When I fold clothes I think of when I waited to be arrested at night
July 16, 2021 7:06 AM   Subscribe

Kamil had received a phone call; by the end of it, he looked ashen. He left the office in an agitated state and headed downstairs. His colleagues ..saw three men load Kamil into a car and drive off...Two days later, three police officers drove Kamil home..They emerged with Kamil and his laptop, and drove off. Munire returned home to find their apartment turned upside down... Kamil’s books and papers lay scattered everywhere. China has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs, along with thousands of individuals from other Muslim minority groups, and undertaken a campaign of forced sterilization against Uyghur women. The U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands have officially recognized the crisis as a genocide.
posted by If only I had a penguin... (34 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Please also see the very distressing and detailed recent New Yorker piece (archive.is non-paywalled version).
posted by stevil at 8:05 AM on July 16, 2021 [5 favorites]


I attended a talk by a Uyghur exile 2 years ago at Columbia Law School. The man's entire family had been imprisoned, and he believed that his children had been placed in a mass orphanage as though their parents were dead. From what he knew, the children were forced to only speak Mandarin, to repudiate their Muslim faith, and to pretend that they were Han Chinese.

This is a genocide. It's happening in front of the entire world. So what is anyone going to do about it?
posted by 1adam12 at 8:25 AM on July 16, 2021 [15 favorites]


The world will keep buying shit off Amazon.
posted by glonous keming at 8:26 AM on July 16, 2021 [3 favorites]


This is a genocide. It's happening in front of the entire world. So what is anyone going to do about it?

What you describe and the bit in the article about Uyghur children now being sent to mandatory boarding schools where they are forbidden to speak their language and practice their religion made me think of the residential schools and broader aboriginal genocide in Canada. So the answer, based on that, is of course that the world will do nothing.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:30 AM on July 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


So what is anyone going to do about it?

I've come to the conclusion that the Westphalian nation-state paradigm must be swept away, and the internal affairs of a nation who brutalizes its own people and commit genocide delegitimizes the state itself. The world was hands-off throughout the 1930s and it's hands-off today in this new genocide. But there's too much profit to be lost by properly pressuring the Beijing government to end it, so I expect it'll eventually succeed, just as the "Final Solution" very likely would have succeeded had Germany not started a war.
posted by tclark at 8:44 AM on July 16, 2021 [8 favorites]


It's a lot easier to say "never again" than to enforce it.

tclark, very interesting idea about ending the Westphalian nation-state paradigm-- it really is the source of a lot of problems. Do you have ideas about how, and what to do instead?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:41 AM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


There have already been various types of erosion of the Westphalian order, in my specific instance I'm talking about the concept that a state's "internal affairs" are its own and more or less inviolable -- among them are multilateral treaties with enforcement mechanisms (things like WTO, etc), the existence of the UN (though often not very much in practice), and possibly one of the hints at something that could be a truly post-Westphalian entity, the EU. Another proto-post-Westphalian paradigm, I suspect, is also in parallel development: the reduction of nation states to rump polities in service of corporations. From the mid-18th century (and much earlier in some areas), the corporation/nation mutual parasitism thing has always had strange, occasionally good, usually bad effects, so it's less a matter of "entirely new paradigm" perhaps than more of a shifting of relative prominence.

It's not like smaller, less developed nations ever fully enjoyed the Westphalian concept of complete internal sovereignty anyway.

TL;DR: I'm not sure what it will look like, but whatever does happen if nation-states evolve into some sort of post-Westphalian epoch, there are precursors or foreshadows of it right now.
posted by tclark at 1:02 PM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


The situation is profoundly disheartening. I don't see any realistic chances of anything changing for the better.

The Chinese government has positioned itself in such a way that no country in the liberal-democratic world seems to dare offend it.

I strongly suspect that at some point in the future, we will look back on the West's self-interested rapprochement with the Chinese government, beginning with Nixon's (in)famous trip in 1972, as a colossal mistake. The shortsighted Cold War enemy-of-my-enemy logic with regard to the Soviet Union, combined with the naive idea that capitalism and market economics would somehow magically promote and manifest democracy, led a generation of foreign policy thinkers to defend a policy of authoritarian appeasement that should never have been morally or ideologically justifiable.

