A friend asked me whether I thought the “Uyghur Situation” was an example of Sinophobic anti-China propaganda. I tried to answer on Facebook, but alas Facebook allows comments that are only so long, so, here’s my answer to that:
It certainly seems that way, yes. Let me ask: in every historical instance where genocide has occurred, there have been huge numbers of refugees. Xinjiang is China’s biggest province. It has thousands of miles of borders, which border onto countries that are all muslim majority, many of them are pretty iffy about China. So where are the thousands upon thousands of refugees? Either Chinese border guards are *insanely* efficient, way more than say American border guards, with their walls & listening devices and all that, or it’s just not happening.
In Chinese law, historically, ethnic minorities get better treatment than the Han. During the One Child Per Family era, it didn’t apply if you weren’t Han. Uyghur families were typically 8, 9, 10 kids or more. This is why the explosion in Uyghur population up to about 10 years ago. But then they brought in a less stringent law for the Han, saying, if you’re a city-dweller, you can have 2 kids, and if you’re out in the countryside, 3, but Han rights campaigners said “OK, sure, but apply it all round – everyone gets 2-3 kids max.” So Uyghurs were required to exercise a bit more restraint, and their population growth tops out. Still growing a bit, but not shooting up like a rocket.
One of the countries Xinjiang shares a border with is Afghanistan, where in the 90s, the US were training people to resist communism, to fight the Russians. They made use of, and deliberately radicalised, anyone they could get to fight. Some of these were ethnic Uyghurs, who got it into their heads that they could do likewise in Xinjiang. They attacked civilian populations in Xinjiang with bombs and with knives. (see https://time.com/83727/in-china-deadly-bomb-and-knife-attack-rocks-xinjiang-capital/ for an example) You may have seen the videos of Chinese shopkeepers training to stop knife attacks with these nonlethal pole weapons designed to hold an attacker safely at a couple of metres’ distance. That’s the Chinese response.
There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in Xinjiang since 2014. Part of the reason is they do what we do here & in France: if you’re found spreading terrorist material, literature, videos etc, that’s a prison sentence. If you’re falling in with the wrong crowd, if you’re at risk of becoming radicalised, here in the UK we have the PREVENT programme, and in France they have separate wings in prisons for radicalised inmates to stop the spread of radicalisation. In China they have vocational schools where people learn marketable skills to get a good job, and you’re helped into a job that’s good enough that you can send money home. The way China is though, a lot of jobs involve travelling away from home for a long while. Now, here’s the thing: I’ve seen these on videos from Europeans living in Xinjiang, where the local authorities let muezzins use the local PA system to issue the call to prayer. That doesn’t look like they’re trying to stamp out Islam there. There are 24,300 mosques in the region.
There are 3 main sources for the “Uyghur Genocide” story. 1 is a German anthropologist called Adrian Zenz. He’s never been to Xinjiang but he says he’s interviewed 8 Uyghurs, who said that 1 in 10 of their friends were in jail. Zenz factored that up, based on the idea that there are 11 million Uyghurs, and concluded that 1.1 million Uyghurs must be in prison. Zenz, by the way, is a Born Again Christian who says it’s his mission from God to destroy Communism, so, a fair and unbiased source with his finger on the pulse of local life in Xinjiang. Zenz works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-government set-up (by act of Congress) and funded institution which exists to combat communism.
The second is the ASPI, the Austalian Strategic Policy Institute. This is a think tank set up by the Australian government & funded by their department of defence. They like to take satellite photos of bits of China & say “This is a prison camp! That is a labour camp!” – these have been roundly debunked by people actually going there and showing with photographic evidence tied in with GPS data, that no, this is a school, that is an old folks’ home. You may have seen reports of people “forced” to go work as cotton pickers. They’ve chosen the Xinjiang cotton industry particularly because to us in the West, we think of cotton-picking, we think of African-American slaves in the Deep South, right? Must be slaves. Er, no – China has a managed economy, that uses the market without letting the market rule. They’ve been engaging in poverty alleviation programmes, where if you have no job, they’ll fix you up with one, and yes, again it might be far from home, so they’ll put you up while you work on that cotton harvest, and you can send money home to Mum & Dad. Which they do. Last year, the Chinese government announced that they had completely ended absolute poverty in China. By absolute poverty, we mean malnutrition, starvation, homelessness. In China, people’s basic Maslovian needs are covered. Anyway I digress. Oh and everything’s a “camp” because they want us to think Nazis or Soviet gulags when often it’s just some temporary accomodation on a building site because the workers live hundreds of miles away.
The third source of disinformation on China comes from the Falun Gong aka Falun Dafa. Falun Gong sound like a nice traditional Chinese Tai Chi and dance company – you might see them exercising in the park. The truth is they are a far right racist cult. They believe that if you do what Li Hongzhi says, he’ll put a wheel of energy in your stomach that will give you super-powers like flying & stuff. Li Hongzhi is against Communism because it originated in Europe. He doesn’t think people of different races should marry, and he considers Chinese people to be racially superior to all others. They’ve been spreading this thing about organ harvesting, that FG/FD prisoners in China are being killed for organ transplanting, because according to them their qi gong makes their internal organs extra powerful. It’s insane, really. China bans Falun Gong because they’re basically fascists who want to destroy socialism within China, but also because their reliance on Traditional Chinese Medicine has actually killed a bunch of people. Like, take this herbal tea for your cancer – don’t bother with surgery, just meditate & do some qi gong, it’ll go away. If left unchecked that would become a major public health issue, quite apart from the racism.
So, with these 3 very shaky sources, we have a dominant narrative in the press and online of Xinjiang as basically Nazi Germany. What’s the motivation? Well, we’re past the Hubbert Peak with a lot of fossil fuels. Xinjiang is a vast oil and natural gas reservoir. Everybody wants that oil, which frankly is killing the planet – it’d be better off left in the ground.
China is set to surpass the US as the dominant economy, and they have plans to make a lot more friends around the world. They’re building ports and power plants, railways, all kinds of things, mostly for poorer nations. They’ve come from being poorer than the average African nation when they first had their revolution, to having the highest average purchasing power in the world (better than America already) and they’re set to eclipse America completely within 10 years or so. The Belt and Road initiative is set to help a lot of developing countries out of poverty too. It’s soft power projection, leading by example. If they can show people around the world prosperity from socialism with Chinese characteristics, they expect other people will want to set up socialism with Nigerian characteristics, socialism with Argentinian characteristics, and so on, adapting the system to fit wherever. They realise you cannot build communism in one nation only. You need to do it globally or it will fail, smashed by major capitalist powers like the USA. Xi Jinping’s government is all about learning from the past, and learning from others’ examples, without throwing away the baby with the bath-water. They’ve said that, for example, the Cultural Revolution was a *massive* error, like, let’s never do that again. They’ve been trying to build Chinese national identity as a group thing, bringing all their minorities on board & allowing everyone to express their cultural traditions. I really think that China holds the key to achieving world communism. The next few years, if America can avoid getting into another cold war with them, will be exciting.
skiamakhos 