Posts Tagged ‘Uighurs’
China’s New Morning Star Friends and other Fellow Travellers.
Morning Star platforms ‘Marxist-Leninist’ defence of Chinese Regime.
“Perhaps China’s current ability to tolerate paradoxes is the most notable legacy of Mao – that dedicated admirer of contradictions.” (P 465) “An adaptive ‘guerrilla-style’ mode of policymaking”, “”Maybe that is why China, for the time being, can be ruled by a party that continues to emphasise its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist heritage, whole proclaiming the necessity of market forces; that proclaims its possession of a ‘comprehensive plan’ at a time when China is more complicatedly diverse than at any point in is history. Maybe this explains also why I has a leader who has revived Maoist strategies fifty years after his family were torn apart by Mao’s policies.”(P 465)
Maoism: A Global History. Julia Lovell. 2019.
The one-time pro-Soviet Communist Party of Britain has taken to admiring the Chinese Communist Party.
Quotes from Mao festoon party members’ tweets, the CPB has taken to calling itself ‘Marxist-Leninist'(an old orthodox Official Communist tag, but one these days largely confined to the remaining fragments of Maoism) and they have produced this:
It seems as if the CPB, lacking the Beacon of the USSR, has, in desperation, found a new Socialist Fifth of the World.
Enter the latest sally.
Xinjiang: staying afloat in a wave of disinformation
Kate Woolford, a member of the Southampton Young Communist League and social media editor of Challenge (The YCL journal) writes.
“The latest red scare propaganda targets China and its autonomous region of Xinjiang. Many people will have seen statistics that refer to “one million Muslims” being held in concentration camps and various other human rights abuses — even “genocide.” It is crucial that the public are aware of where the main allegations come from and gain a picture of what is really going on in Xinjiang.”
Scales no doubt fall from our eyes when, after a farrago of ad hominem attacks on small number of reports abut the persecution of this minority we come to,
According to CGTN, “From 1990 to 2016, thousands of terrorist attacks have been launched in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers.”
In response, China has launched campaigns to crack down on violent extremism, separatism and terrorism with a focus on re-education. The camps were built to de-radicalise Muslims who had been victims of Etim’s ideas — this is the point of the mass mobilisation in the region that has led to false allegations of “genocide,” “forced sterilisation” and “torture.”
In the spirit of fairness, after having rubbished any report of bad treatment of China’s Uighur minority China expert Kate Wolford cites the Chinese state’s own line:
“the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China puts the state’s case forward plainly.”
“Faced with this severe and complex problem [religious extremism], Xinjiang has upheld the principle of addressing both the symptoms and the root causes in the fight against terrorism and extremism, by striking hard at serious terrorist crimes, which are limited in number and by educating and rehabilitating people influenced by religious extremism and involved in minor violations of the law.
“In accordance with the law, it has established a group of vocational education centres to offer systemic education and training in response to a set of urgent needs: to curb frequent terrorist incidents, to eradicate the breeding ground for religious extremism, to help trainees acquire a better education and vocational skills, find employment and increase their incomes and most of all, to safeguard social stability and long-term peace in Xinjiang.”
At the camps residents are taught Mandarin — the lingua franca spoken by 73 percent of the Chinese population — taught technical skills in order to help them find work when they leave and offered mental guidance to overcome radicalised ways of thinking.
Of course, as is the case everywhere in the world, the severity of a sentence depends on the scale of the crime and the willingness of a person of acknowledge their guilt.
The people in the re-education centres are assessed on how much harm they have been caused, their willingness to receive training and whether they have already completed a prison sentence but might still require further rehabilitation.
The people in the centres are provided with free education and once the trainees reach their expected criteria, they are offered certificates of completion and can leave. Depending on the reason they are there, many are allowed to go home to visit their families once or twice a week.
It is absolutely not a campaign to stop them practising Islam — religious activities are protected by Article 36 of the constitution: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organisation or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.
The lengthy piece ends with this:
“We cannot ignore the drive to war against China. Fear of speaking out against atrocity propaganda because of its upsetting and controversial nature will only lead to the manufacturing of consent for war. Western intervention led to two million people dying in Korea, 2.4 million people dying in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, three million people dying in Vietnam among millions more elsewhere.
Given the history, given the body count, socialists have a duty to vehemently oppose the idea that our countries should be able to interfere in others; denouncing the false narrative on Xinjiang is now part of that duty.”
This is how the Chinese state has reacted to reporting on the issue;
BBC journalist leaves China after Beijing criticises Uighurs coverage
John Sudworth’s relocation to Taiwan comes after ‘months of personal attacks’ over reporting of alleged abuses of minorities
Here is some more History.
