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
Will there be reparations or is the US going to keep the lands? Is it OK if the Chinese do it now and teach their schoolchildren about it 100 years later?
Looking from the outside this just looks like pulling up the ladder. "Oh we did kill them off but that was years ago. These other countries, though..."
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.
So if certain western countries had done something back in the 19th or first half of the 20th century it's supposedly alright for China to behave the same way now?
Why? Your 'arguments' don't really make much sense. I mean whatever US was doing in the 19/20th centuries was no worse than what the other colonial powers did a hundred or two hundred years before that. Which was no worse than what the Mongols did during the middle ages. So according to this 'logic' everything everyone does is completely justifiable because someone did something worse at some point in the past? Absurd...
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.
The problem with that statement is that China isn't carrying out genocide.
This would be the first "genocide" in history in which the targeted group continued to grow in size, and in which it saw its life expectancy, income and educational levels increase.
Telling China to get over colonialism is like telling black people to get over racism.
These inhumane policies have been in place for centuries so after 3-4 decades of half-heartedly treating people as equals, "get over it" isn't going to fly.
Generally the victims decide when to move on, not the attackers.
The original point was that if a country is doing something now, that can be an excuse for another country doing the same thing now.
If you want to extend your excuse to "a country did something bad 50 / 100 / 500 / 1000 years ago (and later regretted it)" then you need to provide extra reasoning for why that still works as an excuse for what a country is doing now.
Edit: I'm guessing from the downvotes that I didn't make my comment clear enough (or I didn't understand the comment I was responding to). My intent was to point out the logical gap in an argument that could be seen as justifying China's genocidal policies.
Would you be OK with China intentionally displacing natives of one of its provinces with Han Chinese? Today, in the modern era, as opposed to hundreds of years ago?
No one can seriously dispute how bad the Native Americans got it (ANYWHERE in the Americas), and no one can undo that now. But we all just look the other way about ongoing activities in (say) China because what can you do and besides, they brought development to the benighted natives ruled by tyrants, and anyway, Edward Snowden?
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.
Huh? Have you just ignored the last decade of news? China is mostly certainly genocidal. They've put Uyghurs in concentration camps and sterilized them. The question, is why are you apologizing for them and pretending this didn't happen?
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.
What's your argument? That we shouldn't strive to be better today, because horrible things happened in the past? I guess it is also OK for china to genocide the Uyghurs, since the Holocaust happened.
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.
It's funny because China seems to have the mentality that this must be so. And look over to the Japanese and at one time they were similarly minded. And yet look at them now, a pleasure to deal with both on individual and societal level. So it's simply a choice and a mentality which will lead you into all sorts of bad situations. Unfortunately Chinese don't have enough experience with this and instead looking to history to guide their actions, which is a mistake. We simply can't act this way in the world we have built, the consequences are too grave for everyone involved.
I can't wait to see this line of thinking applied to ethnic cleansing.
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