In China, we are seeing forced televised confessions, a mass surveillance state, the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs, and what many are calling a genocide of the Uyghur people. 83 global brands, including major U.S. companies, are tied to Uyghur forced labor in China.
Over in Hong Kong, 53 pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and lawyers were arrested on Jan. 6 under the draconian national security law. Despite all this, the EU recently announced a major trade deal with China.
Today, we sit down with human rights activist and writer Benedict Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch and deputy chair of the UK Conservative Party’s Human Rights Commission, to discuss the commission’s new report: “The Darkness Deepens.”
A new debate in the British Parliament calls to boycott the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. A coalition forming to protest atrocities in Xinjiang offers hope that the CCP crimes will no longer be ignored.
The British government has Beijing roundly in its cross hairs following a debate in parliament urging sanctions over its treatment of Uyghurs. A petition garnering international support with almost 150,000 signatures precipitated the session, which was attended in person by members of parliament from every political party and corner of the British Isles, who spoke vehemently and persuasively of the need to act against China.
The number of debates and strength of feeling among members of the UK Parliament concerning atrocities meted out by the CCP against its citizens has grown in size and intensity over the past two years, since the scandal of organ harvesting of political prisoners was raised two years ago, and demands for sanctions have escalated.
Uyghur exiles asking, “Where are our relatives?” They have had no contact with their loved ones for more than three years.
This comes in the wake of another pivotal gathering of the UN Human Rights Council recently, where Germany on behalf of 39 countries made a statement, calling out Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs and demanding “unfettered access” to the Xinjiang region, based on “increasing numbers of reports of gross human rights violations.”
Turkey stepped off its wavering fence this year, and joined opposition to Beijing with ambassador Feridun Hadi Sinirlioğlu expressing concern. “As a country having ethnic, religious and cultural ties with the Uyghur Turks, we have been particularly alarmed by the recently published reports and news on human rights practices against the Uyghur Turks and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang,” he said.
Support for the Uyghurs in the UN has grown markedly since last year’s July assembly when only 22 nations opposed CCP’s policies. But Beijing was ready this year to counterattack, having primed a total of 70 countries to back them up. Pakistan had rallied 55 countries in support of China’s actions in Hong Kong, and Cuba 45 countries to support the CCP efforts in Xinjiang, with Kuwait making a parallel joint statement on behalf of three Gulf States.
China described attempts to “smear its human rights record” as doomed to failure. They were “despicable,” “poisonous,” and “standing on the wrong side of history,” they said, which echo strongly Xi Jinping’s conviction voiced recently that his policies on Xinjiang are successful and he was not going to back down.
Other international alliances have been forming in attempts to stem the tide of China’s relentless disdain for world opinion. In September, a coalition of 160 human rights groups delivered a letter to the “International Olympic Committee” (IOC) urging it to revoke Beijing’s hosting of the Winter Olympic Games. IPAC, the “Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China”, an international cross-party group of legislators working towards reform on how democratic countries approach China, headed by UK parliamentarian Sir Iain Duncan Smith, is also campaigning to see the sporting event moved.
Roadside posters leaving dissenters in no doubt of their fate should they demur.
A Washington Post editorial in September suggested that China should be stripped of the Winter Olympics. “The world must ask whether China, slowly strangling an entire people, has the moral standing to host the 2022 Winter Olympics,” it said. “We think not.”
Leading the UK debate in London, MP Chris Evans Islwyn, in the face of Beijing’s disregard of world opinion, urged for Magnitsky sanctions to be imposed by the UK on Chinese officials implicated in the Uyghur scandal. “The suffering that the Uyghur Muslims have undergone, and sadly continue to undergo is nothing short of horrifying,” he said, detailing the fears of the Diaspora now severed from their families, the harrowing tales of beatings, torture, rape and mass sterilizations, destruction of their language, culture and religion, and now the mass deportation of former camp detainees to work as forced laborers all over China making goods for Western brands.
“The image is dystopian,” he said. “The surveillance is total.” He went on, “Uyghur Muslims do not have the right to their religion, to their bodies, or to freedom of expression. The system is policed through directives given to officials in Xinjiang. The directives do not mention judicial procedures, but call for the detention of anyone who displays so-called ‘symptoms’ of radicalism or anti-Government views. The international community should be gravely concerned,” he urged.
