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.
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.
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.
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.
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.