What are you thinking, CYCLING RELATED, on tariff subject

[openwheelracing]

Originally Posted by redir

Uyghurs

Yes I have heard and read all about the “genocide”, “concentration camp” and “forced labor”. Yet I have never been presented with concrete evidence. I remember the same lady interviewed for all the media to broadcast. Same picture of men in same uniform. Yes I am aware how strict it is to film in China, but there are also plenty videos showing how normal XingJian is by YouTubers. Singapore is strict. That doesn’t directly translate to “genocide”.

Flip side we are sanctioning XingJian made products. The whole point of the re-education campaign is to create special economic zone in XingJian because it has a history of domestic terrorism and low income. This again goes back to the Chinese mentality: peace and prosperity. It almost feels too convenient to start smear campaign during the time we are trying to “contain” and slow China’s economic growth. If we care so much about this Chinese minority group, then why are we stifling specifically its economic growth? That makes no sense to me. I am seeing progress being made as companies still invest in the region but it could’ve been way faster.

[mlc]

I feel like this is defo getting close to being political but just not American politics... that said, I'm living in Kyrgyzstan right now and from the perspective of someone living exceedingly close to Xinjiang, from what I've heard it's pretty bad out there. I spent a weekend chatting extensively with a woman who went to college out there right around the time when things started getting bad for the Uyghurs, and while she was exceedingly cagey about specifics, the long and the short of it was that students and faculty were pretty much locked on campus while the rest of the area became quickly and intensely repressed.

Part of what is hard is that things aren't easy for Uyghurs anywhere... I have a Uyghur coworker here who has said he's experienced intense racism in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, to the point where he was getting verbally abused by teachers in Karakol growing up in K-12 school. It's not a China-specific thing, the Uyghurs are an ethnic minority in a part of the world where being an ethnic minority is not an easy thing. Look at the ethnic enclaves on the Tajik-Kyrygz border, or the Uzbek enclaves, or just how the nomadic peoples were treated in general by the USSR... things get ugly all over.

This is all to say, a lot of horrifying things have happened to the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, and the West has historically remained ignorant to that both in the moment it happens and historically. There are reasons for this, of course, namely that this is a region that is VERY far from the American/Western European spheres of knowledge and influence, but still, I don't think it is at all out of line to say that it feels pretty clear (from what I've read and from just living here) that the Uyghurs are likely suffering pretty intensely under China.

You can say that doesn't change the fact that you align economically with Chinese interests, but putting your head in the sand and refusing to recognize that the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs is abhorrent just feels like conscious blindness to facts. If you've heard and read all about the conditions there, what more evidence do you need? I'm no crazy China hawk myself (indeed I myself am half-Chinese lol) but the willful ignorance regarding the fact that China is absolutely an authoritarian police state is simply disingenuous. I'm down to buy from them in many cases too, but there's no need to pretend that the political climate there is something it's not.

Sorry for the super long off-topic post... mods can let me know if it went a step too far...