I had anarchist comrades who had this weird chip on their shoulder about Xinjiang and would bristle when I pointed out that this whole story sounds suspiciously like a way to make the US seem good and a rising rival seem bad, and that maybe they were inclined to believe the story because China is at least nominally Communist and “authoritarian” so they want to believe that China is doing something horrible. But the story didn’t add up so I went looking for sources to back up their beliefs, and all I found was clear American propaganda. Your partner is carrying water for a Washington DC based think tank. Washington DC, famous friend of Muslims. All English language citations for the “Uighur genocide” I’ve been able to find eventually trace their citations back to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. I could not find one that did not, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there because I eventually gave up in despair.

I cannot believe for a moment that the US cares about Muslims, so based on that alone I simply did not trust the narrative. If America is pushing it, it’s more likely than not bullshit. But just in case, I asked my mother, who is a Muslim immigrant and politically pretty well informed but not on the radical left by any means and is pretty unsympathetic toward China, her take on the situation and got a 2 hour lecture. Given that she’s the one who taught me about how the US fucked around in Afghanistan and 9/11 was just blowback for fomenting radical Islamic extremism in a country that didn’t natively even have that problem in order to fight the Soviets, and how Saddam was America’s favorite pawn before they did what they always do to “allies”, I’m inclined to take her assessment seriously. In summary: There’ve been terrorist attacks from the East Turkistan separatist movement, even going so far as to team up with Balochistani separatists and assassinate Chinese engineers who were working in Pakistan. Xinjiang neighbors Afghanistan through a narrow passage and it’s likely that “radical islamic” ideas spread across that porous border. China eventually responded to it with a heavy-handed crackdown and deradicalization programs, to which the claim of “cultural genocide” might carry some weight, but it’s a far cry from mass murder. Furthermore, she laughed at claims that China was using fashion to erase Uighur identity and pointed out that if you compare historic traditional Uighur fashion and modern fashion, the latest fads (very conservative, burqas) are clearly influenced by the dress codes the Taliban had imposed. Because they come from the same ideological root. So are these new radical islamic movements the ones who are actually doing cultural genocide against the Uighurs?

So, she said it’s complicated and a bit muddy, because who is to say that the separatists don’t have the right to secede? Meanwhile, no nation state ever wants to cede territory or deal with terrorist attacks from armed separatists. But this narrative has existed for a long time and at no point have we ever seen a shred of convincing proof of the mass-murder phase of genocide, while we see it in Palestine, and it’s just ridiculous to call whatever is going on there “genocide.” At this point, the burden of proof is on the people who say there is a genocide to prove it, and they have not. They just call you a genocide-denier if you say “alright, show me the corpses” and that’s pretty telling.

I don’t know what race you are but if you’re white I would approach this cautiously because poc typically don’t like being whitesplained to. At the same time, it may be helpful to gently point these things out to your partner, point out the ways that , and point out how strange it is that the US government would pretend to give a single shit about Muslims. Does she really think that being on the same side of an issue as the US State Department, famous for murdering millions of Muslims and Middle Easterners, actually cares about an ethnic minority of Muslims in China? If so, give me her number, I’ve got a bridge to sell her.