Citing the US government’s implementation of Magnitsky sanctions against Russian human rights violators in 2012, and the UK’s own version devised earlier this year, he pointed out that already it had been used to sanction the killers of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, organizations implicated in forced labor in North Korea, and the very Russian officials who were allegedly involved in the mistreatment of Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail.
“The Magnitsky sanctions are effective, because sterling is a valuable global currency to hold,” he pointed out. “By having their assets frozen in Britain, sanctioned individuals are unable to have assets or continue to do their business.” The remit of the sanctions include no longer being allowed to enter the country or to own residences, and encompass people who act on behalf of a state to violate other human rights, such as the right not to be subject to torture, the right to be free from slavery or forced labor and, above all, the right to life.
Without exception participants in the debate asked why Britain was dragging its heels on sanctions. “China is undeniably an economic powerhouse, but we cannot let its strength in world economics shield it so as to allow atrocities and human rights violations,” urged Chris Evans, concluding that the time to act had come.
The time for mere “outrage,” expressions of “grave concern,” and just speaking out against human rights abuses, was over, he suggested. “We have an abundance of evidence in the form of leaked documents, satellite imagery and the harrowing testimony of victims. We cannot continue to listen to the mounting evidence and do nothing substantial with it,” he said.
Ploughshares into medieval weaponry, for ordinary every-day folk in Xinjiang… now guarding each other.
Many of the British MP’s calling for action pointed to the USA, whose Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 set a new bar for trade with China and goods produced with forced labor. Its Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, passed overwhelmingly on September 22nd, went a step further to ensure that U.S. entities are not funding forced labor among ethnic minorities in the region. Imports that have even a hint of slavery in their supply chains, are banned under the new legislation and the UK MP’s demanded Britain follow suit.
Responding to a welter of persuasive rhetoric from thirteen other MPs demanding fearlessness and maintenance of moral high ground against Beijing’s bullying and subversive tactics vis a vis not only Uyghurs, but Tibetans and more recently Southern Mongolians, Nigel Adams, UK government Minister for Asia admitted that the British government was not blind to the atrocities. “We are committed to responding robustly to all human rights violations in Xinjiang,” he promised, citing the government’s leading role within the international community to hold China to account.
While remaining vague on an expansion of the scope of the UK Magnitsky provision to include China, which in the final analysis was in the hands of the UK Foreign Secretary, he went so far as to state, “China must immediately end extrajudicial detention in Xinjiang, and uphold the principles of freedom of religion or belief, freedom of speech, and freedom of association for every single one of its citizens.”
He confirmed that any action taken on behalf of the British Government against Beijing, would always be in the context of national values. “As the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have made clear, we want a positive relationship with China, but we will always act to uphold our values, our interests, and our national security. We are crystal clear with China when we disagree with its approach,” he stressed.
What happens when one man attains “absolute power”over hundreds of millions?
“I begged them to kill me,” said Mihrigul Tursun. “Each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently, and I could feel the pain in my veins.”
Tursun was describing the torture she suffered while being held for months with 60 other women in an internment camp. Their cell was small and suffocating. They slept in turns, with most standing to make floor space for the few whose turn it was to lie down. They were routinely beaten, electrocuted, and forced to take unknown medications, including capsules that caused them to blackout and a liquid that caused bleeding in some and cessation of menstruation in others. During Tursun’s final three months, nine women from her cell died. All the while, in an Orwellian twist, the women were made to sing songs praising their captors.
And here is an important detail: “Tursun’s nightmare did not happen decades ago in some long-shuttered concentration camp. It happened in an internment network run by her own national government, and it is still operating right now.”
Mihrigul Tursun is an ethnic “Uyghur” from Xinjiang. This region, south of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, was long contested by the Mongols, the Chinese and several Turkic groups until the Qing Dynasty brought it under China’s control in the 18th century. Ever since, Xinjiang has been an intermittent flash point for tensions between the Uyghurs, who are mostly Turkic-speaking Muslims, and the Han Chinese, Mandarin-speaking atheists who comprise more than 90 percent of China’s total population.
The anxieties intensified throughout the 1990s: The Kazakhs, Kyrgyzians and other Turkic-speaking, Muslim, Communist neighbors seceded from the Soviet Union and formed independent nations bearing their names. Many Uyghurs sought to make Xinjiang a sovereign nation as well: “Uyghuristan.” But Chinese leaders were bent on keeping Xinjiang locked into what they call “the great family of Chinese national territory.”
