Imagine for a moment that Netflix had just signed a major deal with an author who publicly voiced his support for the indefinite detention of ethnic minorities in concentration camps.

One would think there would be massive outrage.

This is not, however, a hypothetical situation.

On Monday, news broke that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of Game of Thrones would be adapting Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy into a Netflix series. Liu is China’s most prominent science-fiction writer, and his Three-Body Problem trilogy has been a global bestseller.

Liu is also, however, one of the most prominent non-official defenders of the concentration camp system that the CCP regime has built in the colony that it calls Xinjiang. For this reason, he and his work should not be platformed by Netflix.

Asked about the camp system in a July 2019 discussion with Jiayang Fan of The New Yorker, Liu commented, “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at trains stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds].”

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the camp system Liu is discussing, Apple Daily English has an important series of reports on this topic [https://hk.appledaily.com/us/20200601/QMXS32IDL4V62EKSKDITAC6OKI/]. At least a million and perhaps as many as three million people of Uyghur and other “minority” ethnic backgrounds are being held indefinitely and arbitrarily in concentration camps. Horrific accounts of life inside the camp system have emerged from former inmates and guards, including political indoctrination, abuse, and torture.

Beyond the camps, children left behind when their parents are taken away are held in state-run orphanages, where they are forced to renounce their family’s culture. And in June of this year, researchers revealed that the CCP regime was engaging in systematic forced abortions and sterilization of Uyghur women.

The UN Convention on Genocide defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

What is happening today in Xinjiang is undoubtedly genocide. Yet for Liu Cixin, chatting over a comfortable meal in the United States, it is little more than “helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.”

When faced with this question, Liu had options. He could have said that he did not want to discuss a politically sensitive issue. I would have been disappointed that he was choosing not to use his platform to speak out about these crimes against humanity, but on a certain level it would have been understandable. Considering the CCP regime’s tight control over political speech, his silence would have been excused.

Yet Liu did not choose silence. He chose to proactively voice his enthusiasm for crimes against humanity: a decision beyond the pale of polite society. Liu’s open enthusiasm, as horrid as it is, sheds important light on the political and ethnic situation in China today.

First, Liu’s enthusiasm shows how much public opinion in China is shaped by official narratives, which are often in reality little more than transparent excuses for state abuses.

For example, many people genuinely believe that the CCP helped lift millions out of poverty, a regime talking point which Liu echoes here. In reality, the CCP in the reform era just stopped forcing people into poverty in the service of a failed Maoist delusion, allowing people to lift themselves out of poverty, and then expecting everyone to thank them. The degree to which such state constructed gratitude exists suggests that Stockholm Syndrome might best be renamed Beijing Syndrome.

Second, however, Liu’s comments highlight a toxic Han-centric racism in Chinese society that supports state crimes against ethnic others. The specter of the underdeveloped primitive in need of assistance from the Han elder brother invariably haunts Chinese representations of the ethnic other. Uyghur representations, however, are further distorted by an exaggerated focus on terrorism, referenced in Liu’s comments, thus necessitating surveillance, control, and of course other measures as the regime deems necessary.

One would think that openly cheering genocide would be a career ending decision rather than a path to a Netflix deal. Yet in contrast to Liu’s eagerness to speak openly, the international response to Liu’s comments has been characterized by silence: when it comes to China related matters, how quickly we switch from punching Nazis to giving Nazis major television deals.

After the announcement of the Three Body Problem television series, most concerns voiced in the United States media have focused on the fact that Benioff and Weiss are of non-Chinese background. Citing the location of the story and the lack of diversity in the cast of Game of Thrones, concerns have been raised that the two producers might “whitewash” the series.

Yet by giving a concentration camp supporter such a prominent platform, what we are really whitewashing is genocide.

There is a certain self-absorbed nature to western critical thought that inflates our perceived micro-aggressions over the macro-aggressions of an expansive colonial state engaged in crimes against humanity on the other side of the world, as if the question of the casting decisions in Game of Thrones is of greater importance than literal genocide. Ironically, such a stance reproduces and reinforces Western-centrism within its supposed critique.

As a result, meaningless pseudo-activism takes priority nowadays over genuine steps to face real crimes against humanity. It is all too easy for Netflix to remove some old television episodes that include jokes that are no longer politically correct: everyone cheers! But does Netflix have the moral backbone to stand up and say that it will not platform an author who openly supports the CCP’s genocide?

Netflix should cancel the Three Body Problem series and redirect funds to develop a documentary series on the Xinjiang camp system, raising global awareness of and resistance to this ongoing genocide.

The budget for such a documentary would of course be considerably lower than the amount of money that would need to be poured into this sci-fi trilogy. The remainder could thus be used to create a fund supporting victims of the camp system, helping refugees rebuild their lives and pursue educational and business opportunities in their new homes abroad.

When the history of the Xinjiang genocide is written, we won’t be able to say we didn’t know: the evidence is before us, and the only question remaining is what we do about it. Business as usual cannot be an option: the world needs to act today to stand unequivocally with the oppressed, rather than platforming and encouraging their oppressors.

(Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play