The claim relies on data abuse and baseless claims by a far-right ideologue, Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal report.
Purple Light Pavilion in Beijing during a 2013 U.S. official visit. (State Department, Flickr, Alison Anzalone)
By Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
Both President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have endorsed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last-minute accusation of “genocide” against the Muslim Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang province.
But an investigation of published work by the researcher Pompeo relied on to level his genocide allegation reveals a pattern of data abuse and fraudulent assertions that substantially undermines the incendiary charge.
The U.S. government’s accusation of genocide against China stems from a single source: a June 2020 paper by Adrian Zenz, a right-wing German researcher affiliated with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and neoconservative Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Articles by the Associated Press, CNN, and BBC also relied on Zenz’s article to claim that plunging Uyghur birth rates and the application of birth control measures in Uyghur counties of the Xinjiang region were proof of a policy of “demographic genocide.”
Just days after the publication of Zenz’s paper, Pompeo issued a statement denouncing China’s alleged policy of “forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning,” personally crediting “Adrian Zenz’s shocking revelations.”
Biden backed the the genocide charge last August when it first appeared in a flurry of media reports. His campaign spokesman told Politico, “The unspeakable oppression that Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have suffered at the hands of China’s authoritarian government is genocide and Joe Biden stands against it in the strongest terms.” Blinken, for his part, declared at his first press conference as secretary of state that he agreed genocide has been committed against the Uyghurs.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Feb. 4. (State Department, Freddie Everett)
While Zenz’s employers describe him as “one of the world’s leading scholars on People’s Republic of China government policies towards the country’s western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang,” he is, in fact, a far-right Christian fundamentalist who has said he is “led by God” against China’s government, deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions.
Lyle Goldstein, a China specialist and research professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department of the Naval War College, told The Grayzone that Zenz’s labeling of the Chinese approach to the Uyghurs as “demographic genocide” is “ridiculous to the point of being insulting to those who lost relatives in the Holocaust.”
Goldstein said the Chinese approach to Xinjiang “is a more repressive posture than we would like, but it sure isn’t genocide.”
Moreover, a careful review of Zenz’s research shows that his assertion of genocide is contradicted by flagrant data abuse, fraudulent claims, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations.
Genocide or Family Planning Policy?
In Adrian Zenz’s 2020 paper for the Jamestown Foundation, he boasted that his findings “provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
Zenz was referring Article 2 (d) of that Convention: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” But Article II qualifies the relevant acts as those “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
But “preventing births” by itself cannot be evidence of alleged genocide without evidence of intent to destroy the group in question. Otherwise, any birth control program provided to an ethnic group would be prima facie evidence of a policy of genocide against the group.
Zenz argued that population control measures applied to Uyghurs could be branded as “genocidal” because population growth rates fell by 84 percent in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and declined further in several minority regions in 2019. But more complete statistics that Zenz cited in his report, and data that he conveniently omitted, contradicted his conclusion.
Zenz provided statistics revealing that between 2005 and 2015, Uyghur population growth in Xinjiang was 2.6 times higher than that of Han Chinese in the Xinjiang region. (The chart displayed in his report is below).
Both official Chinese figures and Zenz agree that the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased significantly between 2010 and 2018.
Left: Zenz’s graph on population changes in Xinjiang. Right: Official Chinese statistics on the same issue.
Zenz’s figures shows an increase in Uyghur population from 10.1 million to 11.8 million during the 2010 and 2018, while Chinese government figures demonstrate an even larger increase from 10.1 to 12.7 million. That means the Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew by a staggering 25.04 percent.
Zenz shows the Han Chinese population rising from 8.5 to 9.8 million during the eight-year period, while Chinese government figures show a smaller increase in Han population from 8.8 million to 9 million.
Both the rapid surge in Uyghur population growth rates and the increased margin of the Uyghur majority over the Han population of Xinjiang in recent years are the result of the one-child policy imposed on Han Chinese couples by the Chinese government in 1979.
According to China specialist Martin King Whyte, the one-child policy was accompanied by a long-term pattern of abuses in its implementation, including “intrusive menstrual monitoring, coerced sterilizations and abortions, staggering monetary fines for ‘over-quota’ births, smashing of furniture and housing of those who resist and withholding registration for babies born outside the plan.”
