For years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to adopt an identity rooted in Chinese nationality and allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.
Now, that push has been codified into a sweeping new law that reaches into classrooms, neighborhoods and homes – and gives Beijing the right to target people outside of its borders that it believes violate its rules.
The statute, officially known as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, came into effect on July 1. It bans acts that “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division” among China’s 56 officially recognized ethnicities, which include a Han Chinese majority that makes up over 90% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
Using the UNs definition of genocide including “cultural genocide” means that every nation on Earth is and has been committing genocide. It’s an unfortunate definition, in my opinion;any distinction that applies to all loses its meaning.
Oh so we should not accept a world wide definition just because genocide has happened before? So you think genocide is justified just because it has happened in other places as well?
Elaborate
Example: Many Americans don’t speak their native tongue.
That’s because English is the national language and the lingua franca. People adopt and use it out of their own will. There’s no systematic policy in place that punishes people for speaking a different language with the intent of erasing them.
Intent or not, the outcome is there. You think the Irish immigrants decided on their own to forget their home language? They were derided as non-white and their language was part of that non-white identity.