Seeking to bolster their regime’s image with the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Chinese Communist propagandists are working overtime.
From Xi Jinping’s perspective, their hard work is much needed.
After all, China’s treatment of athletes in COVID-19 lockdown hotels, who have lamented at being fed what looks like dog food, hasn’t exactly helped the regime’s foreign reputation. But the propagandists did think they had an ace up their sleeve: deploying a Uyghur athlete, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, to help light the Olympic cauldron at the start of the games.
The regime wanted the world to look at this spectacle and say, “Ah, perhaps the human rights organizations are wrong after all. Perhaps China does simply provide vocational training opportunities to its Uyghur Muslim population. Perhaps the genocide is an American concocted lie.”
As with China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy, the strategy has not had the intended effect.
Indeed, the pathetic showmanship has served only to underline the actual Uyghur reality. The reality was born by the thousands upon thousands of witnesses and victims, the libraries’ worth of human rights reports, and the satellite photos of China’s concentration camp industry in its far northwestern Xinjiang province.
More specifically, the reality is that the Uyghur people are victims of a continuing genocide.
It’s a reality testified by the well more than 1 million (perhaps 2 million) innocent men, women, and children who have been dragged from their homes and thrown into glorified prisons. It’s a reality testified by their treatment inside those prisons, subjected to the forced abandonment of their faith, indoctrination in Communist Party diktats, forced sterilization, rape, and even murder. It’s a reality testified by their treatment on release, which sees hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs deployed as forced laborers far from their homes. The historical parallels of their present cotton-picking work and the enslaved Americans hundreds of years ago are impossible to ignore.
The truth is the same: These are the victims of a very grave injustice.
It’s understandable that Xi Jinping’s regime wants to hide this. The regime says any attention to the Uyghur plight is an insult to and intrusion of China’s internal affairs. It insists the stories of abuse are all made up. It screeches these assertions.
But Beijing has a problem. It can send Uyghur athletes to light torches and rely on the utterly corrupt International Olympic Committee for global prestige. In the end, however, the world is waking up to what is happening in Xinjiang. And the impact isn’t only diplomatic. The European parliament has suspended trade talks, and the United Nations is pushing for access to Xinjiang.
In turn, China’s real fear is what would happen as more and more average citizens of democracies the world over pay attention to its evil deeds. It fears that as they do, these people are far less likely to vote for governments that support China’s interests or tolerate China’s injustices. And if that happens, the centerpiece of Xi’s global strategy (his offer of massive trade in return for political loyalty) is doomed to fail.
And ultimately, so is Communist China.