The tensions exploded in 2008 when Uyghurs protested Chinese oppression with terrorist bus bombings and attacks on police facilities. Chinese authorities said the violence killed hundreds of people, mainly Han Chinese, and deployed large numbers of People’s Liberation Army soldiers to Xinjiang’s largest city, Ürümqi. The violent outbursts continued throughout the next few years, but the Chinese Communist Party kept tightening its grip on Xinjiang.
Then a new man was appointed leader of China. He would tighten the Communist Party’s grip to a choke hold. When Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Communist Party in late 2012, he was a relatively obscure personality in Chinese politics. Most experts believed he would lead the nation in the tradition of his most recent predecessors, maintaining the status quo. But Xi began almost immediately to confound those forecasts.
Rather than keeping the “first among equals” brand of leadership followed by his recent predecessors, he embraced a strongman approach. He bypassed State Council authorities by creating policymaking party groups, many of which he personally chairs. He took direct control of writing policy on everything from China’s economy and international relations to its Internet regulations. Xi waged an anti-corruption campaign resulting in the arrest or imprisonment of a breathtaking 1.4 million Communist Party members. He disappeared dissidents and hundreds of human rights lawyers in waves of arrests. He also implemented profound military reforms that made him the unchallenged head of China’s vast army.
“He not only controls the military,” Shanghai-based military expert Ni Lexiong told the Associated Press, “but also does it in an absolute manner. He is ready to command personally.”
In April 2014, just weeks after knife-wielding Uyghur terrorists killed 31 people and injured 141, Xi made an official visit to Xinjiang. Hours after his departure, a Uyghur bomb tore through an Ürümqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.
Xi seemed to take the attacks as a direct challenge to his authority and to China’s overall stability. “Build steel walls and iron fortresses,” he said later that year while announcing a “People’s War on Terrorism.” He told party leaders in Xinjiang: “Set up nets above and snares below. Cracking down severely on violent terrorist activities must be the focus of our current struggle.”
Xi’s government lost no time making his vision a reality. And the campaign quickly began to extend far beyond a crackdown just on “violent terrorist activities.”
By May 2015, when Mihrigul Tursun was first detained, Xinjiang was being transformed into a state of inescapable surveillance and “predictive policing.” There were ubiquitous cameras, thousands of police checkpoints, and hundreds of what the Chinese government euphemistically calls “reeducation” or “vocational training” schools. It was in these facilities that Tursun was tortured for months on end.
She was detained upon returning to China from Egypt, where her husband lived. Since the Chinese Communist Party views Egypt as a potential “radicalization zone”, party officials snatched her and abused her until they were convinced that she posed no threat to societal stability. Vast numbers of other Xinjiang residents have suffered similarly for far less.
Various sources put the total number of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang Muslims detained in the camps in 2019 between 1.1 million and 3 million. This is of a total population of just 10 million Uyghurs, which grows to 12 million when the count includes non-Uyghur Muslims, some of whom have also been detained.
Xi’s government says the purpose of holding these individuals is to educate “religious extremism” out of their thinking and to teach them Mandarin and job skills. But evidence from survivors such as Tursun and from two caches of highly classified Communist Party documents reveal the true goal: “Xi Jinping is using his dictatorial powers to perpetrate cultural genocide.”
Before Xi, the Communist Party portrayed China as a multi-ethnic society that believed in cultural pluralism. In this spirit, it permitted various minority populations certain government-sanctioned expressions of distinction. But Xi has changed that. He has shown himself determined to “Sinicize” Xinjiang and to subdue and assimilate Uyghurs into a “monolithic Han culture.”
“The organs of dictatorship” must be used to subdue the region, Xi told Communist Party leaders during a 2014 speech that was transcribed among the documents leaked in 2019. “Show absolutely no mercy,” he said. “The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering.”
Inside Xinjiang’s camps and prisons, Chinese agents are implementing these orders. They are forcing detainees to consume alcohol and pork and forbidding them to pray or speak their language. They are subjecting those who resist to “torture, sexual abuse, forced abortions, sterilization and transplanting their organs against their will.” The organs of dictatorship.
Outside of the camps, Xinjiang has been transformed into the world’s most technologically advanced and obtrusive police state. Arabic script and Islamic imagery is being “eradicated” from businesses and homes, often replaced by pictures of Xi and Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong. Mosques and Muslim graveyards are being systematically destroyed.
