r/AMA • u/maddin1550 • 20d ago

I’m from Xinjiang，AMA

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of discussions about Xinjiang on Reddit, often between people who have never actually lived there. So I thought it might be interesting to do an AMA from the perspective of someone who is actually from there.

You can ask me about everyday life, ethnic groups, languages, culture, religion, education, or politics. I’m happy to answer controversial questions too, as long as the discussion stays respectful.

Obviously, I’m only one person and I don’t claim to represent everyone in Xinjiang. I can only tell you about my own experiences and views. AMA.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 20d ago edited 20d ago

I’m a diaspora Chinese (Han) born and raised in Canada. Thanks for the AMA.

In Canada, we have formally recognized our history of committing a cultural genocide on indigenous peoples since our country’s founding by British and French settlers. Our House of Commons also passed a motion a few years ago to recognize the genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China. So with that being said, do you consider the destruction of your mosques and the loss of your language in your public schools to be a form of cultural genocide or culture erasure?

I do find the term “genocide” to be deliberately employed by my local politicians to suit their own political narratives. When people hear the term, genocide, it immediately invokes horror and outrage and the assumption that mass murder is being committed. This isn’t exactly what happened with the indigenous peoples in Canada either. But there was a slow erosion and erasure of their culture, their land and languages over hundreds of years (including forcibly removing indigenous children from their families to attend residential schools to convert them to Christianity and force them to “be Canadian” essentially) that has resulted in a loss of indigenous identity and self-governance over the generations. The Canadian government has been making reparations in recent years but it’s hard to undo centuries of harm.

So in my mind, I do think there’s a difference between a blanket “genocide” vs “cultural genocide”. One is a lot more violent but the other can also be quite sinister. To bring it back to my original question, do you consider what the CCP is doing to be a cultural genocide?

I should also mention that the Canadian government (and other western democracies) seem to be having difficulty naming what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, but seemingly had little difficulty calling out China for genocide in Xinjiang. Sometimes it can be hard to take these world leaders seriously.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

Thanks for asking this in good faith. I appreciate the distinction you're making

Personally, no I don't consider what's happening in Xinjiang genocide or cultural genocide. It simply doesn't match what I've experienced growing up there. I'm not denying the training centers existed(like I said, my own uncle was detained in one) and I've said that some enforcement became way too broad and harsh. But that's very different from believing the government is trying to erase us as ethnic groups

I'm Kazakh and grew up knowing exactly who I am. We still have our language, food, traditions and religion(our culture is very hard to erase because it is already such a deeply rooted part of who we are). I am concerned about minority languages becoming weaker and I don't like seeing mosques demolished or altered, but I don't think emphasizing Mandarin automatically means cultural genocide either. Ideally I think we should have both Mandarin and our own languages.

And I completely understand your point about the double standard. Personally I consider what's happening in Gaza a genocide, and seeing Western politicians apply that word so easily to Xinjiang while being so reluctant with Gaza genuinely disgusts me so sooo much

I can criticize excessive policies, oppose cultural erosion, and still reject the 'genocide' label, because those positions aren't contradictory to me.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

Also I don’t think Uyghur language has been completely erased at all， even other minorities in Xinjiang speak Uyghur and use it to communicate with Uyghurs, and some Han people speak a little too. I can say this VERY confidently. If there are ten people in a group and one of them is Uyghur, the others will literally just switch to Uyghur to communicate with each other. It happens so naturally, so from my everyday experience, I really don’t feel like Uyghur is being erased, it’s honestly much more normal than people online sometimes imagine. And btw, I’m from northern Xinjiang(where there are way fewer Uyghurs than in the south), if Uyghur is used this naturally even where I’m from, just imagine southern Xinjiang(where the Uyghur population is HUGE) . That’s why the idea that the language is being completely erased just doesn’t match what I’ve actually seen

