Beijing is very upset.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights published a long-awaited report Thursday on China’s human rights abuses against its Uyghur ethnic minority citizens. Released just minutes before the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet ended her four-year tenure, the report declared “credible evidence” China’s actions toward the Uyghurs “may constitute … crimes against humanity.” Bachelet says that she was under “tremendous pressure to publish or not to publish.”
The content of her report should have made that decision a no-brainer. After all, the report found that “allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.” The U.N. also found credible the allegations that China is using Uyghurs for forced labor and forcing them into sterilization procedures.
This corroboration isn’t surprising. Numerous independent reports from analysts and media outlets such as the BBC have shown that China’s policy toward the Uyghurs does indeed reflect a grotesque crime against humanity. These investigations have proved that as many as 2 million innocent Uyghur men, women, and children have been forced into reeducation camps, abused in these prisons (sometimes raped and/or executed), and then deployed as cotton-picking forced laborers far away from their homes.
What really upsets China, though, is not the stain on its reputation this report delivers, but rather the impact that stain might have on its political interests.
Front and center here is the European Union. While leaders such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron remain keen to attract Chinese investment and are thus willing to ignore the Uyghurs’ plight, others in the EU are growing more hesitant about dealing with China. This is most notable in Eastern Europe and with European Union parliamentarians in Strasbourg, France.
A major EU-China trade deal has already been suspended under EU parliamentary pressure. With a clear focus on the Uyghurs, pressure is now growing to ban imports made with forced labor. The problem for Chinese leader Xi Jinping is that this threatens a central plank of his strategy for global hegemony — namely, his leveraging of trade to detach Europe’s China policy from that of the United States and thus divide the Western alliance structure. Xi has not helped himself this week by participating in Russian war games. That move will upset Europe, seeing as Russia is waging a war within Europe’s eastern flank.
Hence why China is so furious about the report. China’s mission to the U.N. declared it “a farce” that “smears and slanders China, and interferes in China’s internal affairs. It seriously violates the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” That statement (and another by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin) claimed that “nearly 1,000” nongovernmental organizations had written to Bachelet demanding she not release her report. Left out, however, is that many of these NGOs are very likely funded by China or run by one of its de facto colonies such as Pakistan. Wang concluded that the report “is completely illegal, null and void.”
Yet while Beijing’s concern over its broader foreign policy interests is the key to its anger, there’s another factor in play. Ego.
Put simply, China’s leaders and diplomatic corps have been unable to come to terms with the dramatic shift over the past several years in how they are treated. Prior to the Trump administration, Chinese communist officials could rely on either appeasement or deference from Western powers. Even as Chinese officials insulted its top officials, the British government lauded a “golden age” in relations. Describing a “marriage made in heaven,” Benjamin Netanyahu happily allowed China to access very sensitive Israeli technologies as prime minister. French, German, and EU leaders slathered political deference in their pursuit of new investments. Encapsulating this Western approach, President Barack Obama even asked China to sign a piece of paper promising to stop its industrial campaign of cyberespionage (shockingly, China broke its word).
Now things have changed.
At both Western popular and political levels, Beijing is viewed with far greater skepticism. These trend lines are not positive for China. And the Communist Party doesn’t know how to respond. And for a political culture that views obedience as its exigent value, the impulsive response to perceived Western disobedience is anger. But the risk of this impulsive response is equally clear. Wang offered another telling example of this on Thursday. Because it wasn’t just the U.N. and the U.S. who found Wang’s ire. He also lashed out at Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and the state of Arizona. Those that Wang says exemplify China’s friendship? Venezuela and Russia.
Caught between its own policies and its anger, China has a growing problem.
