Are you sure? Do you have an example of substantial disaster or scandal that resulted in loss of life and loss of face for China, but perpetuators got away?

For UK I have: Grenfell tower scandal (over 100 dead, no one in prison), infected blood scandal (thousands dead, no one in prison), postmaster scandal (thousands falsely imprisoned , no perpetrator in prison), etc.

Well but the point was, that these are wiped from the internet. Sure it’s convenient, but I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese government - I’m sure they have erased quite a bit of uncomfortable facts.

I don't understand how they could simultaneously wipe some things completely off the Internet and other things are completely leaked out.

If it leaks into independent medias, they probably will have a hard time erasing it. If they erase it before it makes it to any independent media, they have a good chance it will never surface again. At least that’s how I imagine it.

Are we restricting this to businesses, or is the genocide of the Uyghurs fair game?

How does it relate to the question?

Wuhan situation is clearly government policy. It may be terrible, but that is besides the point.

It was not policy of British government to burn down a skyscraper in central london with hundred of people inside cooked alive.

It was not the policy of British government to infect 30,000 people with AIDS.

Yet British government is unable or unwilling to take action against people responsible.

They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time.

That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda on this topic, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.

> you need to be killing people to call it genocide

No, you don't.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

See Article 2.

So the “-cide” root of the word which means “kill” no longer means that?

It's never meant only that, but that's not the argument. We decided that a long time ago.

Genocide refers to a People (race, kind, tribe, family, etc.), not individual people. The group is a concept, and 'killing' it doesn't have to involve the biological death of the group members. That's part of what the linked resolution is trying to say.

For example, you could go sterilize every member of an ethnic group, without killing - causing the biological death of - any of them. None of them will be able to have children, and as they die of old age, the group disappears. That's genocide.

Another example would be to forcibly separate all the members of the group and prevent them from engaging in the lifestyle associated with membership in the group (e.g. style of dress, music, food, language, worship, etc.). Over time, perhaps generations, the people basically give up trying to do any of these things if they even remember what they were. They have no group cohesion, so the group has essentially disappeared. No need to directly cause any biological death. The argument is that if this is done intentionally, it is also genocide.

Genocide as a concept is about ending the group, not specifically the individual members. It's definitely true that you can end a group by killing all its members, though.

Ok but none of those things came even close to happening in this case. The arguments are all, like, it was in pursuit of genocide, because I say so, so if one guy died in detention then it's a genocide.

Well there are allegations of mass detentions, forced labor, destruction of religious sites, suppression of language, separation of children into Chinese-controlled boarding schools, coercive birth control, and sterilization.

You agreed with me that genocide is more expansive than "we're directly killing people". For the sake of argument, let's assume the allegations are true: what would you call that?

But the allegations aren't true for the most part. Some are out-of-context true, like if you have too many kids they sterilize you, that was true across China for decades and going away now. But then the limit on kids for minorities was HIGHER than it was for Han Chinese until recently. So were they self genociding?

Taking an angle like "well, lets assume these things are true, THEN can we accuse China of genocide" is basically what the media did for 5 years on this topic.

Was, yes. That policy ended in 2017 I think, which I don't know if I call that recent. Post-2017 some evidence pieced together by a journalist suggested that IUDs and forced sterilizations were higher in Xinjiang than the rest of the country, and went up when the rest of the country went down. But you're right, their population has not evaporated.

My point about the assumption was to get you to agree that if these things are happening, we know that it constitutes genocide. At this point I don't care if you agree or not.

They stopped being higher because the limit was raised from 2-3 for Han, not because it went down for minorities. It happened in 2021.

And it's very easy for me to believe that rates of childbirth and hence violations are higher for subsistence farmer populations than urban workers, because that's true everywhere. Uyghur population grew a ton between 2010-2020, 3 kids per couple is net growth.

Lastly, no, there's no such thing as a "technical" genocide on a points system without some massive crimes against humanity that would drop anyone's jaw, and those things are hard to hide. It's not like you make a couple of technical errors and, oops, genocide even though the population is substantially fine and economic reforms are working.

So genocide ranges from “murder” to “discrimination, maybe”?

The only thing this does is cheapen the word. In the past genocide was something serious. But now it includes activities that are simply upsetting.

