askchapo

China does not harvest organs from Falun Gong weirdos. I have been counselling Chairman Xi to change his mind on this to no avail.

Read the UN report on Xinjiang. It's the closest thing you're ever going to get to an "unbaised" report. When Wahhabi paramilitaries began trying to expand in to Xinjiang and convert local Muslims to Wahhabi beliefs, with the violence and disruption Wahhabi beliefs entail, China responded with a bunch of different counter-terrorism programs. Some were overtly military, some were intelligence based, some were aimed at making Xinjiang more resilient in the face of subversion attempts. The programs that got spun in the west at genocide involved surveillance, some restrictions on movement, arbitrary arrest and detention of some Uighur Muslims for as much as 3-4 months, and related activities. These are certainly violations of human rights as conceived by the west, but are not genocide by any definition and frankly aren't much different from the day to day behavior of western security forces. Interviews in the un report describe being held in prison facilities for several months while undergoing questioning, some cultural and religious education programs intended to instill Uighur cultural identity and Chinese national identity, while also showing how Wahhabism contradicts many islamic principles and brings violence and instability. Also apparently a lot of being forced to sing patriotic songs, which, really?

Was it nice? No, arbitrarily arresting people is not nice. However it needs to be positioned within the context of the global war on terror and the enormous amount of bloodshed the west and it's allies unleashed "fighting terrorism". At any rate, it seems to have worked - wahhabi violence in Xinjiang has dropped off and afaik the Chinese counter-terror program was wrapped up several years ago, and was already wrapping up when the UN investigation was being conducted.

Seriously, read the UN report. It's very much critical of china and it's critique of what china was really doing shows how absurd and bad faith the accusations of genocide were.

The Uyghur stuff is the lie of the decade.

Like, consider what even is the claim they are making.

The way it works is to take some tiny nugget of news and expand it beyond recognition into genocide.

For example, the Chinese government made birth control free. A provision of sexual health care and the ability to conduct family planning. This became the claim that China was conducting “mass forced sterilizations.”

Another example was China providing free meals to kids at school. Now, during Ramadan Muslims do not eat during the day but children are excluded from this and are allowed to eat. The age at which someone is expected to participate isn’t well defined and different Muslim communities adopt different standards for when someone is considered a child for the purposes of Ramadan. In Uyghur culture it is typically into the teens. So when China was providing free meals to kids at school… this was spun a campaign to assimilate Uyghurs and “cultural genocide.” Free meals to school kids is cultural genocide.

There is a heavy handed security presence in Xinjiang related to Islamic terrorism since there has been a problem with Islamic fundamentalism intersecting with Uyghur separatism. I do have sympathy for the heavy police intervention and there has been at least some degree of racism in the way that was applied. So there are valid criticisms to be made about how China responded to the problem of Islamic extremism. But the heavy hand of the state seems to be receding as the threat of fundamentalism declines, so that is at least improving, and it needs to be contrasted with the western response to Islamic fundamentalism which was extremely violent.

When you make that comparison then the Chinese response is exemplary, without denying the examples of racism and police violence in that response but also acknowledging those issues do not seem to have a systemic character.

The truth of Xinjiang is that the USA and the west likes to exploit and promote ethnic conflict within adversary states. It’s called a “fifth column”. A way to weaken your enemy is to promote internal conflict.

The USA has sought to promote ethnic conflict in China by funding Uyghur separatists, and Uyghur separatism is inextricably connected with Islamic fundamentalism.

When you look at these “international committee to free east Turkmenistan” they are usually based in Virginia.

The narrative of Uyghur genocide is to train a western audience to view China as another Nazi Germany because this provides a (false) moral basis for war and geostrategic conflict with china.

Whenever you read these articles, look for the name “Adrian Zenz”. He’s a fundamentalist Christian based in Germany who doesn’t speak Chinese and hasn’t been to China or Xinjiang. He has previously claimed that God gave him a mission to destroy communist (atheist) China. As in, he described a voice talking to him and giving him this divine mission. He’s the source of about 80% of this bullshit and the BBC uncritically repeat his claims because the BBC is state-owned media.

Another whole angle of this I was thinking about the other day - you actually CANNOT just genocide a group of people without them responding in some way. People can tell when the atmosphere of the state they're living in is turning towards genocide against them (and a culture preparing for a genocide to the point of ordinary citizens accepting it generates a HUGE amount of propaganda, which there is obviously no evidence of in China). Before WW2 there were millions of Jewish refugees, and during it there were Jewish militias and partizans fighting back. Colonized countries rose up again and again to throw out the colonists who were exploiting and killing them. And now Israel is showing exactly what happens in the modern day if you try to annihilate an entire population: absolutely intractable guerilla warfare. Israel would love to just send in the army and gun down all 2 million people in Gaza, but they CAN'T because their army would be torn to shreds.

