I’m skeptical that there’ll be any action just as there has been no action after similar stories elsewhere in pretty high-profile media outlets.

The Washington Post ran the op-ed "China’s attacks on Uighur women are crimes against humanity” almost a year ago. [1] Foreign Policy magazine ran the argument "China Must Answer for Cultural Genocide in Court” in December last year. [2] The Atlantic ran a piece headlined "Saving Uighur Culture From Genocide” a week ago, too. [3]

And I think ’see it and nod’ is about right. We can’t say we didn’t know, we just decided there were other things that we prefered to be doing than stop it.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/21/chinas-at... [2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/03/uighurs-xinjiang-china-... [3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/ch...

What needs to happen is prominent people the Chinese population pays attention to need to call out and embarrass the state. The NBA taking a stand would have been great.

China has extremely powerful group of lobbying. They have ability to control a nation. They have silenced a peaceful protest condemning Uyghurs treatment in germany - "...Think about your family" they said.[2] I doubt even Germany could do anything. Just yesterday, they raised concern of referring Genghis Khan as mongol, shamelessly trying to rewrite history.[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/14/china-insists-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/think-of-your-...

I heard a Yale history professor make a similar claim that the Huns were closely related to the nomadic people now in mongolia. I’m sure china is saying so for propaganda reasons but the best propaganda contains a lot of truth.

One possibility is that some economic pressure can be brought to bear by a Biden administration, perhaps in concert with other Western countries.

Edited to add: This statement is political, but the genocide against Uyghurs is political too, and if we want to hold our leaders accountable to doing something about it, we need to acknowledge facts. Trump had previously indicated he wasn't interested in letting such matters interfere with trade talks. https://www.axios.com/trump-uighur-muslims-sanctions-d4dc86f...

What exactly did Biden do to stand up to China during the Obama/Biden administration (or throughout his political career)? Here’s an incomplete list of things Trump has done:

- He refers to the Wuhan Virus as the China/Chinese Virus (CCP is trying very hard from distancing themselves from responsibility; they won’t even let us into Wuhan to investigate).

- He started a trade war with China, which has forced companies to move their manufacturing to Vietnam, India, Mexico, Taiwan, etc. (Biden admittedly said he would end Trump’s China tariffs, but the many companies that already left are unlikely to return), and even high end tech such as the iPhone is starting to get assembled outside China as well.

- He was the first US President to speak directly with Taiwan's President since 1979.

- He made the largest arms sale to Taiwan in the past few decades.

- The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act was signed under his administration.

- The TAIPEI Act was signed under his administration.

- Meng Wanzhou was arrested under his administration (which dragged Canada into it because China decided to arbitrarily arrest Canadian citizens).

- China Mobile was blocked from offering services in the US, citing national security risks.

- Huawei was blocked from using Android and chips with US tech (which will effectively kill their mobiles once their stock runs out).

- Huawei was blocked from building 5G networks (USA paid other nations to block them as well).

- Hong Kong’s special status was revoked.

- Universal Postal Union agreed to let countries raise postal rates after Trump threatened to leave - this means you’ll no longer be able to buy cheap junk from Aliexpress (and resellers like Wish) at no shipping cost (the receiving country was previously forced to deliver the products for free, even if you brought some toy for 10 cents).

- Trump is pushing for WTO to drop China’s developing country status.

- TikTok and WeChat (likely with more to come) would’ve been blocked by now if it wasn’t for judges temporarily blocking the bans.

China’s GDP growth in 2019 was also the lowest it’s been since 1990, and 2020 will be even lower. And China’s reputation around the world is at an all-time low (because all over the world then everyone is discussing everything Trump says, and he often attack China).

Also, China’s behavior is nothing new. The only thing that’s new is the fact that we finally have a president that for whatever reasons decided to turn them into his enemy. If EU and the rest of the world had any interest in standing up to China then they could implement their own tariffs, give 5G contracts to their own nation’s companies, etc. But they, just like the Obama/Biden administration, have no interest in doing so.

I'm referring specifically to the Uyghur situation. Trump may have done all sorts of things China doesn't like, and I'm not interested in getting into a general political debate about the merits of each of those things, but he hasn't done much about the Uyghur situation, aside from when his arm's been twisted by Congress. His personal concern in Chinese trade policy seems mainly to be mercantilist (minimizing trade deficits and whatnot).

What exactly can he do outside of economics sanction? It’s either that or saber rattling. We don’t want a war with China, that would be a global catastrophe. We just want to keep them in check long enough for communism to inevitably collapse once again.

Economic sanctions would be good, if they were conditioned on China's treatment of Uyghurs. But they're not.

Right now, to the extent that they're conditioned on anything at all (and I'm going to refrain from a broader critique of Trump's goals and methods of negotiation here), they're conditioned on trade balance, intellectual property, currency manipulation, 5G, and the like. Some of these are worthy objectives, some not. But at the end of the day, they do nothing for the Uyghur population if Trump says to Xi, "do whatever you want with the Uyghurs, I don't care; I just want you to buy more of our stuff".

For leverage to work on issue A, you actually have to say (and follow through on): "If you do A, I'll do X, and if you don't do A, I'll do Y." If you replace A with B, you can't expect any traction on issue A.

Except he actually encouraged China to continue its concentration camps.

I'm very anti-Trump (being a brown guy it's hard not to be) but his China policy is much better than any of the last several Presidents'. That said, I wish he had more of a human rights mindset and less of a money mindset. You can bet that if some aspect of the trade balance hinged on the Uighurs, he'd be advocating for it.

Remember, you're not allowed to talk about anything positive the Trump admin has accomplished on hn. It's an unwritten rule.

What exactly is political about genocide? Genocide is a byproduct of ideological derangement.

American corporations are beholden to China’s massive market and Biden is beholden to American corporations. It is far more likely that Biden capitulates to China than puts any economic pressure on them.

Mutual hatred is a powerful unifying force, it is not beyond dictators to use this as a tool to enhance their power. You shouldn’t take autocrats at face value, their public interaction is much more staged for effect than people seem to believe. In that way, genocide is just another political trick.

My dictionary defines political as "relating to the government or the public affairs of a country". Given that genocide is the policy of the Chinese government, it's a political matter.