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SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Uyghur "Genocide" is so hardwired to people's brains, how do any of y'all try convince others that they're believing propaganda?

It's really frustrating, I was talking to someone about how successful China has been in de-radicalization of reactionaries. But they responded to this by saying they're only successful because, and I quote "put them all in concentration camps and killed them"

Has anyone here been successful in deprogramming people about this topic? If so any good sources I can use to dissuade them? I tried telling them that the UN report, if you read it, just says that there's concerns about abuse by internment offcials, and there's no evidence of genocide. But when I say this they just dismiss it as if the UN is controlled by the PRC. It's like a religion to liberals to believe anything bad about China and can get really frustrating.

110 comments

  • My go to dunk is that there's zero Muslim majority nation that has even produced a comment on the Uyghur thing. It's 100% coming from Western nations with recent history of wars in the Middle East and Islamophobia.

    • And going this route, you find out whether your lib is a well meaning but politically naive potential comrade, or if they're a racist, chauvinistic chud.

      On reddit you'll probably mostly get the latter. The chuddier libs love falling over themselves to talk about how literally every single Muslim majority country is governed without the consent of its people by theocratic despots who are fully supported and propped up by Chinese bribes. Just wild conspiracy shit like this rehashing the oldest racist tropes in the book without the slightest hint of self awareness.

  • People only ever bring up Xinjiang to dismiss China. It's nothing more than a trump card: "Oh, you think we should be less hostile toward China and listen to the Chinese? Uyghur genocide Taiwan independence Hong Kong protests Tiananmen square!!!"

    You're never going to get through to people without confronting their chauvinism first because they can always pull another reason to hate China out of their ass. Part of that is investigating why they want to believe against China in the first place. Is it cope? Scapegoating? Plain racism?

    • Is it cope? Scapegoating? Plain racism?

      Does anti-communist brainworms count?

      I just don't get it, like okay, be anti-commie if you want, but why the fuck do you want to overthrow foreign governments? It's hypocritical coming from supposedly pro-peace libs.

      • Because they’ll all be replaced by wholesome 100 keanu chungus pupperino western european style governments with perfect scores in the Freedom Eagle Democracy Ranking, just ask Yeltsin

      • to open new markets and destroy fixed capital, both of which will temporarily paper over the falling rate of profit. that's not a conscious motivation for the squishy libs, but they will follow obediently the mainstream progression as bourgeois media demonizes the enemy and invents atrocities. pro-peace libs are against all wars except the current ones

    • China is as real as Mordor to most of us, it's an idea that needs to exist in order for people to feel better about themselves

      • There always needs to be a greater evil to hold the US up against. This is the only thing keeping the guns pointed at the rabble rousers instead of the reptiles in their marble buildings in D.C. People will not only accept, but defend any atrocity as long as they think the alternative is worse.

    • Taiwan independence

      They always seem to forget that there is not a single nation-state on the planet that recognizes the island of Taiwan as independent from a Chinese state.

      Hong Kong protests

      Best part was the "Chinese Colonizers Get Out" banner. I can't believe China is colonizing an indigenous British city in checks notes Asia. Another highlight was the mindless propaganda-regurgitating redditor who posted the "Free Hong Kong" graphic, but in a display of their incredible laziness and lack of genuine fucks to give about the people there, translated the "free" to mean literally "free of charge" in the Chinese text.

      Tiananmen square

      One hundred gazillion dead bicycles never forget

  • "put them all in concentration camps and killed them"

    At some point I feel like they're self confessing their own thoughts about how to treat ethnic minorities and projecting onto china. You might have just been talking to a cryptofash.

    I've been successful since I'm also Muslim and I can accuse them of islamophobia and only caring about Muslims when it's convenient in Xinjiang but "bad optics" in Palestine.

    How could there be a genocide if no one was killed?

