And it does look like Xi Jinping has set out to try to
resolve this problem of separatism among the Uyghurs for once and for all.
And at least as it's articulated as well, it's also
seen as a problem of terrorism. And what's
remarkable about it is that they chose a vast, massive collective punishment
approach to deal with the threat of terrorism. Now, I understand from the
point of view of the Chinese Communist Party,
all unrest in Xinjiang is...
It's instability, right? It doesn't fit the model, it's very worrisome from
them, from their point of view. But if you actually look at
the kinds of acts which we would recognize as terrorism that is
with a religious inspiration and targeting random civilians,
there aren't that many. And another thing came out of the documents was,
it was specific, three terrorist events in 2014
that seemed to have pushed Xi to adopt a whole new approach,
as opposed to a much longer horizon of unrest, even one including the
2009 riots in Ürümqi. So this is an important distinction, because if you're
only looking at the terrorist acts and extremist thought, as it comes clear
from these documents, then the idea of locking up 1.5 million people is
absolutely crazy when you have a handful, literally a small handful of perpetrators
of terrorist acts. If you're looking more broadly at unrest and instability
in the region,
but not necessarily expressing itself through terrorism or attacks on civilians,
or even necessarily in a religious manner,
then you have to really start and look closely at what are the
policies in the region that might be leading to such broad dissatisfaction?
And unfortunately, it's that... That I don't think, that kind of introspection
is not happening
in the Chinese Communist Party. In any case, the answer your question,
what they're trying to do is eliminate instability, is eliminate what they
see as separatism, eliminate extremism. But I think there's a
very
broad, a very large misdiagnosis of the problem going on. And hence,
they've come up with the wrong prescription for how to resolve it.
So the stated goal, and this is stated in internal documents and it's
actually very, very similarly stated in public statements by Xinjiang Public
Officials, and even in the Foreign Minister and so on, they've said this
many, many times, the stated goal is to
inoculate people from extremist thinking, or to eliminate a thought virus
in their minds by locking them up for months and years, and subjecting
them to indoctrination followed by a kind of coercive labor regime.
I think most reasonable people, and now we even know officials on the
ground in Xinjiang, in Yarkant County, in Akto County,
they think this is crazy. This is a crazy idea that you can
use these kind of coercive means,
applied to hundreds of thousands of people to change their thinking.
They're trapped in their own metaphor, a metaphor of the idea of a
thought virus. So let's have a thought inoculation program, or let's give
people a kind of chemotherapy which will knock out the bad thoughts.
The metaphor has taken over policy making in Xinjiang. And so,
of course, it's not going to work, and even
Chinese Communist Party officials on the ground know that it's not going
to work. The broad takeaways from the documents
include, one,
it really lets us know how much these policies are coming from the
top, from Xi Jinping himself or from people very close to him.
They also tell us that there isn't absolute uniformity of opinion about
whether they're a good idea, and that local officials,
as I just said, that local officials might not approve of them.
They confirm the thinking behind the policies, this idea
that there are extremist thoughts that have percolated through the entire
Uyghur population
that need to be addressed through these kinds of extreme means,
and in that regard, this is quite interesting because they don't really
differ that much from public statements.
One thing which the documents do show us, which we didn't really know
before, are the sort of cracks in the edifice of the idea that
local officials were dragging their feet, or were concerned about the economic
impacts of
the internment camps
and also concerned about potential backlash from those,
and the fact that they leaked themselves, this is really quite a major
event. This doesn't happen very often. And many people have compared this
to, for example, The Tiananmen Papers. It was really the last big leak
of internal documents with such political impact. The model of these so
called, educational transformation centers, internment camps, re education
camps,
they can also be called concentration camps.
It's various roots to this. There's a certain kind of confusion,
transformation idea in there,
which of course, was amplified and was very much part of the Mao's program
of labor reform and thought reform. But of course, there was also a
Soviet model of thought reform in Gulag type settings, which was I think
also part of the system of thought reform and labor camps in the
PRC in its earlier decades, particularly in the cultural revolution. So
there's a confluence of
Soviet and more traditional Chinese approaches there. The irony right now
is with the camps in Xinjiang, we see something we didn't see in
the cultural revolution before because they've singled out people on the
basis of ethnicity
and of religion to apply these means to, and that's quite different.
And in so doing, they've put this whole class of people collectively
in what the theorists of ethnic cleansing and of concentration camps called,
"A state of exception." And this is a state where they're outside of
the norms, they don't need to be treated through the legal system,
they don't need to get, is it rights and treatment that would be
available even to Han in China, even in an authoritarian situation.
