Thread by @dpinsen

I’ve got a call shortly, but after that I think we need a short thread on the claim that China is a “genocidal security state”. 🧵

https://twitter.com/jordylancaster/status/1488538862116872201

Committing genocide seems a lot worse morally than, say, (re)occupying Crimea, so if China is doing that, we ought to be sanctioning them more harshly than we are Russia. It looks like there've been a smattering of sanctions under Trump and Biden... nbcnews.com/politics/natio…

But we imported $48.4 billion in goods from China in November, 2021, uscc.gov/trade-bulletin…

Which was about 18x what we imported from Russia the same month.
census.gov/foreign-trade/…

So, if China is the new Nazi Germany, doing this level of business with it would seem to be immoral. But is it?

When the Nazis took over Germany, in 1933, the Jewish population was 505,000. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

Ten years later, in 1943, the Nazis declared Germany to be Jew-free, though the Jewish Virtual Library quotes an estimate of 19,000 Jews remaining there underground.
jewishvirtuallibrary.org/germany-virtua…

In contrast, according to China's census data, there were 9,759,196 Uyghurs in Xinjiang in 2010, and 11,624,257 ten years later in 2020. fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cgtrt/eng/n…

Now, maybe the Chinese government just made up those numbers, but you'd figure if they were completely made up and they had in fact massacred most of the Uyghurs since 2010, there'd be some independent confirmation of that: satellite footage of mass graves or something.

Nevertheless, activists argue that China is committing genocide by... promoting interethnic marriages in its media (quote-tweeting Candace here because Leta Hong has blocked me).

https://twitter.com/CandiceLen/status/1283938650821136384?s=20&t=YTWeyalngVxYju06oF15MA

Now, clearly, the Chinese government is not a fan of diversity, doesn't think it's been a strength for the West, and wants to nip it in the bud at home. Does that make them genocidaires?

Could China still be guilty of genocide according to the UN Definition of it?

I guess in theory, but considering they're a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power...

un.org/en/genocidepre…

So, I don't know. I'm sure China is guilty of some human rights abuses, as are other countries. But I suspect the reason why it gets rhetorically attacked on the Uyghur issue is because China resists the poz. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

And the reason China hasn't been subjected to significant sanctions is because too many elites in America have financial interests in its success.