Uyghur families, however, were exempted from the one child policy. Urban Uyghur couples were allowed to have two children, and rural Uyghur couples three. In practice, moreover, rural Uyghurs often had large families, with as many as nine or ten children in some cases, as even Zenz acknowledged.
In 2015, the Chinese government announced a relaxation of the decades-long one-child limit on urban Han couples, allowing urban couples to have two children and rural families to have three. In Xinjiang, where birthrates routinely exceeded previously established limits, local officials urged the equal application of family planning policy between Han and Uyghur couples.
In July 2017, Xinjiang’s regional government ended the exemption on the old child limits for Uyghurs. Uyghur couples were thus expected to follow the same limitations recently imposed on Han couples: two children in urban areas and three in rural regions.
As the Chinese government has freely acknowledged, a 5 percent decrease in the birth rate in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2018 was the result of the equal enforcement of family planning policy across ethnic lines.
While eliding this point, Zenz also overlooked the fact that China’s overall birthrate has fallen precipitously in recent years across the demographic spectrum as the population ages and contraceptives become more widely available through programs like the government’s annual free distribution of one billion condoms. For example, in the city of Guangzhou, which is far from Xinjiang, the rate of newborn babies has plunged to its lowest point in a decade.
Cherry Picking & Distortion
Also in 2017, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission announced a $5.2 billion healthcare investment in Xinjiang, stating its intention to strengthen a brittle health infrastructure in impoverished, rural areas of the region.
According to Chinese government statistics, maternal and infant mortality rates in Xinjiang were nearly halved by 2018, while average life expectancy rose as a result of increased public health investments. A 2019 study by Lancet described China’s improvement of maternal health and infant mortality reduction as a “remarkable success story.” Another study that year by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences arrived at a similar conclusion. How these positive health indicators could serve as proof of genocide was left unexplained by Zenz, who simply omitted the numbers from his report.
Throughout his paper, Zenz framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as evidence of a genocide in the making. For example, Zenz pointed to a photograph of Uyghur residents of rural regions of Xinjiang receiving medical consultation at a free health clinic as part of an “effort to enforce the thorough implementation of increasing intrusive birth control efforts.”
However, the photograph depicted an elderly couple who were far too old to have children, and was dated May 2017 – months before the Chinese government announced an end to the child limit exemption for Uyghurs.
Left: Adrian Zenz’s creative interpretation of a photo showing an elderly couple receiving a free health check-up. Right: The original source of the photo.
According to the original source of the photograph, an article in China News, it depicted a regiment from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps deploying to a rural province as part of the government’s poverty eradication program. There, the doctors “measured blood pressure, electrocardiogram, blood sugar, height and weight for poor villagers who came to see the doctor for free… More than 200 poor people were diagnosed and treated, and more than 100 common drugs were distributed on the spot.”
At another point in his paper, Zenz cited an August 2019 document from Xinjiang’s Wenquan County government office as evidence of “greater pressure to implement intrusive birth control methods.” He referred to a single mention of 468 “birth control surgeries,” which could alternately be translated as “family planning operations,” but provided no evidence that the operations were coercive. Revealingly, Zenz omitted the next line, which expressed satisfaction with a birth rate of 8.11 percent.
Zenz proceeded to ignore the rest of the document, which touted the increased provision of free mental health services, polio vaccinations and AIDS prevention treatment as well as poverty alleviation measures and the construction of new hospitals and medical clinics for the population of Xinjiang.
How did a massive investment to improve the health of previously neglected rural communities fit within the framework of a policy of genocide? Once again, Zenz avoided the issue entirely.
Inventing Statistics & Spinning Tales
Among Zenz’s “major findings” was the claim that “80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China… were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.”
According to the 2019 China Health Statistics Yearbook published by the National Health Commission – the original source of Zenz’s claim – the number of new IUD insertion procedures in Xinjiang in 2018 accounted for only 8.7 percent of China’s total. So Zenz’s “major finding” was off by a factor of 10, a staggering error that undermined the entire substance of his argument.
Zenz also omitted mention of the 89,018 IUDs that were removed in Xinjiang in 2018, perhaps because those numbers further undercut his claims of genocide.
The Chinese government has published the statistical yearbook chart that Zenz relied on to concoct his “major finding.” The relevant sections were translated by a native Chinese speaker and are displayed below. A full translation of the chart can be viewed here.
