It's heart-breaking to see many of my Chinese friends / peers keep their heads in the sand about this. Usually they'll fall silent the topic arises. At most, they'll say something about cultural differences and social cohesion and that as an American I just couldn't possibly understand. If I press them on it they'll mention the Japanese internment camps in WWII, and I'll agree with them that it was awful and that my country has done evil things that I am ashamed of. But I've never heard this shame reciprocated.
I think most Americans would have gave a similar response during WWII as well. It's only with time that opinion has shifted to it being something that we are shameful of.
There are plenty of things happening in present day American policy that I am ashamed of. On the other hand, I'm grateful that I can openly criticize my government online without fear of imprisonment.
> I'll agree with them that it was awful and that my country has done evil things that I am ashamed of
I think what a lot of the non-West feels is that the West has done horrible things, benefited from it, and continues to commit modern colonialism and direct/indirect exploitation of developing countries to continually benefit from them.
The dissonance is in thinking that the West is no longer doing these things and only the Enemy (China/Russia/whoever) is.
Thus, taking an (invalid) higher moral ground is what probably turns your friends away.
Plenty of Americans were very outspoken against the Vietnam and Iraq wars, among other blunders. Plenty of us find the state of American politics absolutely deplorable. There is no shortage of critics.
Sure, there is plenty of room for improvement. I wish more people cared about social and economic issues, and I wish those who did care were more willing to act. But at least in America it's part of the conversation.
This brings to mind the South Park episode "I'm a little bit country" (Episode 100)
Hancock:
Mr. Franklin, where do you stand on the war issue?
Franklin:
I believe that if we are to form a new country, we cannot be a country that appears war-hungry and violent to the rest of the world. However, we also cannot be a country that appears weak and unwilling to fight to the rest of the world. So, what if we form a country that appears to want both?
Jefferson:
Yes. Yes of course. We go to war, and protest going to war at the same time.
Dickinson:
Right. If the people of our new country are allowed to do whatever they wish, then some will support the war and some will protest it.
Franklin:
And that means that as a nation, we could go to war with whomever we wished, but at the same time, act like we didn't want to. If we allow the people to protest what the government does, then the country will be forever blameless.
Adams:
[holding a slice of chocolate cake] It's like having your cake, and eating it, too.
Congressman 2:
Think of it: an entire nation founded on saying one thing and doing another.
Hancock:
And we will call that country the United States of America.
I imagine that you probably care more than the average American. But saying there’s room for improvement, while the USA has the largest military presence in the world, and uses it to bully everyone else, is quite frightening for the non-West.
> Vietnam and Iraq wars
It’s exactly these (older) examples which I am talking about. The West continues to fuel atrocities in the Middle East on literally a daily basis:
He is not more outspoken than “other Americans”. It’s a common sentiment for our past mistakes. Why? Because we don’t hide from them and pretend they didn’t happen. Our mistakes are recorded in literature even school textbooks, TV shows, and movies for all to see. Why? So there’s a much higher chance that we don’t repeat our mistakes, and we can be proactive at fixing issues that arise from them. This is a key feature of a democracy, though there are exceptions like Japan.
I think mainland Chinese people have a hard time separating the US government from the US population because of the forced conformity that the CCP demands of them, or they would realize that a large contingent of the US population on both political spectrums has wanted to pull back our military presence for a long time now. The US population and the US government are a lot less aligned than you think.
For the record, I’m a Chinese American so I’m not ignorant of what’s going on in mainland China.
For the record, I mentioned Vietnam and Iraq not in the context of the present day, but because a significant proportion of Americans were very outspoken about those wars as they were happening.
You're right, it's harder to remain actively informed about the day-to-day military action that accumulates into something awful. Even when we know about it, our political system doesn't give enough opportunities to give fine-grained feedback about specific issues. Usually the national conversation is dominated by culture war issues, and I can't help but feel that it's an intentional distraction so the public will forget that we're plundering the middle east etc..
But at least I am free to voice my opinion, and to bother all my friends and family about geopolitics when given the opportunity.
