> It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.
Not slaughtering them makes no difference to whether it's genocide.
Genocide is about "intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".
Sterilizing them counts. As would snatching the children of that group and placing them in families of your own group (to give an example where nobody dies, not even the unborn).
> The compulsory sterilization of American men and women continues to this day. In 2013, it was reported that 148 female prisoners in two California prisons were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in a supposedly voluntary program, but it was determined that the prisoners did not give consent to the procedures.
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-stern/sterilization-calif...
It was banned in 2014 at least. But 2013 is contemporary enough.
Evil as that is, it's not genocide since it's not aimed at the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The other western examples cited were aimed at that as is what China is doing.
I think something similar existed in Alaska. I had relatives up in south east Alaska ( the chain of islands that hang down, with cities like Juneau, Ketchican. While visiting we were shepherded around in a little school van by a retired teacher who worked at the local boarding school which was managed by Indian affairs. It was quite interesting talking to him - essentially kids who lived a traditional remote lifestyle in fishing and other villages all over the various islands would come to the school for months at a time for an education.
I'm sure I didn't hear that 'other' side of the story, but it's pretty clear what was happening - taking kids away from their traditional families and putting them into American style education is a softer form of cultural destruction. I also spoke with his former students who had moved to the big city (think 3,000 people), and the city itself is mostly a mix of native, old russian and americans.
In some ways their lifestyle was the same, their income was still fishing but they were living in a mostly normal American town - aside from the fact it was in the middle of no where and there were more boats and than cars in the city.
I'd like to go back up there, everything I have learned about tlinget and the people I spent time with was a really interesting and awesome opportunity.
Similar things happened to the scotts when scottish gaelic stopped being taught in school and was transferred to English. Now of course almost everyone in Scotland besides the Outer Hebrides speaks English.
In many ways the Tlinget I met in SE Alaska were aware of what was going on and there was a lot of cultural preservation and focus on their language and traditional lifestyle, but again what else would you expect when you talk to people who work at the local cultural center? It's hard to say what the 'average' Tlinget experience is and since it's pretty sparse up there, experiences vary wildly.
Article II of the Convention defines genocide as:
... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
From skimming those articles I'd tend towards yes, but I'm neither a legal professional, nor would I claim that I know enough about those situations to make a judgment myself.
One does not hear about the "US genocide" or the "Australian genocide" in the same way. So is the West exhibiting double-standards until it reflects a little more on its own actions?
Judge de current situation by ethical standards of the present and judge historic ones with the eyes of those days. Eugenics was, once upon a time, seen like "good stuff" all around the globo, not anymore.
It sounds unfair. It's OK for these other countries to keep enjoying the benefits of eugenics they did in the past, but China can't join in? (same argument can be used for pollution)
Increased unity, no need to consider minority demands. e.g. consider the Keystone XL pipeline. Would it be easier and quicker to build without the Native population being there to protest? Or consider the recent race riots in the USA, would such a thing even be possible in places without such diversity?
Indeed it was. I once had occasion to study a 1930s paper on the mathematics of population growth by R.A. Fisher, it gave me no pleasure to leaf through the "Annals of Eugenics" to find it.
But we have an essential difference I think between the genocide that China stands accused of, which you yourself see as a "temporally relative evil" (yes the US did it, but it was a while ago), and the genocide of the German attempt to destroy European Jewry (which was also a while ago) that I think we would all agree is an "absolute evil". So perhaps the Economist have a point here.
The west is reflecting on its own actions, but (lacking a central ideological authority!) that doesn't make every person and institution flip their position on this. It gets acknowledged piecewise, and the quantity of culture war fought over it is considerable.
This 26th January we heard about the conflict between the people who call that day "Australia Day" and the people who call it "Invasion Day".
The former only would if actually erradicating a group was either the intent or the (eventual) end result. Not sure the US eugenics program would count under that def (it might have hit many minorities disproportionately, but wouldn't have wiped them out entirely).
What evidence is there of sterilization that’s not coming from Falun Gong? I don’t find those cultists to be any more of a legitimate source than Scientology. They have pretty insane and hateful believes and have been found unreliable many times.
The Nazi genocide also started with "softer" measures like this and then progressed to forced labor and finally to mass murder. It's sort of like a large scale collective version of how serial killers escalate.
