On Thursday, China’s People’s Liberation Army published a video of special forces soldiers training to smash up Uighur Muslims.
The PLA doesn’t openly admit as much, of course.
The video’s description is that of soldiers conducting endurance and operations training in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. But considering what we know about the nature of Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang province, the video’s ultimate purpose is clear: to remind all its viewers that, whether through choice or coercion, the Communist Party retains absolute dominion over its people.
Although its production quality is relatively impressive, the video itself isn’t particularly interesting. It shows soldiers running through mountains, strenuously pushing trucks, and engaging in single-file column assault exercises. But the devil lies in the detail behind the video. This is the “Mountain Eagle Commando,” the PLA-police special forces unit for Xinjiang province.
Under the direct authority of the Central Military Commission in Beijing, state media makes clear that the unit isn’t just for propaganda videos. An August 2019 report describes how “in 2018, the amount of ammunition used by the new commando unit was equal to all of the other Armed Police units in Xinjiang in the past three years …” In an extensive biography of the unit’s commander, Wang Gang, the PLA describes how Wang doesn’t view his work simply as that of an infantry officer. “Whether performing tasks or inspecting work at the station,” the PLA proclaims, Wang “always took the time to preach to the people of all ethnic groups about the decision-making and deployment of the Party Central Committee and Chairman Xi.”
When it comes to Xinjiang province, the “preaching” involves the annihilation of Uighur culture under the Communist Party’s boot. Whether it is “preaching” reeducation of the kind Wang pursues in his spare time, or slave-like forced cotton-picking, or just imprisonment, the Mountain Eagle Commando and other units of the PLA-police exist to dominate individual lives, not to defend individual freedom. This is a very different breed of military police force to those of U.S. National Guard units or the French gendarmes, for example. Those units work for public protection. The PLA-police has that role, but only insofar as public protection serves the supreme party’s interests.
As the peoples of Xinjiang and Hong Kong know all too well, the Communist Party’s interests are rarely those of the people.
