Chinese Tensions
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America “mobilises” the island nations of the Pacific against China
The Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, and was attended by leaders or delegates from 11 countries or territories, but representatives from a significant number of countries, including Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Samoa did not attend.
By contrast, last week, China held a virtual China-Pacific island discussion which was attended by senior representatives from the governments of most countries, including the prime ministers of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, the president of the Federated States of Micronesia, the premier of Niue and Fiji’s defence minister.
China has wider spheres of influences. The 21st century is the century of the Chinese capitalism
Well, I do not think the world working class is mentally ready for a socialist revolution, they continue supporting capitalist leaders, nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, and they are moving toward the right and supporting reactionaries personalities, and workers are completely disunited. In my whole life, I have never seen such a retrogressive situation as the one we are experimenting now
Malaysia scrambled fighter jets to respond to a major incursion of its airspace by 16 Chinese aircraft and called the incident a “serious threat” to its national sovereignty and flight safety.
the Chinese Embassy said its military planes didn’t violate Malaysia’s airspace and had exercised freedom of overflight in the area. It said they were carrying out routine flight training
MS, i’m the glass-half-empty pessimist but even I acknowledge that class consciousness does not increase at an arithmetic rate. It spreads like a pandemic to use a current example.
To be optimistic, more and more although not drawing 100% correct conclusions are still questioning what capitalism is and how it can be changed. The environmental crisis is drawing attention to the failure of capitalism to resolve the problems and produce a remedy.
While there are increased nationalism and bigotry, accompanying it is also a rise in tolerance and acceptance.
We should refrain from predictions because what and when an event triggers off revolutionary ideas, we simply don’t know for sure.
The U.S. Air Force indicated that it plans to buy “state-of-the-art, long-range weapons that are better-suited for operations in the Pacific,” Military.com reported.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/pacific/
The Air Force also wants to increase its procurement of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, stealth cruise missile, an advanced weapon with a range of roughly 600 miles, the budget documents state. Officials have previously stated the JASSM and its cousin, the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM, can be used for stand-off precision strikes throughout the vast expanses of the Pacific region.
The Trade War intensifies
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57334265
Biden is set to ban Americans from investing in dozens of Chinese tech and defence firms with alleged military ties. The new executive order will come into effect on 2 August, hitting 59 firms including communications giant Huawei. The list of firms will be updated on a rolling basis.
The move expands an order previously issued by Trump.
Whilst on the Chinese side a new “charm offensive” is being encouraged.
This is a useful backgrounder on the situation in Xianjing.
Why Scholars and Activists Increasingly Fear a Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang
“In addition, an important foreign policy angle potentially explains why China has chosen this moment to impose a “security state” in Xinjiang and suppress the Uyghurs. In 2013, the PRC government adopted the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure development strategy which aims to invest in nearly seventy countries and international organizations and promote a China-led Eurasian integration. As the grand strategy within Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” it seeks to balance against American primacy while securing the northwest frontier: as the key gateway to Xi’s vision, stability within the territory of Xinjiang is considered paramount.”
What is happening in Xianjing is settler colonialism, full bored and conscious on the part of the Chinese authorities, seeking to build a demographic majority in a border region: “At each turn, the Chinese authorities appear to have grossly over-reacted to the perceived Uyghur threat, coming finally in 2014 to view the group as dangerous, unco-optable and uncontainable – a circumstance not unknown in colonial and quasi-colonial borderlands managed by an insecure state.”
“Viewed through this lens, the situation begins to resemble a colonial genocide, where the perpetrator targets the indigenous peoples on the frontier because of their growing resistance to the former’s predatory behaviour.”
““It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide. These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.””
The aim may not be to absolutely wipe out the Uighurs, but to reduce them to a demographic rump and shore up China’s Western border.
“Kazmi’s point about the US being itself imperialist and more interested in maintaining its position as global hegemon, supported by its UK partner in the “special relationship,” is well made. In the US, the Left has been similarly slow to react to the Xinjiang crisis owing to its reticence toward the idea of finding common ground with Trump-era Republicans.132 But in June 2020, something happened that provoked a shift: following publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, it emerged that Trump had secretly encouraged Xi to continue constructing internment camps to detain Uyghurs. This revelation, argues investigative journalist Casey Michel, has opened up “an opportunity for the left to move into the moral vacuum Trump has created – and that [Joe] Biden, and Democrats more broadly, are suddenly moving to fill.””
