this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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The wikipedia article cites Adrian Zenz prolifically. So most of what you're reading comes from the same ridiculous and disgraced source that nearly every other report on the matter comes from. But, the Uyghur birthrate IS decreasing. That's what happens universally when communities become more affluent, more educated, and more secure. But what's the population growth rate? It was 11.4% growth. Now it's 3.7%. Is that a decline in population? No. It's an increase in population, a 3.7% increase in population. Explain to me how a genocide increases the population by 3.7%. I'll wait.
That UN report literally cites Zenz as it's primary form of evidence that doesn't come from sources managed by the intelligence community. Remember that the CIA has an East Turkistan project to incite terrorist violence by spreading extreme interpretations of Islam in the reason as an explicit program to destabilize China. You cannot trust anything that the West touches in this regard. That's why we refer to the 30+ countries with Muslim majorities who actually toured Xinjiang and say not only is there no genocide but in fact Xinjiang is a place that is good and healthy for the continuation of the Uyghur culture.
But aren't actually in Xinjiang. There are plenty of people who claim to be from the region. There are also plenty of people who were arrested due to actually being involved in extremist groups with ties to the CIA program. These groups had several different ways of identifying themselves including dress, vocabulary and talking points, and interpretations of history and religion, and symbolism. They also have networks that connect them to wider regional logistical partisan and terrorist networks. So when they escape Chinese law enforcement and get out of Xinjiang, they tell their story about how they were imprisoned after being profiled for wearing "traditional" clothes, all the while if you actually go to Xinjiang people are wearing traditional clothes all over the place, and most of them know what the extremists look like, what they wear, how they talk, and where they congregate.
Because the West has a history of using the lie of "impartial inspections" for espionage and war propaganda. China has no requirement to comply with Western inspections while not a single Western organization is doing inspections or oversight of the CIA program for East Turkistan extremism or any of the dozen other programs that the West created to do harm to China.
Appeal to authority. I don't give a shit what her former opinions on this are. Her position on this topic uncritically cites a right-wing anti-semitic German evangelical who's report stated that China was installing over 100 IUDs per person and also counted removal of an IUD the same as the installation of an IUD and then construed access to voluntary family planning medical care as evidence of genocide despite population continuing to grow. Remember that the UN didn't even allow the PRC to be part of the UN until 1971, instead giving the seat to the KMT in Taiwan during the most violent and brutal years of the White Terror when the KMT killed tens of thousands of people for the political crime of agreeing that the PRC was now the government of China. So, expecting the UN to be an impartial and valid arbiter, especially in matters regarding China, is just ignoring the entire history of the North Atlantic's relationship and the UN's relationship with China.
To be fair, I'm basically with the UN on this in that I'm not fully convinced it's a genocide, but there's a lot of evidence against them of at least some human rights abuses. Like it might be tending towards cultural genocide, through not letting them wear their clothes or practice their religion or culture, which would be how the population is still increasing.
As for it all just being Zenz's word, what about the satellite pictures of their massive camps and their growth, videos and pictures of their re-education schools (think I saw this on the Jon Oliver episode of the subject?), Xi's 2017 order that all religions have to be Chinese in nature, and some Uyghur saying they had family members arrested and now don't know where they are, like Ilham Tohti.
Like it could be that these camps are necessary to quell a massive terrorism group, and at least they said the schools have been dismantled, but it comes off as the Islamophobic version of the WW2 Japanese-American internment camps where innocent are thrown in with the guilty. Why else would they need to be that big? And not letting people see the prisoners like that guy I linked above isn't great either. It's not a great look, especially since the people defending it are usually the same people criticizing the US's massive prison industrial complex, although I sometimes confuse the views of ML communists, who might be okay with that if they were used on the right people, and anarchists, who I know are definitely not.
I think the Jon Oliver video convinced me the most along with normal news articles detailing the history and China's treatment of the region. Do you have a source for the East Turkistan Project? It comes off as a conspiracy theory.
