethnic cleanings in the USSR [1], the CCP is currently enacting at least 2 efforts to erradicate non Han minority groups, the Khmer Rouge set about the mass murder of Muslim Cham and Vietnamese in Cambodia, the Ethiopian Derg were accused of similar atrocities.
It is not wrong for individuals to choose to assimilate. The deliberate and systematic destruction of other cultures - which China is engaged in on multiple fronts - is wrong.
Can someone confirm whether genocide is actually occuring? I understand cultural genocide is happening, but is mass human slaughter at the level of the holocaust actually occurring?
I don't condone the actions china takes but I don't want to read an exaggerated story either.
The terrible unfortunate reality is that genocide works - and the Chinese government knows that. We have seen it time and again where conquering ethincities looking to create an ethno-state commit genocide and end up with exactly what they wanted. Turkey is one example, China is another, Burma (Myanmar) as well as most of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand - but there are many many historical examples.
They are going to ethnically cleanse that part of China and re-settle Han Chinese there. No one is going to stop them since they're a nuclear power, and it will probably be complete prior to the end of the century.
...and this same strategy is going to be employed wherever they want to exert political and social power.
Also I think you mixed up my comment with someone else’s. I did not mention either Hu or Xi
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