Time for the West to learn from China’s ethnic unity

In Western Canada, ground penetrating radar has unsurfaced approximately 100 suspected unmarked graves of indigenous children near a former residential school in late August. Along with the 751 unmarked graves found in 2021, more than 1,300 unmarked graves near religious educational institutions have now been recorded.

These deaths are the legacy of Canada's forced assimilation into a Euro-centric Canada where 150,000 indigenous children were taken away from their families from the late 19th century to the mid-1990s. Under this regime, native languages were not taught and children were punished for using their native languages. This has led to a devastating cultural and linguistic loss.

Official Canadian statistics show that the indigenous population comprised 1,807,250 people in 2021, of which only 237,420 were able to conduct a conversation in their indigenous language - 13.13 percent. Canada, which was founded in 1867, has in 156 years practically wiped out its indigenous culture and replaced it with European civilization.

This tragedy has been repeated across North and South America, as well as Oceania. Despite this historical fact, I have had many conversations with Europeans and those from the aforementioned three settler continents who have without a whiff of irony or self-reflection highlighted to me the danger of China's growth - "evidencing" its treatment of its ethnic minorities.

On the one hand, I can't blame them. The propaganda of the Western transnational liberal elite is so encompassing that challenging false narratives of Chinese ethnic mistreatment needs hours of research to debunk - few have the interest or the time.

However, facts on the ground show that the West has much to learn from China. Both Xizang (Tibet) and Xinjiang, which are large ethnic minority regions, have been part of China long before global European linguistic colonization -  Today the use of both Tibetan and Uygur languages in both its spoken and written form is ubiquitous. I can say this with absolute certainty as I have visited both autonomous regions for an extended period.

China's own use of boarding schools has been used to disparage China. However, there is no policy of wiping out ethnic languages - this is not a rerun of Canada's policy. China's policy for ethnic minority groups is dual language education, coupled with extra help for impoverished ethnic minorities to allow them to attend university. For some, even this is too much but all countries need to balance cultural and linguistic diversity with a lingua franca and a shared dream. History proves China does this far better than the West!

As a former university teacher in China, I know well that many Uygur parents encourage their offspring to have a strong grasp of both Mandarin and the Uygur language. This organic support may seem counterintuitive to propagandized liberals. However, those opposed to my experience would no doubt readily accept that the same Uygur parents, just as their Han counterparts, also readily encourage their children to master English so as to improve their future prospects.

As a Western citizen my experiences on the ground, between 2005 and 2019, my interactions and friendships with Chinese ethnic minorities, and as a witness to China's miraculous development - along with the consciousness of the cultural destruction on three continents, due to the expansion of the European "lebensraum" make me wince with embarrassment when those such as the ultra-woke Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau feels he has the moral high ground to lecture China on its ethnic situation, as he did in 2021, or when Britain's Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, on his recent visit to Beijing, brought up the same topic.

Perhaps to Cleverly's defense, he does know the human rights abuse claims are bogus - there has been more than enough evidence and time to disprove the hoaxes, which all lead back to Washington funding. Thus, Cleverly may be posturing to the corporate liberal press - of course, having to do this in the first place has serious implications for the health of British democracy as it indicates that the governing apparatus is captured by an outside anti-China force.

This transnational force uses its historical atrocities pragmatically to justify its own internal and international class objectives. For example, Trudeau's apology to the indigenous community is the "gild on the sword of liberal imperialism" giving the image of a system that self-corrects and works to not repeat such errors. Consequently, it imbues Western transnational spokesmen, such as Trudeau, as repentant sinners, who have the capacity to lecture China and the Global South. Even the atrocity of war is justified in the name of their sham human rights claims.

Internally, this history is used to divide the Western working class. For example, the class project of settling the Americas, including the history of genocide and transatlantic slavery (which the indigenous graves are but a footnote of), is misplaced into the embodiment of the white working class as "white guilt" when the ancestors of this section of the working class fled tyranny and poverty in Europe. 

In a clever sleight of hand, racism in the guise of woke anti-racism is disguised in plain sight. The divisions in Western societies are manifest and rather than combatting these divisions with a real leftist ideology or elitist self-correction at home, woke ideology is all they have to fortify their class position. Instead of real change, the right is set free to explain ensuing social chaos caused by division through an individualizing "pull your socks up" narrative or worse a racist ideology that justified the subjugation of the world by European powers in the first place.

Western states beset by ethnic divisions nonetheless seek to delegitimize and carve up China's ethnic unity justified by ethnic differences. In fact, all states are multi-ethnic to some extent and have their own ethnic contradictions - the trick is to balance diversity with an overarching unity, which is something Western woke elites are currently unable to do. 

China in contrast, constantly strives for unity while expressing diversity. Their dominant ideology regarding ethnic groups is not one of creating division or racial guilt. Instead, China expresses unity in a family of ethnic groups whose shared task is to develop common prosperity. It is this unity and shared purpose that the West lacks. Indeed without a major shift in their global outlook, Western transnational elites will continue to fear ethnic unity both at home and abroad.