. “From October 1050 to October 1951, the regime eliminated somewhere between 1,5 and 2 million people. (P 24) this time, death sentences were fewer, formal executions many suspects killed themselves. “The objective was to produce a docile population by transforming almost every act and every utterance into a potential crime.”(P 241)
The Cultural Revolution A People’s History, 1962—1976 Frank Dikötter 2016.
Here are some more Fellow Travellers: John Ross, former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG),
The main theme of the fellow Travellers of Chinese Communist Party is that its development of the productive forces in the country is a miracle. The lack of democracy, human rights, is less important that “this extraordinary successful political project”. The regime has “extraordinarily” increased the ‘real’ freedoms of the population. Happiness is the CCP.. (Martin Jacques).
Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, was famously the betist of bêtes noires of the Communist Party of Britain. Speculation is growing that he will be invited back to their pages.
Left Internationalists do not agree:
Update: there is also this,
‘FIND OUT THE FACTS ON THE UYGHURS’
The Communist Party of Britain is urging labour movement bodies not to rush to judgment on the Uyghur question in China.
Mr Griffiths said the reports of ‘genocide’ from a network of right-wing institutes and pressure groups funded by the US, British and Australian governments are recycled uncritically in the Western media.
As one of many international delegations to visit Xinjiang, he had seen for himself that mosques are open, the Uyghur language can be seen and heard everywhere, and the majority of top state and political officials are Uyghurs, not Han Chinese.
Asa Winstanley on ‘Fabricated’ ‘Disinformation’ Claiming Chinese State Persecution of Uighurs.
Can you trust a Word this Man Says?
Asa Winstanley is a journalist, a self-styled ‘investigative journalist to boot.
You can read his material on his Blog: my latest articles here. “Most of my work is published at The Electronic Intifada.”
He has become known for this story,
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor at the Electronic Intifada. On Tuesday 19 January, he broke a story about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party hiring an ex-spy.
He’s a favourite with other ‘alt’ news sites.
This gives a flavour of his investigations:
The views Ash Winstanley expressed on the Chinese state persecution of the Uighurs are deeply offensive.
This is what the left is saying:
How the Left Can Oppose the Uyghur Genocide
How the International Left Can Support the Uyghur People
There is much that activists concerned with human rights violations can do to compel their states to take action. First, by lobbying our elected officials, we can pressure the states of which we are citizens to implement Magnitsky-style sanctions that target specific individuals—for example, Communist Party leaders in Xinjiang and administrators of the detention camps—implicated in the Uyghur cultural genocide.
…
The suffering of China’s Muslims may seem distant to many activists in North America and Europe. This assumption of distance is grounded in an illusion, however. Every time we turn our computer on, buy a new shirt from the Gap, or add tomato paste to our pasta sauce, we are potentially complicit in the detention, torture, and rape of Uyghurs and the slow extermination of their culture. The fact that our governments prefer to look the other way as China seeks to eradicate and coercively assimilate their largest Muslim population does not absolve us of our duty to resist. If the erasure of a minority community were taking place in our neighbourhoods and communities, what would we do? This is happening to the Uyghurs of China every day, and it is an atrocity we cannot afford to ignore.
When it comes to the oppression of minority populations, geographic distances have a way of shrinking much faster than we expect. The surveillance apparatus that China has developed for monitoring and persecuting its Uyghur population involves technologies such as facial recognition that have captured the interest of U.S. corporations as well. Ironically, this surveillance apparatus has been built with the help of U.S. behemoths such as IBM and Google. State surveillance is big business, after all. As journalist Ross Andersen has suggested, “Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang… [H]e could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.” The recent $400 billion deal between China and the authoritarian Islamic Republic of Iran, which commits the two countries to close strategic and economic cooperation for the next 25 years, should be viewed in this light.
No democrat or internationalist should touch Ash Winstanley with a barge-pole.
Socialist Action: Left Should not be “taken in” by “US Lies” about Uighurs in China.
![Seeking ways to tell 'My China Story'[2]- Chinadaily.com.cn](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20160530/7427ea21079d18b66c513a.jpg)
John Ross, “China has a real understanding of human rights”.
Socialist Action is a small left wing organisation, visible largely only through its web site. It originated in the International Marxist Group (IMG).
Its best known member is John Ross, who led a Tendency (‘B’) in the IMG and was effectively the group’s leader untright through to the creation of the Socialist League or Socialist Action.
