See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — China’s reaction to the OHCHR’s Xinjiang report
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — China’s reaction to the OHCHR’s Xinjiang report
WRITTEN BY DAVID O’BRIEN
28 September 2022
The recent United Nations report, which finds that the People’s Republic of China has committed serious human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minority groups, has been described as a game-changer in how the international community views what is happening in Xinjiang. The UN investigation by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) found claims of arbitrary detention, widespread torture, sexual violence, forced sterilisation of women, and forced labour to be credible, and that these could amount to the “commission of international crimes, including crimes against humanity”.
The report was released by UN Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet on her last day in office. She also outlined how she had come under huge pressure not to publish it. “The High Commissioner’s damning findings explain why the Chinese government fought tooth and nail to prevent the publication of the Xinjiang report, which lays bare China’s sweeping human rights abuses,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch said after the report was published.
Things have never been so good
In China, the report barely received any coverage neither in official media nor online. This is hardly a surprise given the Chinese government has long sought to manipulate and dominate the discourse on Xinjiang. A recent report from the US State Department accuses China of engaging in a sophisticated campaign to drown out critical narratives by flooding search engines and social media with AI-generated postings that appear to support its repression. Beijing also uses old-fashioned threats and cyberbullying to intimidate and silence those who criticise or question its policies or intent.
In the run-up to next month’s key National Party Congress meeting when Xi Jinping will almost certainly extend his rule, possibly for the rest of his life, there can be no criticism, no focus on what is happening, no words to be spoken.
While the damning investigation from the UN received almost no mention, Chinese media have been trumpeting the government’s ‘human rights achievements’ in Xinjiang. For instance, the Global Times ran a piece on a Chinese-organised meeting which took place on the sidelines of the 51st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The article, which was illustrated with a photograph of Uyghurs dancing in a field to celebrate the grape harvest, claimed the government has put “priority on improving people’s welfare, safeguarding social stability in accordance with laws, promoting high-quality economic development, and continues to improve residents’ livelihoods, consolidate unity among different ethnic groups and fully protect religious freedom”. It claimed that Xinjiang had made unprecedented achievements on economic development and human rights, and angrily accused “some Western countries” of spreading lies and disinformation about the region.
The Global Times piece sums up China’s response to claims that it is committing genocide against its own people. All such reports are lies, it states, and in reality, people are happy, security has never been better, terrorism has been defeated, and Uyghur people are so overjoyed they cannot help but to break into song and dance.
Curing ideological disease
The idea that Xinjiang is now stable, and that the internment of around one in ten Uyghurs in concentration camps has been such a great success that China holds it up as a policy for others to follow, is just one of the many deeply disturbing aspects of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) justifies what it is doing. When evidence of its campaign of repression first began to emerge in 2017, the Chinese government denied its existence. When this evidence became overwhelming, they reversed tactics by admitting the camps were real but calling them ‘vocational training centres’. They were, in the government’s own words, a way to treat the “ideological sickness” of people who did not appreciate how much the Communist Party had done for them.
According to a speech by the Chinese Communist Youth League Xinjiang Branch posted online in 2017, the camps have “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”. Despite Xinjiang increasingly appearing in international media as the site of this extraordinary campaign, the region has also seen an extensive boom in domestic tourism over the past few years and is being foregrounded in Chinese media as a tourist ‘hot spot’.
Indeed, tourism is being described as one of the main things being assured by the camps and key industry ‘re-education’ prepares Uyghurs to work in it. In this context, tourism is an emphasised symbol of social stability, as well as explicitly positioned as the ‘solution’ to the stated grounds of ethnic tension: poverty and lack of opportunity among ethnic minorities. ‘Come to Xinjiang to see for yourself its prosperity and harmony and witness the achievements on human rights’ is the constant refrain from Chinese officials. Except that is not possible now. Much of the region is locked down due to COVID-19. In mid-September, residents of one of Xinjiang’s largest cities, Ghulja, took to social media to say that they were running out of food, having been subjected to a 40-day lockdown.
Overwhelming evidence
The evidence uncovered by the UN report, alongside the ever-growing testimony of camp survivors and their families is now overwhelming. The US government, along with British, French, and Dutch parliaments have declared what is happening in Xinjiang to be genocide, yet the Chinese government's response remains the same: they deny, they hide, they cover up. I have lived most of my adult life in China and I can say with absolute certainty that the vast majority of Chinese people are good, decent, kind, and compassionate. But their government hides what it is doing to their fellow citizens from them, it has such control over the media and public discourse that they cannot know.
In the run-up to next month’s key National Party Congress meeting when Xi Jinping will almost certainly extend his rule, possibly for the rest of his life, there can be no criticism, no focus on what is happening, no words to be spoken. Terrible things are happening in such silence. The Chinese government wants to achieve internationally what it has achieved at home when it comes to Xinjiang. It wants people to turn away, to forget, to say nothing, and it will use fear, bullying, and intimidation to achieve this. Increasingly the CCP’s greatest power is its power to silence.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr David O’Brien is a lecturer in the faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He researches and writes on ethnic identity in Xinjiang, a region he has lived in and visited for almost 20 years. Image credit: Flickr/Matt Hrkac.