While we should have seen it coming, the CCP took advantage of a twofold blind spot: on one hand, the political Left's historical soft spot for and reluctance to criticize anything putatively "socialist" in flavor, and on the other, the Right's profit-uber-alles turpitude and desire to break unions at home. This resulted, until very recently, in a nearly bipartisan lack of criticism to the trade policies that powered the Chinese government's rise to that of a global power. (Even today, it's really only on the far Right that you get the strongest criticisms of the Chinese regime—a classic example of a stopped clock occasionally being right, despite being broken—meaning that it's considered more than a bit déclassé to agree with them, if you're not a Trumpist fellow-traveler.)

Those who will lose the most, as usual, are not the ones in charge. The international order is not going to change its stance because of the ongoing Uyghur genocide, or even the de facto annexation of Hong Kong. It remains to be seen what might happen if the Chinese government makes good on its longstanding threats to Taiwan. I am not optimistic.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:29 PM on July 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


I have a co-worker who is only just getting back in touch with her Native roots. She was Christian before, having been sent to a Catholic residential school and told to hate her parents who lived on a reservation. She and I are both American.

I do think this genocide of a minority population is horrible. I also think that the US is currently enacting multiple versions of this that we, as its citizens, don't hear about. The Nordic countries themselves have a mandatory policy that forces refugee children to attend schools in order to learn Nordic 'etiquette'.

Like someone else said above, if we look back in history and we aren't grappling with how things like this are natural products of organizing nation states around shared ethnic identity then this dystopian hell will only get far, far worse, given what the estimates are for the total number of climate refugees, which I've heard is up to an eighth of the world's population.
posted by paimapi at 2:10 PM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is a genocide. It's happening in front of the entire world. So what is anyone going to do about it?

What do you recommend?
posted by aniola at 2:15 PM on July 16, 2021


What do you recommend?

Despite its own national myths, China is just a country. A big country, sure, but just a country - not the majority of the world's population, nor its GDP, nor its natural resources, nor its military might, nor anything else. What did we do with South Africa once the world recognized the horror of apartheid? Let's do that.

This will be expensive. It will be painful. Mothballed manufacturing capacity will need to be reactivated everywhere. Prices will go up, sometimes by a lot. Medium- and low-wage countries that are wanting for economic opportunity can receive investment to get new capacity online. But it is something we can and should do, not only for the benefit of the people being murdered in Uyghur lands right now, but for everyone else's benefit - it's not good for the world for any single country to be in control of so much manufacturing capacity, never mind a murderous autocracy.

Because make no mistake, but the desperate fear of offending the PRC isn't about anything except money. The WHO's refusal to engage with Taiwan is about nothing but money. As long as we continue buying all of our crap from one country, then the PRC has a lever that no one else can resist.
posted by 1adam12 at 2:37 PM on July 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


Please spell it out. What exactly did we do with South Africa once the world recognized the horror of apartheid?
posted by aniola at 3:04 PM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


I think this is a relevant example RE: South Africa:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Africa
posted by The Ted at 3:11 PM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


Please spell it out. What exactly did we do with South Africa once the world recognized the horror of apartheid?

Nothing, given that the horror was recognised very early. South African apartheid ended when the cold war did and the regime was no longer useful against the Soviet Union.
posted by atrazine at 4:10 PM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don't think South Africa is comparable to China. I see the world's unwillingness to take action against China similar to the US facing few consequences in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Basically, as long as a country is a superpower, they will be able to get away with a lot. In theory, superpowers should be checks on each other, but in practice it doesn't really work that way.
posted by FJT at 4:58 PM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


In some ways, this is the worst and most important crisis in the world.

Because if China gets away with this, there will be nothing but relatively impotent internal resistance to stop multiethnic countries from simply eliminating their ethnic and religious minorities as an early step in attempting to cope with the way Global Warming will reduce the carrying capacity of the entire world.
posted by jamjam at 5:11 PM on July 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


I strongly suspect that at some point in the future, we will look back on the West's self-interested rapprochement with the Chinese government, beginning with Nixon's (in)famous trip in 1972, as a colossal mistake.

