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Uyghurs in Xinjiang – Onward to the Inevitable
- phoebus 8y agoUyghurs' backward culture need to be improved to modern time. For example, they don't respect other people by thinking that pork is shit. This is creating a lot of conflicts between Uyghurs and normal people. They should learn to respect other people's food.
- 01100011 8y agoOfftopic. I'm now to the point where I reflexively close a tab if a model dialog pops up and obscures the content. Why do so many sites insist on annoying their users these days?
- gardnerbickford 8y agoTo prevent many such bothers you can enable Fanboy's Annoyances list in uBlock Origin. Please don't miss the irony of you complaining about full screen modals on an article discussing xenophobic genocide. You may experience some down votes for venting your first world problems at a poorly chosen time.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoThank you for making this reply. I knew the comment was in poor taste but you really captured why nicely.
- yorwba 8y agoIt's interesting that "genocide" is the term you chose, when the mass killings haven't started yet. Maybe it's because that feels like the inevitable outcome of the current situation, just as the internment camps were the inevitable outcome of the apartheid-like segregated society described in the article?
- dx87 8y agoGenocide is any attempt to destroy a group of people or their culture. Killing is one method of commiting genocide, but imprisoning members of a culture in an attempt to destroy that culture is also considered genocide.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoNo, genocide has a pretty precise definition, actually. I'm sure I'll get downmodded to hell for pointing this out, but what's happening in xinjiang right now is a mass internment, with terrorism as the casus belli. It might turn into ethnic cleansing in the near future. It's unlikely to turn into genocide, and it's definitely not right now.
- chr1 8y agoWhere did you find a definition about the culture? Searching genocide on google brings up only definitions including killing, and the word itself means killing people not culture.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> the mass killings haven't started yet That all depends on your perspective. Xinjiang used to be where the Dzunghar Mongols lived. The Uyghurs are just the people who filled the vacuum.
- arduanika 8y agoIt's practically the Always Sunny pilot, where Charlie is reeling from a cancer diagnosis yet all Dennis can think of is mooching some sugar from him for his coffee.
- zhte415 8y agoOne hour, 22 upvotes, and disappeared? I found it carefully written and well worth sharing. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoDamn really? I just finished reading and I thought it was really interesting.
- zhte415 8y agoI thought very interesting too.
- paulorlando 8y agoThanks. For a while I had been thinking about my experience there and how things have changed. Glad you liked it.
- sctb 8y agoOK, we've turned off the flags and wound back the clock on the post.
- burfog 8y agoMaybe you could make something to alert yourself whenever a story appears to be related to China. Stories about China seem to always get flagged to death whenever they include anything that could be considered unflattering.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoHi sctb, I’m given to understand that you’re one of the moderators here. I’ve tried to contact you three times in theee weeks through email, and this is my third time trying to get your attention in the comments, so far without a response. Is there a better way to contact you? I don’t feel good about inserting my comment in an unrelated post like this, but I’m unsure what else to do.
- intelliderp 8y agoIs this the future of genocide? Uninquired about, unmentioned, and forgotten as soon as it was noticed. I don't really care what Steven Pinker thinks. It is truly a sad world to live in.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoWhat on Earth happened to the comments here?
- arduanika 8y agoFor one thing, 01100011's comment is ambiguous: as in, "This is an off-topic comment, but <whines about model [sic] dialog>", or "I find this submission to be off-topic". Charitably, let's say it's the former. Still, the discussion got off to an acrimonious start. Submission is clearly on-topic. Country sets up concentration camps; big tech aids and abets at every turn; Google comes this close to building them a bespoke censorship machine. Clearly relevant in a technical forum, beyond merely "gratify[ing] intellectual curiosity". Never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag As far as the quantity of downvotes, far be it from me to suggest that a nationalistic pride and defensiveness might grip the Xi regime's many apologists.
- thratchnee 8y agoOf course, everyone that disagrees with you is a foreign shill.