So to suggest the people of Xinjiang - which shares hundreds of miles of desert-mountain borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan - would just meekly accept a million people (literally 1/20th of the population!) disappearing without fighting back using the enormous amount of weaponry and guerilla warfare expertise within a trivial distance of them, or even just trying to escape with their lives, is outright infantilizing. WW2 shows they would fight back, the history of decolonial movements shows they would fight back, Gaza shows they would fight back, and the total lack of such a violent conflict in Xinjiang shows that whatever is happening there is not a genocide.

Falun Gong is the Chinese equivalent of Scientology. Shen Yun, the dance show, and the Epoch Times are both arms of the church.

It's absolutely in their interests to make up anything smearing a government that doesn't tolerate their shit.

You can dig into the details, but you don't need to. The holocaust has tons of physical evidence. It takes a lot of stuff to commit a genocide. For this genocide there isn't even a photo. Also, the politician most invested in the genocide accusations was Joe Biden. His only response was to cancel a diplomatic delegation going to the olympics in China. The delegation wasn't even real. These aren't the actions of someone who actually thought there was a genocide happening.

(not a historian)

in pretty much every case, sources for the "uyghur genocide" trace back to Adrian Zenz, a guy who can't read chinese who deliberately makes shit up to support his "holy crusade against china"

the thing that actually happened is that China had to fight CIA-funded terrorism in Xinjiang; they did so with prison sentences and re-education instead of ultraviolence - it worked, so they stopped doing it (much to the dismay of china watchers)

Falun Gong is banned because they are a death cult

Pretty much, the organ harvesting claim in particular originally was based in the falun gong belief that(Disclaimer: This is not a bit) their spiritual practices literally made their internal organs superior in quality and impervious to disease or physical ailments(This leads into their belief that modern medicine is unnecessary and a satanic communist tool) and therefore the Communist Party harvests those organs to make their party elite live longer.

This was later transplanted basically wholesale into the idea of "halal organs", the claim that there are muslim elites who refuse to receive organs from anyone who has not adhered to halal requirements in their lifestyle, and therefore the Communist Party are systematically harvesting organs from the Uighur muslim population to sell on the black market, presumably to the muslim nations that stand with China.

There has as far as I have read never been any evidence to support either claim that isnt either a claim of personal experience or a "whistleblower" statement that also is exclusively a personal claim of experience, unless China also is running a whole black market supply system of immunosuppressants and other post-transplant support medical care, you would see very obvious signs such as consumption of those medical supplies being obviously higher than recorded transplants.

The only signs like that that has been pointed to is that China has a notably short waiting list for organ transplants from what I have heard, but thats basically where the supporting evidence begins and ends, no further investigation has borne fruit.

I'm pretty convinced its all bullshit, but:

Especially now more than ever: In my interactions with people on this subject I usually try to avoid framing it in the question of whether or not its true because IMO it doesn't ultimately matter.

Even if you accept the Uyghur genocide itself as entirely true for the sake of discussion: the past few weeks should really clarify how much any and all moral outrage around it has been entirely cynical bullshit.

-If you stand with Israel in this situation then full stop you don't actually give a shit about the lives of Muslims and you only scream about the Uyghurs because you want a cudgel to use against China.

-If you stand with Palestine in this situation then you have what should be a clear and self evident obligation to address the genocide your own government is actively funding and facilitating before you get involved in whatever the hell a foreign government is involved in. We have absolutely no moral leg to stand on regarding the Uyghurs until then.

Falun Gong: yes.

Uyghur genocide: yes

There's no need to bend over backwards to try to justify the government treatment of Uyghurs as being a genocide. It just isn't and there's no evidence that it is. The claims are paper-thin and always trace back to these things:

• Adrian Zenz
• Close collaborators of Adrian Zenz working in think tanks that are clearly NatSec cutouts.
• Radio Free Asia and similar.
• "Government in exile" NGOs funded by the NED that say the wildest shit and are clearly just a propaganda tool.
• Literally the US NatSec ghouls

I remember watching hexbears tie themselves in knots trying to justify this or that academic spewing absolute bullshit, like they are just itching to believe a China Bad line. Believing statements next to satellite images analyzed by a teenager and going, "yeah that checks out" or citing one Zenz-collaborating academic ghoul that has literally never been to China nor speaks any Chinese languages but appropriated the language of the left so I guess it must be legit.