I don't think it's a colossal mistake. Some form of rapprochement was inevitably necessary. The plan up to 1972 of keeping China poor and out of the international community, while attempting to use Western intelligence services to destabilize it, and then maybe for the Republic of China to retake the country was not working. And it may have been a good thing for it to not work, because a re-ignited Chinese civil war would have been bloody and also nuclear if it happened after the late 60s. Though China was very unlikely to be a Western-style democracy, there were political reforms going on slowly and some genuine admiration for the West/Japan/Asian tigers until around the 2000s. I read it was really the Great Recession that changed things, as the West's financial systems were greatly weakened and China's was left largely standing, and this proved to China that it was right not to listen to clueless Western advisors and economists.

While I don't think it can come down to one event, I do think that in general it kind of shows that everyone underestimated how fast China would grow and overestimated at how well the US/West would be able to maintain it's influence and power (and in the US case not consistently making own goals).
posted by FJT at 5:53 PM on July 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


And none of the above is meant to excuse the atrocities that China is committing in Xinjiang. But if we're talking about "colossal mistakes" that the US made, I don't think starting to communicate with China and establishing normalized relations is one of them.
posted by FJT at 6:02 PM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Race relations are complex and have long histories, so I apologize for the incoming wall of text, but if you want to know how this issue is viewed internally in China, read on...

The first question an outsider may have is - why did China never apply the One Child Policy on its minority population like the Uyghur - and why are they applying it now? Why the crackdown?

The short answer is: the CCP literally did not have the power to enforce birth restrictions on minorities for the past 40 years.

There are 55 minority cultures in China, the largest of which is the Zhuang, Hui and Uighur. While small in number (less than 10% of the total population) they occupy 64% of China's land area, mostly at their borders.

This poses a problem that all large empires in history have faced. The British Empire could never have hoped to maintain control over colonies like India or Malaysia - regions that are
(1) Far away
(2) Ethnically different from the rulers
(3) Speak a different language

- will eventually rebel and seek independence unless they are given very favourable treatment. The Soviet Union broke apart - and China learned most of their lessons in political and administrative control from them.

To keep a region from seeking independence, you need to convince them it is in their interest to be part of China. Hence the policy of RAEM - "Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities" - which grant special rights to minorities.

Any area in China where an ethnic minority exceeds 20% of the population, it gets given special rights. This applies to the province (state) level, prefecture and county level. The governor must be from that ethnic minority, and the region gets independence of finance, economic planning, control of local police, and choice of local language in schools and government. They also get increased representation in the legislature, and increased healthcare funding and economic development investment. Basically this is the carrot approach. RAEM regions grew their economies and population faster than the Han majority regions, and Xinjiang is no exception.

Interestingly, it is this policy (copied from the Soviet Union) that allowed the Chinese Communist Party to rise to power - they gained broad support from minorities, and it allowed them to displace the Nationalist government (which lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan). The Chinese Communist Party could be argued to have rose to power due to the equitable way they treated their minorities - giving them a higher degree of independence and autonomy than most governments in the world currently do. Very few governments in the world today allow local minorities the freedom to mandate the use their own language in their school syllabus or government, for example. China still retains the policy of RAEM as one of the three fundamental cornerstones of the Communist Party ideology (the other two are socialism and CCP leadership)

Of the 55 minority groups, only two have mounted serious efforts at seeking independence - Tibetans and Uyghurs. Both are fuelled by external influences - the Dalai Lama in exile remains a spiritual leader for the Tibetans, while the Uighurs are inspired by radical Islam, Turkic nationalism and the independence of other former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

In recent decades, an ascendant China has given ethnic groups an incentive to identify themselves with the Chinese nation. Its surging economy has made it a pragmatic choice for many minorities to learn Mandarin instead of their own local language, further improving integration.

