cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2223566
“Authoritarian legality:" China’s oppression, mass imprisonment of the Uyghur minority amounts to “genocide” the world “has not seen since World War II”, study says
Here is the study: Uyghur Race as the Enemy: China’s Legalized Authoritarian Oppression and Mass Imprisonment (pdf)
Chinese authorities sentences Uyghurs -a minority in Nothwestern China- to prison for an average of 9 years, including for “offences” such as wearing a hijab or sending money to family abroad.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to “legalize” and “normalize” Uyghur persecution by incorporating it into the pre-existing criminal justice system “undermining the possibility of a life of dignity, prosperity, and freedom for future generations as well,” the researchers say.
Evidence indicates that trials against Uyghurs, if they happened at all, have been cursory and performative rather than substantive.There are countless documented arrests that were almost immediately followed by formal imprisonment in less than a month.
The Uyghur population is currently set to suffer from a cumulative total of 4.4 million years of imprisonment, “undermining the possibility of a life of dignity, prosperity, and freedom for future generations as well,” the researchers say.
Almost 90% of criminal records in Xinjiang are not public, even though legal records in other Chinese regions are, meaning that records of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who are known to be imprisoned were unavailable for the context of this particular analysis.
Additionally, the limited data available does not provide substantive information on incarcerations. There exist 13,088 entries for which no official reason for arrest or incarceration was made available to anyone, including families and loved ones, with 3,849 of those in- dividuals known to be incarcerated and 9,059 of those individuals whose status remains unclear.
25,155 entries [in the official the database] do not even have sentencing data, and most entries provide only unclear reasons for indictment, such as “Flagged by autonomous-region IJOP (一体化推送人员)” or “Four lines (meaning unclear) (四条线).”
The victims’ families were left in no better position when it came to transparency and communication of the victims’ status, in some cases being left oblivious to their family members’ imprisonment for years. The report cites case of Mr. Abdurahm Tohti’s family:
Mr. Tohti was living in Istanbul when he lost contact with his wife and two kids—the youngest being only five months old.31 Mr. Tohti’s entire family was sentenced to a total of 90 years after their disappearance 7 years ago, but only recently did Mr. Tohti learn of the sentencing through other locals. Mr. Tohti still does not know what his wife or kids were charged with. In another case, Uyghur professor and ethnographer Rahile Dawut’s daughter lost contact with her in 2017. Her daughter, who lives in the United States, did not hear any news regarding what had happened to her mother until four years later, in 2023—only to find out that she had been sentenced to life in prison. She has not spoken to her mother since, and is unable to ask anybody in Xinjiang for more details. This opaqueness has led to immense frustration and caused tremendous pain for Ms. Dawut’s daughter.
“These are merely emblematic examples. Many families have endured a similar fate, not knowing what happened to their loved ones after they disappeared,” the report says.
I just read the 25 pages and they used a lot of hard data from China’s own databases, though the data is very limited access and particularly opaque even when compared to other regions according to the report, and it looks pretty compelling.
Edit: I’ll add that I’m changing my mind about it. I used to believe it, then I started to distrust it, but now I guess I’m coming back to it. What’s pretty wild is I’ve watched videos of people going to Xinjiang and it looks totally normal. Mosques everywhere, arabic text, people smiling, etc. Then on top of that it’s pretty clear that western capital wants to reduce China’s gains, so of course we’re happy at these reports.
But the quickest way to clear it up would be for China to let the UN come and look and interview people, but they aren’t. I do recognize that UN investigations tend to come with US spies, but I don’t really see what’s over there to hide, anyway.
What happens in Xinjiang is as disgusting and inhuman as is what happens in Gaza, and so is this whataboutism that is still widespread here.
Just one among many examples is this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/18948648 with the title: “English-language Wikipedia editors concluded: Israel committing genocide in Gaza”
At the time of this writing, there are 69 comments to this post, but none of them is mentioning the genocide in China, no whataboutism. Why not here?
And the whole ‘story’ is based on a Wikipedia entry, you know, the same Wikipedia that is criticized in the .ml communities for its bad quality seems to be good enough here. Why?
I would argue that this title implicitly suggests there’s no genocide in Gaza while the other title doesn’t reach beyond the bounds of Gaza.
As to the “wiki is a bad source” I don’t claim to have any knowledge of that poster’s thoughts, but here’s a couple possibilities I’ve come up with:
They thought it was interesting that the genocide was evident to the “ordinary” person that edits wiki despite them thinking it’s typically a bad source
They are just some random ml user whose opinions on wikipedia don’t strictly match that of the concensus of lemmygrad, hexbear, et. al. Since those instances are more united on that stance than I’ve observed Lemmy.ml to be (right or wrong as they may be, not making a judgment here)
