I could go on and on about Adrian Zenz, his terrible methodologies; about terrorist groups trained by Isis and utilized by American for creating unrest in Xinjiang; stats about real population numbers in Xinjiang; about differences between American and Chinese anti-terror efforts regarding radical islamic terror groups; about infrastructure building in the area, investment by China; about the number of mosques per capita; about the preservation of regional identity that Xi is working towards; etc. Etc.
But, regardless, just saying that I don't believe that there is religious persecution in Xinjiang means, in their eyes, that I don't care about our Muslim brothers and sisters.
It's similar to talking about Hong Kong.
Libs use these places as tools to spread liberalism, so caring about the actual policies, people, and reality is a disadvantage to conversation.
How can I approach these subjects?
Maybe the better question to ask is: Why can't it be true that there is no mass killing taking place in XJ, true that Adrian Zenz is an idiot, true that the CIA is trying to take advantage of the situation, but also true that China's mass arrests of people before they commit any crime constitutes mass racial profiling? And true that that is different from what the FBI does when it frames an autisitic muslim teenager, or what France does when forces new muslim immigrants to take "acculturation" classes, only in the sense that it is taking place on a much larger scale?
You can critique western coverage of the issue without defending what is clearly an Islamophobic policy. Despite what some people on this site might tell you, anti-imperialism doesn't mean you have to defend Xi Jinping on every point, all the time, always.
Yes, I fully agree with this. It is really the straight up stating of millions of Uighur detainees, killings organ harvesting, and cultural erasure that gets me.
There is definitely something going on, and certainly there are detainees, and may be some abuses, but as far as I can tell, there isn't any credible evidence that re-education camps are not just education and detention facilities.
You're right that detaining people who do no crimes is bad - is that actually done?
Yes, definitely, even Chinese state media says they are detaining people who are "radicalized" or "susceptible to radicalization", not just people who have committed a crime (and beyond that, we should remember that some things which are considered crimes in XJ probably shouldn't be). In my experience, even the most hardcore members of the China brigade here mostly just nibble around the edges of this. "They get to leave the facility on weekends" or "they are taught how to be electricians" or whatever--none of which eliminates the fact that people are being taken from their homes, separated from their families, and laboring for pay that is far below even the (capitalist, exploitative) prevailing market rate.
Thanks. You bring up a good point that I forgot, about the labor. This has been a big media talking point. What is the truth there?
No one with access to this site knows for sure what "the truth" is, but given that inmate labor is pretty common in China (as it is in a lot of the world), and that the administrators in charge of these sites would stand to benefit materially from using the labor of the people under their control, our default assumption certainly shouldn't be "It's not happening." If even 20% of what's reported in Western media is true, then there's definitely a lot of forced labor happening.
But I don't ask that anyone believe anything in Western media, just that the next time someone here drops a 5000-word post sourced entirely from Chinese state media, random people on twitter, and the same two or three journalists, we treat those sources with the the same healthy skepticism we would level at the NYT.
The truth is somewhere between it being slave labour (western pov) and just them learning good skills that is applicable to the market in China (China's pov). Nothing is ever white and black I guess