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Uyghur Genocide

Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>

Date: 2021-03-30

I used to live in Tajikistan, which is a land that borders China and the Xinjiang territory. Tajikistan is predominantly Tajik by ethnicity, but it's mixed like the surrounding region. A Tajik is a Central Asian who speaks Persian, a language I speak as well, which is why I was living in Tajikistan. Tajiks have a culture nearly identical to that of Uzbeks, as the two ethnic groups have more or less merged together over the ages, but they continue to speak two different languages. As you know, Persian is an Indo-European language that influenced the region greatly, and Uzbek is a Turkic language. Despite their separate origins, Tajik Persian and Uzbek grew to be very close. By just knowing Tajik Persian, I can understand a fair bit of basic Uzbek, especially since I had in the past studied Turkish as well.

Uyghurs are a Turkic people whose language is nearly identical to Uzbek. It seems the main thing separating them is the fact that they live on the other side of the border, in China. Otherwise I recognize their music, traditional clothing, foods, handcrafts, and so on. That's why I feel such a great affinity and fondness for them even though I have never met an Uyghur or been to Xinjiang. To me they are like lost cousins.

In Tajikistan people are vaguely aware of Uyghurs. Apparently some live there, but not a great number. On the street I once saw a young man wearing a shirt with "Uyghur" written on it in Perso-Arabic script, which most people in the country can't read. I wondered if he even knew what it said. Sambusas, a popular street food sold everywhere in the region, recently started being called "Uyghur sambusas" by street sellers in Dushanbe eager to market their product. I'm not sure what makes them "Uyghur", since they are just typical Tajik sambusas, but I got the impression that this marketing campaign showed that Tajiks like Uyghurs enough for their name to make the sambusas somehow more interesting. My father-in-law had even once been to Urumqi, as he mentioned in the past, and I had met another man in Tajikistan who had traveled there. (He was an ethnic Uzbek.) So they aren't entirely cut off from one another.

I always dreamed of traveling there myself, but eventually when I heard about the Chinese government's mistreatment of the Uyghurs, it greatly disappointed me. There isn't really anything someone like me can do about it except hear about it. I didn't just read news articles, but also more or less got a feel for the current state of Xinjiang from videos filmed there. I understand how authoritarian governments operate; nothing I saw from there surprised me.

The main problem the Uyghurs face is that they live in China. This makes their problem unique, because other Central Asian peoples also suffer under a kind of protracted "communist" (I mean, USSR) rule. In Tajikistan, you have similar issues of the government cracking down on any people's movement. Democracy is not allowed, religion is not allowed, nothing is allowed except what the government tells you you should be doing. They do the same contradictory song and dance of claiming to support the nation, claiming to support Tajik language and culture or religion, while repressing everyone behind the scenes. There's hardly anything different about that in China.

However, in China it's on a large scale, with more force and extremity behind it. China's crackdown on the Uyghurs has a kind of urgency to it, as opposed to the lazy Soviet ghost haunting Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Yes, Tajiks are sort of being pressured to assimilate into Russia, adopt Russian language, norms, beliefs, and so on, but that program faltered when the USSR collapsed, and now they have a government which is less invested in that process and whilst making a more desperate appeal to the national language and culture.

In Xinjiang, Uyghurs don't just have to adopt "Chinese" culture, they have to do it *right now*. They have to stop speaking their language, stop practicing their religion, and work as underlings to people from another nation. It's the sort of thing citizens in countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan can happily avoid sometimes, but in Xinjiang it's being very brutally and coercively enforced, seemingly without mercy or a shred of remorse.

In Tajiksitan, for example, Russia's influence over the country is increasingly indirect, and the process of Russification is to a large extent being perpetuated by Tajiks themselves, who naturally have more sympathy towards fellow Tajiks and themselves have less genuine interest in becoming 100% Russian than perhaps the Kremlin would like. The Sinicization in Xinjiang is less a phenomenon occurring within its own society as much as it is imposed from the outside by direct intervention from Beijing.

That is to say, the outlook is just rather more grim. The grip of authority is tighter, whereas Central Asia is kind of a loose, barely-governed region tending towards autocracy, the government can't dominate everything about your life though it tries. In China the government has more means to do so.

For better or worse, Tajikistan is now increasingly coming under China's influence, so I hardly see a future for that country aside from being some kind of weak vassal state to China, but I hope Tajikistan's de facto independence will prevent it from turning into another Xinjiang. Maybe it would, given another fifty years.

Nowadays a lot of people are shilling for the CCP online. There's probably someone on Gemini right now that doesn't believe China isn't being wonderful towards the Uyghurs and that all the media is lying except for official Chinese government outlets. I get it, Western media can be sensationalist and hypocritical, but I don't care about that. Sensationalism aside, Xinjiang is dysfunctional, and everybody knows it. The Chinese government lies about it, and everybody knows it.

Some people would deny that what's happening in Xinjiang is "genocide". Maybe it isn't, but only if you define genocide in terms of literally just murdering everyone. The Chinese government isn't doing that in Xinjiang, but the policies are designed to make it so Uyghurs stop existing as soon as possible in all but name by doing all but killing them. So yes, it's not mass murder, but it's mass imprisonment and coercion, maybe even sterilization. It means Uyghurs need to be gone within the span of a single generation, so their kids need to all be raised as Chinese speakers and non-Muslims.

I get that assimilation happens. It happens all over the world, but there's just a limit to how far you can go when it comes to forcing people to assimilate. I don't entertain fantasies that Xinjiang will in the future not be part of China or won't eventually assimilate, but the devil is in the details. The situation just needs to be handled better, and urgently.