Settler colonialism in action

[kodé]

I was surprised to see that the thread I split off from the discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict specifically to talk about larger underlying issues of colonialism and racism has become so active. Now I see it's because y'all are just using it to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I’ll take that as my cue to take a left turn: to what extent is the repression/possibly genocide in Xinjiang/Uyghurstan an instance of settler colonialism? Like in Tibet, it’s systematic repression of an indigenous population that won’t cooperate with the CCP coupled with (that’s the important part) massive immigration of Han Chinese to skew the demographic balance away from the indigenous population. It’s not an exact parallel to European settler colonialism, but it’s reasonably close.

I’d even argue that settler colonialism has been part of official Chinese policy since before the Communists. The Chinese settlement of Taiwan has always struck me as uncomfortable close to the violent settlement and takeover of North America by Anglos: the indigenous population was pushed toward more and more marginal land, typically violently so, with the heavy lifting done by individual settlers or groups but always with the blessing of the Qing government. And the demographics now are similar, as is the celebration-cum-paternalism of more progressive Taiwanese Chinese.

[zompist]

I’ll take that as my cue to take a left turn: to what extent is the repression/possibly genocide in Xinjiang/Uyghurstan an instance of settler colonialism? Like in Tibet, it’s systematic repression of an indigenous population that won’t cooperate with the CCP coupled with (that’s the important part) massive immigration of Han Chinese to skew the demographic balance away from the indigenous population. It’s not an exact parallel to European settler colonialism, but it’s reasonably close.

Absolutely. Once you start looking, it's not hard to find examples all over the world.

It also happened in south China, in historical times. As late as the Three Kingdoms period, the southern coast was non-Han.

[Torco]

I don't know that PRC wanting to conquer Taiwan is a good example of settler colonialism: it's like if, I don't know, at the end of the american civil war the ottomans had funded some just-as-anglo-as-the-separatists loyalists in coney island or something. But yeah, formosa had pre-chinese inhabitants that were themselves colonized both by the han and by various european groups. Xinjiang is a much clearer case: I understand the policy of paying -and giving benefits to- han people to move there in order to han-ify it and displace the natives dates back to the Qing.