    • I've confronted this one guy a few years ago when he started to indirectly accuse me of shirk/takfiri because I openly state that I'm a communist and hold pro-China/CPC views. He very quickly went for the "Uyghur genocide" and got angry at me refuting it. My rationale was the high-sped rail connecting Xinjiang to the rest of China, the improving trends of quality-of-life statistics among Uyghurs (increased pay, employment, literacy rate, electrification, clean water, mechanized agriculture, dropping of infant mortality, reduction of poverty, etc.), videos of Xinjiang's culture, both from people who actually visited and from GCTN, the fact that Uyghurs are also Chinese citizens, multiple other sources refuting claims of anything resembling a genocide and of course, literally that the claims originated from a certain German preacher who's also a Nazi sympathizer. Or simply enough that I'm from a country whose former and current heads of state have very openly stated that "Western powers have no right to make claims of the rest of the world". South Africa and Namibia have also praised China's efforts in Xinjiang as recently as early 2024.

      I also did a little thought exercise and asked if it is "also" colonization for anyone to move from Berlin to Frankfurt, or from Tallinn to Narva. Easily answered no. Then of course the person in question still considers it colonization for someone to move from Guangzhou or Shanghai to Urumqi. The last question I asked if it is colonization for a person to move from say, Johannesburg to Cape Town - This was "difficult to answer". Obviously it's only "difficult" or "too political" because South Africa is no longer a West-aligned country.

      Also he supposedly delegitimized much of the Palestinian solidarity movements solely because it was spearheaded by the South African Communist Party over 20 years and many pro-Palestinian groups and individuals in South Africa of all faiths and backgrounds are active members of the SACP, or at least supportive of them. Oh, he definitely agrees that Shitrael is committing a genocide against Palestine, but presumably doesn't like it when communists (especially South Africans) wave Palestinian flags in the streets.

      Funny that no one in South Africa ever called me "political" or "takfiri".

  • Maybe I'm actually crazy, but there was a time like a year or two ago when it seemed like the US actually gave up all pretenses and admitted it was bullshit? (edit:I should say it later seemed like this may have been reversed). I distinctly remember a collective cathartic sigh on then Twitter that the uyghur slander thing was FINALLY coming to an end. I definitely remember a NED tweet from well before then basically laying claim to supporting sowing extremism in the region, but I could also swear there was a major outlet expose (maybe multiple exposes) months later detailing all the state department bullshit surrounding the situation (e.g. deliberately mistranslating/mislabeling "job centres" to torture camps or something to that effect, and so on)

  • I go "how could you be worried about China at a time like this, with Saddam Hussein getting closer and closer to obtaining a nuke"

    To be less facetious, it's easier now that we see what an actual genocide looks like in Palestine, you can just ask "If these impoverished people with unreliable communications to the outside world still have smartphones and internet, if they can upload their suffering despite every attempt to censor it, then where the fuck are all the horrifying gory videos from Xinjiang, a place that is not under seige or blockade? Don't you think if such videos existed, we in Amerika would never hear the end of it?"

    And hey, if China is committing a genocide against Muslims, how come the US isn't arming and supporting them?

  • Well it's pretty simple, ask them if they trust the US after all they did to Muslims around the world. If they are "neither Washington nor Beijing" type leftists then you can have a constructive discussion and patiently explain your point of view and acknowledge theirs in good faith. If they do trust the US then they can't be salvaged and just agree to disagree on believing anything coming from the western block

  • Gonna take this opportunity to bounce an argument off of you folks.

    This supposed Uyghur genocide seems to have zero confirmed martyrs. No one is confirmed to have died in this genocide. So I like to ask people to name one person who has died in this genocide and folks never have any answers.

    Some people like to say that it is a cultural genocide. Even madempanada said this. One could argue that hypothetically you could culturally genocide a people without killing one of them. But reality does not turn out this way because it turns out that peoples are intimately linked with their cultures and they don't usually just accept their culture's erasure without fighting back. This often leads to violent encounters which leads to people dying. But the supposed Uyghur genocide does not have any incident like this.

    Meanwhile actual cases of genocide always have confirmed reports of people dying during the struggle. Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Muslims in Kashmir and so on. Seems like the Uyghur are unique in the fact that they don't fight back and instead delegate their struggle to NGOs based in Washington lead by Guantanamo translators.

    • One thing that I find to be very odd about the Uyghur genocide accusations is that we are currently witnessing a genocide in Palestine and it is being extremely well documented through social media posts, news coverage, etc. We can hear directly from the victims of the genocide and their families in near real-time and see direct evidence of what is happening because everyone there can document it using a phone that has a camera and a microphone.