A utilitarian perspective is probably more productive than worrying about who has the moral high ground in any case. The fact is that the situation in Xinjiang is terrible and seems to be getting worse. The question is what can be done about it. For the Chinese government, the answer is simple: Close down the internment camps, and let the people go home. But the Chinese government isn't likely to read this comment, and even less likely to act on its advice. For other countries, the available actions will be more indirect. I think we should focus on getting as many Uyghurs out of the country as possible. This would require other countries to take them in as refugees or immigrants. It would also require some way of getting them physically out of China, which would be easier with the cooperation of the Chinese government. In theory, if China views the Uyghurs as a kind of nuisance, it should easily agree to let them leave for greener pastures, but in practice that doesn't seems to be the case. Perhaps the worry is that they will badmouth China once they leave. It's probably more complicated than that, but definitely worth pondering on with so many lives at stake.
> A utilitarian perspective is probably more productive than worrying about who has the moral high ground in any case.
While I agree with this, the OP was commenting about how their friends turn away when the issue is brought up, and comparing how OP reacts to similar crimes about their own country. So, that’s a point I felt warranted to discuss.
More generally, historically, colonization has always been about “taming the savages” and “teaching them (Western) morality”. Slavery and exploitation went hand in hand with this mindset.
Maybe in 100 years with benefit of hindsight, even then for performative reconciliation, such are nature of these things. A Chinese person with connection to east&west understands five years of XJ securitization that affects less than 1% of population eliminated previously regular extremist terrorist attacks with heavy sticks like internment / reducation but also carrots like development and vocational training. It's the best of a terrible situation. Meanwhile, US+coalition just exited one ME forever war, with others ongoing, many indigenous communities in west don't have running water and US for profit industrial complex jails more blacks as proportion of their population than the wildest wested funded thinktank extrapolations for XJ internmen. All without meaningful reconciliation in sight, and to the relative indifference of the "global community" that's strangely engaged in how PRC mistreats a domestic muslim minority.
The TL;DR: is Chinese with dual perspective of how US/west and PRC prosecuted their war on terror hold their opinions after considered evaluation, they're silent because it's un/counter-productive to discuss with their western friends whose heads are in sand due to western propaganda. Most are tired of such westerners, majority of whom only get exposed to narrative from one side keeps asserting they wish their Chinese peers knew better. What the last few years of US manufactured consent campaigns about XJ/HK etc. has taught most Chinese (a lesson previously learned by diasphora of many global south previously targetted by US) is that free fifth estate and disucssion creates more dangerous brainwashed individuals that are both self-righteous and oblivious to their ignorance. There's no point in engaging.
You say that China's current policy towards the Uyghurs is the "best of a terrible situation". The word "best" implies a search through all possible alternatives. So walk me through the optimization process that recommends the current policy, if you will, because it seems to my naive intuition that there were plenty of better options. Terrorism is the killing of civilians as an act of war, i.e. it's a subcategory of murder, which is highly illegal. Why were the usual law enforcement and justice systems ineffective here, lack of resources? Building large numbers of concentration camps seems very expensive, why not devote those resources to beefing up law enforcement and security? Also, Tahir Izgil and his friends and family don't appear to be mass-murderers, so what's the anti-terror benefit in locking them (and so many other innocent people) up? For that matter, what's the anti-terror benefit in making it so hard for them to leave China? If Uyghurs are considered to be such a problematic minority, why not let them simply leave?
Old minority policy based off Soviet oblast model of autonomous regions and harmonious "salad bowl" relationship between discreet minorities groups failed in frontier regions that poor PRC did not have resources to comprehensively tame. In Tibet this opened up CIA infiltration, in XJ this was decades of extremist attacks influenced by imported Salafism that eventually affected interior provinces. Both naturally also linked to separatism. So reality is these fringe regions were left alone out economic and geographic practicality (East of HeiheTengChong line) while rest of country became harmonized over the last 70 years. But now there is resources to finally harmonize restive frontier regions, using newer methods - CCP didn't spend trillions building infra connections and surveillance in Tibet or XJ (or HK) for nothing.
