Absolutely fascinating Foreign Policy article about China, Xinjiang, and Uyghurs from May 2014!

Before Obama's "pivot to Asia" got going, propaganda was still wall-to-wall "Muslim Terrorism", so people wrote about Chinese issues more sympathetically. https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/14/one-uighur-mans-journey-goes-viral/

Opens up by clearly explaining that there is indeed ongoing terrorism in the region, but that Uyghurs lived normaly lives all over China.

This fact is nowadays obscured, terrorism merely an "allegation" from the "regime".

Look at this! The "some would say" is reserved not to demonize those who hold back on demonizing China, but on those who do!

Nowadays we hear wall-to-wall the opposite: "China's propaganda machine (some would say news station)"

FP giving a voice to an Uyghur author explaining their own personal circumstances and rejection of religious fundamentalism!

Absolutely unthinkable in 2020.

This is the kind of stuff that is completely obscured by American propagandists. People who argued vehemently that MENA Muslims need to get bombed, and now get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to argue that "bilingual education" is "cultural genocide".

Representation of China and its political organs as complex, with internal disagreements? Unheard of these days.

Nowadays China is ubiquitously represented as Borg-like: one single will. Any crime, any mistake, is simply assumed to be a secret devious ploy by "Beijing".

Fawning pro-China propaganda? *Not even close*.

It's an easy-to-relate-to article about the complicated process of living together in spite of differences, as it happens *everywhere in the planet*.

In spite of incessant repetition that "China is Inscrutable", it isn't!

In the 2000s, the neocon popular intellectual Sam Harris wrote a pair of heinous essays that got mass readership: "In Defense of Profiling" and "In Defense of Torture".

I remember spending so much time arguing endlessly about them. China is expected to simply skip that step!

It's like reading an essay from a different planet. A fair acknowledgement of very real issues, fair awareness of the ways that the problem is exacerbated and made difficult to deal with by propagandists with ulterior motives.

Incredibly strong all the way to the conclusion.

And it was translated by that arch-propagandist Bethany Allen!

I guess it simply was a different landscape back then, when the US State Department wasn't barking "China Bad".

More on her work today here: https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1287424072452841472

An article about trailblazing Chinese female imams who say "Men and women are equal here, maybe because we are a socialist country" from NPR.

Simply wouldn't be published today! https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1287438786650083328

Regarding the comparison to Afghanistan at the end of the essay, this is crucial reading.

From American foreign policy sage Z. Brzezinski himself: https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1287433666231238657

For my whole deep dive into this topic, check this thread out. Always open to fielding any questions or critiques that arise from reading it. https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1287411708374454273