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Comment by draklor40 | Hacker News Reader

By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocational training centres”. It has forcibly sterilised some Uyghur women. But it is not slaughtering them.

- Yes, Guardian is so sure that no mass murders took place. How ? Cause you know, CCP says so, so must be the truth.

A sham of an article in the name of journalism and "trying to name the crime accurately".

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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?

These aren't extermination camps, people are eventually being released from them. Their notional aim is re-education and making people genuinely love Big Brother/the Communist Party, but I doubt the deciders are naive enough to believe that will actually happen. Instead, it's sufficient that the detainees become broken, intimidated and compliant.

Recent interview showed they also round up people for "further education" after releasing them the first time.

Assuming the allegations are true- psychological, physical torture, rape, forced work and so on- is it not reasonable to assume that not all who enter will leave?

People die in prisons too, that doesn't make them extermination camps.

They don't need to be extermination camps to have mass graves, and if I am not mistaken, many extermination camps were thought by outsiders to be prison / work camps until the truth came out.

All of this- on every side- is pure speculation until a trusted independent inspection can be performed. Unfortunately, I am skeptical that will happen anytime soon- I seriously doubt China would see attempts to do so as anything other than a violation of their sovreignty.

> people are eventually being released from them

According to what I've read, people in these camps disappear and are never heard of again.

They sound a lot like concentration camps. Just because they aren't full blown extermination camps yet, doesn't make them any less despicable. The Nazi camps didn't start as extermination camps either, that was a gradual development.

Well, actually, I'm pretty sure an extermination camp like Treblinka that's purpose-built for killing humans is more despicable. This is also pretty much what the article is saying: excessive hyperbole cheapens the very real problem.

Excessive hyperbole, aka crying wolf, does make it less likely that if horror happens, it will be taken seriously. But this is not that. China has jailed over a million people from a single targeted ethnic group. Rapes, forced sterilizations, disappearances, etc have been happening and have been documented.

It is genocide according to the UN definition, which the Economist writer mentions and ignores blissfully, because of course they would know better. History repeats itself, and good people will continue to discuss semantics while others are tortured and killed.

So as long as it's just sterilisations and imprisonment and forced labor camps and just a few murders for organs it's hyperbole to call it a genocide?

I don't get the point. Yes, they haven't reached the point of murdering by the millions yet. But its still a very worrying development.

We know from history what happens when people are accused of being asocial and are sent to work camps. It's happened before, and people didn't believe it, and it took decades for people to fully realise what was going on.

I always wondered why nobody did anything against the concentration camps, the doctors who killed patients, the mass murders.

I think people were either choosing to not believe it, or they were watching in terror, helplessly, relieved that they were not yet victims themselves.

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.

What do you mean by `Red Rage` ?

It's a reference to US political policy: the USSR was an enemy, and therefore everything associated with anything under a red flag[0] is evil.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_(politics)

Isn't the term `Red Scare` ? Strange that I get called out for mixing up names :)

Anyway, Guardian, Economist, etc, doesn't really make a difference. They all write the same subservient way about China anyway \__(:-/)__/

The term Yellow Peril was also around for a good half century in the West before it somehow disappeared. I guess they can't say it anymore.

Seriously, in what parallel universe do you toss The Economist and The Guardian in the same bucket. The only think they have in common is the article in the name

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