“Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang

[deleted]

The salient point of Genocide (for me) is the intent not the means.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

  4.3 Genocidal intent
  ...
  4.3.3 "A national, ethnic, racial or religious group"
  
  4.4 Genocidal acts
  4.4.1 Killing members of the group
  ...
  4.4.4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

I thought Lemkin coined the word with the Armenian genocide in mind. In 1943, the scale of the Holocaust was unknown among the public, and even Western intelligence to some extend. Lemkin was in the US by then, so the information available to him about the scale of Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe would be largely unavailable to him.

The difficulty is that we need to have different terms for different levels of atrocities. Forced sterilization of an ethnic group is an atrocity. Mass murder of an ethnic group is also an atrocity. But they're on different levels. Both of these are crimes against humanity. Both are deplorable. But they're not equally deplorable. Both are bad, but they're not equally bad. Clearly, mass murder is worse than mass sterilization. It's a crime that should be treated differently, just as we treat rape and murder differently.

If we call what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to the Uyghurs a genocide, then we should come up for another word to describe what the Nazis did to the Jews. Or, heaven forbid, if they really do start murdering Uyghur families in mass.

Then the word should be retired. The suffix -cide means to kill. Any other meaning makes the word itself a lie.

Also, nobody knows how many Uyghurs are actually being killed (probably a lot). It could be a lot worse.

How do you quantify the "in part" portion of that definition: "intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group"?

What's the minimum number or percent of a group that must be targeted in order for an act to be considered genocide according to that definition?

>Not slaughtering them makes no difference to whether it's genocide.

In terms of the definition adopted in various official contexts this is obviously correct. But the problem is in terms of discourse "genocide" has a much more specific connotation for most of the public and it's all too easy to (deliberately or not) to conflate the two things - making the issue harder to discuss.

If you'll forgive a controversial analogy - it's like the term sexual assault. Clearly sexual assault in legal terms has to include unwanted sexual touching of any degree. No doubt. But if I say "I am a sexual assault survivor" then this inevitably conjures up images very different to the truth (which is : my bum was pinched a few times in nightclubs two decades ago). In the case of sexual assault modifiers like "serious" or "minor" get used because clearly there is a big range of possibilities here. And although my experience was sexual assault, it's intellectually dishonest for me to put it like that (at least not without heavy explanation).

Similarly with genocide, if (to use your least severe hypothetical example) the only issue was an above average number of children from one ethnic group being taken into care and placed with foster families of another ethnic group then it would feel dishonest to say (in public discussions) that that was a genocide (by itself). (Note : That is NOT what is happening here, I am merely responding to your example)

I don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to say myself but maybe "genocidal practices" might be more appropriate, I don't know. It feels poor taste to call anything "a minor genocide".

Forced sterilisations have unfortunately happened all over China as a result of the One Child policy. To my knowledge that has occurred across the board and no ethnic group was ever specifically targeted. In fact under the One Child policy minorities have the right to have more children than the Han majority, and they do have more children. So reporting that "some forced sterilisations" have occurred is not really significant in itself.

Likewise, when it said that the birth rate has significantly dropped I think it would be useful to see figures (if they exist) on the average number of children per woman in the region because, again, China has a pretty strict birth control national policy and that would allow to see how it was enforced in Xinjiang before versus now. The figures quoted in an article I quickly found through Google [1] suggest that the One Child policy (even with recent relaxation) was not strictly enforced and that the birth rate was much higher than it should have been under national policy. If so that could mean that they were cut some slack and have now been brought in line with the rest of the country. Of course this is from the Golbal Times, an official Chinese organisation, so I do not know how reliable the figures are.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1212073.shtml

Yes. It appears so. But it's so horrific, no one wants to talk about it.

In December 2018 The Tribunal issued an interim judgement:

“The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgment/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30324440https://ww...

Harvesting organs from prosecuted groups is, allegedly, a common activity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong

Some unknown but probably large number of people is executed in China every year. Some of them are Uyghurs.

For organ transplantation, a corpse is a corpse, whether they died in a traffic accident or were executed doesn't matter (except probably execution by poison as practiced in the US).

So yes, executed Uyghurs are used as organ donors in China, but the causality is inverted: they're not killed for organ harvesting, they have their organs harvested because they were killed.

As someone whose studied both situations pretty extensively I disagree. Israel practices something more akin to apartheid. There is no eugenic component as far as I’m aware, Gaza has a significantly higher birth rate than israel. In Xinjiang, forced sterilization is a systemic aspect of the campaign thereby fitting into the UN definition of genocide.

Then we do

Homicide and suicide apply to individuals. Genocide applies to a group. You don't have to kill every living member of a group to eliminate it. For example, you could just sterilize the females.

Which is why that practice (along with kidnapping/relocating children) is recognized as such.

The definition of "genocide" isn't really that simple. Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term "genocide" in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, said that genocide is " a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure" (my emphasis).

China might not be literally committing mass-murder but my non-expert understanding is that they're making a deliberate effort to eliminate Uighyur culture and identity which is very much within the definition of genocide.

As defined in the Geneva convention, genocide also includes forced sterilisation and removal of children from parents.

Also, what do you expect the end result of mass incarceration in prison camps to be, other than mass graves?

Dude, take a deep breath and chill. Your "Red Rage" led you to confuse the Economist - always a stalwart champion of British Liberal Capitalism - with The Guardian, a somewhat leftish newspaper from the UK.