I've talked about this on the site before, but the gist of my take is: it's definitely not as bad as Western media wants you to think, because in their pathology they like to project their dark underbelly onto others. However I personally get disheartened by the lack of skepticism for these camps among leftists.

My concern is that they are clearly approaching this situation in the mode of the secular nation-state, something that has never worked. You simply cannot approach Islam that way without getting something wrong at some point. Of course I don't want this to turn into a China struggle session, so I'll speak in a more general sense. What China is doing, regardless of the ideological position of the party, what they're doing in terms of their actions, is bad for the left globally and bad for the vulnerable Muslim community specifically, because their actions are consistent with cultural erasure. I would never go as far as to call it a cultural genocide, because that's absolutely not what the CPC is doing, they aren't nearly going that far. But what they are doing is not good either - they are diminishing unique cultural and spiritual practices and ways of life because they believe this will pacify the region. And it might very well do that, but that is not the same thing as saying it is the only way to make the region not a threat to you.

There are ways to positively develop Xinxiang's relationship to the State as a whole, to diminish terrorism in the region, without resorting to these kinds of policies, and as leftists we should want them to take those options because it protects a vulnerable community.

Let's say you were a smart, pragmatic Marxist and you found yourself having to navigate the Xinxiang problem, and since you are a Marxist obviously your goal here is to cultivate the necessary conditions to replace capitalism with a communist economic system. A smart thing to do, something which is rarely pursued because for some reason it's a novel idea, would be to help develop in the region a synthesis of Marxist ideals, Islam, and Uighur culture. As I've pointed out a lot, Islam and leftism are fully compatible and it's not very difficult to espouse an Islamic version of many of these ideologies. This would cultivate the idea within a population that reactionary terrorists are simply un-Islamic and provide nothing of value to you. Maybe even develop a distinctly Islamic strain of a vanguardist State in the area to serve as a perpetual check on counter-revolutionaries, and they'll do this because they are actively fueled by the belief that the revolution is willed by God. These would make for valuable allies, would they not? But for some strange reason people are barely willing to entertain the notion that you could construct a theological argument for communism when it's practically screaming at you when you open any holy book. For the Uighur people specifically, I am concerned that a similar effect will take place there, where the population loses any sense of meaning and suffers a form of political alienation, the same one many Muslims face today after having the political dimensions of the din taken away from them and having their own culture diminished. Just food for thought. Halal, of course.

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