The panic that gripped the region a few years ago has subsided considerably, and a sense of normality is creeping back in.
Best bit:
Behind him, a drunk Uyghur man was yelling. Alcohol is forbidden for practicing Muslims, especially in the holy month of Ramadan.
“I’ve been drinking alcohol, I’m a little drunk, but that’s no problem. We can drink as we want now!” he shouted. “We can do what we want! Things are great now!”
Have… have you read the rest of the article? It’s fucking terrifying. It’s basically saying “this place went from a concentration camp to a prison”, and even then that’s what a random foreigner saw and has been told by the government. We don’t know if that’s the truth, and even if it was that’s still pretty fucking bad.
Uyghur activists abroad accuse the Chinese government of genocide, pointing to plunging birthrates and the mass detentions. The authorities say their goal is not to eliminate Uyghurs but to integrate them, and that harsh measures are necessary to curb extremism.
Regardless of intent […]
They’re actually doing the false balance thing. When was the last time the western press was fence sitting this much about this issue?
China eased up on their crackdown, which is good, but the western press went so far above what they could prove, they’re now walking back. Actually more like dropping the story: When was the last time you saw a new article about Xinjiang and not some social media echo?
The OHCHR Report isn’t even a year old. And if a country was actively committing genocide I’d guess they wouldn’t really make it easy to have constant news about it.
Two years ago, that shit used to be in German newspapers every month or so. Haven’t seen anything in like a year now. Also, pretty sure the UN report didn’t allege genocide, which is what the media here was claiming back then.
Heck I remember one of my friends was under the impression that there was ethnic cleansing and some major refugee movements, despite the media never actually alleging that. But when they hear the word “genocide” over and over, that’s what people imagine.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
The report details the second, third and fourth of those acts. It effectively qualifies as genocide.
There’s plenty of evidence of China trying to improve the living conditions for Uyghurs in Xinjiang and in the rest of China (poverty alleviation, affirmative action programs for university students, the crackdown against hate speech on social media, …). So imprisoning some people based on some vague “extremism score” and then seemingly releasing them after some months doesn’t show intent to impose living conditions in order to destroy a group. It shows intent on crushing separatism.
Preventing births is true for everybody in China, how does that show an intent to destroy a particular group? It doesn’t.
So we’re left with “serious bodily or mental harm”, which can be explained just as well by an intent to suppress separatism and religious extremism. Literally every war causes some nationality “serious bodily or mental harm” far worse than what China is doing, and we don’t call every war a genocide, do we?
Preventing births is true for everybody in China, how does that show an intent to destroy a particular group? It doesn’t.
Are you really comparing the one-child policy to forced sterilization? I’m trying to have this conversation in good faith but I really can’t believe you seriously think that.
Let’s see how the western press thinks things are going:
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9
Best bit:
Cheers!
Have… have you read the rest of the article? It’s fucking terrifying. It’s basically saying “this place went from a concentration camp to a prison”, and even then that’s what a random foreigner saw and has been told by the government. We don’t know if that’s the truth, and even if it was that’s still pretty fucking bad.
Yeah but have you seen what they used to write?
There’s this passage:
They’re actually doing the false balance thing. When was the last time the western press was fence sitting this much about this issue?
China eased up on their crackdown, which is good, but the western press went so far above what they could prove, they’re now walking back. Actually more like dropping the story: When was the last time you saw a new article about Xinjiang and not some social media echo?
The OHCHR Report isn’t even a year old. And if a country was actively committing genocide I’d guess they wouldn’t really make it easy to have constant news about it.
Two years ago, that shit used to be in German newspapers every month or so. Haven’t seen anything in like a year now. Also, pretty sure the UN report didn’t allege genocide, which is what the media here was claiming back then.
Heck I remember one of my friends was under the impression that there was ethnic cleansing and some major refugee movements, despite the media never actually alleging that. But when they hear the word “genocide” over and over, that’s what people imagine.
The report details the second, third and fourth of those acts. It effectively qualifies as genocide.
There’s plenty of evidence of China trying to improve the living conditions for Uyghurs in Xinjiang and in the rest of China (poverty alleviation, affirmative action programs for university students, the crackdown against hate speech on social media, …). So imprisoning some people based on some vague “extremism score” and then seemingly releasing them after some months doesn’t show intent to impose living conditions in order to destroy a group. It shows intent on crushing separatism.
Preventing births is true for everybody in China, how does that show an intent to destroy a particular group? It doesn’t.
So we’re left with “serious bodily or mental harm”, which can be explained just as well by an intent to suppress separatism and religious extremism. Literally every war causes some nationality “serious bodily or mental harm” far worse than what China is doing, and we don’t call every war a genocide, do we?
Are you really comparing the one-child policy to forced sterilization? I’m trying to have this conversation in good faith but I really can’t believe you seriously think that.
My impression was that the forced sterilization claim was made up, or at least the evidence was not convincing.
When even the “false balance thing” includes relaying an admission of cultural genocide, you know the reality is really fucking bad.