> We need to actively decouple the Xinjiang issue from the pursuit of Western interests in Asia, and provide it with a different framing, one that speaks in universal terms of a rejection of racism and discrimination.
This is the key, I think, to understanding Jacobin’s perspective.
They do talk about US interests in the region and the hypocrisy of the West.
Writing to the US ambassador in Beijing, he [Rubio] asked him to look into the issue because the “crackdown in the XUAR touches on a range of interests critical to US efforts to secure a free and open Indo-Pacific region.” Rubio is now spearheading an effort to ramp-up pressure on China across the board, a push that follows on the heels of Washington’s most hawkish foreign-policy statements on China since it officially recognized the People’s Republic in 1979.
There’s no point talking about holding China to international norms when those norms don’t exist. Reading Jim Wolfreys’s recent book on France, it’s not hard to see similarities with the measures being implemented in Xinjiang: bans on forms of veiling, citizens encouraged to look out for signs of radicalization as innocuous as someone changing their eating habits. Many of these PRC citizens have mixed feelings about an issue like Xinjiang: they recognize that CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping might be heavy-handed but think he’s right about Western meddling in China’s affairs.
But, in the end, they want people to not view what is happening from a geopolitical/economic lens and think more in terms of the actual in-the-moment human cost. When viewed from that perspective, yeah, what is happening to Uighurs is bad and they don’t deserve it. But, at the same time, Jacobin doesn’t really provide any solution. They don’t talk about how to influence US policy so that we can actually decouple the Xinjiang issue from the pursuit of Western interests in Asia. They just say that we should. I don’t know if this is because they are idealistic or naive or what.
https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/chinese-salafism-and-the-saudi-connection/
https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/china-muslims-work-change-perceptions-after-knife-attacks
even back in 2014 there was an acknowledgment in VOA & Diplomat of Saudi & Western imperalist-funded Muslim extremism destroying lives & causing terror to unfold in PRC. But only since then has the narrative changed & extremism is now downplayed in the west.