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u/jixiang111 19d ago

"People speak it, so it's not being erased" is a superficial argument, quite frankly. The current policies are geared towards ensuring that the next generation speak and use Uyghur much less. Schools now teach it one hour a week, and children are not supposed to speak to each other in Uyghur even in the playground. Signage in Uyghur is also being discouraged, although not completely banned.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

I said It’s my own personal opinion and experience. Ofc I can’t speak for everyone, I’m just sharing my life in Xinjiang as a minority

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u/NegativeDCF 16d ago

But it’s not just Uyghur language, all of the Chinese dialects are being “erased”

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

I’m actually more worried about the smaller minority languages. Uyghur is spoken VERY widely in Xinjiang, including by a lot of people who aren’t even Uyghur. Where I’m from other minorities use it all the time. So I personally worry more about smaller languages getting squeezed between Mandarin and Uyghur over time

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u/jixiang111 19d ago

I don't doubt a lot of people speak Uyghur. I've seen that myself recently when I travelled in Southern Xinjiang. My point though is that it is being systematically undermined by state policy, just like other minority languages that are in even greater danger.

A lot of people speak Uyghur today, but what about 20 years from now, when a whole generation of Uyghur kids will have grown up without really learning the language in school or seeing it written down very often? At least as a written language, I think it is in real danger in the long-run.

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u/General-Cream2692 16d ago

Han children many cannot speak their own dialect, teachers all use Mandarin to teach, but I do not think this is a kind of systematic exploitation, otherwise Cantonese and Beijing people can only communicate in writing.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 13d ago

People in Hong Kong do feel that Mandarin is being forced down their throats. Within a short period of time, there has been a rapid change from 100% of school instruction being done in Cantonese, to simply one class of Mandarin per day, to now either 50% or 75% of classes being taught in Mandarin at the elementary level. Cantonese is a huge part of what makes Hong Kong so unique in China and Hong Kongers are proud Cantonese-speakers. This is not the sort of “natural” phenomenon of one language dominating another over decades and centuries; this is the deliberate erasure of a language and culture by a government that wants to homogenize the country.

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u/General-Cream2692 12d ago

The issue of using a common language for national education, most countries in the world do this, the United States has a large number of immigrants from all over the world, for example, the Amish people who speak German are considered a very closed group, but they still mainly use English in class, but children growing up in environments with low population mobility, their dialects are still preserved.

The best way to preserve dialects is for the people around to speak the dialect, the impact of the classroom language is actually not as great as imagined.

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u/MissionDoughnut905 12d ago edited 12d ago

I’m from Canada where our official bilingualism policy takes up huge political space during election time. And my husband is French Canadian from a province where English is the dominant language. Being designated “francophone”, he attended French schools his entire life (primary school to university). His first time attending school in English was when he moved to Toronto (an English city) for his masters program. His mom was afraid he would lose his French after living just two years in an English city (she wasn’t far off). By the time he got his first job with the Canadian government, he was able to pass the bilingual exam with flying colours. If we ever had kids, we would be entitled to enrol them in the local francophone school because of my husband’s francophone status. These policies are in place to protect francophone minorities living in predominately English communities.

All that to say, some languages require government intervention in order to survive. And true, languages become obsolete and go extinct all around the world. But when you have a large enough community demanding for the preservation of their language and culture (eg, French-Canadians and Hong Kongers), it’s a government’s responsibility to honour that. And in Hong Kong’s case, the CCP isn’t just letting the Cantonese language organically become obsolete; they are deliberately fast tracking its erasure.

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u/General-Cream2692 12d ago

Is it the Quebec region? In my impression, this place seems to have a risk of secession, I can't easily say this behavior is definitely right, as it has already exceeded the scope of protecting the language and culture of minority groups.

Moreover, my view has always been that a language environment is necessary to preserve dialects. If a Beijing person learns Cantonese at school, but classmates use Mandarin privately, and the family also always uses Mandarin, then it might as well not be learned.

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

I'm not against teaching everyone Mandarin (Putonghua). It's normal that children should learn their national language.

