Crass Injustice and Inhumanity Continues in China

Anyone who takes a brief glance at the paper has probably seen the coverage of the Chinese Government crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang province, bringing the already tense relations between the Uighur ethnic minorities in China and the Han majority to a fever pitch. In the wake of all of this unrest, twitter and blogger have been banned, joining youtube on the Great Firewall of China's black list. I leave for Harbin, China in 21 days and a handful of hours meaning these posts will be my final opportunities to easily access blogger and write a post that is somewhat subversive in the paranoiac eyes of Beijing and it's keepers in the government.

Human rights have never been the strong suit of the PRC but these recent events in Xinjiang surely bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened Republicans who would rather toss human rights issues to the side in order to continue to pursue persistent economic dialogue with the CCP. What some fail to recognize is that the human rights violations in these parts seem to go hand in hand with Han racism toward its ethnic minorities, particularly Uighur Muslims, which the Han Chinese often believe are synonymous with Anti-China separatists. But what we have seen in Xinjiang are really just race riots that the Chinese government has manipulated to project to the international community that the government is cracking down on Uighur separatists and their subversive protests. Race riots between the majority and disenfranchised minority or mass arrests and persecutions of the disenfranchised minority. Neither reflect well on the PRC but as they have seen, there are many in the US who are able to look the other way in order to maintain a working relationship between the two countries that promotes any kind of economic partnership.

So, perhaps rather than insisting on a dialogue in terms of human rights with China, the US needs to look at its own legacy of racism and apply that in how it helps the PRC to come to terms with its ethnic makeup and allow for a rapproachment between its 54 minority nationalities and the Han majority nationality.

Here is a piece in the New York Times about how the PRC can learn from the US and its history of race riots.