Western Propaganda and Xinjiang
The standard practice of the West is to ignore the crimes of its allies/vassals while exaggerating or even making up the “crimes” of its enemies; creating a threatening Other against which populations can be rallied. An excellent case is that of the “Contra” terrorist force that was used in an attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in. the 1980s. In a reversal of reality, the Sandinista forces that had overthrown the horrendous US-backed Somoza dictatorship were typified as unrepresentative and “authoritarian” (one of the favourite words used by the West to vilify its opponents) and the Contras as “freedom fighters”. Another example is that of Saddam Hussein, who was suddenly turned into a “ruthless dictator” after many years of good service to the West when he invaded Kuwait. Rajan Menon in his work The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention details the Western misuse of discourses of human rights to create support for its interventions once the “threat” of communism could not be used after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Usage of Human Rights/Democracy Discourse Against China and its Failure
With respect to China, a human rights discourse was used to delegitimize the reintegration of Hong Kong, the British colonial outpost, with mainland China. With the end of the colonial lease approaching in 1997, between 1992 and 1997 the British colonial authorities suddenly discovered the need for local democracy after a century and a half of brutal colonial rule. This created a “poison pill” for the Chinese authorities; even then it was a “democracy” heavily weighted in the favour of the economic elite. The “one country, two systems” agreement between China and the UK included the need for national security legislation that would curtail activity directed at undermining or overthrowing the Chinese Parry-state, but such legislation was not passed by the local legislature. As China came to be seen increasingly as a competitor by the West, Hong Kong was seen as a useful site for destabilization given its relative political openness and lack of national security legislation. This was exploited in 2014, when the Chinese state put in place a national security review of all candidates for office for the 2017 elections (the first HK elections to use universal suffrage) to weed out those that called for fundamental changes to the Chinese social, political and economic structures (or even independence for HK and Western intervention). The Chinese state practised a high degree of restraint and patience in defusing the resultant student-driven “umbrella” protests; there were no scenes of mass state violence that could be utilized for propaganda by the West.
When the Chinese state tried to have an extradition treaty between China and HK passed in 2019, to remove the very real possibility of criminals crossing the internal border to escape prosecution (with some actual cases), new violent protests erupted; with very public support from the West and its agencies. The actions of Western politicians in openly supporting the anti-government protestors were reminiscent of those in the Maidan in 2014. The Chinese government kept its nerve in the face of the threat of US sanctions, and its patience in not being drawn into an overreaction that could be exploited for Western propaganda purposes and pushed through the implementation of national security legislation. The same type of laws that all Western nations have to curtail actions directed at the overthrow of the state. Hong Kong was removed as a possible point of Western interference in internal Chinese matters – and is disappeared from the Western media and politicians’ speeches. The Grayzone did an excellent expose of one Western operative masquerading as HK Chinese:
I have noticed the use of age restrictions by Youtube on content that in no way requires such age restriction (the same content is freely provided by the MSM), seemingly as a soft layer of censorship - putting another step in the way of people viewing the content. I don’t know if such age restrictions also affect the algorithm that serves up content.
A much more balanced discussion of the HK protests than will be found in Western media:
The US has taken in many of the anti-government protestors and has suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong so that they cannot face justice in Hong Kong. This mirrors the ongoing Western support for the Dalia Lamas and his entourage after the overthrow of the horrendous medieval religious regime overseen by their ancestors in the 1950s by the Chinese state. The Dalia Lama was put on the “back burner” by the West after the 1972 rapprochement with China but has recently been brought more to the fore. Michael Parenti has written about the realities of this horrific regime:
https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/
In Canada, a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded Tibetan Action Institute has spuriously attempted to compare schools in Tibet to the notorious Canadian residential schools; a comparison that was immediately picked up by the Canadian state broadcaster.
The West has tried to blame China for an imagined Uighur population genocide in Xinjiang, but this failed as it was shown that the Uighur population was growing rapidly, substantially faster than the local Han population, This is at least partly due to loopholes in the “one child” policies provided specifically to the Uighur population.