      It has to be said that we live in the age of social media where information always leaks out in some form or another no matter how much anyone in power within any system tries to stop it from doing so. If there were such a genocide occurring the victims would be documented, we would know their names, and we would see posts about it which show very clear evidence of this crime.

      This is especially glaring as the USA attempts to ramp up to a new cold war with China (The US military has even released statements saying they consider themselves in a war footing with China, and nearly every new military RnD project is designed to counter Russia and China). If this genocide were happening, the documentation of it being done by the United States Government's most significant enemy would be everywhere on the news, you would be hearing constantly about the victims of such an act. It would be used to make the public favor economic warfare against China.

      But we have seen almost no documentation or evidence of such a crime in the news, on social media, or anywhere else despite the fact that so many people have the tools to document it with ease.

      • It's a confluence of several forms of racism to put it naively. They see "the Chinese" as devious, where they could covertly culturally genocide you without you knowing anything about it, and other groups as too backwards to speak for themselves.

        The genocide of Palestinians has thrown a spanner in the works of their racism factory because now they cannot accuse others of genocide as casually as they did before.

    • It also can't be a cultural genocide (whatever vibes based analysis that would entail) because they are still considered an ethnic group part of China and not part of another ethnic group. Uyghurs have political representation in the CPPCC and people in China know they exist. It is literally called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

      Meanwhile, the US has beyond a reasonable doubt committed a cultural and physical genocide on the various indigenous tribes in North America. From boarding schools where children were forced to give up all links to their culture to what the US literally calls "reservation camps" which native peoples are forced to live in total systemic poverty. The children who grow up in the US are not taught anything about indigenous cultures beyond the fact that the US displaced and exterminated them. Indigenous peoples couldn't even vote until the 1900s.

      Xinjiang poses a threat to the settler class because it is an instance of a nation state actually resolving ethnic conflict not by state-backed terrorism and displacement. If people were to learn the truth about Xinjiang it would only endanger the grip that settler-colonialism has on the West.

      • It also can't be a cultural genocide (whatever vibes based analysis that would entail) because they are still considered an ethnic group part of China and not part of another ethnic group. Uyghurs have political representation in the CPPCC and people in China know they exist. It is literally called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region

        these cannot be applied as principle, the existence of administrative units and official recognition are components of a dignified reality but not necessarily indicative of one. Israel has an 'autonomous' administration for the palestinians in the west bank 'Palestinian Authority'. it does not protect the palestinians. the native reservations in the US are recognized and autonomous but cultural genocide is ongoing against indigenous populations because of the marginal economic position these autonomies are in relative to the white supremacist state, to say nothing of the land & resources. by all accounts China's autonomous regions & minority programs bring disproportionate funding and support in favor of its minorities, but it is not the simple existence of autonomous administration that makes it so.

      • The thing is that concern trolls have conjured ample ammo to consider it a cultural genocide. It is mostly because they aim for a white Eurocentric envisionment of genocide that assuages their own guilt since it falsely equivocates state-designated enemies with themselves. For example, an American news outlet that I can't remember the name of won a major journalistic award off of this shit. (I think it was Pulitzer but I could be wrong.) The investigation involved looking at satellite images to discover what they supposed were demolished mosques.

        So I asked within this context of their weird conception of genocide whether it is reasonable to ask them to find one confirmed martyr in this genocide.

    • I like to ask people to name one person

      this seems like bad faith argumentation, can you offer specific names in "Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Muslims in Kashmir and so on" on the spot without any investigation?

      also the characterization of no deaths and no fighting back is easily contradicted by the terror attacks. i wouldn't attempt to argue that the re-educational and deradicalization camps/schools the narrative revolves around are unrelated to those attacks.

      anyway when you bring up the terror attacks it's relevant to make clear the US had the militant groups on the terror list & Uyghur prisoners in Guantanamo bay

      • Well I don't mean it in bad faith. I don't mean to put people on the spot with gotchas. I allow people to look into it as long as they want to. The point is that with both Kashmir and Rohingyas you can find confirmed kills, even massacres.

        also the characterization of no deaths and no fighting back is easily contradicted by the terror attacks.

        I don't understand this. Can you explain more?

