By Helen Raleigh
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
The New York Times’ Asia correspondents Austin
Ramzy and Chris Buckley dropped a bombshell last Saturday by reporting on the
Xinjiang Papers, a 403-page collection of reportedly classified documents
including speeches by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other Communist Party
officials on plans to carry out the massive incarceration of the Uyghur Muslim
minority in Xinjiang and government directives instructing local officials how
to coerce Uyghur students to return home with lies and threats.
The leak of such classified documents out of China is
unprecedented. Ramzy said on Twitter that the person who leaked these documents
was from the Chinese political establishment and “expressed hope that the
disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi Jinping, from escaping
culpability for the mass detentions.” We should thank this leaker for risking
his or her life to expose the true evil of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in
their own words. The Xinjiang Papers confirm what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang
is an ethnic cleansing, and the CCP is ruthless and untrustworthy.
State-Conducted
Torture, Rape, and Imprisonment
The United Nation defines ethnic cleansing as “a
purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by
violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or
religious group from certain geographic areas.” Some of the coercive practices
used to remove civilian populations include “torture, arbitrary arrest and
detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical
injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible
removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population.” These have
happened and are still ongoing in Xinjiang, a supposedly “autonomous territory”
in northwest China and home to many ethnic minorities in China.
There are about 14 million Uyghur Muslims living in
Xinjiang. Between one to three million of them have been sent to “re-education
camps” since 2014, most without any criminal charges. Inside these camps,
Uyghurs are reportedly ”forced to pledge loyalty to the CCP and renounce Islam,
sing praises for communism and learn Mandarin. Some reported prison-like
conditions, with cameras and microphones monitoring their every move and
utterance.” An international tribunal also found evidence of forced organ
harvesting inside these camps.
Uyghur women probably suffer the worst: rapes, sexual
assaults, forced implants of contraceptive devices, and even forced abortions
inside the camps. They are not safe outside the camp either. There are reports
of either forced marriages to Han Chinese men or co-sleeping arrangements
against these women’s will. In these cases Chinese men who are assigned to
monitor Uyghur women whose husbands were sent to camps sleep in the same bed as
these women.
Besides unspeakable human suffering, Uyghurs are losing
their religious sites and cultural heritage. It was reported that more than two
dozen mosques and Muslim religious sites have been partly or completely
demolished in Xinjiang. Researchers believe hundreds more, smaller mosques and
shrines have also been bulldozed, but they lack access to records to prove it.
The magnitude of cultural destruction appears to surpass
what happened under Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Uyghurs are
concerned that with adults locked away and mosques razed to the ground, their
children will grow up without any knowledge of their cultural and religious
identify. What Beijing has done and continues to do in Xinjiang is nothing
short of ethnic cleansing.
The Chinese Communists Want
Ethnic Cleansing
The leaked Xinjiang Papers confirm that’s exactly what
the CCP wants. In 2014, after a series of Uyghur Muslim militant attacks,
including a knife attack that injured more than 100 people, Chinese leader Xi
gave a series of private speeches to CCP members. According to the Xinjiang
Papers, Xi complained that the tools and methods Xinjiang police used were “too
primitive.” He demanded that “the weapons of the people’s democratic
dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering” to wipe out
radical Islam in Xinjiang. He was also recorded saying, “We must be as harsh as
them, and show absolutely no mercy.”
Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Chen Quangguo, who has
carried out the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang since 2016, is Xi’s attack dog. He
carried out Xi’s directive by incarcerating millions of Uyghurs in prison-like
camps, forcefully collecting Uyghurs’ DNA, blood samples, and fingerprints, and
confiscating passports to prevent freedom of movement. He vowed to “round up
everyone who should be rounded up,” including Han officials who refused to
carry out his orders.