So that's why the Uyghur were never subject to birth restrictions, even though the Han Chinese living alongside them in the same region were put under the One Child Policy - heavy handed intervention by the central government could have incited minorities to rebel and seek independence.

Nowadays, though, China is so strong and has the support of the vast majority of minorities - it does not need to "play nice" with the Uyghurs anymore. As one of the only "problem" minorities in China causing problems (terror attacks, etc) it seems like the CCP have made a calculation that the most practical way of making this problem go away is to use authoritarian social control to eliminate the source of unrest and bring them in line with the rest of the Han Chinese. No more carrots, the sticks are out.

From the point of view of the Chinese, they represent the gold standard globally in their treatment of minorities - see how Australia / Canada / US / UK treated their colonies or natives. Any accusations of them "mistreating" their minorities coming from West sounds completely out of touch with reality, bordering on insanity.
posted by xdvesper at 3:53 AM on July 17, 2021 [18 favorites]


To add to that - I found the recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan interesting, in the context of China's relations with Muslim countries.

The US War on Terror in Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 241,000 people since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. (primarily UNAMA figures). Mere days after the US withdrawal, the Taliban issues a statement welcoming China's investments to rebuild their shattered infrastructure. And the world still wonders why not a single Muslim majority country has joined the Western world in condemning China's treatment of the Uyghur...

One side destroys, while the other, rebuilds. One could almost imagine a dystopian conspiracy where the CIA and the CCP are actually working together! (obviously not, but would make a good fiction book)

This mirrors a long-standing joke in China that Peking University creates all the social revolutionaries who tear the country apart, and the nearby Tsinghua University creates all the engineers who put the country back together again...
posted by xdvesper at 3:57 AM on July 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


While hoping to avoid any red herrings, I'm genuinely trying to understand what makes the imprisonment of 1 million Uyghurs (of, it looks like, 12-25 million in China) more of a genocide than the incarceration of people of African-American heritage in the US? In 2004 this paper quoted it as 17% of black men. If those numbers are correct, that is 2-4x a greater proportion of a population; or perhaps equivalent in the most conservative counts and just talking about racial-ethnic identity without sex.

Both, and many more cases, feel suffocating. It feels like we (all, wherever we are from) likely need to look inward, while still simultaneously looking outwards, to determine how to implement social change for the better. What forces of resistance there are to this "better" in our own cultures? Are these similar or entirely different in China?

I suppose BLM protests or Arab Spring catching on globally showed that perhaps these were at least global trends, and making an effect "at home" (wherever that might be) can lead to global change. The same true of the continuing era of anti-colonialism, in both providing models of oppression, and ways to oppose them.
posted by rubatan at 8:19 AM on July 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


From the point of view of the Chinese, they represent the gold standard globally in their treatment of minorities - see how Australia / Canada / US / UK treated their colonies or natives.

Well, the first problem I see with the Chinese perspective on this is that they even see Xinjiang as a colony with natives instead of a province with people. The second and bigger problem is that they are comparing themselves with how the Brits and Americans did things, which is frankly a very, very low bar to clear. This is like the person that goes around beating people up and putting them in the hospital comparing themselves to a serial killer and saying, "Hey, I'm a great guy!".

Sure, buddy.
posted by FJT at 8:20 AM on July 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


Nazis-as-bad-guys has been tiring for my whole life. Why are Nazis the single true stereotype of an ultimate evil bad guy that always gets trotted out (I'm in the US)? Because if it's them, then it's not us. That's changed in the past few years.

This truly terrible genocide is the new ultimate evil bad guy so we don't have to look inward.
posted by aniola at 9:00 AM on July 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


(We should look inward and outward.)
posted by aniola at 9:01 AM on July 17, 2021


I appreciate MeFites in this thread asking for recommendations on actions to take, and hope there continues to be constructive suggestions to that end, along with links to organizations working on this.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 12:02 AM on July 18, 2021


Owning the libs, China style.
posted by homerica at 10:12 AM on July 18, 2021


I live in the US. Here's the wikipedia article on incarceration in the United States. Don't buy from China (see above), don't buy "made in the USA" (US prisons), don't buy from far away (climate change). Frequently, there are no good options for buying things new right now.


use it up
wear it out
make it do, or
do without

posted by aniola at 6:11 PM on July 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I strongly suspect that at some point in the future, we will look back on the West's self-interested rapprochement with the Chinese government, beginning with Nixon's (in)famous trip in 1972, as a colossal mistake.