The Communist Party is not only detaining Uyghurs, but they are often replacing them, in their own households and in their own beds next to their wives with Han Chinese men. The party is literally breeding Uyghur genes out of Xinjiang: “genocide by father replacement.”
This and more was confirmed to the world when the party’s internal documents were leaked. Yet the leak and the international condemnation that followed does not seem to have shaken Xi. He has claimed that the personal testimonies and leaked papers are “fabrication and fake news.” The Global Times, which his party controls, recently praised Xi’s “training centers” in Xinjiang for their success in turning potential extremists into “normal people.”
While he used the “organs of dictatorship” to commit “cultural genocide”, including cutting organs out of unwilling victims, Xi was also successful in early 2018 in removing the constitutional term limits on his rule. His “organs of dictatorship” can now continue for the rest of his life.
It is clear that this self-justifying and unfathomably powerful Chinese dictator will keep on asserting his will upon the Uyghurs and all of China’s 1.4 billion people. And this will result in profound suffering for millions far beyond “the great family of Chinese national territory.”
In the modern age, Xi’s immense and almost entirely unchecked powers seem somewhat anomalous. But history is filled with dictators like him. Such men have almost always produced broad-scale abuses of human beings like those now underway in Xinjiang. Give government enough power, and this is what happens.
Qin Shi Huang, Ghengis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, King Leopold II and Adolf Hitler: “All used the organs of dictatorship to gruesome effect.” Xi’s fellow champions of “communism” are notorious for it:
Mongolia’s Khorloogiin Choibalsan killed tens of thousands of his people; Cambodia’s Pol Pot killed almost 2 million of his own people. But they were merely bullies on a playground compared to the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, who slaughtered 20 million to 60 million. Then there was Mao Zedong, Xi’s recent predecessor, under whose despotic reign 65 to 75 million Chinese people were starved, tortured, bullied to suicide or executed as traitors. “Every Communist must grasp this truth,” Mao said. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Over and over again, when a human government is given great amounts of unchecked power, genocide, politicide, democide, repression and egregious human rights violations are inevitable. This is often because the leaders feel violence is justified to build a better world, and they succeed in selling their vision to supporters.
In many cases, it is a matter of leftist, utopianist tyrants who believe the ends justify the means. My vision is noble, and my ideals are virtuous. I must use absolute force to quash dissent so my ideals can become reality. I must wield my power pitilessly today to create a beautiful world for tomorrow.
When an authoritarian is driven by such thinking, the throat of liberty is slit. Human rights are blindfolded and shot in the street. And rule of law is publicly guillotined. These are all necessary casualties in the pursuit of the larger goal. They are the blood sacrifices that must be offered up to the “greater good.”
Xinjiang is just the beginning, such authoritarian governments and policies will soon dominate the world.
On the matter of religion in China, Beijing has made one thing perfectly clear: “No religious group lies beyond the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
Late last month, the Jamestown Foundation reported on a new CCP program of collectivization and reeducation in Tibetsimilar to the forced-labor campaign being carried out against “Uyghurs” in Xinjiang province. In 2020 alone, just under 600,000 rural Tibetans were subjected to this program of indoctrination and retraining for various forms of menial labor.
The military-style training program is accompanied by a labor-transfer program that redistributes workers to places other than their hometowns — often to places outside of Tibet. Rapid collectivization separates person from place, uprooting individuals from their heritage, replacing their native language with Mandarin, and reorienting and secularizing their religious traditions to conform with the tenets and goals of the CCP.
We have heard this story before. We will no doubt hear it again. Never does it have a happy ending.
In 2017 reports emerged that the CCP was collectivizing and interning Muslim Uyghurs in political reeducation facilities in China. Early estimates of a couple of hundred thousand having been placed in the camps were quickly revised to reflect the true picture: camps holding approximately 1.8 million Uyghurs.
The blessed few who have been released subsequently shared stories of hearing the screams of neighbors down the hall being tortured, of receiving forced injections that left them sterilized, and other horrors.
Like Tibetans, Uyghurs are also subject to forced labor. Among those not yet taken to political reeducation camps, well-educated Uyghurs are being forced out of their white-collar jobs and into blue-collar labor. And they, too, have been subject to systematic labor transfers.
