The Fascinating Double Standards of "Anti-Colonial" Defenders on Chinese Social Media
When discussing colonism and minority policies, the mental gymnastics used by some defenders of the China as I observed on China-related SNS are truly a work of art:
1. Demographic "Migration"
- Elsewhere: When a democratic free neighbor has normal, unorganized civilian migration across its sub-districts, they call it "settler colonialism" and "demographic replacement."
- In China: when the state deploys a massive, state-funded, paramilitary organization (for example, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps) to systematically resettle millions of the dominant ethnic group into a minority's home to alter regional demographics, they suddenly call it "free movement of citizens" and accuse critics of "supporting apartheid🤡."
2. Linguistic "Standardization"
- Elsewhere: When a democratic state standardizes a bunch of closely related regional dialects within the same language family, it is heavily criticized by those "progressives" as "cultural genocide" and "forced assimilation."
- In China: When the state bans entirely sino-unrelated language teaching in natives' schools (like Turkic or Tibeto-Burman) , forcing ethnic minority children into fully closed boarding schools, and forces them to learn only the Chinese, as well as sentencing local scholars to life or to death, and put QR codes ID check even on kitchen knives, they praise it as "promoting national unity," "poverty alleviation," "countering extremism."
It seems the definitions of "colonization" and "integration" are incredibly flexible. Why does state-orchestrated cultural homogenization only become "progressive education" when it happens under their own flag?
PS: The Ultimate Cop-out:
When these contradictions are pointed out and cannot be denied, the immediate reflex is to pivot: "How about what the western countries did in the 17~18th century?" as if the Chinese Empire was a human rights pioneer at the time.