And I know it's trite, but if you've got a YouTube video debunking Jon's, I'd be curious to hear it out, too. It's like one I heard before debunking Jon's video on Venezuela helped convince me at one point that it's our complicated than it seems. But the Uyghur situation I'm still not convinced on. I'll read up on the East Turkmenistan thing and see if there are any links between them and US Int, but still, there might just be more than one bad guy. Too many accusations and China is being so secretive. China is allowed to be distrustful of the West, but I don't think that trumps human rights.
I don't have a John Oliver video, but I do have this https://xinjiangahr.carrd.co/ which is a collection of well-researched data on the subject, gathered up in an easily approachable and surveyable format
Sources on East Turkestan project:
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202205/t20220507_10683090.html (Chinese source which cites its references)
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/east-turkestan-islamic-movement-etim (Pro US/CIA source that shows you what the Western narrative is)
https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=4767d3ce-8490-464f-8508-d8f3b7878808&subId=703775 (PDF of Australian minister's analysis of the situation submitted to Australian parliament to oppose sanctions)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkistan_Government-in-Exile (note that the East Turkestan Govt in Exile was formed in Washington DC and operates out of Washington DC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party (note that the US has listed this extremist party as having "training and financial assistance" from Al-Qaeda and ...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_Mahsum (But the party was founded by in 1940 and associated with Islamic extremists fighting the USSR, which we know the US funded and trained)
https://apnews.com/article/79d6a427b26f4eeab226571956dd256e (AP article about how Uighur's are fighting against Assad in Syria after being trained by Al-Qaeda)
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2021/10/05/bidens-era-of-strategic-competition-494588 (politico short blurb about how the Taliban is cooperating with China to remove East Turkestan militants from the Chinese border now that the US has left the region)
https://www.ned.org/testimony-by-damon-wilson-before-senate-foreign-relations-committee-on-democracy-and-human-rights-us-tools-and-responses/ (NED, the CIA's "legal" arm, states they support Uyghur partners)
http://english.scio.gov.cn/xinjiangfocus/2020-03/05/content_77241200.htm (Chinese article, but really well done history. If you don't believe the CIA/Dalai Lama connection, just read his brother's book)
https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/why-xinjiang-is-central-to-us-cold-war-on-china/ (Great article by Vijay Prashad on the strategy without the accusations of direct CIA training)
https://www.newsclick.in/the-US-trying-light-match-islamic-extremism-china-xinjiang (Another great article about the origins of US-led jihad and the origins of Uyghur extermism)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB9HRKKZHak (Interview with Vijay Prashad about the topic)
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/inss/strategic-perspectives-42.pdf (Page 16 centers the jihadist terrorism in the region that extends from the 80s into today and is recognized by US academia and military)
Still no. What the US is doing to the native population is cultural genocide. Xinjiang is a legally protected autonomous region explicitly to prevent assimilation as a requirement to engage in society. They teach and speak their native language in school, they conduct commercial and government business in their native language. China is running the most complex multi-cultural society in the history of the world. They are not engaged in cultural genocide.
There are more mosques per capita in Xinjiang than anywhere in the world. The clothes and practices you're talking about are explicitly East Turkistan separatists, a movement with no basis in history that was fomented by the CIA in a radicalization program, the existence of which is public knowledge, with the explicit purpose of destabilizing China, just like the CIA used to train Tibetan terrorists and then airlift them into Tibet.
Since the days of the Mujahideen, the US and British military intelligence agencies have been developing a perverted interpretation of Islam for the purpose of creating religious extremists, training them in guerilla warfare, and aiming them at countries they want to control. The Uyghur's of Xinjiang are the target of the CIA East Turkistan radicalization program. The satellite pictures do not actually show anything like what would constitute even a human rights violation let alone a genocide. Prisons and re-education are literally the response to the radicalization program. The number of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang plummeted through this program, and instead of vilifying Islam, like the West does, the autonomous region is still autonomous. Xi's order that all religions must not call for the destruction of the Chinese state is pretty straightforward. If the USA is inventing a history of East Turkistan and wrapping a religious fervor around the project to separate from China and create an independent Islamic state, then the solution is to establish that Islam is just fine, but religious justification for terrorism and separatism remove the protection from the state that all religions have. Thus, Xinjiang is still massively Muslim and the state is allowed to arrest extremists who justify their extremism with a perverted interpretation of Islam and they get reeducated IN ISLAM to show the contradictions in their position. They are reeducated away from the radicalization programs of the CIA and MI6.