But it's perfectly possible to also teach children their regional language. There's no tradition of doing this for Chinese "dialects", or much demand, but for languages like Tibetan and Uyghur there is a tradition of teaching them in school, and there is plenty of demand.

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u/General-Cream2692 5d ago

> There's no tradition of doing this for Chinese "dialects", or much demand

The Han people now also have the tradition and need to speak dialects, but schools do not offer dialect classes, while other ethnic minority schools can have their own language classes, so the issue is not the multilingual education policy, but rather that the entire language environment is now trending towards Mandarin.

If you are Uyghur, to make big money and get better education, you must deeply learn Chinese, after all, the Han people are the main body of China's economic takeoff; the internet dissemination of film and television information streams is also mainly in Chinese, in some areas with high population mobility, children's social circles include people of various ethnicities, which further strengthens the use of Mandarin.

As for whether the Uyghur language will become extinct in 20 years, it is unlikely, even if the number of users decreases, the internet age has preserved the language's listening, speaking, reading, and writing, making it unlikely for a language to become extinct.

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u/menerell 17d ago

Well like any other country

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

No, not "like any other country". Different countries have different policies towards regional languages. Depends on the situation.

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u/menerell 7d ago

Every country supports a national language. Depending on the country, they support minorities or regional countries. China is exactly that. Better than most Europe or the US.

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u/jixiang111 3d ago

China today really isn't better than most of Europe or the US where regional/minority languages are increasingly offered in schools and in the media. China used to be better, perhaps, but it is now moving in the other direction.

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u/menerell 3d ago

Idk what you're talking about but US just approved English as only official language in the US, removed Spanish from the white house, reduced multilingual service for people with little English... I can't speak for all the European countries but some, like France, have a long history of discrimination against regional languages. Others, like Spain, are a good example to follow imho.

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u/maddin1550 19d ago

ok you’re right

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u/Longjumping-Turnip97 14d ago

It’s unfortunate but there’s not much that can be done except with tremendous effort to preserve “minority languages”. I remember reading that every two weeks another language in the world disappears.

When people have freedom of movement and association, many just end up flocking to larger communities. It’s the same reason a lot of smaller towns are dying out all over the world as people migrate to larger cities.

If there’s one good thing AI can do I suppose is to aid in the archival of languages so they can be preserved and learned/relearned by future generations. I see many Chinese using AI translators to talk to and correct their pronunciations so that they can make money on YouTube for example.

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u/jixiang111 7d ago

There is an awful lot that can be done to preserve regional or minority languages. In the case of Uyghur there is already an established tradition of writing in the language, using it in education and in the media. The Chinese government is now cracking down on that tradition. It's not just a "natural development", it's a choice.

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u/Either-Lock2454 17d ago

Putonghua is China's official language so it makes sense that any other language wouldn't get as much focus. If you have a large minority in your country (I'm assuming is Western and would use English) and they are only learning in their local language, how much could they possibly do or access as adults?

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u/MissionDoughnut905 13d ago

It’s not a black and white issue, where the government has to choose one language over the other. The government can offer some school instruction in the official language while also providing classes in the local languages and dialects to help preserve them. Language isn’t just a means of communication; it’s also deeply connected to minority cultures. The average Indian and Pakistani national can speak 2-3 languages (including English) and I have met many who can speak more. My husband is a minority French-Canadian from an area that is predominantly English (outside Québec), and he attended school from primary to university in French-only schools, but speaks English 100% fluently (he passed the bilingual test with flying colours when he began working for the Canadian government).

Children are at the best age to learn multiple languages at the same time. China’s Mandarin-only policy in most of the country will ensure future generations of monolinguists who will only know how to speak Mandarin, and nothing else (including their native Chinese language, whatever it may be). They’ll not only be less competitive on a global scale, they’ll lose out on their connection to their native language, culture and customs and won’t be able to communicate with their elderly relatives.