This Anti-China Foreign Policy Piece Makes No Sense
Organs of the Deep State propaganda apparatus are concentrating their fire more and more on China now. Foreign Policy, a longstanding, transparent misinformation platform, is actively doing its masters' bidding.
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]recent Foreign Policy piece on the reeducation campaign in China's Xinjiang region is another example of nonsensical claims made in the current anti-China propaganda campaign.
Uighur people pick up their children from school on July 27, 2017, in Kashgar City, Xinjiang, where everyday activities such as wearing a headscarf in the presence of the PRC flag can be cause for detainment.
Notice the picture caption. The picture caption makes no sense. Carl Zha points out that every school in China flies the People's Republic of China flag. It is raised in a weekly ceremony each Monday morning. All the women in the picture above wear headscarfs in the presence of a PRC flag. Will they all be detained for some ideological training? How come they show no fear of being thrown into a "concentration camp"?
The Foreign Policy piece is based on a Human Rights Watch (pdf) report which again is based on interviews with 56 expatriates from the Xinjiang area of China. These people make claims of reasons for which they believe they themselves, or people they claim to know, were put through ideological training sessions. The FP author list all 48 of these reasons, claimed by notoriously unreliable expats, even when many of them do not make any sense.
How can "Trying to kill yourself when in the education camps" be a reason to be send into an education camp? "Owning welding equipment" is likewise certainly not something, on its own, that will put anyone into ideological training. China has an active anti-smoking campaign with high penalties for smoking in prohibited space. To then claim that "Abstaining from cigarettes" is a reason for being send into reeducation is obviously nonsense.
Sine the early 1990s a number of terror incidents by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) killed several hundred people in China. ETIM is sanctioned by the UN as an al-Qaeda aligned movement. Three years ago China decided to attack the problem at its roots. It prohibited Salafist-Wahhabi Islamic practice, which was only recently imported into the traditionally Sufi Uyghur-Muslim areas, and it tries to weed out any such ideology. It also fears the potential growth of an ethnic-nationalistic Turkic Uyghur movement, sponsored by Turkey, that could evolve into a separatist campaign.
People who are susceptible to such ideologies will be put through an reeducation training which includes language lessons in Mandarin and general preparation for the job market. This may not be the way 'western' countries mishandle a radicalization problem, but it is likely more efficient. There surly are aspects of the program that can be criticized. But to claim that these trainings happen in "concentration camps" and for nonsensical reasons is sheer propaganda.
For more on the issue you can listen to Carl Zha's recent Clash of Civilization podcast: Trouble on the Silk Road: The Real Situation of Uyghurs in China.
SELECT COMMENTS
I wonder what the tie-in is with this FP article I linked to on open thread about negotiations with Taliban saying they're a "government in waiting"? Clearly, the women have a degree of freedom only dreamt of by Saudi women. The Outlaw US Empire's government better be careful or its 2.5 million strong Gulag slave labor system will find itself in global headlines along with its well documented history of raising and training death squads to overthrow left-leaning governments which are then used to terrorize the oppressed publics of the right-wing dictators they install. (IMO, this isn't done nearly enough, although Russian media has occasionally mentioned them.)
So, what is the Outlaw US Empire afraid of? Given Xi's and Putin's words, it's afraid of nations capable of doing business far better than it can, that're free from being restricted by the goals of Corporatism, and that puts forth what was once known as the American Dream. To back that assessment, I encourage people to read Putin's address to the Eastern Economic Forum, which I relink here.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 13, 2018 4:24:30 PM | 4
How long have the CIA been planning on using the Uyghurs? How long have they been "minding" them? The first time I heard mention of their name in the msm a few years ago I knew we'd be hearing more from them. Their affiliation and location must have been irresistible for the alphabet agencies for some time, but our relationship with China may be further gone than they're admitting if we're now openly threatening sanctions to benefit one of their minorities(who just happen to live on the border of our colony Afghanistan.
Posted by: sejomoje | Sep 13, 2018 3:48:56 PM | 2
I came across this article indirectly through linking to some of the linked articles at this MoA post and following those articles' links:
"China: Massive Numbers of Uyghurs & Other Ethnic Minorities Forced into Re-education Programs"
https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghurs-other-ethnic-minorities-forced-into-re-education-programs/
MoA regulars are welcome to read it for what it's worth. I haven't read all of it, just parts of it, and on browsing / speeding through parts, the thought occurred to me that many if not all of these "re-education camps" may be none other than boarding schools for young people living in rural areas where the population is too low to support regular day schools.
You get passages like this one:
"... One Han Chinese businessman, who has lived in Xinjiang for 20 years, told us, on condition of anonymity, that:
“Entire villages in Southern Xinjiang have been emptied of young and middle-aged people—all rounded up into ‘re-education’ classes. Only the elderly and the very docile are left in the villages.”..."
Typically the interviewee is described in vague terms who will only speak as an anonymous source and who also describes what he knows of (directly or indirectly, we do not know) in terms so vague they seem stereotypical. For all we know, the young people may have gone to school or colleges in larger towns and cities, serving in the army (or even fighting as terrorists overseas); and the adults have gone to work in offices and factories Urumqi or in other parts of China.
Or you get this from a "young Uyghur woman":
"... “My village has about 2,000 people. I estimate about 200 of them have been sent to county-level education centers, not including those who have to attend trainings at the township and village levels. There are education sessions in the township, which some villagers are forced to attend in the mornings. There are also education sessions in the villages. My mother is required to go there. The education includes simple Chinese language and relevant Chinese laws. My mother has to go every evening, from 7:30 to 9:30… I heard that the policy required that everybody between the age of 15 and 60 must attend these sessions…Outside of those attending the county-level education camp, it’s hard to calculate the number of people who have to attend the education sessions at the township and village levels.” ..."
So it's not in the interest of Uyghur people to know basic Chinese and Chinese laws that might affect them in their daily lives?
Elsewhere in the article there is mention of "re-education" camps where people are allowed to leave to eat meals and go home to sleep. Sounds a lot like they're going to school, night school or college to me.
Posted by: Jen | Sep 13, 2018 6:46:11 PM | 11
ADDENDUM
Special commentary by Godfree Roberts, our Far East correspondent:
By mid-2021, the Voice of China will be ready to roll out internationally: thousands of qualified, competent journalists around the world with full size studios in every capital on earth.Godfree serves opportune warning about the "soft power" disinformation offensive being rolled out against China:
Whenever the Western nations, especially the US, want to use a certain excuse to bash China, there would be flocks of related questions thrown out onto Quora, repeatedly.
For example, recently, I read reports that the US is trying to arouse the world’s attention on China’s religious policies and is hoping to use religion as one of its “weapons” to “renovate” China. Personally, I am not a believer of the conspiracy theory, but when I saw all these:
Is it true that China is suppressing Muslim minorities such as the Hui and Uyghurs?
Why is China forcing Muslim in their country to eat pork?
Why does China oppress Muslim and Tibetan monorities?
Why is China tearing down Catholic Churches and their crosses from atop their buildings?
Why aren't the nations of the world and the UN condemning China's persecution of Muslims?
How did Xi Jinping persecute Muslims in China? And how many people were dead?
How does the Islamic world view the persecution of Uighur Muslims in China?
…………..
It would seem the above proves Godfree's point. And Quora is just one venue where the West's propaganda offensive is unfolding.
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All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors.
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In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report