Stop projecting Western racist atrocities on the rest of the world. Chinese people were exposed to the worst excesses of European racism. They are steeped in that history. They have zero desire to repeat it. They are not rounding up everyone who looks Muslim. They are, however, likely catching some innocent people in their efforts to stop attacks at the root. On balance, since they aren't harming these people, but rather establishing a process by which they can be sure they are deradicalizing as many people as they can, I think we can agree that it's better than the dragnet the USA implemented after 9/11 and the number of innocent people they kidnapped, tortured, and put in secret prisons in other countries and left them to rot or die.
Do you have any idea how big Xinjiang is? How many people are in ISIS or Al Qaeda? Would you rather the prisons actually be small fenced in yards with people packed in like sardines? Or should the facilities for these people be large, spacious, and accommodating? Maybe you can't imagine China imprisoning people and treating them well because the US treats pregnant women like dogs by packing 4 of them into a single cell or because they put toddlers in solitary confinement. But the PLA won the war because they showed the KMT soldiers that they were far more humane, far more thoughtful, and far more just than the KMT was. That history doesn't die easily.
China has no obligation, while fighting a Western radicalization program, to let Westerns inspect their operations. Beyond the possible ways that could be used to inoculate new radicalization targets against reeducation, the West has zero moral standing and cannot set these terms and China is letting them know they have no grounds to impose terms on how China fixes a mess the West created.
Anarchists don't support China, so that's easy. Listen, the US imprisons so many people that even with massive prisons in Xinjiang China's prison population per capita still doesn't even come close to the US's. The US also has a massive extractivist parole system so you can't even count just the people in prison you also have to count all the people with ankle bracelets AND all the people with $50k in debt to the prison that garnish their meager wages for the rest of their life. You are projecting Western atrocities onto China and then getting confused why people who criticize American atrocities also support China. It's because you are imagining Western atrocities are equivalently happening in China when they aren't.
China is distrustful of the West because the West is the worst offender against human rights the world has ever seen, and a lot of those human rights atrocities happened under Western occupation of Asia.
It'll take me awhile to go through all them lol, but thanks for all the sources. You're one of the few people I've seen from lemmygrad or hexbear not just immediately default to ad hominem attacks, trolling, and pig poop balls, and I appreciate the actual attempt at a discussion in good faith instead of shouting "racist lib" and running back to your echo chamber to make fun of how clueless all us libs are. I appreciate it.
Some good points there, but I will say, you're acting like the West are the only civilizations which have ever committed atrocities, which I think is a mistake to make. Every large group of humans have been capable of doing such horrible things, as we've seen in wars and such all over the world.
The West is quite literally the only civilization that ever dominated 80% of the world. The West is the only civilization to engage in full on extinction hunting, from the buffalo in America to steal treaty land to the deer on Taiwan to many other animals. The West is the only civilization to develop fascism. What we all know and understand as systemic racism is a Western system. The West developed capitalism and spread it. The West created the most effective and brutal forms of chattel slavery, apartheid, and genocide.
But more importantly, none of those things are merely "in the past". Unlike the ancient histories of atrocities, the atrocities of the West have been happening in an unbroken chain of events for the last 600 years to the present day. Your daily coffee, tea, banana, coca-cola, potatoes, corn, sugar, and many many other foods are the direct heritage of the brutality of the West and it has never let go of its spoils. The king of England was photographed on his recent coronation wearing literally millions of dollars of stolen resources from India. The West forced famines on people, continues to extract billions from the people they have subjugated, and continues to launch wars of dominance destroying the lives of millions.
No one has killed more people, dominated more land, systematized more brutality, dehumanized more thoroughly, and benefitted from it all more profitably than the West. And when we finally dismantle the West and reverse the damage it's done, then maybe a new violent force will arise and after a couple centuries you can argue that it's not just the West. Until then, drop the whataboutism.