A Sino-Turkish balancing act: Economy vs geopolitics

AUG 7, 2023

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Photo Credit: The Cradle

The geopolitical competition between Beijing and Ankara challenges their mutually harmonious Silk Road initiatives. As western pressure on China and its Asian periphery increases, will NATO-member Turkiye choose growth and development over a hegemonic clash?

Erman Çete

In the highest-level meeting between Chinese and Turkish officials since 2011, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi – also a Politburo Member of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee – late last month to Ankara. 

Per Turkish accounts, the dominant agenda on the table was the advancement of mutually-beneficial economic issues. After their private discussion, Turkiye’s president expressed his desire to fast-track efforts to align China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with Turkiye’s Middle Corridor Initiative (MCI) and to launch the first meeting of the High-Level Working Group established for this purpose. 

However, Chinese media’s portrayal of the event suggested a deeper geopolitical agenda. According to CGTN, Erdogan told Yi that Ankara does not support NATO’s intensifying campaign in the Asia-Pacific region, and is willing to maintain communication and coordination with Beijing on international and regional issues such as the Ukraine crisis. 

The report noted that recent US-China tensions were also referenced, with Erdogan confirming that “Turkiye adheres to the one-China principle and believes that China’s development is not a threat.” 

The significance of this meeting lies in the growing trade volume between Turkiye and China, which surged by over one-third between 2015 to 2021 (from $27.3 billion to $36 billion), according to the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs. While Turkiye once aspired to emulate China’s success, it now serves as a semi-developed raw material exporter to its vastly more advanced counterpart. Turkiye exports various goods, including marble, metals, and ores, while importing high-tech products like phones and data processing machines from China.

Beijing’s recognition of Turkiye as a regional power

The confluence of the BRI and the MCI represents more than just economic ties; it indicates a broader geopolitical realignment. Shanghai-based strategic analyst Shaoyu Cen believes that China recognizes the need to collaborate with regional powers to successfully implement the BRI, telling The Cradle:

“As long as Turkiye helps stabilize this region and enhance the connectivity, China would be glad to see it play an important role as a regional power. If it can balance the US on some issues, it would be even better.”

For Cen, the main obstacle in the way of more cordial Sino-Turkish relations is the Uyghur issue in China’s Xinjiang region. “Turkiye always criticized China on the issue for years. Some Turks even viewed Xinjiang as a part of the pan-Turkism ambition,” says the analyst. Nonetheless, dreaming of interfering in Xinjiang “is exactly an act of overreaching for Turkiye.”

Today, Ankara finds itself at the intersection of conflicting east-west geopolitical interests, particularly regarding the Asia-Pacific region. Umit Alperen, a Visiting Professor at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, informs The Cradle that Ankara’s approach to the Asia-Pacific is primarily economic, rather than political or security-centered:

“NATO’s increasing interaction with QUAD and AUKUS as well as Japan and South Korea in the Indo-Pacific does not ‘directly’ serve Turkiye’s interests. It is no longer a secret that the main objective of NATO’s increased activity in the Indo-Pacific is to limit China’s sphere of influence in the region. Turkiye does not want to be a ‘visible’ part of NATO who is going beyond its own sphere, a force that limits China.” 

For Alperen, although Turkiye has not yet mended its relations with the west, it is natural that it does not want to antagonize China in regions that are not in its direct sphere of interest.

However, Ankara faces a delicate balancing act: NATO-member Turkiye cannot overtly resist NATO’s Asia-Pacific strategy due to its deep economic ties with countries like Japan and South Korea. Turkiye’s defense industry also shares a significant partnership with South Korea. 

According to Alperen, it is unlikely that Turkiye would oppose the inclusion of South Korea and Japan in NATO’s Asia-Pacific strategy: “Turkiye will probably not oppose NATO’s Indo-Pacific strategy, but will give its silent support.” 

Overlapping Silk Road initiatives 

The Middle Corridor is a rail-based transportation route, connecting Europe through China, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Turkiye. This corridor, known as the Trans-Caspian East-West-Middle Corridor Initiative, is a crucial component of the historical Silk Road revival. For Turkiye, the Middle Corridor represents the realization of a long-standing pan-Turkist dream: a direct connection to Central Asia through Caucasia.

In the context of China’s BRI, the Middle Corridor serves primarily as a supplementary route. However, for Turkiye, it holds greater significance as it strengthens its ties to Turkic states in Central Asia. This interconnectedness between the BRI and the MCI also poses challenges as it brings China and Turkiye into competition over European trade. 

Alperen tells The Cradle: “For the European market, China’s and Turkiye’s products are not complementary to each other, but rather alternatives.” He posits that the increase in China’s market share in Europe causes a decrease in Turkiye’s market share in Europe, and this goes for North Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia markets, too.

In recognition of these dynamics, prominent Turkish businessmen proposed in 2020 to use Turkiye as the US’s gateway to Africa, countering China’s influence in the continent. The Chairman of the Turkiye-US Business Council (TAIK), Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, wrote a letter to Republican Senator Lindsay Graham suggesting that:

“Joint ventures in Africa could be an exciting part of this plan. Not only would we be helping fragile economies that will need assistance in recovering, but we also would be striking a blow against Chinese designs in Africa and forging closer economic ties between Turkey and the US.”

The intensified competition between Chinese and Turkish construction firms has played out in Africa for a decade, in which Turkish companies have blamed China for “unfair competition” in the continent. In 2019, struggling Turkish contractors feared being swallowed by cash-abundant Chinese firms. But today, some analysts suggest that Turkish companies are now “nipping at China’s heels across the continent.”

NATO’s limited role in Asia 

In Cen’s point of view, NATO does not actually have any “serious plans” in Asia, and regional countries do not believe NATO will actively engage in conflicts “close to the giant,” given China’s proximity.

Some NATO members, driven by “anti-China hysterics,” may seek involvement near China, but Cen believes it wise for Turkiye to distance itself from such impulses. To which Alperen adds this insight:

“China does not pose a visible problem for Ankara on major issues such as Cyprus, the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria, which Turkey regards as its priority areas of interest.”

While an alliance or close friendship between Turkiye and China may be unrealistic, Ankara’s refusal to become a yes-man for the west holds value for Beijing. Turkiye’s independent and influential regional power status makes it a precious friend of China. 

Meanwhile, Beijing continues to closely monitor Ankara’s increasing influence in the Caucasus – particularly after the Second Karabakh War in 2020 – and its growing influence on Central Asian countries, which still raises concerns about Pan-Turkic imperialism.

Turkiye’s balanced approach between the US and China, as well as its growing influence in Central Asia, provides leverage for Ankara in its relations with China. NATO’s expanding presence in the Asia-Pacific region could also elevate Turkiye’s role as an important actor in global affairs.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

China Warns ‘Israel’ against Harming Relations Due to US Pressure

 August 18, 2022

News that last week, China warned “Israel” not to damage relations with Beijing as a result of US pressure.

According to the Israeli news outlet, China’s message was conveyed last week by a top Chinese diplomat, Liu Jinchao, to the Israeli ambassador to China, Irit Ben-Abba. Jinchao leads the international relations department of the Chinese Communist Party, which is a minister-level position in the government.

“Senior officials at the Foreign Ministry said that this is the first time that ‘Israel’ has received such a sharp and direct message from China on the issue of the ‘Israel’-US-China trilateral relations,” the paper wrote.

“We don’t want the relationship between ‘Israel’ and the US to depend on Israel moving away from China,” said Liu. “China and Israel share long-term interests and a positive future.”

According to the officials, Liu stressed that ‘Israel’ should not follow suit with Washington when it comes to criticizing China’s human rights situation, particularly when it comes to US allegations that China has been waging genocide against the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang.

The Israeli officials noted that they do not know what is the reason behind the “unusually harsh Chinese message,” speculating that the issue may be related to tensions between the US and China regarding Taiwan.

A senior Israeli official remarked that “Relations with China are stable and good, but they know that the US is our closest ally.”

In June, “Israel” joined a group of Western states in the UN Human Rights Council to condemn China’s policy against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Last June, due to increasing pressure from Washington, ‘Israel’ joined the announcement of the group of member states of the UN Human Rights Council, which condemned the Chinese policy towards the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.

This wouldn’t be the first time China threatens to downgrade ties with ‘Israel’.

A diplomatic spat occurred in May over an article published in the Jerusalem Post that called China “authoritarian”, suggesting that ‘Israel’ should not have economic ties with an authoritarian country otherwise it will be jeopardizing its national security.

Following the publication of this article, The Jerusalem Post’s Editor-in-Chief tweeted that he received a call from the Chinese embassy, asking him to take down the article, or Beijing will cut ties with the paper, and downgrade ties with ‘Israel’, the reason ostensibly being giving the ‘breakaway region’ of Taiwan a voice that would lend it legitimacy amid the US’ push to arm it with weapons to combat China.

Source: Agencies (edited by Al-Manar English Website)

Chinese Envoy to US Warns of Possible ‘Military Conflict’ over Taipei

January 29, 2022

China’s top envoy to the US has warned of a likely “military conflict” over persistent American efforts to urge officials of Taipei to seek independence from the mainland.

“The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” China’s Ambassador to Washington Qin Gang said Thursday during an interview with state-funded National Public Radio (NPR).

“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”

China has long considered the nearby island territory as its “sacred” territory and has always vowed of its eventual unification with the mainland even if it has to resort to the use of force.

Qin, however, insisted that forceful measures would be the last resort towards unification, saying, “People on both sides of Taiwan Straits are Chinese, so we are compatriots. So the last thing we should do is to fight with compatriots.”

“We will do our utmost in the greatest sincerity to achieve a peaceful reunification,” he added, noting that since Taiwanese authorities, buoyed by the US, are following a path towards separation from the mainland, “China will not commit to giving up the un-peaceful means for reunification because this is a deterrence.”

The remarks came after Chinese President Xi Jinping also warned earlier this month that a confrontation between major world powers could only lead to catastrophic consequences and will not solve any problems.

While addressing the virtual Davos World Economic Forum on January 17, Xi insisted that countries must abandon Cold War mentality and seek peaceful coexistence and win-win outcomes.

“Our world today is far from the tranquil, rhetoric that stokes hatred and prejudice abound,” Xi declared after warning against all forms of unilateralism, protectionism as well as hegemony. “History has proved time and again that confrontation does not solve problems, it only invites catastrophic consequences.”

Pentagon reaffirms US support of Taipei

Reacting to Qin’s warning about the likelihood of a US-China conflict, some American officials appeared adamant about extending political and military support to the breakaway Chinese Taipei.

“We will continue to assist Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability while also maintaining our own capacity to resist any use of force that would jeopardize the security of the people of Taiwan,” said a Pentagon spokesperson.

The official, however, added that Washington remained committed to its “one China” policy and its commitments under the US Taiwan Relations Act, which officially recognized Beijing instead of Taipei, but also obliges the American military to provide Taipei with the means to “defend itself.”

The US State Department and White House have not yet reacted to Qin’s remarks, which came just hours after American top diplomat, Antony Blinken, discussed with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the persisting crisis over Ukraine in a telephone conversation.

Wang further warned Blinken to “stop interfering” in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing after a handful of Western countries followed the US to boycott the international sports event.

“The most urgent priority right now is that the US should stop interfering in the Beijing Winter Olympics,” Wang said during the call.

The Chinese envoy to the US also slammed Washington’s so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the upcoming event over propped up human rights allegations, pointing out that the hostile move has added to tensions although it drew little support from American allies — even with US athletes taking part in the major sport event.

Alleged ‘genocide’ against Uyghurs ‘biggest lie’

Qin further rejected as the “biggest lies of the century” the highly publicized US allegations of Chinese “genocide” against the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority in western China, and emphasized that Uyghur people – like ethnic groups across the mainland – “enjoy a happy life.”

“They enjoy the rights and the freedom guaranteed by the constitution of China. They are a member of the big family of Chinese nation,” he then underlined, reiterating that “there is no genocide at all.”

According to NPR, the remarks by the senior Chinese diplomat marked “an unusually direct statement” regarding the US and Taiwan, with observers saying that Beijing often addresses the issue in more general terms, such as saying that the US is “playing with fire.”

The report further points to surging concerns among US officials and analysts over Taiwan’s ability to defend itself amid American focus of attention on a potential war in Ukraine.

The development also came as US President Joe Biden has maintained former president Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products and American diplomats have continued to trade contentious statements with their Chinese counterparts.

It is widely recognized in Washington that a decades-long US policy of engagement with China produced great wealth for many companies but failed to spark Americanization of the world’s most populous nation.

This is while Qin further insisted during his latest interview that any ideas of “changing China” were always “an illusion.”

Source: Agencies (edited by Al-Manar English Website)

ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed

January 20th, 2022

By Alan Macleod

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That ASPI is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century. 

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA – Social media giant Twitter raised many eyebrows recently when it announced that it had partnered with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in its fight against disinformation and fake news. ASPI, Twitter revealed in a blog post, had helped identify thousands of accounts that “amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives” around China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. These accounts have now been permanently deleted.

This is of concern because the ultra-hawkish Australian think tank is actually the source for many of the most incendiary claims about China and its foreign policy, and, as Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told MintPress, has been a driving force in the ramping up of tensions between China and the West, something he explored in his 2016 documentary, “The Coming War on China.” Pilger stated that,

ASPI has played a leading role – some would say, the leading role – in driving Australia’s mendacious and self-destructive and often absurd China-bashing campaign. The current Coalition government, perhaps the most right-wing and incompetent in Australia’s recent history, has relied upon the ASPI to disseminate Washington’s desperate strategic policies, into which much of the Australian political class, along with its intelligence and military structures, has been integrated.”

Importantly, neither ASPI nor Twitter claimed that the deleted accounts were fake or operated by the Chinese state, strongly implying that merely agreeing with Beijing or questioning bellicose Western narratives was reason enough to be banned.

This is not the first time that Twitter has joined forces with ASPI. In 2020, it announced that, on the think tank’s recommendations, it had shut down more than 170,000 accounts that praised China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, generally “antagoniz[ed]” the U.S., or amplified “deceptive narratives” about the Hong Kong protests (i.e., ones that did not agree with the State Department or the 44% of Hong Kongers who supported the movement). In the same cull, Twitter also deleted thousands of Russian and Turkish accounts.

That a global social media platform is now in open partnership with ASPI should trouble anyone who is concerned with free speech or peace, as the think tank is funded by the U.S. government and the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, and has consistently agitated for global conflict.

Faux independence

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute describes itself as an “independent, non-partisan think tank” whose mission is to “nourish public debate and understanding” and “better inform” the public, as well as to “produce expert and timely advice for Australian and global leaders.” It insists that it is not identified with any particular ideology and that it is committed to “publishing a range of views on contentious topics.”

Despite claiming to be independent, it also notes that it was established in 2001 by the Australian government, the sole owner of the organization. This represents a PR problem for the think tank, which warns that “the perception as well as the reality of that independence…need to be carefully maintained.” Its annual financial reports reveal that most of its funding comes straight from Canberra, although it also receives hefty donations from other governments including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the Netherlands.

While the lion’s share of its funding comes from various sources within the Australian government, the vast majority of its overseas funding comes from Washington and, more specifically, the Department of Defense (over $700,000 in fiscal year 2020-21) and the State Department (around $430,000 over the same period). In addition, ASPI takes money from American tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook.

For many, including veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh, this foreign cash has fundamentally sullied the organization. Haigh told MintPress:

ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government. It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

As Haigh noted, ASPI is also funded by a cavalcade of the world’s largest weapons companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Thales. Perhaps even more worryingly, many of ASPI’s key personnel moonlight as defense contractor executives. Indeed, almost half of its senior council are on the boards of weapons or cybersecurity firms.

Robert Hill is a case in point. As Minister of Defense between 2001 and 2006, he was one of the key figures driving Australia towards war in Iraq. Hill consistently lied to the public, claiming that it was “not in dispute” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that the occupation, in fact, saved many Iraqi lives. One former senior defense advisor, Jane Errey, claims she was even forced out of her job after she refused to lie to the media on Hill’s behalf about Iraqi WMDs. Today, he is on the board of Rheinmetall Defense Australia, a company that supplies fighting vehicles and ammunition to the Australian military.

Hill’s successor as defense minister, Brendan Nelson, is also on ASPI’s senior council. Nelson continued Australia’s collaboration in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, although his loose tongue got him in trouble in 2007, when he casually stated that the reason Australia was in Iraq was not WMDs, as Hill had insisted, but in order to secure a slice of the country’s oil reserves for itself. “Energy security is extremely important to all nations throughout the world and, of course, in protecting and securing Australia’s interests,” he said, in response to a direct question about whether this was a war for oil.

While director of the Australian War Memorial – a monument to those who died in Australia’s wars, Nelson controversially allowed weapons companies Boeing, Thales, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems to sponsor the institution, a decision critics allege turned it from a sober memorial into a glorification of war. Just weeks after stepping down from that position, he accepted a job as president of Boeing Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, a title he still holds.

Michelle Fahy, an investigative journalist specializing in the Australian arms industry, was particularly concerned by Nelson’s position at ASPI, telling MintPress:

Along with the funding, it is hard to see how this board appointment fits with a claim to being an ‘independent’ organization when Boeing is a multi-billion-dollar, top-five contractor to the Australian Defense Department, the third largest arms manufacturer in the world, and Nelson was formerly Defense Minister in an earlier government of the same political party now in power.”

Thus, a group headed by the individuals who championed the biggest political deception of the 21st century – one that led to the deaths of 2.4 million people – is now in charge of deciding what is real and what is fake news online for the entire planet. This raises a question: if ASPI had similar control over the means of communication in the early 2000s, would voices questioning the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion have been silenced for promoting false narratives?

Lt. Gen. Ken Gillespie was Vice Chief of the Defense Force from 2005-2008 and then Chief of the Army – the highest military position in Australia – between 2008 and 2011. As such, Gillespie was central to Australia’s efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As his own LinkedIn biography boasts, “I led the initial Australian Defense Force contribution into the Middle-East and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11 strikes on the U.S.A. I was a key planner for Australia’s contribution to the Iraq war, and I commanded all Australian Defense Force operations for a lengthy period.” Both Gillespie and fellow ASPI council member Jane Halton are on the board of Naval Group Australia, producer of warships and other combat systems. They both also work for cybersecurity companies; Gillespie is director of the Senetas Corporation, a cybersecurity firm that regularly partners with weapons manufacturers, such as Thales, that have heartily endorsed Senetas’ work. Meanwhile, Halton is chair of the board of directors at Vault Cloud, a defense-minded cybersecurity firm.

Another ASPI council member is former politician Gai Brodtmann. Brodtmann serves on the advisory board of cybersecurity firm Sapien Cyber, a firm that has secured a number of large military contracts and is chaired by former Minister of Defense Stephen Smith. In addition to this, she holds a senior position at Defense Housing Australia, a company that provides a range of services aimed at military personnel.

One of the newest members of ASPI’s council is James Brown, an ex-army officer and son-in-law of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Brown is chief executive officer of the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA), an organization that represents the interests of a number of prominent weapons corporations, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman Australia and Saab Australia.

As Fahy noted in an article in Declassified Australia, many former ASPI council members had similarly questionable connections to the arms industry. Jim McDowell was chief executive of BAE Systems Australia. Fellow politicians Stephen Loosley and Allan Hawke were on the boards of Thales Australia and Lockheed Martin Australia respectively, at the same time as serving on ASPI’s council. Meanwhile, retired Vice-Marshal Margaret Staib was on British aerospace giant QinetiQ’s board.

ASPI’s pro-war teenage growth spurt

ASPI began life 20 years ago as a relatively small think tank with a mandate to produce timely and independent research. However, in recent years, the organization has ballooned in size and now employs dozens of full-time staffers (contrary to its original vision). Its aggressive targeting of funding from a wide range of sources has undermined its credibility in Fahy’s eyes. As she told MintPress:

ASPI’s charter requires it to work to maintain the perception as well as the actuality of its independence. Given the widespread criticism directed at ASPI in recent years due to the perceived excessive influence of the U.S. government and U.S. arms and cybersecurity multinationals on its output, there is little doubt that the perception of its independence has been lost.”

Nevertheless, its ascendancy has led to it carrying inordinate influence within Australian politics and beyond, the organization’s reports being frequently cited in major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Fox News. Diplomat Haigh said:

ASPI has supplanted the Department of Foreign Affairs in advice to the government. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, [Marise] Payne, is really very weak, and has been bypassed. So ASPI is feeding straight into the prime minister’s office on matters of foreign policy, particularly as it relates to China…This is part of the militarization of Australia and the Australian public service.”

Unsurprisingly for an organization taking money from weapons contractors, ASPI publishes some of the most crude and relentlessly pro-war propaganda anywhere, and has been a leader in the rush to declare a new Cold War on China and Russia.

This militaristic attitude is exemplified by ASPI’s executive director, Peter Jennings. Last year, Jennings bitterly denounced President Joe Biden and his decision to pull out of Afghanistan, describing it as his “first big blunder” in office. Jennings confidently predicted that Biden’s assessment that the U.S. “could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government” would be proven wrong. “In fact, that is precisely what American, Australian and other forces delivered to Afghanistan: a flawed but functioning democracy, keeping the Taliban at bay and preventing groups such as al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a training base from which to attack the West,” he wrote. Later that year, the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban, only days after American troops finally withdrew.

In the same article, Jennings went on to state that Biden’s decision was “an abandonment as complete as the U.S. failure to back South Vietnam…in the face of North Vietnam’s advancing conventional forces in 1974 and 1975,” thereby signaling that he supported the Vietnam conflict as well.

Indeed, it is hard to find a war Jennings has not advocated for. He vociferously backed the Iraq War, even demanding in 2015 that Australia increase its troop numbers. A committed cold-warrior who has argued that “the West is setting the bar for military response too high” and that the world must stop the “Leninist autocracies” of ​​Russia, Iran and Syria, last week he came close to calling for war against nuclear-armed Russia. “America’s credibility is on the line” in Ukraine, he thundered, demanding that Biden back up his talk with “believable military options.”

An arms producers’ Yellow Pages

For a think tank that was supposed to produce nonpartisan, expert advice, it is remarkable how far ASPI strays from this goal, going so far as to run advertisements for weapons manufacturers masquerading as serious analysis. One example of this is a 2020 study, titled “Australia needs to ensure it has the advanced missiles it needs.” Comparing death machines to crucial lifesaving equipment, it states:

Missiles are like a combination of a medical ventilator and the masks health workers need during a pandemic…You need many thousands of them and they can’t be reused. Ordering or holding a few hundred just doesn’t cut any mustard outside peacetime training routines. So, production is key.

“Without such weapons,” the author continues, “Islamic State might still control major chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.” This claim, of course, ignores the fact that it was largely Iranian forces under Qassem Soleimani that were responsible for destroying ISIS, and that the United States assassinated him in 2020. ASPI chief Peter Jennings appeared to support Trump’s decision, writing that “it’s surely a positive that, after Soleimani’s death, bad actors in the region might pause to wonder if a Hellfire missile on a circling drone has their name and address programmed in.”

Hammering the point home, ASPI claims that “Australia is fortunate in having close relationships with…companies like Raytheon, Rafael, Lockheed Martin and Kongsberg” that can close the country’s supposed “missile supply gap.” “Getting agreement to and support for high-end U.S. missiles, like the long-range anti-ship missile made by Lockheed Martin, to be manufactured in Australia as well as the continental U.S. through co-production, will only happen if the senior leadership of our nations drive it,” it concludes.

If it were not clear that this was a “buy more missiles, says group funded by missile manufacturers” advertisement, ASPI included both Thales’ and Lockheed Martin’s logos on the page. Indeed, every page on ASPI’s website includes a sidebar advertisement for those two companies, complete with links to their websites.

These sorts of practices would be problematic enough if ASPI were a think tank trying to promote orange juice drinking in Australia while being filled with executives from Tropicana and Minute Maid. But it is not fruit ASPI is selling: it is war. It is literally a life-and-death affair.

Red flags, Yellow Peril

Saber-rattling at Russia or running unofficial advertorials for weapons companies are sidelines to ASPI’s main business of hyping up the threat that China poses to Australia and the world. Earlier this month, Jennings took to the pages of The Australian to demand a more formal military alliance with Japan in order to take China head-on. The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper failed to disclose the fact that Jennings’ organization – and therefore his hefty salary (around $332,000 last year) – is being directly paid in part by the Japanese government. He has also recently called for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics.

ASPI was the source behind the infamous 2019 documentary “Red Flags,” which aired on state broadcaster ABC. In McCarthyist fashion, “Red Flags” claimed that Australian universities were “infiltrated” with thousands of agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), learning Australian secrets and bringing them back to their homeland. ASPI’s report, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” insisted that universities were in active “collaboration” with the CCP.

I grew up in the cold war. Third-rate academics and a rag bag of charlatans made fools of themselves with their mighty conspiracy theory of Chinese (aka the Yellow Peril) under our beds. They're back! This lot, the ASPI, echoes Trump's lies and racism.https://t.co/Ir9HZ3D2yP

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) June 18, 2020

The Canberra-based think tank was also behind the scaremongering that led to the Australian government canceling Huawei’s contract to upgrade the country’s notoriously poor telecommunications infrastructure. Adding to the hype, one ASPI employee even took to the pages of a national newspaper to claim that if the small city of Bendigo went forward with its plans to attach Huawei sensors to their garbage trucks, it would constitute a national security threat.

Jennings hailed the government’s subsequent decision to cancel the nation’s 5G plans as “absolutely the right call,” categorizing those opposing it as simply “the inevitable whining from China’s red brigade of useful idiots.” At no point did he acknowledge that telecom giants who fund ASPI, and on whose boards many of its key members sit, would likely benefit from the decision.

I met ASPI acolyte Vicky Xu today at the cab line at the airport. When I explained I'm concerned we're heading to war with China she said, "We're already at war with China." I said, "No, a real war." She replied, "I'm in a real war with China." ASPI has a lot to answer for, IMHO.

— Robert Barwick (@RobbieBarwick) April 14, 2021

Last summer, ASPI also published a report with the title “China threatens Australia with missile attack.” The basis of the “threat,” was not China, however, but a two-paragraph statement from Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of a Chinese newspaper, The Global Times. Hu wrote that if Australia declared war on China, sent troops to Taiwan, and started killing Chinese soldiers, then China should have the capability to fire back on Australia. The author of the piece, Paul Dibb, the former head of Australia’s equivalent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, surely knew the difference but did not let that get in the way of a good story.