Zenz’s questionable claims did not stop there. Elsewhere in his paper, the daffy data diver asserted that 73.5 percent of married women of childbearing age in Xinjiang’s Kuqa County had IUDs fitted between 2017 and 2018. In his footnote, Zenz claimed, “This data comes from a cache of over 25,000 local government files obtained by the author in 2019.” The article he provided as accompaniment, however, was written by himself for the Jamestown Foundation and contained no data on IUD operations in Kuqa County.
Zenz attempted to pad his shaky statistics with dramatic testimony from U.S.-based Uyghur exiles who have been cultivated by the U.S. State Department. The narratives of these exiles have been vehemently challengedby family members in Xinjiang, as well as by vocational center graduates and local doctors, who produced official hospital documents purporting to disprove their allegations.
In his paper, Zenz cited a September 2019 article in the U.S. government-run outlet, Radio Free Asia, containing testimony by a U.S.-based exile, Tursunay Ziyawudun, who claimed she was forcibly sterilized and physically tortured in a Chinese internment center.
However, in February 2020, Ziyawudun changed her story entirely, telling Buzzfeed: “I wasn’t beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain — you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason.”
Ziyawudun changed her story again after being relocated to the U.S. and cultivated by the U.S. government-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project. This February, she told the BBC and CNN that she was gang raped by guards in an internment camp. The BBC report relied on none other than Zenz as its expert voice on China’s supposed policy of “systematic rape.”
Zenz’s propagandistic framing, cherry-picking of original source materials, and cooking of statistics fit a pattern of misrepresentation on display in a December 2019 paper he authored for a NATO-linked publicationalleging a Chinese policy to force members of the Uyghur minority into “slave labor.”
As Ajit Singh reported for The Grayzone, Zenz painted an article about a government program providing Uyghur women with free childcare as evidence of forced family separation – a “shocking example of this ‘liberation’ of women from their children,” he called it. Zenz conveniently omitted a quote in the article from a Uyghur woman who said the free childcare “solved [her] problem, now there are people who take care of my children, I can in peace go to work… very convenient.”
A look at Zenz’s political background helps explain his hostility toward China’s socialist system, and raises questions about his views on the use of birth control. Indeed, Zenz is an anti-abortion, anti-feminist Christian fundamentalist captivated by End Times theology, and has said that god has led him on a mission against the Chinese government.
Adrian Zenz’s first book, co-authored with Marlon Sias, condemns gender equality, homosexuality and socialism as works of the Antichrist.
‘Led by God’ Against China
The BBC based its June 2020 report alleging “forc[ed] birth control to suppress population” on Zenz’s work, referring to him as a “China scholar” without mentioning his employment by right-wing institutions in Washington or his own hyper-ideological views.
Like the BBC, an AP report relied entirely on an advance copy of Zenz’s paper, but provided no background and whitewashed his right-wing politics or institutional affiliations. A CNN story published a month later and a CNN follow-up in September 2020 on alleged Chinese forced sterilizations in Xinjiang also relied on Zenz without mentioning his political background.
As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far right Christian fundamentalist who claims to have been “led by god’ to defeat the Communist Party of China. While he is almost invariably touted in Western media as a leading scholar on China, he described himself in 2015 as “a lecturer in empirical research methods at a Christian university.” As late as 2018, in fact, Zenz was listed as a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University in Korntal, Germany.
Zenz’s first published book, “Worthy to Escape: Why all believers will not be raptured before the Tribulation,” he and his co-author, Marlos Sias, urged Christian believers to subject unruly children to “scriptural spanking,” condemned homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast,” and argued that Jews who refuse to convert to evangelical Christianity during the End Times would either be “wipe[d] out” or “refined” in a “fiery furnace.”
Adrian Zenz, the primary source of western media reports on Uyghur "concentration camps", is a German anti-Semite who believes Jews that refuse to convert to Christianity will be "wiped out" and put into a "fiery furnace".https://t.co/4iMObYmEzC pic.twitter.com/Unc7rvprCN
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) August 10, 2020
In the End Times tome, Zenz predicted that the coming fall of capitalism would bring to power the Antichrist within a “few decades.” He identified the force that “will usher the Antichrist into power” as “the economic and financial fall of ‘Babylon,’ with ‘Babylon’ symbolically representing the world’s global economic system (capitalism).”