Even though Xi also paid lip service to religious
tolerance in some of his speeches by reminding his overzealous comrades to
respect Uyghurs’ right to worship, under Xi, all religious beliefs in China
must be “sinicized,” meaning adjusted to serve the CCP. Government-sanctioned
Christian churches in China often hang Xi’s portrait next to the cross,
equalizing his status to God.
Early this year, the Chinese government published a plan
to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism.” These speeches and directives
also show why the CCP’s crackdown on Muslim and ethnic minorities isn’t limited
to Xinjiang and has little to do with extremism. It’s reported that the kind of
repression Uyghurs experience in Xinjiang has now spread to two other ethnic
groups in China, Hui Muslim and Dongxiang.
You Can’t Trust
Anything They Say
The Xinjiang Papers not only show the CCP’s thinking and
planning behind the Muslim crackdown, but also how it plans to lie about it.
The most telling is the directive on “how to handle minority students returning
home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017.” The reason this is important is
because per the directive, “Returning students from other parts of China have
widespread social ties across the entire country. The moment they issue
incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the
impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”
The directive instructed local officials and police to
meet returning students as soon as possible and if students question where
their families are, local officials and police were instructed to say “They’re
in training schools set up by the government,” and “They are treated very well,
with high standard of living, free room and board.”
If a student asks when he can see his family or when they
will be free, the officials are instructed to say that the student’s family
members “had been ‘infected’ by the ‘virus’ of Islamic radicalism and must be
quarantined and cured. If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never
thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism.” The
directive also explains the reason even family members who seem too old to
carry out violence could not be spared from the camps, because “No matter what
age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”
The directive also gives veiled threats to students,
warning them that their behavior will determine how long their families will
stay in the camps. Students are also told to be grateful for the CCP’s
benevolence and generosity.
Bold-Faced Lies to
International Audiences
According to the Xinjiang Papers, Xi also anticipated
international backlash and told his comrades, “Don’t be afraid if hostile
forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang.” When foreign
media started reporting on the massive incarceration in Xinjiang, Beijing first
denied it. Later it insisted the camps are not prisons but vocational training
schools and Uyghurs chose voluntarily to take government-sponsored free
training.
When asked about the destruction of mosques, Chinese
foreign ministry spokesperson claims “China practices freedom of religion and
firmly opposes and combats religious extremist thought… There are more than 20
million Muslims and more than 35,000 mosques in China. Religious believers can
freely engage in religious activities according to the law.”
The CCP has a long record of lies and more lies. Xi
promised former President Obama that China wouldn’t militarize the South China
Sea. Yet In 2017, CSIS, a Washington-based think tank, reported that satellite
images showed China had built new military facilities on its man-made islands
in the South China Sea, including missile shelters, radars, and various
communications facilities.
China promised that the goal of its “One Belt One Road”
infrastructure program is to help underdeveloped nations build roads and
bridges and stimulate local economies out of the goodness of its heart. Now
more and more of those countries that signed on to the program find themselves
trapped in mountains of debt and several, including Sri Lanka, had to sign away
the control of their major sea ports to China.
China promised the Hong Kong people “One Country, Two
Systems” for 50 years under the joint declaration with the United Kingdom. But
in 2017, only 20 years after Hong Kong’s handover, a Chinese Foreign Ministry
called the joint declaration a “historical document that no longer had any
practical significance.” Now central Hong Kong, including several universities,
has become a battleground between freedom versus tyranny.
The Xinjiang Papers confirm what we already knew: the CCP
lies; it’s cruel and can’t be trusted to uphold international norms; what the
CCP is doing in Xinjiang is an ethnic cleansing. The UN says ethnic cleansing
is a crime against humanity and such acts could also “fall within the meaning
of the Genocide Convention.”
Apparently no Muslim country is willing to call China out
so far because they are a total sellout to China’s money and influence. Western
democracies, especially the United States, need to do it. It appears the Trump
administration, especially Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, has stepped up criticism of the CCP for failing to live up to its
commitments or abiding by basic morality and international law. Hopefully they
will add the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang to their long list of grievances.
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