Dibb himself has openly ramped up tensions between the two nations. In 2020, he wrote an article for ASPI entitled “How Australia can deter China.” The article was illustrated simply with a picture of a Lockheed Martin missile. Pilger told MintPress:

ASPI is one of the world’s most blatant propaganda ciphers. If we were back in the old Cold War, it would be the equivalent of Pravda – though my memory of Pravda is that it was honest in its role as a voice of the state whereas ASPI pretends to be independent.”

For a think tank that claims to be a guardian against fake news and disinformation online, ASPI has been at the forefront of mainstreaming conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and China, particularly that of the Wuhan lab leak. In a report called “The Great Covid Cover-up,” ASPI insisted that there has been massive, worldwide collusion on the part of the scientific, academic and medical communities, and even from parts of the U.S. government, all to hide Covid’s true origins and to run interference for China.

Perhaps most importantly, however, ASPI is a worldwide driving force behind bringing the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang to global attention. Their many reports, particularly the ongoing Xinjiang Data Project, have been the basis of hundreds of articles and news segments across the planet. Unfortunately, much of their research is as sloppy as it has been with other projects. As soon as it released an interactive map of the locations of what it claimed were hundreds of Uyghur detention centers, local Chinese people and even just individuals using tools like Google were able to show conclusively that many of these “prisons” were actually schools, government offices, or other more mundane edifices.

ASPI's report's Turpan Detention Center Facility #7 & Facility #1 turn out to be Gaochang District Bureau for Veterans Affairs and Gaochang District Bureau for Business & Industry Informationisation respectively. The smoking gun is that they both have external walls! https://t.co/yb3LTz9wvA pic.twitter.com/WuRprk4Bih

— Chengxin Pan (@ChengxinPan) September 27, 2020

Of course, this is not to say that no detention facilities exist, or that a great number of Uyghurs have not been oppressed or imprisoned. Even the Chinese government accepts that it has put large numbers of people through what it describes as deradicalization programs. What it does highlight, though, is the sloppy nature of the scholarship that is being used to justify a worldwide boycott of Xinjiang-linked companies on the grounds of forced labor, something ASPI has helped lead. Thus, ASPI is far from a neutral arbiter in Twitter’s decision to close thousands of accounts on the grounds of stopping misinformation about Xinjiang spreading; in fact, it is serving as the prosecutor, the judge and the executioner all at once.

Ironically, at least 11 of the think tank’s largest financial backers are themselves heavily implicated in using forced labor to produce their weapons, or in human trafficking. Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin all make use of forced American prison labor to make their products, while certain national sponsors, including the United States and the UAE, engage in forced labor.

The organization that constantly attacks China was also among the driving forces behind the yearslong RussiaGate conspiracy in the United States. ASPI agents were flown across the world to provide supposedly expert testimony to the U.S. Senate hearings about alleged Russian interference online and in the 2016 election. Remarkably, ASPI’s report, “Hacking Democracies,” claims that only Russia and China interfere in other nations’ elections, blithely ignoring the long history of the American government doing just that.

Facing mounting criticism at home, ASPI has inexpertly attempted to launder its own image online. The organization was caught scrubbing negative information off its Wikipedia page while using an ASPI-registered I.P. address. A number of users editing the page to add positive content and remove negative information were identified as sock puppets (fake accounts controlled by another user to give the impression of a group consensus) and banned by Wikipedia. Journalist Marcus Reubenstein also discovered that another pro-ASPI Wikipedia editor named “Wyvern2604” was originally called “ASPI ORG” before changing their name. This sort of crude online propaganda is exactly what ASPI accuses its enemies of engaging in. Yet, far from being discredited and having its accounts removed, ASPI is now a leader, supposedly, in the fight against disinformation – whether the public likes it or not.

Signing on to Bellum Americanum

Australia’s stance on China has taken a dramatic turn in recent years. Once, it had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Beijing and developed deep economic ties to it. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in and out of office between 2007 and 2013, even impressed his Chinese counterparts with his fluent Mandarin.

Yet as the United States has turned its eye upon Beijing, Australia has followed suit, joining the U.S.-dominated military organizations like The Quad (U.S., Australia, Japan, India) and AUKUS (Australia, U.K., U.S.), both of which are squarely aimed at preventing China’s further economic rise. To that end, there is a concerted U.S. effort to develop what senior generals have called an “Asian NATO,” sooner rather than later.

Media have worked with ASPI to hype the China threat, while politicians not going along with this dangerous jingoism are labeled “panda huggers.” To that extent, it has had a profound impact on public opinion. As recently as 2018, 82% of Australians saw China as an “economic partner” rather than a “security threat” (12%). However, by 2021, those numbers had radically shifted; 63% considering China a threat, and only 34% describing it as an economic partner. Even Rudd himself has become something of a China hawk, describing the country as “a 1,000-pound gorilla in the front living room.”

Historically, Australia has consistently followed the United States into whatever military endeavor it begins. There were nearly 8,000 Australian soldiers in Vietnam at the war’s peak, the country suffering some 3,500 casualties. It also accompanied the U.S. during the First Gulf War and the two largest post-9/11 campaigns.

This continues to the present day. Late last year, Australia committed to purchasing eight enormous nuclear submarines at a cost of around $64 billion. The announcement was understood on all sides to be a gesture to Washington, showing that Australia will stand by it, come what may. Yet as China is by far and away Australia’s largest economic partner (almost one-third of all Australian exports go to the P.R.C.), any conflict would be devastating. Thus, the enthusiasm with which the government in Canberra has chosen the U.S. over China speaks wonders about what it sees its true role as being. As Pilger put it:

In the words of a senior CIA officer once based in Australia, Australian prime ministers are ‘forever obsequious to us.’ Up until 2015, the relationship with China was pragmatic and businesslike. China is Australia’s biggest, most important trader. The relationship is now a spectacle akin to aiming a pistol at one’s own feet.”

“Australia now has become very much a part of the American confrontation with China,” Haigh said. “The Americans are dead set keen to take on China. It is not a matter of ‘if,’ it is a matter of ‘when,’ because that is what they want to do. They have made their minds up… It’s gunboat diplomacy with aircraft carriers,” he added.

"Do you want me to drop this c***?"

Horrific Video shows Australian SAS soldier shooting and killing unarmed Afghan man at close range in #Afghanistan.#Australia #WarCrimeshttps://t.co/O3V6qfTjEE pic.twitter.com/gSzNiUAEum

— DOAM (@doamuslims) March 18, 2020

The think tank-social media axis

Twitter’s collaboration with ASPI is part of a growing trend for the biggest social media platforms partnering with hawkish, state-sponsored think tanks. In 2018, Facebook announced it was collaborating with NATO think tank the Atlantic Council, whereby it gave an undisclosed amount of control over users’ news feeds to the group, allowing it to help Facebook decide what posts users saw and which ones were suppressed.

If anything, the Atlantic Council’s connections to state power are even deeper than ASPI’s. The council’s board of directors is a who’s who of powerful state figures – including senior statespersons like Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger; a host of top U.S. generals, including Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus; as well as no fewer than seven former directors or acting directors of the CIA. Like ASPI, the Atlantic Council receives its funding from Western governments, weapons manufacturers, and big tech companies. As such, it represents the collective consciousness of the American state.

The Atlantic Council, like ASPI, has also been central to the rush towards potential war with Russia or China, the organization constantly putting out highly questionable reports of Russian or Chinese interference in domestic politics. Last February, the Atlantic Council published an anonymous, 26,000-word report outlining its vision for a future China. “The United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power;” it wrote, hoping as well that head of state Xi Jinping will be “replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and that the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.” In other words, that China has been broken and that some sort of regime change has occurred.

A week later, Facebook hired former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Ben Nimmo, to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” Nimmo specifically named Iran and Russia as potential dangers to the platform.

Another former Atlantic Council hawk turned social media boss is Reddit’s Jessica Ashooh. Ashooh left her job as deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Force to become Reddit’s director of policy – a position for which she was completely unqualified on paper.

A second, highly significant example of Twitter collaboration with state intelligence is the case of Gordon MacMillan. MacMillan is an active-duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare, yet was somehow appointed to become Twitter’s Head of Editorial. Despite his outing being covered extensively in alternative media (including in MintPress News), only one mainstream U.S. publication – Newsweek – even mentioned the revelations at all. The Newsweek journalist who wrote the story was forced out of the industry only a few weeks later. Yet to this day, MacMillan remains in his important post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.

Ultimately, what these incidents hint at is a fusion between social media and the national security state, something that the Twitter/ASPI union underlines. This has long been foreseen, even championed by both entities. At NATO’s 70th anniversary gala in 2019, Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO supreme commander for Europe, declared that his organization would very soon be “far more engaged” with tech and cybersecurity issues. But long before then, executives at Google were pitching their company as a new weapon for the U.S. empire. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, The New Digital Age, a book that came replete with a ringing endorsement from Henry Kissinger on the back cover.

Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are far more widely used and influential than any newspaper or TV network. Whoever controls their algorithms and has the power to promote or delete accounts at will has significant influence over global public opinion; hence the desire to control them. When an organization like ASPI or the Atlantic Council has even some amount of editorial control over social media, that is tantamount to state censorship, but on a worldwide scale.

This power is already being used in a flagrantly anti-democratic manner. Just days before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram worked, seemingly in unison, to essentially wipe the left-wing FSLN Party (a longtime bête noire of the U.S.) from the internet, purging thousands of accounts, channels and pages at the most politically sensitive time. Activists who had been suspended by Facebook for “inauthentic behavior” (i.e., being bots) poured on to Twitter, recording messages stating they were real people who supported President Daniel Ortega. Incredibly, Twitter took the decision to delete virtually all these accounts, too.

That Twitter intends more of these types of operations in the future is made clear by the fact that they announced partnerships with two other organizations at the same time as with ASPI. One is Venezuelan outlet, Cazadores de Fake News, a group that presents itself as a fact-checking organization but appears to be inordinately dedicated to attacking the left-wing government of Nicolas Maduro (another American target). Cazadores de Fake News tacitly endorsed the self-declared president, Juan Guaidó, a favorite of Washington. It was also supportive of the U.S.-backed military coup that briefly brought Bolivia’s Jeanine Añez to power in 2019. The other organization partnering with Twitter is the Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that boasts about training a new generation of (anti-Russian) leaders in Ukraine and whose director, Alex Stamos, is also on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.

While the Australian Strategic Policy Institute might have started out and even operated for years with the best of intentions, it is increasingly clear that its primary role is to create crises – fake or otherwise – to serve their backers’ agendas. Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars; today, wars are often manufactured to sell weapons.

The interests of the U.S. government and of arms companies are not those of either the Australian public or of social media users. Where once the online space was a place where critical information could circulate freely, we increasingly live in an upside down world where a giant government influence operation is being carried out under the guise of protecting us from a similarly large (foreign) government operation.

ASPI has become not only a prime vehicle driving the West to war, but it now also holds considerable power to suppress dissenting opinions, meaning it can simply invent reality. That this organization is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.

Chris Hedges: PEN America and the Betrayal of Julian Assange

December 27th, 2021

By Chris Hedges

Source

Careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks successfully leverage corporate money and backing to seize and deform historic rights organizations into appendages of the ruling class.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai” fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group’s annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America’s partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a “contributor” to The Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as Vice President of US Business Development for Bertelsmann.  Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of the CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York City and resigned from the organization, which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises “grave concerns” about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012 not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example, made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher facing extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange’s behalf from PEN America. “Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here,” Nossel said. But, as a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government’s case against Assange. PEN America under her direction has sent out news briefs with headlines such as: “Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling.” The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.

“There are some things Assange did in this case, or is alleged to have done, that go beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do, in particular the first indictment that was brought about five weeks ago focused specifically on this charge of computer hacking, hacking into a password to get beyond the government national security infrastructure and penetrate and allow Chelsea Manning to pass through all of these documents. That, I think you can say, is not what a mainstream news outlet or a journalist would do,” Nossel said on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on May 28, 2019.

But Nossel did not stop there, going on to defend the legitimacy of the US campaign to extradite Assange, although Assange is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US based publication. Most importantly, left unmentioned by Nossel, is that Assange has not committed any crimes.

“The reason that this indictment is coming down now is because Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years trying to escape his extradition request,” she said on the program. “He faces an extradition request to Sweden where he has been charged with sexual assault and now this huge indictment here in the US and that proceeding will play out over a long period. He will make all sorts of arguments about why he faces a form of legal jeopardy that should immunize him from being extradited, but there are extradition treaties. There are legal assistance treaties where countries are able to prosecute nationals of other countries and bring them back to face charges when they have committed a crime. This is happening pursuant to that. There are US nationals who are charged and convicted in foreign courts.”

WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then private first class Pfc. Bradley Manning. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA under Donald Trump, called WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia, rhetoric embraced by Democratic Party leaders.

Assange also published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and earned the eternal hatred of the Democratic Party establishment. The Podesta emails exposed the sleezy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and identified both nations as major funders of Islamic State [ISIL/ISIS]. They exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton’s repeated dishonesty. She was caught telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy while publicly promising financial regulation and reform. The cache showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, which blames Russian interference for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. Hillary Clinton calls WikiLeaks a Russian front. James Comey, the former FBI director, however, conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

“A zealous prosecutor is going to look at someone like Assange and recognize that he’s a very unpopular figure for a hundred different reasons, whether it’s his meddling in the 2016 elections, his political motivations for that, or the blunderbuss nature of these disclosures,” Nossel said on Leher’s program. “This is not a leak that was designed to expose one particular policy or effectuate a specific change in how the US government was going about its business. It was massive and indiscriminate, while in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals. I was actually working at the State Department during the WikiLeaks disclosure period, and I was briefly on a task force to respond to the WikiLeaks disclosures and there was really a sense of alarm about individuals whose lives would be in danger, people who had worked with the US, provided information, human rights defenders who had spoken to embassy personnel on a confidential basis. There is a problem of over classification, but there is also good reason to classify a lot of this stuff and they made no distinction between that [which] was legitimately classified and not.”

Any group of artists or writers overseen by a CEO from corporate America inevitably become members of an updated version of the Union of Soviet Writers where the human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own violations and those of our allies are ignored or whitewashed. As Julian Benda reminded us in “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” we can serve privilege and power or we can serve justice and truth. Those, Benda warns, who become apologists for those with privilege and power destroy their capacity to defend justice and truth.

Where is the outrage from an organization founded by writers to protect writers about the prolonged abuse, stress and repeated death threats, including from Nossel’s former boss, Hillary Clinton, who allegedly quipped at a staff meeting, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” (and didn’t deny it later) or from the CIA which discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange?  Where is the demand that the trial of Assange be thrown out because the CIA through UC Global, the security firm at the embassy, secretly taped the meetings, and all other encounters, between Assange and his lawyers, obliterating attorney-client privilege? Where is the public denunciation of the extreme isolation that has left Assange, who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, in precarious physical and psychological health? Where is the outcry over his descent into hallucinations and deep depression, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine? Where are the thunderous condemnations about the ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he has had to live without access to sunlight, exercise and proper medical care? “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Morris said of the stroke. Where are the demands for intervention and humane treatment, including an end to his isolation, once it was revealed Assange was pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall? Where is the fear for his life, especially after “half of a razor blade” was discovered under his socks and it was revealed that he called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day”? Where is the call to prosecute those who committed the war crimes, carried out the torture and engaged in the corruption WikiLeaks exposed? Not from PEN America.

Melzer in his book “The Trial of Julian Assange,” the most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange, blasts those like Nossel who blithely peddle the lies used to tar Assange and cater to the powerful.

When Assange was first charged, he was not charged with espionage by the United States. Rather, he was charged with a single count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” This charge alleged that he conspired with Manning to decrypt a password hash for the US Department of Defense computer system. But as Melzer points out, “Manning already had full ‘top secret’ access privileges to the system and all the documents she leaked to Assange. So, even according to the US government, the point of the alleged attempt to decode the password hash was not to gain unauthorized access to classified information (‘hacking’), but to help Manning to cover her tracks inside the system by logging in with a different identity (‘source protection’). In any case, the alleged attempt undisputedly remained unsuccessful and did not result in any harm whatsoever.”

Nossel’s repetition of the lie that Assange endangered lives by not redacting documents was obliterated during the trial of Manning, several sessions of which I attended at Fort Meade in Maryland with Cornel West. During the court proceedings in July 2013 Brigadier General Robert Carr, a senior counterintelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the US Department of Defense, told the court that the task force did not uncover a single case of someone who lost their lives due to the publication of the classified documents by WikiLeaks. As for Nossel’s claim that “in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals” she should be aware that the decryption key to the unredacted State Department documents was not released by Assange, but Luke Harding and David Leigh from The Guardian in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

When the ruling class peddles lies there is no cost for parroting them back to the public. The cost is paid by those who tell the truth.

On November 27, 2019, Melzer gave a talk at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to dedicate a sculpture by the Italian artist Davide Dormino. Figures of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, cast in bronze, stood on three chairs. A fourth chair, empty, was next to them inviting others to take a stand with them. The sculpture is called “Anything to Say?” Melzer stepped up onto the fourth chair, the hulking edifice of the US Embassy off to his right. He uttered the words that should have come from organizations like PEN America:

For decades, political dissidents have been welcomed by the West with open arms, because in their fight for human rights they were persecuted by dictatorial regimes.

Today, however, Western dissidents themselves are forced to seek asylum elsewhere,  such as Edward Snowden in Russia or, until recently, Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian  embassy in London.

For the West itself has begun to persecute its own dissidents, to subject them to draconian punishments in political show trials, and to imprison them as dangerous terrorists in high-security prisons under conditions that can only be described as inhuman and degrading.

Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian  Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted.

They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today’s witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control.

The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights.

In all these cases, it is not about the person, the character or possible misconduct of these dissidents, but about how our governments deal with revelations about of their own misconduct.

How many soldiers have been held accountable for the massacre of civilians shown in the video “Collateral Murder”? How many agents for the systematic torture of terror suspects? How many politicians and CEOs for the corrupt and inhumane machinations  that have been brought to light by our dissidents?

That’s what this is about. It is about the integrity of the rule of law, the credibility of our  democracies and, ultimately, about our own human dignity and the future of our children.

Let us never forget that!

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture

The tenuous return to power of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, and the specter of a Republican rout of the Democrats in the midterm elections next year, along with the very real possibility of the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, or a Trump-like figure to the presidency, has blinded human rights and press groups to the danger of the egregious assaults on freedom of expression perpetrated by the Biden administration. The steady march towards heavy handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration that charged ten government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have since at least 2017 marginalized left-wing content, including my own.  The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Party, only contributes to the steady tightening of the vice of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China’s totalitarianism capitalism.

CNN’s Halloween Horror Story About Xinjiang Is Full Of Holes

14 OCTOBER 2021

By Andrew Korybko

Source

Their Halloween horror story was invented in order to attract the Western audience’s attention during this scary season and then remind them of the US government’s false claims of genocide in the XUAR.

It’s October, which means that many in the West are preparing to celebrate Halloween at the end of the month. This occasion usually sees folks talking about scary things and sharing stories that are intended to frighten others, though all for the purpose of having a little bit of fun. CNN is also participating in this seasonal activity as proven by the horror story that they published last week about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). As with everything that has to do with Halloween, it’s also fake and has nothing to do with reality.

This leading Western mainstream media outlet claims to have obtained exclusive testimony from a former Chinese police detective who says that he tortured minorities in the XUAR. The alleged details are straight out of a Hollywood horror flick, complete with accusations of extreme violence, gang rape, and even murder. It’s very disturbing to read, but the story is full of holes. CNN refuses to release any evidence backing up that person’s claims, unconvincingly saying that it’s to protect their identity.

Their Halloween horror story was invented in order to attract the Western audience’s attention during this scary season and then remind them of the US government’s false claims of genocide in the XUAR. It’s not unprecedented for self-interested individuals to flee their countries in order to participate in an adversarial government’s meddling campaign against their homeland in exchange for promised economic opportunities. That’s exactly what’s happening here since the alleged source cannot back up his audacious claims of crimes.

His haste to concoct the most horrific stories possible just in time for Halloween resulted in him making several glaring mistakes that disprove his story. It’s also surprising that his media partners at CNN didn’t realize this ahead of time and refined their narrative in order to account for these inconsistencies. The source says that his superior told him that “we must kill them all” in the XUAR, yet the Chinese census’ figures from this summer confirm that minority populations grew by 14.3% in 10 years in that exact same region.

The next hole in his story was when he says that “Many restaurants and places are closed” in the XUAR. That’s also not true as confirmed by the many foreign diplomats who’ve visited the region to assess the veracity of the US’ genocide claims there. Video footage from the XUAR that’s routinely shared on Chinese social media also debunks this false claim. In fact, that region actually has a thrivingtourismsector that’s become very popular with Chinese during the pandemic while international travel remains restricted. Everything is open, not closed.

CNN’s source then spews another false claim by asserting that “it was common knowledge among police officers that 900,000 Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities were detained in the region in a single year.” Not only is this figure completely unsubstantiated and therefore untrue, but it also suggests a contradiction with what the outlet reported earlier in their story when writing that “The US State Department estimates that up to 2 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been detained in internment camps in Xinjiang since 2017.”

To explain, this implies that almost half of the alleged genocide took place in a single year, meaning that it’s presumably become less intense with time. Of course, no such genocide has ever occurred, but those who’ve been misled by this false narrative should question this inconsistency. It doesn’t make sense for the US to claim that a genocide is still occurring in the XUAR when the indexing of fake figures from CNN’s source and the State Department suggests that the number of allegedly detained minorities has actually been decreasing each year.

The outlet couldn’t help but reveal the intention behind their Halloween horror story when quoting their source’s claim that he had become “disappointed” with the Communist Party of China (CPC) even before becoming a torturer due to what he says is its “corruption”. He claims that he wanted “to stand on the side of the people” by admitting to his alleged crimes against humanity that he’s curiously not being prosecuted for in the unnamed European country where CNN says he’s hiding despite supposedly sharing evidence of them.

Any objective observer should now realize that this source is a foreign intelligence asset otherwise there’s no way that he’d escape prosecution for the crimes against humanity that he claims to have shared evidence of committing. The whole point of CNN’s Halloween horror story about the XUAR is discredit the CPC and falsely make it seem like the Chinese people are against it. In reality, Chinese people of all ethnicities proudly support the CPC for successfully eliminating terrorism in the XUAR in a way that’s fully consistent with human rights.

Say hello to the diplo-Taliban

July 09, 2021

Deploying diplomatic skills refined from Doha to Moscow, the Taliban in 2021 has little to do with its 2001 incarnation

by Pepe Escobar with permission, and first posted at Asia Times

A very important meeting took place in Moscow last week, virtually hush-hush. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, received Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security adviser.

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and other members of the Taliban arrive to attend an international conference in Moscow on March 18, 2021. Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko / AFP

There were no substantial leaks. A bland statement pointed to the obvious: They “focused on the security situation in Afghanistan during the pullout of Western military contingencies and the escalation of the military-political situation in the northern part of the country.”

The real story is way more nuanced. Mohib, representing embattled President Ashraf Ghani, did his best to convince Patrushev that the Kabul administration represents stability. It does not – as the subsequent Taliban advances proved.

Patrushev knew Moscow could not offer any substantial measure of support to the current Kabul arrangement because doing so would burn bridges the Russians would need to cross in the process of engaging the Taliban. Patrushev knows that the continuation of Team Ghani is absolutely unacceptable to the Taliban – whatever the configuration of any future power-sharing agreement.

So Patrushev, according to diplomatic sources, definitely was not impressed.

This week we can all see why. A delegation from the Taliban political office went to Moscow essentially to discuss with the Russians the fast-evolving mini-chessboard in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban had been to Moscow four months earlier, along with the extended troika (Russia, US, China, Pakistan) to debate the new Afghan power equation.

On this trip, they emphatically assured their interlocutors there’s no Taliban interest in invading any territory of their Central Asia neighbors.

It’s not excessive, in view of how cleverly they’ve been playing their hand, to call the Taliban desert foxes. They know well what Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been repeating: Any turbulence coming from Afghanistan will be met with a direct response from the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

In addition to stressing that the US withdrawal – actually, repositioning – represents the failure of its Afghan “mission,” Lavrov touched on the two really key points:

The Taliban is increasing its influence in the northern Afghanistan border areas; and Kabul’s refusal to form a transitional government is “promoting a belligerent solution” to the drama. This implies Lavrov expects much more flexibility from both Kabul and the Taliban in the Sisyphean power-sharing task ahead.

And then, relieving the tension, when asked by a Russian journalist if Moscow will send troops to Afghanistan, Lavrov reverted to Mr Cool: “The answer is obvious.”

Mohammad Suhail Shaheen is the quite articulate spokesman for the Taliban political office. He’s adamant that “taking Afghanistan by military force is not our policy. Our policy is to find a political solution to the Afghan issue, which is continuing in Doha.” Bottom line: “We confirmed our commitment to a political solution here in Moscow once more.”

That’s absolutely correct. The Taliban don’t want a bloodbath. They want to be embraced. As Shaheen has stressed, it would be easy to conquer major cities – but there would be blood. Meanwhile, the Taliban already control virtually the whole border with Tajikistan.

New face of the Taliban: The insurgents’ spokesman Mohammad Suhail Shaheen speaks to media in Moscow on February 15, 2021.

The 2021 Taliban have little in common with their 2001 pre-war on terror incarnation. The movement has evolved from a largely Ghilzai Pashtun rural guerrilla insurgency to a more inter-ethnic arrangement, incorporating Tajiks, Uzbeks and even Shi’ite Hazaras – a group that was mercilessly persecuted during the 1996-2001 years of Taliban power.

Reliable figures are extremely hard to come by, but 30% of the Taliban today may be non-Pashtuns. One of the top commanders is ethnically Tajik – and that explains the lightning-flash “soft” blitzkrieg in northern Afghanistan across Tajik territory.

I visited a lot of these geologically spectacular places in the early 2000s. The inhabitants, all cousins, speaking Dari, are now turning over their villages and towns to Tajik Taliban as a matter of trust. Very few – if any – Pashtuns from Kandahar or Jalalabad are involved. That illustrates the absolute failure of the central government in Kabul.

