China once celebrated its diversity. How has it come to embrace ethnic nationalism?
David Tobin
A useful definition of China is “The Han Empire”. The Han being an ethnic group.
China once celebrated its diversity. How has it come to embrace ethnic nationalism?
David Tobin
A useful definition of China is “The Han Empire”. The Han being an ethnic group.
When did China (the state) ever celebrate its diversity? It built a wall around itself to keep diversity out. Burnt its entire shipping fleet to sever connections with the outside world.
Imagine being this dumb:
China’s party-state openly criticises Europe’s history of colonialism and genocide, so why is it imitating its darkest moments with violent assimilation policies of Xinjiang’s Uighurs?
Yes, it’s a total fucking mystery why the Chinee freely criticise the gweilo while doing whatever they think they can get away with in pursuit of their own interests. Why, it’s as if the Chin merely use words as rhetorical cudgels and that makes no sense because humans have never done this before.
Somebody call Lt. Columbo to help solve this baffling enigma.
I thought the Great Wall was built to keep the peasants in. Whatever.
You could write Chinese history as a series of ethnic cleansings. From Polynesians through the Hmong and other SE Asian hill tribes and now the Uighurs.
Well the Mongols and the Manchus used to run China and the British, Russians, Japanese, Germans French etc used to run the coast, perhaps that is what he means by diversity.
Because racism works. It keeps societies cohesive and together. It helps mobilise them against outsiders. It was behind the success of the British Empire. The Chinese don’t want to be left out.
David Tobin? This David Tobin?
New Books Network | David Tobin, “Securing China’s …
For this reason and many others, David Tobin’s Securing China’s Northwest Frontier (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the PRC state-building and narrative-creation efforts which justify projects like the region’s vast network of detention camps
So he is trying to sell his book? Academic book? Good luck with that.
Whist not justifying what they’re doing in Xinjiang it shouldn’t be forgotten that Uighurs have been fighting for ISIS and its offshoots in significant numbers and there has been terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.
This is also a good read to understand China’s hive mindset:
‘celebrated its diversity’
To “celebrate diversity” is to devalue one’s self.
The Left doesn’t mean to tolerate others; they mean become others.
“she worried aloud about future generations’ ability to speak the Uighur language and their right to practise their religion.”
The thing with religion is that it’s really just about power, then you have common binding rituals. The language thing is the same.
What China understands is that they can’t have an Islamic enclave in their country. Unlike the west that gives it a load of “Religion of Peace” and hopes to integrate it, China has realised that doesn’t work and it isn’t fucking around in its methods to remove Islam.
That doesn’t mean ethnic cleansing of the population. This is about ideology, not race. You just have to find the teachers, put them out of action and then move in with your own ideology. In a generation or two, the religion is eradicated.
The Chinese are often accused of copying the west , but i doubt anyone in China has looked at somewhere like Bradford and thought – we’re going to copy that. China has spent years working it’s way out of 2nd/3rd world status – i don’t see them in a hurry to go back. Diversity is the code for turning your country into a shithole not a superpower.
@ moqifen
+1 on Braford (and Dewsbury plus umpteen other Northern old mill towns).
If you want to see what it was like during Victorian times (overcrowded houses, no toileting inside, people cooking in the streets) visit Manningham.
Instructor: “You should value all cultures.”
Student: “What about ours?”
Instructor: “That’s not why we are here. STFU.”
China is like quantum physics: If you think you understand China, you don’t. I’ve been here 13 years and still don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.
Worked with a Chinese colleague for a couple of years. Asked him about his background; he’s like ‘yep, yep, I’m Han’.
Couple of years later when we’re travelling together the topic of ethnicities in China comes up again. Then he says ‘No I’m not really Han. We’re all a different ethnic group where I was born but we just say we’re under the wider Han umbrella group because it’s easier and we’re ok with that. There’s Han but there’s like 27 different ethnicities who can call themselves Han’
Xinjiang… what’s going on there is pretty ugly.
Xinjiang… what’s going on there is pretty ugly.
Yes. And it is nothing like the situation in the UK or anywhere else suffering Muslim immigration. The Uighurs did not ask to become part of China, they did not move there and fail to assimilate, they were conquered by the Chinese Empire and they have made numerous attempts to free themselves over the past couple of hundred years.
The suggestion that what’s going on in Xinjiang is China’s attempt to protect itself from Islamism is bollocks.
“Han” is closer to “European” than anything else. Norwegain, Spaniard? Nah, they’re all gweilo, all look same.
China has a long history of being invaded, often successfully, but the invaders always end up being absorbed – becoming ‘Han’. China has always had numbers on its side. Mao thought the atom bomb to be a “paper tiger” because while 100 million dead Americans is a catastrophe, 100 million dead Chinese is a rounding error (as he was later to demonstrate).
As an aside, once Chinese schoolchildren have gained sufficient competence with the ludicrously complex system of ideograms, they’re expected to learn the “300 Tang Poems”, a classic work of Chinese (and world) literature. Note that the Tang dynasty occupied the 7th to the 9th centuries, so this would be a bit like English schoolkids learning Beowulf, which (of course) is largely incomprehensible unless you’ve learned Old English, but modern literate Chinese can read these works easily – they’ve absolutely no idea how they might have been pronounced, though, because the ideograms give few clues to that.
@ MrKing – despite travelling quite close to Bradford on my annual drive to see my mate in Lancaster (which is chock a block with Chinese students ie real asians rather than what the uk media calls asians) I’ve never had the inclination to pop in to visit, but then again I’ve travelled through Morocco, Egypt and Jordan so I’ve had my fill of 3rd world shitholes and muslims.
The Han Chicoms held a festival/parade of China’s cultural minorities some years ago. Come to find out they were all Han Chinese wearing the minorities cultural costumes ( so no minority could stage any kind of protest). Roughly the equivalent of UK doing having a parade with whites in blackface as rastas and pakis.
That is the CCP concept of “diversity”.
China has a long history of being invaded, often successfully, but the invaders always end up being absorbed
The Mongolians still speak Mongolian, not Chinese, and are culturally very much not Chinese. They were never absorbed.
Admittedly the Manchu did lose their language after a couple of hundred years.
+1 Dongguan John 🙂
“The longer I verk here, diverse it gets.”
A question, DJ. Is Xi an absolute dictator, or is he just the head of a committee that runs China? If the ChiComs are run by a committee, it would explain a lot.
@Gamecock. Xi Xi top.
Interesting to note that the fuss is about Mahometans. One suspects that if this was being done to Brits, the Guardian’s attitude would be entirely different.
Of course it would be fair to say China is ruled by the National Socialist Chinese Workers Party. This is certainly the predominant form of government in the non-white world.
It’s entertaining to notice that Hitlers’ basic approach has now triumphed. The only difference is that whites are the untermensch.