  • believing propaganda

    propaganda doesn't have to be false (even though it is in this case). the word has been loaded like this to imply that anything with a viewpoint to promote is false while pretending that mass media is objective when it promotes bourgeois viewpoints

  • Is it safe to assume that this person also believes that Zion-occupied-Palestine is not suffering a NAT-involved genocide and that every toe stub in Ukraine since 1917 is genocide?

  • Notify them that their own empire's intelligence organisations don't believe that, and ask them what evidence they have that the combined efforts of the CIA, NSA, FBI, MI5, and the other such organisations couldn't uncover.

  • At this point, it's a distraction from the very real genocide that's going on in Gaza. Ask them:

    1. Where are the fucking bodies? It takes like 2 minutes to find photos of piles of dead Palestinians exterminated by the IOF. You can easily find NSFL photos of Palestinian babies with their heads missing or Palestinian bodies with their viscera bursting out of their bodies because they were run over by an IOF tank. So where are the goddamn bodies?
    2. Why has every single Uyghur separatist group support the Zionist entity that is currently committing genocide in Gaza? Why do you see every dipshit separatist with a stupid smile shaking hands with a Zionist freak? Every Muslim majority country supports China's claims while every Uyghur separatist groups suck up to the Zionists. When even comprador regimes like Egypt and Jordan keep up the flimsiest of appearances by rhetorically opposing the Zionist entity, these Uyghur separatist groups can't even offer the most token of opposition.

  • It depends on the person. Some people don't really pay attention to the news, were relatively young when some of this first came out, and some people are just sorta ambivalence about all the politics stuff, even if they see it. With them, I know I might have hope in explaining details.

    If it's someone that's committed, but is still a bit of a civility lib, I just quickly mention the UN report that said there wasn't genocide, mention that there may still be issues, and then talk about how they shouldn't use that word too carelessly, because it lessens the impact of more "real" genocides. That should all happen in the span of less then a minute, and then I'll quickly change the subject or leave the conversation. Hopefully, they care enough about word choice that they stop using the word "genocide" (though often they'll call it something else that's also sort of wrong, but hopefully less wrong). Getting people to change the words they use is a very small step, but hopefully more steps in the right direction can follow.

    And then there are some people where it's easier to just dodge the China topic. China hasn't been the main focus of the media for a while, so saying good things about China usually gets through, a lot of the anti-China libs of the 2010's are much more focused on the whole Ukraine and Russia ordeal. Saying good things about China and Xinjiang will probably get a lot less of a reaction than having a controversial opinion about Ukraine. I've never seen random people flying Uyghur supporting flags, but I've seen many, many Ukraine flags.

  • If you don’t have sources, why are you engaging in debate?

    I don’t think China is straight up doing death camps. They have put them in "re-education centers" and there has been a significant drop in Uyghur birth rates.

    The fact that Islamic countries haven’t spoken out could well be that they are also known for religious persecution. Turkey spoke out against China's treatment of Muslims in 2009 and got hit for it. To this day, China reminds them not to mention it. There’s a lot of money moving there plus the belts and roads initiative.

    It’s not clear cut. We can’t definitively say that they aren’t abusing human rights. So, maybe we don’t make claims we can’t prove either?

    Edit: I forgot to say it works both ways. If they’re making a claim, it should be on them to provide evidence too. So, ask for that.

    Edit #2: or take advice from here and use straw man arguments, whataboutisms, and generally attack anyone that doesn’t 100% line up with your opinion.

    • how magnanimous of you to admit that you don't think china has death camps.

      if you knew fuck all about the region besides what the US State Department wants you to know, western asia has been a locus for US backing of opium gangsters and religious extremists for over 50 years. western backing of the same has been going on there for over 100 years, all in service of destabilizing the eastern powers at all costs. it was western-backed psychos that burned down thousands of schools to prevent literacy among women, and opium warlords that threw acid in the face of women politicians.

      the only reason you can even name an ethnic group in western china is because china has figured out how to stop it from working, and the west is furious at losing their #1 strategy.

      go close your own literal death campus and make some actual meaningful gesture towards respecting human rights, then you can weigh in on what is happening in places where there isn't a Burger King.

    • The thing that convinced me was the data used to support the claim that sterilisation was occuring at record rates - which was technically true, but the jump was from 50 to 250 sterilisations per 100,000 people.

      Declining birth rates is occuring across the world, but we don't have to refute claims about genocides in Hong Kong or South Korea which are both much lower than Xinjiang.

