What China is doing to Uighurs qualifies as genocide

> [The atrocity in Xinjiang] very specifically meets one of the five criteria set forth by the United Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide from 1948, which specifically says the suppression of birth.

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-o...

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739567

You can redefine words if you want, but you're devaluing then in the process.

In this case, people are doing this in order to whip up further hysteria. I recall in 2011, when Western media promoted false claims of genocide in Libya, in order to justify the bombing of the country and the overthrow of its government. Same thing in Iraq in 2003. There's a pattern here.

Ah yes, "redefining" them by quoting the United Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide from 1948.

If you're going to compare China's enforcement of the 2-3 child rule in Xinjiang to the Holocaust, then there has to be a new word to describe the Holocaust, because those two things do not belong in the same category.

There are consequences to this sort of demonization. You're supporting a hysteria that has a good chance of leading to war.

Hitler started with mass sterilization, the killing was secondary. Which is why the term is about more than just mass killings.

In China forced abortions and mass sterilization are selective based on ethnicity. Combined with reeducation camps and differential taxation based on ethnicity and number of kids is not simply enforcing a policy. The Chinese government is even dealing with the excess male population from their previous one child policy and preferential marriage laws to eliminate an ethnic group.

This is systematic genocide, even without the obvious mass graves.

The comparison to Hitler makes my point for me. This sort of hysteria is dangerous, because if you're saying that China is the same as the Third Reich, you're essentially calling for war.

It would be interesting to hear how you compare the actual killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq by the United States to the Holocaust, given that you've now compared the 2-3 child policy to the Holocaust.

Iraq’s population went from 23.5 million in 2000 to almost ~40 million in 2020 that’s the opposite of genocide. China on the other hand is using mass detention, sterilization, forced abortion, and IUD’s to cut Uighur‘s drastically below the replacement birth rates.

Meanwhile “it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-cuts-uighur-...

“They gave Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children.

If she didn’t, they warned, she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps — often for having too many children.“

Of note a significant number of couples must have 3 children to maintain the population as some children die or never have children of their own. But, again that’s just one policy they are doing many other things which all add up.

You're now defending the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, but denouncing the enforcement of the 2-3 child rule in Xinjiang.

The Uighur population of Xinjiang has grown rapidly over the past 5 years (something that you've said proves there was no genocide in Iraq), and what you're reading about in the news is the draconian enforcement of the same family planning policies on Uighurs as have up to recently only applied to Han people. Ethnic minorities used to be exempt from the one-child rule. Now, rules have been relaxed to 2-3 children, but they're being applied to minorities as well. You can denounce this policy without comparing it to the Holocaust, Rwanda, and other actual genocides.

First, deaths and genocide are different things. The CCP’s killing between 20 and 43 million people from 1959–1961 was incompetence not a genocide. Numbers of deaths are irrelevant the intent must be the systematic destruction of a people.

So sure the Iraq war combined combined with a sectarian civil war, and after effects from the breakdown of the economy and social order possibly reached a few hundred thousand deaths. But that’s by definition not a genocide. If you want an American genocide look back to what happened to Native Americans.

I didn't compare it to the Holocaust. Genocide does not start and end with the Holocaust, even if it's the most well known example.