Providing care
Meanwhile, about the Uighurs…
China has detained an estimated 1 million to 2 million Uighur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang, and millions more live one step away from detention under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party.
Why it matters: It has been two years since the internment camps first came to light internationally, and a series of reports from Xinjiang have made vivid the scale of the abuses. Yet foreign governments and corporations are content to pretend it isn’t happening.
“If right now, just about any other country in the world [were] found to be detaining over 1 million Muslims of a certain ethnicity, you can bet we’d be seeing an international outcry,” says Sophie Richardson, china director for Human Rights Watch.
- “Because it’s China, which has enormous power in international institutions these days, it’s hard to muster any response at all.”
- “There has been this almost childlike hope that as China gets wealthier and more secure it would change” and adapt to international norms, Richardson says. Instead, China is using its economic clout and influence at the UN to undermine those norms.
And, fascinatingly, even other Muslims are carefully looking the other way. So much for the ummah, eh?
What they’re saying:
- Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan, which borders Xinjiang but has a deep economic reliance on China, told the FT in March: “Frankly, I don’t know much about” what’s happening to the Uighurs.
- Indonesian President Joko Widodo gave a similar answer, despite leading the world’s largest majority-Muslim country.
Business is business, yeah?
- The Organization of Islamic Cooperation went so far as to praise China in March for “providing care to its Muslim citizens,” while in February Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman defended China’s “right” to crack down on its Muslim citizens “for its national security.”
So shoving people into internment camps is “providing care”? Strange how Trump doesn’t realize what a lot he has in common with the OIC.
“There has been this almost childlike hope that as China gets wealthier and more secure it would change”
Where would such hope come from? And who has been hoping for positive change? When there are no negative consequences for acting a certain way, the behavior is not likely to change. So far, worldwide, I see no negative consequences for any egregious behavior in the last several years (decades? centuries?). Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Mohammad bin Salman and probably many others that I’ve not heard of.
Muslims? What Muslims? Maybe they’re not the right kind of Muslims? They’re like the not-more-geopolitically-important-than-their-captors ones.