- peisistratos 8y agoI read and watch the Western news nowadays - Trump is a Russian spy as are his staff, the majority of UKers voted Brexit because of the Russians, the yellow vests are Russian backed, the Italian five stars are Russian stooges. Anything the establishment doesn't like is Russia's doing - including the elections in Italy, the US and UK. I just watched TV today where the congressmen and commentators talked about Trump's lawyer and the Russians are behind everything. Western liberals have really gone mad. It's like 50s McCarthyism jumped to the other party. We have been hearing this for over a century actually, about Russia being why people want what they want versus what the elite want, even before the 1924 Zinoviev letter. Maybe the Chinese are next in line for this mainstream conspiracy mindedness.
- greesil 8y ago
- sverige 8y agoThe observation that the cultural distance between the author and Uyghurs is less than that between the author and Han Chinese rings true for me. I've never been to China, but I've had a similar sense of the distance with Chinese and Muslim friends here in the U.S., even though theoretically I "should" feel closer culturally to my Chinese friends with whom I share a common religion. Very interesting indeed.
- thratchnee 8y agoWhat units do you measure culture in? I feel more similar to my Middle Eastern friends than I do to my Western ones, do any of our opinions have objective merit?
- exolymph 8y agoI vouched for this comment, which was previously invisible unless you had showdead toggled on. The thought is expressed civilly and I see no reason for it to be flagged out of the conversation.
- thratchnee 8y agoIt's a controversial topic and this is a new account. I know it's against the guidelines but I seriously believe that the intellectual rigor commentors on this site hold themselves to has gone down recently. So many unsubstantiated claims without anyone calling them out.
- mirimir 8y agoBased on TFA, it's pretty clear that Uyghurs and Western Europeans are far more similar than either is to Han Chinese. By appearance, which more-or-less means genetics. And by religion and culture, both Uyghurs and Western Europeans having been Judeo-Christian for centuries. But anyway, it'd be better if Xinjiang were independent. Or even if it had been occupied by Russia, as the "stans" and Mongolia were. But so it goes. And arguably, if there were some area, occupied by China, that was populated largely by Jews or Slavs or some other Western European ethnic group, they'd be just as screwed as the Uyghurs are. Edit: If someone actually has some evidence that TFA is wrong, and that Buddhist Han Chinese were historically the majority in Xinjiang, please share. Everything that I've found online does seem to agree.
- topkai22 8y agoWonderful article, but I reject the conclusion that the mass internments and violence were inevitable on principle. Ultimately, the decisions that lead to these outcomes are made by people, people who should be able to say "we've seen this script before, and I don't like where it is going." If we should have learned anything from the first half of the 20th century is that simply accepting the systematic subjegation of minorty groups can lead to horrific outcomes. For a while in the late 20th century, it felt like these sorts of actions were beyond realpolitik and there would be true international condemnation and shame. I wish those days were still with us.
- chibg10 8y ago> For a while in the late 20th century, it felt like these sorts of actions were beyond realpolitik and there would be true international condemnation and shame. I wish those days were still with us. It's personally been very eye-opening for me over the past decade to see just how much the size of a country's economy can wielded as club to silence international opposition and how easily the international community goes along with it. I was always aware intellectually that the world revolves around economics/business/trade interests, but seeing so many otherwise liberal/progressive countries remain conspicuously silent in so many areas where retaliation from Beijing is virtually assured has really been both disappointing and sort of amazing to watch at the same time.
- realusername 8y ago> It's personally been very eye-opening for me over the past decade to see just how much the size of a country's economy can wielded as club to silence international opposition and how easily the international community goes along with it That's the big shift occurring since the end of WWII. Countries lost power and influence to businesses & companies, every decade it's been more and more visible until the situation of today.
- Sniffnoy 8y agoBut it's not Chinese companies that go around making these threats -- it's the Chinese government with their ability to control those companies or cut off access to them. Same old monopoly on violence that's doing this, just wielded against your trading partners rather than you directly.
