China's "big lie" obscures its tyranny in Xinjiang

Hong Kong, February 14 : The Beijing Winter Olympics was a fine opportunity for the world to express its opprobrium at China's brutal crackdown on its Uyghur population, Muslims who are the inhabitants of the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Apart from a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, to which only a handful of countries signed up, international criticism has been muted over China's incarceration of Muslims since 2017.
This is precisely how China wants it, as it uses the Olympics to mask human rights atrocities being perpetrated in places like Xinjiang and Tibet. Beijing even attempted to deflect criticism in a token move of including an Uyghur, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, as a torchbearer at the Olympic opening ceremony.
Ironically, a different Uyghur torchbearer from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence. Adil Abdurehim, a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was jailed for "watching counter-revolutionary videos".
He is just one of perhaps a million Muslims locked away in concentration camps in Xinjiang. Some sources even say that up to 1.8 million have passed through these camps to date. China is prosecuting a vociferous campaign of disinformation and propaganda about Xinjiang. Using international social media platforms, it denies anything untoward and frequently employs "useful idiots", Westerners who are persuaded or paid to say that everything is rosy in Xinjiang.
Unfortunately, many outside China believe the CCP's cover story, refusing to credit the government with the terrible atrocities being perpetrated in Xinjiang.
Just as in Nazi Germany, the bigger the lie and the more frequently it is repeated, the easier it is for people to believe. Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility...in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie ... It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation..."
Lessons from Nazi Germany are equally being applied in communist China, where the CCP does everything to obfuscate the truth. When word first broke about Uyghurs being rounded up in 2017, China denied it vehemently. In August 2018, for example, when the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination expressed concern at Uyghur detentions, CCP senior official Hu Lianhe flatly denied that such camps existed, something later echoed by Xinjiang governor Shohrat Zakir.
However, when this blatant lie could no longer be maintained because of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, China altered its story to say the state was "re-educating" the Muslim population in vocational re-education centers.
This is the story that China continues to tout, despite terrifying testimonies of those who have graduated from the concentration camp system. Inmates are held incommunicado in rigidly run camps, their families having no idea where they are. Nor is there any due legal process specifying their charges and the length of their sentences.
Secret government documents disclosed that Zhu Hailun, Deputy Party Secretary of Xinjiang, mandated that the re-education camps be run like high-security prisons, with strict discipline, punishment, no "abnormal deaths" and no escapes. In them, inmates are forced to recant their faith and pledge loyalty to the CCP. Before meals, they chant, "Thank the party! Thank the motherland!"
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) documented the existence of more than 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang in 2020, 40 per cent more than earlier thought. Furthermore, China has created a pervasive surveillance regime in Xinjiang that is one of the most Orwellian in the world.
Official budget figures showed no increase in vocational training whatsoever or increase in criminal convictions by courts in Xinjiang. Rather, German researcher Adrian Zenz discovered budgets that "...reflect patterns of spending consistent with the construction and operation of highly secure political re-education camps designed to imprison hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs with minimal due process".
In 2017, security-related construction rose 213% and by nearly CNY20 billion. Furthermore, spending on vocational training decreased in Xinjiang as camp construction snowballed, revealing the lie that China was establishing vocational training centers. Spending on prisons also doubled from 2016 to 2017.
Xinjiang's policing budget nearly doubled in 2017 compared to a year earlier - most of the increases going to social stability management, detention center management, and "other public/domestic security expenditures". These camps were funded not from vocational training budgets, but from Xinjiang's policing, re-education, and domestic security budgets.
Zenz concluded that "Xinjiang's re-education campaign seems to be managed by the Ministry of Justice, administered by the public security agencies, and funded largely out of the budgets of these same authorities". These camps are nothing more than institutions of political indoctrination and intimidation.
In fact, this "vocational training" is little different from China's former re-education through labor system, which it abolished in 2013 because the government deemed it inappropriate for a modern society governed by the rule of law. Obviously, the CCP thinks it is still necessary in Xinjiang.
Some Muslims have been forced to eat pork, drink alcohol, and throw out their religious garb. Men cannot have long ("irregular") beards. Religious education, fasting during Ramadan, and prayers are either restricted or banned. Arabic text is expunged from public buildings, and mosques are being demolished on the pretext that the public needs to be protected from dilapidated structures.
China has banned parents from giving their children Islamic-themed names. Some are forced to marry Han Chinese, and there is forced sterilization for some women. Birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by a third in 2018 compared to 2017, with the rate far higher for just the Muslim portion of the region's population.
Additionally, Uyghurs living abroad are forced to return home due to threats against family members. State documents reveal 533,000 people in Xinjiang were formally prosecuted between 2017 and 2020, a rate six times higher than the national average. Official data shows around 500,000 children have been assigned to residential boarding schools and, since 2017, the state has hired more than 90,000 new Chinese-speaking teachers. Sending children to Mandarin-speaking boarding schools far from home is yet another way of divorcing Uyghur children from their roots.
