They Come For Us At Night: China’s Vanishing Muslims [SLYT]

June 30, 2019 10:34 PM

Isobel Yeung goes undercover in a special VICE News report that reveals how China is oppressing the Muslim minority Uighur people in horrific conditions.
posted by querty (15 comments total)

Another recent video from the BBC: Inside China's 'thought transformation' camps
posted by reductiondesign at 12:35 AM on July 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

China money makes all other Muslim country along the belt and road quiet. Last I read on my end is our minister for Islamic affairs basically said this is all fake news (just today his office denied it). Especially galling because political Islam in the country, much like American political Christianity is about how Christians are under threat all the time.
posted by cendawanita at 2:09 AM on July 1, 2019 [8 favorites]

Ah sorry I didn't finish my thought. To continue, and in our case political Islam makes so much hay over how Muslims elsewhere face persecution and discrimination.
posted by cendawanita at 2:14 AM on July 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

Emigration isn't a remedy for cultural genocide, though.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:02 AM on July 1, 2019 [3 favorites]

If you want a peak at a dystopian future, here's an article on how the Chinese are using AI to oppress the Uighurs.

I'm not in a position to watch videos at the moment, so excuse me if this is covered in the OP.
posted by eye of newt at 8:09 AM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Adrian Zenz has a new piece in the Journal of Political Risk on the re-education camps.

Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s “Vocational Training Internment Camps”

VTICs represent only one of up to 8 forms of extrajudicial internment in Xinjiang. In 2016, prior to the large-scale internment campaign, one Uyghur population majority area had already placed nearly 10 percent of its adult population in dedicated re-education facilities. In 2018, the Xinjiang government gave about 1.6 billion RMB in VTIC food subsidies to its minority regions, enough to feed several hundred thousand or more persons. Overall, the author suggests a speculative upper limit estimate of 1.5 million, corresponding to one in six adult members of these minority groups.

posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:12 AM on July 1, 2019

Here’s a good 10 min video from Vox about the camps and about the OSINT sleuths who are finding them on the internet. It starts with a potted history of the Xinjiang region and the Uyghers, covering the 2009 riots, the later crackdowns, and the strategic importance of the region to the PRC in terms of energy resources and the One Belt One Road project.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:54 AM on July 1, 2019

I would dispute that this is "cultural" genocide. In the video they mention forcing people to terminate pregnancies. In a country over 90% Han, with massive Han immigration to historically non-Han areas, cultural assimilation is the first step in complete ethnic assimilation. If your children are taken by the state, I imagine they will also be dispersed. If they are trained to identify as "Chinese", they will be more likely to marry Han. This is genocide, full stop. They will first dilute, and then replace non-Han people for the crime of, as the woman in the train car says, "being backwards".

I really do not like how Western journalists make this about Islam, because I think it does an insidious favour for the Chinese government by implying this is solely a matter of culture. Doing this causes the presentation to play worse with a lot of people in Europe and its settler colonies since so many have a negative bias towards Muslims to begin with.

Sometimes I worry that we'll see lebensraum, anschluss and other familiar concepts creep up again, only with Mandarin names. The only difference this time around is that they've learned not to but bodies in furnaces because it's hard to hide and bad PR. What happens when Malaysia or Singapore's Chinese communities are deemed to need "protection" from "ethnic strife" perpetrated by nefarious non-Han? I'm really scared for the future of SEA.
posted by constantinescharity at 10:41 AM on July 1, 2019 [3 favorites]

Extremely pertinent Twitter thread from Luna Lin (which reflects one side of the current discussion on China Twitter), about how Vice was irresponsibly exposing the locals to upcoming reprisals due to their gonzo journalism style.

It opens with: I've watched the full report and can't get over how irresponsible the reporter was on her trips to Xinjiang and how ruthless she was when she approached/tricked locals who probably had no idea of who they were talking to.

I don't actually know many of the regulars of China Twitter commentary but this one by @laurimyllyvirta sums up the above: Seeing reactions like Luna's from a lot of Chinese folks. In a way, holding western media to immeasurably higher standard&seeming to feel much more agency towards it than the Chinese govt is a statement. Govt brutality is a fact of life, no point in wasting moral outrage on it?

Sorry am on mobile, if anyone else can do the thread reader)

(Can't say I'm disappointed, I was around during the Naomi Wu debacle.)
posted by cendawanita at 10:42 AM on July 1, 2019 [6 favorites]

I think that not emphasizing the silent, empty mosques during Ramadan and other measures indicating the eradication of non-state-approved forms of Islam, out of hopes that racists and bigots elsewhere in the world might pay more attention, would be a fool's errand.

Maybe you can explain better why you see cultural genocide and complete ethnic assimilation as distinct enough to warrant concern, constantinescharity? I'm hard-pressed, from my understanding of history, to think of a case of one occurring without the other, and so talking about cultural genocide doesn't appear to be understating anything.
posted by XMLicious at 11:36 AM on July 1, 2019

What happens when Malaysia or Singapore's Chinese communities are deemed to need "protection" from "ethnic strife" perpetrated by nefarious non-Han? I'm really scared for the future of SEA.

I completely agree. For the life of me I cannot understand how the dictatorial, totalitarian Chinese government (now ruled by an emperor for life bringing personality cults back into vogue) a is not viewed unanimously as the greatest threat to pretty much anything worth caring about, especially for their neighbours. I'd be far more interested in talking sanctions instead of tariffs.

