detaining people is not Genocide dude, so no they didn't admit anything.
I will admit that its really hard to understand what is going on with this, because as usual there are evil people on both sides of this story/conflict.
Yes the vast majority of anti-China propaganda is coming from the Neocons and the far right. People who had no qualms about slaughtering millions of muslims and demonizing them any chance they get.
Now all of a sudden those who hated muslims with a passion, suddenly care about muslims when they can use it to attack China.
Smells like BS tbh.
At the same time China is testing out a technological AI control grid and they are said to be in a race against the West to control AI and police state apparatus.
There's also some very strange bed fellows in this whole thing which makes it even more confusing.
Erik Prince's Blackwater firm is involved in the detention of Uguyhr muslims and he seems to have deals with the Chinese state, (or at least private business elements in China)
So while Prince is working with the Chinese to detain muslims, he is a part of the whole right wing network which is demonizing China.
If I were to guess, China is doing some bad shit, but at the same time it is massively exaggerated by the propagandists in the West.
The more you look at it through a meta-political lens (who is against who, who gains most from this), the more you will be led to denying damning evidences, evidences that are too inconvenient, too anomolous to fit into your preconceived hypothesis. It's not a good method of looking for the truth, because you will discard any data that does not confirm your theory.
Evidences such as: aerial photographs of newly built internment camps in Xianjiang (some showing crematoria and graveyards built alongside them), footage of the inside of the camps, testimony of detainees (r*pe, torture, forced abortions), statistical data showing decrease in Uyghur birth rates (how do you explain 60% decrease in birth rates over a three year period when birth rates in the country as a whole only fell by 10%?), testimony of Uyghurs who have fled to other countries and lost their family members.
Besides this, there are leaked CCP gov't documents admitting to the detention and specific targeting of the Uyghurs.
Xi Jinping: “There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals.”
Chen Quanguo: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”
Leaked videos of blindfolded and shackled Uyghur prisoners.
The historical precedent is clear - Uyghurs have always wanted their own state and their dissatisfaction culminated in events like the Urumqi riots, after which the CCP began to crack down harder on the Uyghurs.
The economic motive is there - the BRI initiative and Xianjiang's plentiful natural gas means China must consolidate its control there if they want to expand Westward.
China's historic behaviours are a further evidence in itself - what China is doing to the Uyghurs they did to the Falun Gong in the 90s and 00s (detention, torture, organ harvesting, killing); their treatment of the Hong Kongers; their detainment of ethnic Mongolians, forcing Chinese culture and language on them.
This is not to mention atheist China's consistent intolerance for competing ideologies, Islam being one such ideology.
Then you can look at what the CCP have admitted themselves. The above tweet about is a clear veiled inference to population control measures. Other Chinese social media propaganda, that they think is making them look good, similarly exposes their pathological outlook on the Uyghurs.
If you yourself admit at least that they are being detained, and possibly tortured and raped, is it such a big leap in logic to consider that they are also killing them?
Let's say for the sake of argument they aren't killing them. What they're doing is worse than killing, I firmly believe. Forcing them to marry and sleep with Han Chinese, taking away their children, aborting their unborn children, punishing them for displaying any Islamic affiliation, torturing and raping.
Also, genocide is not limited to killing. Its definition according to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court (ICC) mention transferring children to another group, and taking measures to prevent births, as two criteria for labelling genocide, criteria covered by the CCP's actions.
Lawyers have suggested that there is enough evidence to possibly convict, based on contravention of these statutes against genocide.
According to the legal opinion, that “it is at least arguable on the available evidence that there is an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Uyghur population of Xinjiang as such.” The evidence suggests that the actus reus requirements for the following specific crimes of genocide are fulfilled: “causing serious bodily or mental harm to Uyghurs in detention, including acts of torture and forced sterilizations; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The legal opinion further states that there is sufficient evidence to find the existence of a widespread and systematic attack on Uyghurs in Xinjiang within the meaning of Art. 7 of the Rome Statute and the actus reus of “enslavement, by the use of forced labor by former and current inmates of detention facilities; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, constituted by widescale deprivations of liberty of members of the Uyghur population held in detention facilities without charge or trial; torture in detention facilities, including the use of ‘tiger chairs’ and sexual violence; r*pe in detention facilities; enforced sterilization of Uyghur women, as part of efforts to reduce the Uyghur population; persecution, ranging from the deprivation of liberty to sexual violence and enslavement, directed against persons on the basis that they are members of the Uyghur population and/or Muslim; enforced disappearance of members of the Uyghur population.”