    • We can’t definitively say that they aren’t abusing human rights. So, maybe we don’t make claims we can’t prove either?

      This is shifting the goal posts

      The discussion is about genocide, the destruction of an entire ethnic group, not human rights abuses. I don't doubt that there are human rights abuses at a reeducation camp - by its very nature, any form of imprisonment will involve the abuse of human rights - and this is the conclusion the UN came to

      Genocide is a much more serious and extraordinary claim to make, far beyond "human rights abuses". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there's been zero evidence of a genocide

      • The agreed term includes the destruction of a religious group. That could totally happen by forcibly converting people in education camps or by indoctrinating their children. It doesn’t have to be murder.

    • If you don’t have sources, why are you engaging in debate?

      Doesn't even cite sources in the response, makes an edit complaining about the eeevil Hex-bear tankies going after them.

    • The fact that Islamic countries haven’t spoken out could well be that they are also known for religious persecution. Turkey spoke out against China's treatment of Muslims in 2009 and got hit for it. To this day, China reminds them not to mention it. There’s a lot of money moving there plus the belts and roads initiative.

      Is this really the simplest explanation, that every single Muslim-majority country is completely bought off and/or just doesn't mind "religious persecution" in the abstract, even if it's fellow Sunni Muslims being persecuted?

      Even Saudi Arabia, a country that is Sunni by vast majority and also financial very deeply tied to the US -- involving arguably one of the single most significant financial ties in the world, i.e. the petrodollar -- has come to China's defense on this subject.

      Surely you see how, with a complete lack of specific evidence, what you're saying is no better than a crass conspiracy theory, right? Frankly speaking, it's a racist one at that, assuming all of these countries and peoples, because they are "also known for religious persecution [of other groups!]" can be causally bought off and thereby shrug off an atrocity of profound proportions as a country's worth of Muslims get eradicated.

      or take advice from here and use straw man arguments, whataboutisms, and generally attack anyone that doesn’t 100% line up with your opinion

      I, too, wish they held their temper slightly, but it makes no sense to cry about opinions when it comes to accusing a country of genocide, the gravest and most morally disgusting crime any nation has ever committed.

      It's also a crime that, when it is actually happening, has produced a wealth of evidence, evidence that we do not have in China's case.

    • It’s not clear cut. We can’t definitively say that they aren’t abusing human rights. So, maybe we don’t make claims we can’t prove either?

      We? Who's we?

      You

      to bullshit to pretend you're not a Western chauvanist.

      We are communists who understand how imperialist propaganda works, and why libs like you believe it.

    • I see a couple comments you posted before (since removed) excusing the American government for overlooking the Palestinian genocide.

      So it's interesting that genocide becomes an important issue for you when it can be used as a cudgel against China.

      And fuck off with your whiny edits about how you're just a lil guy getting dogpiled. If you want to have a good faith disagreement about China or whatever that's more than allowed here, providing you make a real attempt. Which you did not.

      Sorry you stumbled onto one square milimetre of internet that doesn't follow imperial narratives.You wanna feel validated in your anti China sentiment? Go read or watch any major media outlets, speak with any politician, or talk to 90 percent of random people where you live. They will all share in those opinions.

      • That’s bullshit. What’s been happening in Palestine is atrocious and America's long-standing policy towards funding it is inexcusable.

        The only thing remotely near "excusing" is my staunch belief that letting Trump be the next president bc of the current admin's stance is not helpful or even counterproductive. Especially given the GOP's regressive stance toward gays, trans, education, etc.

    • there has been a significant drop in Uyghur birth rates.

      -The Uyghur people, along with ~50 other officially recognized minority groups, were exempt from the one child policy. When the one child policy was ended a few years ago and was replaced with a more general three child policy, these minority groups were no longer exempted.

      -There is a direct correlation between rising living standards and declining birth rates, and China is a relatively rapidly developing country, obviously including the Xinjiang region were most of the Uyghurs live.

      IMO these two points go a pretty long way in explaining the drop in Uyghur birth rates.

  • dont bother with any of that. instead, tell them the genocide is real and really, really bad, and that they should read a FULL paper by adrian zenz. then you get a low chance that they do that. and if that happens... uh how to put it nicely... there must be serious brain damage involved if they continue believing in it.

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