Twenty-eight years after President Ronald Reagan declared Soviet communism the “focus of evil in the modern world,” communist China has taken its place.
A new report by Amnesty International tells the tale.
The human rights group interviewed 108 people with direct knowledge of the internment camps where China is holding Muslim minorities, all of whom “recounted cruel and degrading treatment, including torture,” according to NBC. “More than 1 million Uighurs and other minorities from Xinjiang are believed to be held in internment camps, where they are forced to study Marxism, renounce their religion, work in factories and face abuse, according to human rights groups and first-hand accounts.”
Of the 108 interviewees, 55 were former detainees. All 55 said they were treated extremely cruelly or tortured. The other 53 interviewees who worked at the camps confirmed the torture. The abuses included electric sleep deprivation, shocks, beatings, being hung from a wall, and manacling to a chair for hours or even days at a time in painful positions.
One detainee described the treatment of another who was chained on a chair for three days: “Two [cuffs] were locked around his wrists and legs. … A rubber thing attached to the ribs to make the person [sit] up straight. … He would [urinate and defecate] in the chair. … We told the guards. They said to clean him. His bottom was wounded. His eyes look unconscious.”
Then, to try to hide their tracks, Chinese officials spent six full days feeding a “bonfire” of documents regarding activities at the camps. But there’s no hiding it: Two years ago, a cache of other documents unearthed by a consortium of international journalists told much the same story. The Amnesty International report adds to the record with all of its eyewitness accounts to the picture painted by those earlier papers.
None of this is a huge surprise, of course, as the basic contours of the story have been generally accepted for years. The granular details, however, are hideous.
There is never a good reason for torture of this sort. There is no good reason at all for any harsh treatment of entire minority ethnicities, especially when they pose no real threat to the increasingly paranoid Chinese regime. Indeed, even the Chinese excuse for detaining these people should send chills down the spines of all decent people. The Chinese communists call them “reeducation” camps, which of course is socialism-speak for thought control at the point of a gun.
Meanwhile, the world has watched as the Chinese government has violated treaty obligations and abused human rights by shutting down democracy and liberty in Hong Kong while brutally rounding up democracy advocates. The world also knows quite a bit about China’s bullying tactics of threatening Taiwan and making absurd claims to sovereignty over the South China Sea.
Even after Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” six decades ago killed up to 55 million people through the communists’ sheer malice and incompetence, and even after the atrocities of Tiananmen Square three decades ago, Western policymakers have repeatedly and foolishly engaged in wishful thinking about China. They somehow convince themselves that China just needs understanding and some positive reinforcement in order to begin behaving like a responsible member of the community of nations.
This is nonsense. Communism was, is, and always will be a dehumanizing, murderous evil. China, with its vast size, population, and resources combined with a long history of ruthlessness, makes that evil ideology into a massive threat to world peace and to human decency. It must be countered with all the wisdom and resolve the rest of the world can muster.