Testimony of Gulbahar Haitiwaji
Sometimes, one or another of us would faint. If she didn’t come round, a guard would yank her to her feet and slap her awake. If she collapsed again, he would drag her out of the room, and we’d never see her again. Ever. At first, this shocked me, but now I was used to it. You can get used to anything, even horror.
...
After almost five months in the Karamay police cells, between interrogations and random acts of cruelty – at one stage I was chained to my bed for 20 days as punishment, though I never knew what for – I was told I would be going to “school”. I had never heard of these mysterious schools, or the courses they offered. The government has built them to “correct” Uighurs, I was told.
...
Nadira showed me around the dormitory, which had the heady smell of fresh paint: the bucket for doing your business, which she kicked wrathfully; the window with its metal shutter always closed; the two cameras panning back and forth in high corners of the room. That was it. No mattress. No furniture. No toilet paper. No sheets. No sink. Just two of us in the gloom and the bang of heavy cell doors slamming shut.
This was no school. It was a re-education camp, with military rules, and a clear desire to break us. Silence was enforced, but, physically taxed to the limit, we no longer felt like talking anyway. Over time, our conversations dwindled. Our days were punctuated by the screech of whistles on waking, at mealtime, at bedtime. Guards always had an eye on us; there was no way to escape their watchfulness, no way to whisper, wipe your mouth, or yawn for fear of being accused of praying. It was against the rules to turn down food, for fear of being called an “Islamist terrorist”. The wardens claimed our food was halal.
At night, I collapsed on my bunk in a stupor. I had lost all sense of time. There was no clock. I guessed at the time of day from how cold or hot it felt. The guards terrified me. We hadn’t seen daylight since we arrived – all the windows were blocked by those damned metal shutters. Though one of the policemen had promised I’d be given a phone, I hadn’t been. Who knew I was being held here? Had my sister been notified, or Kerim and Gulhumar? It was a waking nightmare. Beneath the impassive gaze of the security cameras, I couldn’t even open up to my fellow detainees. I was tired, so tired. I couldn’t even think any more.
...
At her signal, we all stood up as one. “Lao shi hao!” This greeting to the teacher kicked off 11 hours of daily teaching. We recited a kind of pledge of allegiance to China: “Thank you to our great country. Thank you to our party. Thank you to our dear President Xi Jinping.” In the evening, a similar version ended the lesson: “I wish for my great country to develop and have a bright future. I wish for all ethnicities to form a single great nation. I wish good health to President Xi Jinping. Long live President Xi Jinping.”
...
But as the days went by, fatigue set in like an old enemy. I was exhausted, and my firm resolve to resist was on permanent hold. I tried not to give in, but school went steamrolling on. It rolled right over our aching bodies. So this was brainwashing – whole days spent repeating the same idiotic phrases. As if that weren’t enough, we had to do an hour of extra study after dinner in the evening before going to bed. We would review our endlessly repeated lessons one last time. Every Friday, we had an oral and written test. By turns, beneath the wary eye of the camp leaders, we would recite the communist stew we’d been served up.
In this way, our short-term memory became both our greatest ally and our worst enemy. It enabled us to absorb and regurgitate volumes of history and declarations of loyal citizenship, so we could avoid the public humiliation dished out by the teacher. But at the same time, it weakened our critical abilities. It took away the memories and thoughts that bind us to life. After a while I could no longer picture clearly the faces of Kerim and my daughters. We were worked until we were nothing more than dumb animals. No one told us how long this would go on.
...
Death lurked in every corner. When the nurses grabbed my arm to “vaccinate” me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilising us. That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice.During violent interrogations by the police, I kowtowed under the blows – so much so that I even made false confessions. They managed to convince me that the sooner I owned up to my crimes, the sooner I’d be able to leave. Exhausted, I finally gave in. I had no other choice. No one can fight against themselves for ever. No matter how tirelessly you battle brainwashing, it does its insidious work. All desire and passion desert you. What options do you have left? A slow, painful descent into death, or submission. If you play at submission, if you feign losing your psychological power struggle against the police, then at least, despite it all, you hang on to the shard of lucidity that reminds you who you are.
