How many muslim countries can you count on the side that cry about a genocide in Xinjiang?

  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Yeah, I fear that there's a similar dynamic here. Many of the Uyghurs fell under the Wahhabist spell of radical Islam, and that kind of ideology doesn't mix well with a communist state. Likewise, China is heavily pursuing its poverty alleviation deadlines, and pushing the Uyghurs to become more integrated into the Chinese economy helps tremendously with that effort. Hence the job programs, subsidies, etc. Also, Xinjiang is central to the Belt and Road Initiative, and will become something like an economic pivot in the coming decades, so China wants to shore up control and dominance of the region to ensure smooth sailing.

    That said, I don't think it's going so far as Native boarding schools like Canada and the United States. Unlike these settler colonial states, in China they're building more mosques, exempting the Uyghurs from the one child policy to encourage population growth, and generally encouraging Uyghur culture to develop, granted within the bounds set by the Chinese state. There's always a tough line to toe when dealing with "regressive" cultures in a progressive state, and China is running straight into those troubles. I don't know if they're handling it perfectly (and the CPC has always been a bit heavy handed when it comes to things like this), but they're certainly not handling it like the largest genocide in recent memory as the US and Canada did.