[defrost]

> Brother, I eat at a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan pretty regularly.

Honest question here;

is it a traditional Uyghur owned and managed restaurant freely frequented by local Uyghurs as a living expression of past and ongoing Uyghur culture, or

is it more a Disney "themed Uyghur restaurant" with the same relationship to Uyghur culture as Outback Steakhouse has to actual IRL Australian food and culture (ie three tenths of f-all).

[nixon_why69]

It's run by a family from there, they speak dialect among themselves which is very much not Wuhanhua. The food is only slightly xinjiang actually, its a stretch noodle shop with a couple of lamb dishes.

But even if it were the latter.. even that would go against the narrative of total cultural hostility?

[defrost]

In context, and I'm not just thinking of Uyghur culture in China here, the presence of {X}-like restaurants can mean a lot of things.

Majority culture "celebrating" / "allowing" minority culture restaurants, clubs, bars, etc happens in many different ways with many differing meanings, complicated layers even.

Black Harlem in New York went through stages of being an outpost of US black culture(s) (from US North and South, urban, rural, "African"), a hip place for hip white people, birth place for new takes on old culture, etc. All that while the attitude of majority culture in the US fluxed a few times wrt black minority culture.

TLDR; It's hard to get a read on what a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan means either way in the greater China attitude toward the re-education of the Uyghur.

[nixon_why69]

Ok, can I step back a bit and call out some big picture differences?

The legacy of slavery in America is a key component of the microwave background radiation there, the story seeps into default assumptions of everything.

China just.. doesn't have that. They had slavery amongst themselves in the olden days like everyone else but no master race chattel slavery period. There's definitely racism on the black/white scale here but it mostly goes with perceived income/status of the black/white foreigner (most blacks here are from africa), its not some core piece of the national story.

Additionally, minorities here have mostly always been loosely governed people at the empire's periphery, rather than integrated and persecuted in the core. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_regions_of_China). The Xinjiang camps were an exceptional case after some terror attacks, and they're over now.

I think the equivalent core narrative here would be being victims of colonialism during the century of humiliation, which puts them if anything on the same side as domestic minorities.

[defrost]

Opinions seem varied, that's for sure.

Wikipedia describes the camps more as rebranded than "over now" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

and those annoying Australians are claiming the CCP are using "powerful resources in Beijing’s ongoing efforts to reshape the global narrative on Xinjiang, influence political elites abroad" - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/cultivating-friendly-forces/ (July 2026)

/r/AskHistorians adopts a practice of waiting 20 years before attempting to write a reasonable balanced history on current events .. so give things another 16 years and we'll see, I guess.

[nixon_why69]

Yeah, ASPI and Adrian Zenz are the sources for basically every allegation in Xinjiang besides just quoting what the government itself said they're doing. Their evidence is typically "sources".

Meanwhile all of Ukraine and Gaza have been on youtube the whole time, everyone has a cell phone, why do we go back to the same 2 ideological think tanks with rumor-tier evidence every time on this issue? Seriously. Find any article and cite crawl, it's always either ASPI or Zenz at the bottom, citing each other or "sources".

If someone accused the US government of a secret genocide for 7 straight years with this caliber of evidence they would rightfully considered cranks. Especially if everyone was still alive.

[jfyi]

To be fair, Gregory Stanton has had the US listed as problematic for awhile now and he's considered a top authority on the topic. Of course his reports are based on the definition from the UN Genocide Convention which you don't seem to hold in high regard.

https://www.genocidewatch.com/country-pages/united-states-of...

I would suggest that the strict etymology of a word doesn't really matter much in geopolitics, at least not as much as legal definitions arrived at via international consensus.