It is clear that many people (sometimes with good intentions) would bring this logic to any discussion about this matter.
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China is having their Muslim population put into camps and they live in a horrible injustice situation. They are targeted because of their religion /ethnicity.
Chinese government saying that US is being hypocrite because they did so and so in Iraq and whatever happened after 9/11 from abuses..etc would be good. If only they did that in general while not trying to say okay don't talk about us doing it because we think you did the same.
That would be great if you stand up against oppression in general not just when you can benefit. It would be great if we can just talk about people suffering and try to help them in every possible way.
I think a major resentment people have when they see these "moral stands" by the US, is that in its literal present day actions, neither US nor China "stand up against oppression in general not just when you can benefit", but also, China does not rhetorically claim to do so -- the US does make that false claim.
The easy present day case to back up this claim that the US does not "stand up against oppression..." is Yemen: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113852. With various slight modifications, and given enough time to explain, you can add a host of other countries to that list: Afghanistan, Syria, Israel+Palestine, etc. Go back 20-30 years and you can add Iraq. Go back a little further and add Indonesia+East Timor, Iran, most of South and Central America. It's more complicated to make the case, and there are still too many uncertainties about what actually happened, but you could probably even add "nice, Western" countries like Italy to that list.
The point is, China often uses this false talk of "moral stands" as a (mostly sarcastic) retort to the US, because the US sincerely engages in the same false talk in 90% of its communications and more importantly, in material actions that affect actual lives on the ground.
But we do try to make things right for US citizens (and often foreigners) inside our own borders. What happens inside your borders is way more important than outside.
I don't think what we've done in the middle east is remotely good but it's substantially different.
I don't think that matters really. First, I don't see the point in doing moral rankings. If I live in the US and the US does a bad thing, that's what I should care most about (up to a point). Even if I thought, "well, my morality points ranking shows China's worse", that shouldn't affect my political decisions in the US, where I can influence US decisions but not Chinese ones.
But sure, if I have to pick which country to live in, on this metric I'd probably pick the US (we're smoothing over some extremely significant internal problems in the US here, but not directly comparable to Xinjiang, so OK, let's side-step them for the moment).
But that's a pretty selfish view. Good conditions at home don't justify imposing awful conditions abroad. To think so is literally imperial logic. I realize using phrases like "imperial" induces eye-rolling in some, but it's appropriate for the concept we're discussing here. The US's cold calculating cruelty is perhaps less obvious, but it undoubtedly impacts far more lives and deaths. So while I won't weigh in on whether the US is an empire (don't care), if you buy into the logic that "we're only evil abroad, at home we try to be nice", then that is imperial logic.
> ICE stopped sending immigrant women to Amin after the allegations of nonconsensual and unnecessary procedures came to light. The FBI is currently investigating Amin for a series of unnecessary, rough, or abusive procedures, according to a report in Prism by Tina Vásquez earlier this month.
> The feds shut down the entire facility after the allegations came out. It wasn't a case of one doctor.
Well the hysterectomy thing was the one doctor (and the facility failing at its duty to properly oversee him). However, it wouldn't surprise me if there were other issues there as well.
Habitually performing major surgery without informed consent is a structural problem that can't be pinned on a single doctor. An incredible amount of checks have to break down to get to that point.
> Habitually performing major surgery without informed consent is a structural problem that can't be pinned on a single doctor. An incredible amount of checks have to break down to get to that point.
No, because I doubt very much that it was "a lack of oversight". He pretty much must have had support for what he was doing. There's a difference between not noticing something occasionally weird and mass sterilization.
> No, because I doubt very much that it was "a lack of oversight". He pretty much must have had support for what he was doing. There's a difference between not noticing something occasionally weird and mass sterilization.
> At least 43 women at Irwin county detention center (ICDC), in Georgia, have now alleged misconduct by Amin. He is accused of operating on migrant women without their consent or performing procedures that were medically unnecessary and potentially endangered their ability to have children.
> Ogburn, who has worked as a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist for nearly three decades and who has led organizations that develop patient care standards, said Amin did a variety of tests and surgeries for patients that “did them little or no good, and potentially caused harm.”
> “In summary the care provided by Dr. Amin did not meet acceptable standards based on the review of these records,” Ogburn wrote as part of his complaint. “My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients.”
1. Less than 43 women is not "mass sterilization." It's well within the scope of damage could be expected from one incompetent doctor.
2. It's quite believable to me that the jail officials never questioned the medical activities of the doctor (let alone understood what he was doing was malpractice) and just ignored complaints they received from the detainees. For comparison, this outrageously incompetent guy (https://www.propublica.org/article/dr-death-christopher-dunt...) managed to avoid oversight for two years while he was maiming and killing people.
If you click through to the compliant it's not claimed that only 43 women had issues, but instead every woman that doctor came into contact with. They were only able to track down 43 women after ICE started covering their tracks.
> Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody.
Nurse Wooten, who filed the whistleblower complaint.
I mean, after the lawsuit was filed, ICE shutdown the facility and expedited the deportations of all who had filed the suits leaving no paper trail and nowhere for the lawsuits to go. That's not exactly what I'd expect from an org acting on the up and up.
