Europe’s silence on China’s treatment of the Uighurs shames the West
The oppression of the Uighur people, the Turkic minority that have inhabited China’s far western region of Xinjiang for millennia continues unabated. By conservative estimates, at least one million are now incarcerated across a gulag of corrective, concentration and “re-education” camps across the province. That is around a tenth of the total Uighur population of 11.3 million in China. Some estimates suggest that one and a half million are now being held in the camps, including other Muslim minorities.
In July this year, 22 nations, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan signed a letter to the UN Human Rights Council demanding the camps be closed immediately. But 38 countries, including Saudi Arabia sent a counter-letter to the UNHCR praising China for its “remarkable achievements in Xinjiang.” In February this year Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman defended the use of camps as “China has the right to carry out anti-terrorism and de-extremism work for its national security.”
Conspicuously, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has failed to come to the aid of its co-religionists of the Uighur Muslim community. Gulf countries, including Iran, won’t touch the subject at all, so dependent are they on China for purchasing their energy output and inward investment.
The present crackdown, and the institution of the camps, began in 2014, and was boosted by a new provincial Communist Party Secretary, Chen Qanguo, in 2016. He had been promoted from a similar post in Tibet where he had been credited with success in an aggressive “Sinification” programme, imposing Chinese values, standards, and repressive politics. The inmates of the camps are made to speak and undergo political indoctrination in Mandarin. There are some reports of them being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. In Xinjiang, the Beijing regime stands accused of a concerted campaign of cultural eradication. The Uighur Turkic language and literature are suppressed, and Islam frowned upon and worse. Mosques and churches have been destroyed. Halal butchers and shops have been closed.
The camps are described in terms of an Orwellian nightmare – torture, enforced abortions, kidnaps, disappearances, and enforced internal exile to elsewhere in China. This has been accompanied by deliberate pressure on the Uighur diaspora of about a million strong. Email and social media contacts are meticulously and minutely monitored, and then used to compromise the Uighurs at home.
The story of the Uighurs and China has a deep, rich and highly complicated past. The Uighurs emerged as one of about twenty different Turkic groups, each with a distinct language or dialect, about two millennia ago. They continuously challenged the power and authority of the Chinese establishment to the east. From the 8th to the 9th centuries of the Common Era, they boasted their own powerful Khaganate, which for the subsequent two centuries became the Uighur Kingdom.
Sometime during the Khaganate, the Uighur communities adopted Islam – it was a gradual process by osmosis more than a compelled conversion. Even with the arrival of Islam, their culture remained surprisingly humanistic, with figure portraits, ballads and music, and open and airy interior design and architecture.
The 2005 Royal Academy exhibition, Turks – a thousand years of civilisation 600 – 1600 CE – showed some extraordinary examples of Uighur art, portraiture especially. My favourite was a double portrait of a Uighur man and woman from a Xinjiang mural of the 12th Century CE. The label simply said “examples from Uighur culture, a remote medieval Turkic people”, or words to that effect. The show was sponsored by the Turkish government, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party had just won power. Erdogan doesn’t like the Uighurs, though he likes to talk of the “great family” of Turkish and Turkic peoples. He much prefers the family of his new friend – the president and leader-for-life Jinping.
As much as history, and the catalogue of past confrontation, it is geography that makes Beijing so sensitive to the role of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, China’s largest, most remote, and most westerly province. Roughly the size of Alaska, it forms the bridgehead of the ancient Silk Road. Jammed between the Gobi Desert and the great northern steppe, it commands access to the two main western routes of the road, one going south to Balkh in Afghanistan and into India and the sub-continent, and north towards the Aral and Caspian seas and via Bokhara to the shores of the Mediterranean. Today the new strategic Silk Road Railway runs through Xinjiang.
The latest spat between Beijing and Europe occurred a few days ago with the EU’s award of the Sakharov prize for human rights to Ilham Tohti, a moderate Uighur activist sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014. He was praised by the European Parliament as “a voice of moderation and reconciliation” – he is not a separatist – adding that he should be released immediately. Beijing faxed a reply that Tohti is a criminal, the EU should respect Chinese sovereignty, cautioning them not make a terrorist appear influential.
If past clashes with the Qen kingdom across the centuries and during the early years of Communist China still cast a long and dark shadow, the future for the Uighurs of Xinjiang suggests a grim forewarning of what new surveillance governance is likely to mean for all of us. Xinjiang is an extreme example of the surveillance state showing off its new tools and powers. Ironically, many of the techniques now used to surveil, corral, and dominate the Uighurs came from America and the West, from facial recognition to entrapment methods by securing and analysing DNA.
Beijing sees a direct correlation between Islamic religion, the Uighur language and cultural identity with violent extremism, sub-version and terrorism. Riots in the capital Urumqi in 2009 saw 197 killed on the spot, and many more “disappeared” and injured. In 2014 further attacks to the south of the capital led to some 70 deaths. In October 2013 a truck rammed a crowd in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, leading to five deaths – all blamed on “Uighur extremists” of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – or ETIM.
