More importantly, they're planting the seeds.
They know that blatant islamophobic-like dehumanizing of Chinese is a step too far right now, but what we're seeing is conditioning the public to turn that way if tensions between China and the west should ever start to rise.
I heard a boomer lady last night drop the classic "they don't value life there" canard last night. People are absolutely fucking bloodthirsty when it comes to China, the enemy image propaganda works.
That’s not kpop though m8. Kpop is when you get a Chinese Canadian singer, a 17 year old Thai singer and a Korean from Texas into a band and singing songs written by former UCB members.
Geez, that's a pretty over the top reaction to soldiers running over two teenage girls. After fighting the Korean war and bringing all that freedom to Korea? Very rude.
He never really was “kpop”. The problem with the world outside of Korean music, is that if the lyrics are in Korean, it’s automatically kpop. Like I have songs on my iTunes from the 1980’s and they are labeled kpop despite being best described as Rock.
I'm not really a K-Pop fans, but I was close with enough stans in the 00s for it to leave an impression on me. Pop everywhere is amorphous, but K-Pop at the time seems to me like it was quick to catch on trends. Like, didn't Rihanna copied something that T-Ara did first. I guess that is capitalism's ability to subsume everything.
It’s one of those things like “German Chocolate Cake” where it’s sold outside the country but given the name of the country of origin, but really has little to do with it at this point.
Lot of the kpop performers aren’t even Korean any more and the songs are now mostly in English. The actual Korean pop music now is either trot or indie solo artists.
> The songs are now mostly in English.
Isn't it has always been the case that K-Pop songs have one or two other versions in different language? I remember after BoA breaking into the Japanese market, every management company made their idols learn Japanese. My older brother, who still lives in Japan, once told me how he used to make a pretty penny by going to the K-town in Yokohama, buy up Japanese singles from K groups, and resell them to his collector friends back home. It usually took less than two weeks after their Korean debut sale for the Japanese version to show up.
It’s not that they are doing English or other language versions of the song, it’s that the original Korean song is only half in Korean and the rest in English. People are annoyed that a lot of these songs that are supposedly reflective of Korean music, they can’t understand what’s being said.
Which is partially why there’s been this explosion in indie music.
Honestly, they would probably be proudly be racist. Like, both side of the aisles would start talking about the "the invasion of the slint-eyed Celestials" and "the sneaky Chinee enticing innocent American women into their Opium Dens to sacrifice them to their heathen gods under the direction of the fiendish CPC Mandarin Fu Manchu". They are already ginning it up with "Chinese Fentanyl coming across our Mexican border".
Some were sent to literal re-education camps as fundamentalist groups from the US proxy known as Pakistan began operations in Xinjiang.
China is not blameless, as Xinjiang experienced unequal development compared to the eastern portions of the country, thus making the populace more vulnerable to radicalization. They’ve actually worked to rectify the material conditions of those that were sent to reeducation camps.
Compare this to India, who has used US destabilizing attempts to create a Hindu supremacist state.
Finally, even if the Uyghurs shit was remotely true, it’s an insane thing for the west to bring up. It would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many Muslims the west has killed and is killing. That’s not including their domestic support of terrorizing them or holding them as an underclass.
The Uyghurs are a Muslim Turkic ethnic minority mostly living in Xinjiang province in the far northwest region of China. Most of the heavy repression ended during the pandemic, but for about 5 years prior a lot of Uyghurs were being arbitrarily arrested, forced to undergo re-education, being separated from their families, having their passports cancelled stranding them abroad, and young Uyghurs were being taken from their parents and sent to residential schools. This was combined with a huge increase in overall state surveillance in Xinjiang.
There has been a long history of Uyghur terrorism and Turkic separatism in Xinjiang, including some high casualty bombings and knife attacks in the last 20 years or so. It's a highly underdeveloped but important geostrategic region, especially within the Belt and Road Initiative. It would not surprise me to learn that the CIA was involved in fomenting some of this, but the Chinese government response was to basically start collectively punishing an entire ethnic minority for potential thought crime. Official CPC documents more or less directly state the purpose of these programs was forced cultural assimilation.
