The Xinjiang news kept coming to me even though I really prefer not seeing the fighting scenes. I like pretty things in life, the positive things, the forward looking things where we human beings all get along well and work out our differences effectively — not through fighting but coordination and talking. Such a scenario is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We can only hope things will eventually get better — after they get worse.
There Must Be Genocide In Xinjiang, Right?
There are many reports and much global news & social media coverage of Xinjiang lately, both in regarding the alleged genocide charge and the forced labor accusation. For people who do not know much of the background information about Xinjiang (or China in general), these charges and accusations MUST be true because the evidences are overwhelming from so many places and sources. For example, the numerous reports on the so called internment camps, which even China’s State Council, in its white paper on Xinjiang employment and labor situation published on September 17, 2020 (its English version here), openly stated that “(e)very year from 2014 to 2019 Xinjiang provided training sessions to an average of 1.29 million urban and rural workers, of which 451,400 were in southern Xinjiang.” This belated statement just seems to confirm the long rumored fact that Beijing had locked up more than one million of the Uyghurs. As the US commission on China pointed out, it is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” This latest report from CNN also pointed out the inconsistence in Beijing’s responses to external criticisms over time.
If we combine this shocking but official number of 1.29+ million “inmates” with the other reports that inside the camps the Uyghurs were forced to study the party propaganda materials, learn Mandarin and to give up their own language and religious beliefs, this must be a textbook case of genocide, right?
On the other hand, Beijing has been trying, awkwardly and clumsily as always, to claim that everything in Xinjiang is about fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism (the three evil forces in their terminology), about jobs and employment and about social and ethnical integrity. There is no genocide, even absurd to raise the issue or charge.
Who should we believe? If you think that the truth is somewhere in between, you are right. I like this information rich answer from Nathaniel Brown on Quora, which cited several important sources of videos and reports on Xinjiang. Like Brown, I want to remain critical to both sides because neither is completely innocent, objective or even independent as they claim they are. According to Brown, “The basic problem is that this is an information war and both sides are fighting dirty and lying (in different ways). Neither side is telling the whole truth.” He also asked questions that are thought provoking: “If America doesn’t have anything to hide why don’t they let reports visit Guantanamo Bay and check it out?” and “If America doesn’t have anything to hide why don’t they let reports visit Fort Detrick and check it out?”
I did not even know what and why Fort Detrick but I do hear about Guantanamo Bay (from the movie A Few Good Men, haha). Luckily Brown himself answered these questions: “Fort Detrick is a military base that just happens to study biological weapons. It makes sense not to let foreign reporters visit. Guantanamo Bay is a prison so again foreign reporters generally don’t have free access to prisons.”
Brown then pointed out something I agree completely, “I think foreign reporters should be allowed full access to Xinjiang (it isn’t a prison or military base) but at the same time, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m sure a number of the reporters would be spies.” and “I understand China’s justification but still disagree with it. China should allow more foreign journalists into the region to investigate. Maybe they will find something. Maybe they won’t.“
China Is Not The US, So Don’t Pretend To Be
I would go further by saying China should not compare or match itself with the US on everything. After all, the US has earned its reputations and international status through centuries of efforts, China has a much shorter history of being a successful country and it would only help itself to stay humble and to tolerate external criticisms. China must earn its own reputation and position in the world through its actions. After all, no two countries are exactly the same in the world. Even after China’s economy becomes the first in size, it still have much to learn from others, especially the US but also Japan and South Korea. In short, China has a long way to go in proving itself to others.
On the other hand, I want to point out that the genocide charge has been partly resulted from cultural difference. Not everyone in the US or EU wanted to destroy China, some are sincerely and honestly concerned about human rights and protecting ethnic minorities. The problem is that some acts are perfectly reasonable and even popular in China, like most Han Chinese would support locking up some extremists, terrorists and separationists. Beijing also has a sympathetic audience inside the country when it comes to pushing the idea of “Transformation through education.” In fact, many if not most Chinese would be thrilled if government offers them free job training, free language training and free law obedience lessons with free room and board.
The trouble is, China lives in the 21st century and in an open international community — an unfriendly one that not only is unwilling to tolerate its problems but also seeking or creating problems for the huge country. To make things worse, its own domestic legal environment is so different from others (US and EU) that China is inherently vulnerable to international criticism because whatever it does will have legal holes, some are very obvious from western eyes. To the extent that China needs to catch up in its legal infrastructure, international criticism and accusations similar to the Xinjiang case will arise again in the future to haunt China, like it or not.