It doesn't cheapen the word. If discrimination is intentional and has the effect of minimizing and eventually eliminating the target ethnic group, then you have the same result as if you lined up everyone in that group and shot them.

The word is attached to the intended outcome, not the specific actions taken to achieve it.

Of course it cheapens it.

Using your example, if some ethnic group changed how they dressed it would be genocide.

That cheapens the word. Change in dress is not as severe an outcome as buried in a ditch with a bullet in your head.

So beeing unable to keep up, because your culture holds you back that is a genocide? Like somebody develops machines, that marginalize your existence until you fade away, that is a genocide?

No I believe it requires intent (possibly systemic in nature) on the part of the perpetrator. If the quakers end up disappearing and it turns out to be primarily due to their refusal to adopt modern technology that's not genocide as I understand it so long as everyone else was at worst indifferent to their plight.

You're omitting so much, such as torture and ethnic cleansing and massive levels of abuse. Any genocidal concentration camp could be called 'an internment camp'. Anyone reading this, just look up coverage in credible sources.

"Killing people" is not required for committing a genocide:

Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and

2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:

2.1 Killing members of the group

2.2 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

2.3 Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

2.4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

2.5 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

Brother, I eat at a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan pretty regularly. Nobody destroyed any groups.

There was a big overreaction that violated people's rights but the people still exist and are fine.

If we contrast with how the West have reacted to terror attacks, its quite rich to see them throwing UN definitions at China.

I really haven’t written anything about Uyghurs specifically. I only corrected your mistaken assumption that genocide must necessarily involve the killing or physical extermination of people. It doesn't even require to be successful at its mission - it's the intent when taking any of the specified actions that counts, such as causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing destructive conditions of life, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children. If those acts are committed with intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part, it might be considered a genocide.

So “Uyghur restaurants still exist” or “Uyghur people still exist” does not answer the legal question. The relevant question is whether the group’s cultural, religious, familial, or biological continuity is being targeted as a group. It's enough to do this in a single village.

This may sound like a grammar nitpick, but I think it points to the actual issue: “the people still exist and are fine” does not answer the genocide question.

Genocide is not simply about whether “the people” — individual members of a group — still exist. It is about whether a people — a protected group as such — is being targeted for destruction, in whole or in part.

So the relevant question is not merely whether “the people still exist and are fine,” but whether a people still exists as a people, and whether it is fine culturally, religiously, socially, biologically, and institutionally.

In this particular case, I don’t claim to have enough information to make a final judgment. But the fact that so little independent journalism and investigation is possible must be blamed on the CCP and cannot be treated as counterevidence. Unlike individual human beings in a court of law, governments that suppress a free press and block independent investigations should not receive the benefit of the doubt in the court of public opinion.

I'm saying all of the people still exist and their lives were never in danger. There were some dozens executed for actual terror/separatism charges, maybe some of those cases were bad, but it was not a threat to "the people".

The fact that the argument has to lean into technicalities and attributed unspoken intentions rather than actual horrors should say everything.

There are people saying all the Jews were still alive in Germany. For a matter of fact, I've recently been to a jewish restaurant. The owners seemed fine.

And those people are cranks because we have tons of evidence of the holocaust.

Conversely, in this case, Adrian Zenz is a crank because for a decade he's been unable to put up any. In an era where every single person carries a high def video camera in their pocket. It's a faith-based accusation.

What if a culture is genocidal and hellbent in removing all minorities from its surroundings? Like nazis driving everything away in a wave of conquest? Is extinction of this genocide? Look at the minority histograms of the middle east for example

> Brother, I eat at a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan pretty regularly.

Honest question here;

is it a traditional Uyghur owned and managed restaurant freely frequented by local Uyghurs as a living expression of past and ongoing Uyghur culture, or

is it more a Disney "themed Uyghur restaurant" with the same relationship to Uyghur culture as Outback Steakhouse has to actual IRL Australian food and culture (ie three tenths of f-all).

It's run by a family from there, they speak dialect among themselves which is very much not Wuhanhua. The food is only slightly xinjiang actually, its a stretch noodle shop with a couple of lamb dishes.