It didn't have to turn out this way. It wasn't inevitable. Tiananmen Square really could have been the watershed moment, but it wasn't. And then, before Xi took office, China had been slowly liberalizing for decades---since Deng Xiaoping! Xi Jinping surprised everyone by going hard authoritarian, including the CCP central committee, who installed him because they thought he was stupid and he'd be easy to control.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:44 PM on July 19, 2021 [4 favorites]




re: moorooka

Thank you for linking that amazing specimen of CCP English-language propaganda.

I'm always struck by how unsophisticated China is in its forays into these things. Like, maybe they should just farm it out to Russian intelligence, who are quite good at sowing doubt and creating wiggle room for odious views. This reads like a transliterated press release direct from The Party. It's not how academics write, nor how Western journalists write. I wonder if those "signatories" know their names are appearing here. I've often puzzled how China can be so good at so many things, and yet so bad at this, and I've settled on the conclusion that they are not sending their A-game. Maybe the English language propaganda office is full of people who failed out of everything else.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:03 AM on July 24, 2021


they are not sending their A-game

Their A-game just ain't that good. The citizens are largely cowed, and ready to stand aside and pretend to believe. They do not have practice in needing effective rhetoric because internally, they depend on the threat of force.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:16 AM on July 24, 2021


China has an island of 7+ million people where millions of adults have better command of English than the average American, but they don't trust any of them enough to let them write the propaganda!
posted by jamjam at 1:58 AM on July 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


Alexander Reid Ross writes for Haaretz's opinion page about the Xinjiang: Understanding Complexity, Building Peace report, including some disturbing connections between the report's authors and international fascism and the alt-right, and its parallels to Holocaust denialism.
This bizarre reference [to Lev Gumilev] makes sense in light of the organization that led this this effort – the Centro Studi Eurasia e Mediterraneo (CeSE-M), or Italian Eurasian Mediterranean Research Center. The banal-sounding think tank was born out of the network of Claudio Mutti, who's been described as a "Nazi-Maoist," combining neo-fascism with ideas taken from the extreme left. Arrested in Italy under suspicion for involvement in fascist terrorism after the 1969 bombing at the Piazza Fontana in Milan, Mutti has long engaged in international fascist organizing, establishing relations with Libya, China, and of course Russia. He's also an admirer of Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism – a convert to Shia Islam (taking the name of the SS officer who found post-war sanctuary in Egypt and advised President Nasser), his journal, "Jihad," was funded for several years by Iran, and his Dugin-style "neo-Eurasianism" is said to combine "anti-Semitism with virulent anti-Westernism." [...]
He founded a far-right publishing house which reprinted works by Italian fascist (and alt-right hero) Julius Evola, Nazi sympathizer and spy Savitri Devi and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. He also republished the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with his own supportive commentary - and explains why the Protocols are "true" in a lecture available on YouTube.
Several signatories to the report have similarly unsavory backgrounds.

Ross argues that the target audience for the report, however, is not the international alt-right movement, but actually the hard left, and notes that many of the report's talking points have been picked up by notionally anti-imperialist outlet The Greyzone (Wikipedia link because I'm not going to link directly; you can find it on Google if you care to). Greyzone's tweets have subsequently been amplified by CCP officials.

Ross is also the author of Against the Fascist Creep, which profiles US rightwing and alt-right extremism vis-a-vis the rise of Donald Trump.

The Greyzone has apparently only come up once before here on MeFi, in the context of leftist protests in Latin America in late 2019.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:28 AM on July 27, 2021


Well if that’s how we’re going to judge the credibility of research on this topic I have some bad news about Adrian Zenz
posted by moorooka at 6:51 PM on July 27, 2021


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