China says interning Muslims brings them into 'modern' world

[noddy]

https://www.apnews.com/ce4c3e49f24d4223b831b3f4c19eb2cf

China on Tuesday characterized its mass internment of Muslims as a push to bring into the “modern, civilized” world a destitute people who are easily led astray — a depiction that analysts said bore troubling colonial overtones.

The report is the ruling Communist Party’s latest effort to defend its extrajudicial detention of Central Asian Muslim minorities against mounting criticism.

China’s resistance to Western pressure over the camps highlights its growing confidence under President Xi Jinping, who has offered Beijing’s authoritarian system as a model for other countries.

About 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been arbitrarily detained in mass internment camps in China’s far west Xinjiang region, according to estimates by a U.N. panel.

[Ibrahim]

The news of these internment camps in Xinjiang is so outrageous that even I, ever searching for new things to be outraged about, didn't believe it could be real. It had to be an exaggeration of the imprisonment of hardcore separatists.

Alas, satellite images seem to show otherwise.

[noddy]

on the flipside - being jammed into a ghetto with little to no ability to escape and then being force fed propoganda is as a pretty good simulation of modernity.

[Ibrahim]

Occurs to me that by placing this in the "Muslim World" subforum instead of the China thread in the "East Asia" subforum we are tacitly supporting Uyghur separatism.

[noddy]

Im all for it, which is why I posted it in this section.

The outcomes for Chinese colonialism always looks suspiciously like those from European colonialism, with the original inhabitants living in ghettos, strangers in their own countries.

[Ibrahim]

Im all for it, which is why I posted it in this section.

The outcomes for Chinese colonialism always looks suspiciously like those from European colonialism, with the original inhabitants living in ghettos, strangers in their own countries.

The Dalai Lama's position on Tibet is the one I'd like to see in Xingjiang, wherein the territory remains part of China, but is left alone to run its own domestic religious and cultural affairs, insofar as they don't violate the Basic Law. It seems more realistic than full-on independence and less likely to result in bloodshed. This is also what the SARs were originally supposed to be.

But it doesn't look like Beijing is interested. The governor who has implemented this new internment camp system is the same one who oversaw the last crackdown in Tibet.

[noddy]

I suspect you dont get to be autonomous if your land is the gateway to middle eastern energy supplies and the european market.

[Ibrahim]

I suspect you dont get to be autonomous if your land is the gateway to middle eastern energy supplies and the european market.

Were I Tibetan or Uughur I might say: feel free to mine and drill, just don't operate concentration camps and bulldoze ancient monasteries etc.

But I guess Beijing wants to do both. The easily rode out the "Free Tibet" movement of the 80's and 90's, so they will have no problem doing the same to a tiny Muslim population.

[Typhoon]

Large scale interment and forced indoctrination is reprehensible.
However, repression typically leads to resistance.

On the other hand, as with Tibet, PR China has a more insidious and probably more effective long term method: flooding the region with ethnic Han Chinese thereby making the local nationality a small minority in their own region where they once the large majority.

The method is probably as old as human history.

Recent examples:

The German National Socialist had planned to deport and/or eliminate the populations of the occupied Slavic and Baltic nations and replace them with Germans, but the loss of the war put an end to their plan.

Imperial Japan sent lots of settlers to the occupied part of mainland China that was then Manchuria. Also, the loss of the war lead to mass repatriation.

The Soviet-Russian Communists employed this method with varying degrees of success in occupied countries: success in eastern Ukraine, limited success in Estonia and Latvia, abject failure in Lithuania and Georgia.

Of course, the relatively small indigenous populations of N, C, and S America were completely overrun by waves of immigration.

Unfortunately, PR China can probably carry out this Sinofication program.

[Ibrahim]

Absolutely. Uyghurs are a small minority in Xinjiang, and have been for some time. Moreover ethnic Han are given preference in employment in Xinjiang's energy extraction industry, which has also driven up local prices. Uyghur are disproportionately impoverished in their own homelands, and Han attitudes towards Uyghurs would often make a hardened alt-right troll blush.

I look at it a bit like I look at American and Canadian treatment of First Nations/American Indians: you already won, you don't need to keep running up the score.