Following Beijing’s move to implement harsh national security legislation in Hong Kong, critics of China’s ruling Communist Party — including Australia — have stepped up pressure over its egregious human rights abuses of about 10 million ethnic minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
Beijing’s point-blank denial of well-verified concentrations camps, which hold more than 1 million people, and serial inhumane treatment of Uyghurs inside and outside the camps — including torture and various measures of forced birth control — was laid bare in a train-wreck BBC interview with China’s UK ambassador Liu Xiaoming.
Liu was shown a video of several hundred handcuffed and blindfolded detainees at a train station in Xinjiang. The video was uploaded to YouTube and has been verified as being filmed on or around August 18, 2018.
Despite this Liu — looking rather ill by this time — denied that his country has concentrations camps for ethnic Uyghurs, saying: “They enjoy peaceful, harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups of people.
“There is no so-called pervasive, massive, forced sterilisation among Uyghur people in China. Government policy is strongly opposed to this kind of practice.”
Indeed, for quite some time Beijing completely denied the existence of the camps which it began building in 2016, despite independently verified satellite images that showed dozens of facilities in use and under construction.
But the evidence was ultimately so overwhelming that it changed tack, admitting camps but describing them as “re-education” centres aimed at better equipping Uyghurs and other Central Asian ethnic minorities, including Kazakhs.
“The training has only one purpose: to learn laws and regulations … to eradicate from the mind thoughts about religious extremism and violent terrorism, and to cure ideological diseases,” Human Rights Watch quoted a speech by the Chinese Communist Youth League Xinjiang branch from March 2017.
“If the education is not going well, we will continue to provide free education until the students achieve satisfactory results and graduate smoothly.”
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Beijing has long instituted campaigns again the Uyghurs who are Muslim and ethnically Turkic, including an early policy of “Hanisation” — sending millions of the majority Han ethnic Chinese to live in Xinjiang. A similar policy has been executed in Tibet.
In June veteran Chinese researcher and German academic Adrian Zenz released research detailing the state subjecting minority women to pregnancy checks, forced implantation of intra-uterine devices, sterilisation and abortion.
Beijing has a particularly poor track record when it comes to population control. Honed during the dark years of the one-child policy from 1979-2015 when forced abortions — including late-term terminations and sterilisation — through its Orwellian family planning bureaucracy.
However, most ethnic minorities in China, particularly those in impoverished rural areas, were exempted from the one-child policy, allowing the populations of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang to grow in recent decades.
After Zenz’s report, a group of 27 countries including Australia and New Zealand filed a letter with the UN saying: “We call on China to uphold its national laws and international obligations and to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion or belief in Xinjiang and across China.
“We call also on China to refrain from the arbitrary detention and restrictions on freedom of movement of Uyghurs and other Muslim and minority communities in Xinjiang.”
Since becoming Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister in 2018, Marise Payne has moved China’s human rights abuses to the fore and has spoken out regularly against its action in Xinjiang. They had previously generally been swept under the carpet by her predecessor, Julie Bishop, most likely over fear of trade-based retribution.
It is not just in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China that Uyghurs suffer egregious persecution. It also happens in countries including Australia. The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department has a program of harassment against the estimated 500,000 Uyghurs living outside China and engage in abuses against family inside China.
China’s abuses of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are the first gulags of the 21st century, no different from Nazi Germany’s concentration camps or Soviet Russia’s gulags.
China’s aim is to destroy Uyghur culture, identity and future population. It’s time we called it what it is: genocide.
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As usual, Michael Sainsbury puts out another tendentious assertion about China’s treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, possibly to whip up hostility to China in a way that will satisfy the US strategy of confrontation with China and its hope for China’s economic isolation, for no better reason that I can discern than that the US does not want to be only the second largest global economy.
The really appalling thing in Sainsbury’s article is the view that China’s “re-education” camps are no different to Nazi concentration camps or Soviet Gulags and then wants to call its policy toward Uighurs “genocide”. The Nazi concentration camps were for the purpose of genocide of Jews. There is clear evidence of that. Where is Sainsbury’s evidence for Uighurs being worked and starved to death? Where does he cite any report that describes anything more than imprisonment and an attempt to force changes of religious belief? Where is the evidence of gas chambers or their equivalent to kill Uighurs on a mass scale? None is cited. It is just an unsupported allegation. It is deplorable that a journalist feels free to make a charge as serious as genocide without citing evidence.