In 2015 ISIS extremists killed 50-year old Fan Jinghui, a Chinese national, in Iraq. Uighurs in ISIS forces, numbering about 115 in all according to the US New America think tank, demanded loyal Muslims rise up and kill Chinese officials working in North Africa.
The Beijing regime has employed the tried and trusted methods used by the Qen kingdom in its confrontations over two centuries with the Uighurs of Xinjiang, and flooded the region with Han Chinese from further west. The biggest recent game changer, perhaps, was signalled by an initiative under the singularly dull sounding title of Document Number Nine – or “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.” It was submitted to the leadership, it is believed, with the signature of President Ji Jinping himself. Even the leaker, a journalist called Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years and put under house arrest.
It rages against the ideology of the West, and any activities “promoting Western constitutional democracy.” The espousal of “universal values” must be eschewed, as must “promoting civil society,” “promoting neo-liberalism” and promoting the “the West’s idea of journalism”. Effectively, the paper sets out the terms and rules of engagement of the new struggle – it actually speaks of the “need to conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield.”
The main weapons system in this war is the Internet – the West’s passion for open journalism must be turned upside down and fired back at the West. This is the blueprint for the new phase of the surveillance state, now being deployed in gruesome detail against the Uighurs of Xinjiang.
All the Chinese equivalents of the West’s Google, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook are state controlled. Attempts, successful or not, by China’s 830 million Internet users to use international websites and apps are monitored and logged. China’s Big Brother is well on top of China’s big data.
In the case of the Uighurs, it means that the reading habits, general tastes, and online discussions are monitored and acted upon. In September last year a Uighur reporter for Radio Free Asia in the US, Shohret Hoshur, was alerted by email about a film being circulated to teachers and education managers in Xinjiang. This film, entitled “The Plot Inside the Text Books”, explained the pretext for rounding up hundreds of intellectuals: they were denounced as “two-faced people who acted to split the motherland.”
On hearing about the film, Kamalturk Yalqun, exiled in Philadelphia, realised his father Yalqun Rozi, a well-known art critic and an editor at the official Xinjiang Publishing House, was vulnerable. Managing to get him on the phone last October, his father said quickly: “It’s not a good time. I’m about to be taken away.” Later Rozi was jailed for 15 years for “inciting subversion of state power.” His “crime”, it later transpired, was that in a textbook he published, he had relied 60 per cent on Uighur and native literary sources – 30 per cent is the permitted upper limit – and in 200,000 words of text the word “China” had been mentioned only four times.
When sanctions were threatened by UN members against the party boss in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, in March 2019, Beijing flatly denied the presence of the detention camps. They were referred to as “re-education centres.” “A country under the rule of law, China respects and protects human rights in accordance with the principles of the Constitution,” a white paper stated, claiming that terrorism had been eliminated, extremism curbed, and social security guaranteed as a result of new policies in Xinjiang.
Yet if the Uighurs only comprise less than one per cent of China’s population of 1.4 billion, why is there such a sense of threat at all levels of officialdom? Some of the answer lies in the human geography of the Uighurs. Just as Xinjiang once formed one of the great junctions of the old Silk Road, it now forms the western bridgehead of its modern incarnation, the Belt and Road project, a project beloved of President for Life Ji Jinping. It is a keystone of the postmodern mercantilism through which China seeks to dominate the global economy.
The three principal land routes of Belt and Road emanate from Xinjiang: the new Eurasian Land bridge into central Asia and northern Europe; the China Central Asia and West Asia corridor to Turkey, the Balkans and the Mediterranean; and the China Pakistan Corridor to the Indian sub-continent. The southern and central routes point to Afghanistan and the republics of the southern steppes. They pass through playgrounds for an array of militant Islamist and nationalist groups, new versions of al Qaeda and ISIS, and the affiliates of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The Ferghana Valley running across three Asian republics to the north of the Pamirs has been the setting for on-off feuds and battles running for generations between Islamist groups and local tribes.
The threat of militant Islam, real or imagined, just inside or beyond China’s border is a fixation of Beijing’s security policy. On a wider canvas, the Uighurs seem to be yet another minority that has become a geopolitical inconvenience to bigger and richer powers. They join the roster along with the Kurds and the Hazara of Bamyan, peoples who are nations without a fixed abode and reliable patrons in the international community.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s sense of ethnic loyalty does not stretch to the Islamic and Turkic Uighurs. On a visit to President Ji Jinping last July, and with a tour of Xinjiang he stated, “it is a fact that the people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang are leading a happy life amid China’s development and prosperity.” Previously Turkey had been one of the few Muslim countries to raise questions about the camps. The camps, the surveillance and harsh treatment, including disappearances and tales of torture are the most haunting aspect, perhaps, of the story of the Uighurs today and tools that the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could only have dreamed of are being used for what many regard as an egregious combination of geopolitical domineering, social engineering, and cultural genocide.