Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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> the situation of Muslims in China

Here's your problem; trying to talk about "the situation of Muslims in China" is incoherent. Islam has been an accepted (though small) part of Chinese culture for many centuries, and it still is. The Uyghurs are highly atypical Muslims in China who don't speak Chinese and don't participate in Chinese culture, instead preferring their own rival culture. That (and rebelliousness) is why they're oppressed.

Uyghurs have problems in China. Muslims don't, except to the extent that negative views of the Uyghurs start bleeding over into negative views of Muslims generally (which is indeed happening).

I've been confused for years about why the Western press seems so determined to demonstrate that it has no idea what it's talking about by representing oppression of Uyghurs as "oppressing people because of their religion". The case just can't be made. It would be trivial to call it "oppressing people because of their race"; that case is easy to make. But I guess the Western audience wouldn't see race-based oppression as being all that villainous?

What does "participate in Chinese culture" mean, and why shouldn't the culture of China's Xinjiang province count as "Chinese culture", assuming we accept the official description of China as a 多民族國家 multi-ethnic country?

I do get what you mean about language, insofar as most people of the Hui ethnic group do tend to speak the dominant Sinitic language of the region in which they live and not an entirely different language family like most Uyghur people. But that's more of a geographic inevitability than some kind of fundamental cultural difference - people from Inner Mongolia don't speak a Sinitic language either, does that make them equally as un-Chinese as people from Xinjiang? And if that matters so much, why does the Chinese government insist on holding on to these provinces whose culture is apparently unacceptably divergent from what they deem to be Chinese?

In any case, even Hui face some degree of discrimination in China, documented most recently in national anti-halal actions that expanded well beyond Xinjiang[0]. Like most minority ethnicities in the country, their culture is often joked about or dismissed in ways that "mainstream" Han culture is not. While this may not be blatant bigotry, the discrimination is something that would not be considered appropriate in countries whose people are more welcoming of ethnic diversity.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-religion-islam-idUS...

> But that's more of a geographic inevitability than some kind of fundamental cultural difference

No, speaking a different language is the most fundamental cultural difference there is.

> And if that matters so much, why does the Chinese government insist on holding on to these provinces whose culture is apparently unacceptably divergent from what they deem to be Chinese?

I asked this question of a Chinese high school student once. His response was that the Chinese didn't want to be conquered by the people of those regions. (Which notably happened in the 13th and 17th centuries.)

Wikipedia says that when the Qing dynasty fell, the idea was brought up that Xinjiang and similar regions should be divested from China as not being Chinese; they see the retention of non-Chinese territory as more a matter of no one being willing to take the responsibility/blame for the country getting smaller.

> assuming we accept the official description of China as a 多民族國家 multi-ethnic country?

Responding separately to this bit of inanity, if we're going to take Chinese official descriptions at face value, the Uyghurs aren't being oppressed in any way. They're in charge of their own 自治区.

US media has a long history of conflating race, religion, and socioeconomic class, in part due to the tangled nature of the 'States own biases and prejudice.

I think this is nearly entirely wrong. It's entirely about power and god.

Xi Jinping has cracked down on Christianity shutting down many churches. China has other ethnicities besides the Han, which don't speak Mandarin. If the Uyghurs had no faith they would be safe.

There is little room for religion unless the religion is centralized and submissive to the state. In some sense religion undermines the state.

> In some sense religion undermines the state.

In the 21st century, especially under the CCP, they're just competing forces more than direct adversaries, they both strive to do the same thing. And for most of History, the Church was the State.

It's parallels are quite visible, and now most wars are fought not for the deliberate imposition of deities, but rather for the new pantheon of self-declared god's: political leaders.

>And for most of History, the Church was the State.

Would you agree that the "Party" in CCP is something entirely different from what this term means in the west, and that it's closer in its meaning to a secularised version of a centralised church?

Death Cult, is more like it.

People wash away the misdeeds of the CCP during COVID because it suits their agenda, all the while their were was dissent fomenting during lockdowns. Han Chinese have been starved in Shanghai, those make shift hospitals were a joke and they under reported the deaths etc...

No, I'm very open about my disdain about the CCP, it's a cancer on the World and it should be seen for what it is.

Thank you; we might disagree on moral judgement of CCP (I'm not sure if I even have any consistent opinion), but the reason I've asked is that knowing about that semantical difference - bordering on mistranslation - makes it much easier to make sense of the situation, and I found it non-obvious.

> And for most of History, the Church was the State.

This is wildly false. The Church of England is about as close as things get. What historical periods are you thinking of in which the Church and the State were identified?

The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS. Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well. The Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire...

In short most of the impactful societies, specifically in the West have had hardcore religious zealotry.

> The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS.

It would be difficult for Isabella to be called the Catholic without being religiously subordinate to the Pope.

> Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well.

This is a bizarre claim. Pagan Greece and Rome didn't have organized religion at all, not in any sense we would understand. And both were riddled with mystery cults. The Church was unified with the classical Greek State only in the same sense that it was unified with the olive oil industry, or that the modern American Church is unified with the modern American State.

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