The Alberta separatism thing has influenced my opinion on the Xinjiang Uyghur situation. Providing a decent standard of living for >1,400,000,000 is a big undertaking, no one in human history has come even close. Absolute individual liberty sounds good on the surface, but at what cost?

If you have a small, but very disruptive minority of your population who have made it clear that they would rather tear your country apart than integrate into your established social fabric and norms, what do you do? Isolation and re-education seems like a reasonable, and humane option. Extermination or expulsion would be much easier solutions; investing the time and resources to improve material conditions while also giving people the opportunity to be rehabilitated seems like a preferable alternative.

I see a lot of people very critical of China's Sinicization campaign; but at the same time I also see growing instability in most other culturally diverse nations. Ideological extremism is on the rise, anti-immigration sentiment plagues many other developed nations, and I have yet to see systems or proposed solutions which I think can scale to the extent required for a population of 50,000,000... Let alone billions.