Forced sterilisations have unfortunately happened all over China as a result of the One Child policy. To my knowledge that has occurred across the board and no ethnic group was ever specifically targeted. In fact under the One Child policy minorities have the right to have more children than the Han majority, and they do have more children. So reporting that "some forced sterilisations" have occurred is not really significant in itself.
Likewise, when it said that the birth rate has significantly dropped I think it would be useful to see figures (if they exist) on the average number of children per woman in the region because, again, China has a pretty strict birth control national policy and that would allow to see how it was enforced in Xinjiang before versus now.
The figures quoted in an article I quickly found through Google [1] suggest that the One Child policy (even with recent relaxation) was not strictly enforced and that the birth rate was much higher than it should have been under national policy. If so that could mean that they were cut some slack and have now been brought in line with the rest of the country. Of course this is from the Golbal Times, an official Chinese organisation, so I do not know how reliable the figures are.
> As would snatching the children of that group and placing them in families of your own group
Ok, then the USA are committing genocide in ICE camps[0][1][2].
How can the US government go and call China mass murderers, feeling all morally superior, when the same happens in their country, in their immigrant detention centers?
Why the rest of the west doesn't say anything about the horrors perpetuated by the US?
We keep going with this idiotic double standard, where West = GOOD, Not West = BAD. Wake up.
> As would snatching the children of that group and placing them in families of your own group
While these acts are unquestionably immoral, I don't think the ICE detention or transplanting children equates to genocide. It's not the same intent or effect. Eliminating "culture" is not the same as eliminating "people".
>Not slaughtering them makes no difference to whether it's genocide.
In terms of the definition adopted in various official contexts this is obviously correct. But the problem is in terms of discourse "genocide" has a much more specific connotation for most of the public and it's all too easy to (deliberately or not) to conflate the two things - making the issue harder to discuss.
If you'll forgive a controversial analogy - it's like the term sexual assault. Clearly sexual assault in legal terms has to include unwanted sexual touching of any degree. No doubt. But if I say "I am a sexual assault survivor" then this inevitably conjures up images very different to the truth (which is : my bum was pinched a few times in nightclubs two decades ago). In the case of sexual assault modifiers like "serious" or "minor" get used because clearly there is a big range of possibilities here. And although my experience was sexual assault, it's intellectually dishonest for me to put it like that (at least not without heavy explanation).
Similarly with genocide, if (to use your least severe hypothetical example) the only issue was an above average number of children from one ethnic group being taken into care and placed with foster families of another ethnic group then it would feel dishonest to say (in public discussions) that that was a genocide (by itself). (Note : That is NOT what is happening here, I am merely responding to your example)
I don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to say myself but maybe "genocidal practices" might be more appropriate, I don't know. It feels poor taste to call anything "a minor genocide".
I wonder if anyone had ever read any of the accounts of these "forced sterilisation"? They all claim to be "sterlised" by a needle while they were sleep or something. However, actual female sterilisation requires surgery https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/female-sterilisa...
This really makes me question the narrative of it even happening. If it were, then there needs to be a prelude to all of the stories of "China invents female sterilisation without surgery", which in itself is a huge scientific achievement, since even with surgery female sterilistaion is only 99% effective.
By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocational training centres”. It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.
- Yes, Guardian is so sure that no mass murders took place. How ? Cause you know, CCP says so, so must be the truth.
A sham of an article in the name of journalism and "trying to name the crime accurately".
These aren't extermination camps, people are eventually being released from them. Their notional aim is re-education and making people genuinely love Big Brother/the Communist Party, but I doubt the deciders are naive enough to believe that will actually happen. Instead, it's sufficient that the detainees become broken, intimidated and compliant.
Recent interview showed they also round up people for "further education" after releasing them the first time.
Assuming the allegations are true- psychological, physical torture, rape, forced work and so on- is it not reasonable to assume that not all who enter will leave?
They don't need to be extermination camps to have mass graves, and if I am not mistaken, many extermination camps were thought by outsiders to be prison / work camps until the truth came out.
All of this- on every side- is pure speculation until a trusted independent inspection can be performed. Unfortunately, I am skeptical that will happen anytime soon- I seriously doubt China would see attempts to do so as anything other than a violation of their sovreignty.
According to what I've read, people in these camps disappear and are never heard of again.
They sound a lot like concentration camps. Just because they aren't full blown extermination camps yet, doesn't make them any less despicable. The Nazi camps didn't start as extermination camps either, that was a gradual development.
