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The Left's Deafening Silence on China's Ethnic Cleansing
https://newrepublic.com/article/158374/left-deafening-silence-uighur-china
In an Alaska-sized chunk of western China known as Xinjiang, the greatest human rights atrocities of this unfurling decade continue to sprint forward, tipping toward genocide. The region has long been coveted by authorities in Beijing; standing in the way of their settler-colonial designs is the fact that the area is the homeland of approximately 11 million Uighurs, an ethnic Turkic and largely Muslim population. Chinese officials have also viewed the region, and the Uighurs in particular, as a petri-dish population on which to inflict their burgeoning, AI-infused dictatorship, and all of the crimes against humanity entailed therein.
The marriage of those two realities—of settler-colonialism as official policy, and of harnessing technology in the pure service of brutal dictatorship and ethnic Han supremacy alike—has, for the time being, cemented Beijing’s control over the region. But it has simultaneously resulted in one of the greatest mass atrocities the world has seen in decades. And yet just as significant is the silence from significant segments of the Western body politic, most especially those on the left. Where in the past one would find loud and bold confrontations with dictatorial illiberalism, from South Africa’s dark apartheid era, to the more recent persecution of the Muslim Rohingyas at the hands of the government of Myanmar, the Western left has been oddly muted and non-confrontational against what is arguably this young century’s most egregious crime against humanity.
The horrors Beijing has rolled out in Xinjiang are almost too nauseating to name. Buoyed by a series of thousands of so-called “re-education camps,” Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have effectively transformed the entire region into what The New York Times describes as a “virtual prison,” with everything from race-based facial recognition tools to the tracking of DNA samples and iris scans stalking Uighurs wherever they go. To take just one measure of comparison, Xinjiang now has a higher level of police density than even East Germany—which itself had magnitudes more police informants per capita than even Nazi Germany—at the end of the Cold War. “Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in” Xinjiang, wrote Der Spiegel.
The comparisons to North Korea extend beyond simple monitoring protocols. Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has researched Xinjiang development for some two decades, said in 2018 that Xinjiang “has become a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid.” Thum later added that the CCP’s policies in the region are now “a mix of the North Korean aspiration for total control of thought and action, with the racialized implementation of apartheid South Africa and Chinese AI [artificial intelligence] and surveillance technology.” The Economist concurred, describing the CCP’s policies in the region as “as race-based as apartheid in South Africa was.” As Chinese dictator Xi Jinping outlined in a series of leaked documents, the CCP will implement the “organs of dictatorship” to show “absolutely no mercy” to Uighurs, whether or not they’re sucked into the CCP’s camps.
The marriage of those two realities—of settler-colonialism as official policy, and of harnessing technology in the pure service of brutal dictatorship and ethnic Han supremacy alike—has, for the time being, cemented Beijing’s control over the region. But it has simultaneously resulted in one of the greatest mass atrocities the world has seen in decades. And yet just as significant is the silence from significant segments of the Western body politic, most especially those on the left. Where in the past one would find loud and bold confrontations with dictatorial illiberalism, from South Africa’s dark apartheid era, to the more recent persecution of the Muslim Rohingyas at the hands of the government of Myanmar, the Western left has been oddly muted and non-confrontational against what is arguably this young century’s most egregious crime against humanity.
The horrors Beijing has rolled out in Xinjiang are almost too nauseating to name. Buoyed by a series of thousands of so-called “re-education camps,” Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have effectively transformed the entire region into what The New York Times describes as a “virtual prison,” with everything from race-based facial recognition tools to the tracking of DNA samples and iris scans stalking Uighurs wherever they go. To take just one measure of comparison, Xinjiang now has a higher level of police density than even East Germany—which itself had magnitudes more police informants per capita than even Nazi Germany—at the end of the Cold War. “Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in” Xinjiang, wrote Der Spiegel.
The comparisons to North Korea extend beyond simple monitoring protocols. Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has researched Xinjiang development for some two decades, said in 2018 that Xinjiang “has become a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid.” Thum later added that the CCP’s policies in the region are now “a mix of the North Korean aspiration for total control of thought and action, with the racialized implementation of apartheid South Africa and Chinese AI [artificial intelligence] and surveillance technology.” The Economist concurred, describing the CCP’s policies in the region as “as race-based as apartheid in South Africa was.” As Chinese dictator Xi Jinping outlined in a series of leaked documents, the CCP will implement the “organs of dictatorship” to show “absolutely no mercy” to Uighurs, whether or not they’re sucked into the CCP’s camps.
12 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Seems Like It.
