It is a deliberate choice,
@Nilgiri, not to be in response to any earlier post in this discussion, but to put in a word of my own.
It is certainly right to state that the deaths due to the Great Leap Forward and to the Cultural Revolution were the results of failed and over-ambitious (in the sense of over-optimistic) policies, rather than efforts to cause deaths of people. It is also correct to claim that the very large death-toll in the US currently, due to the bungled response to the pandemic, is again a failure of policy, a failure to address the pandemic rather than the popular response to it and the proposing of a proposed leadership response to it. Taking the arguments placed before us further, it is also true that the deaths of 4 million Bengalis (=in terms of this discussion, 4 million Indians) was due to policy failure, rather than a deliberate attempt at genocide. We can add a number of examples of this, and subtract a number of examples of the other kind, deliberate action to kill people, such as the Nazi death camps, or Stalin's attempt at resolving the 'nationalities' problem, and make some very sophisticated arguments.
To use these correct taxonomic decisions as substitutes for political analysis is self-seeking, and not in a particularly individual character; it tends towards self-seeking in terms of a fictional self-aggrandisement by a segment in a 'manifest destiny' kind of context. In effect, it is being stated that those instances of the savage ill-treatments of a population subject to military or autocratic control, subject to the use of force, are equal, in some way, to the instances of similar effects in the cases of populations NOT subject to such military and autocratic control. The instance of the discussion around the Burkha comes to mind.
These instances are not equal to each other. In the case of the examples from populations under the threat of armed force, military or civilian (the use of the PLA, considering its positioning as the strong arm of the party rather than as the strong arm of the nation, is illustrative), there is a vital element that differentiates it from examples from populations NOT under such forced conditions. That element is widespread knowledge in the latter case, the conscious and deliberate suppression of information in the former case. What Trump has done to the American people is widely known, already, even before the horrific impact is over. What Churchill did to the people of Bengal, India, is equally widely known, and has been meticulously researched. There is far less ambiguity about the numbers; they are still not defined with precision, but that is due to the failure of the then machinery to enumerate the savage impact, partly due to political reasons, partly due to administrative failure. There is far more ambiguity about the numbers concerned in the examples generally grouped under controlled populations; those numbers are not intended to be known, and are deliberately suppressed.
That is policy; it is policy intended to obscure history, and the record of failed decisions, specifically in order to create the narrative that is being presented now, a narrative that states (in part) that great things have been achieved, that great mistakes have been made in trying to achieve such great things, and that the great mistakes were worth the pain because these mistakes are an integral part of a progress that benefited the people at the end of the day. In short, the efforts at suppressing the information in a deliberate, planned manner is essentially and characteristically different from the studied neglect of such information, by, for instance, the British Empire and its Indian representatives; it is the same as the Nazi and the Stalinist efforts at suppressing information, or, for that matter, the Japanese efforts at suppressing information about atrocities committed against the Chinese population during the Sino-Japanese War, or the nascent attempts by the Republican Party in the US to misrepresent and to seek to distort the impact of the failed policies relating to the pandemic.
Stating that Tienanmen is a catchall phrase that has been distorted (the date, June 3, against June 4; the place, outside Tienanmen, as against within the square), or arguing that the present organisational control of the CPC is in the hands of the 'Tienanmen' generation, are fairly flimsy defences that need only a cursory acknowledgement in the process of brushing these aside to concentrate on the main argument. That main argument is that Chinese subjugation to Manchu rule, and earlier, to Mongol rule, that the relentless drive to homogenise culture within broad boundaries determined by an artificial construction of Han culture has crushed many independent and viable cultures on the borders. An obvious example is the grotesque deformation of the 'outer' Tibetan culture of Qing Hai, that is conveniently obscured by the present savage excesses committed against the Uyghur and the Inner Tibetan alike.
How does it matter to us, and why should it matter to us? The answers are fairly obvious, and it is infantile to pretend that the only people concerned with these matters are the Chinese people, and as long as they are content with this state of affairs, there is no need for others to get wound up. Infantile, because progressively the self-determined boundaries of Han dominion are being expanded.
In the 18th century, East Turkestan was precisely that: East Turkestan. It was arguably the ur-heimat for the Turkic people, from where they started to expand into central Asia and finally come to a presence on three continents. It was in the later stages the seat of a very powerful tribal and military grouping, the Dzungarians; ironically, China's extremely flimsy claims to Inner Tibet are founded on the record of Dzungarian domination of the region, and cultural affinities that were structured by Dzungarian rulers, affinities that have in a further development of irony being rejected by the self-proclaimed successors to the Dzungarians. This entire cultural complex was destroyed by a complete and comprehensive genocide, that wiped out the Dzungarians, and that deliberately injected the Uyghur into the region as a vassal people.
In the 20th, now the 21st century, that is what applies to Inner Tibet. This is where the importance of understanding the Borg-like assimilation of other cultures by the Han becomes important, for a deliberately multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual and multivariate state such as India. When a governing philosophy of the sort that is today represented by the Tienanmen generation of party politicians of the CPC is in power, and presents itself to all its neighbours, that is the moment and the situation when it becomes everybody's business, not just the business of the Chinese people.