Furthermore, China mobilized more than a million Han Chinese to live in Uyghur homes. Pretending to be "big brothers and sisters" to reluctant hosts, they indoctrinate and spy. Behavior such as greeting a neighbor in Arabic, possessing a Quran, or praying on a Friday is recorded in their notebooks or online forms and can lead to imprisonment.
The first wave of 200,000 "relatives" was conscripted in 2014 to "Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People". There was a second wave of 110,000 civil servants in 2016 under the "United as One Family" campaign. A third wave continued in 2017, placing more than a million civilians in villages for weeklong homestays.
The aim is to turn Muslim belief into secularism, with the government inserting itself into the most sacred corners of family life.
As one Han Chinese "big brother" explained, "These Uyghurs are being treated like drug addicts who are going through rehab." This reflects China's contention that they must be "cured" of their Islamic ideology. Many Han think they are doing their part for a better China, not realizing they are tearing apart the fabric of Uyghur society.
Social, cultural, and religious cleansing is doubtlessly occurring in Xinjiang. Indeed, on 19 January 2021, the US State Department declared the CCP was committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.
There has been no recorded terrorist incident since at least 2016, but China still claims it is "deradicalizing" extremist Muslims bent on terror against the Chinese state. It routinely warns against the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which it regards as a terrorist organization.
Another development after internment camps is widespread forced labor, with inmates either working for free or at minimal wages. Local governments receive funds to build factories in or near camps, plus they receive a USD260 subsidy for each inmate employed. ASPI estimated that at least 80,000 Uyghurs were relocated from Xinjiang under forced-labor conditions from 2017-19. Some factories they were working at included suppliers to brands like Amazon, Apple, Nike, and Samsung.
Beijing describes the vocational training centers as "transformation through education". In Nazi Germany, they used the slogan "work sets you free". Who is behind this chilling Xinjiang pogrom? Official announcements like to emphasize that these are "local legislative procedures", but this is probably to insert some distance back to the central government and absolve it of any backlash.
Chen Quanguo became party secretary for Xinjiang on 29 August 2016. He is widely credited as being the mastermind of the internment program. However, mass internments began just nine months after Chen assumed the reins, so it was certainly a premeditated plan. Some analysts have surmised that the groundwork was laid at the Two Sessions in March 2016.
On 1 April 2017, Beijing introduced the Xinjiang De-Extremification Regulation, which was revised in October 2018 to include so-called vocational skills education and training centers. Importantly, this law legalized the internment campaign and gave the camps retroactive justification, at least in Chinese law. Given that the law took two years to draft, its development must have begun in early 2015.
This regulation was overseen by high-ranking members of the Politburo Standing Committee, including Li Zhanshu and Wang Yang, the third and fourth highest members of this committee headed by Xi Jinping. This illustrates that China's leadership, to the very highest levels, was instrumental in framing, approving, and supporting Chen's harsh campaign in Xinjiang.
Officials stressed that the regulation "constitutes implementation of the central government's policy decisions and deployments, especially to implement the important instructions and requirements of General Secretary Xi Jinping". This is highly significant, underscoring that Xi approved the process and that his inner circle is undeniably implicated in the atrocities being committed in Xinjiang.
Indeed, Xi is the most culpable for he laid the foundation for this pogrom. In April 2014 he demanded an all-out "struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism" that would show "absolutely no mercy". He described Islamic extremism as a virus, whose eradication would require "a period of painful interventionary treatment".
Xi got what he requested, for he said on 26 September 2020 that "practice has proven that the party's strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era is completely correct" and that "the sense of gain, happiness, and security among the people of all ethnic groups has continued to increase".
In August 2019, some Chinese officials claimed that up to 90 per cent of Uyghurs had been released and returned to society.
However, there is scant evidence to support these claims. An Australian National University report released in late 2021, entitled "Xinjiang Year Zero", noted: "While the most visible manifestations of state violence in Xinjiang might be receding from public sight, the situation is far from returning to the status quo ante ... Uyghurs who have emerged from the camps are often not returned to their former positions in society. In fact, many who have been transferred from the camps are still absent from their families, in factories far from home. Still, others have been given formal prison sentences and will not be released any time soon. The system appears to be shifting from internment without due process and criminal sentencing, to proletarianization and criminal prosecution and mass imprisonment of former detainees."
Thus, the CCP campaign to eliminate and replace aspects of Muslim social life has not receded.
The Office of Strategic Services, the American forerunner to the CIA, recorded in its profile on Hitler: "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
This verdict is just as valid for China and its leader Xi. In China's omniscient oppression, the CCP permits only submission.