The Xinjiang Indigenous Rights Discourse / Cultural Genocide
With the failure of the population genocide discourse, and related “forced mass sterilizations” stories, Western propaganda smoothly moved onto the very slippery and vague term of “cultural genocide”. Of course, the West has extensive experience of committing both outright genocide (the Amerindian populations) and cultural genocide (e.g. the Canadian and Australian residential school systems); with the indigenous populations still subject to widespread mistreatment and neglect. There is also the history of the extensive work of social science practitioners, such as anthropologists, in support of Western colonial and neo-colonial objectives. With respect to the usage of an indigenous rights discourse as a weapon against the “enemies” of the West, specifically China, three types of actors can be seen:
· Outright fabricators and/or Western state actors
· Created “fact” launderers, security-state affiliated actors and academics
· Western academics who may fetishize indigenous culture at a cultural level but pay little notice to matters of political economy and may be co-opted by the above two types of actors
Such a framework matches Gramsci’s understanding of the role of organic intellectuals (arguing from an elite-interested standpoint) to co-opt the general intellectual community. In the discourse of Uighur indigenous rights and “cultural genocide” we can also see how what Gabriel Rockhill calls the “Global Theory Industry” goes a step further to create issues that can be exploited for propaganda purposes.
With respect to Xinjiang and the Uighurs, Adrian Zenz is the chief fabricator. From absolutely nowhere, with no previous research on the Uighurs or Xinjiang, from 2016 onwards Mr. Zenz has been catapulted into a position of premier Western-accepted authority on all things Xinjiang; with extensive support by the Trump administration. When looking at a student research paper one expects to have to validate the references, but one would not expect to have to do the same with established academics. With Mr. Zenz, every reference has to be checked as they do not tend to support the statements they are supposed to legitimate, or Mr. Zenz has fundamentally misrepresented them in his text. He does not publish in peer-reviewed journals, and the Journal of Political Risk that some of his articles have appeared in is simply a product of the right-wing security-state connected Jamestown Foundation. He is a senior fellow of the US-government created (and substantially funded by Poland’s right-wing government) Victims of Communism Memorial Fund in Washington DC; placing him as both a fabricator and probable Western state actor. Mr. Zenz is also a born-again Christian who feels “led by God” in his crusade against China and believes in the Rapture; a perfect candidate for use by Western propaganda organs. A Grayzone takedown of Mr. Zenz’s “research”, and how that research is cited extensively by the Western media:
As with other Western attempts at interference in other nation’s affairs, am NGO-complex funded directly by US and Western governments (including agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy) has been put in place. With respect to Xinjiang this includes the Washington-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) who stated that at least two million Uighurs had been “re-educated” based on interviews with eight Uighurs; displaying the same tricks as Mr. Zenz.
There is also the World Uyghur Congress in Munich Germany, funded by the NED that has many subsidiary and affiliated organizations (e.g. the NED-funded Uygur Rights Advocacy Group in Canada). Such organizations tend to push the testimony of individuals from Xinjiang, many of which seem to wildly escalate their claims over time; with testimonies mirroring that of the Babies Thrown Out Of Incubators lies to Congress in the run up to the First Iraq War by the unidentified daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US that was widely repeated by Western media and politicians. There is also the generally anti-China Australian Strategic Policy Institute funded by the Australian Department of Defence, other Western governments (e.g. Japan, UK and US) and military contractors. It was this organization that employed a teenager to identify “Chinese detention centres” from satellite images of Xinjiang, the source of so many Western media reports; another example of “fact” creation. It has also pushed the short-of-actual-facts Uighur slave labour discourse:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
There is also the US Newlines Institute of Strategy and Policy founded in 2019 with extensive ties to the US security state, and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights founded in 2015 by a purveyor of the West’s humanitarian intervention discourse, which jointly published a propagandist report on Xinjiang:
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/17/report-uyghur-genocide-sham-university-neocon-punish-china/
As well as being constantly repeated in the Western media, and by Western politicians, these created “facts” need to be legitimated, or “laundered”. through Western academia. This is when the second and third set of actors become engaged; academics in respected Western universities. To help identify some of these, I have reviewed two recent academic books The Wat On The Uyghurs China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press) and The Xinjiang Emergency: Exploring The Causes And Consequences Of China’s Mass Detention Of Uyghurs (Manchester University Press).
