nednobbins

Weapons. That's the connection.

The US sends vast arsenals to Israel and Israel uses those weapons for genocide and other war crimes.

That's outrageous. We should immediately stop funding Hamas.

No more weapons packages.
No more military funding.
The Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group should stop supporting them now.

China knows that the US has a lot of economic leverage. They've been working very hard to change that and a lot of those efforts have flown under the radar.

BRI is pretty obvious and it's seen as one of the major reason the ASEAN countries are pivoting towards China. But consider the whole South China Sea issue. Everyone frames it as a contest over sea resources and few people consider the strait of Malacca. It's a potential choke point for all trade west of Southeast Asia. While China is working to be able to defend that they're also working with Thailand to build a canal that would bypass the straight of Malacca all together. All of that is primarily to reduce US leverage and those initiatives tend to work more often than they fail.

US is by far it’s largest customer

That's true and there's also more to it.

The US is China's largest single trading partner but China has many many trading partners.

May nations now trade or at least negotiate in blocks. Both ASEAN and the UE, as blocks, do more trade with China than the US does. When it comes to individual nations the US isn't as far ahead as it might seem. Russia, Vietnam and Taiwan together trade more with China than the US does, despite having a combined GDP that's a tiny fraction of the US.

The key issue is that China has been working really hard to make itself less dependent on the US. They still have a way to go but they're much less vulnerable than they were a few years ago.

The current president of the USA is a Democrat.

Democrats used to say, "The buck stops here."

I have no idea why you keep bringing up that particular deal. It's not like it's the only or even last deal the US has signed.

The US hasn't stopped. The US went out of its way to ensure Israel that there wouldn't even be any delays in shipments.

The US is blatantly enabling genocide and it's currently headed by the Biden administration.

The rest of the world combined isn't funneling billions of dollars worth of weapons into the conflict.

You might not be the target audience. I'm not currently the target audience either.

My wife and I are really into cooking. We have a whole bookshelf of cookbooks, a metrowire rack full of "kitchen stuff" and we use it daily.

There was definitely a time when this book would have been perfect. This book seems to cover a lot of stuff that's obvious to me now but wasn't always.

If you're food plan is a bulk package of Ramen, any help on how to make it not the same as every other day is culinary gold.

The original post claimed that anyone who doesn't believe in a Uyghur genocide is a fascist. That's a very specific and extreme position. Even just redefining it as, "ethnogenocide" or "cultural genocide" is shifting the goalposts. They're not even clearly defined terms. If I accuse someone of murder without evidence, it's pretty sketchy of me to then say, "Well, can you at least admit that you've committed some crimes?"

If we're going to discuss a new claim that claim should also be supported by evidence. There's extensive literature on the importance of primary sources when analyzing history or current events. Wikipedia and various media outlets can be excellent resources for initial overviews on a topic but they're not primary sources. It's often difficult to find primary sources, particularly for current and recent events and that just means that claims on the topic aren't supported by evidence. These are all great first approximations but when there's any doubt, primary sources are what ultimately count.

So what do we actually know about the Xinjiang and the Uyghurs?

We can start with the easy ones.

China includes Uyghur text on its currency. That's a pretty cheap thing to do but it's a pretty strange decision if you're trying to suppress a culture. It's easy to verify though.

China has a staggering number of mosques. They're all over the country and it's easy to find Halal food. Xinjiang itself has more mosques than all of Europe and North America combined. There is some controversy here. There are a lot of claims that China is actively reducing the number of mosques. China claims that it's just doing renovations and demolishing unsafe structures. We've all seen what satellite pictures of destroyed buildings look like. We often get them of locations in active war zones. Why don't we have those for Xinjiang? Mosques are also easy to see from space so we can see that they're still there. It doesn't prove lack of intent but it's strange to leave all those religious centers for a culture they're trying to erase.

Xinjian has experience multiple terrorist attacks per year for decades. This is also easily verified. It obviously doesn't justify human rights abuses but it clearly warrants some preventative action. Every nation responds to terrorists in some way, so a critique of a particular response really should provide at least a suggestion for a better one.

China mandates quality of life protocols for inmates who are incarcerated as part of their terrorism prevention practices. We know this because it says so in the "Xinjiang Cables" which Adrian Zenz published as part of his claims about a Uyghur Genocide.

China is making massive infrastructure investments in Xinjiang. It's a key location for the belt and road initiative. If we had any doubt we could just look at all the new construction on satellite images. The effects are harder to verify. China claims that GDP growth in Xinjiang actually exceeds that of the rest of China and independent estimates agree. It's even harder to know how to interpret this. The negative interpretations are either that the wealth is primarily accruing to non-Uyghurs, ie Han, or that the increase wealth itself is a form of cultural genocide. The second seems patently ridiculous. A large wealth increase will obviously change a culture but not in the "genocide" direction." We don't really know how much of that wealth is going to Uyghurs vs Han in Xinjiang but we certainly don't have any evidence that Uyghurs are being economically harmed.

China has mandated that classes be taught in Mandarin. This isn't disputed. It's often cited as evidence of cultural genocide but it's a fairly standard practice. The US is a bit unusual in that it's one of 9 countries that don't have an official language. While language can be an important part of cultural identity it's also an important tool for social interaction. The reason there are so many people who speak English as a second language (or primary language in lieu of their mother tongue) is that it provides significant economic advantages. The same holds true for Mandarin, particularly for people living in China. That's not the same as suppressing Uyghur though. You can find numerous images of publicly displayed Uyghur writing in Xinjiang.

The strongest evidence in support of human rights abuses is from eyewitness testimony. The problem is that we can't generally verify any of it. The explanation is generally that we need to protect their anonymity for the safety of family members who are still in China. That might be true or it might not be. We can't tell. We do have numerous Muslim leaders who have visited Xinjiang and then provided positive and public assessments of the treatment of Uyghurs. The value of confidential informants is in breaking a story, not in supporting it. That requires verifiable sources and the vast majority of the verifiable reporting supports China's version of the situation. In this case I'm using "verifiable" simply to mean that we can check who made the claim and that they actually made the claim, not the stronger requirement of being able to verify that the claim was true.

So in light of all this, what exactly is the "ethnocide" or "cultural genocide" that China is supposedly conducting? What can we confidently point at and say, "We're sure this is happening and it's clear evidence of human rights abuses."

Could be.

A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn't think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn't care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.

Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you've never heard of and then someone comes along and says, "We're going to make it and we're pulling out all the stops on the graphics."

If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.

No idea.

It's hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.

Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.

That seems to be highly dependent on where they are.

In some cities, everyone on public transport behaves themselves. They're clean and there's no fear that they'll be harassed or assaulted. Some people really like that and get afraid or skeeved when they think about some public transport systems.

In other cities public transportation riders are expected to "live and let live". Officials won't stop you from doing anything unless it presents an imminent danger. Some people love the freedom from that sort of system and hate the idea of someone forcing them to behave a certain way.

There are, of course, many reasons why certain public transport systems are more like one than the other; money, age, geography, preferences, etc. While there are great arguments for public transportation and I'm a huge fan of improving the infrastructure around it, I can also recognize that a lot of people's actual experience of public transport doesn't paint it in a good light.