This isn't even close to the worst atrocities the Chinese govt commit against Uyghurs and others: millions in concentration camps visible from satellite and unknown numbers of on-demand executions for forced organ donations.
Given their treatment of Uighurs, yes - there is an element of evil. It’s not as if the governments of the world are immune to this - the US has been involved in a long history of heinous acts and China is no different.
The Chinese Government is actively committing genocide against the Uyghur people. They literally have internment camps, multiple governments have denounced this, there are photos.
Huang Shike was arrested in 2016 in Xinjiang province, three months after he formed a discussion group about Muslim worship on the messaging app WeChat, according to the official website China Judgments Online
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-jails-muslim-huang-shike-...
China has put at least a million, if not more, of Uyghur people into concentration camps. That is not detention, it is how you go about eradicating a people
Add to this the current ongoing Genocide against the Uighurs. Utterly insensible to let such a Government access western markets which eventually only bolsters its genocidal prerogatives.
If china's goal is to wipe them out as a people, its more effective to do that quietly.
Having Uyghurs cry for their kins brings international attention. Having them slowly deported to camps and sterialized brings about the same result without that pesky international pressure.
Oh come on. They’re attempting to “re-educate” a culture out of existence, to prevent the transmission of a language, a religion and an identity, a culture and using the most brutal methods to do so but there are no plans to kill everyone. It’s quite evil enough without trivialising actual attempts at genocide, like in Rwanda, WWII or the Dzhungar genocide. This is an attempt at cultural erasure, not a full blown plan to kill everyone of a particular ethnicity. The PRC party-state will gladly take any Uyghur who will cast off their culture and treat them as a loyal citizen.
The country has since 1972 started “re-education” camps of the Muslim Uighurs [1], the confuscian Falun Gong [2] and the buddhist Tibetans amongst others [3]. This is not to mention their social credit system that shut anyone voicing dissent as well as their family from taking public transit, transacting, starting businesses and many other things [4].
Moreover, they are allegedly forcibly extracting organs for donation from people in re-education camps and prisons [5]. If true that is just evil.
How can a country that oppress people they didn’t in 1972 and moreover do so more effectively be freer?
It would be a lot easier to talk about this subject if it hadn't been so shamelessly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
The Chinese government has, by all appearances, carried out a harsh crackdown on what it views as separatism and religious extremism. It has forced large numbers of people to go through political indoctrination, based on suspicions of being sympathetic to the Uyghur separatist movement or of harboring fundamentalist religious beliefs.
The Chinese government has also begun imposing the 3-child policy on Uyghur families. The 1-child policy used to only apply to the Han majority. It has been relaxed to 3 children, but is being applied more broadly.
However, the Uyghur population continues to grow. The Uyghur language continues to be an official language in Xinjiang and it is one of the primary languages used to teach children in state schools. And as I said before, life expectancy and average incomes are increasing among Uyghurs.
The Chinese government doesn't intend to "remove" the Uyghur people. It is trying to stamp out separatism, both by implementing harsh police methods and by pumping money into the region to improve living standards.
This is not what a genocide looks like. That term is just propaganda in this case, meant to influence people who aren't at all familiar with the situation in Xinjiang.
There were acts of political violence against the state recently (within the last 5 years), and China in general is a surveillance and police state whose tactics are in general unjust (from an outsider's perspective), so I presume the state is focusing those tactics on the population of Xinjiang in particular.
But the question is, _why?_ What's their incentive to apply more cruel population control on one ethnic group over others?
It's a culture- and religion-based form of oppression. The ethnic Uighur people are Muslims, for the most part. They form a distinct subculture within China. The Communist Party sees their nonconformity as a threat to social harmony. That's why, in addition to forced sterilization and forced birth control, the government has imposed forced re-education in concentration camps.
Their goal is to destroy the Uighur population's distinctiveness as a subculture in China. It is deliberate ethnocide (by forced internment) and genocide (by reproductive suppression).
Except it's even worse, because in this particular case they're targeting an area full of ethnic minorities in a Han dominated china: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang
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