They're outside of all of that and can be treated however the state
wants to do it. And the fact that the state has decided
that it can do that to Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang is
an indication that it's worrying about them in some of the same ways
that for example, the United States worried about Japanese Americans during
World War II. The way in which European states worried about
minority populations or Jews or Gypsies, or others in Europe, and of course
the Nazis as well.
These are particular conditions of
modern nation states when the governments are insecure,
when there's majority and minority tensions, when there's toxic nationalism,
those kinds of things. And this is why it's appropriate to use the
word, concentration camps for these, because I don't think Xi Jinping or
anyone in Jungnang gu said, "Let's create a system of concentration camps
in Xinjiang." But they've managed to reinvent the wheel for reasons,
and having to do with their perception of the circumstances that's really
quite similar to perceptions by states in
Europe in the 20th century, and in other places indeed where concentration
camps have emerged. So the problem of how to deal with
human rights violations generally
in state to state interactions
is a difficult one, in particular in US China relations
where there're so many different aspects of that relationship
that need to be dealt with at the same time, right?
And when you get a situation like this where there are horrific human
rights violations, things that are way beyond the pale that we haven't seen
before,
what do you do with a state that's doing that when you still
have to deal with them over other things? And indeed right now,
US China relations have come to a very sorry pass, they're more tense
and problematic than they've been for a long time. So there are many
dangers
in that relationship, and
one's initial reaction might be, "Oh my God." Their concentration camps,
their thought reform, this massive human rights violations being perpetrated
against the Uyghurs, sexual abuse and torture in these prisons.
How can you then turn around and deal with them on
tariffs on electronics or apparel, right?
And this is a danger, and it's a problem really that
is more acute now than it has been really at any time.
I suppose since the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen killings and
so on. So I think that one tool that's been created now,
which really wasn't around in 1989 so much,
is this idea of sanctioning individual officials
in a very public way. Global Magnitsky Sanctions is of course
the law from which this comes,
and it's implemented by
various organs of the US government. It's reflected in Congressional Acts.
And that has the advantage over, for example, massive trade tariffs in that
they are targeted, they are specific, they speak to these particular kinds
of issues. So I do think those are... That's a pretty good thing to be doing.
It took quite a while to get
those sanctions applied and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which is
the equivalent of the Hong Kong Act that just passed
both Houses of Congress yesterday. That Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act has
still not gone all the way through. So I think that should go
through. It should be signed by the President.
Some of the
entities listed on the most recent version of the US Entities List,
it includes tech companies, Chinese tech companies that are doing business
with Xinjiang authorities, but it also includes local authorities in Xinjiang
themselves, the police departments of county level. And then also, the
production construction... The Xinjiang Production Construction Corps or
the Bingtuan, which is very involved in building
these camps, very involved in
the overall repressive regime in Xinjiang. So I think it's right to call
them out on the entities list, and to sort of keep an eye...
What sorts of
dealings, international corporations are having
with Xinjiang authorities, with companies working in Xinjiang, and also
with one degree he moved with technology, and other kinds of companies
that are connected and associated to the system in Xinjiang. And
so far the focus has been on technology.
I think one thing that's going to start happening more, and this is
less of a government... That is a US government
action, and more that's something that's going to, is it, filter up from
people at large, and as more information gets around,
is going to be the problem of tainting of supply chains more generally,
of things coming from Xinjiang, in particular, cotton,
also, tomato paste. Xinjiang actually grows a tremendous amount of the world's
supply of tomato paste. I think it's something like 20%.
China produces 20% to 30% of the world's raw cotton and Xinjiang produces
80% of that, and a large proportion of that is produced by the
Xinjiang Production Construction Corps, which is a state owned enterprise
on steroids there. So it's very... This is only recently becoming to be
sort of better known,
but it's very, very difficult to
not just source apparel from Xinjiang, but to source
cotton or cotton thread from China generally, without being
tainted by what's going on in Xinjiang, because so much of the cotton
itself that China uses and China sells, for example, to Vietnam to make
clothing, so much of that is actually coming from an entity that runs
concentration camps, the Xinjiang Production Construction Corps. I was recently
in a Muji store in Boston, just last week, and they have a
rather unfortunate new sort of campaign of Xinjiang cotton shirts,
that they rolled out last May. And they're still selling them,
and they say right on the tag, "Made with Xinjiang Cotton."
And I wouldn't mean to single out Muji 'cause there are plenty of
corporations where this is happening.
What was interesting about the shirt is it's Xinjiang cotton made in Vietnam.
So what that shows is that this is an issue of cotton in
broader supply chains, that are going into making all sorts of textiles
in other places outside of China even. And I think when that comes
to be better known, I think it will be... It will have a
big impact on, or potentially could have a big impact on
the textile industry in China, generally.
