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China's War on the Uighurs

Podcasts Nov 6, 2018 PS editors

In China’s far West, Muslim Uighurs are under attack in a wave of official repression occurring on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution. For James Leibold, an expert in China’s ethnic policies, the question is not what China is doing, but how to stop it. Listen to all episodes from your favorite podcast app, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or RSS Feed.

* This podcast was recorded on September 26, 2018. *

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Godfree Roberts Nov 6, 2018

In 2011 President Obama ordered the execution of Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen (for preaching the same Wahabbist extremism that some Uyhgurs have adopted) and separately executed his sixteen-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter separately, all without trial.

A Chinese friend, Xiao Zhang, writes, "I have a friend who just came back from Xinjiang and he has visited some of the reeducation camps and talked with people there. And he told me that Uighurs really received vocational education inside, not kidding, and cannot get out until completion of courses. The government in Xinjiang simply kept all the potential “trouble makers” they could find in detention based on the reports they received from various sources, among which reports from communites make up a major part. The government has known for years that poor-educated, impoverished and umployed people are more easily to be radicalized. Now they take actions to ensure they won’t make troubles. This is another example of Chinese style of government behaviour, just like one-child policy. You may hold good intentions, but you cannot force people to be good".
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Dark Chocolate Nov 6, 2018

Classic nonsense. Mao was brutal in his radical social engineering in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but Mao, or the Chinese government for that matter was never oppressive against the so called ethnic minorities, the Uighurs included. The word and concept of minorities in China simply does not have all the historic and cultural baggage nominally associated with minorities in other cultures. It simply means ethnic groups that are numerically small in population. Hence minorities.

For people in the know (that means mostly the Chinese people themselves), accusing China of ethnic and religious persecution makes as much sense as accusing the British people of 'Ping Pong Hooliganism'. It simply is not a thing. That's not to say in this world with diverse cultures these things does not exist. Western civilization in particular has a rich historic experience of ethnic and religious persecution the ramification which still haunts the West to this day . Hindu civilization even institutionalized ethnic persecution into an art form called the Caste system and communal violence between different religious and ethnic groups is a constant fixture in Indian society. So the irony is that ignorant Chinese people will never charge the West of religious and ethnic persecution not because these things are absent in these societies but because they are not cognizant of their existence. On the other hand ignorant and/or politically motivated Westerners will constantly charge China of religious and ethnic persecution not because they exist in China but because to them to oppress is just part of basic human nature, as basic as eating and sleeping!

Here is something for the readers and the author to ponder. Assuming China is guilty as charged, given China is the world's oldest continuous civilization, shouldn't we expect it will left behind a trail of cultural artifacts that points to these oppressions? In America short history for example, we have a noose as a symbol of lynching of African Americans, popular saying such as 'a good Indian is a dead Indian', anti-Semitism in Europe goes back thousands of years. And then of course there are all kinds of ethnic slurs. The 'N' word, the 'K' word, the 'C' word...etc. Can people or Sinologist find anything similar to these in China? What is the ethnic slurs of the Han Chinese for the Uighurs, Tibetans or any of the other 56 minorities group? None! And if Chinese are into religious oppression, why is that there is no religious war in China in the whole of Chinese history?

In all his self-righteous lecturing, what the author did here is to expose a very ugly side of Western civilization. And that is ethnic and religious oppression. Unbeknownst to him of course.
- Godfree Roberts Nov 6, 2018
  
  Mao was never brutal. Far from it. The Great Leap was interrupted by the El Nino event that also cut Canada's Prairie wheat crop in half and which the US exacerbated by imposing a grain embargo.
  
  The Cultural Revolution was non-violent and liberated 400 million peasants at the cost of a few dozen accidental deaths. Compare that to the 58,000 deaths in the French Revolution if you want to discuss brutality.
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