A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them.

While I agree with the over all sentiment of this write up, as the vast majority of people criticizing China’s government don’t really care about human rights violations against Islamic minority groups.

However, utilizing that fact to shield any accusations of criticism against the government is fallacious. Any government enacting re-education camps on minority populations should be scrutinized.