My point isn’t to excuse anything

there’s a very clear double standard

Which one is it? Based on your comment history you're clearly engaging in Chinese apologism. I don't know what propaganda you've fallen victim to, but normal people don't argue about genocides like this, they don't quanticize, analyze and categorize genocides and get salty when laymen refer to a genocide as a genocide. This is the kind of behavior of appologists and propagandists.

Alternatively if we want to go full Godwin's law, the Nazis initially "only" persecuted, imprisoned, enslaved, and tortured the Jewish people at similarly large scale before The Final Solution where they started killing them en mass. By your logic that was "only a cultural genocide" until the gas chambers entered use.

Edit: of course you put in the typical Tankie bullshit of "but but US bad" the US prison system is bad. The US has done every bad thing you can think of at least once in it's history, but the US at least is rising above it and slowly working to right its previous wrongs. Prison labor is outlawed in many states, cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed in the entire country. Both are standard practice in China for the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are evaluated for their patriotism and cultural compliance. The Uyghers are heavily surveiled in the country with the heaviest state serveilance aperarus in the world. China carefully controls the information that leaks out about its treatment of the Uygurs. China is showing no signs of slowing nor course correcting on their genocides, and instead is doubling down.