- peisistratos 8y agoIt's funny how the USA is in its 17th year of war and occupation and drone strikes in Afghanistan, about 40 years after it sent Osama bin Laden there to wage jihad and overthrow the secular government - yet we hear not about that in the West, but about something we have almost nothing to do with and have no control over - how the Chinese are treating what in US parlance would be called Islamic jihadists in their own territory. With an expansiveness to the definition possibly equivalent to the US's.
- cromwellian 8y ago> what in US parlance would be called Islamic jihadists in their own territory. Bad analogy, because the vast majority of the Uighurs are ordinary people who are being hurt by a capricious dragnet. The proper analogy is the WW2 Japanese Internment of Japanese Americans by the FDR government.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoEven that analogy has problems. America was at war with Japan. China is happily and deeply economically engaged with Muslim nations. It is almost entirely an internal matter for China to maintain control and order.
- cromwellian 8y agoYou say control and order, I say rounding Uighur for things like having a beard or refusing to let PLA soldiers stay in their house. The language you’re using denudes the situation of any semblance of the real horror of it. The ‘control and order’ you’re talking about goes far beyond putting up security checkpoints or arresting people for disorder, they’re sending people to re-education camps for the mere suspicion of opposition and they are forcibly trying to “HANify” these people’s culture away unlike the other ethnic minorities in China like the Dong, Miao, Hui, or Yi. Is it an internal manner? Sure. Do I have to ageee with it? Nope, it does not absolve the PRC of criticism. The usage of terrorism to erect a security surveillance state should be opposed everywhere.
- 8y ago
- _cs2017_ 8y agoI wonder what the Chinese government's long term plan is. Do they expect to just continue on with this heavily antagonistic relationship with the Uyghurs forever? Wouldn't that cause an increasing risk of some kind of an uprising? Or do they expect that after a generation or so, the Uyghurs will largely assimilate into the Han culture? Wouldn't that require a lot more subtle and delicate policy? In any case, I really doubt it's realistic; if it was, I'd think it would have already been done. Also, the example of the former USSR suggests that even in a highly authoritarian and centralized country, ethnic tensions remain.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoProbably the latter. It's called "Hanification" 汉化, "han hua" where "han" refers to the Han ethnicity (not Chinese national identity which would instead be "zhong" 中). "Hua" means conversion. The phrase has existed for a very long time and it is an idea that people treat "seriously" like you see it in officially sanctioned writing
- thratchnee 8y ago中 is literally the word for middle or center, by itself it does not refer to the country. The term used to refer to national identity is 中华, which is the phrase used in China's official name. I'm confounded by how you could make such a bad mistake and still speak so confidently of Chinese racial relations. Imagine someone claiming the English term for British is simply the letter "U" and then going on to describe gentrification in Detroit. >The phrase has existed for a very long time and it is an idea that people treat "seriously" like you see it in officially sanctioned writing Complete non sequitur. The existance of a term for something does not mean that it's supported. If you actually read some of these "sanctioned writing"s you'd realize that the term is referred to in a negative sense in the same way the word gentrification is used. In fact it's mainly used in a historical context.
- zachguo 8y agoFYI, a bit of info rarely covered by Western media. China's attitude towards Uyghurs in the 20th century was super relaxed. As a result, the number of mosques grew from 2000 to 22000, Islam population grew rapidly while secular Uyghurs population shrunk, women started putting on black dresses, and children no longer went to schools and got educated in mosques instead. Entering 21st century, Uyghurs extremists bombed a few buses, slaughtered hundreds of Han civilians in city downtowns, and injured thousands. Then the CCP started the crackdown, and it's also a main driving factor for implementing the Great Firewall.
- parsadotsh 8y agoSources?
- zachguo 8y agoIt's from a few articles written by Chinese think tank to urge greater control over Xinjiang by central government. Wikipedia covers some major events, but demographic stats probably don't have English sources. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict