this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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My question aims to know what kind of procedures did the Chinese government (allegedly) take since 2014 in Xinjiang, and why to begin with. And what can we know about the region in the current time, like can a random tourist go and see with their own eyes the truth, and maybe film it ?

There are Youtube videos and a Wikipedia page documenting human rights infringements, while China and the Marxist forums deny anything harmful. Now that almost nobody is bringing it up, I want to know what was legitimately documented. Investigating the origins and later developments of the case on my own would be so hard.

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[–] emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yogthos, Cowbee etc. have given very detailed answers below. From what I know, the things they said are mostly correct. However, one point to note is that a very small minority of Uyghur people, who were influenced by fundamentalist Wahhabi teachings, carried out terrorist attacks against non-Uyghur people in the 2010s. So there was an atmosphere of fear and suspicion against all the Uyghurs, and many innocent people were subjected to searches, arrests, and so on. This has been documented by the UN. Of course, this is not dissimilar to the way Muslims were treated in France or the US after terrorist attacks. In fact, representatives from Muslim countries who visited Xinjiang praised the government's response, as it included a lot of job creation and infrastructure projects to turn people away from extremism.

[–] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

So it was just that ? People were not forced to: change their religion, receive torture like their clothes taken off, or mass murder !? It was only annoying procedures like in Europe ?

[–] BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Essentially yes, though some people were almost certainly subject to abuse by police while in custody, just not as a deliberate policy.

[–] Blursty@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

were almost certainly subject to abuse by police while in custody

Doubtful. There were no credible reports.

[–] emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 16 points 2 days ago

As far as I know, no one was forced to change their religion (Uyghurs aren't even the biggest Muslim group in China, that's the Hui) and there was no mass murder. I believe some innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being terrorists were strip-searched, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

[–] porpoise37@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

They did have their culture/religion repressed; not in totality but many practices are disallowed or only conditionally allowed. Many innocents are compelled to attend re-education centers that may in some cases restrict certain religious practices.

It's bad, in the way stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, or ten commandments schools are bad; it's not Auschwitz, in fact the camps and prisons the US sends people to are far closer to that level of depravity. The bickering you often see online about whether it's "genocide" is sometimes from a bad faith bombastic comparison to Nazi Germany usually rooted in misinformation (Thai BDSM clubs were once photographed and claimed to be "Uighur torture facility"; another photo of a bunch of Uighurs sitting in chairs had the chairs cropped out to make it look like they were forced to sit on the ground, just a couple examples), but other times it's based on the argument that what is being done functionally constitutes a cultural genocide which I personally think is worthy of discussion.

[–] Blursty@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

They did have their culture/religion repressed; not in totality but many practices are disallowed or only conditionally allowed. Many innocents are compelled to attend re-education centers that may in some cases restrict certain religious practices.

There were no re-education centres. That's a sinophobic trope. There were vocational training centres. That's all.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 days ago

The bickering you often see online about whether it’s “genocide” is sometimes from a bad faith bombastic comparison to Nazi Germany usually rooted in misinformation

Also, the declarations of genocide are political. Based only on a few Uyghur women who travelled to UK, and who reported being sterile after having 4+ kids. Autonomous Uyghur/Xinxiang region has been exempt from China's one child policy, but there may have been sterility programs for excessive children.

Xinxiang prosperity has kept up/exceeded with China's provincial average since 2014. It's by far the most humane response to terrorism in human history.