Beijing counters UN criticism with anti-Western play

By Dake Kang | Associated Press

BEIJING — Hours after another assessment by outside observers that China’s crackdown in its westernmost region of Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin took to the podium to launch the offensive.

“The so-called assessment you mentioned was orchestrated and produced by the US and some Western powers” and was a “political tool” designed to contain China, he said.

It was a tactic long used by Beijing to deflect criticism of its mass detentions of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang: blame a Western conspiracy.

He finds a willing audience at home. But abroad, it angered Uyghurs and alienated foreigners. The result is a split in views of Xinjiang in China and in the West, a chasm that threatens to destroy already poor relations.

For decades, Beijing has struggled to integrate the Uighurs, a historically Muslim group with close ethnic and linguistic ties to Turkey, locking the region in a cycle of rebellion and repression. After bombings and stabbings by a small number of extremist Uighurs, Chinese leader Xi Jinping launched a crackdown, trapping vast numbers of people in a network of camps and prisons.

Since the crackdown began, the Chinese government has tried to control the narrative. They have done this through secrecy and censorship. But they also did so by tapping into powerful, deep-rooted anti-Western sentiment born of a century of humiliation by the West.

Growing up in Xinjiang, Uyghur linguist Abduveli Ayup learns about how European empires advanced on China’s capital and burned down ancient palaces. He learned about the American colonization of Hawaii and how it took Texas from Mexico.

Even as a Uyghur, Ayup said, this history instills resentment.

“Throughout our history, we’ve been taught that China is the victim and all these countries around us are very bad,” Ayup said, adding that he himself opposed the West to a deep maturity. “Anti-Western sentiment is really strong.”

He had barely turned thirty, Ayup said, when he saw the authorities weaponize historical grievances to deflect blame from themselves. On July 5, 2009, protests demanding justice for lynched Uighurs turned bloody. Police opened fire, violent demonstrators pelted passers-by with stones from the majority Han ethnic group, and hundreds were killed in the melee.

Beijing blamed the unrest on overseas “terrorists” and “separatists” backed by foreign governments. They glossed over long-standing Uyghur discontent and glossed over evidence showing that the police were also partly responsible for the violence.

“I felt it was ridiculous,” Ayup said. “How could these foreign powers manipulate the Uighurs from afar?”

When the government first started the crackdown, they tried to keep it secret. For months they denied the existence of the camps.

But as the evidence piled up, the state changed tactics and followed the same pattern: They hit back with accusations of a foreign conspiracy.

When the BBC investigated labor practices in Xinjiang’s cotton fields, state media denounced the report as “using the so-called ‘research’ of anti-Chinese scholars” to “make up rumours”.

When a former resident of Xinjiang compiled records of more than 10,000 people detained in the region, a government spokesman said the database was “created by anti-Chinese figures” backed by the US and Australia.

And after Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh and Uighur who spent eight months in detention, testified about torture in the camps, he was branded a liar with “stories full of loopholes” by state media, fueling the “slander of anti-Chinese forces.” “

This is disappointing, Becali said, because he believes most Han Chinese in China are well-intentioned but have been kept in the dark by the country’s sophisticated censorship apparatus.

“If you want to know the reality, talk to the victims,” ​​he said. “The government controls the media, they keep telling lies.”

As criticism grew, Xinjiang authorities also took quiet steps to reduce the most visible signs of repression. Although it is not clear whether it was due to global control or planned all along, the result was the same: the intensity of the repression was hidden from outside visitors.

They removed the barbed wire, dismantled some of the camps and ripped out the surveillance cameras peering over the city streets, bare wires still dangling from poles overhead. They replaced the region’s hardline leader with one from a wealthy coastal province known more for booming economies than brutal police.

Then they took journalists to vineyards and banquets, dance performances and historic mosques with a clear, basic message: Xinjiang is open for business.

Today, Xinjiang’s tourism industry is booming. Travelers stuck in China due to its draconian “zero COVID” policy are flocking to the region’s deserts, mountains and bazaars, attracted by what they see as its exotic, Islamic-infused character.

Although hundreds of thousands are still in prison on secret charges, they are tucked away in facilities behind forests and desert dunes, far from urban centers and prying eyes. Voices that oppose the party line are silenced with fear and sometimes prison sentences.

As a result, ex-prisoner Becali said, “people in China don’t know what’s really going on.”

With the latest report on abuses in Xinjiang, there’s a change from the usual pattern: The assessment doesn’t come from the US State Department, or a human rights group, or the Uyghurs in exile.