It’s clear that meaningfully PRC is committing democide/genocide.
Joanne Smith Finlay writes:
•It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide. These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”I don’t know who introduced this dubious extension of the meaning of the word “genocide” into the English language or what axe they had to grind, but the suffix -cide has always implied physical extermination as in homicide, suicide, parricide, regicide etc. Persecuting someone does not amount to homicide. Nor are republicans regicides just because they want to abolish monarchies.
The word for killing off a culture or language should not be “cultural genocide” but something like “culturecide” or “linguacide” if you want a word for it.
Extending the meaning of genocide to include this sort of thing weakens its original meaning and reduces what the Nazis did in the end to the Jews to the same level as attempts to discourage the use of the Welsh language in the 19th century.
The Chinese government is oppressing the Uighers but it is not seeking to exterminate them as applying the word “genocide” to this implies and in many cases is deliberately meant to imply.
And what does she mean by “genetically reducing”? She appears to mean reducing the proportion of Uighurs in the population of Sinkiang. This would seem to be the policy of the Chinese government, or at least a consequence of it, but it doesn’t involve killing anybody. It’s the language of the propagandist rather than of the objective academic researcher.
Let’s not accept this manipulation of language any more than we accept the attempt to extend anti-semitism to mean anti-Zionism.
I think that links back to the problems with the idea of genocide itself: it is about destroying a people as a people, so acts like forced sterilisation, forced adoption, etc. are genocidal, especially as they tend to the elimination of the Uighurs as Uighers. The aim does seem to be that they will lose any cultural, linguistic identity at the end of this.
Part of the problem is that the bar is set by the Holocaust, as the most extreme version of genocide (or the Rwanda case).
It does seem China is going beyond oppression into a form of elimination, even if, it seems, they need the labour of the Uighers as well.
We just saw Ratko Mladic lose his appeal for acts of genocide in Bosnia. What was interesting was that one judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe from Zambia accepted Mladic’s defence that he acted for “humanitarian reasons”.
But I am sure that you are aware that your definition is not the full legal definition as determined by the United Nations.
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.Both these charges have been levelled at the Chinese Government, not as isolated events but systematic policy.
The originator of the word Raphael Lemkin defined genocide, a relatively new term to the English language, as follows:
“New conceptions require new terms. By ‘‘genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin tide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group”
The UN further explains that genocidal acts include
Less obvious methods of destruction, such as the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services;
Creation of circumstances that could lead to a slow death, such as lack of proper housing, clothing and hygiene or excessive work or physical exertion;
Programs intended to prevent procreation, including involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage and long-term separation of men and women;
Forcible transfer of children, imposed by direct force or through fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or other methods of coercion;
Death threats or ill treatment that causes disfigurement or injury; forced or coerced use of drugs or other treatment that damages health.The destruction of or attacks on cultural and religious property and symbols of the targeted group that may be designed to annihilate the historic presence of the group or groups;
Targeted elimination of community leaders and/or men and/or women of a particular age group (the ‘future generation’ or a military-age group);
Other practices designed to complete the exclusion of targeted group from social/political life.https://www.un.org/ar/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf
So Joanne Smith Finlay’s description of a slow genocide and Zenz’s are if accurate in accordance with international law. China is not a member of the ICC and has refused admittance to any other independent investigatory team to directly verify these allegations
I don’t think China is doing any other than accelerating what was done over longer periods in previous developments of capitalism.
“If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. [15] The Genesis of Industrial Capitalism.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
It seems to be agreed by everyone that the Chinese government is not carrying out a policy of mass killings, death camps etc (which is what most people will understand them to be doing if they are accused of “genocide”). So what are they doing besides the “normal” policy pursued by many other states, today and in the past, of oppressing some “national” minority?
The end result may be that the Uighers end up a minority in Sinkiang but will their culture and language have been suppressed? Is their language banned?
Thanks, Alan, for who invented his own definition and somehow got it incorporated into that scrap of paper known as international law.
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