Genocide in China ignored by most of the press

Genocide in China ignored by most of the press
Uighurs in China in 2014. Al Jazeera video, YouTube

China is running concentration camps and committing demographic genocide, but the media hardly care. Journalists prattle about “cultural appropriation” that supposedly oppresses them and peddle hate-crime hoaxes to fan the flames of racial and political unrest. Meanwhile, most of them are ignoring a catastrophe unfolding in Western China.

In northwestern China, as many as three million members of ethnic minority groups have been imprisoned in grim concentration camps. Over one million of the imprisoned people are Uighurs, the largest minority group in China’s Xinjiang province. Torture is widespread in the concentration camps, and thousands have died in them. Uighur cemeteries have been destroyed in a campaign some have called cultural genocide.

But many progressives think America is more racist than China. Thus, they argue, it lacks any moral authority to criticize China’s human-rights violations. “We cannot lecture China on their treatment of the Uyghurs,” said Texas Democratic Senate nominee M.J. Hegar.

But America treats ethnic minorities much better than China does. In America, members of racial minority groups have held the most powerful jobs in our country, such as president, Supreme Court Justice, and senator. Blacks and Hispanics receive racial preferences in admission to selective colleges. And while there are racial differences in incomes (the average black household has a lower income than the average white household, and whites have lower incomes than Asians, on average), even minorities who are below the poverty line have enough to live on.


Poverty isn’t killing off minorities: Hispanics actually live three years longer than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control, even though their income is lower. Nor are minorities targeted for elimination by our government. In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were shot and killed by the police, compared with 19 whites, in a country of 330 million people. A study by the black Harvard economist Roland Fryer found that race is not a significant factor in police shootings.

Even most Americans below the federal poverty line have a living standard that is higher than most Europeans. For example, 97% of “poor” households have a color TV. Half of them own their own home, and those that do typically have a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio. As Robert Rector, an analyst at The Heritage Foundation, noted:


Many racial minorities flourish in America. African immigrants to the United States, especially those from Nigeria, actually out-earn whites in America — even though slavery wasn’t abolished in parts of Nigeria until 1936, and Africans were subjected to forced labor by colonial powers that was slavery in all but name, well into the twentieth century.

By contrast, some ethnic minorities in China currently fear the loss of their lives and livelihoods. Images show hundreds of Uighurs, heads shaved, hands bound behind their back, sitting in lines on the floor or being moved by guards at rail stations, in transit to concentration camps. Drone footage and satellite images confirm this happening.

On June 29, demographic genocide in China was reported by the Associated Press, in a story that most American journalists chose to ignore:

The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities…even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children…The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”


Hans Bader

Hans Bader