Well, actually, I'm pretty sure an extermination camp like Treblinka that's purpose-built for killing humans is more despicable. This is also pretty much what the article is saying: excessive hyperbole cheapens the very real problem.
Excessive hyperbole, aka crying wolf, does make it less likely that if horror happens, it will be taken seriously. But this is not that. China has jailed over a million people from a single targeted ethnic group. Rapes, forced sterilizations, disappearances, etc have been happening and have been documented.
It is genocide according to the UN definition, which the Economist writer mentions and ignores blissfully, because of course they would know better. History repeats itself, and good people will continue to discuss semantics while others are tortured and killed.
So as long as it's just sterilisations and imprisonment and forced labor camps and just a few murders for organs it's hyperbole to call it a genocide?
I don't get the point. Yes, they haven't reached the point of murdering by the millions yet. But its still a very worrying development.
We know from history what happens when people are accused of being asocial and are sent to work camps. It's happened before, and people didn't believe it, and it took decades for people to fully realise what was going on.
I always wondered why nobody did anything against the concentration camps, the doctors who killed patients, the mass murders.
I think people were either choosing to not believe it, or they were watching in terror, helplessly, relieved that they were not yet victims themselves.
Homicide and suicide apply to individuals. Genocide applies to a group. You don't have to kill every living member of a group to eliminate it. For example, you could just sterilize the females.
Which is why that practice (along with kidnapping/relocating children) is recognized as such.
The definition of "genocide" isn't really that simple. Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term "genocide" in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, said that genocide is " a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure" (my emphasis).
China might not be literally committing mass-murder but my non-expert understanding is that they're making a deliberate effort to eliminate Uighyur culture and identity which is very much within the definition of genocide.
Dude, take a deep breath and chill. Your "Red Rage" led you to confuse the Economist - always a stalwart champion of British Liberal Capitalism - with The Guardian, a somewhat leftish newspaper from the UK.
Seriously, in what parallel universe do you toss The Economist and The Guardian in the same bucket. The only think they have in common is the article in the name
Yes. It appears so. But it's so horrific, no one wants to talk about it.
In December 2018 The Tribunal issued an interim judgement:
“The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”
Some unknown but probably large number of people is executed in China every year. Some of them are Uyghurs.
For organ transplantation, a corpse is a corpse, whether they died in a traffic accident or were executed doesn't matter (except probably execution by poison as practiced in the US).
So yes, executed Uyghurs are used as organ donors in China, but the causality is inverted: they're not killed for organ harvesting, they have their organs harvested because they were killed.
You have many comments sympathetic to the CCP. Your suggestions on the topic of organ harvesting are unsubstantiated, and significant evidence has been presented to the contrary.
I do? What gave you that impression? I oppose death sentences on principle (hard to reverse in case of wrongful conviction), so I would count my comment above as unsympathetic to the CCP.
> significant evidence has been presented to the contrary
Evidence that Uyghurs would not be killed if there was no shortage of organs for transplantation? What evidence?
> Calling it genocide depends on a definition rooted in a UN convention which suggests that one need not actually kill anyone to commit it
This article is ignoring the history of the word "genocide". It was coined by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, during the Second World War, to describe what the Nazis were doing to his own people (and to others too). However, Lemkin himself never defined it so narrowly as to only involve mass slaughter. Indeed, Lemkin played a significant role in advocating for the UN Genocide Convention, and the breadth of the definition in the Convention reflects the breadth of Lemkin's own understanding of the word he originated. So I think dismissing this as just something some UN convention says is ignoring the actual history of the origins of the word.
In geno-cide, it is the group you are killing (the genos), not necessarily its individual members. Sterilise them all and you will have successfully killed the group when its last member dies of old age, even though you never killed any individual member of it.
There are “growth regulator herbicides” and “growth-disrupting insecticides” that harm the growth of plants or inhibiting the reproduction of insects withing killing them.
I thought Lemkin coined the word with the Armenian genocide in mind. In 1943, the scale of the Holocaust was unknown among the public, and even Western intelligence to some extend. Lemkin was in the US by then, so the information available to him about the scale of Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe would be largely unavailable to him.