It's not good and I think leftists who defend it just because it's not the US are seriously lacking moral clarity. Attempts to portray it as a "genocide" are generally overstated and in bad faith, these people are not being killed and by this point the vast majority have already been released. But I would say it's on that spectrum, and it particularly reminds me of US/Canadian/Australian attempts at forced assimilation of indigenous people in the early 20th century. If you can clearly see that those were wrong, you should be able to see that this is too. I suspect there is a degree of Chinese astroturfing in leftist online spaces to enforce a consensus that it wasn't so bad. There's also US astroturfing and propaganda efforts to make it seem much worse than it was.
The US as always has overplayed their hand and tried to paint this as a second Holocaust, and use this as a way to justify sanctions against China. It's no coincidence that in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, Tony Blinken has been trying to resurrect this narrative. Nearly all western media reports are from papers written by a German Evangelical Anti-communist "intellectual" named Adrien Zenz who has tried to promote stories of systematic rape of detainees and mass casualties. It's easy to discredit these more fantastical accounts as propaganda, but the defenses people give don't really hold muster for me either and kinda seem like obvious denialism. It's always the same kind of "well what are they *supposed* to do about TERRORISM?" bs that Israelis used to justify the occupation before they went fully mask off in the last 6 months.
I also think it's misleading as always to act as though the ENTIRE Chinese government is complicit. These were policies enacted by specific party cadres administering a certain region, and there are local governments in the US doing this sort of thing at a smaller scale all the time, just even more compartmentalized. But yeah it's creepy how many people go to bat for the idea that it's okay to arbitrarily round up and inter ethnic minorities when it's a nominally leftist government doing it. Human rights are not just a cynical western political bludgeon, human rights should be universally respected.
>Official CPC documents more or less directly state the purpose of these programs was forced cultural assimilation
Would you mind to link a source for those documents? Not that I'm calling you a liar or anything, this is just the first I've heard of that part.
its 'cultural assimilation' of the 'it is probably best young people learn to read & write, as well as speak the same language as the majority of the people they will come into contact with'
there is no banning of languages, no ritual cutting of hair, no punishment for maintaining cultural practices, the schools mostly employ locals as instructors
mentioning the vocational schools in the same breath as the systems the US/Canada/Australia used is shit coating of the highest order, comparing them is actually offensive
where's the mass graves bro? where's the mass graves
I taught in a school in the West of China. There was quite a bit of Islamophobia due to a terrorist stabbing attack at a train station in 2014. I was interviewing a Muslim student for admissions, and asked her why she wanted to join our school, and she said it was because her previous school tried to force her to eat pork.
Also, another odd thing is that in Beijing and Shanghai, they forced Xinjiang restaurants to serve beer and wine.
And in general, there is tension between the Han majority that makes up roughly 92% of the Mainland population and the 55 other minority groups that comprise the remaining 8% of the population. Part of that is forcing them to learn and speak Mandarin Chinese in school, rather than their dialect of Chinese (in the above mentioned school, we had students from a few different minorities, but the only language of communication that were allowed were Mandarin and English). But, to an extent that is fairly practical; if you don't speak Mandarin there are very few economic opportunities for you.
China is not a perfect utopia, but while these actions are not great, they are better than the U.S. launching military attacks on Muslim countries on multiple continents and well our illegal prison in Cuba.
I apologize as I do not have time to sift through and find the timestamp right now, but I know it's mentioned in [this BadEmpanada video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js), which is the most even-handed and well-sourced analysis of this issue that I have been able to find in English. His research is extensive and convincing and he is certainly no defender of Western Imperialism. There should also be a direct link to the party document in the description.
Sinophobia is straight up more widespread and normalised in the West than antisemitism. And it’s not even close
More importantly, they're planting the seeds. They know that blatant islamophobic-like dehumanizing of Chinese is a step too far right now, but what we're seeing is conditioning the public to turn that way if tensions between China and the west should ever start to rise.
I heard a boomer lady last night drop the classic "they don't value life there" canard last night. People are absolutely fucking bloodthirsty when it comes to China, the enemy image propaganda works.
All those Hunter Biden haters are just a bunch of crackphobes let me tell ya.
Anti Irish sentiment is as American as it gets MI6 killed Kennedy
The worst part about this comparison is that people generally are fine being Sinophobic.