I'd also like to remind everyone that the claim of genocide magically appeared as a result of think tank ghouls that cited no new evidence and did not make any kind of case that stands up to the lightest criticism. It just got put out there in the classic style of manufacturing consent during a series of anti-China pushes. Prior to this, it had been getting called a cultural genocide, a term intended to play on the gravity of genocide while being fuzzy enough that libs who know nothing can argue about any level of ethnic discrimination fitting the bill. The claim of cultural genocide was supported by people duped into believing that salafist politics is traditional Uyghur culture (because they didn't deign to actually learn anything about Uyghurs before believing the paper-thin propaganda of empire) and that any form of ethnic oppression, any form, is cultural genocide. If you find that you or anyone else on the left is trying this hard to make excuses for the imperialist line, take a pause and ask yourself why you're doing it and whether you're asking the right questions. You are not immune to propaganda and finding a way - any way - for the imperialists to be right is its basic function in these scenarios.

The claim of Uyghur genocide is a series of rhetorical escalations that do not match conditions on the ground and is coming from sources that any competent leftist should learn how to scrutinize and reject.

Just to tack on to what others have said, organs are incredibly delicate. They don't last long outside the body. If at all possible they move one of the patients to the same hospital as the other to make the transfer. You couldn't just have a warehouse full of organs for future use. When someone sells a kidney or something they get tested first and they sell it to a specific recipient

It’s literally just zenz, some rando dry cracker who still pushes this shit. And people still gobble it up because orientalism doesn’t need no source besides “I said so”.

It's bullshit. Fun fact though: one of the two ghouls conducting the "investigation"that started the organ nonsense, David Matas, is usually characterized as a human rights lawyer, which shows how desperate the West is to make any of this seem more legitimate.

Even according to NATOpedia his only ""accomplishments"" have been to try to block a UN Human Rights Council report on Israel's actions in Gaza and to prevent the extradition of a businessman responsible for a massive corrupt smuggling ring to China. Literally all he has ever done was be a Zionist stooge who does anti-Chinese propaganda as a side hustle. Well, sometimes he also does both at once lol:

In his book "Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism", Matas accused critics of Israel's post-1967 war policies regarding the West Bank of having double standards in not also criticizing China's occupation of Tibet.

Uyghurs and the places they live are heavily surveilled, and rather than their schools being a more organic entity the state has a pretty heavy hand in running them. Anything beyond that is just a distortion mirror.

Practicioners of Falun Dafa are in prison or in exile or in secret, where they belong.

Falun Gong is a destructive cult that does gay/trans conversion therapy because they're homophobic reactionaries. The leadership should be arrested. They're young earth creationists too, they spread misinformation about vaccines. Their adherents are discouraged from seeing doctors, instead they're encouraged to do taichi instead.

Their victims should be informed of what they're part of. The elderly people who just wanna do taichi in the park should keep doing that but without a cult involved. Falun Gong shouldn't exist.

CEO Rachel Jake reviews Shen Yun

It's all but 99% of the people living in the will accept it as undisputed gospel and call you a genocide denier/CCP (or Putin) propagandist, or "you're too much into politics, sweaty". And their source is always some bullshit like Worldnews, Reuters, BBC, laowhy, Serpent, "source: i made it up", or "sinophobe but im scared to admit it you might hit me"

Related anecdote when i went to china as a tourist our tour guide was a Han Boomer who was really mad about affirmative action for Uyghurs

Yes it’s all bullshit

Besides everything already posted, tell me ONE religious far-right movement the US hasn't funded/supported at some point

The organ harvesting thing is because the Falun Gong thinks their meditations make their organs extra pure or whatever. Literally religious delusion.

Check out BayArea415s old stuff

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsCaI-gsA29xVYzFI-kYWLcx2QhowNBCL&si=PsYhMmF-VytJrtY0

FLG is a dangerous cult similar to fundie cults in the US. Some extreme members believe they have a “law wheel” (that’s what Falun means) in their stomach and they’ve like cut each other open trying to find it. It’s banned bc cults are bad. Also I’m fairly certain they are CIA funded or something because they swan around western major cities putting on grotesque propaganda shows disguised as Chinese history spectacles

(I don’t have sources just what I was told by Chinese relatives)