Those who do not join the Taliban simply desert – as did the Kabul forces manning the checkpoint close to the bridge over the Pyanj river, off the Pamir highway; they escaped without a fight to Tajik territory, actually riding the Pamir highway. The Taliban hoisted their flag in this crucial intersection without firing a shot.

The Afghan National Army’s chief, General Wali Mohammad Ahmadza, fresh into his role by appointment from Ghani, is keeping a brave face: ANA’s priority is to protect the main cities (so far, so good, because the Taliban are not attacking them); border crossings (that’s not going so well), and highways (mixed results so far).

This interview with Suhail Shaheen is quite enlightening – as he feels compelled to stress that “we don’t have access to media” and laments the “baseless” barrage of “propaganda launched against us,” which implies that Western media should admit the Taliban have changed.

Shaheen points out that “it’s not possible to take 150 districts in just six weeks by fighting,” which connects to the fact that the security forces “do not trust the Kabul administration.” In all districts that have been conquered, he swears, “ the forces came to the Taliban voluntarily.”

A smoke plume rises from houses amid an ongoing fight between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters in the western city of Qala-i- Naw, the capital of Badghis province, on July 7. The Taliban launched its first major assault on a provincial capital since the US military began its final drawdown of troops from the country.

Shaheen makes a statement that could have come straight from Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s: The “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are the real freedom fighters.” That may be the object of endless debate across the lands of Islam.

But one fact is indisputable: The Taliban are sticking by the agreement they signed with the Americans on February 29, 2020. And that implies a total American exit: “If they don’t abide by their commitments, we have a clear right of retaliation.”

Thinking ahead to “when an Islamic government is in place,” Shaheen insists there will be “good relations” with every nation, and embassies and consulates will not be targeted.

The Taliban “goal is clear: to end the occupation.” And that brings us to the tricky gambit of Turkish troops “protecting” Kabul airport. Shaheen is crystal clear. “No NATO forces – that means continuation of occupation,” he proclaims. “When we have an independent Islamic country, then we will sign any agreement with Turkey that is mutually beneficial.”

Shaheen is involved in the ongoing, very complicated negotiations in Doha, so he cannot allow himself to commit the Taliban to any future power-sharing agreement. What he does say, even though “progress is slow” in Doha, is that, contrary to what was previously reported by media in Qatar, the Taliban will not present a formal written proposal to Kabul by the end of the month, The talks will continue.

Going hybrid?

Whatever the “Mission Accomplished” non-denial denials emanating from the White House, a few things are already clear on the Eurasia front.

The Russians, for one thing, are already engaging the Taliban, in detail, and may soon strike their name off their terror list.

The Chinese, for another, are assured that if the Taliban commits Afghanistan to join the Belt and Road Initiative, connecting via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, ISIS-Khorasan will not then be permitted to go on overdrive in Afghanistan bolstered by Uyghur jihadis currently in Idlib.

And nothing is off the table for Washington when it comes to derailing BRI. Crucial silos scattered across the deep state must be already at work replacing a forever war in Afghanistan with hybrid war, Syria-style.

Lavrov is very much aware of Kabul power brokers who would not say “no” to a new hybrid war arrangement. But the Taliban for their part have been very effective – preventing assorted Afghan factions from supporting Team Ghani.

As for the Central Asian “stans,” not a single one of them wants any forever wars or hybrid wars down the road.

Fasten your seat belts: It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

In 2018 the US Was at War With Uyghur Terrorists. Now It Claims They Don’t Even Exist

May 01st, 2021

By Alan Macleod

Source

With China now in the U.S. crosshairs, the ETIM has moved from being an adversary to being a potential asset.

WASHINGTON — In the dying months of his administration, President Donald Trump removed from the United States terrorist list a little-known paramilitary organization called ETIM, an acronym that stands for either the East Turkestan Independence Movement or the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, depending on whom one asks. The group is also sometimes known as the [East] Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP or ETIP).

Explaining the decision, the State Department said that “ETIM was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist.” The move was hailed by a wide range of Uyghur groups in the United States, who saw it as a step towards blocking China’s actions against Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province.

Yet the decision will have confused anyone with a long memory or who closely followed the War on Terror. Only two years previously, the U.S. was actively at war with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, with Trump himself ordering an escalation of a bombing campaign against them.

In 2018, Major General James Hecker, the commander of NATO Air Command-Afghanistan, gave a press conference in which he noted that not only was ETIM real but they were working hand in hand with the Taliban and boasted that his forces were destroying their training bases, thereby reducing their terrorist activities both in the Afghanistan/Pakistan/China border region and inside China itself.

“Anybody that is an enemy of Afghanistan, we’re going to target them,” Brigadier General Lance Bunch told the The Washington Post, also announcing that “[w]e’ve got new authorities now that allow us to be able to . . . target the Taliban and the ETIM where they previously thought they were safe.”

Why then was the government suddenly insisting that ETIM/TIP did not exist? And who is this shadowy organization?

Who are the ETIM/TIP?

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is a jihadist group led since 2003 by Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, a Xinjiang-born Uyghur. Its goal is to set up a Muslim-only ethnostate (East Turkestan) in Xinjiang. A dry and mountainous region at the western edge of China, Xinjiang is about the size of Alaska and is home to around 25 million people.

“This land is for Muslims alone,” Haq explains in an al-Qaeda PR film; “the mere presence of the disbelievers on this land should be a sufficient reason for Muslims to set out for jihad.” ETIM is still considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, United Kingdom, and Russia, among others.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government also classifies it as such. When asked for comment, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told MintPress that “ETIM has long been engaging in terrorist and violent activities, causing heavy casualties and property losses, and posing serious threats to security and stability in China, the region and beyond.” Wenbin also criticized the U.S. “flip flop” on ETIM, something that, in his words, “once again exposes the current U.S. administration’s double standard on counter-terrorism and its repulsive practice of condoning terrorist groups as it sees fit.” MintPress also reached out to a range of Uyghur organizations for comment, but all declined to do so.

Some of the most high-profile of these attacks inside China, cited by Wenbin, were ETIM’s attempts to sabotage the 2008 Beijing Olympics by carrying out bomb attacks on host cities. Just before the games, ETIM released a video featuring a burning Olympic flag and warning all Muslims to stay away from the venues. There has also been a string of deadly attacks attributed to ETIM in which terrorists drive vehicles into crowds of pedestrians then proceed to carry out stabbing rampages.

In 2009, tensions between Uyghurs and ethnic Han Chinese spilled over into deadly riots in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, where nearly 200 people, mostly Han, were killed. As a result of the unrest, Beijing ordered a massive increase in surveillance and security across the region, flooding the province with cameras, armed police, and spies. To this day, it retains an extremely high-security presence.

Of course, the large majority of those killed by ETIM around the world have been non-Salafist Muslims, and considering ETIM to be representatives of the Uyghur population as a whole would be extremely misleading. In fact, the Uyghurs of Xinjiang have been caught in the crossfire between the ETIM and the Chinese government. To this day, the Afghan government also considers the group to be a serious threat to peace and security in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda, Taliban ties, Chinese target

ETIM units have trained and fought in what seems like virtually every single conflict involving Muslims over the past 20 years, but always with an eye to bringing their skills back home. A 2017 Associated Press exclusive titled “Uyghurs fighting in Syria take aim at China” found that at least 5,000 Xinjiang Uyghurs had traveled to Syria to train and fight alongside both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was,” one ETIM fighter told the AP; “We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” For many, Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of the Urumqi riots was the catalyst. “We’ll avenge our relatives being tortured in Chinese jail,” another fighter told the AP. A 2015 New York Times report also notes that one Chinese Muslim had been trained in Libya before going to Syria to fight against government forces.

The United Nations states that ETIM “has maintained close ties with the Taliban, Al-Qaida and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.” Indeed, since 2005, ETIM leader Haq has been a member of al-Qaeda’s council of elders, a group of about two dozen individuals who control the organization’s direction. The UN notes that the ETIM’s major source of funding was Osama Bin Laden himself, who directly employed and paid Haq.

“The organization is clearly a part of al-Qaeda’s network — there is no real question about this fact. Al-Qaeda doesn’t hide its sponsorship of the TIP [ETIM]. And the TIP [ETIM] doesn’t hide its allegiance to al-Qaeda,” wrote Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a hawkish think tank located in Washington. “But the Chinese Communist Party’s detestable policies in Xinjiang have led some democracy and human rights activists to downplay or dismiss the TIP’s overt jihadism,” he added.

In 2002, U.S. forces captured and detained 22 Uyghur militants at an ETIM camp in Afghanistan. They were sent to Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and were accused of traveling from China to join the ETIM jihad, something many admitted to. However, all insisted that they were uninterested in harming the United States and instead saw China as their major enemy. Considering them no direct threat to itself, the United States began releasing them to third countries and by 2013 all had been freed.

A Uyghur fighter in Syria affiliated with ETIM is shown in an al-Qaeda propaganda video

The training camp was located in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan and run by Haq himself. U.S. intelligence actually concluded that many of the trainees acted as a “blocking force” for Bin Laden in 2001, when American forces came very close to capturing him. This allowed him to evade the U.S. for a further ten years. The U.S. carried out an assassination attempt on Haq in 2010, with media reporting that he had been killed by an unmanned drone. However, he was merely seriously injured and escaped with his life.

The State Department designated the ETIM as a terrorist group, adding them to its list in September 2002. At that point, the Bush administration had declared a war on terror, was battling the Taliban in Afghanistan and was about to invade Iraq. Furthermore, relations with China were good at the time and the Bush administration wished to secure Chinese co-operation or at least dampen Chinese resistance to its campaigns.

“Designating ETIM/TIP as a terrorist organization does seem appropriate,” Daniel Dumbrill — a Canadian YouTuber currently in Xinjiang, and an outspoken critic of U.S. policy towards China — told MintPress, adding:

I don’t believe they suddenly and abruptly cease to exist and I don’t believe the U.S. government believes this either. Even if they did, the Tamil Tigers have been inactive for over 10 years since their defeat, but they remain on the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like clearing off inactive terror groups has ever been a matter of priority. There is of course, I believe, an ulterior motive to [their removal from the terrorist list].”

A fight for global supremacy

Today, however, relations with China have definitely soured. The country’s rapid economic rise has alarmed and preoccupied many planners in the West, who now see China as America’s “unparalleled priority” for the 21st century. President Trump placed sanctions on the country and attempted to block the growth of Chinese tech companies like Huawei, TikTok, and Xiaomi. Along with the trade war has come a war of words, with top brass in Washington suggesting that the new Cold War with Beijing will be less about tanks and missiles and more “kicking each other under the table.” Others have advised that the U.S. should wage a widespread culture war, including commissioning what they call “Taiwanese Tom Clancy novels” meant to demonize and demoralize China.

The prospect of a hot war cannot be overlooked, however. And U.S. actions are making the threat all the more likely. In 2013, the Obama administration announced a “Pivot to Asia,” meaning a draw-down from the Middle East and an escalation of tensions in the Pacific. Today, over 400 American military bases encircle China. American ships and aircraft continue to probe the Chinese coastline, testing their defenses. In July, U.S.S. Rafael Peralta sailed within 41 nautical miles of the coastal megacity of Shanghai. Earlier this year, the head of Strategic Command stated that there was a “very real possibility” of war against Beijing in the near future.

Uyghur repression

It is in this context that the United States has begun to denounce China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority. Xinjiang has been under serious security measures for more than a decade, and the internment of Uyghurs has been going on since at least 2014. Yet the U.S. was largely silent about their treatment until recently. Today, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) accuses China of imprisoning between one and three million Uyghur Muslims, describing it as a genocide. The NED has given nearly $9 million to Uyghur groups and has condemned what it sees as a “deafening silence in the Muslim world” about their plight.

Amnesty International has largely agreed, labeling what China calls re-education facilities, meant to deradicalize the population, as “detention camps for torture and brainwashing of anyone suspected of disloyalty.” Uyghurs have alleged that they have been forcibly sterilized, that their places of worship have been demolished, and that they were made to eat pork and separated from their families while interned.

Others have rejected this interpretation. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, recently wrote:

There are credible charges of human rights abuses against Uyghurs, but those do not per se constitute genocide. And we must understand the context of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which had essentially the same motivation as America’s foray into the Middle East and Central Asia after the September 2001 attacks: to stop the terrorism of militant Islamic groups.”

Dumbrill seemed to agree, noting that many Uyghurs in Xinjiang see the extremist jihadists as their primary worry, not government forces, of whom some Uyghurs speak fondly. “The police presence aside, people lead fairly ordinary lives here with the same kinds of hopes and dreams that people anywhere else would have as well,” he told MintPress, criticizing the foreign coverage.

Wenbin was, unsurprisingly, even more dismissive of the charges. “Western politicians and media are frantically spreading lies on Xinjiang,” he said, adding that “the allegation of ‘genocide’ is more than preposterous.”

The politics of terror

At the same time as it was delisting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement for apparently not existing, the Trump administration added Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terror. Without a hint of irony, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed to the island’s “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere” as the reason for the designation. A report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services outlined what such malign influence was: offering doctors and other medical teams to other needy countries during a global pandemic.

Yet the politics of the terror list has always been highly suspect. In an attempt to dampen worldwide support for his cause and shore up the Apartheid government, the Reagan administration placed South African leader Nelson Mandela on the terrorist list in 1988. Mandela was not pulled off it until 2008 — 14 years after he became president.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration also recently removed Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terror, in what was an openly transactional event. Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel and give the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars. As usual, Trump was unable not to say the quiet part out loud: “GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to U.S. terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan,” he tweeted.

Ultimately, the drastic change in U.S. policy on the ETIM has nothing to do with the movement itself — which remains the same jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban — but rather to a changing American stance towards China. For years, the U.S. ignored human rights issues in Xinjiang, as China was seen as a useful workshop for American capitalism. But the PRC’s rapid rise has frightened many in Washington; hence the sudden fascination with the plight of the Uyghurs. The designation of the ETIM as a terrorist group was likely seen as getting in the way of longstanding U.S. attempts to provoke unrest in China. With China now in the crosshairs, the group has moved from being an adversary to being a potential asset. It appears that the government decided that insisting they no longer exist was an easier sell than pretending they are no longer a terrorist group.

While the change in status might seem inconsequential, it could be a harbinger of a dangerous future. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement was placed on the list because of the War on Terror. Now it has been taken off because of the coming war on China.

Xinjiang Native Speaks Out: “Western Media Jeopardizing Uyghurs Interests”

By Dan Cohen

Source

Dan Cohen speaks with Gordon Gao, an ethnic minority and Xinjiang native on the realities of life in Xinjiang, Western media coverage and US-China tensions.

WASHINGTON — Dan Cohen speaks with Gordon Gao, Director of Strategic Research at Tsinghua University Endowment Fund in Beijing and a native of Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Gao discusses growing up as a Mongolian ethnic minority in XUAR, and how the propaganda war against China hurts Uyghur interests, but will ultimately backfire on the United States. Gao and Coden also discuss the U.S.-China artificial intelligence arms race as well as the comparative strengths of the two countries.

Max Blumenthal debunks US accusation of China’s ‘genocide’ against Uighurs

Source

April 01, 2021

Max Blumenthal documents the deceptions behind the US government’s accusation that China is committing “genocide” against Uyghur Muslims in its Xinjiang region, picking apart NED-funded studies that rely on botched statistics and exposing extremist Adrian Zenz and his error-filled research

. This was part of a panel discussion held on March 19, 2021, hosted on Daniel Dumbrill’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdw1N…

Sitrep China : Xinjiang backlash market shock

March 30, 2021

Selections from Godfree Roberts’ extensive weekly newsletter : Here Comes China, plus editorial notes. You can get it here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe

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The last two weeks we’ve watched in awe the Chinese telling the US in Alaska that a more assertive China now is a reality as the empire has left it no choice.  Of course the Alaska meeting was spiked with sanctions poison minutes before the meetings started, to present a strongman ‘advantage’ (or so they thought) to empire.   This backfired spectacularly and lasted but 15 minutes of a blistering response by China, so perfectly translated by the Chinese translator that she immediately became a new sensation in the eyes of the Chinese people.   The Chinese response is continuing and the stance is now permanent.  I think it is fair to say that China will take no more empire so-called ‘rules-based’ international order.

We saw Mr.Biden calling President Putin a “killer with no soul”.  We saw Russia moving away from empire, in action and in (less than diplomatic) words, with Foreign Minister Lavrov completing a triumphant visit to China directly after the Alaska meeting, and in press conferences making it clear that the petrodollar is now oh so last century news.  New economic and financial mechanisms will put it in its place and we already see this.  Take a look:

China signed a currency swap agreement with Sri Lanka before $3.7 billion of its foreign debt matures this year. Sri Lanka is entitled to a $1.5 billion swap facility from the PBOC, valid for three years. More than 22% of the nation’s foreign purchases were from China last year. Read full article →.

And then these wild two weeks ended with China and Iran signing a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership, of course, not using any last century petrodollars.

The US fought back fiercely, with nothing else but rumors and the rest of the west sanctioned everything that they could possibly think of.  The rumors and propaganda are about Xinjiang and included the bathwater and the baby, cold war style, threatening hot war style and seemingly quite out of step with developments in the rest of the world.  We will look at the market fall-out in some detail.

But why now? Why did both Russia and China stand up and declare that they are here to stay, while we were used to a more muted approach from both?

James W. Carden and Patrick Lawrence considers that it is a deep disappointment with discovering the “retrograde character of the Biden administration’s foreign policies”  “We thought too well of the United States” Mr Yang, Foreign Minister of China said.  They had hopes for Biden, in other words. Given his fading competence, we ought to add, we think these policies will be shaped and directed in large measure by Blinken and Sullivan, with an adjunct role for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. This will prove another competence problem.

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/our-cold-two-front-war

What has not had much media coverage, is foreign minister Wang Yi’s tour to the Middle East after the Iran agreement announcement.   He visited Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman, all Belt and Road member countries.   To cap off these two weeks of telling empire to become productive, take their rightful place in the world if they can, stop playing warmonger and policeman and economic hitman, the take-away statement from this tour is that Wang repeatedly said global powers should butt out of making the Middle East their arena for big-power rivalry.

(Imagine empire confusion while the penny drops that their empire is over.  Anyone hearing someone playing the fiddle or more accurately the lute?)

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A short video from Professor Bill Brown at Xiamen University in southeast China’s Fujian province about the changes in China after spending 33 years there.

The empire struck back with an all-out attack against the province of Xinjiang.  The Xinjiang cotton industry was attacked with baseless rumors and propaganda about the Uyghur people and the propaganda and sanctions machines went into overdrive and we saw sanctions everywhere, mainly against anyone buying cotton from the region.  It is quite ludicrous to pretend to care for the Uyghurs if your sanctions are designed to deprive them of their major industry and their income, which is from cotton.  As fast as the western sanctions were announced, they were responded to with reciprocal sanctions.  Mr.Lavrov already mentioned that there will be a concerted effort throughout the world to do away with unilateral sanctions, so, it is almost as if they do not matter, as no country in the world can or should spare the resources to manage all the sanctions.

But China is striking back hard.  In addition, the cotton manufacturers out of Xinjiang are bringing legal action against Adrian Zenz, who stitched together the rumors of forced labor, labor camps, forced sterilization, and many others.  If you do not want to watch this video, just take a scroll through the comments though.

The Chinese people got angry and a major market kerfuffle commenced and is still ongoing.  For Australia with their thoughtless comments against China, their trade (excluding iron ore) has dropped by 40%.

H&M’s agony, Nike’s fear, the market strikes back. H&M craters after saying it would not source cotton from Xinjiang. All e-commerce platforms removed it from their websites. Searches for ‘H&M’ and ‘HM’ yielded no results, celebrities cut ties, and 200 million Weibo users boycotted H&M’s 450 stores. Nike and Adidas are under attack for using the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which stopped licensing farms in Xinjiang. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3126828/hm-under-fire-china-over-refusal-buy-xinjiang-cotton

A-list Uyghur stars Dilraba Dilmurat (Dílì Rèbā), an actress with a huge Han fan base, and Liú Yìfēi, who starred in Mulan, ended their business relationships with Adidas. Nike, Calvin Klein, and Converse have lost their Chinese brand ambassadors. https://supchina.com/2021/03/24/hm-faces-boycott-in-china-over-year-old-xinjiang-cotton-ban/

Japanese fashion retailer Muji, with 17% of its total sales from China, said its stores in China will continue carrying products made with Xinjiang cotton. The company has conducted due diligence on all companies in Xinjiang involved in its supply chain. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Retail/Muji-features-Xinjiang-cotton-as-Chinese-netizens-lash-its-rivals

“H&M, Nike, and others are now suffering heavy losses to their reputations in the Chinese market. Enormous investment in public relations has been destroyed instantly. They need to complain to Western society, because they know that, whether they are active or passive, they have indeed done something intolerable to Chinese consumers”. – Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times.  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219413.shtml

Why this focus on the Chinese province Xinjian?  Is it really caring deeply about the Uyghurs?  Of course not.  This is not how empire conducts its business.

“The investments and the infrastructure development under the BRI will bring an explosion of growth in Xinjiang. It will not just become a wealthy region, it will become ‘Dubai wealthy,’ said engineer Robert Vannrox, “the West does not want this. The more Chinese investment pours into Xinjiang, the louder the anti-China propaganda becomes.”

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Cover Image: Chinese archaeologists announced Saturday that some new major discoveries have been made at the legendary Sanxingdui Ruins site in southwest China, helping shed light on the unified, diverse origin of the Chinese civilization.  https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2103206280/

This is but a fraction of what I gleaned from the Here Comes China newsletter.  If you want to learn about the Chinese world, get Godfree’s newsletter here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe

Amarynth

The Watchdogs of Imperialism and the Uyghur Genocide Slander

By Stephen Gowans

Source

On February 26 the Canadian Parliament passed a motion, by a vote of 226 to 0, expressing the opinion that “the People’s Republic of China has” implemented “measures intended to prevent” Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births and that these measures are “consistent with” the United Nations Genocide Convention.

The reality is that Beijing is not preventing Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births, and a report by a German anthropologist widely cited as evidence that it is, contradicts this claim. That report, by Adrian Zenz, a fellow at a US government-created foundation whose mission is to bring about the end of communism and the Chinese Communist Party,  reveals that while Chinese family planning policy restricts the number of children Chinese couples are allowed to have, it does not prevent couples in any group, including Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, from bearing children. Moreover, limits on family size are the same between the Han Chinese ethnic majority and religious minorities. There is, therefore, no discrimination in Chinese family planning policy on the basis of national, religious, or ethnic affiliation.

Perhaps aware their position was untenable, the parliamentarians sought to buttress their motion by citing political opinion in the United States, where “it has been the position of two consecutive administrations that Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims are being subjected to a genocide by the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” the motion observed. In an act of unseemly subservience to imperial power, Canada’s parliament constructed a motion, based on no evidence, to echo a point of view articulated in Washington, also based on no evidence.

Significantly, the last two consecutive administrations have designated China a rival, and therefore have politically-motivated reasons for slandering their challenger. Moreover, apart from using the hyper-aggressive US military to extort economic and strategic concessions from other countries, US administrations have a long record of fabrication to justify their aggressive actions. That “two consecutive administrations” have held that the Chinese are carrying out a genocide is evidence of nothing more than Washington continuing to operate in its accustomed fashion of churning out lies about states that refuse to be integrated into the US economic, military and political orbit. A Serb-orchestrated genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; moderate rebels in Syria: these are only the tip of the iceberg of US lies and calumnies offered as pretexts for imperial aggression. Genocide in Xinjiang is but the latest.

Below, I look at the genocide slander from four perspectives:

1. The geostrategic context.
2. Who is behind the accusation?
3. How do the accusers define genocide?
4. What is the evidence?

The geostrategic context

In 2003, Graham E. Fuller, a former vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Estimate and one-time CIA station chief in Kabul, wrote a book for the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Study at the Johns Hopkins University, titled The Xinjiang Problem. His co-author was the academic  S. Frederick Starr.

Fuller and Starr wrote that:

“the historical record suggests that the decision of countries and even of international organizations to raise specific human rights issues is often politicized and highly selective. Many countries will devote attention to human rights issues in China in inverse proportion to the quality of their overall bilateral relationship.“

It need not be said that today, 18 years later, the quality of overall bilateral relations between the United States and China has deteriorated sharply. China has emerged as a formidable competitor to US economic and technological supremacy, and US policy has shifted, beginning with the Obama administration, toward an explicit program of eclipsing China’s rise.

In recent days, US president Joe Biden has said “American leadership must meet … the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden’s “goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.” However, the US president, according to the newspaper, intends to portray the conflict as one based on “a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy,” rather than a clash of economic interests.

At the base of a deteriorating Sino-US relationship, then, lies a commercial rivalry, on top of which Washington has layered a narrative about a clash of values. In a Foreign Affairs article written before he became president, Biden outlined a strategy of confronting China over the economic challenges it poses to US businesses, US domination of the industries of tomorrow, and US technological (and concomitant military) supremacy. Biden said he would use a human rights narrative to rally support for a US-led campaign against China.

Fuller and Starr continued: “It would be unrealistic,” they wrote, “ to rule out categorically American willingness to play the ‘Uyghur card’ as a means of exerting pressure on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation.” Many “of China’s rivals have in the past pursued active policies in Xinjiang and exploited the Uyghur issue for their benefit.” Almost two decades later, with US hostility rising as Washington’s claim to primacy on the world stage is under challenge, the United States has decided to play the Uyghur card.

Who is behind the accusations?

A network of groups and individuals, animated by an antagonism to the Chinese Communist Party, and supportive of continued US global supremacy, are involved in originating the slanders against Beijing. At the center is the German anthropologist, Adrian Zenz.

Zenz’s opposition to Beijing lies in his religious beliefs. A fundamentalist Christian, he views communism, feminism and homosexuality, as abominations against God. Zenz also believes that he is on a divinely-inspired mission to bring about the demise of communist rule in China.

Zenz is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation, created by the US government to discredit an ideology which competes against the United States’ first favorite religion, US state-capitalism (Christianity being the second) seeks to free the world “from the false hope of Marxism” and save it from “the tyranny of communism” (the leitmotif of Hitler’s political career.) This it strives to do by educating future generations that “Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history,” (one that, by this view, is fully capable of carrying out a genocide), a task the foundation sees as especially pressing today, when “Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States.”

