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Uyghur secular culture is fine, but not its religious culture. The methods have gone significantly overboard but the motivation has always been what the state o
by pishpash 8y ago
Uyghur secular culture is fine, but not its religious culture. The methods have gone significantly overboard but the motivation has always been what the state openly said, to stem the "three evil forces" of "separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism."
Your question might be rhetorical but let's answer it at face value. What kind of standards does it set based on the values in the above observation? A strongly sovereign and non-interventionist world; a materialistic if not atheistic world; and one where terrorism is strongly suppressed at home by state power. These are starkly different value priorities than how the U.S.-led Western alliance might go about running the world, but it's worth considering without the prejudice of home bias.
- paul_milovanov 8y agoThere's no question that the current Xinjiang situation is tragic, that the Chinese measures are draconian, and that the sooner these camps close and people can return to living their lives the better. God forbid this were to escalate to mass murder, but Beijing is far smarter than that. However, at this point, the individual Uyghurs have a choice of assimilating by force (and learning Mandarin, which they en masse don't speak) and giving up part of their identity, or staying in camps indefinitely. Assimilation & submission is the only way this story ends well. China will have a stable, secure and controlled Xinjiang and they are pretty serious about it. It's not like anybody in the "global community" will seriously consider for a moment sanctions or (God forbid) any military action. Coverage of what's going on in Xinjiang is good, and so is welcoming Uygur refugees. But any encouragement or foreign support of dissidents/etc inside Xinjiang is deeply unethical because Uygurs must and will submit to Beijing and anything that delays that will hurt people and cost lives.