Others will add their own fond memories of Ross, and the Rossites, their ability to cite Lenin, at length. Plans to ‘Bolshevise’ the organisation by schemes such as creating a ‘cell’ based structure, and later the “turn to industry”
You can read more about the IMG and related history on the excellent site, Red Mole Rising including this section, Discussing the Turn to Industry- a 1980 perspective and (more significantly, as the role of John Ross is discussed): On the Turn to Industry, the American SWP and other questions of IMG history
There were serious splits in the 1980s. The Ross faction retained the name Socialist Action and by the end of the 1980s had moved away from the Fourth International (there is no picture of Trotsky on their site) . Some of its key members, such as Redmond O’Neill, went on to become key members of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s inner team after his victory in the election of 2000. Ross himself was Policy Director of Economic and Business Policy.
Not a great deal has been heard of them since the end of the first decade of the new millenium.
John Ross, apparently, ” better known in China under his Chinese name Luo Siyi (罗思义) is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.
Ross has vocally defended the Chinese government’s policies, and the Chinese Communist Party’s record on human rights, for some time.
Here is an example from this year.
China’s human rights record is keeping people alive: British scholar
China’s human rights record is keeping people alive, said John Ross, a British senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, when talking about China’s anti-coronavirus efforts in an interview with RT.
“All the misrepresentation and nonsense which has just come now will fade away and people will understand that China is the only country that got the virus under control,” he added.
He has tweeted.
Ross appears on Chinese official televison.
Now his helpers have sprung into action:
The left should not be taken in by ‘US WMD lies’ – this time about Uyghurs
Extract:
Sometimes it is necessary to wait years before the lies of US of US intelligence agencies are definitively revealed. The following outstanding piece of investigative journalism by Max Blumenthal, editor of the US website the Grayzone, is therefore extremely valuable because it catches the latest case of such US intelligence services lying in the act – this time about the Uyghurs. It shows in detail, in Blumenthal’s words, ‘the micro socio-political relationships’ in how the US security services lies about the Uyghurs were constructed and propagated. Blumenthal’s account does not need amplification and needs simply to be read in full by anyone taken in by the US intelligence services lies.
All that needs to be added here is the ‘macro’ aspect of the situation – that is why the US had to resort to the lying and falsification Blumenthal so meticulously exposes? It is because any look at the situation reveals that the US was lying.
Take the claim that there are a million Uyghurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang. If that were true there would be a mass of satellite photos that would reveal what would be the massive number of such camps and the US would be displaying them all the time. They don’t and there is only one explanation – because they don’t have such photos because the camps don’t exist. They are a fabrication of right-wing fantasist, ‘sent by God’, Adrian Zenz who Blumenthal reveals the character of in detail.
Take also the claims that ‘genocide’ is taking place against the Uyghers in Xinjiang. Take the facts.
The Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 5.55 million to 11.68 million in the 40 years 1978-2018 – i.e. it more than doubled. But in that period the total population of China grew by 46% while the Uyghur population grew by 110% – that is the Uyghur population grew more than twice as fast as the overall, majority Han, population of China. A very strange ‘genocide’ in which the population against which it is supposedly being carried is growing in size twice as fast as the rest of the population. We fail to recall that the Jews under the Nazis grew in population twice as fast as other Germans.
Why did this more rapid growth of the Uygur population of China than the majority Han population take place? Because under the one child policy in China, which only recently ended, Han Chinese were only permitted one child., but ethnic minorities, specifically including Uyghurs, were allowed two. This was probably precisely because China did not want to, and did not want to be seen, as discriminating against ethnic minorities. Given this situation of course the Uyghur population increased much more rapidly than the Han population. Again, it is very strange form of ‘genocide’ in which the Uyghur families were permitted to have more children than the Han Chinese. Perhaps someone will point to which of Hitler’s laws specifically permitted Jews to have more children than other Germans?
In short, the ‘macro’ facts clearly prove that the US claims about the Uyghurs are simply lies. But Max Blumenthal has done the inestimable service of ‘catching the thief with their hand in the till’ – that is showing in detail how these lies were invented and the nature and means used by right wing fanatics, the US security services, and the US media to fabricate them. They are simply the methods that were used to invent the lies about WMD in Iraq and the non-existent attack by North Vietnam on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. And they were invented for the same reasons – to launch US aggression.
And what should the left do about this? They should not get caught up in spreading the same type of lies as those about WMD that were used to justify the Iraq war, and the lies that were used about the Gulf of Tonkin to launch the Vietnam war.
These are very serious claims, ones disputed by nearly everybody, including the left – with the exception of the daily Morning Star.
In the Trotskyist movement only Sam Marcey (1911 – 1998) was marked by such a turn away from workers’ democracy and towards the Chinese state.
The assertions of Socialist Action are stomach-churning.