Zenz has also written anti-Beijing reports for the Jamestown Foundation,  an anti-Communist outfit supported by corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals, whose mission is to shape public opinion against China and North Korea.

The slanderers also include a number of Uyghur exile groups, including the World Uyghur Congress, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a US government-bankrolled organization whose first president conceded that it does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely destabilize foreign governments by strengthening fifth columns. The NED does so under the cover of promoting democracy and human rights.  The organization has boasted on Twitter that it has been funding fifth columnists in Xinjiang since 2004.

Another propagator of anti-Beijing slanders is the Epoch Times, the newspaper of the Falun Gong. Like Zenz, the roots of Falun Gong’s anti-Beijing animus lie in reactionary religious convictions. The cult deplores gender equality, homosexuality, and communism as affronts against God.

How do the accusers define genocide?

Those who accuse Beijing of carrying out a genocide employ a ruse regularly used in the corporate world to dupe consumers and employees. The subterfuge is to redefine a word to mean something other than what the word would be reasonably interpreted to mean.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo used this ruse. He accused Beijing of trying to integrate Xinjiang and its Turkic people into the larger Chinese society. While this did not meet the definition of genocide, Pompeo labelled Beijing’s actions as genocide all the same.  According to the magazine Foreign Policy, State Department lawyers told Pompeo that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang did not satisfy the UN convention’s definition of genocide. Pompeo, who has no respect for the truth, much less the contrary opinions of government lawyers, was undeterred.

The current US secretary of state Anthony Blinken also accused Beijing of genocide. Using the same ruse, Blinken pointed to non-genocidal actions, namely one million Uyghurs in ‘concentration camps’, to make the claim that Beijing was trying to destroy a Muslim minority.  The claim was a double deception. First, there are no Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, and second, even if there were, concentration camps do not equal genocide. Blinken was likely trying to exploit the association of the Holocaust with German death camps to insinuate that concentration camps and genocide go together, like the artic and snow, and that the Chinese government, and its Communist Party, are contemporary expressions of Nazi horror.    

The source of the concentration camp allegation is yet another of Beijing’s political foes, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists in Turkey, which serves as a platform for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist outfit which seeks to transform Xinjiang into an Islamic State. ETIM is considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States—or was considered a terrorist organization by the United States until Pompeo removed the group from the US terrorism list in October, thereby eliminating an impediment that had limited the contribution the jihadists could make to the US project of destabilizing Xinjiang, propagating calumnies about the Chinese government, and ultimately undermining China’s ability to compete with US businesses on the world stage.

In July of last year, Zenz wrote a paper for the Jamestown Foundation on Uyghur birthrates, which appears to be the basis for the claim cited by Canadian parliamentarians that China is carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang. Zenz’s report raised the question of genocide only in its final sentence, and then only tentatively. It was, instead, the Jamestown Foundation editor, John Dotson, a former US naval officer and US Congressional staff researcher, who concluded in an introductory note that “Zenz presents a compelling case that the CCP party-state apparatus in Xinjiang is engaged in severe human rights violations that meet the criteria for genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Zenz, however, concluded only that Chinese policies “might be characterized” as constituting “a demographic campaign of genocide per” the UN convention. To be sure, any policy might be characterized in any particular way one wants, but the ad rem question isn’t, can policy x be characterized as y, but is it y?  Zenz, unlike Dotson, was not prepared to say that Chinese birth control policy constitutes genocide. And there’s a good reason for this; it clearly doesn’t.

Zenz’s paper was a political tract erected on the foundations of a report on Beijing’s family planning policies and their effects on Uyghur and Han birthrates in Xinjiang. What the report showed, notwithstanding Dotson’s politically-motivated misinterpretation, was that:

• Previously, Han Chinese couples were limited to one child, while Uyghur couples were allowed two in urban areas, and three in rural areas. Family planning restrictions were not rigidly enforced on Uyghur couples.
• Today, Han Chinese couples are permitted to have as many children as Uyghur couples are permitted (two children in urban areas, and three in rural areas.)
• Family planning restrictions are now rigidly enforced.
• The change from lax to rigid enforcement has been accompanied by a decrease in the Uyghur birth rate.

Zenz’s report showed that the Uyghur population continued to grow, despite enforcement of family planning policies; Uyghur couples are not prevented from having children, (they’re only limited in the number of children they can have); and family planning rules apply equally to Han Chinese.

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reads as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• 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.

The relevant consideration is the fourth item, namely, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Chinese family planning policy does not prevent births within the Uyghur population; it only restricts them, and the restriction is non-discriminatory; it applies equally to all groups.

What is the evidence?

US State Department lawyers told Pompeo there is no evidence of genocide in Xinjiang. As we have seen, that didn’t stop Pompeo–who once boasted that as CIA director “we lied, cheated, and stole“– from making the accusation. He simply changed the definition of genocide, carrying on the US state tradition of fabricating lies to advance its interests.

Bob Rae, Canada’s representative to the UN, accused China of committing genocide, and then said efforts should be made to gather evidence to demonstrate this to be true.

John Ibbitson, a columnist with Canada’s Globe and Mail, conceded that Chinese government actions in Xinjiang do not meet the UN definition of genocide, but that Beijing is carrying out a genocide all the same.

The watchdogs of imperialism

The United States is waging an economic and information war on China, to preserve its economic,  military, and technological supremacy. Washington is recruiting its citizens, its allies and their citizens, and the progressive community, into a campaign to protect the international dictatorship of the United States from the challenge posed by the peaceful rise of China. Every manner of slander has been hurled at China to galvanize popular opposition to Beijing and mobilize popular support for economic aggression and growing military intimidation against the People’s Republic, from accusations that Chinese officials concealed the spread of the coronavirus; to calumnies about Muslims being immured in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor, and targeted for genocide; that Beijing is violating the one state-two systems agreement in Hong Kong (when in fact it’s only implementing a security law to undergird the one state part of the accord) and that Beijing’s efforts to reunify the country by re-integrating a territory the US Seventh Fleet prevented it from reintegrating in 1950, are really acts of aggression against an independent country named Taiwan.

Progressive forces, from Democracy Now!, which has provided Adrian Zenz a platform to traduce Beijing, to the New Democratic and Green parties in Canada, which voted for the motion declaring a genocide is in progress in Xinjiang, collude in the campaign to protect and promote the profits of Western shareholders, investors, and bankers from the challenges posed by China’s rise. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about communism, international rivalries, and the perfidy of progressives, described the predecessors of today’s Democracy Nows, Greens, and New Democrats as the watchdogs of imperialism. His words echo through the corridors of time.

Is Washington going to Maintain its Ties with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Source

By Vladimir Odintsov
Source: New Eastern Outlook

According to media reports, Republican Senator Ted Cruz recently sent another bill to the US Congress, proposing to declare an Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia – ed.), a terrorist organization.

Earlier, in late 2014, the US administration, in the face of Congressman Ted Cruz, already made a similar suggestion. In it, he referred to the fact that Egypt, after the President of the Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed Morsi was overthrown in late 2013, declared the organization a terrorist organization, and in March 2014, Egyptian example was followed by Saudi Arabia. In November 2014 the UAE declared the actions of 83 organizations in their territory illegal. This list included the Muslim Brotherhood, while Jordan arrested numerous high up and ordinary organization members, whom they promptly accused of terrorism. In April 2016, however, Ann Petersen, then Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs, speaking before a subcommittee of the US Congress, refused to consider the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, stating that “the organization is represented by legitimate political parties in several Middle Eastern countries, moving away from its violent position that it has held for decades”.

Nevertheless, in 2017, a group of Republicans represented by Senator Thea Cruz introduced a new bill in the US Congress recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Soon enough, another bill was introduced against the Islamist organization, proposing that it be declared a terrorist group in the United States.

In order to understand the reasons for the difficulties in having the US authorities officially recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, which has long been recognized as one in Russia and a number of other countries, it seems appropriate to recall the history of its existence and its “friendship” with the US authorities.

The Muslim Brotherhood was established as an international religious and political association in March 1928 by teacher Hassan al-Banna in Ismailia, Egypt. The status of this organization is ambiguous – in some countries it is legal, and political parties associated with it have seats in the parliaments of their respective countries, in particular in Yemen, Sudan (until November 2019), Tunisia, Turkey, etc. At the same time, it is recognized as a terrorist organization in Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, UAE, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Tajikistan.

US cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood began in 1953 under President Eisenhower, when several dozen Islamic theologians were invited to Princeton University to participate (according to the official version) “in a scientific conference”. In fact, the US authorities thereby intended to enlist the support of the spiritual leaders of Islamic countries to combat the growing “Communist threat” in the Middle East. Moreover,

Said Ramadan (second from the right) in the Oval Office with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other Muslim leaders in 1953

in the reports published in the media about this meeting, one of the main representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood at the time, Said Ramadan, who was present at the meeting, was referred to by the US intelligence agencies as a “fascist” and a “Falangist:”.

In his book, “Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood”, Ian Johnson, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, noted that US  interest in the Muslim Brotherhood especially increased after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to use Islamists in opposition to the USSR in that country at the time.

And then, in September 1981, the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated by members of a terrorist group, a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood. During the same period, the Muslim Brotherhood actively supported Islamic extremist groups operating in Afghanistan. Since the mid-90s, the Muslim Brotherhood has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, carried out a series of major terrorist attacks on tourist routes against foreign nationals, and participated in military operations in Chechnya and Dagestan on the side of the bandit formations.

After the September 11 attacks, US contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood were frozen for some time. However, given the George W. Bush administration’s clear miscalculations in the two wars in Muslim countries, cooperation with representatives of this Islamist group has been strengthened by Washington in the hope that they will “help ease tensions” in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Europe. Therefore, in 2006 in Brussels, with the mediation of the US State Department, a conference was organized, involving the European branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, where representatives of the US and British intelligence agencies discussed the prospects for cooperation with the Islamists.

With the arrival of Barack Obama into the White House, this close cooperation continued, especially since people from George W. Bush’s team, who were developing a strategy for rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood, remained in the Obama administration. The leading role in maintaining these contacts was played by the US (CIA) and British (MI6) secret services, as Thierry Meyssan, the founding president of the Réseau Voltaire website, has written about in great detail and accuracy. It was not without the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood that the United States succeeded in deposing and executing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Today, the Muslim Brotherhood has great influence not only in a number of countries in the Middle East, but also in Europe and the United States, and it is very well organized. The Muslim Brotherhood is a real international network with decades of experience. In Europe, the centers of this organization are London, Munich and many other major cities.

Given that Washington’s main goal in foreign policy has always been to maintain the role of the US as the absolute global leader, America could ensure its leadership in a global crisis only by, first, creating a climate of chaos in the world, in the midst of which the US would look like “an attractive island of stability”. In addition, it is much cheaper to manage chaos than it is to manage order. Second, America could retain global leadership if the economic and military-political power of China, the only competitor of the US in the battle for world domination, ready to take the crown of the winner from the United States, was severely restricted. Therefore, in recent years, the “friendship” of the United States with the Muslim Brotherhood has taken a blatantly anti-Chinese focus on using these Islamists to wreak havoc in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China and Central Asian countries.

By agreeing to a strategic alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, the US government has opened a Pandora’s box. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has repeatedly proclaimed its desire to build an Arab caliphate based on Sharia principles “from Spain to Indonesia,” intends to conquer new spaces and countries, especially enemies of the United States, with the active support of Washington through terror and propaganda.

As for the United States, under the guise of legal difficulties in officially recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, it clearly fears the unintended consequences of such a step for its relations with Turkey and Qatar, which support the Muslim Brotherhood on both the religious and political levels. If the assistance of the peninsular emirate in the Persian Gulf is mainly limited to financial support for this Islamist organization, Ankara has made the Muslim Brotherhood one of its “combat wings” in Syria and Libya.

That is why it would be unwise to expect a positive outcome from the consideration by the US Congress of another bill to declare the Islamist organization Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia – ed.) a terrorist organization, even though relations between Washington and Ankara have noticeably deteriorated lately.

Vladimir Odintsov, a political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.

China’s Reaction to a US Unannounced visit to Taiwan – PressTV Interview

By Peter Koenig

Global Research, November 24, 2020

Background

China has reacted strongly to a senior US official’s unannounced visit to Taiwan, warning that it will take legitimate and necessary action according to circumstances.

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman reiterated Beijing’s firm opposition to any official ties between Taiwan and the US. The reaction came after the media cited sources, including a Taiwanese official, as saying that US Navy’s Rear-Admiral Michael Studeman was on a trip to the self-ruled island. He’s the director of an agency which oversees intelligence at the US military’s Indo-Pacific Command. The administration of US President Donald Trump has recently ramped up support for Taiwan, including with the approval of new arms sales and high-level visits. Beijing has long warned against such moves. China considers Taiwan a breakaway province and maintains its sovereignty over the region under the One-China policy.

Interview of Peter Koenig with Press TV

***

PK

China has of course every right to protest against any visit and any US intervention in Taiwan, be it weapons sales, or provoking conflict over Taiwan self-declared “sovereignty” which it clearly has not, as it is but a breakaway part of Mainland China.

By and large this looks to me like one of Trump’s last Lame Duck movements to do whatever he can to ruin relations between the US and China.

In reality, it will have no impact of significance.
In fact, China’s approach to Taiwan over the past 70 years, has been one of non-aggression. With various attempts of rapprochement – which most of the times were actually disrupted by US interference – as Taiwan is used by the US, not because Washington has an interest in Taiwan’s “democracy’ – not at all – but Taiwan is a tool for Washington to seek destabilizing China – not dissimilar to what is going on in Hong Kong, or Xinjiang, the Uyghur Autonomous Region, or Tibet.

But China’s objectives are long-term and with patience – and not with force.

Just look at China’s recently signed Trade Agreement with 14 countries – the so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. This agreement alone is the largest in significance and volume of its kind ever signed in recent history. It covers countries with some 2.2. billion people and controlling about one third of world GDP.

And the US is not part of it.
Worse, the US-dollar is not even a trading currency.
This must upset the US particularly – especially since the 2-year trade war Trump was waging against China resulted in absolutely zilch – nothing – for the US. To the contrary, it pushed China towards more independence and away from the US.

The same applied to Chinese partners, happy to have honest trading partners, not of the western, especially the Washington-type, that dish out sanctions when they please and when they don’t like sovereign countries’ behavior.

So – no worries for China, but geopolitically, of course, they must react to such acts against international rules of diplomacy.

——
PressTV:
What will change under President Biden?

PK

Most likely nothing. To the contrary, Biden’s likely Secretary of Defense, Michèle Flournoy, played an important behind the scene role in the Obama Administration. She has not changed the aggressive position of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” which essentially consisted in surrounding China with weapons systems and in particular stationing about 60% of the US navy fleet in the South China Sea.

Though at this point, it looks like China is but the target of an off-scale aggression by President Trump, in reality, China is part of a long-term policy of the US, not only to contain China, but to dominate China.

As we see, though, to no avail.

Interestingly, China does not respond with counter-aggression, instead she moves steadily forward with new creations, towards an objective that does not seek domination, but a multi-polar, multi-connected world, via, for example, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – not the type of globalization that especially the Biden camp – along with the corporatocracy behind the World Economic Forum (WEF) is seeking.

The US empire is on the decline and China, of course, is aware of it. Washington may be lashing around in its deteriorating times, to create as much damage as possible and to bring down as many nations as they can. Case in point is the constant aggression, sanctions and punishment against Iran and Venezuela – but here too, these two countries are moving gradually away from the west and into the peaceful orbit of China – pursuing after all a shared bright future for mankind.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals such as Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO) and more. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
Peter is also co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

US Is the Top Human Rights Violator in the World, and It’s Not Even Close

By Danny Haiphong

Source

Few things are more politicized and distorted in the United States than the subject of human rights. Over the last two generations, the U.S. political class and its conduits in the corporate media have weaponized human rights to serve an imperialist agenda. NGOs such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International tend to focus much of their time crafting human rights narratives on matters of critical importance to the U.S. Department of State. Syria, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and a host of countries have been condemned by these organizations for alleged human rights violations. Since 2018, China has been targeted for the same treatment.

China is accused of detaining millions of Xinjiang-based Uyghurs in “concentration camps.” Thanks to Ajit Singh and The Grayzone, we know that the sources for these allegations are far from reliable. We know that the principle source for all things Xinjiang in the U.S. is Adrian Zenz, a far-right Christian fundamentalist who believes he is led by God to overthrow the Communist Party of China. We know that the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders responsible for the study that conducted a total of eight total interviews to derive conclusions of mass Uyghur internment is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-linked organization. We also know that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) currently leading the charge to demonize China on human rights issues is sponsored by military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

The primary concern of institutions such as ASPI is not the issue of human rights, but rather the creation of an atmosphere of war that will service its donors in the U.S. weapons industry. This is exactly what the propagation of the “Uyghur oppression” narrative has achieved. While relying completely on speculation, faulty satellite imagery, and testimonies from Uyghur-exile groups funded by the NED, the successful penetration of the baseless claim that China is detaining millions of Muslims in camps has played an important role in building up public support in the U.S. for a New Cold War against China. U.S. public opinion of China has dropped significantly over the past year. The U.S. has used the Uyghur human rights narrative to successfully sanction businesses and Communist Party of China officials in Xinjiang.

When U.S. officials accuse other countries of human rights violations, what comes afterward is always far worse than the allegations. After 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies accused Saddam Hussein of stockpiling non-existent Weapons of Mass destruction. The U.S. went on to invade Iraq in 2003—a war that caused the death of over one million Iraqi civilians and poisoned thousands more with toxic depleted uranium. In 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was accused of “murdering his own people” only to have Libya transformed into a failed state following a more than six month bombing campaign by NATO to protect a jihadist insurgency. Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has been repeatedly accused of using chemical weapons “on his own people.” Syria has been mired in an endless war with both the U.S. and its regional allies which has left hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced, and nearly one-third of its oil-rich and water-rich territory occupied by the U.S. military.

These examples are just a few of many that demonstrate why the U.S. is the chief human rights violator in the world. However, it is important to note that how the United States conducts itself abroad is a reflection of the myriad of ways that it violates the human rights of people living in the United States. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown are just a few of hundreds of examples of Black Americans that have been killed by police officers without redress. An average of 1,000 people in the United States are killed by police officers each year. Unlike the U.S.-led Xinjiang narrative, it is well-documented that over 2 million people reside in U.S. prisons and that nearly three-quarters of that prison population is Black, Latino, or Native American.

The U.S. is home to a quarter of all prisoners in the world. Around 80,000 of these prisoners are held in solitary confinement, a practice of prolonged isolation that the U.N. has firmly declared to be an act of torture. Research suggests that solitary confinement is directly linked to a host of psychological maladies from psychosis to suicide. Solitary confinement also causes lasting structural damage to the brain, especially in the hippocampus region responsible for memory and spatial awareness. Widespread use of solitary confinement in the U.S. is not a benign practice but one that specifically targets racial groups. Over forty percent of all male prisoners in solitary confinement are Black American. The world has long known that the U.S. engages in torture abroad at CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay Prison but fewer are aware of how torture is commonplace in the U.S.’ numerous prisons.

For decades, the U.S. has accused countries such as China of the very policies that make up the foundations of its domestic and foreign policy. U.S. elites have accused China of suppressing free speech but say little about the NSA’s massive surveillance program or the attempted extradition of a non-citizen in Julian Assange for publishing documents relating to U.S. war crimes. China has been accused of sterilizing ethnic minorities yet U.S. officials have failed to scrutinize documented cases of sterilization within U.S. immigration detention centers or its mistreatment of Muslim citizens since the War on Terror was declared in 2001. The Economist has accused China of using its anti-poverty campaign to build loyalty to the Communist Party of China but has yet to call out Joe Biden or Donald Trump for ignoring the needs of the forty percent of people in the U.S. who have virtually no disposable income. China is routinely accused of possessing an “aggressive” foreign policy by the same policy makers and thought leaders who have kept the U.S. at war for more than two-hundred years of its existence.

The ideology of American exceptionalism has created the illusion that the U.S. deserves to hold a monopoly on the issue of human rights. American exceptionalism presumes that the United States is the model example for countries and peoples all over the world. However, the days when the world was forced to bow to the U.S. are over. Most of the world sees the U.S. as the biggest threat to human rights and a peaceful existence. The U.S.’s human rights track record suggests that the world is correct, and it is the entire planet that suffers when issues such as war, climate change, poverty, and racism are blamed on China rather than addressed with solidarity and cooperation at a global level. 

Xinjiang: An In-Depth Analysis and Resource Compilation

Source

Based on a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies, Western governments have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China’s anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China.

This resource compilation provides a starting point for critical inquiry into the historical context and international response to China’s policies in Xinjiang, providing a counter-perspective to misinformation that abounds in mainstream coverage of the autonomous region.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Summary
2. Timeline of Events
   1. 1989-2016
      1. Formation of the World Uyghur Congress (1989-2006)
      2. Violence and Unrest (2009-2016)
      3. Chinese Anti-Terrorism Policy and Context (2012-2016)
   2.  2017-present
      1. The Seeds of Controversy (2017-Aug 2018)
      2. Entrenching the Narratives (Aug 2018-Jan 2020)
      3. U.S. Pursues Unilateral Action (Jan 2020-present)
   3. On the Nature of Unsubstantiated Allegations
3. Resources
   1. Overview
   2. Chinese Perspectives on the Problem of Terrorism
   3. Geopolitical Context
   4. Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development in Xinjiang
   5. Overview of Chinese Minority/Religious Policies
   6. The Misinformation Industrial Complex
   7. Views from Xinjiang: People, Cultures, and History

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1. Introduction and Summary

In the mid-2010s, China launched far-reaching de-radicalization and economic development programs in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Before then, few casual Western observers were even aware of the province’s existence, which makes up 17% of China’s land and whose population consists of 65% ethnic minority peoples. Fewer still could speak to the autonomous region’s complex political, cultural, and religious history as well as to its complex legacies as a crossroads between diverse peoples over many centuries.

However, since 2018, Western media and state officials have put Chinese government policy in Xinjiang under intense scrutiny, citing just a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies to lodge charges of forced labor, slavery, and genocide.       

Having saturated Western media, these charges are difficult to systematically refute. The situation on the ground is complex, and there are limits to what we can know. While we recognize that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique, these critiques should be debated and resolved on Chinese terms and in Chinese dialogues, and not be used as crude ammunition in the U.S.-led geopolitical assault on China. Based on the history of Western atrocity propaganda, its funding sources, and the poor quality of the ‘research’ being pushed, we are skeptical that the U.S.—having engaged in two decades of perpetual war in Muslim-majority nations—has any legitimate moral interest or grounds on which to defend Muslim religious rights in Xinjiang. 

Moreover, given the history of PRC ethnic and religious minority policy, and the reports from first-hand delegations to Xinjiang from countries and organizations including Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and even the World Bank, neither genocide nor slavery accurately describe the realities of Xinjiang. It is not a coincidence that these accusations have ramped up during a period of unprecedented Western antagonism towards China. Instead, these unfounded claims serve primarily to build consensus for conflict, intervention, and war with China. 

The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated. 

These resources are preceded by a timeline that focuses on the events preceding China’s Xinjiang de-radicalization program, the international responses it provoked, and other relevant contexts.       

This resource list is intended only for initial inquiry into the immediate controversy over China’s de-radicalization program in Xinjiang. In the spirit of seeking truth from facts, this resource does not offer definitive answers, nor is it comprehensive in scope. It aims only to be a starting point for critical inquiry, and we urge readers to seek a diversity of sources and form their own opinions. A more complete and nuanced view requires further study into the region’s history, China’s policies towards ethnic and religious minorities, and ongoing geopolitical developments.

Note: There are several ways to spell “Uygur” in English, including “Uygur,” “Uighur” and “Uyghur.” “Uyghur” is perhaps the most common in international settings, although “Uygur” is the official romanization by the Chinese government. We will use “Uyghur” in accordance with the common spelling in Western dialogue, except when referring specifically to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Similarly, the common Western spelling of “Kazakh” and “Kyrgyz” differs from the Chinese government’s official romanizations of “Kazak” and “Kirgiz.” We will similarly use the common Western spelling.

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2. Timeline of Events

a. 1989-2016

From 1990-2016, China considered the terrorism problem to be particularly severe in Xinjiang. It is a period marked by immense difficulty and upheaval for China, unilateral U.S. military action throughout West Asia, and rapid Chinese economic growth.

i. Formation of the World Uyghur Congress (1989-2006)

➤ 1989 June 4 – The Tiananmen June 4th Incident, born of contradictions from market reform, inflamed by Gorbachev’s perestroika, and combined with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its fall on December 26, 1991, sparks a generational crisis in China. A wave of disillusioned students and upwardly-mobile young people leave China for the U.S. and other Western nations, with some receiving lavish attention and platforms as ‘dissidents’ who serve a strategic interest for U.S. ambitions vis-a-vis China.

• Some of the most prominent Uyghur diaspora activist leaders today are as follows: Erkin Alptekin, Rushan Abbas, Dolkun Isa, Rebiya Kadeer, Omer Kanat, and Nury Turkel. Of these six, four arrived in the West on or after 1989 (Abbas 1989; Isa 1994; Turkel 1995; Kadeer 2005, as the cause célèbre of Turkel). Alptekin left around 1949 as part of the Guomindang’s defeat and Kanat left in 1971.  

➤ 1990 April 5 – Baren Township Riots, considered the first terrorist attack of a phase lasting till 2016 during which terrorism was considered a severe problem in Xinjiang. This is also the first attack China has attributed to the then East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), now Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) (ETIM/TIP). (see White Paper: The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang)

➤ 1996 November – The World Uyghur Youth Congress (WUYC) is established in Germany, with Omer Kanat and Dolkun Isa playing important roles. Both of them still hold high positions (Chairman of the Executive Committee and President, respectively) in the WUYC’s successor organization, the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). Kanat apparently left China in 1971 to Afghanistan, then to Turkey in 1979, before moving to the United States in 1999; Isa left China in 1994. Kanat has served as the Senior Editor of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service from 1999 to 2009.

