[heraclius]

As much as it’s important to remember the plight of the Uyghurs especially in formulating a broad strategy towards China, it seems odd to extend this to ‘nobody may discuss any aspect of China without mentioning the camps’. Would you do this to, e.g., some intellectually interesting but (at the moment) otherwise entirely useless pure maths paper posted on HN written by a Chinese researcher?

Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.

[dayjobpork]

So you want people to discuss the economy without mentioning the genocide camps of forced labour that underpin manufacturing?

[heraclius]

Uyghurs are important to a large part of the economy, but it’s presumably possible to discuss parts of it without discussing Uyghurs at every stage.

Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found.

If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs.

The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis.

In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.

[heraclius]

It occurs to me that this:

> Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour.

is rubbish interpreted in the natural sense. Of course I meant without the use of forced Uyghur labour as we see at the moment. It is arguable that growth 1970s-now mostly was not underpinned by forced labour, but the strategies of the 50s-60s certainly involved a lot of what we should call forced labour.