Chinese paramilitary units with experience in dishing out the brutal repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang may be deployed to Taiwan once the island nation is conquered, a leading China scholar has warned.
Citing a document released by the US National Defense University, Dr Jonathan Ward warns Xi Jinping may look to model a potential occupation of Taiwan on Beijing’s ongoing and brutal repression of the Uyghur people, says the author of the forthcoming book, The Decisive Decade: American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China.
The Chinese Communist Party’s crimes against the Uyghurs have been the subject of numerous expert reports, including one released in August by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, notes Carl Gershman, a Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.
A report issued in 2019 by the Uyghur Human Rights Project documents the demolition of mosques and notes that Beijing launched a “Mosque Rectification Program” in 2016 that destroyed as many as 5,000 in just three months. The Uyghur cultural leadership has been hit especially hard, with The Guardian reporting that Uyghur activists in 2020 had produced a list of almost 400 writers, poets, teachers, scholars and other intellectuals who had been imprisoned from 2016-20, he writes for Tablet.
The Xinjiang Police Files is an investigation by a team of independent outlets that sheds light on the Chinese State’s alleged detention of over a million Uyghurs in internment camps, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) reports:
The investigation, involving journalists from ten European media houses, revealed previously unknown details, including confidential instructions from the authorities and speeches by Chinese officials. The leak contained never-before-seen photos of the inside of the camps and evidence of mass internment and arbitrary detention. The investigation triggered a worldwide response, with several foreign ministers calling for transparent investigations into China’s human rights violations.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
Ahead of the 2023 IJ4EU Impact Award Ceremony, ECPMF spoke to Christoph Giesen, Der Spiegel Correspondent in Beijing, about The Xinjiang Police Files. Read more about the project here.
The attack on Uyghur culture has less to do with a particular antipathy by the regime toward Uyghurs as a people than with the totalitarian character of the Chinese political system, which cannot tolerate any kind of cultural, religious or political diversity that limits the total control of society by the communist state, adds Gershman, previously the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED):
The Tibetan people have long been subjected to what the Dalai Lama has called “cultural genocide,” in resistance to which some 160 Tibetan monks, nuns, and ordinary people have self-immolated since 2009. While the Dalai Lama has not endorsed the desperate act of self-immolation, he has recognized it as a form of nonviolent resistance to the regime’s repression that is as much a threat to the survival of the Tibetan people as it is to the Uyghurs. And like the Uyghurs today but much earlier, the Dalai Lama has also recognized the urgent need to develop a strategy for cultural and religious survival.
The Dalai Lama has said that Tibetans should ‘copy some of the Jewish determination and the techniques they have used to keep their identity, their religious faith, their traditions under difficult circumstances,’ Gershman notes. RTWT