The author of the first book, Sean R, Roberts, worked for USAID in Central Asia as a democracy promotion specialist from 1998 to 2006, during the peak of the “Global War On Terror”, and then worked for the USAID funded Academy for Educational Development from 2007-2008, before joining the faculty of Georgetown University where he is now Director International Development Studies. A man with a depth of experience with US foreign agencies. His book makes extensive use of the work of the creators of “facts” such as Zenz, the World Uyghur Congress, Radio Free Asia (the propaganda media wing of the US state in Asia), and the deeply right-wing anti-China Jamestown Foundation. He also attempts to play down the scale of terrorist activity in Xinjiang by simply stating that certain acts were probably not the work of terrorists; we just have to take his word for it.
The second book is a collection of essays edited by Michael Clarke, who works at the Australian Centre for Defence Research, at the Australian Defence College. His introductory chapter makes extensive use of references from Zenz, the CHRD, Radio Free Europe and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, some of which are somewhat “hidden” behind intermediary references (e.g. an article referring to the work of Zenz etc.). The second chapter is extremely weak, as the personal experiences of the author, Sandrine Catris (Augusta University, US) during a trip to Xinjiang in May-June 2018 are used in an attempt to draw parallels with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In the third chapter, Anna Hayes (James Cook University, Australia) tries to equate the redevelopment of the central residential area of the city of Kashgar to a “creeping” genocide. To do this she both greatly overstates the cultural impact of the change and romanticizes the old buildings. As Powers notes in an article for Open Democracy, at least one of the new residents is happy with their new accommodation, “Of course, I like my new house … It has running water, electricity, and air conditioning”; the lack of which in the old buildings is never mentioned by Hayes. Powers further notes that “Uyghur identity persists and their culture thrives outside close-knit mähälla communities in Ürümqi, Beijing, and even in cities in the US”, showing the misrepresentation by Hayes of standard urban redevelopment as “creeping” genocide.
The fourth chapter is produced by Sean R. Roberts, the author of the first book above so I do not need to comment further about the quality of his work. In the fifth chapter, Timothy A. Grose (Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, US) and James Leibold (La Trobe University, Australia and Australian Strategic Policy Institute) make extravagant claims for how Chinese society as a whole is managed by the Party-state and how that is intensified in Xinjiang, but don’t really make any case for any kind of genocide. In chapter 6, Darren Byler (Simon Fraser University, Canada) utilizes a very limited number of ethnographic interviews to describe what would constitute an extremely heavy-handed security and ethnically charged response to the violent and murderous attacks of the previous few years, but not cultural genocide. A problem with such interviews is whether they represent general reality (the experiences may be specific to the individuals involved, or a specific area, or a specific institution) or lack veracity (the interviewees have been previously coached or rewarded for exaggerating their accounts). Below, Daniel Dumbrill points out some of the issues with the testimony of Tursunay Ziyawudun (at 12.02), including increasing exaggeration and variance over time:
In chapter 7, Dilmurat Mahmut (McGill doctoral candidate) and Joanne Smith Finlay (Newcastle University) analyze the contents of a primary school textbook series in Xinjiang and do provide significant evidence of changes designed to de-emphasize Uighur cultural and political separateness in order to better assimilate students into a feeling of belonging to China rather than a separate Xinjiang. This excellent work is somewhat tarnished though by the repeated diversions using the “facts” of Zenz etc. to try to link these to other processes. There is also an overplaying of certain parts of the textbooks, especially those that are seen in textbooks of most nations (for example pride in the nation, the “official” history, and treatment of foreign nations). In chapter 8, Matthew Robertson (doctoral candidate at ANU) utilizes circumstantial evidence and statistical analyses to argue that a massive prisoner organ harvesting industry exists in China (related to Falun Gong detainees) and then goes on to use yet more circumstantial evidence to argue that the Uighurs are possibly being used for illegal transplants; speculation rather than scholarship.
Chapter 9 by Michael Clarke simply repeats all the failings of his earlier chapter, as well as attempting to project Australia’s inglorious attempts at the cultural genocide of its own indigenous population onto the Chinese. Chapter 10 by Adlimit Raki Eltersih (senior language tutor in Mandarin at Manchester University) discusses the impacts on the Uighur diaspora of the inability to contact their relatives in Xinjiang. In Chapter 11, David Tobin (University of Sheffield) argues that issues of overall Chinese identity and internal cultural diversity are at odds and this creates an ontological insecurity that must be addressed through forced assimilation. Nothing about Western aggression toward China, the extensive Western manipulation of religious extremists as a weapon against other states, the attempted Western coup in neighbouring Kazakhstan, nor the importance of Xinjiang to the Belt and Road Initiative - no its all in the minds of the Chinese leadership and the threat to their ontological security. An excellent example of conventional subjectivist scholarship which makes the political-economic milieu invisible.