➤ 1998 April – The Uyghur American Association (UAA) is founded. One of the people who played an important rule in its founding is Rushan Abbas, who would serve as Vice President for the UAA for two terms while also reporting for Radio Free Asia. Abbas arrived in the United States in 1989 and co-founded the United States’ first Uyghur association, the Uyghur Overseas Student and Scholars Association, in 1993.

• Abbas would later serve the United States at Guantanamo as a linguist and a translator. This has caused some netizens to doubt her legitimacy to speak on human rights issues.

➤ 2001 June 15 – In the inaugural meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China identified the “three evils” (the Chinese term 三股势力 is more akin to the “three forces” or “three influences”) of extremism (极端主义), separatism (分裂主义), and terrorism (恐怖主义). It has since applied this framework to the terrorism problem in Xinjiang. (see The Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism)

➤ 2001 September 11 – The 9/11 attacks claim the lives of 2,977 people (excluding the perpetrators). In response, the United States begins to wage the “War on Terror” and engaged itself in combat in at least 24 countries. This war has displaced anywhere between 37 to 59 million, according to a recent report (September 2020) from Brown University. This report also notes that 801,000 have died as a direct result from combat, but “indirect deaths” may reach up to 3.1 million after a war that has lasted almost two decades. 

➤ 2002 September 11 – The United Nations registers the ETIM/TIP as a terrorist organization. As of 2020, the United States Department of State has still not classified the ETIM/TIP as a terrorist organization, although the Department of State designated ETIM/TIP under E.O. 13224 prohibiting transactions with “Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism” on September 3, 2002.

➤ 2003 December 15 – China designates the ETIM/TIP, the WUYC, and two other organizations as terrorist organizations.

➤ 2004 April 16 – The WUC is founded in Munich, merging the East Turkestan National Congress and the WUYC. Its inaugural president is Erkin Alptekin, the son of Isa Yusuf Alptekin, a Guomindang affiliate who was virulently anti-communist (to the point that he largely opposed the Soviet-backed Second East Turkistan Republic) and violently opposed marriage between Hans and Uyghurs. Isa Alptekin remained active in Turkey after the Communist victory in China. 

• Presumably around the same time, the Uyghur American Association founded the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) with a supporting grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The UHRP was co-founded by Nury Turkel, who arrived in the United States in 1995 and was appointed to be a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom on May 26, 2020.
• The NED has since boasted on May 29, 2020 that it “has awarded $8,758,300 to Uyghur groups since 2004, serving as the only institutional funder for Uyghur advocacy and human rights organizations.”
• Erkin Alptekin himself is a longtime affiliate of the CIA, helping the CIA to build up “network of contacts with the Uighur separatist elements” in the 1970s and 1980s, and enjoying close relations with the 14th Dalai Lama. (see Raman, Bahukutumbi. “US & Terrorism in Xinjiang.” South Asia Analysis Group (Paper no. 499) (2002).)

➤ 2006 November 26 – Rebiya Kadeer is elected president of the WUC. Kadeer was sentenced to 8 years in prison for providing state information to foreign entities in 2000. This was after a career as a business owner, Vice-Chairwoman of the Xinjiang Federation of Industry and Commerce, Vice-Chairwoman of the Xinjiang Association of Women Entrepreneurs, and as a member of the 8th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. She was given leave on March 17th, 2005 to seek medical treatment in the United States on condition that she not engage in any subversive activities abroad.

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ii. Violence and Unrest (2009-2016)

The extent of terrorist violence in China during this period is not well known in the West. Although there were many attacks between 1990 and 2016 and not all of the information is yet available, some high-profile attacks are as follows:

➤ 2009 July 5 – The Urumqi Riots, 197 killed, 1700 wounded. Chinese investigations allege that the riots were enflamed by foreign entities such as the WUC to undermine regional stability and unity. As an aside, due to Facebook’s failure to provide information to the Chinese government following the attacks, Western social media was banned from China.

➤ 2013 October 28 – Tiananmen Attack, 5 killed, 40 wounded. Usmen Hasan, along with his mother and wife, drives a jeep through a crowd at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square before setting the vehicle on fire. Authorities find “extremist religious content” and a jihadi flag in the remains of the vehicle.

➤ 2014 March 1 – Kunming Train Station Attack, 31 killed, 141 wounded. Eight attackers burst into the city’s rail station, stabbing people at random before police arrive at the scene. Officials identify the leader of the group as Abdurehim Kurban, and state that insignias and flags worn by the attackers point to political involvement as “East Turkestan” separatists. The international community, including U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, joins China in denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism. 

➤ 2014 May 22 – Urumqi Attack, 39 killed and 94 injured as attackers drive two cars into a crowded marketplace and throw explosives towards surrounding buildings.

➤ 2014 July 30 – Assassination of Imam Jume Tahir at the Id Kah Mosque after morning prayers. Tahir was the practicing imam of Id Kah, China’s largest mosque, as well as a deputy to the National People’s Congress and vice president of the China Islamic Association. Tahir had called for peace and stability amidst rising violence in the region. (see also)

➤ 2016 September 6 – Kyrgyzstan’s state security service attributed the suicide bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek to the ETIM/TIP.

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iii. Chinese Anti-Terrorism Policy and International Context (2012-2016)

➤ 2012 October 30 – Chinese officials announce that since May 2012, ETIM/TIP has been participating in the Syrian Civil War, which had started in early 2011. (Later Anadolu Agency report from 2014)

➤ 2014 May 25 – The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region issues a notification on “Striking Hard Against Terrorist Activities Within the Confines of the Law,” indicating a turn of attention towards the problem of terrorism in Xinjiang.

• For an example of news coverage on Xinjiang’s society after this notification but before the De-radicalization Regulations of 2017, see Daily Sabah, “Uighurs do not face harsh oppression, Anadolu Agency reporters claim.” Daily Sabah, July 8, 2015. (based off “Anadolu Ajansı Uygur Özerk Bölgesi’ne Gitti: Oruç Yasağı Bildirimi Yok.” Haberler, July 8, 2015 [Turkish language])

➤ 2015 – A “Turkish passport plot” (see Global Times report) is exposed in which Turkey provided false passports to Chinese nationals in third countries (usually Thailand & Malaysia) for passage to Turkey.

➤ 2015 January 1 – Shohrat Zakir, a CPC cadre of Uygur nationality, assumes his current position of Chairman of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. He additionally remains the Deputy Party Secretary of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a position he has held since December 2014, and Secretary of the Party Group of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a position he has held since December 2013. This is in culmination of a decades-long career serving the CPC and Xinjiang, including serving on the Party Standing Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) from December 2005 to June 2011.

➤ 2015 May 29 – China receives a loan from the World Bank on the “Xinjiang Technical and Vocational Education and Training Project,” a five-year project lasting until April 30, 2020. It is the “fourth technical and vocational education and training project that the World Bank has supported in China since 2007.” This loan would be reviewed by the World Bank later on November 11, 2019. On March 31, 2019, it was reported that 113,880 students had enrolled in schools funded by this project, of which 40,413 were women and 65,015 were minorities.

➤ 2015 July – Thailand repatriates 109 Chinese nationals allegedly en route to Turkey to join terrorist groups in Syria. A few weeks later on August 17, 2015, terrorists detonated a bomb in Bangkok, claiming 20 lives. 2 Chinese nationals of the Uyghur nationality were charged. The prevailing theory is that it was in retaliation for the repatriation.

➤ Mid-2015 – The ETIM/TIP becomes settled in Idlib Province, Syria, particularly in the city of Jisr al-Shughur, near the border with Turkey. The ETIM/TIP occupation of Jisr al-Shughur is marked by “changing demographics” (p. 15) and sectarian violence.

➤ 2015 October – France begins operating “de-radicalization programs.” It would seem these programs have since garnered mostly criticism from the public, but mainstream Western discourse has not accused France of cultural genocide.

• While France’s de-radicalization program largely attracted controversy, programs like Denmark’s preceding France’s mostly went unnoticed, even being praised as a “groundbreaking de-radicalization program focused on providing opportunity to reintegrate versus punishment.”
• A year later in October 2016, the United Kingdom began the “Desistance and Disengagement Programme” aimed at “address[ing] the root causes of terrorism, build resilience, and contribute towards the deradicalisation of individuals.”
• New York Times reported on Kazakhstan’s de-radicalization program on August 10, 2019.

➤ 2015 December 27 – The 12th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passes the “Anti-Terrorism Law” (Chinese-language text), the first of its kind in the country.

• 2016 July 29 – The 12th Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region passes the “Xinjiang Implementation of the Anti-Terrorism Law,” adapting the Anti-Terrorism Law to Xinjiang’s regional context.

➤ 2016 – Chen Quanguo is appointed the Party Secretary of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the First Commissar of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (The First Commissar of XPCC is always held by the Party Secretary of Xinjiang). As his previous tenure from 2011 to 2016 was as the Party Secretary of Tibet Autonomous Region, Western NGOs cite Chen’s influence for alleged increase in human rights abuses in Xinjiang. A year later in 2017, Chen would be appointed a seat in the Politburo while retaining his two posts.

➤ 2016 December 23 – Adrian Zenz begins his career pivot to Xinjiang after a brief focus on Tibetan language and culture (and born-again Christian writings) with a Foreign Affairs article about Xinjiang’s police and surveillance apparatus.

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b. 2017-Present

The waning of the severity of extremist violence in Xinjiang by 2017 coincided with elevated antagonisms in the U.S.-China relationship. The Trump Administration’s inaugural National Security Strategy document identified China as a strategic threat to U.S. power, setting the stage for ongoing trade, tech, and ideological attacks on China. During this time, the U.S. raised the issue of Xinjiang in international bodies and federal legislation as part of its efforts to isolate China on the world stage.

i. The Seeds of Controversy (2017-Aug 2018)

➤ 2017 March 6 – President Donald Trump signs Executive Order 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” or “Travel Ban 2.0,” superseding EO 13769 issued on January 27, 2017. It originally banned the entry of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—all Muslim-majority countries. This was all done quickly after President Trump assumed his post on January 20, 2017, after fervently advocating a “Muslim Ban” during his candidacy (see J. Sotomayor’s dissent in Trump v. Hawaii). 

➤ 2017 March 14 – Zenz joins the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief and continues his pivot to Xinjiang, initially focusing on the securitization of Xinjiang. (2017-3-14 Article, 2017-9-21 Article, 2018-3-12 Article) Interestingly, Adrian Zenz’s March 14th, 2017 article was considered a “fair assessment,” if biased, by Ian Goodrum, writer and digital editor for China Daily, indicating that there may have been a time Adrian Zenz did not feel as clearly “led by God” on a mission against China, as he indicated on May 21, 2019.

➤ 2017 March 29 – The 12th Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region passes the “Xinjiang De-radicalization Regulations” (Chinese-language text). Contemporary mainstream media’s focused criticisms on the “ban on long beards, veils” (Al-Jazeera) articulated in Article 9 of the original Regulations and not on Article 14, which outlined education and psychological counseling as part of de-radicalization work. 

• See Cui, Jia & Gao, Bo, “Islamic institutes step up training to fight extremism.” Xinhua. March 30, 2015, for an earlier instance of education as de-radicalization work.

➤ 2017 May 11 – Syrian ambassador tells China that up to 5000 ethnic Uyghurs were fighting in various militant groups in Syria.

➤ 2017 June 1 – China releases the white paper “Human Rights in Xinjiang – Development and Progress.”

➤ 2017 August 1 – WUC begins activism and writing on “internment camps,” citing April and May as the first months of detainment of Uyghur citizens. Sporadic reporting include: 

• September 10, 2017 Human Rights Watch report alleging “thousands” of detainees. Interestingly, Human Rights Watch reported that “State media in Xinjiang, including the Xinjiang Daily, have reported on these facilities,” which would seem to contradict Reuters’ later 2018 headline that the facilities were “secret.” 
• January 22, 2018 Radio Free Asia report claims “around 120,000” detainees based on information provided by an anonymous source from Chasa Township (possibly 恰萨美其特乡)
• February 28, 2018 Foreign Policy article by a “Special Correspondent” on “A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag.”
• March 13, 2018 Newsweek Japan article (Japanese-language) by Naoko Mizutani (Japanese researcher previously barred from China for her support of Rebiya Kadeer) reporting “890,000 or more” detainees based on an unverified “leak” by Istiqlal TV (Uyghur-language, “leaked information” at 3:14), a Turkey-based media platform advocating for separatism from China. Also runs the English-language Turkistan Times.
  • As an aside, Rebiya Kadeer has also previously visited the Yasukuni Shrine on May 14th, 2012. The Yasukuni Shrine honors, among others, 1068 war criminals, including 14 Class A war criminals, as ruled by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

➤ 2017 September – Presumably around this time, Rushan Abbas founds the Campaign for Uyghurs.

• On November 12, 2017, Dolkun Isa takes Rebiya Kadeer’s place as President of the World Uyghur Congress. Although Kadeer said, “It is time for the younger generation to take up the leadership role at the WUC,” Isa seems to have been involved in diaspora Uyghur organizations longer than she has, at least overtly (since at least 1996 for Isa and since at least 2005 for Kadeer). 
• Similarly, Omer Kanat sometime in 2017 took up both the Chairman of the World Uyghur Congress Executive Committee and Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

➤ 2018 April 26 – Mike Pompeo, former Director of the CIA and notoriously proud of lying, cheating, and stealing, assumes office as Secretary of State, heralding a new era of rapidly deteriorating U.S.-China relations.

• Prior to assuming the post of the United States’ foremost diplomat, Pompeo had a long and distinguished history of being a relentless Islamophobe. Among other instances, he declared that “silence [in condemning the 2013 Boston bombings] has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit.”

➤ 2018 May 15 – Zenz starts to fix his eyes on Xinjiang’s de-radicalization program and criticizes education as de-radicalization work authorized by Article 14 of the Xinjiang De-radicalization Regulations. Between “several hundred thousand and just over one million” detainees are “estimate[d]” from “information from various sources…”, citing specifically Naoko Mizutani’s Newsweek Japan article.

➤ 2018 May 29 – The United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom releases the 2017 Report on International Religious Freedom. Its report on China raises concerns that “human rights groups and others reported hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims… forcibly sent to re-education camps…”

➤ 2018 August 3 – Chinese Human Rights Defenders publishes a report “China: Massive Numbers of Uyghurs & Other Ethnic Minorities Forced into Re-education Programs.” This is the report taking eight anonymous interviewees and extrapolating 1 million incarcerated (or even up to 3 million) from their unverified statements.

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ii. Entrenching the Narratives (Aug 2018-Jan 2020)

➤ 2018 August 10 – Meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It is here that Gay McDougall alleged concentration camps, forcing the controversy over the de-radicalization program in general, and the vocational centers in particular, into wide public discourse for the first time. (press release, 2018-8-13)

• Reuters on the same day erroneously reported it as “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps.” Most news outlets failed to clarify that the UN CERD—let alone a sole committee member thereof—cannot speak for the UN; Gay McDougall said she had credible reports but failed to cite them.
  • Grayzone rebuttal by Ben Norton & Ajit Singh
• The Press release actually reads: “Committee Experts, in the dialogue that followed, congratulated China for creating extraordinary prosperity and lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, including in the eight multi-ethnic provinces and regions, but remain concerned over the growing inequality, particularly for ethnic minorities who continued to disproportionately experience poverty… A great source of concern was racial discrimination in the context of laws fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism, particularly against Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other ethnic minorities.” (As it turns out, Gay McDougall was both the only American at the meeting and the only person at the meeting to bring up “internment camps”)

➤ 2018 August 20 – While being interviewed by Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone, Omer Kanat admits that the “one million” figure was from “Western media estimates.” 

➤ 2018 September 6 – Adrian Zenz publishes “Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang” in the Central Asian Survey, a peer-reviewed article version of Zenz’s May 15, 2018 report. In it, Zenz clarifies the sources for his estimate of “approx. 1,060,000”: Naoko Mizutani’s Newsweek Japan article and Radio Free Asia.

➤ 2018 October 9 – The 13th Standing Committee of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region People’s Congress amends the “Xinjiang De-radicalization Regulations” (amended Chinese text here) to expressly outline vocational education as a central strategy for de-radicalization work (Global Times report, SCMP report) (Relevant changes: Article 14 amended; Articles 17, 21, 33 added).

• It is important to note that vocational education is not unique to Xinjiang. For instance, the Ministry of Education reported in 2015 that 7.25 million adult students were undergoing non-academic degree higher education, while the Ministry reported in 2018 that 11.3 million students were registered in vocational colleges. The white paper “Employment and Labor Rights in Xinjiang” provides further that from 2014 to 2019 “Xinjiang provided training sessions [vocational education] to an average of 1.29 million urban and rural workers [annually], of which 451,400 were in southern Xinjiang.” This 1.29 million figure here is for all vocational education, not just persons who undergo vocational education as a part of the de-radicalization program.

➤ 2018 November 1 – The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) publishes “Mapping Xinjiang’s ‘re-education’ camps,” a report analyzing satellite imagery. Mainly, ASPI analyzes “28 facilities,” but alleges 181 (Agence France-Presse) or “as many as 1,200” (Adrian Zenz) such facilities, although an examination of their cited sources reveals no evidentiary basis for such allegations. (Note: ASPI is primarily funded by the Australian government and maintains strong funding relationships with weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin)

➤ 2018 November 15 – China releases the white paper “Cultural Protection and Development in Xinjiang.”

➤ 2018 December 19 – Relying on ASPI personnel and witnesses, AP condemns Hetian Taida Apparel for using “forced labor” due to its public association with a vocational training program, which AP insinuated were “concentration camps.” The Hetian Taida Apparel ordeal is the birth of the “forced labor” allegations in the current controversy. 

➤ 2018 December 28-30 – Diplomats from 12 countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Kuwait) visit Xinjiang. Pakistani diplomat Mumtaz Zahra Baloch reported that the delegation was given full and open access to three vocational centers and that she “did not find any instance of forced labor or cultural and religious repression” during her tours of the region.

➤ 2019 January 6 – Reuters visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 January 9-16 – A media group of 12 representatives from 6 countries (Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 January 22 – The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation announces its one-week-long visit to China. This is presumably the visit on which the later OIC resolution is based.

➤ 2019 January 25-31 – A media delegation from Egypt visits Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 February 16-19 – Senior diplomats from the permanent missions of eight countries to the United Nations Office at Geneva visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 February 22-27 – A group of 11 journalists from Indonesia and Malaysia, as part of the ASEAN Elites China Tour 2019, visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 February 25-27 – Around 200 representatives of 50 political parties from nearly 30 countries visit Urumqi Xinjiang for a meeting aimed at showcasing China’s ethnic policy in Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 February 28-March 2 – Diplomats from Myanmar, Algeria, Morocco, Vietnam, Hungary, Greece, Singapore and the mission of the League of Arab States visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 March 1-2 – 46th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the Non-OIC Member States (OIC/CFM-46/2019/MM/RES/FINAL), ¶20 of Resolution No.1/46-MM [pg.5] (“… commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens…”).

➤ 2019 March 18 – China releases the white paper “The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang.” A transfer employment program for 100,000 people was mentioned and would presumably be the object of consternation in the ASPI report of March 2020 alleging slavery.

• CGTN summary with some infographics

➤ 2019 March 25 – The European Union rejects China’s offer of Xinjiang tour, but says it is open to one later. The EU would sit on its rain check for 539 days before once again demanding “independent” investigations into Xinjiang on September 14, 2020, despite the nearly 1,000 personnel from diplomatic, media, and academic circles who were invited to visit Xinjiang in 2019. 

➤ 2019 March 27-29 – Milan Bacevic, Serbian Ambassador to China, and Selim Belortaja, Albanian Ambassador to China, visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 May 7 – NPR releases its report on its visit to a vocational center.

➤ 2019 May 10 – Val Thompson, founder and publisher of International Focus Magazine – Houston, writes on his experiences visiting Xinjiang. He states that in his group of media visitors were journalists from “Afghanistan, Egypt, Belgium, Bangladesh, Belarus, Jordan, Japan, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, India, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, UAE, USA, Switzerland, and a Geneva Delegation.”

➤ 2019 June 15 – Under Secretary-General of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Office Vladimir Voronkov visits Xinjiang and reaches a “broad consensus” with China on the issue of counter-terrorism.

➤ 2019 June 18 – BBC’s visit to a vocational center.

• See also Sun, Feiyang, “Breaking down the BBC’s visit to Hotan, Xinjiang.” Medium. July 18, 2019.

➤ 2019 June 18-21 – Diplomats from 14 countries (including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Congo (Democratic Republic of), Laos, Malaysia, Nigeria, Serbia, Somalia, Tajikistan, Togo) and a representative from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation based in Geneva visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 July 1 – Hong Kong protestors storm and vandalize the Legislative Council. It would appear that Western media would spend most of the remaining summer fixated on Hong Kong.

➤ 2019 July 8, 12 – 41st Session of the Human Rights Council. Two joint letters took opposing views of China’s conduct in Xinjiang.

• A/HRC/41/G/11 [criticizing] – Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom [22]
• A/HRC/41/G/17 [supporting] – Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo (Democratic Republic of), Congo (Republic of), Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of), Kuwait, Laos, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Palestine [50]

➤ 2019 July 12 – Adrian Zenz pushes the “forced labor” angle with his paper, “Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Grand Scheme of Forced Labor, Poverty Alleviation and Social Control in Xinjiang,” which would not get peer-reviewed until its publication in the Journal of Political Risk (a journal with a long history of involvement with U.S. military and intelligence) on December 10, 2019. Zenz relies on scaremongering about China’s poverty alleviation programs and pair assistance programs (whereby a richer province gives monetary and other material aid to poorer provinces, manifesting in factories or educational support) to draw foregone conclusions of forced labor. One such poverty alleviation workshop mentioned in Zenz’s report can be seen in this vlogger’s video.

➤ 2019 July 14-22 – Journalists from 24 countries including India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, and Uzbekistan visit Xinjiang.

• One of the journalists on this trip was Tunç Akkoç, General Manager of Turkey’s Aydınlık Daily (newspaper of Turkey’s Vatan Partisi). His report published on Xinhua is as follows. (2019-8-11)
• Aydınlık Daily and Vatan Partisi have since rebuked the United States’ position in the controversy (Aydınlık 2020-2-21, Vatan Partisi’s statement reported in Aydınlık 2020-9-10 [Turkish language]).

➤ 2019 July 21 – China releases the white paper “Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang.”

➤ 2019 August 17 – China releases the white paper “Vocational Education and Training in Xinjiang” (this is the white paper that states that “No terrorist incidents have occurred in Xinjiang for nearly three years since the education and training started.”). 

➤ 2019 August 17-23 – A media group from 16 countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 August 19-21 – Diplomats from Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and Nigeria visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 August 28-September 1 – Diplomats from Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 August 29 – ABC’s visit to the vocational centers.

➤ 2019 September 9-12 – Diplomats from 16 African countries (including Burundi, Djibouti, Uganda, Lesotho, Sudan and Zimbabwe) and the African Union visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 October 17 – Amy K. Lehr & Mariefaye Bechrakis from Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) publish “Connecting the Dots in Xinjiang: Forced Labor, Forced Assimilation, and Western Supply Chains.” Noticeably, in the interceding 10 months since the Hetian Taida Apparel report, the researchers do not have another “‘smoking gun’ for forced labor in Xinjiang,” and are left with witness testimonies and Zenzian logic that vocational training and rural poverty alleviation carries “a significant risk that in many cases the detainees and rural poor are not participating by choice,” without anything to back up that assertion.

• Global Times 10/25 rebuttal

➤ 2019 October 29 – 74th Session of the General Assembly (A/C.3/74/SR.37).

• Total 24 countries and the European Union criticized China’s position on Xinjiang
  • ¶41 – United Kingdom joint statement on behalf of itself, Albania, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United States
  • Represented in joint statement and criticized in individual capacity: United States (¶43)
  • Criticized in individual capacity: European Union (¶58), Turkey (¶45)
• Total 57 countries supported China’s position on Xinjiang
  • ¶40 – Belarus joint statement on behalf of itself, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo (Democratic Republic of), Congo (Republic of), Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of), Laos, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Togo, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Palestine
  • Represented in joint statement and supported in individual capacity: Bolivia (¶56), Burundi (¶52), Cambodia (¶49), Cameroon (¶48), China (¶66), Cuba (¶53), Congo (Republic of) (¶77), Equatorial Guinea (¶60), Guinea (¶70), Laos (¶76), Myanmar (¶61), Nicaragua (¶64), Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of) (¶73), Pakistan (¶68), Syria (¶55), Zimbabwe (¶57)
  • Supported in individual capacity: Ethiopia (¶72), Kyrgyzstan (¶59), Saudi Arabia (¶75 – note: qualified support)

➤ 2019 November – Sometime in November, Former Deputy Speaker of the Indonesian House of Representatives Fahri Hamzah led a delegation to visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2019 November 11 – World Bank releases a statement regarding its visit to Xinjiang concerning the vocational centers, finding no aberrations.

➤ 2019 November 16 – New York Times publishes a story about “leaked documents” concerning Xinjiang. These documents had strange grammatical errors and have been disavowed as false.

➤ 2019 December 5 – CGTN releases two specials about terrorism in Xinjiang, with footage never released to the public before, including footage of the above-mentioned attacks. They were made available to YouTube on December 11th. 

➤ 2019 December 9 – Xinhua reports that students “participating in education and training programs of standard spoken and written Chinese, understanding of the law, vocational skills and deradicalization at vocational education and training centers” have all graduated.

By the end of 2019 – 

• Nearly 1,000 personnel from diplomatic, media, and academic circles were invited to visit Xinjiang in 2019. 
• Xinjiang received more than 200 million tourists in 2019, up 41.6% from 2018’s 150 million.
• From 2014 to 2019, nearly 2,923,200 residents of Xinjiang constituting 737,000 households were lifted out of poverty, dropping the poverty rate from 2013’s 19.4% to 1.24%. (original Chinese editorial, English summary) 645,000 were lifted out of poverty in 2019 alone. Xinjiang must still lift another 165,000 people out of poverty to meet China’s 2020 goals for poverty alleviation. (see CGTN report)

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iii. U.S. Pursues Unilateral Action (Jan 2020-present)

➤ 2020 January 23 – Having confirmed human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in tandem with the World Health Organization, China locks down Wuhan City and later the entire Hubei Province. While still pushing the Xinjiang issue, Western media became fixated on the pandemic response, seizing on human suffering to push a political and often racist agenda.