It was both - the Armenian genocide, and the Nazi crimes, which Lemkin was dedicated to documenting as they occurred, including in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He might not have been fully aware of the scale of the Nazi crimes, but he was already viewing them through the framework of “genocide”
The difficulty is that we need to have different terms for different levels of atrocities. Forced sterilization of an ethnic group is an atrocity. Mass murder of an ethnic group is also an atrocity. But they're on different levels. Both of these are crimes against humanity. Both are deplorable. But they're not equally deplorable. Both are bad, but they're not equally bad. Clearly, mass murder is worse than mass sterilization. It's a crime that should be treated differently, just as we treat rape and murder differently.
If we call what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uyghurs a genocide, then we should come up for another word to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews. Or, heaven forbid, if they really do start murdering Uyghur families in mass.
The Genocide Convention of 1948 (a response to the Holocaust) specifically mentions “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” in the definition of genocide.
4.3 Genocidal intent
...
4.3.3 "A national, ethnic, racial or religious group"
4.4 Genocidal acts
4.4.1 Killing members of the group
...
4.4.4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Well if you go by UN (aka diplomatically actionable) definitions, by formally extending family planning uniformly to minorities which previously disproportionately targeted Han, China did not start genociding Uyghurs but effectively stopped genociding Han. Unless the argument is family planning is genociding everyone, in which case the primary victims are still urban Han. The verbiage trying to define Cultural Genocide makes more sense:
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
"Trying" because there's no official definition of cultural genocide at UN, hence the game by certain interests attempting to fit XJ into literal genocide box. If the matter is intention then no need to conflate sinicization with destroy, if only for the reason reducing 56 official minorities to 55 would ruin Xi's legacy. If PRC actually wanted to destroy / genocide Uyghurs, it could do so much faster and cheaper than spending 5+ years and trillions in resources. Enough time has passed that even warn torn Germany's rudimentary death camp infrastructure applied to XJ would have reached final solution by now. China is capable of doing what Nazi's did over years in weeks, but hasn't for the exceedingly simple reason that the goal is not to genocide.
> genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> (a) Killing members of the group;
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Was CCP trying to destroy Han via the One-Child Policy? No.
Was CCP trying to destroy Uighurs via (b)(d)(e)? Arguably yes.
(b)(d)(e) applied to and still does to Han as well, there's no distinction in terms of family planning. Hence no intent to destroy. The distinction is the greater XJ security architecture, in which case it's comparable to prison industrial complex that disproportionately target minorities, which again, has been likened to cultural genocide. If the CCP wanted to destroy Uyghurs, they'd destroy them, not setup elaborate sinication program.
As someone whose studied both situations pretty extensively I disagree. Israel practices something more akin to apartheid. There is no eugenic component as far as I’m aware, Gaza has a significantly higher birth rate than israel. In Xinjiang, forced sterilization is a systemic aspect of the campaign thereby fitting into the UN definition of genocide.
The whole idea behind labour camps in Xinjiang is to strip Uyghurs living in China from their independent identity. Take away their history by destroying ancestral graveyards. Rid them of Islam by prohibiting religious practice and "educating" them with communist ideas through loudspeakers. And even end them as an ethnicity, by sterilising some women and raping others to produce Han offsprings.
Genocide describes that perfectly.
P.S. Though better of journalism quality of The Economist.
101 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadFrom the article:
> It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.
Not slaughtering them makes no difference to whether it's genocide.
Genocide is about "intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".
Sterilizing them counts. As would snatching the children of that group and placing them in families of your own group (to give an example where nobody dies, not even the unborn).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
> The compulsory sterilization of American men and women continues to this day. In 2013, it was reported that 148 female prisoners in two California prisons were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in a supposedly voluntary program, but it was determined that the prisoners did not give consent to the procedures. > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-stern/sterilization-calif...
It was banned in 2014 at least. But 2013 is contemporary enough.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/9/15/21437805/w...
I guess there can be some room for discussion about whether it is genocide if there is not a clear target group/culture.
Doesn't make it less heinous, just a different sort of heinous.
And it very much is a failure of government if an individual is systematically abusing people that are in government custody.
A failure of government ≠ intent, which is what I indicated with my use of the word machinations.
And I wasn't arguing that there was intent, I was arguing that intent isn't the standard that we should use to judge governance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
EDIT: and good on you for honouring her.
I'm sure I didn't hear that 'other' side of the story, but it's pretty clear what was happening - taking kids away from their traditional families and putting them into American style education is a softer form of cultural destruction. I also spoke with his former students who had moved to the big city (think 3,000 people), and the city itself is mostly a mix of native, old russian and americans.