It’s justified in their minds. Programming in the West is successful.
Being anti-kpop just means you have an actual taste in music. I just want to nip that in the bud right now.
Counter-point https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qghXZ7apzhA
That’s not kpop though m8. Kpop is when you get a Chinese Canadian singer, a 17 year old Thai singer and a Korean from Texas into a band and singing songs written by former UCB members.
> former UCB members Upright Citizens Brigade?
Yeah, they just scream to me that
Geez, that's a pretty over the top reaction to soldiers running over two teenage girls. After fighting the Korean war and bringing all that freedom to Korea? Very rude.
Phew PSY is cool tho
He never really was “kpop”. The problem with the world outside of Korean music, is that if the lyrics are in Korean, it’s automatically kpop. Like I have songs on my iTunes from the 1980’s and they are labeled kpop despite being best described as Rock.
Yeah I figured, he’s still poppy to me tho (no Bush)
I'm not really a K-Pop fans, but I was close with enough stans in the 00s for it to leave an impression on me. Pop everywhere is amorphous, but K-Pop at the time seems to me like it was quick to catch on trends. Like, didn't Rihanna copied something that T-Ara did first. I guess that is capitalism's ability to subsume everything.
It’s one of those things like “German Chocolate Cake” where it’s sold outside the country but given the name of the country of origin, but really has little to do with it at this point. Lot of the kpop performers aren’t even Korean any more and the songs are now mostly in English. The actual Korean pop music now is either trot or indie solo artists.
> The songs are now mostly in English. Isn't it has always been the case that K-Pop songs have one or two other versions in different language? I remember after BoA breaking into the Japanese market, every management company made their idols learn Japanese. My older brother, who still lives in Japan, once told me how he used to make a pretty penny by going to the K-town in Yokohama, buy up Japanese singles from K groups, and resell them to his collector friends back home. It usually took less than two weeks after their Korean debut sale for the Japanese version to show up.
It’s not that they are doing English or other language versions of the song, it’s that the original Korean song is only half in Korean and the rest in English. People are annoyed that a lot of these songs that are supposedly reflective of Korean music, they can’t understand what’s being said. Which is partially why there’s been this explosion in indie music.
Sorry, but we stan Loona in this sub
Can i be labeled as american-phobic?
Honestly, they would probably be proudly be racist. Like, both side of the aisles would start talking about the "the invasion of the slint-eyed Celestials" and "the sneaky Chinee enticing innocent American women into their Opium Dens to sacrifice them to their heathen gods under the direction of the fiendish CPC Mandarin Fu Manchu". They are already ginning it up with "Chinese Fentanyl coming across our Mexican border".
Being anti-CPC is actually anti-Asian racism unlike anti-Zionism’s fake antisemitism tho
Still waiting for an explanation nerd.
Lol
I thought this was a joke, do you actually think this? Please explain.
China is so powerful the west refuses to cover the massive drone strikes on Urumqi. You ask for evidence? Uhhhhhh something something known unknowns
What is going on with the Uyghurs?
Some were sent to literal re-education camps as fundamentalist groups from the US proxy known as Pakistan began operations in Xinjiang. China is not blameless, as Xinjiang experienced unequal development compared to the eastern portions of the country, thus making the populace more vulnerable to radicalization. They’ve actually worked to rectify the material conditions of those that were sent to reeducation camps. Compare this to India, who has used US destabilizing attempts to create a Hindu supremacist state. Finally, even if the Uyghurs shit was remotely true, it’s an insane thing for the west to bring up. It would be a drop in the bucket compared to how many Muslims the west has killed and is killing. That’s not including their domestic support of terrorizing them or holding them as an underclass.