➤ 2020 February – Adrian Zenz publishes a report about the “Karakax List” in the Journal of Political Risk, supposedly a leaked document from 2017 provided by the Uyghur Human Rights Project proving collection of information about 3,000 Uyghurs and detention of 311 of them in Karakax (Moyu) County.

• Global Times’ 2/18, 2/20, and 2/23 rebuttals.

➤ 2020 March 1 – ASPI publishes “Uyghurs for sale,” a report alleging forced labor (and, notably, “slavery”) of Uyghur people around China. This seems to be scrutinizing the transfer employment program from an earlier Chinese white paper. It also builds on the material previously pushed by Adrian Zenz and CSIS. 

• 2020 March 26 Grayzone rebuttal by Ajit Singh. Global Times 3/1, 3/16 rebuttals.

➤ 2020 April 4 – China holds a national mourning ceremony for the victims and first responders of COVID-19. China’s ability to contain COVID comes in sharp contrast to the United States, which declared a state of emergency on March 13th and has since watched its situation worsen significantly. The United States accelerates escalation of tensions with China.

➤ 2020 June 17 – President Trump signs the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act into law, ending a process started after it was first passed as a bill by the Senate on September 11, 2019.

➤ 2020 June 18 – CGTN releases another special about terrorism in Xinjiang, Tianshan: Still Standing. 

➤ 2020 June 29 – Adrian Zenz publishes a report alleging mass sterilization of Uyghur people through the Jamestown Foundation. This report has a blatant mathematical error. 

• Global Times rebuttal (2020-7-3), Global Times infographic (2020-9-7), Rebuttal by Dr. Lin Fangfei of Xinjiang University (2020-9-14) (CGTN summary)), Rebuttal by the Southwest University of Political Science & Law (summary) (2020-9-16)

➤ 2020 July – 44th UN Human Rights Council meeting, in which two joint statements took opposing sides as to China’s conduct in Xinjiang

• [criticizing] (2020-6-30) – United Kingdom on behalf of itself, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland [27]
• [supporting] (2020-7-1) – Belarus on behalf of itself, Bahrain, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, China, Comoros, Congo (Republic of), Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of), Laos, Lesotho, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Syria, Togo, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe [46]
• The criticizing statement also attacked China’s sovereignty on Hong Kong, leading to a same-day joint statement on Hong Kong made by Cuba on behalf of 53 countries.

➤ 2020 July 6 – The Washington Post editorial board publishes the opinion piece, “What’s happening in Xinjiang is genocide,” marking the rapid escalation of allegations. The opinion references “new evidence” of forced sterilizations, but cites only Adrian Zenz’s June 2020 report for the Jamestown Foundation and an Associated Press “investigative report” which similarly relies on Zenz’s research.

➤ 2020 July 16 – An Urumqi resident is found to be an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19 (Chinese source), leading to an identified COVID-19 cluster in Urumqi, Xinjiang, which had until then seen minimal cases since January 25. However, China’s efforts to combat COVID in Xinjiang go largely unreported.

• As an aside, photos from February 19, 2020 show doctors, police, and border guards on horseback on snowy Kurte (Ku’erte) Plains (near the border with Mongolia), Fuyun County, Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (Business Insider and People’s Daily Wechat Post). This demonstrates the extent of China’s COVID response, as officials made sure every person was provided for, in this case agro-pastoral citizens in border regions. 

➤ 2020 July 24 – In response to the United States ordering the Chinese Consulate in Houston to close, China ordered the United States Consulate in Chengdu to close. Radio Free Asia among others speculated that this would stymie United States intelligence gathering on Xinjiang.

➤ 2020 July 30 – Amy K. Lehr of CSIS publishes a brief “Addressing Forced Labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Toward a Shared Agenda.” Particularly noticeable about this brief is its emphasis on the XPCC, with assertions cited backed up by sources from Radio Free Asia, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Citizen Power Initiatives for China (an otherwise opaque organization based in Brookline, Massachusetts founded by Yang Jianli, a self-described “Tiananmen survivor”). Footnote 33 cites Bao Yajun’s article on the XPCC but misrepresents the source, which does not mention labor camps as Lehr asserts.

➤ 2020 July 31 – The United States imposes Global Magnitsky sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps over accusations that it is connected to human rights abuses against minorities in Xinjiang. The sanctions include Chen Quanguo, the first Politburo member to be sanctioned by the United States. 

➤ 2020 July 30 and August 7 – Coda Story—a self-described counterweight to Russian and Chinese “disinformation” funded by the U.S. and EU—runs two pieces seeking to undermine The Grayzone, Jerry Grey, and Carl Zha, some of the few Western sources to contradict the mainstream media narrative on Xinjiang. 

• The Grayzone’s rebuttal by Ben Norton (8/18).

➤ 2020 August 15-16 – Carl Zha and Daniel Dumbrill both release interviews held with Arslan Hidayat, an activist noted for spreading many lies about Xinjiang by faking captions and taking Douyin and other videos out of context on social media (see this Twitter thread, which also exposes similar lies made by CJ Werlemen, who would shortly afterwards write an article alleging 9 million incarcerated in Xinjiang). Among other happenings, Hidayat admits to putting fake captions on videos he posts as well as to having no hard evidence for his claims, instead relying on mainstream media and “scholars” like Adrian Zenz. Hidayat also displays a seeming ignorance of the general contours of Xinjiang history and its people.

➤ 2020 August 17 – Radio Free Asia reports that Xinjiang hospital kills babies, relying on witnesses and Adrian Zenz’s mathematically suspect June 29 report.

➤ 2020 August 24 – CJ Werlemen at Byline Times reports “evidence that up to nine million Uyghurs are unaccounted for and allegations Chinese authorities plan to kill, incarcerate or convert the whole population.” His only source is Dr. Erkin Sidick, President of the Uyghur Projects Foundation and senior advisor to the World Uyghur Congress, who left China in the late 1980s and whose own sources are ever reliable anonymous Chinese government sources. The report also cites Zenz’s mathematically suspect June 29, 2020 report and the NYT’s November 16, 2019 grammatically wanting “leaks” to back up Dr. Sidick’s otherwise baseless allegations. Near the end of the article, Dr. Sidick decides to liberally tamper with the statistics to prove his own foregone conclusions.

➤ 2020 August 25 – CGTN releases a new documentary collecting the experiences of students of the vocational centers, Lies and truth: Vocational education and training in Xinjiang.

➤ 2020 August 27 – Buzzfeed, backed by ASPI and Open Technology Fund (part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Radio Free Asia, and a key supporter of 2019 Hong Kong riots) among others, pushes a two-part report relying satellite imagery, blanked-out images on Baidu Maps which are otherwise common occurrences, and witness testimony to further the Western narrative on Xinjiang. One such “camp” is in actuality an apartment complex with a five-star rating.

➤ 2020 September 2 – After about a month and a half, the COVID-19 cluster in Xinjiang is contained and Urumqi’s lockdown is lifted.

➤ 2020 September 9 – The U.S. State Department creates a new page just for propagandizing “CCP”’s atrocities in Xinjiang, in addition to releasing a short condemnatory video. Neither add anything new. The webpage relies on “recent, documented evidence” for “forced population control,” presumably Adrian Zenz’s mathematically suspect June 29 report; “NGO estimates and media reports” for “forced labor,” presumably ASPI’s and CSIS’ scare pieces; and unsubstantiated nonsense such as “CCP target[ing]… Uyghur language and Uyghur music.”

➤ 2020 September 14 – The United States restricts cotton and apparel imports from Xinjiang, citing “forced labor.” Both cotton and apparel industries are important to poverty alleviation and economic development in Xinjiang.

➤ 2020 September 15 – China agrees to and will arrange for European Union diplomats in China to visit Xinjiang.

➤ 2020 September 17 – China releases the white paper “Employment and Labor Rights in Xinjiang.” Some actors have twisted the white paper’s statistics (“Every year from 2014 to 2019 Xinjiang provided training sessions to an average of 1.29 million urban and rural workers, of which 451,400 were in southern Xinjiang”) to allege that China admitted to interning “8 million” into camps (presumably 1.29 x 6 = 7.74 for the headlining “8 million”). It bears repeating that this figure includes normal vocational education as well as those educated in institutions funded by the 2015 World Bank project. To date, the Chinese government has not released a figure on the number of people who have undergone vocational education as part of its de-radicalization program.

• The relevant statistics in the original Chinese reads as follow: 据统计，2014年至2019年，全疆年均培训城乡各类劳动者128.8万人次，其中，南疆地区年均培训45.14万人次。

➤ 2020 September 22 – The U.S. Congress passes the “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act,” authorizing sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and any other Xinjiang entity as determined by the discretion of the Department of Commerce. It expressly targets China’s poverty alleviation and pair-assistance programs designed to develop Xinjiang and bring residents out of absolute poverty. For more about the genocidal impact of U.S. sanctions as a form of economic warfare primarily targeting civilians, see Robin Davis, Onyesonwu Chatoyer, & Nancy Wright, “Sanctions Kill: The Devastating Human Cost of Sanctions,” Hood Communist (blog), March 26, 2020.

➤ 2020 September 23 – ASPI launches a “Xinjiang Data Project” (reportedly mapping “380 sites of suspected re-education camps, detention centres and prisons that have been built or expanded since 2017”) with an accompanying report on “Cultural erasure.” The former in particular has been heavily criticized online for designating common schools and offices as concentration camps and listing the renovated Keriya Aitika Mosque as demolished.

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c. On the Nature of Unsubstantiated Allegations

The World Uyghur Congress began conducting activism based on the allegation of Xinjiang “concentration camps” in August 2017, four months after the promulgation of the Xinjiang De-radicalization Regulations. The controversy entered mainstream Western discourse a year later in August 2018 with Gay McDougall’s unsubstantiated claims at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 

In the interceding time, claims of concentration camps, cultural genocide, demographic genocide, slavery, and mass sterilization have saturated media and political discourse. The evidentiary weakness of these rapidly escalating claims is evinced by the shifting numbers of alleged detainees, which has ebbed and flowed from 120,000 on the low end to up to 9 million out of a Uyghur population of roughly 12 million (2019).

While Western media often paints Xinjiang as a black box, Xinjiang has in fact never been closed or restricted to outside visitors until the outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020 (unlike Tibet Autonomous Region, which requires most foreigners to acquire special permits to visit). Indeed despite the nearly 1,000 visits by outside observers and 200 million tourists to Xinjiang in 2019, no convincing photo or video evidence has emerged of supposed genocide in Xinjiang, much less the complete absence of any recent refugee crisis originating from Xinjiang.

Photos and videos fallaciously used to prove, show, or insinuate either concentration camps or slave labor of Xinjiang people include:

• An April 14, 2017 de-radicalization public talk at Luopu County Reform & Correction Centre (explanatory Twitter thread).
• An August 12, 2017 arrest of pyramid fraudsters in Bijie, Guizhou (explanatory Twitter thread)
• A video uploaded on September 17, 2019 appearing to show a routine prisoner transfer in what looks to be Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, with vests printed “Kashgar Detention House (喀什看守所).” (see Global Times, 2020-7-22, in response to the re-emergence of the video in summer 2020 and BBC’s confrontation of Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming using the video on 2020-7-19) Detention Houses are otherwise normal infrastructure in today’s China. (see this Zhihu answer for one person’s experience staying 37 days in a Detention House, and this post about the work of a police personnel tasked to a Detention House) [Chinese language]
• A December 21, 2019 transportation of suspected fraud criminals from Shanghai to Taiyuan by Taiyuan police (explanatory Twitter thread).
• A stock photo of a Chilean shoe factory from 2010 (Reddit post)
• Satellite imagery of assorted buildings in China, some of which are normal prisons and at least one of which is a 5-star apartment complex.
• In some extreme cases, videos from other countries entirely (video was from Indonesia – part of what is being said is “ampun, pak, gak lagi” – have mercy, I won’t do it again), videos from a Taiwanese BDSM club, or edited and pixelated photos to try to push the narrative. 

It is clear that the burden of evidence for disproving allegations of slavery and genocide in Xinjiang has been set far higher than the burden of evidence for lodging these allegations in the first place. With the popular imagination saturated with images of alleged atrocities, it is difficult to argue for any course of U.S. action other than sanctions, isolation, and intervention. Such is the nature, by intent, of atrocity propaganda as it has been wielded to justify U.S. imperial adventurism. If nothing else, the context and evidence provided in this timeline should make clear that spurious claims based on weak evidence have been wielded unilaterally by the U.S. and its allies to spurn China despite broad international approval for Chinese policy in Xinjiang.

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3. Resources

a. Overview

These readings are general overviews of Xinjiang in general and the current controversy in particular. They can act as effective one-stop resources for those seeking a quick summary.  

Ang, Matthias & Wong, Kayla. “Different media report differently on controversial Xinjiang re-education camps in China. Read them all.”, Mothership, July 21, 2019.

• Ang and Wong offer an even-handed survey of the biases and conflicting diagnoses of different news reports on the Xinjiang controversy. The authors don’t try to take a side but advocate seeking a diversity of sources. 

Kanthan, Chris. “Xinjiang and Uyghurs – What You’re Not Being Told,” World Affairs Blog (blog).

• A quick collection of facts about key cultural, historical, and political aspects of Xinjiang.

“Notes on China-Uighur Controversies: An Ever Increasing Collection of Notes, Links, Sources, & Observations”

• A well-sourced and extensive ongoing Google Document written by a leftist in critical evaluation of the Xinjiang controversy.

Singh, Ajit & Max Blumenthal. “China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-reach researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing.” The Grayzone. December 21, 2019.

• A rather thorough examination of the handful of sources from which claims of ‘millions’ in concentration camps has been uncritically adopted by mainstream media. The argument focuses on the personal records and financial ties of frequently-cited ‘experts’ such as Adrian Zenz. 

Zhao, He. “Xinjiang: Facts vs. Fiction.” Medium. November 16, 2019.

• This is perhaps the quickest yet comprehensive read on Xinjiang generally and the current controversy in particular. 

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b. Chinese Perspectives on the Problem of Terrorism

These sources document the scope and extent of the recent history of terrorism in China, which received little attention in the Western press. These sources also highlight official Chinese perspectives on how to resolve the problem as peacefully as possible. China’s stated policies of economic development and poverty alleviation are key pathways towards improving social stability and tackling some of the root causes that foment violence—an approach that stands in stark contrast to the tactics employed during the U.S. so-called “War on Terror.” 

It is important to note that Western reports and figures have failed to differentiate between generalized vocational education in Xinjiang—which is an aspect of poverty alleviation programs throughout China—and vocational education as part of targeted de-radicalization programs.

CGTN. “Fighting terrorism in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 50:01. December 11, 2019.

• CW: Violence. This documentary in particular is notable for releasing previously unreleased footage of terrorist attacks as well as extensive interviews with a wide variety of people including victims, former terrorists, religious authorities, locals, and police. [some of the interviewees speak in Uyghur]

CGTN. “The Black Hand – ETIM and Terrorism in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 29:06. December 11, 2019.

• CW: Violence. This documentary shares some footage with the above, but otherwise is a shorter film focused more on the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM/TIP), its links to al- Qaeda, and the international nature of the threat it poses. [some of the interviewees speak in Uyghur]

CGTN. “Tianshan: Still Standing – Memories of fighting terrorism in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 57:52. June 18, 2020.

• CW: Violence. This documentary revisits the lingering impacts of terrorism in today’s Xinjiang. Some highlights include the revisiting of Dilqemer’s story from the “Fighting terrorism” documentary; new interviews with police and locals such as Memet Jume, son of former Id Kah imam Jume Tahir assassinated in 2014, and Muhpira Rahman, a female People’s Armed Police member; and exclusive looks at Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County and the Chinese-Afghan border. [some of the interviewees speak in Uyghur; the interviewee Memetrehim Ibrahim speaks in Sarikoli] 

CGTN. “Lies and truth: Vocational education and training in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 35:08. August 25, 2020.

• CW: Violence. This documentary focuses on vocational centers and their students. There is some overlap with the “Embracing a New Life” mini-series (see below), particularly in the stories of the painter Ablizkari Ubul and dancer Aqida Arslan. Has a short section near the end containing comments by international observers to Xinjiang. [some of the interviewees speak in Uyghur]

“Why are western media silent on China’s documentaries on Xinjiang?” CGTN. December 9, 2019. (Based on Tong, Li. “CGTN发“大尺度”新疆反恐纪录片，西方媒体却沉默了.” Guancha. December 9, 2019.)

• From a Chinese perspective, this article questions why Western voices which claim to value human rights have not paid heed to issues of violence and terrorism directed against civilians in Xinjiang and beyond. 

“Joint Letter to Mike Pompeo, From Scholars and Religious Personnel in Xinjiang.” Tianshan Net. July 19, 2019.

• A letter from about 100 scholars and religious personnel in Xinjiang rebuking comments made by Secretary Pompeo.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang. 2019. 

• A white paper concerning the broader strategy against terrorism undertaken in Xinjiang.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Vocational Education and Training in Xinjiang. 2019.

• A white paper focusing specifically on the vocational centers and their operations.

Sha, Yuan. “China’s contribution to the international counter-terrorism cause.” CGTN. September 26, 2019.

• Paraphrasing remarks made by Wang Yi at the UN – clearly identifying poverty as a root cause of terrorism.

Ed. Xiang, Bo. “Full transcript: Interview with Xinjiang government chief on counterterrorism, vocational education and training in Xinjiang.” Xinhua. October 16, 2018. 

• Xinhua interview with Shohrat Zakir, Chairman of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, concerning the roots of terrorism, poverty alleviation and education as solution, and the vocational centers.

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c. Geopolitical Context

These sources place the current controversy in light of geopolitical interests. In particular, the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive Chinese-led multi-national infrastructure project that has drawn ire as a threat to U.S. unipolarity, runs through Xinjiang as a strategic region connecting China to North and West Asia.

While the U.S. has long recognized that its naval supremacy in the South China Sea could effectively “strangle” China’s economy in the event of hot war, Xinjiang in particular and the Belt and Road Initiative in general provide an overland route for Chinese trade which undermines U.S. military supremacy. As such, these sources contextualize the Xinjiang controversy amidst broader U.S. efforts to contain and isolate China.

Al-Ghadhawi, Abdullah. “Uighur Jihadists in Syria.” Center for Global Policy. March 18, 2020.

• A short article about the circumstances surrounding ethnic Uyghur fighters in Syria.

Azam, Azhar. “BRI is instrumental to realizing ‘no poverty’ vision.” CGTN. October 18, 2019.

• A short article making clear BRI’s role in Xinjiang’s poverty alleviation as well as its potential for poverty alleviation in other countries.

Bhadrakumar, M.K. “US lacerates China’s Uighur wound.” Indian Punchline (blog). March 28, 2019.

• Indian Punchline is a blog run by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a retired career diplomat of India. This blogpost—slightly dated now given the evolution of the controversy—properly examines the Xinjiang controversy in the U.S.’s strategic calculus.

Fuller, Graham E. & S. Frederick Starr. “The Xinjiang Problem.” Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. 2003.

• An interesting dated report on the then situation in Xinjiang, written by a former Vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council and CIA Station Chief in Kabul. Not only a primer on some of the longer-term background of the issue through the lenses of the United States (and a light on the severity of the terrorism issue), but also a window into a prior time in which a prominent United States thinker urged cooperation with China to defeat terrorism and to avoid over-politicizing the issue in the hopes of greater global stability. 

Gunaratna, Rohan. “Salafism in China and its Jihadist-Takfiri strains.” Al Mesbar Studies & Research Center. January 18, 2018.

• A short report on Salafism in China and the connection of some of its more extremist strands to terrorist activities over time.

Novák, Izak. “The War on China.” Izak Novák (blog). April 17, 2020.

• A general overview essay about the longstanding decades-long strategy of the United States against China. Importantly, it discusses the Belt and Road Initiative as a strategy to break out of U.S. encirclement, hegemonism, and imperialism, and Xinjiang’s central importance to the BRI.

Prashad, Vijay. “Trade and tensions between the U.S. and China.” Monthly Review. August 3, 2020.

• Only a small part of this article is about Xinjiang, but it places the Western fixation on it into proper context in advancing Western “political and commercial ends.”

Ron Paul Liberty Report. “‘What is the Empire’s Strategy?’ – Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Speech at Ron Paul Institute Media & War Conference.” YouTube video, 26:10. August 22, 2018. 

• One former U.S. military official’s insider perspective as to why the United States is in Afghanistan. He asserts it “has nothing to do with fighting terrorism” and more to do with establishing military control over a territory of strategic interest to Chinese trade routes. Time stamp starting at 20:55 is included in the link. 

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d. Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development in Xinjiang

These sources describe a small slice of Xinjiang’s poverty alleviation efforts and economic development initiatives, while exploring the real and concrete impacts these programs have on the lives of ordinary people.

“Animal husbandry helping to drive up incomes.” CGTN. May 7, 2020.

“China’s Xinjiang generates 260 bln kWh clean electricity.” Xinhua. August 8, 2020.

• Xinjiang is quickly becoming a hub for green energy production and distribution. This short note and video offers a small glimpse into the greening of Xinjiang and China.

“E-commerce development boosts farm produce sales.” CGTN. May 6, 2020.

Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty. Film. Directed by Peter Getzels. The Kuhn Foundation & PBS Socal, 2020. [available here]

• A documentary hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn offering an insightful look into the war against absolute poverty. The documentary not only provides an on-the-ground look at the procedures and effects of poverty alleviation efforts as well as their often imperfect executions, but also shine a light on the workings of the Communist Party of China, including mobilization, promotion, corruption, monitoring, and discipline. Kuhn travels to Hainan, Gansu, Guizhou, Xinjiang, and Sichuan, gaining a rare and balanced insight into Chinese society and policies. Ironically, some of the entities involved in poverty alleviation in Xinjiang, such as the one highlighted by the documentary, are the very entities being sanctioned and boycotted by U.S. legislation and private brands such as H&M. [the interviewees speak in a wide variety of local dialects and accents; the Xinjiang interviewees except for Murzabek Tapi speak in Kazakh]
• First aired on May 11 and 12 of 2020, and despite its award-winning status, the documentary was quickly taken down barely a week after release on May 20, citing “editorial standards.” Kuhn called it “a shame” that PBS removed his film from its platform due to “extraneous internal political matters in the United States.”

Jie, Shan. “Xinjiang scores victories in the war on poverty.” Global Times. December 18, 2019.

• A very short and succinct article with small snippets of human stories concerning poverty alleviation in Xinjiang.

“Labor transfer program boosts employment.” CGTN. May 8, 2020.

“Localized factories lift Xinjiang locals out of poverty.” CGTN. May 8, 2020.

Lu, Yin & Zhang Xinyuan. “Xinjiang’s millennial entrepreneurs make the most of the Internet age.” Global Times. July 4, 2016.

• An older article from 2016 about new Xinjiang entrepreneurs harnessing both the power of the internet and the increasing interconnectivity of Xinjiang to the world via the Belt and Road Initiative.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Employment and Labor Rights in Xinjiang. 2020.

• This white paper provides an overview of the employment and labor in Xinjiang, providing statistics, giving personal anecdotes, and highlighting labor laws and the efforts being made to improve them, in the context of poverty alleviation programs.

“Trans-regional job offers help Xinjiang farmers shake off poverty.” CGTN. May 3, 2020.

“Villagers get access to clean water as projects continue.” CGTN. May 2, 2020.

“Wellness of people in remote areas safeguarded.” CGTN. May 4, 2020.

Ed. Yang, Yi. “China highlights support to Xinjiang through pairing assistance.” Xinhua. July 16, 2019.

• Pairing assistance is a common practice in the People’s Republic whereas richer provinces and localities directly send aid, expertise, and cadres to poorer provinces and localities in order to help them develop. This is a short article about the visit of a senior Party official Wang Yang to Xinjiang and the re-emphasizing of this program. 

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e. Overview of Chinese Minority/Religious Policies

These sources provide a quick overview of China’s policies towards minority nationalities and religion, with some focus on efforts with relevance to Xinjiang and Islam. 

Beech, Hannah. “If China is Anti-Islam, Why are These Chinese Muslims Enjoying a Faith Revival?” Time. August 12, 2014.

• A relatively honest Western media attempt to look at Islam in China before the current 2018 controversy. The author notes that thriving Hui Muslim communities in China have also been targeted by terrorist attacks.

CCTV. “Students’ Daily Life [sic] at Xinjiang Islamic Institute in Northwest China.” YouTube video, 2:19. June 19, 2016.

• This is a short video showing daily life at an Islamic educational institute in China.

Kasim, Muhabbat (Muhabaiti Hasimu). “新世纪新疆双语教学：七大变化，三点建议.” China Minzu Cultural Resources. September 20, 2018. (reprinted from Zhongguo Minzu Bao (China Ethnic News), August 13, 2010, 6)

• A Uyghur scholar of bilingual education and Turkic languages reflects on the changing situation of bilingual education in Xinjiang, noticing seven changes from her personal experience and leaving three recommendations for the future. Of particular note, it was not until the recent decade that Chinese language was taught to minority children starting in the first grade (previously it started in the fourth grade). [Chinese language]

Li, Qian. “Chinese government goes to great lengths to help Muslims go on the hajj.” Global Times. August 14, 2017.

• Documents Chinese state programs to offer support for those who want to go on hajj pilgrimage.

Lim, Louisa. “Female Imams Blaze Trail Among China’s Muslims.” NPR. July 21, 2010. 

• Documents the unique Chinese Muslim tradition of women-led mosques. The article ends with a curious line: “And so it appears the future of female imams in China is threatened — not by the state, not by resistance from inside Islam, but by the forces of market economics.” This seems to reflect the shifting and inconsistent media agenda on China: from ‘ruthlessly capitalist’ forces stymying Chinese state efforts to preserve minority cultures and religious practices to godless Communist entity seeking to wipe out Islam.

Liu, Xin. “Xinjiang Muslims welcome govt’s efforts on hajj journeys.” Global Times. August 2, 2019.

• A more recent article detailing the governmental measures offering support for rural Xinjiang Muslims who wish to go on hajj pilgrimage.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. National Minorities Policy and Its Practice in China. 1999. 

• Although dated, many of the policies described in this paper are still in effect today.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. China’s Ethnic Policy and Common Prosperity and Development of All Ethnic Groups. 2009.