Chinese government (propaganda) is usually deploying this logic to suppress the discussion about their actions. It is a wide spread tactic that we see everyday. It is not like china is ever interested in helping people in Iraq, Afghanistan.. they could just stop doing the same (if not worse) as a good well gesture.
I personally think China has done a great work in Afghanistan than US. They sent humanitarian aid to poor people who were never responsible for terrorism. I acknowledge that China might have their own interest, and might be some Shenanigans. Or, it might just be a marketing tactics to earn good will & gesture?
However, US freezing the whole country account is bad. This doesn't just punish few bad people, but it punishes many good people. Liberation happens through development, not through revenge & suppression.
China is actually interested in helping people in Afghanistan. They sent aid[1] during the winter crisis and they have called for the return of the assets of the Afghan people that have been stolen by the United States[2].
Fun facts about me, I'm not Chinese or paid by the Chinese government. I don't want to see my friends or our collective kids go off on a stupid war with China or another war in the middle east. We remember the WMDs lie, we remember decades of wage stagnation, we remember the decades of politicians low-balling us on healthcare reform/student loan forgiveness/nuclear power plants/other green energy. We know how much Iran/Afghanistan cost. We know who, for decades, sent all our jobs to China. It wasn't China. Want us to give half a shit about putting Xi in jail? Put Bush and Cheney (random names from a long list) in jail first. We can't afford any more wars. We're tired of endless do nothing politicians and constantly being gaslit.
It's a completely fair question to ask what is the Chinese justification.
I found this documentary[1] by CGTN about the recent history of extremism and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang to be useful in outlining some of the context for this.
These terrorist attacks were a real problem and have resulted in the deaths of over 1000 civilians (including Uyghurs). China's argument is basically their re-education "camps" are an attempt to address the underlying causes of this, which is basically economic under-development, lack of education and job opportunities. So China basically identified the people who were involved in these groups and susceptible to radicalisation by them, and set up these schools for them which would teach them skills, including Mandarin, that would help find decent jobs that could provide for them and their families, which eliminates the underlying material basis of the support from some parts of the population that the terrorists may have had.
Having said that, there is still a huge discrepancy in what China says it's doing and what the west claims it's doing. Western sources claim that these are actually "concentration camps" and that there are as many as one or even two million Uyghurs interred there. These allegations are dubious for a number of reasons, but that's a topic for a different post.
Like I said, your question is the right question: what is the Chinese justification for this? And I think it's fair to say their answer is at least plausible on the surface of things and internally consistent. But it leads us to another question: if the claims of western sources of one million plus Uyghurs in "concentration camps" are true, then how does the west explain China's motive for that? China isn't stupid. Why would it put 10% of the population of an entire province in a concentration camp? Are they just that cartoonishly evil? It doesn't really add up to me.
At end of the day repressing restive frontier minority that accounts for less than 1% of population for domestic security (especially terrorism) is the "correct" political decision for CCP. There isn't any feasible calculus for not taming XJ (or Tibet or HK or TW). The real answer is they were left alone for too long due difficult access (whether by geography or politics), granted privileges in hopes they would not stir up trouble. That didn't work, and now wealthier PRC can build high speed rail into their provinces to forcefully integrate. Something every other Chinese province was subject to post 50s. In short, it's simply their turn.
Even the most pessimistic Zenz estimates of XJ internment at 1/12 of population is roughly lifetime incarceration level of US blacks. And the hit job articles on XJ vocational/reeducational "slave" labour programs still have "inmates" paid dramatically better than US prison labour in absolute terms and substantially better in regional terms. Exceeding ~40% of 600M Han Chinese subsisting on informal wage economy. Han Chinese would lose their shit if they find out the amount of subsidies going into XJ securitization and sinicization. If they the the choice between spending trillions to "tame the savage" in XJ versus 12M bullets for an actual genocide, the amount that would pick the latter would be disturbing.
US tried to nation build and spread western values in Afghanistan - PRC is nation building in XJ and spreading PRC values. Just with less bombs and more infrastructure.
Zenz is literally _the_ source of anti-Chinese propaganda. He's the main person behind "Chinese Tribunal", which... well, a private NGO, operating without any legal basis or oversight, calling themselves a "tribunal", think what you will.
I am not saying that it is the case, but let's assume for a moment that China is "re-educating" the Uyghurs to help them "find decent jobs that could provide for them and their families" and so on. Do you think it is acceptable to force someone to undergo "re-education" against their will?
> hypocrite
...
> just talk about people suffering
Talk all you want, PRC's position is the hypocrisy is moving beyond talk into sanctions and other actions that undermine XJ development for counter-insurgency actions. Same reason rest of world is annoyed into being pressured to sanction RU over invading UKR when US/west did not. It's about weaponizing morality for geopolitics.
Chinese government saying that US is being hypocrite because they did so and so in Iraq and whatever happened after 9/11 from abuses..etc would be good. If only they did that in general while not trying to say okay don't talk about us doing it because we think you did the same.
That would be great if you stand up against oppression in general not just when you can benefit. It would be great if we can just talk about people suffering and try to help them in every possible way.