My partner is Lebanese and one issue that has consistently come up with any discussion of Marxism (and honestly the online left as a whole) is Uyghur genocide denial. Essentially, they see it as proof of (white) western leftists being hypocrites and having a glaring Islamophobia problem. I’m inclined to defer to them, but at the same time, I’ve found myself often politically aligning with MLs on other issues, and I know very little about Chinese internal politics or the Uyghurs myself, so I would greatly appreciate being able to get an understanding of what the ML perspective is.
The biggest critique of the Western left that arises from the Uyghur issue is how willing the majority were to believe the genocide narrative. There’s a real genocide being streamed to all their phones, their nations sit on textbook examples of ethnic cleansing from their colonizer days and beyond, and yet their governments, who commit war crimes on the daily and are the most blatantly pro-capitalist, anti-worker governments on the planet sling a litany of bullshit accusations at China and the Western leftists go ‘yeah, that tracks’.
Support for China amongst the Western left is relatively new as it’s getting harder for Western media to credibly deny the good that the Chinese nation is doing for its people, for foreign allies that the West continues to abuse, and for the environment. And yet when the Uyghur thing is denied as more of the same Sinophobic red scare bullshit, it still sticks. And there’s no way to make that make sense without Westerners coming off as latently racist with lingering white man’s burden/manifest destiny brainrot.