Chinas extremist Muslim problem is being dealt with.
Another member of the ‘Hyperventilating Foreign Correspondents Blob’.
When a member of that ‘Blob’ bothers to mention UN Security Council Resolution No 2161, which is headed;
“EASTERN TURKISTAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENT”
And says;
Reason for listing:
The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement was listed on 11 September 2002 pursuant to paragraphs 1 and 2 of resolution 1390 (2002) as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” or “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Al-Qaida (QDe.004).
And, mentions former Democrat Congresswoman, Cythia McKinney, was a member of a group of half a dozen that visited Xinjiang, very late last year, as was American – Vietnamese journalist, Danny Haiphong, who wrote an excellent ‘travel diary’, which was published at ‘Black Agenda Report’, where he is a Contributing Editor, then I might choose to tread beyond the headline of pieces like the one above.
Otherwise, I’ll remain very skeptical about ‘motivation’, which continues to leave me ‘just not buying it’.
And/or the Grauniad piece of Nov 25, 2013, which is headed;
“Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China’s Tiananmen Square
Group releases eight-minute audio clip which warns of future attacks in Beijing”
So are you saying that these reports are false and there is no genocide? Or that it is happening and it’s justified for reasons you outlined?
Doesn’t look like he’s saying anything for the most part Reck, he’s simply quoting sources that provide a much less emotional perspective. Classic shoot the messenger on your part buddy. Like so many other Oz “journalists” Sainsbury is lazy, always tugging at emotions, seldom right and still gets a guernsey.
What I’m ‘saying’ is Sainsbury, yet again, provides me with insufficient evidence for me to doubt those who have a) been there (and, very recently), and b) provide actual evidence, not freakin’ hearsay.
I’ve got a ‘fun fact’, and it involves ‘contact tracing’;
All the Western reports on Xinjiang can be traced to 8 ‘witnesses’, and every last one of those 8 is based in the US, and receives ‘living expenses’ from outfits like ‘The National Endowment for Democracy’, which cognisant beings know used to reside within the CIA, and now uses the State Dept as a ‘cut out’.
Effectively you are saying all Muslims are terrorists – maybe with the qualification ‘if they live in China’. That is a pretty unacceptable view of the world.
That’s how I read it too
Another who can’t or won’t ‘read’.
Seriously? Is that how you comprehend a UN Security Council Resolution – that’s been in place since 2002 (do you even understand the “Veto” process at the UNSC?).
The Yanks supported the original resolution, and its extension which is still in place.
Beyond that, I’m quoting WESTERN journalists and reports, including a former US Democratic Congresswoman – who has actually been there. And, I supplied references from Western mainstream sources. Oh, and only the UN Security Council!
Did you actually go and seek out those references? Plain sight, Baby, plain sight.
As for the rubbish: “Effectively you are saying all Muslims are terrorists”;
Who started the damn ‘War on Terror”?! Iraq? Iran? Libya? Afghanistan? Now, Yemen?
Are you aware there are still thousands of Uighurs in Idlib Province in Syria? Still ’embedded’ alongside AQ and ISIS remnants? The Uighur mercenaries who have been shipped from Syria to Libya?
Go and read something, and something that doesn’t come from the ‘Blob’.
If you want an evidence based debate, rather than simply perpetuating the tripe that comes from a joint that has featured, yet again, in evidence based reporting of breaches of International Human Rights Law – the ABC’s ‘Afghan Files, for instance – again, today!, then get back to me.
Otherwise, take the blinkers off.
And, a P.S. Osama Bin Laden was ‘inspiring’ Uighurs in Xinjiang – IN Xinjiang, to rise up against China, using the money provided to him by the US in Afghanistan to fight the USSR.
‘Polite’ foreign correspondents call it a ‘spillover’ from Afghanistan.
“As for the rubbish: “Effectively you are saying all Muslims are terrorists”;
“Who started the damn ‘War on Terror”?! Iraq? Iran? Libya? Afghanistan? Now, Yemen”?
So we’ll take that as a “Yes” then?
Brilliant?
Idiotic.
Fair dinkum!
Any chance you might connect a dot?!
I am NOT GW Bush!!!
A little cream on top – an excerpt from the Grauniad article I referenced, from 2013, from the ‘press release’ after the attack on Tiananmen Square;
“O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened,” the organisation’s leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online this weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan.
