• regul [any]
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    4 years ago

    I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect the Uyghurs to subsume their identity while they're essentially being colonized by Han Chinese just because you taught them Mandarin and gave them jobs in a factory.

    If they're left out of the massive creation of wealth that is occurring (which I fully expect they will be since, you know, they don't own the means of production) it's not going to go smoothly.

      • regul [any]
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        4 years ago

        I very purposefully said "subsume" and not "eliminate" because what's expected is that they'd view themselves as Chinese first and as Uyghurs second, right? With "Uyghur" in the future carrying an implication of "Chinese".

        Your defense of belt and road reads like a defense of southeast asian sweatshops. Just because China is doing it doesn't mean it's good. Cheering on the exploitation of people by capital because the global poverty stats will go down sounds like a straight up neoliberal talking point.

          • regul [any]
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            4 years ago

            It's fully within China's power to make these new factories that are being built (Uyghur) worker-owned cooperatives.

            From a Marxist point of view, the working conditions barely enter into why such factories are bad in Bangladesh and why they're still bad in China. Labor is being exploited in both.

            A pattern repeated elsewhere will repeat again: A new territory is opened for the expansion of capital. It is colonized and the indigenous people will not see the same benefits as their colonizers.

              • regul [any]
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                4 years ago

                I'd hardly call worker-owned co-ops a strictly anarchist organizing method just because they're horizontal.

                But as you said, co-ops are having the workers exploit themselves. This is why people say co-ops aren't socialism when they're inside a capitalist society. The difference being that they receive a greater proportion of the actual value of their labor vs. simple wages.

                What do you mean by "hard to implement at scale"? The capitalists are having the factories built. A state as strong as China's could surely expropriate these factories and give them to the workers.

                  • regul [any]
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                    4 years ago

                    BRI is mostly transportation infrastructure and coordinated at a very high level. However, this infrastructure investment has signaled to capitalists that Xinjiang is "open for business" and has spurred a lot of recent development (factory construction, housing construction).

                    I don't care so much about the road and train building so much as I care about the tagalong development alongside it, especially with respect to how the wealth from it is not going to the people who are from Xinjiang.

        • abdul [none/use name]
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          4 years ago

          Just because China is doing it doesn’t mean it’s good.

          No I think you don’t understand. Communism is when China does things. If you don’t approve of the ethnic cleansing, you aren’t a communist.