Like other born-again evangelicals, Zenz is also fiercely anti-abortion and opposed to gender equality. “Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures,” Zenz wrote. “Through notions of gender equality […] the enemy is undermining God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.”
Zenz currently serves as a fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a Washington DC-based right-wing lobbying front born out of the National Captive Nations Committee. The latter group was founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky to stifle any efforts at diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a leader of the OUN-B militia that fought alongside Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in World War II.
In April 2020, Zenz’s employer listed all global deaths from Covid-19 as “victims of communism,” blaming each of them on the Chinese government.
Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation Adds Global Coronavirus Deaths To Its Tally Of Historical Victims Of Communism #CCPCoverup https://t.co/h7tMrp16Wq https://t.co/P88k9YmM9o
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) April 11, 2020
Zenz is also employed by the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC founded as the outcome of efforts by Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director, William J. Casey, to establish an extra-governmental channel to pay Soviet dissidents. In the past, Jamestown leadership has spearheaded lobbying efforts to support separatism in Chechnya.
In their apparent zeal for escalation with China, mainstream Western outlets like the AP, BBC and CNN have accepted Zenz’s dubious research as absolute fact, while ignoring his background as a religious extremist who is ideologically committed to regime change in Beijing. If Biden and Blinken formally adopt the Trump administration’s “genocide” designation, they will have effectively endorsed Zenz’s shoddy and propagandistic research as well.
The genocide accusation may appeal to the Biden administration as a useful geopolitical cudgel, as well as a defense against right-wing Republic attacks painting the new president as “soft on China.” But it will only strengthen the hand of hardliners determined to provoke a dangerous and potentially catastrophic confrontation with a fellow nuclear-armed power.
“The United States has set out to vilify China,” former U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing and Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman told The Grayzone, and the accusation of Uyghur genocide “is the perfect issue with which to do so.”
Freeman opined that the Chinese “seem to be doing many cruel and counterproductive things in Xinjiang.” However, he cautioned against taking the genocide accusation at face value: “In the current atmosphere, we should be especially skeptical about any and all assertions by people who have become part of the current anti-China campaign in the West. Before we condemn, we should be sure of our facts.”
The Jamestown Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on Zenz’s research.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including “Killing Gaza.” Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
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The regime change destabilisation playbook of western elites is depressingly familiar.
Unfortunately these malign shepherds know their largely brainless flock all too well.
China will try in vain to have an objective team of westerners look into their necessary response to Uyghur Wahhabi adherent and ultra-nationalist terrorism but any resulting reports will be ignored and buried under a deluge of information trash designed to keep the sheep prodded in the “right” direction.
I find this article extremely interesting, written by two genuine reporters. I would, however, like to know what they or readers here think of the Frontline documentary, “China Undercover,” about the “re-education” program for Uyghurs where, after people complete the program, they are no longer Uyghurs, but completely Chinese.
Since 1978 many Chinese commentators had ridiculed concepts such as ideology, rejected class war, and the need for propaganda to motivate people. As a result, they’re still miles behind Western expertise in the art of brainwashing. Few countries can hope to enslave an entire people from Africa, get them to speak only English, and to use only the names of their slave-masters. Even today, very few Afro-Americans sought to change their names. And people like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Muhammed Ali merely replaced one set of foreign names for another: memories of their origins, their culture, have been erased completely.
Quite the same phenomena had occurred in Africa and much of the Third World. While some African nations managed to call their states with local names, quite a few continue to use names designated by their colonial oppressors. The huge country of India found, after centuries of imposition of English language on that subcontinent, most difficult to use Hindi as their national language. It’s only recently that Prime Minister Modi girded up his loins and announced that Hindi would replace English as the national language of India in the near future. As for Australia there’s no need for such measures: the Native Australians had been reduced to such a pitiful minority that it’s a matter of time that they themselves, not only their language, become extinct like the fate of many Native American tribes.
In China, it’s the law that every minority language be taught at least in elementary schools, and that all Han (the majority nationality) administrators in minority areas must know the local language. Though I don’t particularly like the CPC, I do believe that they’re Chinese enough to remember the ancient saying (2500 years) that “within the four seas all men are brothers.” That’s why minorities in China are still around after thousands of years and not largely disappeared in a mere couple of hundred years like they’ve been in continents like the Americas and Australia.