Overall the book is extremely uneven, with some good scholarship, but with large chunks relying on the repetition of manufactured “facts”, somewhat contorted logic and questionably relevant scholarship. The position that perhaps the best way for the West to reduce the problems in China would be to strive for a less aggressive policy toward China, fully accepting Taiwan as a part of China and not intervening in the internal politics of its neighbours nor internal regions (e.g. giving funding and air time to the Dalai lama and Uighur separatist groups) is never addressed. Given that the ANU workshop from which the book came was funded by the US State Department, perhaps that is not surprising.
What neither book covers, is the environment of Western aggression toward China, including the ongoing attempts at regime change on the borders of China and Russia (e.g. recent coup attempt in Kazakhstan that borders Xinjiang and colour revolution attempt in Belarus), NGO-complex interference in South East Asian politics (e.g. Thailand and Malaysia NGOs and media funded by Western state agencies), support for Taiwanese independence, and Western funding of Uighur separatist organizations. With Xinjiang representing a critical hub for the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as a large geographical part of China, any destabilization of the area in the context of overall Western aggression could be expected to produce a state reaction that would err on the side of over-reaction. The recent Western-supported destabilization of Hong Kong will not have helped the mood of the Chinese elite with respect to Xinjiang. These factors will only intensify as the West attempts to stop the rise of China and the coming of a multipolar world order.
How would the UK state have reacted if an extremist Welsh Celtic group had started regularly murdering English people with knives and bombs, and then it was found that supporters of that group were being allowed to happily reside in Ireland and send funds and arms to their brethren? Oh, well we do kind of know that don’t we given the UK state actions during the Northern Ireland “Troubles”.
Another aspect of the above scholarship may be a fetishization of the Indigenous in Western academia in response to the woeful history of the West, and its social sciences, with respect to indigenous populations and cultures. What China is attempting to do is remove the possibility of terrorism through economic development, which includes the need for the Xinjiang population to both be fluent in Mandarin and be better educated overall to be able utilize opportunities across China. This focus is supported by the provision of university places on a preferential basis to Uighur students. Western nations impoverished their indigenous populations, China is striving to raise up the Uighur population economically; ridding them of the poverty and ignorance that tends to feed religious extremism. A poverty that will only be reinforced by Western sanctions against produce and products from Xinjiang, then again perhaps that is the real purpose of those sanctions; to keep the political-economic basis for religious radicalization in place.
Such a process of development will of course change (not exterminate!) the Uighur culture, but is this a bad thing? Should we expect them to stay in relative poverty so that their culture, frozen in time, can remain? A question answered by a Namibian President in his response to a German envoy when he noted that the Chinese brought economic development, while the Germans residents tended to want to preserve everything. It reminds me of the exhibitions of the 1800s, where indigenous peoples would be exhibited for the curious Western crowds; now a whole indigenous population and their homeland can be treated as an exhibit for Western anthropologists to study; how is this not a colonial approach? Then Western governments can lecture other nations about their supposed “shortcomings”; just like old colonial times minus the gunboats, those are now replaced with “carrier battle groups”, economic duress and internal political interference.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the West brought corruption, destruction, death and poverty to the Muslim population; exacerbated by the recent freezing of Afghani foreign exchange reserves by the US. Strange how the plight of the Uighur Muslims is so important to the West’s humanitarian scholars, media and governments all of a sudden. Also strange how only the EU and the white settler colonies (New Zealand has taken a less aggressive position) plus Japan seem to have sanctioned China over the Xinjiang “genocide”, while not one Moslem state has; in fact Moslem states have openly agreed with China’s approach. The result has been numerous Western media articles insulting those Moslem nations, calling them complicit in the supposed “genocide”. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya and a GWOT focused on “Muslim-terrorists)” you would have thought that the West would be stopped by their own hypocrisy, but no.