In some ways their lifestyle was the same, their income was still fishing but they were living in a mostly normal American town - aside from the fact it was in the middle of no where and there were more boats and than cars in the city.
I'd like to go back up there, everything I have learned about tlinget and the people I spent time with was a really interesting and awesome opportunity.
Similar things happened to the scotts when scottish gaelic stopped being taught in school and was transferred to English. Now of course almost everyone in Scotland besides the Outer Hebrides speaks English.
In many ways the Tlinget I met in SE Alaska were aware of what was going on and there was a lot of cultural preservation and focus on their language and traditional lifestyle, but again what else would you expect when you talk to people who work at the local cultural center? It's hard to say what the 'average' Tlinget experience is and since it's pretty sparse up there, experiences vary wildly.
Anyway - Go to Sitka, AK, it's beautiful!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schoo...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_S...
And the other one is happening right now and the govt is denying it.
But we have an essential difference I think between the genocide that China stands accused of, which you yourself see as a "temporally relative evil" (yes the US did it, but it was a while ago), and the genocide of the German attempt to destroy European Jewry (which was also a while ago) that I think we would all agree is an "absolute evil". So perhaps the Economist have a point here.
This 26th January we heard about the conflict between the people who call that day "Australia Day" and the people who call it "Invasion Day".
(I don't know much about the Australian example, so won't comment on that, other than to say that a cursory search that seems to also imply UM YES)
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong
Likewise, when it said that the birth rate has significantly dropped I think it would be useful to see figures (if they exist) on the average number of children per woman in the region because, again, China has a pretty strict birth control national policy and that would allow to see how it was enforced in Xinjiang before versus now. The figures quoted in an article I quickly found through Google [1] suggest that the One Child policy (even with recent relaxation) was not strictly enforced and that the birth rate was much higher than it should have been under national policy. If so that could mean that they were cut some slack and have now been brought in line with the rest of the country. Of course this is from the Golbal Times, an official Chinese organisation, so I do not know how reliable the figures are.
[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1212073.shtml
What's the minimum number or percent of a group that must be targeted in order for an act to be considered genocide according to that definition?
> As would snatching the children of that group and placing them in families of your own group
Ok, then the USA are committing genocide in ICE camps[0][1][2].
How can the US government go and call China mass murderers, feeling all morally superior, when the same happens in their country, in their immigrant detention centers?
Why the rest of the west doesn't say anything about the horrors perpetuated by the US?
We keep going with this idiotic double standard, where West = GOOD, Not West = BAD. Wake up.
[0]: https://www.justsecurity.org/72587/the-u-s-bears-internation...
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/immigration-dete...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_se...
While these acts are unquestionably immoral, I don't think the ICE detention or transplanting children equates to genocide. It's not the same intent or effect. Eliminating "culture" is not the same as eliminating "people".
In terms of the definition adopted in various official contexts this is obviously correct. But the problem is in terms of discourse "genocide" has a much more specific connotation for most of the public and it's all too easy to (deliberately or not) to conflate the two things - making the issue harder to discuss.
If you'll forgive a controversial analogy - it's like the term sexual assault. Clearly sexual assault in legal terms has to include unwanted sexual touching of any degree. No doubt. But if I say "I am a sexual assault survivor" then this inevitably conjures up images very different to the truth (which is : my bum was pinched a few times in nightclubs two decades ago). In the case of sexual assault modifiers like "serious" or "minor" get used because clearly there is a big range of possibilities here. And although my experience was sexual assault, it's intellectually dishonest for me to put it like that (at least not without heavy explanation).
Similarly with genocide, if (to use your least severe hypothetical example) the only issue was an above average number of children from one ethnic group being taken into care and placed with foster families of another ethnic group then it would feel dishonest to say (in public discussions) that that was a genocide (by itself). (Note : That is NOT what is happening here, I am merely responding to your example)
I don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to say myself but maybe "genocidal practices" might be more appropriate, I don't know. It feels poor taste to call anything "a minor genocide".
This really makes me question the narrative of it even happening. If it were, then there needs to be a prelude to all of the stories of "China invents female sterilisation without surgery", which in itself is a huge scientific achievement, since even with surgery female sterilistaion is only 99% effective.
One can only imagine how bad it is in Xinjiang with the strict control of independent reporting as to what is going on.
- Yes, Guardian is so sure that no mass murders took place. How ? Cause you know, CCP says so, so must be the truth.
