China urged calm Sunday in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel from Gaza.
“We call on relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians and avoid further deterioration of the situation,” a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
The statement also said that China would work “relentlessly” to attempt to bring peace toward the region.
“The recurrence of the conflict shows once again that the protracted standstill of the peace process cannot go on. The fundamental way out of the conflict lies in implementing the two-state solution and establishing an independent State of Palestine. The international community needs to act with greater urgency,” the spokesperson said.
An Israeli diplomat in Beijing said he was disappointed in China’s statement.
“When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution,” Yuval Waks told reporters, according to Reuters.
Hundreds of people had been reported dead, most of them civilians, and fighting continued Sunday.
Imagine for a second that Israel or the US suggested China establish an independent state of East Turkestan in Xinjiang, shortly after a huge terrorist attack perpetrated by Uyghur terrorists.
What would China’s reaction be?
China literally already had that happen and their response was this:
Isolate terrorist cells using China’s massive ISR advantage and hunt them down with great prejudice
Call for US help in attacking terrorists in neighbouring Afghanistan
Having solved the effects, determine what the causes of terrorism are (income inequality/poor education, poor infrastructure, Islamic radicalization)
Solve each of these problems by extreme force (Islamic radicalization: cut off communication with radicalizing factors and culturally integrate citizens with China, while also removing some of the special legal privileges granted to minorities that separates them from society at large. Poor infrastructure: dump stupid amounts of money into connecting the region with the best of China and invest in manufacturing and energy production jobs in the region. Income inequality/poor education: force everyone lacking skills to learn basic labour manufacturing)
Crucially, whereas Israel has opted to maximize civilian casualties by attacking residential towers at night and mosques during the day, China’s approach has been more slow and methodical because Xinjiang, unlike Gaza and the West Bank, is not an explicitly ethnically segregated community. The Han minority would NOT appreciate missiles flying over their homes to strike their neighbours, and the many Uyghurs who are in support of the CPC would become radicalized by that process. This would obviously be undesirable. Thus, China’s policies today have involved mostly applying the same things they’ve done to Han groups in the rest of China to Uyghur groups within Xinjiang: this is both politically expedient (because no one is going to complain about doing what Mao Zedong did) and less morally ambiguous (because the CPC is simply applying the same hammer to a different problem). Of course, China’s human rights record in general isn’t that great, but that’s not a problem unique to any particular ethnic group: it’s more of a result of policy created during the Cultural Revolution.
Basically, China believes the rise of ETIM to be driven by economic factors that it can solve, while Israel believes Hamas is driven by religious ideology that is unsolvable.
That’s a cute way to write genocide and forced labour.
Forced education is not forced labour (though, if you’ve ever done a STEM degree, you’d know that it feels a lot like it lol).
The principle of reform by labour was a core pillar of Chinese economic and social reform during the Cultural Revolution. It’s been reformed countless times and is still used to a limited degree today on some prosecuted prisoners around the country. Crucially, they are not the same thing. You can be educated without being forced to work (and vice-versa).
It’s fine to be critical of Chinese policy in general, but a lot of people in the West don’t understand Chinese history at all or the context that birthed modern Chinese policy. China’s been remarkably consistent in policy.
I don’t know why you stated that China historically uses forced labor as a mens of reform right after you said they weren’t using forced labor. Am I supposed to be impressed with their newfound restraint? Also, from accounts from inside the forced education centers it sure seems like the prisoners get plenty of physical abuse.
That’s not what I said and you know it. Forced education and forced labour were both part of the mass rural-to-urban migration of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, it’s difficult to argue that the Cultural Revolution was a genocide. Whereas Chinese policy has, by and large, focused on economic factors, genocide implies some ethnically-driven motivation. Such a motivation doesn’t really exist. For what it’s worth, the presence of penal labour in modern China is extremely similar to the US system of prison labour (over-representation by minorities and all). However, whereas in the US this is driven by racial tensions, in China this is driven predominantly by economic ones (the places where minorities live tend to be poorer provinces and the people predominantly have rural hukou).
I’d ask you if you’ve ever gone to school in China but I know the answer is going to be no. It’s a distinct misunderstanding of culture to claim that corporal punishment is only present in China’s education system in Xinjiang. More extreme things might have recently been outlawed, but the enforcement of that law is still not very strong.
I didn’t claim you said anything that you did not and I certainly never claimed that corporal punishment is only present in Xinjiang.
Also, I don’t think it’s ok to point to the US prison system as a good comparison (considering it’s one of the worst, if not the worst in the developed world). Would be better to compare to a different wealthy democratic country if China wants to prove their system is fair.
A wealthy democratic country to… Compare to a country with an average salary of $14k?
Imagine for a second that literally any country in the world suggested that the US should stop invading countries with fake reasons/proof and plundering their goods.