Political Memes

You referred to Wikipedia as an authority earlier

Not at all, on the contrary, I was pointed out that even wikipedia doesn't call it a genocide anymore.

It seems obvious that they want to erase Uyghur culture and replace it with Han.

Not to me, because whenever I look on xiaohongshu for uyghur content there is a lot to find there. The street signs have both uyghur and chinese letters, uyghur is taught in schools, people can practice their faith, I don't see this erasure at all. Whole-ass street festivals where uyghur people celebrate with their food and music, broadcast on a chinese app aimed mainly at chinese people.

And there’s plenty of reasons for China to do this - they’ve long seen the land there as Chinese, regardless of the people living on it.

Who is "they" in this case? The government of china underwent multiple radical transformations. I wouldn't think that the china of today has the same goals as the china of even 50 years ago. Or do you mean the people of china? I am not aware of any popular hateful sentiment towards uyghur people. Shouldn't there be a lot anti-uyghur propaganda around to rally the han chinese against the uyghurs? Granted I'm not super prolific on chinese media, I occasionally go to xiaohongshu but it would be pretty convincing evidence if there was a governmental campaign to rally hate amongst the han chinese against the uyghur people.

Not to mention natural resources, extending borders, marshaling resources to fight capitalist imperialism, et cetera, et cetera…

Why do they need erase the culture of the uyghur people to get access to the natural resources there? The extending of borders doesn't make sense to me, xinjiang is already a part of the republic? And who benefits from all this? A genocide is a massive operation, no one undertakes genocide unless they don't expect immense profits from it. E. g. during the holocaust it was companies like IG Farben, Bayer, Lufthansa, Siemens, Rheinmetall and so on. Also what was the spark that set it off? The reporting is just like, nothing prior to like 2019 or so, suddenly genocide, then some backtracking and now radio silence again.

The ICC would define genocide very narrowly, just the slaughter of people en masse based on ethnicity

And that's what most people understand under genocide. Also the forcible sterilisation would fall under the ICC definition but aside from that one legal opinion from like 5 years or so is there anything new on that? What about the 1 million people in detention have they been freed? Like I see these articles like this one again after a couple years now and they seem even less credible, just really bombastic flashy effects but at it's core, just some satellite images showing like 3 or 4 construction sites to prove abductions of hundreds of thousands, that's the thing that gets me. Hundreds of thousands. That's a massive massive operation, I would expect more evidence and local resistance groups and aid networks and so on...

So let’s leave the rubric of “genocide”

So no genocide in Xinjiang? Or are we going by another definition of genocide?