The situation is likely to get worse as the world will figure out that pretty much the only strength China has is its size of economy. In other words, rule of law is not the only weakness it has, mass communications, social governance, social integration, international dialogues and even English skills, these are all weak or are all scarce resources in China. Pretty much the only thing Beijing is good at is to manage the national economic growth. This CNN report has an interesting story that after being invited to visit Xinjiang, Olsi Jazexhi, a Canadian-Albanian writer and historian, who openly claimed he was “generally skeptical of Western propaganda about the rest of the world,” because “Very often they lie,” only needed one lecture by the Chinese host on the Xinjiang history to make him turning away from Beijing.
While Beijing cannot carry out a live conversation with many if not most international visitors, national proud and national confidence in China has been blown out of proportion, effectively preventing the country from learning from and blending into the international community.
No Simple Truth & Solution
Say you have learned the truth and nothing but the truth, then what? If you think that knowing the truth in Xinjiang will stop the parties from fighting, you would be awfully wrong. Parties will fight no matter what — if the current trend continues. The only benefit of learning the truth is to satisfy your own curiosity and become smarter, while the only chance for parties to stop fighting is when there are sufficient people on both sides knowing the truth and urge their leaders to change their existing courses of actions based on the truth.
But truth can be a very complicated mess, which means single itemed solution is unlikely to succeed. I want to use a good example here. According to this Chinese blog written by Mr. Li from Xinjiang, someone I trust and respect but never met in person, either welding an “iron fist” or projecting a friendly image in Xinjiang does not work for too long. Right after 1949 when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) took over Xinjiang from the nationalistic regime, the leader in Xinjiang, a red army general named Wang Zhen(王震), had kept a high pressure on the Uyghurs, cracking down quickly, relentlessly and harshly anyone who even attempted Xinjiang independence.
This lasted about three decades and then China had entered a “reform and opening up” era. At the beginning of the 1980s, the then party secretary general Hu, Yaobang (胡耀邦) under the Supreme leader Deng, Xiaoping(邓小平), thought Beijing owed the Uyghurs an apology for its decades long harsh policy. In one speech on domestic ethnical relationships, Mr. Hu said just that. And guess what? For decades the Uyghurs did not say anything under the high pressure but then suddenly woke up by this nice gesture and started complaining all the unfair treatments they had received and experienced under General Wang and started to ask for more rights from Beijing.
This of course does not mean Beijing should keep its harsh policies in Xinjiang at all costs, nor that Mr. Hu should not apologize, which was a nice gesture that we rarely saw in the past and unlikely in the future. The best ethnicity policy is to keep fairness and justice to all ethnicity groups, whether any particular group demands or is even aware of its rights or not.
The history of changed rhetoric from Beijing and the responses from the Uyghurs in Xinjiang do tell us however that any one sided or one directional policy is unlikely to succeed in the long run. On the other hand or by the same token, democracy is also not a panacea for ethnical problems. The US is the best example.
Should We Believe “Transformation Through Education?”
This report presented thoughts on the link between what is ongoing in Xinjiang today and Mao, Zedong’s Cultural Revolution “It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi.”
The same AP report by Gerry Shih, who according to this report had been banned from entering China again, also introduced a rare cited study published in June 2017 by a researcher from Xinjiang’s Communist Party School “that most of 588 surveyed participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent to re-education. But by the time they were released, nearly all — 98.8 percent— had learned their mistakes, the paper said. Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, ‘is a permanent cure.’”
I want to point out that we have reason to believe Beijing was spending big money on Xinjiang centers/camps for the purpose of proactively fighting extremism and terrorism, and also improving job situation especially in Southern Xinjiang. What makes me so sure? Simple, it’s the words of Xi Jinping himself. Thanks for this NYT report, we now all know that “Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.”
Now, keeping in mind that Xi Jinping is not Joe Biden, whose words or even executive orders will be contested at the state level or in the courts. Xi’s words are the supreme command not to be taken lightly. Remember the one county party secretary was fired for not gathering all that should be gathered into the center, as we also learned from the leaked party documents?
