Let’s cut a fine line on this Uyghur issue

July 8, 2022 

Let's cut a fine line on this Uyghur issue. 

China has been long known, by those who know a bit of Chinese history, for maintaining border zones with something like a gradient of sovereignty. Tibet is the classic example, but Hong Kong is another. Xinjiang, the home of the Uyghurs, is another of the Chinese state's border zones.

The Uyghurs are living under a quasi-militarized state, and there is an extent that what they are going through is an extension of Cultural Revolution-era re-education camps. You know what they say - if you give an unaccountable state apparatus unregulated power, it will rarely be relenquished.

However, there is a sensationalized rhetoric equivocating the Chinese state with the WWII fascist regimes. We're talking about an entirely different animal. You know what they say - if you put together a huge propaganda apparatus, it will rarely go away. The problem with the Chinese detention camps in Xinjiang is that they are most of all trying to replace the Uyghur culture with the dominant Han culture - restricting the spoken and written languages allowed to Chinese only, and so on. 

The international observers have only a few crimes - forced labor, organ stealing and invasions of privacy - relative in number to the real crimes happening en masse, which is the forced re-education of the Uyghurs in a left-behind but culturally amnesiac minority. 

To the extent that we can act, we should, but the ginning up of hysteria about genocides are going to cause the Chinese state to look down their noses at the well-intentioned protestors and escalate, because they don't see a measured and vigorous opposition to their actions.

It is a fact that the Chinese state is arguably trying to repress the Uyghur identity or story and bring it into circulation as a kind of cheap and easy currency that would disallow understanding that the Uyghur identity applies to real people, and not, say, things. This is the old and "standard" repression by the state apparatus. That doesn't mean we shouldn’t oppose it, but it also means we have to give a measured critique that is nonetheless, also vigorous.