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We're fine, but I do feel bad for the americans who live in some sort of delusion that their exploitation is freedom.
China certainly has its smattering of Han supremacy and engages in (mostly economic) imperialism, but even the Uyghur genocide pales in comparison to any of the multiple genocides of the Nazis.
What do you propose? Military invention would just mean global thermonuclear war. US sanctions against China? They'd either have to be ineffective enough not to have any significant impact (like the Huawei ban) or they'd amount to cutting off your nose to spite the face. The US (like most developed countries) is economically dependent on China at this point. China also holds a significant share of the US's debt. Cutting off China from the US would probably hurt the US more than China and nobody else would follow suit if it impacted their economy.
You want the US to cut off China? Sure. Stop relying on offshore production in developing nations. Pivot back to the isolationism of the pre-WW2 era. But that would mean giving up the excessive military domination and rebuilding the domestic economy from scratch. You can try to half-ass it and move production from China into other countries but that's just delaying the inevitable (who says India isn't going to slide into genocidal fascism next, given they already have a Hindu supremacist problem?).
A genocide is not defined by literal death of individuals but for killings to be part of a genocide they have to intentionally target a specific group and its culture.
The Nazi's Eastern front was explicitly a war to create "Lebensraum" (living space) which went with depopulating large areas. They also deliberately initially displaced and then systematically exterminated Jewish populations. They also targeted Sinti and Roma people. For Jews they also went to the lengths of deliberately destroying their cultural artefacts as well as works they claimed to be influenced by Jewish culture.
If you desperately want to pin a mass murder on historical communists, you probably want the Holodomor. But even the Holodomor seems to have at least in part been a case of administrative failure and apparatchiks not taking complaints seriously. But at least there are indicators of some level of malintent even if it may not have been intentionally genocidal.
Unlike the above, the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims does qualify as genocide under most definitions as it actively seeks out to erase culture and traditions even if the settling of Han Chinese people in Uyghur territory may not. But while it involves imprisonment, so-called reeducation and arbitrary arrests, it doesn't involve mass murder.
Note that what the Nazis did to Jews, Roma, Sinti and (to a lesser extent) Slavs wasn't unique in European history either (except for the technology available to them), but Europeans previously only had done this to populations in Africa or the Americas. From the victim's perspective the distinction between fascism and colonialism is at most times completely arbitrary.
From what I can gather, the unofficial story behind the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward seems to be that Chinese bureaucrats fell for exaggerated claims about farming techniques used in the Soviet Union and pivoted the farmers to using those techniques and set quotas based on the expected returns. When the results didn't match the calculations, nobody wanted to (likely, literally) bite the bullet so they tried to make good on the overpromised exports, starving the local populations.
Much like the Chernobyl incident, this was more of a case of bad judgement followed by a rigid chain of command playing chicken with a catastrophe to avoid taking responsibility for a comparably minor gaffe.
Of course the CCP didn't want its bureaucracy to appear incompetent and for the US it was more useful as anti-communist propaganda to frame it as mass murder than administrative failure, so neither side has been particularly honest about it in most "official" material until the end of the (first?) Cold War.
If you want to point out deliberate mass murders by China or the Soviet Union there were plenty of those (e.g. Mao killing the landlords) but in terms of scale they don't really compare.
EDIT: Also if you seriously want to count famines as mass murder, you won't like hearing about what the British did in India.
The official story is false. They knew what was happening -- they had agents in every village, who amazingly were always well fed. There were regular visits and inspections. Look, both the USSR and China had mass famines in the countryside, and it was for the same reason:
They wanted to rapidly industrialize which meant the creation of a large factory worker class in rapidly growing urban areas. This required a smaller and more productive agrarian class with surplus food being shipped to cities.
But rather than wait and let normal urbanization take its course, they simply transferred populations to the city and confiscated all the food that was needed to feed this class, letting a fraction - about 10% of the rural population - starve to death. The remaining farmers were forced to work harder to make up for their dead colleagues and this was accomplished via intimidation and near-slavery conditions. That is, at the end of the day, what forced agricultural collectivization was all about. It was to make up for the fact that a lot of the farmers would not be given food. And everyone understood what this was about.
It was intentional democide to free up mouths to eat in the cities, in order to achieve rapid industrialization.
The Great Leap Forward was remarkably incompetent in many parts exactly due to the same circumstances I described: forcing ordinary citizens to produce shoddy steel in their backyards to meet quotas for example. You seem to give Mao and the mid-century CCP a lot more credit than they deserved.