But even if it were the latter.. even that would go against the narrative of total cultural hostility?

In context, and I'm not just thinking of Uyghur culture in China here, the presence of {X}-like restaurants can mean a lot of things.

Majority culture "celebrating" / "allowing" minority culture restaurants, clubs, bars, etc happens in many different ways with many differing meanings, complicated layers even.

Black Harlem in New York went through stages of being an outpost of US black culture(s) (from US North and South, urban, rural, "African"), a hip place for hip white people, birth place for new takes on old culture, etc. All that while the attitude of majority culture in the US fluxed a few times wrt black minority culture.

TLDR; It's hard to get a read on what a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan means either way in the greater China attitude toward the re-education of the Uyghur.

Ok, can I step back a bit and call out some big picture differences?

The legacy of slavery in America is a key component of the microwave background radiation there, the story seeps into default assumptions of everything.

China just.. doesn't have that. They had slavery amongst themselves in the olden days like everyone else but no master race chattel slavery period. There's definitely racism on the black/white scale here but it mostly goes with perceived income/status of the black/white foreigner (most blacks here are from africa), its not some core piece of the national story.

Additionally, minorities here have mostly always been loosely governed people at the empire's periphery, rather than integrated and persecuted in the core. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_regions_of_China). The Xinjiang camps were an exceptional case after some terror attacks, and they're over now.

I think the equivalent core narrative here would be being victims of colonialism during the century of humiliation, which puts them if anything on the same side as domestic minorities.

Opinions seem varied, that's for sure.

Wikipedia describes the camps more as rebranded than "over now" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

and those annoying Australians are claiming the CCP are using "powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad" - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/cultivating-friendly-forces/ (July 2026)

/r/AskHistorians adopts a practice of waiting 20 years before attempting to write a reasonable balanced history on current events .. so give things another 16 years and we'll see, I guess.

Yeah, ASPI and Adrian Zenz are the sources for basically every allegation in Xinjiang besides just quoting what the government itself said they're doing. Their evidence is typically "sources".

Meanwhile all of Ukraine and Gaza have been on youtube the whole time, everyone has a cell phone, why do we go back to the same 2 ideological think tanks with rumor-tier evidence every time on this issue? Seriously. Find any article and cite crawl, it's always either ASPI or Zenz at the bottom, citing each other or "sources".

If someone accused the US government of a secret genocide for 7 straight years with this caliber of evidence they would rightfully considered cranks. Especially if everyone was still alive.

To be fair, Gregory Stanton has had the US listed as problematic for awhile now and he's considered a top authority on the topic. Of course his reports are based on the definition from the UN Genocide Convention which you don't seem to hold in high regard.

https://www.genocidewatch.com/country-pages/united-states-of...

I would suggest that the strict etymology of a word doesn't really matter much in geopolitics, at least not as much as legal definitions arrived at via international consensus.

I mean, I wouldn't consider him a top authority. It's an overly lawyerly approach to US treatment of groups that are clearly not actually being genocided (presently, native americans were). So I disagree on the same grounds as China, you need some mass casualties at minimum before getting into the legal nitty gritty. Maybe mass sterilization could also suffice.

I actually restrained myself from pointing out that the standards used against China in this thread would fit just fine against US treatment of minorities, it seemed too facile.

Now, western actions in the middle east on the other hand, we have mass casualties so legal arguments are on the table. I wonder if they said anything incensed and dumb that would indicate genocidal intent.

I agree that scale is often overlooked in these discussions. The real value of current legal definitions isn't just in identifying the industrialized murder of a population, but in recognizing the warning behaviors that precede it. It's crucial to identify when a situation starts moving in that direction.

Ok but this case is over and moving in the other direction.

The middle east on the other hand.. there are a whole group of US establishment natsec people who hold that obviously China committed genocide to the tune of hundreds while obviously Israel did not to the tune of nearly 100,000 and millions displaced. Because we have all of these lawyerly definitions, you see.

As human beings we have got to have a sniff test here.

The middle east is a mess and I can't disagree. The warning signs were there, and they were ignored, mostly.

You don't like my choice in appeal to authority, sure I get that. That doesn't preclude from there being authoritative views on the topic though.