In XJ, trillions of RMB spread over large per capita cost is being poured into of securitization with combination of carrots and sticks. Sharp sticks because fundamentally, many people cannot be bribed to secularize/sinicize/integrate. Condensing multigeneration cultural wars via mass social engineering and indoctrination is something PRC has done, bloodily, but successfully, several times before. And there's also simple fact that CCP cracking down on less than 1% of population on backwater province to eliminate terrorist attacks is no shit political decision that's worth some over reaction just to be thorough. Public sentiment does not forgive being soft on terrorists anywhere. The carrots is vocational training and development, regional GDP increasing, Ürümqi is well on it's way to becoming modern city. None of this restorative, slow wheel of justice, reconciliation platitude designed to drawn out social friction in the west where 20 years from now, I wager many indigenous reserves still won't have plumbing while minorities still going to be disproportionately interned. By all reports the mass arbitrary, internment step in XJ is over, the most problematic cohorts have been identified and being transferred to penal system, prosecuted under convenient charges designed to removed their influence from society undergoing Sinicization. It's a relatively peaceful colonization, roughly the "best" of a terrible situation. If this process started 10 years earlier when west was busy maximum pressure bombing middle east while sino-US geopolitical climate was still cooperative, PRC would have gotten away with an aggressive colonization under guise to destroying ETIM without the PR hit. Keep in mind not colonizing is not an option - excess autonomy is what caused this shit show in first place.
>Tahir Izgil
...
>why not let them simply leave
From memory accused by state of transporting sensitive documents relating to separatist attacks in the 90s. Though like many Uyghur intelligentsia, probably use their influence to undermine PRC Sinicization campaigns. Why not let them leave? Because exiled Tibetans, Uyghurs, democracy dissidents, FLG practitioners, HKers etc. get recruited and weaponized by western NED funded organizations to spearhead campaigns against PRC interest. See the crazy groups anti-PRC activists align themselves with and kind of misinformation they're comfortable peddling. One lesson CCP has learned well in last 20 years is how US peddles influence either domestically in PRC via NGOs (which subsequently got crushed) and internationally via state funded but reportedly "independent" organizations, as seen in last few years. Another ugly scenario is something like FLG developing a well resourced empire... imagine Uyghur diaspora beyond PRC scrutiny with a powerful media wing that could properly fund ETIM. There's less blowback of just keeping dissidents in country or harassing them into silence if they make it abroad.
I feel the opposite, we started to hear so much about China overnight around 2019 that I can't help but feel it's another war the US is starting to brew and preparing the public opinion for it. Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, ... The pattern is the same everytime, the media pick a target to prepare the opinion for the warmongering. Is China doing awful things? Of course. But so is Saudi Arabia, the Yemeni crisis currently dwarf the problems in China (and Syria at the time when the US chose to intervene). I don't know what should be done, but at least US citizen please don't fall blindly for the N-th iteration of the "one and unique evil enemy of democracy that must be dealt with" du jour.
I agree. There’s no doubt that what’s happening in Xinjiang is beyond terrible, but the West and its allies in Asia are preparing for war. I wouldn’t be surprised if India joined.
The big questions are is this just a new Cold War since everyone has nukes, or will it transform into a hot one? Will Russia participate and if so which side will it take? Who will make the first strike? I have a feeling that it won’t be hard to trick Beijing into striking first. All the US needs to do is give the Taiwanese government the freedom to say whatever they want.
Practically speaking, there's very little most governments can do to the most populous nation in the world with a military infrastructure rivaled by only a handful of other countries.
And even fewer things they could do that don't ultimately culminate in massive bloodshed.
We can get out of bed with them. The current situation is like watching the appeasement of 1920s-1930s Germany happening again in real time. Our corporations are defending their supply lines that directly involve businesses run by the CCP. Financial institutions are obviously funneling money for high ranking party members. Politicians and thought leaders are smoothing over all the ugly bumps. Most of the media is silent or vaguely positive about this rising world power. The only positive thing is that the current leadership isn’t territorially expansionist so it’s closer to a brewing Cold War where the battles are based on political influence in other nations but that’s still not a good situation especially since we aren’t gearing up to resist it internally let alone in our sphere of influence.
