I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.