We probably should have something to stand on other than vibes. Maybe we can come to consensus on who is an authority. How about the IAGS? https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Fina...

Now, if it has moved in the other direction since 2022, I don't see anything countering that either and I certainly can't speak to the current state of things and will believe you (mostly because I have no intention of looking deeper currently). I will say that's a strong indicator that the process of being called out on the international stage worked though.

I'll definitely grant that international pressure helped. Even if there were never any possible chance of genocide, internment camps are still bad! It's good that they are over.

I feel like genocide legal debates skip over the human harm into some binary "is it genocide" thing, like detention or the first 90k deaths were ok but now you're really a bad guy.

> intent to destroy

Except there was no intent to destroy, literally all other points 2.X that follows is irrelevant. There's reason plurality of UN takes PRC position that they indented to deradicalize / reeducate, aka not genocide. Which is obvious except to useful idiots on Pompeo propaganda because reducing PRC minorities by 1 is bad for Xi's hagiography. Now the gets to bask in the glory of speed running histories most successful war on terror with minimal bloodshed by sinicizing restive frontier region. Basically Obama should hand over his Nobel Peace Prize to Xi.

So you say the Germans should just have reeducated the Jews to not being Jews anymore - and it wouldn't have been a genocide?

No, it would be "cultural genocide", which bluntly is empty label - there's a reason no international framework exits for something prosaic like enforcing common language and culture on minorities - because it's nation building 101. And regardless that's not even what PRC did, they didn't turn Uyghurs into non Muslims, they Sinicized them back to traditional Uyghur + state Islam and excised strains of extremist Wahhabism which was recent import. You know how western minorities mostly speak the dominant language, aka melting pot, that's what PRC minority policy is moving towards, away from soviet autonomous multicultural oblast model which was too hands off leading to minorities getting to restive/handsy with terrorism/separatism.

German jews btw overwhelmingly spoke German, were deeply assimilated, patriotic of course. XJ would be like if German Jews who spoke only Yiddish and stuck in their minority enclaves, carried out 100s of terrorist attacks, got reeducated to speak both German, and Yiddish, reform religion to be less extremist, and doing it in <10 years / single generation. Not only would it have not been genocide, it would have been exemplar model to emulate for domestic serenity. Which is broadly what XJ securitization was, the most successful deradicalization and integration program in human history. Not unique to human history... again integration = nation building 101 stuff, it was just technologic mediated speedrun, in that sense parallels Germans.

Who, exactly, were the "perpetrators" of Covid19?

Whoever funded the laboratories in Wuhan.

Came to power in 2021 - time traveler too is he? Did you mean Trump?

Hard to tell one old man with dementia from another

Weird way of apologizing for being wrong. Keep that shit on Reddit.

According to Wikipedia, the lab leak theory is, uh... unproven to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

Why is this downvoted? My claims are re: what Wikipedia says and are verifiably true. Whether you agree with Wikipedia or not is a different question.

I wish there was an investigation but the CCP blockaded any inquiries, going so far as removing the computers and not cooperating with international authorities. /s

You're assuming that this guy was actually being prosecuted for crimes or that this guy lacked loyalty to Xi Jinping. A tremendous number of top generals and leadership has been wiped out in a short time and not necessarily refilled, and it's not because China has a huge disloyalty problem.

> You're assuming that this guy was actually being prosecuted for crimes or that this guy lacked loyalty to Xi Jinping

That's not an "or" question, imo. If you threaten the king by having too much power, too many allies, or too keen a mind, you get moved off the board. Disloyalty and risk of disloyalty are both abhorrent to autocrats.

Does it actually have a huge disloyalty problem or are they just better at punishing people for it compared to the us

Given that they've already carried out a Stalinist purge within the military ranks, I'm leaning towards the former. Xi might very well be positioning for a Taiwanese invasion.

> it's not because China has a huge disloyalty problem.

Why not? Dictators often purge anyone who is a threat, often because they form a possibly competitive power structure (regardless of their intent), and often because of paranoid perceived disloyalty, and for actual disloyalty.

And corruption is the cover story they commonly use - it's vague, general, the public sees enough gov't corruption to believe it and to hate it. Trials are not needed. Off the top of my head, Putin in Russia, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, ...