A sham of an article in the name of journalism and "trying to name the crime accurately".
Also, what do you expect the end result of mass incarceration in prison camps to be, other than mass graves?
Assuming the allegations are true- psychological, physical torture, rape, forced work and so on- is it not reasonable to assume that not all who enter will leave?
All of this- on every side- is pure speculation until a trusted independent inspection can be performed. Unfortunately, I am skeptical that will happen anytime soon- I seriously doubt China would see attempts to do so as anything other than a violation of their sovreignty.
According to what I've read, people in these camps disappear and are never heard of again.
They sound a lot like concentration camps. Just because they aren't full blown extermination camps yet, doesn't make them any less despicable. The Nazi camps didn't start as extermination camps either, that was a gradual development.
It is genocide according to the UN definition, which the Economist writer mentions and ignores blissfully, because of course they would know better. History repeats itself, and good people will continue to discuss semantics while others are tortured and killed.
I don't get the point. Yes, they haven't reached the point of murdering by the millions yet. But its still a very worrying development.
We know from history what happens when people are accused of being asocial and are sent to work camps. It's happened before, and people didn't believe it, and it took decades for people to fully realise what was going on.
I always wondered why nobody did anything against the concentration camps, the doctors who killed patients, the mass murders.
I think people were either choosing to not believe it, or they were watching in terror, helplessly, relieved that they were not yet victims themselves.
Which is why that practice (along with kidnapping/relocating children) is recognized as such.
China might not be literally committing mass-murder but my non-expert understanding is that they're making a deliberate effort to eliminate Uighyur culture and identity which is very much within the definition of genocide.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_(politics)
Anyway, Guardian, Economist, etc, doesn't really make a difference. They all write the same subservient way about China anyway \__(:-/)__/
In December 2018 The Tribunal issued an interim judgement:
“The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”
https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgment/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30324440https://ww...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong
For organ transplantation, a corpse is a corpse, whether they died in a traffic accident or were executed doesn't matter (except probably execution by poison as practiced in the US).
So yes, executed Uyghurs are used as organ donors in China, but the causality is inverted: they're not killed for organ harvesting, they have their organs harvested because they were killed.
I do? What gave you that impression? I oppose death sentences on principle (hard to reverse in case of wrongful conviction), so I would count my comment above as unsympathetic to the CCP.
> significant evidence has been presented to the contrary
Evidence that Uyghurs would not be killed if there was no shortage of organs for transplantation? What evidence?
This article is ignoring the history of the word "genocide". It was coined by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, during the Second World War, to describe what the Nazis were doing to his own people (and to others too). However, Lemkin himself never defined it so narrowly as to only involve mass slaughter. Indeed, Lemkin played a significant role in advocating for the UN Genocide Convention, and the breadth of the definition in the Convention reflects the breadth of Lemkin's own understanding of the word he originated. So I think dismissing this as just something some UN convention says is ignoring the actual history of the origins of the word.
Xinjiang genocide is just the same.
If we call what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uyghurs a genocide, then we should come up for another word to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews. Or, heaven forbid, if they really do start murdering Uyghur families in mass.
The Genocide Convention of 1948 (a response to the Holocaust) specifically mentions “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” in the definition of genocide.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/vol...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
"Trying" because there's no official definition of cultural genocide at UN, hence the game by certain interests attempting to fit XJ into literal genocide box. If the matter is intention then no need to conflate sinicization with destroy, if only for the reason reducing 56 official minorities to 55 would ruin Xi's legacy. If PRC actually wanted to destroy / genocide Uyghurs, it could do so much faster and cheaper than spending 5+ years and trillions in resources. Enough time has passed that even warn torn Germany's rudimentary death camp infrastructure applied to XJ would have reached final solution by now. China is capable of doing what Nazi's did over years in weeks, but hasn't for the exceedingly simple reason that the goal is not to genocide.
> genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> (a) Killing members of the group;
> (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Was CCP trying to destroy Han via the One-Child Policy? No.
Was CCP trying to destroy Uighurs via (b)(d)(e)? Arguably yes.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/vol...
Fiat and its owner family made tons of money on making military machinery for Axis Powers.
Fiat is a 50% shareholder of GAC FCA, a Chinese auto makers with factories in Xinjiang out of all places.
Genocide describes that perfectly.
P.S. Though better of journalism quality of The Economist.
There's also torture and organ harvesting, FWIW.