more documentation on Chinese persecution taken from Wikipedia

[John Raymaker]

China is conducting a widespread campaign of persecution against Uyghurs and Christians, characterized by Wikipedia as a genocide or severe human rights abuses, including mass detentions, surveillance, and forced assimilation, targeting ethnic, religious, and cultural identity. 

Persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang (2014–Present):

• Mass Detention: Over 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims have been detained in camps.
• Abuses: Reports indicate torture, forced labor, sexual violence, forced abortions, and sterilization.
• Cultural Suppression: Systematic destruction of religious sites and forced indoctrination. 

Persecution of Christians:

• Sinicization: Churches are pressured to align with Communist Party ideology.
• Suppression: Arbitrary arrests, closure of churches, and removal of crosses, particularly targeting underground, unregistered house churches. 

These actions are driven by a state policy of forced integration, surveillance, and the elimination of religious or cultural practices deemed "extreme" or non-compliant with state ideology. 

Persecution of Uyghurs in China - Wikipedia

Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs...

Wikipedia

Persecution of Uyghurs in China - Simple Wikipedia

The persecution of Uyghurs in China involves many human rights violations in Xinjiang that are hurting Uyghurs. This is being done...

Wikipedia

[Hugh Williams]

John,

Thank you for elaborating on this.

I expect that this is a very sensitive issue for many reasons I’m simply unaware of …

I am convinced, however, that this issue or question of China and its place and position in the world is of utmost importance. Thus, my repeated insistence that one way to give some concreteness to this notion of ‘christian-marxist’ dialogue is through discussions of China’s relations with the nations and peoples of the West. This is the reason I called attention to Mark Carney’s recent trip to China and the imagined conversation with Xi.

For some time, I would have shared uncritically your sentiments re China and its leadership. But then two things have happened that made the question, challenge, and opportunity of ‘being reasonable’ in this instance come to the fore for me in a powerful way –  first, the ongoing climate crisis and the backtracking that has occurred on this by Western governments led by the US especially along with the evidence of the oil industry’s concerted efforts to obstruct and/or delay effective action on fossil fuel replacement. Second, there is this recent Israeli ‘war’ in Gaza and the coverage of it in the Western media.

These two issues raised a deeper epistemological issue for me – that of ‘being reasonable’, the third fundamental term in your good text’s title “Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable, Responsible” (AIRR, 2023). The question that illuminates this third component of this fundamental cognitional structure and process is – ‘is it really so?’

This is a matter of scrutinizing one’s beliefs. These two events cited above made me critically reevaluate my own often inherited beliefs. And a profound shift of will occurred as to where my ‘benefit of the doubt’ was now to be directed. In brief, I no longer give it to Western media sources or what might be called the Western intellectual and cultural edifice and its belief structure.

This is all to say that this shift for me in who gets the ‘benefit of the doubt’ now also applies to China and how it is usually portrayed in various media.

What may be interesting and perhaps relevant for others on this list-serve is what I’ve found Lonergan to say about ‘beliefs’ and ‘mistaken beliefs’.

Allow me to briefly recount some of what I’ve gleaned from Lonergan’s treatment of ‘beliefs’ in Morelli’s “The Lonergan Reader”.

Mistaken belief has roots in the scotosis of the dramatic subject, the bias of the practical subject, and in what he calls the counter-positions of philosophy. I would at least argue here that in the case of China and of our beliefs about this very different society, we do in the West have a real challenge in attempting to unravel and sort through ‘correct beliefs from mistaken beliefs'. There clearly is bound to be an aspect of such mistaken adherence that must be said to be “through no fault of one’s own” but instead results from an environment of significant media bias and distortion.

Lonergan pointed out that the enviable certainty of the scientist and the mathematician is to a large degree because of the remoteness of their subjects from human living. China and what is actually happening in this society is first and foremost a question and problem of ‘human living’ and comparative human living at that. And it is here that our lives can be most vulnerable to a problematic that affects our mind and distorts our beliefs.  Thus, learning of one’s errors is a particular and often painful case of learning, and best begins with some precise issue on which one was most likely mistaken. This has happened for many people in the West because of what I believe is rightly called a genocide in Gaza and in which much of the West has been complicit.

Lonergan distinguishes between what he calls immanently generated knowledge and belief. These differ not so much in their objects or modes, but in their motives and origins. For example, he says E=MC2 if known, the proposition is grasped as unconditional, however, if believed it is the value of being willing to profit unconditionally from the ‘knowledge-work’ of others who get this unconditional ‘benefit of the doubt’.

This state of affairs in our cherished beliefs remains relatively in tact and comfortable until our trust has been undermined or violated. And before being able to eliminate mistaken belief we must realize what beliefs are and that some media or internet report on science (or China) doesn’t add to knowledge but rather to one’s beliefs. Thus, here we have to have some grip on a method for eliminating mistaken beliefs and doing so properly. I am convinced that this is crucial in the case of China today, and particularly in the case of our Western beliefs about China. This is why I’ve stressed the crucial importance (of what is actually a renewal) of ‘Christian-Marxist dialogue’ and which is bound to involve, according to Lonergan, difficult and hopefully informed dialectic in the spirit of goodwill.

Hugh

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[Hugh Williams]

Also, a little addendum further to my more lengthy note below ...

I'm not saying all things in Xinjiang where most of the Uyghurs in China are said to be located

are acceptable or justifiable. But I'm arguing that there is an honest dialectic here where

viewpoints and beliefs can be very one sided and even actively distorted and manipulated.

My sources tell me that the US Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas 

prominently featured in the link you supplied 

is or was a translator, I assume to be working

for the US government, interrogating Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

These then are very complex issues that, in my view, need to be considered

most immediately in the context of the US led "War on terrorism". 

We also mustn't forget how many of 'us' in the West were deliberately 'led'

into what has now been described as one of the biggest imperial crimes of the 21st century

based upon claims of 'weapons of mass destruction' ...

there is here in the West a propaganda machine that can operate with intensity

and pervasiveness in our culture ...

Hugh 

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