Mansour warned of future attacks by Uighur fighters, including one targeting the Great Hall of the People, a granite edifice flanking Tiananmen Square where the ruling Communist party holds many of its highest-level meetings. “The people have learned who is the real enemy and they returned to their religion,” he said. “They learned the lesson.”….”
I recommend avoiding ignorance, at all costs.
“Brilliant?
“Idiotic”
Fair call. I misunderstood your meaning whilst skim-reading. My apologies.
One last comment David. Everything you have written about the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, Osama Bin Laden’s encouragement of them, and the likelihood of some American support going back a bit is accurate.
None of it justifies treating all Uighurs as terrorists. To do so is to adopt group guilt and collective punishment – which places you in line with Israeli policy towards Palestinians.
To be really bald and illogical – some Australians are while supremacists, you are an Australian, therefore you deserved to be punished for Australian white supremacy.
Frankly, Peter, to suggest I am in line with Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in damned offensive.
I have raised doubts about Sainsbury’s report, and supplied references that have led to my doubts.
At no stage I have suggested China’s treatment of the Uighurs is free of all forms of human rights violations.
What I am arguing is the degree, and I am suggesting the reportage claiming degrees such as “genocide” is shabbily sourced, the sources are conflicted, and the conveyors of such information are insufficiently skeptical, at best, and ‘barracking’, at worst.
So, to you, again!, I say go and read the report I cited, by Danny Haiphong at the Black Agenda Report, of the trip made by the group of half a dozen (incl former Democrat Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney) to Xinjiang, very late last year.
Or, don’t – I don’t really care, one way or t’other. Or, I didn’t, until you suggested I was in line with Israeli ‘policy’ toward the Palestinians.
As for the US providing “some support” to Bin Laden ‘going back a bit’, I suggest you go to Youtube, and find a video (June 9th 2011) titled;
“Afghanistan-taliban – Clinton We created the problem to fight against Soviet Union”.
‘Likelihood of some American support’ does not even come close.
some are saying a human rights record comparative to the U.S.A.?
And, some others are suggesting they don’t even compare to the human rights record of the US of A.
Evidence speaks.
Try a bookk by former NYT’s journo, Stephen Kinzer, called “The Poisoner in Chief”.
The life story of Sidney Gottlieb, the architect of MK Ultra.
‘Sid’ didn’t just ‘experiment on foreigners, he did it to US citizens, as well, predominantly African Americans.
Sid was the inspiration for Ken Kesey’s ‘One Flew Over the Cuckkoo’s Nest’.
While I haven’t completed a count, it seems that hardly a day goes by that Crikey doesn’t publish an opinion piece as a stick to poke China.
Without suggesting for a moment that many criticisms of China aren’t justified, I for one would be more impressed with Crikey’s claimed independence if its field of vision was spread a little wider.
Foe example, how many pieces has Crikey published criticising Israel for its genocide against the Palestinians?
If I recall correctly, Keane regularly mentions Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in a very bad light.
I think the forced detention, “reeducation” and sterilisation of 10 million people warrants frequent airing.
1. Keane should stay ‘local’, at which he goes just OK. Beyond these shores? Not a clue, a ‘Blob wannabe. Ambition? Acceptability.
2. “Sterilisation of 10 million people?” You clearly have an infinite capacity for swallowing Blob bathwater. I’d avoid it, if I were you – it’s toxic.
Illuminating contributions DT. Of course it’s understandable that people resent being called twits by inference but there is surely a limit to tolerating willful ignorance. Our MSM has been found wanting so many times on so many matters yet even seemingly intelligent people are often loathe to mistrust it. One would think that those with children would would want to have the clearest possible picture. No lessons learned, apparently, from those Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Where on earth is the evidence that “10 million” people have been subject to “enforced detention”, “re-education “ and “forced sterilisation”? The Nazis in three years only managed to kill in various ways 6 million Jews and others, including communists, and people with various disabilities. Not even Sainsbury makes this absurd claim. He talks of 1 million in detention. He also mentions how minorities were not forced to follow the one child policy, so their populations increased. During the one child policy period, Han Chinese were reportedly subject to forced sterilisations, if they failed to stop at one child. In the case of Uighurs, there is compelling evidence of “re-education” for up to 1 million but none whatever for genocide, nor for “cultural genocide,” unless that means suppression of jihadi Islam beliefs.