Sounds like what the US and Canadian government did to indigenous children. That's not to excuse anything the Chinese government does but it feels like they dusted off an old playbook.
> But they say the worst punishment was being sent to the school's basement. Lütfullah says the teachers told him ghosts lived there, and children including him were locked there in the dark, alone, for hours at a time.
I wasn't aware the US or Canadian governments had institutionalized these kinds of punishment (or similar) to specifically indigenous people in a peaceful period. Was this really the case and were could I read more about it?
In any case I don't think it's fair to compare present crimes of a country with past crimes of another, if anything, it would be fair to compare present crimes of both countries. It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage.
Ongoing controversies around disproportionate indigenous kids thrown in foster care and the mistreatment that occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure. It's not formal policy like residential schools, but it's essentially continuation of said practice.
> It's hard to find a country a century ago that didn't behave like an absolute savage.
Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development. Reality is countries who has capability to address restive minorities until they're merely marginalized or managable, will. That's prerequisite to internal security and domestic serenity. And there's no non-savage way of doing it, pretending we live in an enlightened age doesn't make the underlying tensions and security dilemmas go away. Just about the "best" we can expect is less bloody systems of integration (cultural genocide), that's what's happening in XJ, plenty of carrots along with the sticks. It's how most of PRC was harmonized, now it's simply XJ's turn (and other previously unreachable restive populations) because PRC has the resources to reach that far. The upside is CCP doesn't half ass these things, chances are Uyghurs will be sinicized and more integrated in PRC society before Canada solves it's Indigenous issues or US/EU their minority issues. It's the alternative to platitudes like "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". And that scares people.
> Ongoing controversies [...] occurs at scale for comparable child separation and cultural erasure
Native American population jumps to largest size in modern history [0]
Tribal sovereignty in the United States [1]
Native American Day – September 23, 2022 [2]
Whatever the crime is you're referring to, it's not comparable, are Uighurs given autonomous zones, allowed to celebrate custom holidays and are at their historical population peak?
When you say Native American are undergoing a cultural erasure comparable to the one in China, where Uighurs are in concentration camps to force them lose their culture and identity, I think you'll have to bring more proof than some "ongoing controversies".
My comment was in reference to Canada where 50% of foster care is Indigenous kids who represent 8% of population with associated skewed stats in terms of abuse and incarceration. Meanwhile gov virtue signals about reconciliation. System can be rigged against targetted minorities while celebrating them. Almost as if by design.
> it's not comparable,
Full designation of XJ is Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), modelled after Soviet oblasts which grants minority extra autonomy (and other AA privileges) relative to other PRC administrative subdivisions. Uyghurs at historic population peak and growing even with depressed birthrate via enforcement of family planning. Traditional customs are celebrated, it's heavily pushed / virtue signalled in state propaganda. The new securitization layer is reflection of systemic prosecution in North America where some minorities just happen to be disproportionately represented in jail/programs because the laws were tweaked to fit certain interests. It's the same playbook, whereas PRC interest involves actually integrating minorities whereas interests in west continues to be marginalizing them.
>When you say Native American are undergoing a cultural erasure comparable to the one in China
I'm more saying Uyghurs are finally undergoing cultural erasure comparable to Indigenous peoples in North America. PRC is playing catch-up. Uyghur culture was spared from hard colonization due to logistics until recently. Manifest destiny across Taklamakan Desert too difficult until PRC gained wealth, same with Tibetan plateau. Current PRC repression is merely kicking Uyghurs down to where Indigenous North Americans are now at - sinicizing Uyghurs to the same level North American indigenous peoples have already been westernized. The fact that huge percentage of Uyghurs need to be thrown into reeducation centres to learn Chinese, whereas Indigenous peoples in NA's lingua franca is English shows how much PRC still needs to erase/reprogram. Also sinicization =/= become Han, it's Uyghurs with Chinese characteristics, who will follow Islam with Chinese characteristics (WIP), not imported Salafism. They're not making Uyghurs buddhists. Nor Tibetans atheists. But autonomous regions has to at least direct cultural development in ways that mesh with the country as a whole. What US has already successfully done with history of different repression instruments to coerce restive populations into the melting pot. Literally the model PRC wants to emulate vs previous salad bowl / multicultural oblast model with relatively hands off minority policy. What Canada alleges it is but isn't.
PRC is trying to squeeze 100+ years of western cultural genocide in one generation, without the literal genocide. 10 years from now, PRC would be perfectly content with having english speaking Uyghurs practicing historically tame branch of Islam and mope about their loss of culture and marginalization. Aka, become harmless. But since there's 12+ million of them concentrated in a single region, the sights are set a little higher. If they're lucky they'll get a few mid tier southern cities that will remain predominantly Uyghur, Uyghur patronage networks will get rich of resource exploitation, folks with 1/32 Uyghur with use it to get affirmative action perks for entrance exams etc. PRC is straight up copying western model, but with less blood spilled using modern tech and greater state capacity. North America is just further along the process.
It is actually very similar. China is making the same mistakes that the USA and other western countries did 100-150 years ago. That doesn't excuse anything, of course, but the similarities should definitely give the Chinese government some pause (it won't, but it should).
"During a peaceful period" seems like a bit of a built-in excuse for the US when it was causing conflict with indigenous people by colonizing them and displacing them from their land.
> In any case I don't think it's fair to compare present crimes of a country with past crimes of another.
Why not? If country A committed an atrocity decades ago that largely achieved its objective for the dominant group, and that country still hasn't really atoned for it, it's no surprise that country B would try the same tactics now when they're looking to commit a cultural genocide.
I agree there are similarities in so far both countries committed heinous crimes. However that 150 year hindsight China has is not something that should be overlooked, in fact, given identical crimes, I can't think of a worse aggravator.
You know what is wrong with this statement? This is normalization: "Yes, it's bad, but you've done it too". Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!". Anyway, this sort of rationalization are one of the tricks that authoritarian regimes do and interestingly often then recruit western journalist white wash them and with a diverse assortment of such rationalizations, and much more delicate and elaborate.
> Probably, the next is "This is part of development and we go through it..., as well!".
The next should be "if we (in the US) think this is horrible, what are we doing to try to make it right with indigenous people in our own country, where we actually have influence over the state's policies?", not "whoops, guess if we acknowledge the US did that too it can't be that bad."
Agree but I'm not sure, if my comment understood correctly.
1. I didn't talk about should, I describe the problem with parent comment i.e. immorality of normalization. I have heard such justification before which goes to similar next step. That next step was what the normalizers might say.
2. It's from the point of white washers not the moral stand point that you depicts
3. As a proof, just check the comment in this section by @dirtyid which describe the 'next' I talked about:
> Behaving like a "savage" has very little to do with time but where countries are in their development.
~~(fun fact, I didn't saw it the first time and it was delightful seeing a proof in next step above)~~
Again, If it wasn't clear originally, What I liked to bring attention to is the white-washing (normalization) of tyrannies. It has been done for Nazis and it's currently being done in western journalists and lobbyist. Look at any sort of authoritarian atrocity and you'll see a white washer in NY or DC normalizing it.
I think this sort of abuse comes naturally to humans, in combination of the broken environment they were raised in, and due to different pressures and opportunities later. So however disconnected culturally and physically, they produce similar patterns. Relating this to the current context, I don't think Chinese officials needed to study US and Canadian boarding school abuse to create an environment where they mistreat their minorities in a similar way. Rather it's because we're all humans and we behave similarly under similar circumstances.