• Like the above, a dry read, but full of data that demonstrates the efforts of the government in minority policies – Qiao recommends drawing attention to the passages in the white paper addressing tax exemption programs (Section V), minority languages, and intangible heritage (Section VI).

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Freedom of Religious Belief in Xinjiang. 2016.

• A white paper devoted to the progress of ensuring religious freedom in Xinjiang, although written shortly before the controversial 2017 de-radicalization regulations.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Cultural Protection and Development in Xinjiang. 2018.

• A white paper devoted specifically to cultural policies in Xinjiang, with special considerations for the minority nationalities of Xinjiang.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Seeking Happiness for People: 70 Years of Progress on Human Rights in China. 2019. 

• A more recent white paper about China’s progress on human rights issues. Section V is devoted to minority policies.

“Why does China have women-only mosques.” BBC. February 23, 2016. 

• An article which shows that as late as 2016, there was some attempt by the West to understand Islam in China on its own terms, even by the world’s largest “public broadcasting company.”

Zhang, Hui. “China bans anti-Islam words on social media.” Global Times. September 21, 2017. 

• China’s infamous censoring apparatus actively tries to censor Islamophobic hate speech on social media.

“新疆维吾尔自治区计划2020年全面普及双语教育.” Zhongguo Zhengfu Wang. October 6, 2010. 

• A simple news report from 2010 that explains the plans of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to have widespread bilingual education in the autonomous region by 2020. [Chinese language]

新疆维吾尔自治区人口与计划生育条例 [Xinjiang Population and Family Planning Regulations] (promulgated by the People’s Congress of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, November 28, 2002) (made available on the website of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Health & Hygiene Commission) (current law, rev’d July 28, 2017) (previous version, rev’d June 3, 2010, available on the website 51labour)

• This is the statute currently governing Xinjiang’s family planning. Particular attention should be placed on the general rule articulated in Article 15, pre and post-2017: [Chinese language]
  • Pre-2017: Couples of urban Han residents can have one child, and couples of ethnic minority residents can have two children. Couples of Han farmers and herdsmen can have two children, and couples of ethnic farmers and herdsmen can have three children.
  • Post-2017: Couples of urban residents can have two children, and couples of rural residents can have three children.

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f. The Misinformation Industrial Complex

These sources provide some general context as to the bias and agenda of Western non-state actors, particularly mainstream media and NGOs, which often act in concert with Western imperialist state agendas rather than a check on them. 

In particular, these sources highlight the historic uses of “atrocity propaganda,” through which the U.S. has galvanized public opinion for war and intervention through misrepresentations and outright lies vis-a-vis ‘humanitarian concerns.’ In particular, the wars in Iraq and intervention in Syria provide a historical warning for how mainstream media and research institutes amplify State Department ambitions. 

Bruton, F. Brinley & Tony Brown. “U.S. targets Chinese Uighur militants as well as Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.” NBC News. February 8, 2018.

• Addresses U.S. aerial bombing campaigns in Afghanistan, painting the U.S. bombing of ethnic Uyghur terrorist camps in Afghanistan as good, even natural. At the same time, the article paints these same actors as repressed freedom fighters in China’s domestic context—clear instances of double standards that speak to U.S. geopolitical interests in the region.  

Butt, Ahsan I. “Why did Bush go to war with Iraq?” Al Jazeera. March 19, 2019. 

• One more exploration of the now infamous lies that built consensus for American intervention in Iraq, a war that has directly led to a disastrous humanitarian crisis.

Fisk, Robert. “Bashar al-Assad, Syria, and the truth about chemical weapons.” Independent. December 8, 2012.

• An article about the history of Western allegations of atrocities committed in the Middle East in the leadup to war and intervention.

Ignatius, David. “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups.” The Washington Post. September 22, 1991.

• This article quotes from the horse’s mouth the role of the National Endowment for Democracy as the “sugar daddy of overt operations” for State Department anti-communist and regime change agendas. The admission of NED intent to undermine ‘enemy nations’ should call into serious question why the NED funds groups as diverse as the World Uyghur Congress to the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.  

McIntyre, Jamie. “Meet ETIM, the terrorist group the US just bombed in Afghanistan.” Washington Examiner. February 10, 2018.

• This article from the right-wing Washington Examiner cites Pentagon officials designating the East Turkistan Islamic Movementas a terrorist group of security concern to U.S. ambitions in the Middle East—a label which speaks to the double standard of Western media when it comes to ETIM/TIP as a threat to U.S. interests or a cudgel to be wielded against China.  

“Noble Peace Laureates Slam Human Rights Watch’s Refusal to Cut Ties to U.S. Government.” Alternet. July 6, 2014.

• An older open letter expressing concern over Human Rights Watch’s “revolving door” with the United States government, causing it to overlook the U.S.’s own abysmal human rights record and subjecting the organization to partisan politics.

Norton, Ben. “Twitter spreads paid US gov’t propaganda while falsely claiming it bans state media ads.” The Grayzone. August 10, 2020.

• While focused on Twitter and its pushing of American governmental agenda, this article has a helpful section on the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and demonstrates clearly how the agency and its constituent platforms including Radio Free Asia are nothing more than “soft-power arm[s] of the US government,” a context that should be taken into mind when consuming its contents.

O’Neill, Brendan. “The missing people-shredder.” The Guardian. February 24, 2004. 

• A retrospective inquiry finds the sensationalist accounts of Saddam Hussein’s “people shredder” circulated by Western media in the leadup to the Iraq war were never substantiated. 

“Sinophobia Inc: Understanding the Anti-China Industrial Complex.” Qiao Collective. September 3, 2020.

• An in-depth review of the financial ties of prominent China think tanks such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveals a deep conflict of interest: many such institutes are funded by Western state entities and the same weapons manufacturers now cutting record arms deals to equip the anti-China “Pivot to Asia.” Many of the aforementioned think tanks have promulgated serious allegations with regards to Xinjiang.

Singh, Ajit. “Inside the World Uyghur Congress.” The Grayzone. March 5, 2020.

• An extensively-sourced and medium-length exploration of the World Uyghur Congress, a focal organization from which many of the other organizations advocating East Turkistan independence branches off, and its shady connections with U.S. regime changers and Turkish far-right actors.

Sheridan, Tommy. “Syria and Chemical Weapons – Secrets and Convenient Lies.” Sputnik. May 31, 2019.

• An article outlining the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and how it was manipulated to serve consensus-building for war against Assad.

Sun, Feiyang. “Letters to the Editor: The Case of the Keriya Aitika Mosque.” CGTN. July 7, 2020.

• This is an editorial briefly discussing the “case” of the Keriya Aitika Mosque, in which it was claimed that the mosque was demolished and insinuated that the People’s Republic was engaging in mass demolition of places of worship, but it turned out to be renovation work for the historic mosque.

“The Propaganda Multiplier.” Swiss Policy Research. March 2019.

• This article does not talk about Xinjiang, but about the general procedures of “international news coverage” and why stories appearing consistently across “major” and “respectable” news sources is not in fact a strong indicator that it is credible. The current media structure is highly susceptible to misinformation, and in fact government agencies are very involved.

Witness to War. “Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere.” YouTube video, 15:12. September 29, 2017.

• This video is an interview of a former CIA officer (field case officer) John Stockwell, who speaks about the CIA’s close ties with the news media and journalists, the feeding of “pure raw false propaganda… creating illusions of Communists eating babies for breakfast,” and the particular process through which United States intelligence comes to shape and mold narratives around the world.

Xiong, Jack. “The Fake News in 1990 That Propelled the US into the First Gulf War.” Citizen Truth. May 7, 2018.

• A somewhat recent article that explores the background of the “Nayirah testimony,” arguably the first instance of atrocity propaganda in the then new world order of American unilateralism. 

Zhang, Chi. “One Uighur Man’s Journey Goes Viral.” Foreign Policy. May 14, 2014.

• An interesting look at a contemporary account of Xinjiang’s society at the height of the period between 2009 and 2014 when the problem of terrorism was particularly severe in Xinjiang. Not only does this article explore the perspective of an actual Uyghur person living in China, but this article, in tandem with other articles on this list dealing with female imams and Islamic revival in China, shows how drastically the media agenda on China has changed since 2014. This article ultimately provides an even-handed and frank look at a snapshot of Xinjiang before the current controversy of 2018. 

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g. Views from Xinjiang: People, Cultures, and History

These are miscellaneous sources covering contemporary Xinjiang, Xinjiang’s diverse people and cultures, Xinjiang’s modern and ancient history, and the little-understood, even within China, Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). 

Xinjiang’s Diverse People, Cultures, and Experiences

安妮古丽. “191.新疆叼羊比賽見過嗎？哈薩克族馬背上的熱血競技，現場燃爆了！” YouTube video, 4:43. August 16, 2019.

• CW: Animal harm. Anniguli is a Uyghur woman living in Xinjiang who mostly vlogs about her everyday life. Here she spectates Kazakhs participating in the sport, buzkashi. Buzkashi is a traditional Central Asian sport that often involves playing polo with a sheep carcass while on horseback. [Chinese language, some Kazakh can be heard]

安妮古丽. “新疆零下20°怎麼出門？維吾爾美女有妙招，你覺得這樣有效果嗎？” YouTube video, 3:55. May 23, 2019. 

• This is Anniguli’s most popular video to date. Here she mostly remarks on how cold it got in Urumqi. [Chinese language, some Uyghur can be heard accompanying the pedestrian crossing signal]

阿依图娜. “017南疆偏僻的一个巴扎，每天的交易量惊人！和田人都是隐形的富豪？” YouTube video, 3:48. July 14, 2020.

• Ayituna is another Uyghur woman living in Xinjiang who mostly vlogs about her everyday life. Here, in her most popular video to date, she goes to the goat market and watches its bustling business. [Chinese language]

阿依图娜. “054南疆姑娘开始臭美了！迫不及待到厂子拿新裙子，回家换上转个圈！.” YouTube video, 4:10. August 20, 2020.

• In this video, Ayituna visits a workshop to shop for clothing. The workshop appears to be part of a poverty alleviation program, the type that Adrian Zenz scaremongered about back in July 2019. [Chinese language, Uyghur spoken in the workshop]

CCTV. “Our Stories of the Past 40 Years” Series

• A series of personal stories told by individual members of China’s nationalities, in celebration of 40 years of Reform and Opening Up. The stories told by members of minority nationalities that take place in Xinjiang (or are told by a member of a minority nationality who consider Xinjiang their homeland) are:
• “Our story – the Daur nationality.” YouTube video, 2:17. December 20, 2018. [Inner Mongolia]
• “Our story – the Hui nationality.” YouTube video, 3:02. December 12, 2018. [Ningxia]
• “Our story – the Kazak nationality.” YouTube video, 3:00. December 26, 2018.
• “Our story- Khalkhas: guard borderline to protect our own home.” YouTube video, 2:47. December 4, 2018.
  • The nationality represented here is not Khalkha but Kyrgyz.
  • The interviewee Burmahan Moldo (Burumahan Maoleduo) speaks in Kyrgyz. Burmahan later received the national honor of “Model of the People” and was personally recognized by President Xi Jinping.
• “Our story – the Manchu nationality.” YouTube video, 2:29. December 22, 2018. [Liaoning]
• “Our story – the Mongol nationality.” YouTube video, 2:53. December 11, 2018. [Inner Mongolia; the interviewee Hurcabater (Hurichabate’er) speaks in Mongolian]
• “Our story – the Russian nationality.” YouTube video, 2:22. December 27, 2018.
• “Our story – the Tajik nationality.” YouTube video, 2:44. December 10, 2018. 
• “Our story – the Tatar nationality.” YouTube video, 2:49. December 22, 2018.
• “Our story: Uygur nationality.” YouTube video, 2:51. December 7, 2018.
• “Our story – the Uzbek nationality.” YouTube video, 2:24. December 14, 2018.
• “Our story – the Xibe nationality.” YouTube video, 2:35. December 21, 2018. [Liaoning]

CCTV中国中央电视台. “[2019非遗公开课]《十二木卡姆》 表演：莎车县十二木卡姆民间艺术团.” YouTube video, 2:39. June 7, 2019.

• Muqam is a rich Uyghur musical tradition well-known across China. It was among the first four intangible heritages registered by China to the UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, alongside Guqin, Kunqu Opera, and Mongolian Long Song (Urtiin Duu). This video is a short performance of Muqam as well as traditional Uyghur dance.

CGTN. Amazing Xinjiang Series

• This CGTN playlist contains a number of Xinjiang-focused videos on various topics and localities, largely low-key and laidback content. 

CGTN. “Assignment Asia Episode 75: Transforming lives and building bridges in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 25:16. November 5, 2017.

• This video from before the 2018 controversy covers many aspects of developmental work in Xinjiang, including education, labor transfer, grassroots governmental work, and living standards for people finding employment outside Xinjiang. The footage does not shy away from showing the difficulties and adjustments people in Xinjiang face as they go through changes in their lives. [Uyghur spoken in some scenes]

CGTN. “Dolan Muqam music tradition thrives among local Uygurs.” YouTube video, 4:04. August 16, 2017.

• This video provides a quick overview of Muqam as well as over a distinct rural tradition within Muqam.

CGTN. Eid al-Fitr Series

• A short series of documentaries focusing on the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, commemorating the end of the holy month Ramadan, in China. Notably, having been released in July 2017, it was released during a time after the De-radicalization Regulations were passed but before the World Uyghur Congress began campaigning on “internment camps.”
• “Happy reunion during Eid al-Fitr in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 10:29. July 8, 2017.
• “Muslims in Xinjiang show piety during Eid.” YouTube video, 7:32. July 10, 2017.
• “Over 40 years of friendship between Han and Uygur family.” YouTube video, 11:37. July 9, 2017. [the interviewee Karim Turdi speaks in Uyghur]
• “The flavor of Eid al-Fitr in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 8:12. July 10, 2017.
• “The rhythm of Eid al-Fitr in NW China’s Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 8:22. July 8, 2017. [the interviewees speak and sing in Uyghur]

CGTN. “Epic of Manas: The history of Kirgiz in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 1:15. May 22, 2018.

• The Epic of Manas is a Kyrgyz epic poem traditionally passed down orally. The storytelling of Manas was registered by China in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. This video provides a quick overview of the tradition of Manas storytelling in China.

CGTN. “Looking China: Akyns song that brings happiness.” YouTube video, 9:33. January 23, 2017. 

• This video is a collection of Akyns (song-like recitative improvisation accompanied by dombra) performed by Kazakh musician Jiahnur Ohas, overlaid by scenes of Xinjiang’s Kazakh regions. [songs are sung in Kazakh language]

CGTN. “Looking China: Xibe ethnic group in Xinjiang.” YouTube video, 11:59. Jan 22, 2017.

• This video is a slice-of-life feature of a young Xibe girl living in Xinjiang, entirely narrated in the Xibe language, a relative of the Manchu language.

CGTN. “Modern designs revive traditional craft and industry.” YouTube video, 4:25. October 6, 2016. 

• This serves both as an introduction to “atlas silk,” a characteristic material in traditional Central Asian clothing, as well as a short look at fashion designer Alim Adil’s hope to introduce atlas more into modern clothing. 

CGTN. “The everlasting spirit of the Kazaks on grasslands.” YouTube video, 5:04. May 22, 2019.

• This is a look at the life of a nomadic Kazakh family, including worries and concerns for the future, displaying the still wide experiences of modern life in Xinjiang, much less China today.

CGTN. “Travelogue with Tajik people: Modern life in Xinjiang’s rocky mountains.” YouTube video, 29:19. June 27, 2016.

• This is an older documentary of a Chinese-British diaspora CGTN host spending time in a rural Tajik village. It does a good job of showing the developmental difficulties as well as unique features of high-altitude mountain valley life. 

CHINA LIVE. “帕米尔高原上牦牛叼羊比赛 / Buzkashi with Yaks on the Chinese Pamir.” YouTube video, 2:57. March 20, 2016. 

• CW: Animal harm. Buzkashi is a traditional Central Asian sport that often involves playing polo with a sheep carcass while on horseback. The Tajiks of Xinjiang are distinguished by their playing of buzkashi while mounted on yaks. 

Guangming Online. “Fascinating China” Series

• This series was made in celebration of 70 years of the People’s Republic of China and focuses on the intangible cultural heritages of China’s 56 nationalities. These short episodes exploring the heritages of minority nationalities who consider modern-day Xinjiang their homeland are:
• “Fascinating China EP01: The Mongolian Ethnic Group and Its Gesar Epic Tradition.” YouTube video, 3:13. August 6, 2019. [Inner Mongolia]
  • The Epic of King Gesar is an epic cycle originating in Tibet but finding wide expression across Central Asia. It was registered by China in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. 
• “Fascinating China EP02: A Typical Mutton Cooking Technique in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.” YouTube video, 3:11. August 7, 2019. [Ningxia]
• “Fascinating China EP07: Kyrgyz, An Ethnic Group Closely Related to Falcons.” YouTube video, 3:00. August 12, 2019. [the interviewee Khurmash Khutman speaks in Kyrgyz]
• “Fascinating China EP12: Uygur Dawaz, A Challengeable Sport and Traditional Chinese Art.” YouTube video, 3:05. August 16, 2019.
• “Fascinating China EP17: Manchu Embroidery, Vivid Record of Life.” YouTube video, 2:57. August 22, 2019. [Heilongjiang]
• “Fascinating China EP19: Daur Hanika.” YouTube video, 2:11. August 23, 2019. [Inner Mongolia]
• “Fascinating China EP36: Tatar Saban Festival.” YouTube video, 2:39. September 10, 2019. [The interviewee Zeytuna Karimova also participated in CCTV’s “Our Stories of the Past 40 Years” series]
• “Fascinating China EP38: Xibe, an Ethnic Group of Bow and Arrow.” YouTube video, 2:44. September 12, 2019.
• “Fascinating China EP40: Dombra Art of Kazakh Ethnic Group.” YouTube video, 2:22. September 14, 2019.
• “Fascinating China EP43: Delicacy of the Russian Ethnic Group.” YouTube video, 2:47. September 17, 2019. [Inner Mongolia]
• “Fascinating China EP44: Ashula and Yalla.” YouTube video, 2:31. September 18, 2019. [the interviewee Mansur Zakir speaks in Uzbek]
• “Fascinating China EP49: Costume of the Tajik Ethnic Group.” YouTube video, 2:52. September 22, 2019. [the interviewee Gulnisa Islamhan speaks in Sarikoli]

Looking China Official Channel. “Manas 玛纳斯.” YouTube video, 9:28. August 24, 2016.

• This video provides a more detailed look at the tradition of Manas in China and the scholarly efforts dedicated to researching the Epic of Manas further and preserving it. In particular, the role of the Manas Research Center in Xinjiang Normal University is explored.

New China TV. “Xinjiang Rediscovered” series.

• This is a series of more mundane experiences: average residents of Xinjiang who talk about their lives, experiences, and hopes for the future.

“xinjiang china.” YouTube channel.

• This YouTube channel periodically shares videos of Xinjiang, its people and its places. Particularly recommended are:
  • A short film series called 《我的家乡更美好》, or “Better Hometown, Better Life.” It is a series interviewing several students of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine who are minority youth from Xinjiang, who talk about their experiences in Xinjiang and in university as well as go back to their hometowns to see how much they have developed. Some are only in Chinese. [Chinese source here]
  • 7 videos currently available about people who have studied at the vocational centers, as part of a series called 《拥抱新生活》or “Embracing a New Life.” [Chinese source here, although the videos on this site are now unavailable]

《第一次的离别》(《تۇنجى ئايرىلىش》, A First Farewell). Film. Directed by Wang Lina. Tencent Pictures, 2020.

• A Uyghur-language film popular in China post-lockdown, directly tackles the themes of language and change in a modernizing world amidst a larger story on the impact of China’s poverty alleviation programs. Not yet available outside of China.
• “Domestic film ‘A First Farewell’ wins hearts, box office.” China Daily. August 4, 2020.
• Kuipers, Richard, “Film Review: ‘A First Farewell’.” Variety. March 17, 2019.

Xinzhao Li 李馨曌. “新疆 塔什库尔干塔吉克族 “Through The Unknown Tashkurgan”.” YouTube video, 8:28. January 3, 2020. 

• This is a short overview of a photographer’s extended stay in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, and her experiences as the locality and its people changed and grew.

Xinjiang’s History

Dickens, Mark. “The Soviets in Xinjiang: 1911-1949.” 1990.

• An older but excellent overview of the complexities of Soviet involvement in Xinjiang, as well as the Republican history of the region before 1949.

Grousset, René. Walford, Naomi, trans. Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1970.

• A classic historical text on Central Asia with an emphasis on nomadic empires. It covers broader Central Asia beyond Xinjiang, but also summarizes Xinjiang history up to the Qing Dynasty’s defeat of the Khoja Uprising in 1759.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang. 2019. 

• An official Chinese document concerning the history of Xinjiang. While it does paint in broad strokes, it provides a quick overview of the history of the region.

Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC)

Bao, Yajun (包雅钧). “The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps: An Insider’s Perspective.” Blavatnik School of Government Working Paper Series (BSG-WP-2018/023)  (2018). 

• One of the few English-language scholarly reports—more of a summary—on the XPCC. Nonetheless, an interesting perspective from a scholar who studied the XPCC on behalf of the Central Organization Department of the CPC (Central Compilation and Translation Bureau 中央编译局) during a restive period in Xinjiang’s history.

State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. The History and Development of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. 2014. 

• A white paper on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) that gives an overview of the XPCC, its history, and its operations. The XPCC as a sort of “government within a government” plays an important if little understood role in Xinjiang.

Iran-Russia-China alliance transforming global balance of power: Naqqash

Via The Saker

September 04, 2020

By Middle East Observer

During a television political talk show, senior Lebanese political analyst Anees Naqqash commented on the significance of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s visit to Russia on the 21^st of July, 2020, to reportedly discuss the extension of a decades-long strategic agreement between Tehran and Moscow by a further 20 years.

Zarif’s visit occurred around about the same time that reports emerged regarding the imminent signing of a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership between Iran and China.

Naqqash discussed both agreements, and said they and similar treaties involving additional states indicate the emergence of a global alliance led by Iran, Russia and China that will challenge American hegemony and in fact transform the global balance of power.

Source: Al Mayadeen News

(Important Note: Please help us keep producing independent translations for you by contributing as little as $1/month here: https://www.patreon.com/MiddleEastObserver?fan_landing=true)

Transcript:

Host:

After the war of rumours – so to speak – that targeted the relationship between Moscow and Damascus, and how this relates to Tehran, this visit (Zarif’s visit to Russia) was highly important. In a letter to Putin, Zarif (Iran’s foreign minister) said: “we held detailed discussions with Lavrov (Russia’s foreign minister) regarding bilateral cooperation and regional and international coordination, and extending the cooperation agreement between Moscow and Tehran’. (Zarif was referring to) the agreement that was signed (between Moscow and Tehran) in the 1990s. At the time, there was a shift in the world order. Today, it seems like we are witnessing a similar scene as the global influence of the United States is no longer the same. What conclusions can we draw from this situation?

Naqqash:

You have mentioned the rumours. A while ago,  media campaigns were launched against us over two issues: (1) the Iranian presence in Syria, and (2) Russian-Syrian relations. However, the latest events and facts have come to refute all these rumours, that is, the recent Iranian-Syrian agreement, the recent positions defended by Russia and confirmed by Syria, and the Iranian-Russian meeting today. It has been proven that, contrary to the rumours, relations between these countries are becoming stronger. Today he (Zarif) confirms that this is his most important visit (to Russia). Why is this his most important visit? Not only because of the subjects that were discussed during the meeting, but because of the solid foundation that this meeting is built on.

That is to say: we (Iran and Russia) are allies. We trust each other. We know our capabilities and our interests. First, we are in total agreement that the United States should be deterred for its lack of respect for international law. It must obey international law. It must respect the sovereignty of states. It should no longer compromise the security of states and try to divide them, nor overthrow regimes. The agreement between Russia and Iran is strong and can clearly be seen by (their cooperation) in Syria.

Second, they – Iran, Russia, China and other countries – are all being subjected to (US) economic sanctions; and these sanctions are escalating. It has become clear, as the Chinese foreign minister has said more than once, that “the United States seems to have lost its mind.” This is the reality we have to face. Our opponent has lost its bearings and its mind. So what can we do to maintain international security, protect our interests and defend regional systems? We ought to build a regional and international alliance that would form the club that Mr. Zarif talked about. This political club will guarantee not only strategic agreements between these countries, but also form joint cultural and economic action through which US sanctions will collapse.

This club will lay a solid foundation for something more important, something we have talked about on this episode of your show, i.e. “what will happen to the US”. When there is a certain balance of power in the world, and the internal security and future of a great power such as the United States is at risk, the world must be prepared. It must create alternative systems to protect its people during this great collapse. Otherwise, if we do not prepare ourselves for this collapse – there will be (terrible) surprises (in the future). We may be very happy that the US has been torn apart and is being ravished by a civil war, or that it lost its power in (our) region; but what about international security? Therefore, this club will have a fundamental role in shaping the future of the world and creating (a new) international balance.

Host:

This is important. I wish to ask (the other guest, Russian political analyst) Matuzov about it, about the attributes these countries should have to form an effective club that would stand against the US. However, the time chosen to sign the agreement is also important, especially after the war of rumours. This agreement reinforced the foundations of the (old) strategic cooperation between Russia and Iran. 20 years (the duration of the new agreement) is not a short period of time…

Naqqash:

This coincides with the Chinese-Iranian agreement as well. These two agreements complement each other: a major 25-year agreement (with China) and a 20-year agreement (with Russia). The United States was hoping to extend the arms embargo against Iran, in two or three months. However, this agreement came to cut  (this embargo) short and say “It’s already done. We renewed the agreement and we will continue with it.”

——-

Host:

These three countries have attributes that fit together like a puzzle to form a club that would be at the forefront of the (global) confrontation (with the US). They possess (certain) attributes. They have a common threat – i.e. the United States of America. However, we are talking about a strategic club, front or alliance, not a tactical alliance (usually shorter-term). Right?