Trade embargo is a possibility, and the US has done it before. But only to smaller countries; it's a strongarm tactic, and the US's trade arm is not strong enough to do more damage to China's economy than the US would suffer cutting those ties.
When an opposed nation is weaker than one's own, one can use sanctions and trade embargoes. When they're the same strength or larger? Trade embargoes cut one's own nation out of the international community. China has India and Russia right next door; they don't need the US's trade.
It's definitely an option. I don't think Americans have the stomach for it. The government that tries it will be voted out and replaced by a trade-friendly one.
I think 99% of Americans certainly have the stomach for it. The 1% that derive their income from skimming the difference created by cheap Chinese labor don’t.
The 1% definitely skim more, but the entire American economy benefits from China trade.
Every single item stamped "Made in China" gets more expensive if the scale of embargo or sanctions were attempted that would have political impact on China. It's easier to count the shelves in Walmart that aren't full of those products than the shelves that are. Wall street would feel it, but the impact on "main street" would also be immediate and painful.
And it's not hard for a politician to sell "Every week just got more expensive for you" as ammunition against their opponent. It's a consistent talking point regarding gas prices, and gas prices fluctuate for reasons well outside the control of any single politician. When the price spikes actually are directly the result of political policy? Easy sell to replace those politicians.
Your argument works the same regardless of the atrocities committed by your trading partner. At some point the citizens of your country will need to decide wether their economic well-being merits bearing that responsibility.
Unfortunately, this is the United States we're talking about. Not to be unnecessarily morbid, but I think if one is waiting for the United States to decide the atrocities of an economic partner justify ending the economic partnership at major domestic economic cost, one will be waiting for a long time. The last time the US did something internationally that caused major domestic pain was the Vietnam War. The lesson the country seems to have learned was that it was not worth it. All subsequent international interventions have either been massively asymmetrical power situations or low-domestic-cost affairs.
The US government has many tools at its disposal - sanctions, tariffs, supplier policy, etc.
But culturally we can do a lot more. Western filmmakers, actors, and athletes should not censor themselves (or allow themselves to be censored) to avoid irritating China. There could be a BDS-like movement against China. The media and activists could spend some cycles focusing on the genocide occurring in China in between much lower stakes issues that get disproportionate attention.
But it's tricky, because (a) it's mutually exclusive with trade limitations (one only gets cultural product in front of another nation if trade is maintained) and (b) the CCP is well aware of culture as a weapon and uniquely sensitive to its use and prepared to defend against it.
After the last few months I can only assume the current administration is actually supportive of communism. At best they're ignoring the atrocities in Cuba and China, at worst they're supportive of these governments... I'm starting to think it's the latter.
Who's "they", or "the world"? Do we have a world government already?
You either interfere (on a global scale) in the sovereignty of other nations, or you don't. Hitler was only stopped after a very costly war.
How would any alliance have the disproportionate resources to police the globe, while allowing free trade and the distributed opportunity that allows any nations to get rich enough to challenge them?
You talk of a unified humanity that doesn't exist. China is a superpower - the only solution to policing their actions would be ensuring no other superpowers can rise: neo-colonialism.
It depends. A lot of why China is such a manufacturing powerhouse right now is not only do they have the factories and machines, they have people trained to do that kind of work. They also have lots of factories working near each other with shipping and energy infrastructure to support them, none of which is easy to do quickly. A lack of OSHA and EPA protections certainly helps things move quickly and cheaply in ways our current automation doesn't...yet.
Some industries can switch to different countries much more readily than others (injection molding is easy, rare earth production and silicon foundries much less so), so I wouldn't expect to see trade banned over night, but we have been seeing some manufacturing moving away from China for some time now.
You put sanctions on China, China puts sanctions on you. Then may small asian/eastern countries will be forced to choose sides, and you'll have fewer allies/footholds when China doesn't step down.
“How could they do this?”, People asked.
“That would never happen today” people murmured.
Yet, here we are. Reading the 15th article about it, while the White House deletes tweets that likely anger the CCP
They should be removed from most favored nation status.
Governments could do a lot more but don’t