The Cultural Genocide in China

While scrolling through twitter a while ago I saw a bunch of tweets about genocide in Xinjiang, China. I was confused as to why I hadn’t heard about it on the news or heard anyone else talking about it. I decided to do a little research about this issue.

According to the New York Times, for the past two years Xinjiang has been building a great number of detention camps and heavy surveillance “in a state lead operation to convert Uighurs into loyal, secular supporters of the Communist Party.” The leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hasn’t been acknowledging this situation enough. “It was an about-face from a decade ago, when he said the Uighurs there suffered from, ‘simply put, genocide’ at the hands of the Chinese government” (Perlez).

According to Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher and expert on China’s minority policies in Xinjiang and Tibet, says that the Chinese Communist Party is “waging war” against other ideologies and religions. She explains that this could be compared to the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s when the communist party tried to abolish traditional beliefs, customs, religion, etc, “It was very messy, It was very uncoordinated.” (Zenz).

They are beginning to do the same thing to Uighurs. Uighurs are a member of a Turkic people of northwestern China, particularly the Xinjiang region. They are banned from fasting during Ramadan, naming their children with traditional Muslim names, and wearing ‘abnormal beards.’” (History).

The amount of people being arrested is drastic with a major contributing factor being predictive policing. “Minorities, such as Tibetans and Uighurs, are now living in a virtual police state, where you have cameras on every street corner, where you have artificial intelligence, huge data streams, flowing into databases that are being used for predictive policing, to think this person is behaving different than they behaved yesterday.”(Zenz). These AI systems could even detect something as small as when someone goes through the front door one day and through the back door the next, resulting in the person being arrested (Zenz).

The “vocational training centers” in Xinjiang are far beyond that. They are a complete violation of human rights. “Most recently, the crackdown has expanded with a “re-education” campaign and the internment of an estimated one in ten Uighurs from Xinjiang, possibly 1 million people in all. Initially China denied the existence of these camps, but in November 2018, Beijing acknowledged them and described them as prisons for low-level criminals or vocational training centers. Eyewitnesses and human rights experts have reported brutal conditions, brainwashing, and even torture.” (History).

This is only a little of what we know, and there could be so much more. This situation must not continue to go unnoticed.

References

Perlez, Jane. "China Wants the World to Stay Silent on Muslim Camps. It's Succeeding." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 Sept. 2019. Web. 28 Sept. 2019.

"The Targeting of Uighur Muslims in China." Facing History and Ourselves. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2019.

Zenz, Adrian. "Child Separation & Prison Camps: China's Campaign Against Uyghur Muslims Is "Cultural Genocide"." Democracy Now! N.p., 26 July 2019. Web. 28 Sept. 2019.