The CCP’s coercive measures to restrict family size among Uyghurs have raised concerns that Beijing’s ultimate goal is to significantly limit, or perhaps altogether eliminate, the next generation. Its targeted policy of forced sterilization and forced implantation of IUD’s, combined with its brutal practice of forced abortions and infanticide, have already moved in that direction. There are also reports of Uyghur children being torn from their families and forced into state-run boarding schools. Coercive reproductive limits and the transfer of children from one group to another may constitute genocide or crimes against humanity.
The CCP has long viewed independent “religious practice” as a threat to its rule. While the Party doesn’t seek to eliminate religion, it does seek to supplant the place religion holds in the hearts and minds of its adherents. And if it cannot supplant it, it tries to co-opt it, at the very least.
Persecution of persons of faith has intensified under Xi Jinping’s policy of “Sinicization”, which aims to secularize religion to ensure that it advances the CCP’s goals. The policy accomplishes this, in part, through setting up state-sanctioned religious institutions that moderate and even modify the ways in which people of all religions practice their faith.
Under “Sinicization”, regulation of and outright interference with religious practice have intensified. Christians have seen crosses torn down from atop churches, church buildings demolished, and pastors, like Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Covenant Church, imprisoned.
Chinese Catholics watched their leaders strike a deal with Beijing two years ago, giving the CCP a say on the appointment of bishops in China. And just recently, it was reported that government-issued high-school textbooks altering a Bible story to turn one of Jesus’s key teachings on its head: “After inducing others not to cast stones at a woman who has sinned, Jesus himself stones her.”
Other religious movements have fared no better. Reports abound that members of “Falun Gong”, a spiritual movement founded in the 1990s, were subjected to “organ harvesting and extrajudicial imprisonment.”
Although not persecuted as severely as the Uyghur Muslims, Hui Muslims have not escaped unscathed. They, too, have seen their mosques closed and religious practices curtailed.
While the CCP may target each group for unique reasons, what motivates its anti-religious actions in general is the threat it believes religion poses to its authority. It thus views “religious persecution” as being essential to its internal stability.
Recognizing the importance the CCP places on restricting religious practice should inform the responses of the U.S. government and the international community.
China is one of the world’s most egregious violators of internationally recognized human rights. Yet last spring it was appointed to one of the five seats on the U.N. human-rights panel that selects experts who report on places like Xinjiang and Tibet. And, with that appointment, Beijing is now poised to take one of the 47 seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council.
China’s violations of religious freedom at home are completely at odds with the norms of international human rights espoused by the United Nations. Should China take the helm of the Human Rights Council, those norms could be altered beyond recognition.
No matter who wins the presidential election this November, religious freedom must continue to be a core priority of American foreign policy. Last week, 39 countries signed a statement at the U.N. General Assemblycalling out China’s abuses in Xinjiang; this was the fruit of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s work. The U.S. government must continue to lead the way in this effort and in calling for the release of all political prisoners, including those interned for their religious beliefs.
Upholding the right of all people to live out their closely held beliefs is essential to the preservation of freedom, peace, and security. Defending “religious freedom” is also a critical element in countering the schemes that China and like-minded governments devise to cement and increase their power, which entail human-rights violations as severe as genocide and crimes against humanity.
Located in the far northwest of the People’s Republic, on the borders of central Asia, Xinjiang is the scene of frequent clashes between the Chinese authorities and the Uyghurs, Turkish-speaking Muslims who, like their Tibetan neighbors, reject the colonization of their territory. Going beyond the Uyghur problem (which gets less media coverage than the unrest in neighboring Tibet) the aim of this documentary is to decipher the propaganda that is currently being put out by the Chinese, who are trying to convince the world, and Chinese tour operators in particular, that the region is a haven of peace, a heaven on earth suitable for mass tourism.
Thanks to reliable contacts amongst the organizers of this “Chinese tour” and the help of diasporas based in Europe and Central Asia, and thanks also to accounts given here for the first time by Turkish-speaking Muslims and footage of the most recent revolts, we’ll be able to draw a parallel between a slick, consensual tour and the distress of an entire race. To get a better understanding of the extent to which everything here is built on lies and propaganda, we shall show videos shot by the minorities themselves as well as their accounts. It’s the kind of footage we rarely get to see, showing a reality that China would prefer to keep hidden.
Impact as many lives as possible through the public and private teaching of God’s Word so that people are able to understand it, are led to believe it, challenged to apply it, motivated to love it, and equipped to study it on their own.
Due to the sensitive nature of our work and for the security of the team members and those we meet with, all names and locations have been changed to protect their identity.
China - in His image 