Well, that's something for you to work out. China was great at monitoring the population. If there was a Christian missionary somewhere in those villages they would have been swiftly found (and they were). But you think 50 million people dying and Mao didn't know? Entire villages wiped off the map and no one noticed? Emaciated bodies walking around, children with distended bellies everywhere and it was a secret? Remember for every one that died, there are 100 more walking skeletons that didn't. No serious historian believes this:
Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward," Mao warned colleagues a year later. "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill."
And it was the exact same thing that happened in the USSR when they did the same rapid industrialization program and the same forced collectivization scheme, done for the same reason, in the 30s. Even up to similar proportions of the agricultural population dying. No one is claiming that the Soviets didn't know they were starving the countryside to enable rapid urbanization - they rode up with trucks and took all of the food from the farms, across the entire countryside. So, I don't understanding the apology for Mao here, we have logic, we have precedent, we have a documentary record, and we have his own speeches.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...
> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile
But "classicide" is not genocide. I'm not interested in defending authoritarian governments or state capitalist empires. I'm pointing out that it is extremely ill-informed to compare modern China (or even Maoist China) to the Nazis.
> pumping money into this fascist dictatorship
SNAFU; people invest money into the regime unknowingly. It should be every government's ministry of finance's responsibility to clearly mark a financial instrument (retirement fund, stock bundle etc.) as having ties to a CCP controlled company, so that at least an investor can make an informed decision; and if the parliament has passed a resolution to condemn the genocide, then it should follow through and outright ban such investments. Instead nothing happens, apathy rules, and tragically the victims of the genocide have no mindshare to lobby to change the situation.
Twitter marks CCP controlled content as such, but your stock portfolio and broker do not.
Not so long ago, it was said that Xinjiang was "worse than the holocaust". But now "The barbed wire is almost gone. So are the armored personnel carriers. Young [supposedly genocided] Uyghur men are back on the streets" and "sense of normality is creeping back in". What's more, this "Nazi Germany-like regime" is doing all this voluntarily?!
The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.
There is a problem in Xinjiang, no doubt about it. But it's not the second coming of Nazi Germany. It's a heavy-handed fight against sallafist jihadists that have killed thousands of Han and Uyghur alike, with the end goal of making society safe again even if that means collateral damage and intruding on individual rights.
For example, this: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2019/06/china-s-uygh... "largest since holocaust"
Or this: https://twitter.com/SaeedTV_/status/1301991175713419264?s=20 "The number of deaths of Uyghur Muslims in camps or dead in China now surpasses the number of Jewish people killed in the holocaust."
It was (and I argue, still is) quite common for people to call someone a "genocide denier" simply for saying "what happens in Xinjiang is bad but it's not genocide / it lacks evidence". For example: https://twitter.com/redditiosymboli/status/13875617117339361...
A direct quote from you:
The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.
You're comparing your impression of a bunch of poor quality news with an article by the AP and calling it backpedaling. The AP did not backpedal, because it never said that Xinjiang was worse than the Holocaust.
Further, things can change with time... that AP article is saying that things used to be much worse.
In any case, your focus on whether AP specifically said or didn't say something misses the bigger picture. The real world isn't a high school debate in which only strict debating rules are important.
What's happening here is that the US government and the military industrial complex are manufacturing consent for a war against China, and the media is ignorantly taking the claims at face value and giving the messages a platform. Sure, the media may not always literally make the same claims word for word, but the point is that all these insinuations and mood-making still instil ideas in people's minds. That's why on the one hand "State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China" [1] while on the other hand we have people like shell0x proclaiming that China is the second coming of Nazi Germany.
Have enough people with such a sentiment, and the sentiment becomes truth even if nobody explicitly said it. That's why Dutch parliament members said in parliament debates that "1 million Uyghurs are imprisoned" (not "up to"; exactly 1 million, or even more), even though "reputable" media such as AP only ever said "up to 1 million". Dutch parliament members even said "Amnesty International confirms that there's a genocide", but if you go to Amnesty International's website then the website says "there's not enough evidence for a genocide".
The public and even politicians are being psychologically manipulated to accept a war against China. In the mean time, even though accusations of "genocide denial" don't come from the mainstream media, having enough people say something like that will deter other people from speaking out against the genocide narrative out of fear for being socially ostracized. For a while I feared speaking up for this exact reason. Aren't we supposed to be a free society in which we can question things?
Also in the mean time, actual Uyghurs who wanted to speak out against the genocide narrative are being banned from social media platforms simply for not abiding to that narrative. [2]
And I'm sure I don't need to remind you how devastating a war against China would be for the entire planet.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-...
I suppose the difference between us is that you care a lot less about this topic and thus aren't constantly bombarded with extreme claims and things such as being called a genocide denier, while for me the topic directly affects the lives of my family.