My partner is Lebanese and one issue that has consistently come up with any discussion of Marxism (and honestly the online left as a whole) is Uyghur genocide denial. Essentially, they see it as proof of (white) western leftists being hypocrites and having a glaring Islamophobia problem. I’m inclined to defer to them, but at the same time, I’ve found myself often politically aligning with MLs on other issues, and I know very little about Chinese internal politics or the Uyghurs myself, so I would greatly appreciate being able to get an understanding of what the ML perspective is.
This is the oldest mosque in China, and possibly one of the oldest ones still existing in the world. The Huaisheng Mosque, in Guangzhou. It was built by an uncle of Muhammad around the year 627. Islam has been present in China since its inception.
The lines you quote come from a document from the State Council Information Office of the Chinese government. So when the document says that religious extremists (in the document) overgeneralize the halal concept, they mean overgeneralize. This is a document written by the Chinese government for their own conditions. Halal medication exists, and that medication is available in China. China even has a word for halal (Qingzhen), so the concept is not foreign to them.
China has a halal label:
And applying for the label happens at the local (provincial) level, and the company applying for it has to employ a representative who follows halal habits depending on which industry they are in. This page has more details.
Xinjiang does not belong to the Uyghurs or Islam; it is home to many native populations and since a long time ago (far before the PRC) has been an inseparable part of China. Uyghur extremists cannot claim that only their way goes, but this is what they tried to do through ETIM and other separatist movements. A part that you somehow did not quote from the prolewiki page, right before the halal sentence you quoted:
They [ETIM] are forcing people, Muslim and non-Muslim, to conform to their specific way of things. Muslims in China have evolved their own customs and practices. Some women veil, some don’t. There is no obligation in Chinese law to do so. Uyghurs even traditionally produce wine.
I’m not sure how you can quote those lines above but completely gloss over the very next part which lists some of the deadly attacks that have happened between 1990 and 2014.
Does this look like genocide and repression to you?
It’s not in any way comparable to what’s happening to Gaza.
Again I don’t know how you can read this:
And come away thinking:
Unless you are looking for a specific conclusion. the ProleWiki page (or the Information Office white paper) has examples of attacks in the very next section, just a bit further down: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Vocational_Education_and_Training_Centers#Examples_of_terrorist_attacks. ETIM is using people and convincing them to attack civilian centers at the cost of their own life, while the people who put them up to this safe in their mansions outside of China. Who benefits from this? Not the attacker or the people they killed. The only people benefiting from this are the ETIM leaders who will do it again with another poor sap. I hope we both agree this does not represent islam.
What should China do? Follow in “Israel’s” footsteps? Bomb Urumqi, bomb Pakistan like the US has been doing (and then in 2020 Pompeo said “actually soz guys etim doesn’t exist” which begs the question who have they been bombing for the past 15 years?) Or attack the causes of radicalization at the root. They chose the latter.
There have been no more terrorist attacks since 2016 since they started this vocational centers program by the way. It shows a model that effectively wins against at least one form of radicalization without killing anyone in the process.
Exactly, Gaza shows us the logical conclusion of islamophobia. Where are the refugees from Xinjiang? The journalists risking their lives to show the missile strikes or mass arrests in Urumqi and villages? The gofundmes for Uyghurs? There’s new videos coming out of Gaza every hour of the day but Xinjiang, a place much more populated and much bigger, has none. These videos don’t exist, because Uyghurs in China are not being genocided or repressed to a point that counts as being ethnically targeted. If we want to help muslims then we must focus on real problems, not invented ones for the purpose of regime change operations. Anyone harping on about Uyghur genocide after 2 years of Gaza is not focusing on the real issue and is distracting from an actual genocide - I’m not saying anyone here is, just in general. People like Mike Pompeo, for example.
ETIM is not Hamas, the two are completely different.