The standard for superpowers was already set by the US and USSR - if you have nuclear weapons and the ability to project military force globally, you can more or less get away with anything. I don't know about their force projection capabilities but I'm sure their nukes can reach the US, and they can definitely reach our allies, and of course Japan and Korea would just be screwed.

So... maybe they'll get a stern talking to.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the US has to trade with them or offer them access to its financial systems.

They're one of the biggest markets in the world and they own much of the world's manufacturing infrastructure, and we're already in a trade war with them.

If we can stay on top of that, then yes, soft power might work, but China has a lot of leverage of its own in that regard.

Why don't you post a video of setting half of your salary in cash on fire, and then you get the moral right to make that statement. :)

Nobody is willing to pay the cost of that.

Not that it's even necessarily the ethical thing to do.

We're not exactly being altruist trading with China all these years.

This moment, the opening of the 21st century, is quite literally the worst time for the United States gov't to be really shitting the bed WRT promoting human rights.

The United States stumbles dick-first sometimes into insane or really dumb policies & ideas but they can occasionally be reasoned with & there are people who aren't nakedly corrupt & awful in the gov't aparatus.

When/if China or any of the other usual suspects become the biggest dog on the block that goes out the window

Uyghur secular culture is fine, but not its religious culture. The methods have gone significantly overboard but the motivation has always been what the state openly said, to stem the "three evil forces" of "separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism."

Your question might be rhetorical but let's answer it at face value. What kind of standards does it set based on the values in the above observation? A strongly sovereign and non-interventionist world; a materialistic if not atheistic world; and one where terrorism is strongly suppressed at home by state power. These are starkly different value priorities than how the U.S.-led Western alliance might go about running the world, but it's worth considering without the prejudice of home bias.

There's no question that the current Xinjiang situation is tragic, that the Chinese measures are draconian, and that the sooner these camps close and people can return to living their lives the better. God forbid this were to escalate to mass murder, but Beijing is far smarter than that.

However, at this point, the individual Uyghurs have a choice of assimilating by force (and learning Mandarin, which they en masse don't speak) and giving up part of their identity, or staying in camps indefinitely. Assimilation & submission is the only way this story ends well.

China will have a stable, secure and controlled Xinjiang and they are pretty serious about it. It's not like anybody in the "global community" will seriously consider for a moment sanctions or (God forbid) any military action.

Coverage of what's going on in Xinjiang is good, and so is welcoming Uygur refugees. But any encouragement or foreign support of dissidents/etc inside Xinjiang is deeply unethical because Uygurs must and will submit to Beijing and anything that delays that will hurt people and cost lives.

>I get the US is not exactly the best leader in human rights, but the transgressions of another is a tu quoque logical fallacy.

Holding everyone to the same standard isn't a logical fallacy, it's fairness.

Oh the western people are scarred of China's horrors ? China is not doing anything that USA has not done in past. Putting people we don't like in camps (Japanese Americans), conducting experiments on people we thought were less than humans (Blacks) and so on.

So I think the inspiration is westerns societies.

Implying and providing justification for current actions based on past conduct is not only illogical, it just spits into the face of human progress.

Hunter gatherers had tribal wars and cannibalism, racism was rampant and women were powerless in the past. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be “scarred of the horrors”.

Scale and ability to learn from the mistakes of the past matters.

USA is probably civilised only in last 60 years or so. Otherwise the country was far too overtly racist and oppressive to minorities.

Uighur muslims are just a million or so and minuscule on larger scale. Also, it might be better to de-radicalize them now before they start bombing your cities. For example if USA had not armed Osama Bin Laden, 9/11 was avoidable. China is taking precautionary measures to avoid future wars and terrorist attacks like 9/11.

Stop it.

Post-slavery US behavior is far more favorable and accommodating to human rights than China today. Your comparison between the US and China is false and misguided. Individual rights are generally cherished and protected in the US; in China they are stomped upon by the Communist boot.

> Post-slavery US behavior is far more favorable and accommodating to human rights than China today.

Asking me to stop will not change facts.

Slavery was abolished in 1865, let us see what other things happened after that and what China is doing to Muslims is a page from the exactly same book.

1. 1882 - US government kicked out Chinese (and Indian) people from USA by enacting purely racist law called "Chinese Exclusion Act". Not only Chinese citizens were kicked out but citizenships were revoked retrospectively. The remenants of this law can be seen even today in green card country wise caps on India and Chinese. Cancellation of H4-EAD is just an example of how US admin has institutional racism against Indians and Chinese people.

2. 1942 - Internment of Japanese Americans. Absolutely disgraceful and yet exactly same as what China is doing to Muslims.

3. Forced sterilisation of people in early 20th century. China at least allowed people to have one child. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizati...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment US government knowingly decides to let syphilis spread among black males.

5. There is an entire wiki article about other unethical medical experiments USA did on blacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

6. The current laws like Civil Asset Forfeiture and Marijuana prohibition targets black families and people from low income families depriving them of their own money and freedom.

I am not even coming to the topic of how USA had destabilised perfectly stable countries like Iraq, killed thousands of innocent people, maimed thousands of people and children, bombed hospitals, killed babies, raped women and children across Afghanistan and Iraq here.