I am not sure what term is apporopiate for the horrific treatment, but I found the Economist's point quite valid. > By the common understanding of the word, it is not. Just as “homicide” means killing a person and “suicide” means killing yourself, “genocide” means killing a people. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs is horrific: it has locked up perhaps 1m of them in prison camps, which it naturally mislabels “vocati…
It's explicitly important that genocide can't only be focused on murdering living people, because for the most part, you don't wipe out a race or group of people just by killing them.
Trying to scope genocide down to the simple act of murdering people is a bloody-minded case of exceptionalism that overlooks the ongoing attempts to commit genocide around the world by actively destroying cultures, their history, and severing the ties that future generations have to both of those.
It's also very easy to understand why folks have a hard time closing the gap; virtually every country in the world has some history of tribalism and violence that falls into the broad strokes of genocide, and several countries are still actively engaged in it; it's worth noting that taken in the context of Central and South American immigrants to the United States, a case could be made that the child separation policy is a genocidal act.
There is a reason why the definition of genocide in legal terms steps away from the dictionary definition of the word, and it's documented here -> https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
I would suggest that anyone that doesn't find each of the items of the formal definition of genocide from the U.N. listed below as horrifying as the first line, it's probably worthwhile to spend some time evaluating and learning about the impact policies and governments that have done this in recent history (post World War II) to understand why the scope of genocide can't be limited to murder.
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.