Generally speaking, the "west's" addiction to cheap imports while exporting inflation (and exploiting Chinese labour) will be its greatest shame, and hopefully won't be the catalyst for the end of global liberalism and the post-WW2 world order, as flawed as it may be. If the next century is China's, we're all in deep trouble (including the 99% non-elite Communist party member Chinese). So far, we're about 30 years into the process of enabling a regime that poses more of an existential threat to civilization as we know it than any other prior, including the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
posted by Mirax at 6:42 PM on July 1, 2019

The added perspective that this is ethnicity-based genocide is the careful distinction the state makes between Turkic Muslims like Uyghurs and those more closely related to the Han, eg the Hui Muslims, who's been treated as the 'good Muslims', and have been used as political cover as well.

All this plays in my mind as China makes overtures towards the diaspora in Southeast Asia like mentioned upthread, and this homogenisation of Chinese identity to be a northern, Mandarin-speaking one which is a big deal here (for example this article about how it's changed Singapore).
posted by cendawanita at 9:07 PM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

I really do not like how Western journalists make this about Islam, because I think it does an insidious favour for the Chinese government by implying this is solely a matter of culture.

Exactly.

Tibet - The origin of the ‘Xinjiang model’ in Tibet under Chen Quanguo: Securitizing ethnicity and accelerating assimilation

Mongolia - Inner Mongolia has become China’s model of assimilation - The native population was already in the minority by 1949; now only 20% of people in the province are Mongolian. The region suffered especially severe violence in the Cultural Revolution—up to 100,000 people died, by some reckonings. Buddhism, which was strongly rooted in Inner Mongolia, was crushed, and most temples destroyed. At the sprawling monastery of Da Zhao in the provincial capital of Hohhot, tourists now outnumber devotees (nevertheless, in case of problems, a SWAT team waits around the corner).

Christians - In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture - The church in south-west China has been shuttered and Wang and his wife, Jiang Rong, remain in detention after police arrested more than 100 Early Rain church members in December. Many of those who haven’t been detained are in hiding. Others have been sent away from Chengdu and barred from returning. Some, including Wang’s mother and his young son, are under close surveillance. Wang and his wife are being charged for “inciting subversion”, a crime that carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

Even Shaolin - China's Ruling Party Hoists The Red Flag Over Henan's Shaolin Temple - Authorities in the central Chinese province of Henan flew the red flag of the People's Republic of China over the Shaolin Temple, for the first time in the temple's 1,500-year history. ... Religious believers must "be subordinate to and serve the overall interests of the nation and the Chinese people ... and support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party," the white paper said, which includes "integrat[ing] religious teachings and rules with Chinese culture."

It's not about Islam. It's not about "ethnic" cleansing. Those are categories under its umbrella, but they're not it. It's about crushing religious and ethnic identity specifically, but actually it's about crushing any group identity other than a national one. You're either Chinese in the modern, Mandarin-speaking, non-religious, patriotic, consumerist prosperity-cult sense, or you're in the way, and you will be dealt with in the most expedient way possible. If that means ethnic cleansing and genocide, well, oops!
posted by saysthis at 9:51 PM on July 1, 2019 [6 favorites]

I suppose what I'm trying to comment on is what I see as a particularly genocidal vein in Chinese political culture. Their history of political unity has laid the groundwork for a very biological perspective on ethnic nationalism. I've seen the [necessarily] government-sanctioned anthropological journals in China that speak of racial hierarchies eerily similar to those of Victorian-era Europe, only with the Chinese on top, and always specifically (as opposed to all Northeast Asians). However limited, here in Europe and its settler colonies, we have conversations about our history of colonialism and its crimes (including scientific racism). As far as I understand it, the expulsion of the Hmong, the subjugation of and invasions against Southern peoples, the punitive mass castrations (whose indirect goal is assimilation by blood) are not something that people in China talk about with regret, in part because doing so would likely be seen by the government as disloyalty.

There's a reason that the greatest genetic diversity they have is in mtDNA, and that testing shows very little contribution in autosomal DNA from the indigenous people of the South. Their political consistency has prevented any reckoning with a past of incredibly violent, organized colonialism; complete population replacement across an area nearly the size of the United States, steeled by their confrontations with other, stronger colonial powers in the Modern era (1600 onwards). In this prevention of a dialogue, they've developed an apparent official endorsement instead. In the video, this is where the old farmer woman's indifference comes from. Make no mistake, they're very much like Western Europeans; it is a matter of blood as much as it is one of culture.

The only conclusion I can come to is that, without questioning their past, they will only become more bold in the development and realization of an ideologically racist political philosophy. As their economic engine slows down in the coming decades, due to an aging populace, I do not think it unreasonable to fear that they would see projects of foreign domination and Nazi-like, dual racial-martial plans as viable solutions. Not to mention that at home, as soon as all the minorities are gone, non-Mandarin Han are next on the chopping block.
posted by constantinescharity at 9:15 AM on July 2, 2019

China is installing a secret surveillance app on tourists to Xinjiang's phones

The app automatically scans your data for 73,000 specific items that China deems threatening. That includes materials that encourage terrorism, like al-Qaeda or Islamic State publications, as well as Western academic books about terrorism. The app also hunts for scanned pages from an Arabic dictionary and benign expressions of religiosity like portions of the Quran or a photo of the Dalai Lama.

Another item Fengcai scans for: music by a Japanese metal band called Unholy Grave. The band’s got a song titled “Taiwan: Another China.”

posted by Gordafarin at 2:59 AM on July 4, 2019