China
and a New World Order review are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship? Stuart Jeffries Thu 29 Aug 2019
We never learned why Tursun was detained –
along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang
province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education
centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my
hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I
can only say please just kill me.”
Instead of murdering one Uighur mother,
critics of Beijing contend, China is attempting something worse – eliminating a
people. “There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of
extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben
Emmerson QC. “That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you
like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?”
This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is
what is happening to the Islamic people of Xinjiang.
“This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate
cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. “That’s
a genocidal policy.”
Independently verifying Tursun’s treatment is
scarcely possible, but this documentary heard claims of similar treatment in
the province. A teacher and Communist party member told how she had been sent
to teach Chinese at a detention camp for 2,500 Uighurs.
She claimed not only to have heard detainees being tortured, but also to have
learned from a nurse that women were given injections that had the same effect
as the drink Tursun took. “They stop your periods and seriously affect
reproductive organs,” she said.
China,
we learned, denies these charges and claims to be committed to protecting
ethnic minority identities. What its critics call detention camps, Beijing
describes as “vocational education and training centres” resembling “boarding
schools”. We cut to official footage of drawing, dancing and in one room a
class singing in English “If you’re happy and you know it, shout ‘Yes sir!’”
Which, while not proof of genocidal policy, was grim enough viewing.
But without doubt, since 2013 when Xi Jinping
became president and there was an attack in Tiananmen Square in which Uighur terrorists killed five people and injured
38, Beijing has cracked down on what it perceives as an Islamist
threat from the province. That crackdown has included using smartphones and
street cameras to create a surveillance state for Uighurs.
Should Britain roll out the red carpet to a
country charged with crimes against humanity, of undermining freedom of speech
and democracy in Hong Kong, of crushing freedom movements in Beijing, of – it
was suggested here – creating a cult of personality around Xi the likes of
which have not been seen since Chairman Mao? “Better we engage with them so we
can influence them,” said the former chancellor George Osborne.
But does the UK have any influence? Certainly
not as much as we did in in the 19th century when, instead of trying to charm
them into trade deals, we militarily subdued the Chinese to profitably drug
them with opium. “Very few countries have any leverage at all,” said Jeremy
Hunt, the former foreign secretary. The rest of the world shrinks from
criticising China’s human rights violations because we’re awed by its economic
power and how we benefit from it, argued Panetta.
This first of a three-part series did what
politicians dare not do, namely to raise hard questions, not just of Beijing,
but of us. Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by
cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might,
that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal
dictatorship? The Chinese refer to the 19th century, during which
the British oppressed them with two opium wars, as the Century of Humiliation.
Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.
One day in 2015, while Xi was being charmed by
the Queen and David Cameron, a bookseller from Hong Kong set off to see his
girlfriend. Suddenly, Lam Wing-kee recalled, he was surrounded by 31 people. He
spent the next five months in solitary confinement and was released only after
he admitted to selling illegal books. “I am very remorseful,” he told his
captors, clearly under duress. “I hope the Chinese government will be lenient
to me.” The books he had mailed from his shop to customers in mainland China
included those critical of the constitutional change that allows Xi to remain president for life.
Forget morality, it’s time for more cloudy
drinks. While Lam Wing-kee sat in solitary, Cameron and Xi went to the pub for
ye venerable nightmare of ye photo-op. Neither waited for their pints to
settle, for clouds to resolve into clarity. Instead, both precipitately drank
what, had the cameras not been there, I feel sure, neither would have touched.
An emblem of Sino-British relations in the 21st century.
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