By forcing the Uighurs into internment camps, the government has begun an ethnic cleansing.
If you thought Western neocolonialism was bad, wait ‘til you get a load of Chinese neocolonialism. In China’s western provinces, and especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in ethnic cleansing. As of May 2019, the government has held an estimated 1.5 million Uighurs — an Islamic ethnic minority — in internment camps in the Xinjiang province.
The CCP does not like ethnic or ideological diversity. That’s why Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are coerced into marrying Han Chinese by the CCP with the threat of internment. If someone does end up in an internment camp, they are “re-educated,” and their culture is belligerently whitewashed and replaced with the government-sanctioned Han culture.
In fact, the Chinese government has been actively trying to erase minority ethnic groups. This is why China extended its high-speed rail infrastructure to Urumqi, in Xinjiang, even though the ticket fares don’t even pay for the electricity necessary to operate a train from Xining to Urumqi, let alone the operating cost as a whole. To compare this to U.S. cities, this is the equivalent of building a high-speed rail line from Tulsa, OK to Salt Lake City, UT. It doesn’t make sense to operate such a train service because of how few people would actually use it; in both cases these are medium-sized cities which are in the neighborhood of 1500 kilometers (932 miles) apart, and it is difficult to justify such a massive infrastructure investment when these two cities could more efficiently and more effectively be linked by air travel, which is more appropriate for the number of people who would actually make this journey anyways.
I think that the primary reason why a high-speed rail line was built to Urumqi was to encourage members of the ethnic majority, the Han Chinese, to relocate to this province which has a Uighur majority and forcibly dilute their culture and gene pool. We can see this in practice, because Urumqi’s Han population increased by 764,000 from 2000 to 2010, accounting for almost 80 percent of the city’s growth in that time.
China’s actions toward their own citizens stand in violation of articles 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20 and 27 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Hold on, I hear you saying, what you’ve just described is a melting pot. The U.S. is a melting pot, as well. Isn’t the U.S. equally guilty, then?
No. I’m sure you’ve heard someone claim that “the ends justify the means.” This is the logical fallacy of pious fraud, and, if we reverse-engineer said fallacy, we can apply it to the present situation and see that just because the end result is the same, doesn’t mean that the methods are morally equivalent.
You see, it all boils down to individual sovereignty. In the U.S., if an immigrant has children here, those children will have American accents, eat American food, et al. Although they may retain large aspects of their parents’ cultures, they are fundamentally American. After several generations, most of the original culture has been usurped by a vague American-ness.
Each culture that makes its way into this vast melting pot slightly alters the composition of the nation as a whole. What we typically consider “American” food is not native to the U.S., but was brought here and iterated upon (consider the hamburger, an evolution of the German Hamburg steak). This cultural assimilation is not necessarily intentional; rather, it is a by-product of the fact that the U.S. is a nation built on immigration. Compare this to the violent and hateful eradication of cultures which is being enacted in Xinjiang.
So, since most of you reading this are Americans, take solace in the fact that even if our foreign policy is the most destructive political force in the world today, at least our domestic policy is not as bad as China’s.