Naqqash:

One hundred percent. This alliance is much more than a strategic issue. Let me give you (more) information about what is going on between China and Iran. It is true that the agreement has not yet been concluded and has not reached the Iranian Parliament. However, the plans and information regarding most of the projects that were being negotiated are available today. Some Chinese companies are now moving to Iran to prepare for these constructions (projects). Once the signature is done, the construction will begin.

As for (the agreement) between Russia and Iran, trains are traveling via the (Iranian) Chabahar Port route to the Russian border. They are connected to the Russian railway systems and they even reach Afghanistan.

This is a major shift in geopolitics, transportation, etc. Agreements regarding the Iranian nuclear reactors are also very important – if they are concluded.

The paradigm shift will be after November when the embargo on the sale and purchase of weapons from Iran ends. Iran will be able to export the weapons it manufactures, and to buy anything from Russia and China, which would come as a severe blow to the US. This is what Israel and other countries fear. They fear the increase of Iran’s military capability that was demonstrated when it shot down the (US advanced spy) plane and struck the (American) Ain Al-Assad Base (in Iraq).

However, there will be coordination (once the agreements are concluded). There are agreements surrounding security cooperation between these countries. Therefore, we are heading towards a global alliance that will use a payment system other than SWIFT; that will replace the dollar currency (with another currency in transactions and trade); and even change the overall strategic military balance of the world.

Host:

Judging by the current regional scene, what do you mean when you talk about the overall military balance? Some of the countries that we are discussing in relation to forming a (global) front are now taking part in hotly contested files. Please explain further…

Naqqash:

The battle in Syria is fierce. Today, Russia and Iran are fighting side-by-side against terrorism in Syria. When we say against “terrorism”, we mean against the project conceived by the Gulf and the West. This terrorism did not come out of the blue. It is a plot by the West and the Gulf. Hence, foiling this plot is thwarting a major conspiracy that did not only target Syria. President Putin said in more than four speeches at international conferences: ‘We went to Syria to defeat terrorism, because if terrorism prevailed in Syria, it would have reached our country’. (Putin) was taking a pre-emptive measure to safeguard Russia’s national security.

4,000 Uyghurs came with their women and children to fight in Syria. They came all the way from China. What are they doing in Syria? The defeat (of Uyghurs) in Syria is also to prevent the scourge of terrorism in China. They, Russia and China, realized that this battle is integral to ensure their national security. These are not theoretical battles. Bullets are being fired and battles are raging. China has not yet participated in armed engagement, but its role in the economic field may be equally important, as it complements and protects military victories.

Diplomacy is reciprocal

July 25, 2020

Chris Faure for the Saker Blog

The US suddenly ordered China to end operations from its embassy in Houston, Texas (remember when they did the same to Russia). However, diplomacy is reciprocal and the Chinese so far refrained from a further provocative reaction. They are implementing a fair tit for tat measure, closing the US Consulate in Chengdu, keeping options open for further retaliation. They could have fanned the flames and closed the US Consulate in Hong Kong, or even a bigger one in Beijing, but kept to a fair reciprocal closure – so far.

More about the Consulate spat https://www.moonofalabama.org/

China responded to Mr Pompeo’s highly advertised ‘very important’ speech this week in short, not giving Pompeo that attention that he so craves. The Chinese stance is that Mike Pompeo maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China’s socialist system, and he made remarks that ignored the facts, were full of ideological bias and turned black into white, which showed his Cold War mentality. From the Chinese Foreign Ministry: “Some US politicians have deliberately stirred up ideological disputes, talked about changing China, denied China-US relations, and provoked China’s relationships with other countries. Their purpose is to suppress China’s development and divert the public’s attention from their own country. These tricks cannot fool the Americans and international community.”

The US have stopped all basic diplomatic standards in a grab for their self-delusional rules-based international order. Just recently, Pompeo announced that they will not respect or accept any of the agreements in the South China Sea. He must be thinking that all of the ASEAN countries like him enough to drop their raft of regional negotiated agreements.

Despite Chinese accusations that the US opens their diplomatic pouches, which is in flagrant violation of all Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular relations, the most important is the following which shows that China is still keeping to fair diplomatic and pragmatic standard:

“It must be emphasized that China has no intentions to change the US in terms of its social system, and the US cannot change China either.”

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1800221.shtml

Having followed the Russian reactions on these types of actions by the US toward Russia, we have become accustomed to the frustratingly pragmatic and clinically diplomatic methods of dealing with western bullying. The Chinese are different and they enthusiastically take part in the war of words that is reaching cold war status if one adds in the trade war announced by Mr Trump +- two years ago and which he thought would be ‘easy to win’. What we see now as reaction to the US provocation to China in the US social sphere, many ordinary Americans are deeply into the ‘crush China’ rhetoric which attempts to blame China for all of the US ills.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202007241079970310-us-heading-towards-quagmire-in-the-south-china-sea-by-inciting-tensions-with-beijing-activist-warns/

While it remains unclear if this can be written off completely to electioneering and election rhetoric, what does clarify is that the harm done is not easily fixed, no matter the reason. It is however quite breathtaking how far Pompeo will push this, hoping for retaliation which he can then use to prove himself and the current US administration right. It is beyond a level of comprehension that Pompeo and Co could really think that they will make war against China.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202007/24/WS5f1a5b8da31083481725be24.html

In this time of ‘rhetorical cold war of words’, Godfree Roberts who regularly writes on China for the Unz Review started a new weekly newsletter, Here Comes China, Skulduggery, Good News, Offbeat Opinions, chock-a-block full of what is happening in China.

Godfree has offered the first four newsletters free to Saker readers. From economics, to space, to China-Iran Trade and Military Partnership, to the cleanup and recovering of the Yangtze river, a Hong Kong section, the media war on Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and an in-depth look at Human rights in China, this newsletter stands unique in its scope and its presentation of Western opinions and Eastern opinions.

Godfree’s new book on China is just about ready for release. The book is called:

Why China leads the world: Democracy at the bottom, Data in the middle, Talent at the top.
A preview: https://www.herecomeschina.com/why-china-leads-the-world-the-book/

I also want to draw the readers’ attention to a two part essay written on Mao, Mao Reconsidered, and published in greanvillepost.com. Part 1, Part 2

China Sitrep – 5 selected topics from the Here Comes China newsletter:

Trump Empowers CIA to Launch Cyberattacks

The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets–including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, which are mentioned directly in the document. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House. The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities. [MORE]

Belt and Road Finds New Life in Pakistan

China and Pakistan have signed deals for two hydro-power generation projects costing $3.9 billion in the disputed Kashmir region, and another to revamp the South Asian nation’s colonial-era railways for $7.2 billion — the most expensive Chinese project yet in Pakistan. The Chinese financing has helped rid Pakistan of an electricity deficit that left exporters unable to meet orders and major cities without electricity for much of the day. [MORE]

T.P. Wilkinson: The Yemen

The West encourages dissolution of state entities that could engage in normal relations with China or any other potential competitors. The Yemen is one of those long-term victims of British imperialism. When Britain nominally withdrew from Egypt, Nasser promoted his new government’s participation in his movement for Arab unity, opposed by British clients in Riyadh (the Saud family’s Wahhabi gangsters). The Saud family would like to have annexed the Yemen but could not without war against Egypt-against which the tiny mob had no chance. So David Stirling led a counter-insurgency funded by the British and Saudis to drive Egypt out of the Yemen and leave the country as a quasi-protectorate of Britain/US. Attempts to change that have been fought for decades but until a decade ago the client regime was well protected. Clearly chaos is profitable for the empire which between Somalia and Yemen prevent any stability in opposition to its interests. Not only do Somalia and Yemen lie close to the Suez route they also form part of the ancient East African trading basin that links Asia with Africa. As part of the overall strategy of Denial, this policy is aided by the designs of the mob in Riyad which lacks the population to occupy territories it would like to annex.

Xinjiang

This section from Here Comes China is an in-depth analysis. I suggest you read it in the newsletter itself. Main points:

Islam is neither the Uyghurs’ native religion nor their only one but, in its Wahhabi form, has caused problems around the world, for which we can thank to two fervent Christians, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski,[2] who considered a united Eurasia, “The only possible challenge to American hegemony.” In 1979, months before the Soviet entry into Afghanistan, Brzezinski drafted and Carter signed a top-secret Presidential Order authorizing the CIA to train fundamentalist Muslims to wage Jihad against the Soviet Communist infidels and all unbelievers of conservative Sunni Islam and the Mujahideen terror war against Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan became the largest covert action in CIA history.[2] Brzezinski’s ‘Arc of Crisis’ strategy inflamed Muslims in Central Asia to destabilize the USSR during its economic crisis and, when Le Nouvel Observateur later asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski snapped, “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?”

Twenty years later, in 1999, the CIA’s Islam strategist, Graham E. Fuller, announced, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”[3]

Today, NED money supports the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which calls China’s Xinjiang Province ‘East Turkistan’ and China’s administration of Xinjiang as ‘Chinese occupation of East Turkistan,’ runs articles like, “Op-ed: A Profile of Rebiya Kadeer, Fearless Uyghur Independence Activist,” and admits that Kadeer seeks Uyghur independence from China.

Faced with an armed insurrection, most states impose martial law or a state of emergency, as Britain did in Malaya from 1945 to 1957 and the US did with the Patriot Act, but China decided–despite popular outrage–to write off its losses and play the long game and founded The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),[1] a political, economic, and security alliance, with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, who stopped funneling money and providing corridors for Uyghur terrorists to move into and out of China. The SCO has since expanded to include India and Pakistan and Iran has begun the accession process, making it world’s largest security pact in both area and population and the only one whose membership includes four nuclear powers.

Forming the SCO was easier than assuaging public outrage. An unheard-of lawsuit by victims’ relatives accused the government of reverse discrimination so they stepped up security and published their objectives:

1. restore law and order
2. prevent terrorists from inflicting more violence
3. use ‘high-intensity regulation’
4. contain the spread of terrorism beyond Xinjiang
5. purge extremists and separatists from society.

Neighborhood community centres–labelled ‘concentration camps’ in the western press–educate rural Uyghurs about the perils of religious extremism and train them for urban jobs.
In 2013 President Xi toured Eurasia and proposed the Belt and Road Initiative for three billion people, designed to create the biggest market in the world with unparalleled development potential, and built a gas pipeline to China from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan which, like China’s other western pipelines, power lines, and rail and road networks, runs through the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Beijing then moved jobs to Xinjiang and opened vocational schools to train rural youth in literacy and job skills and swore to protect its neighbors from terrorism in exchange for their pledge to reciprocate. To create jobs in the province Xi directed investment from forty-five of China’s top companies and eighty Fortune 500 manufacturers to Urumqi. Corporate investment increased from $10 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2017 and infrastructure investments of $70 billion in both 2017 and 2018 lifted the annual goods shipments past 100 million tons with a goal of hourly departures to fifteen European capitals. Half a million Uyghurs have relocated from remote villages to cities and, as a result, 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, 312,000 in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018. The last poor Uyghurs will join the cash economy in mid-2020.

The PBOC, China’s central bank, is partnering with ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing to test the use of its sovereign digital currency, AKA Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC. The regulator is working with Didi to apply digital currency electronic payment (DCEP) to the ride-hailing app, which currently serves a total of over 550 million users and is often described as China’s Uber. According to Didi, “the government seeks to support the development of the real economy sectors with innovative financial services.” Didi has more than 30 million daily ride-sharing orders and its bike-sharing daily orders reached 10 million. Meituan and Bilibilibili are also cooperating with banks in the digital yuan project. Meituan’s service platform has over 240 million consumers and five million local merchants, and Bilibilibili is China’s largest video-sharing website.

Sign up for your free one month sub to Godfree’s very extensive newsletter here. At the Saker blog, only a fraction of all the material can be covered.

Is America Up for a Naval War With China?

July 18, 2020

Patrick BUCHANAN

Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing’s claims to the rocks, reefs and resources of the South China Sea?

For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week.

“The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” thundered the secretary of state.

“America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources … and (we) reject any push to impose ‘might makes right’ in the South China Sea.”

Thus did Pompeo put Beijing on notice that the U.S. does not recognize its claim to 90% of the South China Sea or to any exclusive Chinese right to its fishing grounds or oil and gas resources.

Rather, in a policy shift, the U.S. now recognizes the rival claims of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines.

To signal the seriousness of Pompeo’s stand, the U.S. sent the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz carrier battle groups through the South China Sea. And, this week, the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson sailed close by the Spratly Islands.

But what do Mike Pompeo’s tough words truly mean?

While we have recognized the claims of the other littoral states of the South China Sea, does Pompeo mean America will use its naval power to defend their claims should China use force against the vessels of those five nations?

Does it mean that if Manila, our lone treaty ally in these disputes, uses force to reclaim what we see as its lawful rights in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy will fight the Chinese navy to validate Manila’s claims?

Has Pompeo drawn a red line, which Beijing has been told not to cross at risk of war with the United States?

If so, does anyone in Washington think the Chinese are going to give up their claims to the entire South China Sea or retreat from reasserting those claims because the U.S. now rejects them?

Consider what happened to the people of Hong Kong when they thought they had the world’s democracies at their back.

For a year, they marched and protested for greater political freedom with some believing they might win independence.

But when Beijing had had enough, it trashed the Basic Law under which Hong Kong had been ceded back to China and began a crackdown.

The democracies protested and imposed economic sanctions. But the bottom line is that Hong Kong’s people not only failed to enlarge the sphere of freedom they had, but also they are losing much of what they had.

The Americans, seeing Hong Kong being absorbed into China, are now canceling the special economic privileges we had accorded the city, as the British offer millions of visas to Hong Kong’s dissidents who fear what Beijing has in store for them.

In June, Pompeo also charged Beijing with human rights atrocities in Xinjiang: “The world received disturbing reports today that the Chinese Communist Party is using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, as part of a continuing campaign of repression.”

These reports, said Pompeo, “are sadly consistent with decades of CCP practices that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity.”

China has rejected U.S. protests of its treatment of Uighurs and Kazakhs and of its handling of Hong Kong as interference in its internal affairs and none of America’s business.

As for the South China Sea, China dismissively replied, the U.S. seems to be “throwing its weight around in every sea of the world.”

These American warnings, and Beijing’s response, call to mind the darker days of the Cold War.

So, again, the question: Is America prepared for a naval clash in the South China Sea if Beijing continues to occupy and fortify islets and reefs she claims as her own? Are we prepared for a Cold War II — with China?

While China lacks the strategic arsenal the USSR had in the latter years of the Cold War, economically, technologically and industrially, China is a far greater power than Soviet Russia ever was. And China’s population is four times as large.

Can we, should we, begin to assemble a system of alliances similar to what we had during the Cold War — with NATO in Europe and Asian security pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand? Should we adopt a policy of containment of Communist China, which, says Pompeo, is an expansionist and “imperialist” power?

Should we start issuing war guarantees to China’s neighbors? Should we start putting down red lines China will not be allowed to cross?

Before we plunged into our half dozen Middle East wars, we didn’t think through where those would end. Have we considered where all our belated bellicosity toward Beijing must invariably lead, and how this all ends?

creators.comThe views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Turkey’s Multipolar Turn: Ankara and Beijing Come to Terms on Uyghurs Issue

By United World International

Global Research, July 23, 2019

United World International 22 July 2019

China’s relationship to its ethnic minority Uyghur population has been the central issue driving a wedge between China and the Muslim world in recent years. However, the situation is already beginning to change before our eyes – Pakistan, Turkey and many nations throughout the Middle East have suddenly stopped calling the Uyghur education centers in Xinjiang “concentration camps,” while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently said that the Uyghurs live “happily” in Xinjiang. These are all indications of large-scale changes on the geopolitical map and the formation of new poles of cooperation.

Context

The Uyghurs (the second largest Muslim population in China after the Hui (回族) who number around 11 million) live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China. The area became a part of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after Mao Zedong led the country’s communist movement to victory over the Guomindang; Xinjiang has been a zone of political instability ever since.

The Uyghurs are indigenous Turkic people of Eastern Turkestan and Sunni Muslims. Western human rights organizations have recently been paying a great deal of attention to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang (e.g., Amnesty International’s 2013 report, Human Rights Watch’s 2018 report, reports from the Munich-based human rights organization World Uyghur Congress), while leading Western publications (CNN, BBC, Foreign Policy) have systematically criticized China’s policies in relation to the ethnic minority group.

The emergence of a number of articles criticizing China’s Xinjiang policies during the escalation of U.S.-China trade relations in 2018 can hardly be seen as a coincidence. For China, Xinjiang is a source of constant risk, since it has become a hub for radical Wahhabist strains of Islam [supported by foreign governments] which have begun to spread among the Muslim population. Most of the recent terrorist acts in China were committed by radicalized Uyghurs.

Assimilating the Uyghurs into Chinese society has been a very difficult process: their writing is based on the Arabic alphabet and their religion is rooted in Sunni Islam. While Sufism had traditionally been the central strain of Islam throughout Central Asia, in recent decades it has increasingly come under the influence of Salafist and Wahhabi tendencies under the influence of Saudi Arabia and in accordance with the USA’s plans to destabilize the region. The efforts of these countries have created a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism.

During the Arab Spring, Chinese authorities were seriously concerned about the possibility of regional destabilzation in Xinjiang as a result of the spread of radical Islam – at that time, Uyghur social networks were brought under direct control (This was accomplished via tools such as the JingWang Weishi app, which monitors photos, audio messagers and video materials online, and also has access to users private messages on WeChat). The Xinjiang region also has 20 million video cameras that can identify any person in the area in a remarkably short time (no more than 7 minutes). While all of this might seem draconian, such security policies are undoubtedly justified – over the past decade, a large number of Uyghurs have come under the influence of radical Islam, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement  (ETIM).

To fight the spread of this dangerous ideology and to better integrate the Uyghurs into Chinese society, the Chinese authorities opened special education centres that teach the basics of Chinese political culture, Chinese language and conduct a course on the history of the People’s Republic of China. The process is called “transformation through training” or “counterterrorism training.”

The Western media, using an investigation by Human Rights Watch as a basis, has called the centers “concentration camps” (seemingly confusing them with prisons for offenders in the province). Moreover, the Western media and various human rights reports have accused the Chinese authorities of resorting to torture in these institutions, although there is no clear distinction between prisons for criminal offenders and the education centres in the reports. There is the information in these reports that Uyghurs in the education centres are allegedly being forced to renounce Islam. In September 2018, the U.S. government was considering the possibility of imposing sanctions against high-ranking Chinese officials and companies over the alleged violations of the Uygher’s rights and the supposed detention and restriction of freedoms in the “camps.”

More than 20 countries, including Japan and the United Kingdom, have recently issued a joint statement condemning China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region. In a letter to Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, these 22 countries called for an end to “mass arbitrary detentions and related violations” and demanded Beijing grant UN experts access to the region.

The Conversation

✔@ConversationUK

Chinese officials have repeatedly termed the criticism of their treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang region as Western media politicising the issue.

37 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE, seem to agree with China’s position. http://bit.ly/2JSLdnR 

China is building a global coalition of human rights violators to defend its record in Xinjiang –…

A group of 37 countries, including North Korea, Russia and Saudia Arabia, signed a letter in support of China’s human rights record.

theconversation.com

3

3:10 PM – Jul 20, 2019

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The mass media has devoted numerous articles to the issue, describing how the Chinese authorities do not allow Uughurs to perform religious pilgrimage (hajj), and preventing them from fulfilling their obligations during Ramadan.

Concentration camp, prisons or education centers?

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. If the education is not going well, we will continue to provide free education, until the students achieve satisfactory results and graduate smoothly.
—Speech by Chinese Communist Youth League Xinjiang Branch, March 2017

Human Rights Watch’s report of 9 September 2018 published a report entitled “Eradicating Ideological Viruses’, which describes the Chinese authorities’ policy on Uyghurs as a policy of destoying the and violating ‘fundamental rights to freedom of expression, religion, and privacy’, practicing  ‘torture and unfair trials’. HRW note that China’s policy is a violation of international law prohibiting discrimination.

The Human Rights Organization report recommends western governments impose sanctions against the secretary of the party, Chen Quango, and other high-ranking officials. “Party Secretary Chen Quanguo and other senior officials responsible for the Strike Hard Campaign should face targeted sanctions – through tools such as the US Global Magnitsky Act and visa protocols.”    The organization also concludes that in order to address the situation in Xinjiang, countries should tighten export control regimes to prevent the development of Chinese technology.

It is important to note that the materials devoted to the issue of the Uyghur population in China began to be actively published in Western media during the escalation of the ongoing trade war between China and the United States. Interestingly, Trump’s protectionist policy against the PRC was joined by globalist corporations and influence groups, which, unlike Trump, see China as a threat not only to the U.S. economy, but also to the liberal globalist doctrine. This has become particularly evident over the past two years as the relationship between Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin grows closer, while Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative has increasingly shown China’s commitment to multipolarism.

It should be noted that, for China, the main goal in building education centers for the Uyghurs is to prevent the emergence of a domestic strain of radical Islam. China is in many ways an excellent breeding ground for the development of radical Islamic ideology,  which is useful for China’s enemies who want to weaken China by fermenting internal destabilization. According to Chinese authorities, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in China is responsible for more than 200 terrorist attacks which have killed more than 160 people and injured more than 400.

In the absence of countermeasures such as education centres, radical Wahhabi ideas could easily spread among the Uyghur population, gradually creating a situation in China similar to the one which tore apart Syria.

With the trade war between the U.S. and China raging for more than a year, such a development would undoubtedly play into the hands of globalists opposed to China’s rising power and influence. New geopolitical strategies have emerged that pose a serious threat to globalism’s enemies without the need to resort to outright military conflict, such as using proxies to destabilize regions. It is no coincidence that Syria, a country that had no external debt before the war, became a target for terrorism.

What is really China’s policy?

Assimilation of the Uyghurs into Chinese society is gradually taking place on a large scale – for the majority of Uyghurs – Chinese has become a second or even first/native language. The Uyghurs have been granted privileges when it comes to entering universities and Chinese schools, as well as in starting up private businesses.

Uyghur children: “The population that is not there.”

One of the peculiarities of Xinjiang’s demographic picture is the conflict between China’s birth control measures (until the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, the “one family, one child” demographic law was in force, today it is the “one family, two children” demographic law) and Islamic tradition, especially in regard to polygamy which is practiced among Uyghurs and the simplicity of divorce measures, which also do not restrict women from remarriage and having more children.

This has resulted in a significant proportion of Xinjiang’s population not having official registration, i.e. citizenship, which naturally severely restricts their rights, access to education, medicine, legal earnings and travel both within and outside China. This environment of an illegal and unrecorded population deprived of legal status has become the basis for recruiting terrorists, Salafist jamaats and the spread of extremist ideology.

Possible solutions

To address the problem, the PRC needs to establish Confucian schools to integrate Uyghurs into PRC culture. In addition, an important step would be to establish Islamic education schools for the Uyghurs, where mullahs would teach the basics of Islam, which could be an important step in China’s fight against international terrorism.

The creation of Uighur integration centres into Chinese society in the Uyghur language could also be extremely effective. Such centres could be a cultural bridge to establishing a dialogue between two cultures with centuries-old histories.

It is crucial to counter Salafi and Wahhabi teachings with traditional Islam, and Sufism in particular. Chinese leadership has so far failed to significantly utilize this approach, despite that these traditional Islamic structures have already helped to stabilize some regions outside China, such as Turkey, Iraq, Syria and the Northern Caucasus in the Russian Federation.

Between Turkey and China

Turkey had heavily criticized China’s Uyghur policy until February 2019. In 2009, during the Uyghur riots in Urumqi in July, the Turkish government stated its disagreement with the Chinese authorities’ assessment of the situation: a member of the Justice and Development Party resigned from his post in the China-Turkey Interparliamentary Friendship Group, and the Minister of Industry and Trade called for a boycott on Chinese goods as a result.  After a series of protests in Ankara and Istanbul, Erdoğan himself condemned China’s policy towards the Uyghurs, calling it “genocide”. The situation was resolved some time later, but tensions between Turkey and China on the Uyghur issue remained until this year.

Interestingly, Turkey’s Kemalist faction, who are close to the Turkish military, have condemned the anti-Chinese position of the Turkish leadership for years. During a speech in Ürümqi (Xinjiang), Doğu Perinçek, the leader of the Vatan Partisi, argued that “the propaganda and lies aimed at China over the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region target Turkey as well, because China’s friendship with Turkey is necessary to both our security and economy. Clearly conscious of this fact, we immediately took a decisive stance against the torrent of lies concerning the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region.”

In July 2019, during his official visit to China, Erdogan admitted that the Uyghurs live happily in China.This was a radical change of position for the Muslim leader who had long criticized China’s policies. Erdogan, who is known for his support of some rather radical Islamic movements, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, described Erdogan’s unexpected change of heart as a “betrayal.” However, only representatives of the Western media seemed to agree, as Erdoğan’s approval was quickly mirrored by other representatives of the Muslim world.

The globalist mass media has claimed that the reason Erdogan changed his position on the issue was predominantly economic.

In the period from 2013 to 2018, China invested 186.3 billion dollars in the framework of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). According to Morgan Stanley, Chinese investments in the BRI project will reach $1.3 billion by 2027. It is important to note that Turkey’s participation in the BRI is not only economic, but also ideological, as the country also increasingly orients itself toward a multipolar outlook.

Chinese political scientist Eric Li, in an article in Foreign Affairs, noted that the death of “globalism does not mean the end of globalization.” Today, China is developing and offering its partners a new vision of globalization – dialogue and partnership. This vision of globalization is devoid of the liberal dimension of a hegemon mediating between different cultures and states.

Turkey is moving away from its historic cooperation with the U.S., in part due to their support of Muhammed Fethullah Gülen’s anti government putsch three years ago. Turkey is joining the fight against globalism, a movement which is predominantly led by China. This reorientation is vividly demonstrated in Turkey’s deal with the Russian Federation to buy S-400 missile defense systems against Washington’s will. Die Welt called Ankara’s acquisition of the S-400s a de facto “refusal to support their allies in the West.” The publication notes that Turkey is currently reaching a “point of no return”, which may result in sanctions from the EU and the U.S., as well as the impossibility of purchasing F-35 fighter jets from the U.S. as planned.

Today, Turkey has the prospect to become a key player in the Chinese Belt and Road project, which has become the primary movement fighting globalist hegemony. Their participation could represent a significant step forward in the creation of a new, multipolar world.

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