Chinese Tensions
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I believe in some of the re-education centres they are being made to speak mandarin, so there does seem to be an element of cultural suppression. The PRC says this is to help integrate them into the economy and get proper jobs: which I believe was one of the ways Welsh was deprecated. I think the difference is the Chinese State is doing this consciously and systematically.
Forced sterilisation does seem to be beyond the normal oppressive scale, the PRC shouldn’t get plaudits for stopping short of murder.
The Chinese government is doing what others capitalists states are doing too, there is not difference. They are not committing any genocides as the Western state are saying, they are the ones who have done a lot of genocides and they also want to re write history. The leaders of the Uyghurs want to form their own state and establish their own system of exploitation as the case of Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza. The Western states will find all kind of pretext to stop the world capitalist expansion of Chinese capitalism, even more, historically China should have become a capitalist nation a long time ago before England. The Chinese emigrants in USA were treated adversely when they started to work on the railroads, they were treated worst than animals
Western capitalists state want to re write history on their own genocides:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/12/indigenous-peoples-day-billboard-projectI think it is exactly as Matt says, nothing unique to China but something that is part and parcel of the development of capitalism
The current news from Canada as well as in the USA and Australia we witness the indigenous peoples suffering an attempted genocide (and for certain particular tribal communities it succeeded) and by using the cover of “progress” and “welfare” children were ruthlessly abducted and imprisoned in schools to be “re-educated” to be good citizens. Nearer home, we saw similar where the Scottish Highlanders were denied the kilt, culture and livelihood until they were no longer a threat and became romantic figures, much like the “noble Red Indian”.
For ourselves, what the Chinese government is doing is not some history lesson and the connection to expanding capitalism should be at the forefront of our case for socialism.
The creation of the nation-state was the evolution of capitalism, and the homogenous citizenry is part of the goal.
I can’t recall the Socialist Standard article, but it pointed out the racial connotations of “multi-culturalism” was to incorporate and integrate different cultures and religions into capitalism and not as its proponents believed to advance individual identities (I’m not referring to identity politics here, but the freedom of diversity versus the McDonaldisation of consumer capitalism)
ALB is right that we do not yet see the mass murder or the ethnic cleansing in Xianang of the Uyghur, there are no gas chambers but as a distinct people they can be turned into “non-people” and by this, I make a comparison with the Roma.
I see the same fate of the Palestinians who are doomed to follow the footsteps of the Jewish exiles, becoming a diaspora with no homeland.
So my attitude is one of sympathy for the victim and as always making it clear it is the normal functioning of capitalism.
How we successfully do that, I’m open to ideas.
That’s the point. There are minorities all over Asia, Africa and Latin America that are the subject of state oppression. So why single out China? Easy. It’s because it has become a threat to US domination of the Pacific area. So the US propaganda machine and its offshoots such as Radio Free Asia and the Victims of Communism Foundation have gone into action, mixing fact and fiction and exaggerating.
I don’t doubt that, for strategic and commercial reasons, the Chinese authorities want to change the demographic composition of Sinkiang. But frankly I don’t believe that they are deliberately sterilising Uigher women to bring this about. I can believe that sterilisations have been carried out but as part of the one-child policy that the authorities enforced throughout China.
The Chinese authorities have teams of people spreading their propaganda on social media. The US doesn’t do so so obviously but relies on ordinary people to spread theirs. We should be wary of inadvertently helping them by spreading their propaganda.
Just because Western rivals are making propaganda out of atrocity, doesn’t mean atrocities aren’t being committed:
“In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that figure had increased more than sixty percent to nearly 330,000 IUDs, with this rise taking place at a time when everywhere else in China, Han women were getting the devices removed.41 In 2018, eighty percent of all IUD insertions in China were performed in Xinjiang despite the region accounting for just 1.8 percent of China’s population.42
“According to its own budget documents, the Xinjiang government invested tens of millions of dollars into a birth control surgery programme from 2016 onwards, including the provision of community cash incentives for women to get sterilized.43 This has led to sterilization rates rising seven-fold in Xinjiang between 2016 and 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures; again, this occurred precisely when sterilizations are at a record low in other regions of China.44 While the rate of sterilization nationally continued to gently fall from forty to around thirty five women per 100,000, in Xinjiang it increased sharply from thirty to around 245 women per 100,000.45 The city of Khotän in the Uyghur-dominant southwest budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations in 2019, accounting for more than thirty four per cent of all married women of childbearing age.”
(Finley, again).
It does seem to be an uneven application of the child bearing policies of China.
I think there are two issues: firstly, the raw numbers of humans affected (a by-product of this colonial endeavour happening under a greater world population than, say, the genocides in Australia), and secondly, the planned and deliberate character (again, most previous genocides have tended to be sotto voce, unofficial, and, usually, ad hoc).
I can believe that sterilisations have been carried out but as part of the one-child policy that the authorities enforced throughout China.
But that one-child policy has been reversed, has it not, yet there is still an ongoing campaign of enforced birth control being implemented upon the Uyghur if we are to believe the claims.
Actually, the one-child policy permitted non-Han ethnic groups to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas.
It has always been a problem for ourselves of our policy of plague upon both houses, neither Washington nor Moscow, and now, neither Beijing.
