It’s the sheer scale of the thing that is so terrifying.
There are roughly 11 million Uighurs in the sparse, arid lands of Xinjiang in northwestern China. At least a million of them — the U.S. Defense Department says it may be as many as 3 million — have been detained in what can only be called concentration camps.
Spokesmen in Beijing claim, somewhat perfunctorily, that these are “educational centers,” teaching the Chinese language and vocational skills. But they don’t really expect anyone to believe that. What they have in fact created is a gulag archipelago: a chain of prison camps, with armed guards and barbed wire, in which a form of cultural genocide is being pursued.
The Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people, are being forcibly assimilated into Communist China with a brutality that evokes the Cultural Revolution. They are forced to eat pork, drink alcohol, shave their beards. At the same time, they are subjected to forced labor — yet another reminder that communism, in common with almost every other form of social organization over the past 10,000 years, relies on slavery and that, as the great economist Don Boudreaux likes to point out, capitalism is the one system that tends to eliminate that foul institution.
The muted way in which these abominations are covered is puzzling. Sure, there is plenty of hardship in the world. There are wars and refugee crises all over Asia, from Yemen to Burma. But I can’t think of another human rights crisis where there is such a mismatch between the number of people involved and the amount of international interest.
Think of the outrage when President Trump proposed some pretty token restrictions on immigration from a number of Muslim-majority states. There was worldwide condemnation and rage. He was, we were told, validating a form of Islamophobic bigotry that would take us back to the Middle Ages.
Yet when another world power, a totalitarian regime, puts Muslims in concentration camps, the same pundits make mild disapprobatory noises and change the subject. Nor, by the way, does this apply only to American liberals. We find the same double standard among European leftists and, indeed, among commentators and politicians in Islamic countries.
Why the asymmetry? Part of the answer, of course, is “because Trump.” Some critics are just more interested in pointing to the president’s prejudices than in redressing injustices.
But “because Trump” is simply a distilled form of the traditional “because America.” To the committed anti-colonialist, the world’s worst ills come from the West in general and the United States in particular. The poverty in Venezuela, for example, is blamed not on socialism but on largely imaginary U.S. sanctions. The abominations carried out by the Islamic State are somehow America’s fault, because in a way that no one ever quite explains, that group came into existence as a result of the Iraq War. And so on.
In some parts of the world, these conspiracy theories are a legacy of the Cold War. If your childhood was drenched with propaganda about Yankee imperialism, some of it will have seeped in. In the United States, a form of solipsism comes into play. Just as individuals tend to place themselves at the center of the universe, so do countries. We assume that everything is about us.
There is more to it than that, though. Deep down, the asymmetry of condemnation is rather flattering to the United States. Nasty words from a U.S. president are somehow more outrageous than systematic repression from China, because in the final analysis, most people — including most Muslims — hold the U.S. to a higher standard than they do China.
Why is China behaving this way? Partly because communists loathe religion, but mainly because of something more chilling. In The Dawn of Eurasia, published last year, Bruno Macães talks about the roadblocks and checkpoints that a traveler encounters in Xinjiang. He recounts being stopped seven times at successive street corners and held up for a whole day on a rural road. He concludes, “There can be no Belt and Road without Xinjiang, but at the same time it is difficult to see how China will solve the contradiction between facilitating trade and movement while closing borders and subjecting everyone to surveillance.” Macães, a former minister from Portugal, is a far-sighted writer, but the actual solution — interning an entire population — was beyond what he could imagine as recently as last year.
To summarize: In pursuit of commercial gain, modern China is doing something that we associate with Hitler and Stalin, namely locking up whole populations on ethnic and religious grounds. If you’re more bothered by Trump saying hurtful things, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about what motivates you.
