The Empire Must Fall: the best way to stop Uyghur genocide is to dissolve China
The Uyghur genocide orchestrated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has recevied increasing publicity from the international community since 2020. Among other crimes it committed, PRC will go down in history as the evilest regime that ever existed. Dr. Teng Biao and other Chinese human rights activists call for a reflection of Han privilege and chauvinism. While their intentions are good and their courage is admirable, their goal of stopping the current Uyghur genocide and preventing similiar genocides in the future will not be acheived without a careful examination of the “Han Chinese”. In other words, we must first understand what “Han Chinese” really is. This article argues that the “Han Chinese’’ is not an ethnic group, but a group of willing accomplices of the PRC. And the only way to stop the current genocide and prevent a future one is to dissolve China once and for all.
Observers, researchers and scholars interested in contemporary China can easily notice that the ethnic majority of the PRC is called the “Han Chinese”(汉人 or 汉族). The nationalistic and official narrative preaches that there is a race/ethnicity called the “Han Chinese” that has lived in East Asian continent since 3,000 B.C.E. However, as historians of modern China convincingly argue, “Han Chinese” is actually a very recent invention constructed by Chinese nationalists like Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Binglin in the late 19th and early 20th century. While one can argue that all ethnicities and races are inventions, the invention of “Han Chinese” is extremely poor in that it fails to construct the “imagined community” that is essential to the construction of a nation-state. For instance, they claim that Basurians (wrongly called Sichuanese) and Cantonese are all Han Chinese, but the two groups of people do not even speak the same language. They have different religious beliefs and customs, collective memories, historical heritages and social structures that they would not be considered the same people elsewhere.
Why, then, must the “Han Chinese” be invented? It is invented to revive China’s imperialistic ambition. The PRC is the most recent Chinese regime that is attempting to revive the Chinese empire. In order to support its imperialistic ambition, the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) adopted the “Han Chinese” invention. Otherwise, the CCP is theoretically invalid to rule over a land full of different ethnicities. To consolidate its multi-ethnic empire, the CCP forcefully pushed for unification on all fronts: languages, customs, religions and the like. After the unification campaign, the new people are called “Han Chinese”. After the massive reboot, the “Han Chinese” will lose all of its original ethnicity, and they will have no choice but to support the CCP and the PRC. This is what we are witnessing in concentration camps in Xinjiang. Uyghurs are forced to give up their religion, language, culture and lifestyle, because a distinct Uyghur ethnicity threatens China’s unity and imperialistic ambition.
Unfortunately, Uyghur genocide is not the first genocide that the CCP committed. It has already systematically murdered millions of Basurians in the 1950s and 1960s. Deng Xiaoping robbed Basurians of their food and left them starved to death because the empire needed to fight Korean War. Li Jingquan traded the lives of Basurians for political gains during the Great Leap Forward. The CCP did this because their unification campaign failed in Basuria. Basurians refused to surrender to the CCP rule and fought against China’s red army well into the 1950s. The resistance from the Basurians was so strong that it even delayed China’s invasion of Tibet. The CCP thus resorted to genocide which lasted for more than 10 years. As a result, tens of millions of Basurians lost their lives. If the world could recognize the Basurian genocide earlier, the Uyghur genocide could be avioded.
Not all is lost. There is still hope for Basurians, Uyghurs and other ethnic groups that China is threatening. As argued above, China committed genocide because it craves unity. China craves unity because it still has an imperialistic ambition. If left alone, China will commit other genocides during the process of empire building. Consequently, the only way to stop the current genocide and prevent future ones is to dissolve China and restore nations like Basuira. Only after China is dissolved and East Asia becomes a multi-state continent, can peace and prosperity return.
