"nah dude there is a serious element of racism and profiling on the basis of physical appearances involved. In the carl zha interview he goes into detail about a policy in which hotels have to inform the police whenever Uyghurs check in or out, and other alarming shit they shouldnt be glossed over as just a matter of preventing some AQ affiliate from taking over towns or something. People who look physically turkic of have islamic or turkic names are racially profiled in some pretty nasty ways.
Anyways, one incredibly interesting relationship and comparison is that between the uyghur and the hui, who are the other major muslim population in china. Hui and Han have a history of cooperating in conquering Xinjiang, and Uyghurs have had long-standed ethnic tensions with both groups, sometimes erupting in riots and massacres.
Hui seem to be a "model minority", they are anti-separatist, spread out all over and integrated well with Han chinese. It seems China's trying to craft Uyghurs into that mold, with the national unity stuff, and has resolved to try and demographically and culturally change Xinjiang by promoting Han migration there and through some culture policing and re-education camps. Most importantly (probably) is trying to economically develop the region. And yes, re-education camps are prisons - you aren't allowed to leave them and they have guards. If you wanted to be unduly generous you could compare them to mental wards instead or something."
"you claim to not be arguing for cultural education and internment as an essential component of the security apparatus, but i think you're implying it by this consternation about alternative models.
if it's a nonessential security process, then clearly the alternative model is trivial to identify: literally any other mobilisations the prc uses against insurgency and antisocial behaviour in cases that do not involve a marginalised ethnic minority. the prc is a developed and sophisticated security state, the idea that their hands are tied to han cultural chauvinism by default is giving them extremely little credit"
"you two are arguing in a boring way because in the interests of propriety petrol isn't just flatly saying what he believes without qualification.
the uighur imbroglio is interesting to me because of this question; is it ok to stamp out religion? i think yes, and indoctrination is the only way to do this. but i'm not sure that's entirely what the ccp is doing in xianjing. when they do things like suppress the uighur language, that crosses into destruction of national culture. soviet nationalities policy under stalin emphasized the promotion of national culture and autonomy in particular before the war, and it was very successful in promoting alongside this soviet humanism. there doesn't seem to be anything similar to Сове́тский наро́д in the People's Republic of China, which I think is a real obstacle to socialist internationalism and humanism. han chauvinism seems to really be an ascendant aspect of the ruling ideology.
when i was doing some investigation into the uighur affair, which is really difficult to parse, i came across these archived uighur forums and a lot of the complaints in the poorly translated google rendering were about insufficient resources being allocated to the uighur minority. there was a class component to the complaint, ethnicity and class were intersecting in a way that clearly privileged the han over the uighur. some examples here in links and pictures:
https://web.archive.org/web/2011091...80/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=228208&extra=page=1
https://web.archive.org/web/2011091...80/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=228964&extra=page=1
https://web.archive.org/web/20110913090155/http://www.uighurbiz.net:80/html/2009/0622/13103.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20110731150010/http://www.uighurbiz.net/#
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...22631332698783785/Han_racism_Uighur_forum.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme...368/Uyghur_Han_Discrimination_forum_class.png
That last picture in particular is illuminating to me and makes me think of Lenin when he talks about the proletariat of Britain being infected with cultural chauvinism.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachme..._Colonial_Chauvinism_Settlers_Sakai_pg_52.png
Xianjing strikes me as an example of internal colonization, we see this with the reports of incentives for marriage between ethnicities, which on the face of it isn't objectionable, but when mixed with the chauvinism we see many examples of takes on a sinister turn, Australian settlers attempted a similar project; there's not a lot of hard evidence out there but it strikes me as part of a strategy of homogenization.
I'm reaching further back into the depths of memory, but there was a Sean's Russia Blog Podcast episode with Ronald Suny where Suny talked about how in the Soviet Union there were certain ethnicities associated with certain class roles, and how development policy, particularly in Central Asia, by encouraging local culture and administration and competence sought to break these class tags that ethnicities were saddled with. We see it in a crude form in the US with the conception of the Mexican as itinerant laborer."
"Thank you. Internal colonization is exactly what it is, and I suspect it has less to do with religious extremism as it does ethnically based separatism. This isn't an effort to stamp out extremist cells or shut down particularly wahhabi mosques, whatever hard evidence we have points to it as a large scale pacification campaign against an ethnically turkic region prone to rioting against the dominant ethnicity.
As to the question of what is the alternative to reeducation camps and forced "assimilation" (again, assimilation to a cultural and ethnic group coming to them, not one that they themselves are joining), the answer is usually "listen to their grievances and address them to the best extent you can". There are clear indicators of material inequality and alienation from a distant state that sets limits on religious and cultural practice, while offering little in return but an influx of developers with a different religion, language and ethnicity who by every measurement control the regional economy and government. The tricky part is reconciling the fact that integrating Xinjiang with the rest of China will be better for China in the long run, and depending on how its done, for Xinjiang as well, and the fact that there is a long history of Uyghur demands for self-determination."
and here are threads on the general china question:
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/883/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14185/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14547/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14747/