Unfortunately this article is skewed by largely limiting the concept of genocide to forcibly limiting childbirth. Genocide can be much wider as shown in the UK legal review of the situation as described in hXXps://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55723522
This article would be more credible if the author had provided broader evidence
In an otherwise excellent article, the statistical critique here contains an error. The Zenz claim of ‘In 2018, 80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China (calculated as placements minus removals) were performed in Xinjiang…’ is actually correct:
(328,475 – 89,018)/(3,774,318 – 3,474,467) x 100 = 239,457/299,851 x 100 = 79.86 %
ie, the Xinjiang net IUD placements divided by the all-China net IUD placements gives ~80%
Why is it that the USA and some others manage to decide on “enemies” then find some fantastic outlier of truth and reason to support their persecution and interference in their affairs? Remember Bill Browder, whose false claims after his condemnation for fraud were accepted with delight by the USA government who passed the “Magnitsky Act” to punish Russia and even spread this to other nations to continue the sanctions on Russia. No investigation took place but a Russian film maker, Andrei Nekrasov, an anti-Putin activist, actually found during the film’s production that Magnitsky’s treatment was not as the West assumed. His film has NOT been allowed to be shown since 2016, and is quickly removed when it appears online. Perhaps too close to upsetting the story the West prefers.
Why is Navalny taken as a hero? What about Guaido in Venezuela? or the ridiculous 10% woman in Belarus??
Why not allow sovereign countries to deal with their own people and instead try to cope with the giant disasters looming and already present in the USA and its allies???
Well said rosemerry.
The narratives used for propaganda purposes by western elites waging a war to preserve their patrician status are all depressingly similar. They clearly have no humility or honor but simply what they clearly perceive to be a geopolitical necessity, to use whatever lies work for them because for them in their self-justifying state no weapon can afford to be left unused mo matter how immoral.
I agree with rosemerry and Susan. When I think of post-war genocide i think of the American war on Vietnam — 50% of the North suffered either killed, maimed, birth defects still happening, agent orange, napalm targeted at civilians — so until we name US genocidal wars as acts of genocide ….
A very responsible article that gives the lie to the allegedly genocidal acts of the PRC against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Still, Zenz could have have braced up his charge of genocide better if he had addressed the more important issue of Uyghur harsh livelihoods and poor employability within and across Han Chinese public and private business, technological, scientific, industrial and other decent amd lucrative entities and economic sectors instead of merely dwelling wastefully on allegedly discriminatory Uyghur demographics ! Zenz may be emphrically wrong but he was motivationally and morally right to stick up for sophistical discriminations against them in their very titular province by China ! China must continously be monitored on these issues and held to account but ONLY after thorough and multi-sourced verifications !
The reason for the New Cold War with China (and Russia) is clear. The Great War Machine requires external enemies–real or imagined–in order to persuade the American people to shovel obscene amounts of wealth into its fiery furnaces. Fear and hatred of enemies, without actually going to war, is enough to achieve this goal. One big danger is that cold war can turn into hot war either due to misjudgment on either side or by accident.
In any event, U.S. military planners must realize that China cannot be defeated in a conventional war and that there are no winners in a nuclear war. This leaves the U.S. to do battle only with fear mongering and economic competition, which China is much better positioned to win. The American Empire will go the way of the British Empire, and sooner than most people expect.
I agree on all your points Rob, China is rising to the point where she will totally eclipse U.S. influence in Europe. Her ‘Belt and Road’ initiative will increase trade with European nations to such an extent that increased political influence is inevitable.
The elites of the USA have most to lose as do those of the UK, their patrician control has been largely unchallenged in past years and they simply cannot accommodate themselves to the new reality that is fast approaching. No doubt many of them actually believe that the world will go to hell in a hand basket if they lose this patrician control. Others have a more cynical approach and see the economic fruits of their patrician grip waning and headed for a steady decline. Others still mindlessly hate the concept of communism even with a capitalist face and are willing to do almost anything to shore up the so-called democratic option even if it turns China into the kind of chaos seen in their previous attempts across the Middle East.
I, like you foresee China surmounting all these head-up-the-ass dinosaurs and their conceptions, convictions, invective and lies and in the not too distant future either.