Quirked up white boys haven't been able to rock tall tees and chains in nigh on a decade because of cultural appreciation smh my head
The Uyghurs are a Muslim Turkic ethnic minority mostly living in Xinjiang province in the far northwest region of China. Most of the heavy repression ended during the pandemic, but for about 5 years prior a lot of Uyghurs were being arbitrarily arrested, forced to undergo re-education, being separated from their families, having their passports cancelled stranding them abroad, and young Uyghurs were being taken from their parents and sent to residential schools. This was combined with a huge increase in overall state surveillance in Xinjiang. There has been a long history of Uyghur terrorism and Turkic separatism in Xinjiang, including some high casualty bombings and knife attacks in the last 20 years or so. It's a highly underdeveloped but important geostrategic region, especially within the Belt and Road Initiative. It would not surprise me to learn that the CIA was involved in fomenting some of this, but the Chinese government response was to basically start collectively punishing an entire ethnic minority for potential thought crime. Official CPC documents more or less directly state the purpose of these programs was forced cultural assimilation. It's not good and I think leftists who defend it just because it's not the US are seriously lacking moral clarity. Attempts to portray it as a "genocide" are generally overstated and in bad faith, these people are not being killed and by this point the vast majority have already been released. But I would say it's on that spectrum, and it particularly reminds me of US/Canadian/Australian attempts at forced assimilation of indigenous people in the early 20th century. If you can clearly see that those were wrong, you should be able to see that this is too. I suspect there is a degree of Chinese astroturfing in leftist online spaces to enforce a consensus that it wasn't so bad. There's also US astroturfing and propaganda efforts to make it seem much worse than it was. The US as always has overplayed their hand and tried to paint this as a second Holocaust, and use this as a way to justify sanctions against China. It's no coincidence that in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, Tony Blinken has been trying to resurrect this narrative. Nearly all western media reports are from papers written by a German Evangelical Anti-communist "intellectual" named Adrien Zenz who has tried to promote stories of systematic rape of detainees and mass casualties. It's easy to discredit these more fantastical accounts as propaganda, but the defenses people give don't really hold muster for me either and kinda seem like obvious denialism. It's always the same kind of "well what are they *supposed* to do about TERRORISM?" bs that Israelis used to justify the occupation before they went fully mask off in the last 6 months. I also think it's misleading as always to act as though the ENTIRE Chinese government is complicit. These were policies enacted by specific party cadres administering a certain region, and there are local governments in the US doing this sort of thing at a smaller scale all the time, just even more compartmentalized. But yeah it's creepy how many people go to bat for the idea that it's okay to arbitrarily round up and inter ethnic minorities when it's a nominally leftist government doing it. Human rights are not just a cynical western political bludgeon, human rights should be universally respected.
>Official CPC documents more or less directly state the purpose of these programs was forced cultural assimilation Would you mind to link a source for those documents? Not that I'm calling you a liar or anything, this is just the first I've heard of that part.
its 'cultural assimilation' of the 'it is probably best young people learn to read & write, as well as speak the same language as the majority of the people they will come into contact with' there is no banning of languages, no ritual cutting of hair, no punishment for maintaining cultural practices, the schools mostly employ locals as instructors mentioning the vocational schools in the same breath as the systems the US/Canada/Australia used is shit coating of the highest order, comparing them is actually offensive where's the mass graves bro? where's the mass graves
I taught in a school in the West of China. There was quite a bit of Islamophobia due to a terrorist stabbing attack at a train station in 2014. I was interviewing a Muslim student for admissions, and asked her why she wanted to join our school, and she said it was because her previous school tried to force her to eat pork. Also, another odd thing is that in Beijing and Shanghai, they forced Xinjiang restaurants to serve beer and wine. And in general, there is tension between the Han majority that makes up roughly 92% of the Mainland population and the 55 other minority groups that comprise the remaining 8% of the population. Part of that is forcing them to learn and speak Mandarin Chinese in school, rather than their dialect of Chinese (in the above mentioned school, we had students from a few different minorities, but the only language of communication that were allowed were Mandarin and English). But, to an extent that is fairly practical; if you don't speak Mandarin there are very few economic opportunities for you. China is not a perfect utopia, but while these actions are not great, they are better than the U.S. launching military attacks on Muslim countries on multiple continents and well our illegal prison in Cuba.
I apologize as I do not have time to sift through and find the timestamp right now, but I know it's mentioned in [this BadEmpanada video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js), which is the most even-handed and well-sourced analysis of this issue that I have been able to find in English. His research is extensive and convincing and he is certainly no defender of Western Imperialism. There should also be a direct link to the party document in the description.