Tackling China|Joseph Long
Over the past week, the independent Uyghur Tribunal in London has heard dozens of testimonies in what has been regarded as the most comprehensive public investigation since the allegations of incarceration, torture and enslavement against the Uighur people came to light three years ago. One of the testifiers, Omir Bekali, gave evidence at the tribunal and told of the torture and interrogation to which he was subjected during the time he was incarcerated in a “re-education camp” run by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang. In his written evidence, he testified that he was once blindfolded, hung from the ceiling, and flogged with “plastic, wooden, electric batons and metal wire whip.” Another alleged victim, Patigul Talip, broke down in tears as she held up a photo of her family. “Both my son and my daughter, I don’t know whether they are alive or dead,” she said. Talip and her husband have lost contact with their children since 2015 when they were taken away by the Chinese authorities in Beijing airport whilst trying to flee China to join their parents in Sweden. In another harrowing testimony, Qelbinur Sidik, an Uzbek woman from Xinjiang and former teacher at an internment camp, described being forcibly sterilized, hearing guards brag of raping female inmates, and being sexually assaulted by a Chinese minder sent to her home as part of a government integration program.
Last week also saw the International Criminal Court hearing damning evidence submitted by Uighur exiles against the Chinese authorities, as part of an effort to hold Xi Jinping accountable on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Evidence submitted to the Hague suggests that the Chinese state has been actively involved in a campaign of abductions which saw tens of thousands of Uighur people being kidnapped back to the Chinese-controlled region of Xinjiang, where more than one million Muslim Uighurs have been incarcerated and subjected to torture, mass-sterilization, starvation, rape and enslavement. In neighboring Tajikistan alone thousands of Uighur people were abducted by the Chinese state; as a result the Uighur community there had shrunk from 3000 to around 100 people between 2016 and 2018. Many of those who were abducted back to China are immediately incarcerated in re-education camps; others have disappeared and have not been heard since.
The harrowing testimonies given by Uighur exiles in London and the Hague last week evoked in many images of 1930s Germany where the Jewish people experienced the prelude to what eventually became known as the Holocaust – the genocide of some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. What the Uighur people have been subjected to under the iron-fist rule of the Chinese state over the past decade has been uncomfortably similar: an ethnoreligious group being transported and mass incarcerated in camps where they are subjected to forced labor and genocidal treatments. If China refused to take heed of international condemnations and continued with its evil, genocidal project against the Uighur people, then the free world would eventually be left with no choice but to consider taking more dramatic action to stop the predicaments in Xinjiang as a matter of principle – there is only so much that the west can tolerate.
Just before the opening of the G7 summit in Cornwall on Thursday last week, Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison warned of the risk of conflict with China and urged liberal democracies to join together to fight the threat. As China, under the hawkish leadership of Xi Jinping, has grown more and more assertive in its policies at home and abroad, Scott Morrison’s warning is an apt reminder that the west must not be complacent about its preparation to counter the rising threats from China, both strategically and, if necessary, militarily. In the face of China’s growing assertiveness and blatant disregard of the human rights of its minority citizens, western democracies must redouble their efforts to hold their ground in defending their core values of freedom and democracy. The four-day G7 summit that is taking place this weekend will be a good opportunity for countries that share the same values in human rights and pluralism to address the urgent need of tackling a more assertive, expansionist, malicious, and genocidal Chinese regime.
(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong.)
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