This reminds me of the movie A Few Good Men. The key evidence came out when in the military court Tom Cruise the lawyer was questioning Jack Nicholson the supreme commander in charge of the navy base in Guantanamo Bay. Nicholson first claimed (lied) that he specifically ordered his lieutenant “not to touch Santiago,” the slow mariner murdered by his fellow soldiers ordered by their superior. I loved the scenario when Cruise asked the simple question: “If Santiago were not to be touched, and people take your orders seriously, why was he packed up his clothes the night he was murdered?” And this is where Nicholson finally lost his temper and in angry words effectively confessed that he was the one responsible for the death of Santiago!
What a beautiful drama! I have watched it at least five times!
My point is that if Xi Jinping himself asked his subordinates not to touch the Uyghurs (i.e., trying to eliminate Islam in China or discriminating the Uyghurs in Xinjiang), officers from the Xinjiang party secretary Chen Quanguo down are all better off doing what exactly Xi said, with no questions asked. Otherwise why Xi Jinping would have recently shown his satisfaction with the Xinjiang situation now. If he saw any deviation from his orders, do you think he would tell all the party officers that their work was “totally correct?”
Still, there are numerous reports, mostly from overseas Uyghurs, of genocide related evidences. Are those stories to be believed or taken as told? We must understand the nature of Chinese people to get the answer right.
The People of Documental Spirit
Jews and Christians had long been called the “People of the Book /Scripture” by the Quran. Interestingly, what is little known in the west is that the Chinese, especially the Mainlanders, may be called the “People of the Documents,” meaning the party or the government documents provide a pretty reliable guide to reading their behaviors. This means we can explain many, if not most, events or behavioral patterns by finding out what the governmental documents had said before, during and after.
More accurately, the mainlanders are the “People of the Spirit of Documents,” because the whole document is often too long, containing too many cookie-cutter terms deserving little precious attention of the practitioners. Instead of the whole document, they often summarize the key spirit of the document into highly memorable and actionable phrases. In the Xinjiang case, we know the spirit of government documents for Xinjiang was to “Gathering all that should be gathered” into the centers or camps.
By the way, Beijing has been unnecessarily oversensitive to the term “camp,” even though it is neutral. In the US, there are many summer camps designed for kids and are totally harmless. It is the modifiers in front of “camp” that make it sounding bad. I will therefore continue using “centers” or “camps” interchangeably, as they really are.
Anyway, the above vague slogan from the party document clearly allowed a highly liberal interpretation for action tolerable by the government, and prescribes recruitment of many marginally necessary members in the society into the center.
Looking Inside the Center, Not (Just) From Outside
A liberal recruitment policy alone does not necessarily mean the centers are a platform of genocide, although many western media coverages had implied exactly that. Similarly, having satellite images of expanded facilities for the camps provides little information in and by itself, certainly not equivalent to hard evidence of genocide or the scale of oppression against the Uyghurs. In fact if china had recruited many people into the centers without expanding the facilities, like the situation in the US-Mexican border crisis that we experienced or are experiencing, that would be worse than expanding them. The latter action actually says Beijing does care about the welfare of the so called “inmates” by the west or “career students” by China.
It is easy to get angry with China for getting people into the center for things like “wearing the burqa, growing a beard, or reading the Quran” as this CNN report has claimed. But the same report presented no evidence that people with burqa, beard or Quran were actually in the center. The only case was someone violated family planning law in China. This report says “(u)nder the countrywide policy, which rarely if ever is cause for imprisonment, rural families in Xinjiang are limited to three children” but the relative of an frustrated Uyghur living in Turkey had four. Of course, any leaked documents from Xinjiang would be sent to Adrian Zenz, who was quick to come to the conclusion that “the records showed that Beijing was detaining Uyghur citizens for actions that in many cases did not ‘remotely resemble a crime.'” Zenz further claimed that “The contents of this document are really significant to all of us because it shows us the paranoid mindset of a regime that’s controlling the up-and-coming super power of this globe.”
But the leaked list never said anything about “crime.” Thanks to the same CNN report that provided a clip of the list, anybody who can read Chinese will be able to tell you that its title says “The List of Training Students Whose Relative(s) Went Out of China and Unreturned” (出境未归人员亲属送培学员).
I will discuss more of this list in the next blog to avoid getting too long.
Went to watch the girl’s soccer Berkeley to Stanford yesterday afternoon. We lost 0:1 but the game was a big improvement and we were able to keep the ball in the other half of the field most of the time! Stanford had to win a goal during overtime.