We have always had partisans of one side or another challenging us on what they deemed fence-sitting stance. I’m sure CPers accused us of spreading slanders about Stalin’s gulags and the show-trials.
And there is an active ‘anti-imperialist'(meaning anti-American) left-wing busy siding with China and ignoring its imperialism particularly in Africa where the New Cold War is also playing out. (apparently, Chinese corporations are to be welcomed),
We walk a tight rope and we have to ensure our criticisms are nuanced enough to differentiate us from apologists of either side.
Sometimes that will be difficult to do but we encounter the problem repeatedly eg the Syrian Civil War where we take no side but are also subject to controversy such as the White Helmets and the chemical warfare, where our information is limited.
Sometimes we just have to hold up our arms and declare we don’t know what is true and what is not.
But other times we can reach some sort of judgement on events.
I’m with YMS, that we can from the evidence available to us, regardless of its source and despite attempts to block any independent investigation, accuse China’s government of systematic persecution of the Uyghur that is a crime against humanity, if we wish to avoid the term genocide.
As such we offer the Uyghur people our fullest sympathy for their pain and misery, actual physical solidarity and support being outwith our capability, but without any approval of the methods that they may choose to overcome their oppression such as separatism or armed struggle.
And we can add them to a very long list where capitalism has repressed and suppressed our fellow workers on all five continents and in practically every country.
Amnesty International adds their condemnation of China but stops short of calling it genocide, the media report using the term “crime against humanity”
the organisation’s research “did not reveal that all the evidence of the crime of genocide had occurred” but that it had so far “only scratched the surface”.The USA government sterilized thousands of Puerto Rican women and North American natives. The Mapuches in Chile are being oppressed for years by the Chilean state.
I didn’t know that. So it’s the pot calling the kettle black. No wonder the US hasn’t joined the ICC either.
And of course it’s capitalism that’s the big crime against humanity (if you want to use that nebulous term).
The Taiwan anti communist league is one of the most reactionary institutions that existed in Asia Radio Marti in Miami is nothing compared with them
I doubt it will gather many readers but this article tries to lift the lid off the common media narrative on the nature of China’s economy
China disavowed the communist model forty years ago. China’s contemporary economy is modelled after Germany’s 19th-century system, which can be described as state capitalism or industrial socialism.A bit sinophile about successes and little mention of the costs but a change.
We could take exception to the term ‘industrial socialism’ but we also challenged the term ‘state socialism’ too when that was in common usage.
(Again Robert Stafford’s scouring of the net brings up the goods)
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-history-forced-sterilization-latina-women
https://time.com/5737080/native-american-sterilization-history/The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women
Whatever the USA government claim or blame in others countries they have already done them. More than 99% of the US population do not know the real history of the USA, everything is based on fairy tales written in Disneyland, and now they want to re write history and prohibit certain historical passages to be taught at public and private schools and universities, and the strange case is that some Trotskyists groups are supporting that, they claim that the foundation of the USA was a revolutionary act. It looks like the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, that is reason why Trumps and some of his followers are against the Howard Zinn foundation who is Historian that debunked many mythologies and myths
Probably that write has not read a volume of Lenin where he said that State capitalism was a step toward socialism, and the concept was firstly used by Nikolai Bukharin ( including Imperialism ) . The new ruling class of China built state capitalism on top of ( or replaced ) the Asiatic Mode of Production, they never built a communist society, and their system is not a carbon copy of Soviet state capitalism.
Its economic expansion is due to the sweat of the Chinese working class, a large original accumulation of capital and extraction of surplus value from the working class, and it does not make any difference if they copied it from Germany, France, or the USA, it is just another mode of exploration like the ones implemented in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The left-wingers are the ones saying that after the death of Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, and Enver Hoxha capitalism was re established in Russia, Albania and China by a coup and in China by the gangs of four, which means that socialism must be established by a leader
China accuses the G7.
“Stop slandering China, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and stop harming China’s interests.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57466576
To be truthful, I fear this New Cold War much more than the US-USSR and the present Russia stand-off rivalry.
I think China is very much more an economic threat to various Western nations’ businesses than Russia ever was or will ever be.
If they cannot defeat China in the market, as the G-7 are now collaborating to do, there is only military force left to maintain their hegemony, a fierce Far East Asian regional war but involving major global powers.
Another Nostradamus prediction of my pessimistic prognosis.
The Soviet Union was not an economical power house like China, they were too busy producing modern weapons. The Western Powers and the US underestimated the Chineses capitalist class, in their racists and superior mentality they thought that the Chinese were not able to develop themselves,( they do not remembers when Mao and Nixon made their first alliance, and then Bill Clinton, they suffer from ammensia ) and now China is stepping in the tails of all of them, and China is producing from nails up to factories to produce factories, and they have modern infrastructure, by the meantime in the USA, they are falling apart. The ‘scarcity’ created by the pandemic proved that China produced everything for the whole world including masks, medications and medical equipments, they can not stop the further economic development or capitalist expansion of China, they are already kicking butts in Africa, super ports in the middle east East, and they are making heavy investments in Latin America and Chile is their backyard and they are making alliance with right and left wings governments, they are moving slowly and taking over without shooting one shot and without too much barking. The new Silk Road is going to be implemented despite the opposition of some Europeans countries, but there are some who are supporting the new Chinese Silk Road
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-ventures-america-s-backyard-latin-america-n740001
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