Thank you both for this truly clear exposition of what I have suspected throughout this “China’s Human Rights Abuses/Genocidal intentions toward the Uyghers” narrative pushed by the western – especially the US-UK – plutocratic, imperialistic ruling elites. Might I tell you it is plugged heavily by NPR (the US’s state, corporate-capitalist funded medium) as well…(The similarities between the western damnations – totally untrue – of both Russia and China – albeit using different story methods, is enough to make one ill.)
Meanwhile…..Let’s just totally ignore, gloss over, distract from the US-UK’s own human rights/war crimes, why don’t we? Chagos Islanders, Marshall Islanders, Guantanamo, CIA torture program, MK ULTRA and its torture program, Bombing and slaughtering people across the MENA and East Asian countries…etc., etc., Deflection, Newspeak by omission and commission….
Seems the plunging birth rate in US would be more of a concern than what China is reporting but since population control seems the norm here, it is much easier to cast blame than confront the grotesque policies of an empire in free fall.
Great reporting as always!
Well, look at the pot calling the kettle black – the USA is so hypocritical!
Hasn’t it always been like this??? Don’t do as I do, do as I tell you.
Much of the China news I’ve seen in Western sources in recent years seemed suspiciously like the propaganda which precedes most of our recent wars. More “weapons of mass destruction”, in other words, another Gulf of Tonkin Incident, more fictions about Iraqis throwing Kueiti babies out of incubators, etc.
But a serious war between the US and China would almost certainly start with a US nuclear first strike, which would probably kill everyone in Xinjiang, Uighur and Han alike. Kill everyone in Hong Kong, too.
Forget fantasies about a non-nuclear war between Good America amd Evil China. Imperial Japan couldn’t defeat Chiang Kai-shek and the present day US certainly can’t defeat the present day People’s Republic.
Why not send reports to China and interview the people in the education camps to get first hand information? The Chinese should welcome proof that people are not being abused, denied rights or abused. Go to the story and get the fact first hand since you can’t trust second hand. Time someone went to the scene, isn’t it?
Members of the World Islamic Organization (WIC) did visit Xinjiang last year, I think, and they scoffed at the Trump Administration’s accusations. What’s interesting is that some Western commentators did cover the WIC’s stance, and one view was that those Muslim countries didnt want to endanger their economic ties with the PRC. That was a strange assertion, as many of the same countries were US allies or had trade ties with the US as well.
Perhaps there are reasons external to Xinjiang for the WIC’s skepticism: members have seen some of their most progressive brethren states crushed, and millions of their fellow Muslims slaughtered in places like Iraq, Libya, etc., by the West to believe in what must seem to them as pure Western hypocrisy. When it comes to genocides, few could rival the deaths of half a million Iraqi babies which an American leader said she could live with, or the use of depleted uranium ammunition on masses of soldiers and civilians alike. Even today, Muslims are being killed at will in places like Afghanistan (reports of these victims – ordinary men, women and children -are often described as “militants”).
I think Biden, for all his hawkish past, know what’s going on and might decide that, at his age, he could make himself immortal by 1) ending the forever wars, withdrawing troops and military bases from all over world, and 2) focus on really making America great by recovering American economic competitiveness and ensuring a more equitable sharing of America’s wealth by all citizens. Then, and only then, could Neil Diamond’s “America” become the spontaneous theme song of America the world over.
Good idea. Subtitle of Democracy Now piece when they interviewed Zenz [7/26/19] was “China’s Campaign Against Uyghur Muslims Is ‘Cultural Genocide’ ”
Badmouthing China worries me most, but it shouldn’t mean we give everything they do a pass. Everything done under industrial consumerism, or what Ellul termed way back there a thing called technique. In the same vein, Becker and Noh struck me recently as too sure of themselves regarding the lab leak issue. All kinds of western universities, foundations, agencies, and corporations had ties to WIV. It isn’t like all these entities couldn’t have imagined such an error happening at the place. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The Intercept have been pretty objective on the matter at times IMO.
It’s in the Global Times.
No one can prove their innocence to Uncle Sam when he wsnts to go berserk. Many Americans really like raping, robbing, torturing, murdering lesser breeds outside the law. Look at our Indian Wars, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.
The problem is that admitting such ‘visitors’ would admit there is a validity to the accusations. Imagine someone wanting you to allow monitoring your house because they accuse you of abusing your family. In fact, however, several agencies have visited Xinjiang, even Muslims from Pakistan, but their reports are ignored by US & allies’ media.