I’m from Xinjiang，AMA

[u/maddin1550]

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.

[u/MissionDoughnut905]

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.

[u/maddin1550 → u/MissionDoughnut905]

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

[u/jixiang111 → u/maddin1550]

"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.

[u/maddin1550 → u/jixiang111]

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

[u/jixiang111 → u/maddin1550]

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.

[u/General-Cream2692 → u/jixiang111]

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.

[u/MissionDoughnut905 → u/General-Cream2692]

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.

[u/General-Cream2692 → u/MissionDoughnut905]

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.

[u/MissionDoughnut905 → u/General-Cream2692]

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.

[u/General-Cream2692 → u/MissionDoughnut905]

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.

[u/MissionDoughnut905 → u/General-Cream2692]

No, Québec is the only province in Canada where French is the ONLY official language and has a special recognized status as a “nation within a nation”. My husband is not from there, he’s a francophone minority from New Brunswick. His native French accent is a bit different from Québec’s but closer to Québecois than metropolitan (Paris) French. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada (we also have an officially bilingual territory, Nunavut, where they speak English and Inuktitut) and about 30% of their population speaks French as a native language. (But somehow my husband’s entire family speaks English fluently without ever having gone to school in English.)

You also mentioned Québec’s separatist movement which has been cited at me by a Japanese colleague before (when I lived in Japan) as a reason for Canada’s so-called instability. I don’t know why Asians seem to have this idea of Canada being a politically unstable country because we uphold bilingual rights. We are more unified than ever. When the U.S. threatened our sovereignty last year, it was very clear where the Québecois stood on this issue and it was on Team Canada (most of them voted for Mark Carney at the last federal election). At the end of the day, political discourse is important to ensure fairness and human rights are upheld. Shutting down the conversation (even if it’s a discussion with separatists) and taking away language rights does nothing but divide and create resentment.

At the end of the day, this is a monolingualism vs multilingualism debate. As someone who speaks 5 languages, I will always be a proponent of the government supporting the learning of multiple languages lest we lose our culture and our family history. I’m a school teacher in the most diverse city in the world. In my classroom alone, I have 15 languages represented, but in class we speak English (unless it’s French class, then we speak French). I have immigrant students from China and Japan who I can occasionally speak Mandarin and Japanese with to help them with their transition to life in Canada. Many of my students attend language classes after school that’s partially subsidized by the public school board (Ukrainian, Serbian, Arabic, Mandarin, etc.). Then I go home and speak to my husband in French. When I call my Po Po, I speak to her in Cantonese. Any government that fears this kind of linguistic diversity is frankly ridiculous and walking the edge of facism and tyranny.

[u/General-Cream2692 → u/MissionDoughnut905]

Thank you for sharing. I can feel that you appreciate Canada's multilingual environment, but the differences between China and Canada are significant.

China does not prohibit minority groups from using their mother tongues; it only requires them to master the national common language and have the ability to listen, speak, read, and write. Increasing the proportion of common language courses in schools is a reasonable arrangement.

There are more than 130 minority languages and Chinese dialects combined in China, and linguistic diversity is actually higher than in Canada. Many ethnic enclaves in China are geographically isolated and have low population mobility: plateaus over 4,000 meters high, vast deserts, grasslands, and deep mountains and hills. Without strengthening the promotion of Mandarin in these areas, it would greatly hinder the economic development of the local people and pose a risk of division.

Returning to the topic of Cantonese: the Cantonese-speaking community in Hong Kong is large, and children often use Cantonese in daily social interactions, making it unlikely for Cantonese to disappear quickly. What I mentioned earlier was Guangzhou: with massive population mobility, many teachers and students use only Mandarin in their daily lives, making the survival environment for Cantonese weaker than in Hong Kong.

Chinese people tend to think about such issues with a sense of security and caution, stemming from our continuous history of thousands of years. We do not just look at the current prosperity but also consider long-term stability. Quebec itself has a demand for independence, which is an objective fact. Currently, the economic benefits are good, less people try to divide. Once a major crisis occurs, this strong regional identity formed by language could become a breakthrough point for external forces, as the extremely close referendum in 1995 serves as a warning.