Mick Hartley

Aaron Sarin at Quillette on The Crimes of the Red Emperor. Xi Linping has concentrated power in his hands like no other Chinese leader since Mao. His totalitarian vision dominates the new China. But his main legacy is his treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang – and not least in the treatment of women:

The suffering extends beyond the concentration camps. Uyghur women throughout the province have been subjected to forced abortions and state-mandated sterilisations, leading to a sharp drop in the region’s birth rates. Population growth fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018. This is still not low enough for the Party. In one region dominated by the ethnic group, the authorities set a near-zero birth rate target for the year 2020. Sinologist Joanne Smith Finley calls it a “slow, painful, creeping genocide.” Armed police stalk Uyghur neighbourhoods at night, ransacking apartments in search of illegal items—qur’ans, prayer mats, children.

We all know the story of Mihrigul Tursun, the Uyghur woman imprisoned, tortured, and forcibly sterilised when she tried to visit her grandparents in Xinjiang. Her infant triplets were snatched by the police as soon as she arrived in the airport, and upon her release only two children were returned: her son had died in the “care” of the Chinese authorities. But almost every family belonging to a minority group in Xinjiang now has its own private tragedy.

Tursunay Ziyawudun told the Associated Press that she was given a series of mysterious injections in police custody, and while she was there officers also repeatedly kicked her in the lower stomach. Today she is infertile and suffers from chronic womb pain. Gulzia Mogdin was detained by police after committing the crime of downloading WhatsApp, and as a member of an ethnic minority, she was required to provide a urine sample. The sample showed her to be pregnant, so she was taken to hospital and the foetus was sucked out with an electric vacuum. Mogdin doesn’t even live in China—she was just visiting from Kazakhstan. “We lost a part of our body, we lost our identity as women,” says Zumret Dawut, who was forcibly sterilised in one of the detention camps. “We will never be able to have children again.”

Today, when a Uyghur man is taken from his home by the police, his wife can expect a new man to turn up on the doorstep within days. This will be a spy appointed by the government to monitor her behaviour. Invariably, the spy will be Han Chinese, and as part of his “monitoring” he will share her bed. The Communist Party calls this the “Pair Up and Become Family” program, and the eugenicist overtones are unmistakeable. Xi wants to dilute the Uyghur genes. He is unmoved by the human suffering his program entails—suffering perhaps akin to losing a husband in battle in the ancient world and then being taken as the killer’s concubine (the fate of Andromache in myth and scores of nameless women in reality). These women are being punished for the crime of having married the wrong person.

Well – state-sanctioned rape is what it is.

It's not just Xinjiang and Tibet: it looks like Inner Mongolia is next in line for the cultural genocide treatment, in Xi's vision of a monocultural Han Chinese nation:

China is facing growing protests in its Mongolian region after it was accused of attempting “cultural genocide” by ordering schools to dump the native language and teach in Chinese.

Videos surfaced on Sunday of demonstrations involving hundreds of people, including school pupils, in Inner Mongolia, with protesters shouting in their own language: “Our mother tongue is Mongolian. Until death, we are Mongolian.”

The protests come after reports that hundreds of teachers in the cities of Tongliao and Ulaanhad were called into “urgent, secret meetings” to take orders from Beijing to switch curriculums to Mandarin under a state-supported “bilingual education programme”.

According to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre (SMHRIC), a New York-based group, the new policy was issued verbally rather than in writing. It requires Chinese to be taught from the first year of primary school, and demands Chinese replaces Mongolian as the language of instruction for politics and history. Other subjects will be converted as the policy progresses, it says.

Until now, students took lessons in their native language, then began to study Chinese from eight years old. […]

The shift in the education policy appears to be the latest attempt by Beijing to rein in the country’s largest ethnic minorities, which have their own languages and distinct cultural traditions.

With unrest among Tibetans and the Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang, there are rising calls from Beijing that the country’s ethnic populations should learn Chinese to build a common national identity.