You cannot deny, this is a fate worse than death. At least if you are killed, your identity is left intact.
I will not ignore this simply because it is an inconvenient truth for certain political camps. I have no conflict of interest here - America isn't my friend either.
People deny the CCP's systematic campaign of suppression and eradication of the Uyghurs in Xianjiang all the time. I have heard a few people say it in this thread alone. But this view has a precedent, and it is a view that is held for certain political motives,
as CJ Werleman explains.
Despite this mountain of evidence, however, a growing cadre of Uyghur genocide deniers has formed within left-wing circles – specifically bloggers and pundits who refer to themselves as ‘anti-imperialists’. Chinese and Russian state media outlets, such as the Global Times and Russia Today, amplify their anti-Uyghur conspiracy theories and attacks against pro-Uyghur activists.
“It’s important to say loudly: the ‘Uyghur genocide’ narrative is a hoax that has been fabricated as a major weapon in its New Cold War against China,” tweeted Asa Winstanley, a blogger for the pro-Palestinian publication Intifada, in support of his colleague Ali Abunimah’s article, which falsely claims that the Uyghur genocide is built entirely on the imagination of a single source – Adrian Zenz – whom he smears as a “far-right, anti-Semitic German Christian Zionist”.
Last week, the far-left blog The Grayzone – the founder and contributors of which appear regularly as guests on Russia Today to lay cover for Assad-Russia war crimes in Syria – falsely claimed that stories regarding forced Uyghur labour in Xinjiang are a propaganda campaign “brought to you by US Gov, NAT, arms industry to drive Cold War PR blitz”.
...
Genocide denialism among the ‘anti-imperialist’ left pre-dates China’s atrocities in Xinjiang and Assad-Russia’s in Syria, however. Those in this camp also denied and downplayed genocide in Soviet Union in the 1950s); Mao’s China in the 1960s; Cambodia in the 1970s; and Bosnia in the 1990s.
...
This is not to say that all genocide deniers among the ‘anti-imperialist’ left have sinister or manipulative motives. I know a number of Uyghur genocide deniers who care deeply for human rights generally, but are blinded by their reflexive anti-US bias. In other words: the problem does not lie in their heart, but in their head.
More often than not, their genocide denialism reflects an ignorance or rudimentary understanding of how the international system works. Their reflexive opposition to American foreign policy leads them to view the world through a myopic lens, one which posits the US as the only force for evil in the world; an insatiable power-accumulator.
Anti-US imperialist ideology is rooted in geopolitical or international relations illiteracy; a failure to understand that we live in an anarchical international system; one absent a governing global body or police force and thus leaving each nation-state responsible for its own security. Because nations cannot be sure of their neighbour’s or rival’s intention, each nation is left with no choice but to gather as much power –military or diplomatic – as possible. It is the root cause of every arms race and both World Wars.
If the US is vanquished, as anti-imperialists wish, world peace won’t magically occur, as anti-imperialists believe. War and imperial conquests pre-date the United States.
The vacuum created by the absence of US power will be filled by another – China or Russia, for instance, which will behave no better than the US and most probably worse should they rise to global hegemonic status. The former empires of Rome, Spain, Portugal, Britain and the Soviet Union read as historical evidence for that.
This is not to excuse US imperialistic behaviour. America has been responsible for some of the worst crimes in the current and former century. The Iraq invasion, the ‘War on Terror’ and armed interventions in Latin America during the 1980s should embarrass any proponent of US power. But, when one becomes blinded by anti-US imperialism, the danger is that one also becomes blinded to human rights violations carried out by other states and powers – particularly those not allied to America. Worse still, one starts looking for reasons to excuse the behaviour of adversaries, such as China and Russia, in order to score points against the US, at great human cost to the victims of these rivals.
One can then slip into genocide denialism territory – where both dupes and monsters perpetuate the continuation of horrific violence.
I myself don't really want to argue this. If you don't believe this is happening, that's your choice. If you want to make a thread on this, feel free. This thread is exclusively for discussion of the genocide itself.
www.rfa.org
