In an absurd tweet on Thursday, China’s Embassy in Washington linked to an article by its China Daily propaganda newspaper. That article claims Beijing’s policies toward the Uighur people have ensured that women are “no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent.”
The tweet does not serve its intended purpose. On the contrary, as the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy observed, the Chinese Communists have simply reminded us that they are evil.
Still, there are two broader lessons here.
For a start, this is yet more proof that the Chinese Communist Party is not very good at diplomacy. Whatever the embassy communications officer and Ministry of Foreign Affairs think about Xi Jinping’s policy in Xinjiang, they should know better than to post such idiotic tweets. The language choice of “no longer baby-making machines” is almost unbelievable. But it reflects the balancing beam between absolute arrogance and utter ignorance that is China’s foreign policy narrative. When Chinese diplomats aren’t starting pointless fights on Twitter, they are posting idiotic messages.
In part, this is a symptom of a regime and leader that remain deeply insecure about their place in the world. But it’s also a consequence of the communists’ disinterest in trying to understand the thinking of others. Most foreign embassies in Washington go to great lengths to understand American culture and attitudes and then shape influence-strategies reflecting those understandings. China does not.
The more important takeaway is what China Daily’s report tells us about the Chinese Communist Party. Namely, its fanatical dedication to dominating not just thoughts but very existences. The newspaper observes how the “Xinjiang Development Research Center said extremism had incited people to resist family planning and its eradication had given Uighur women more autonomy when deciding whether to have children.” As a response to reporting on the Communist Party’s ethnocidal policy in Xinjiang, we’re supposed to read China Daily and think, “Ah, Xi is actually a father figure to the Uighurs.” But while China Daily insists contraception is voluntary in Xinjiang, it also stipulates “that all [Xinjiang] ethnic groups should implement a unified family planning policy allowing couples in urban areas to have two children, and those in rural areas three.” The article is subsumed with restricted population growth and that this allows Uighur women to lead more productive lives.
Of course, Xi’s conception of a more productive life is rather different than our own.
As applied to the Uighur peoples of Xinjiang, a productive life entails near slave-like labor in cotton fields and factories. The impetus behind Communist Party policy in Xinjiang is not to empower women to decide what size family they have. It is to deter them from having families at all. Though Beijing doesn’t normally say so openly (it occasionally slips up), it believes that Uighur values are fundamentally incompatible with the party’s values. In turn, Beijing believes Uighurs are best dealt with as rodents in Western cities are dealt with. Which is to say, with policies that constrain population growth and mitigate risks to the broader health of the city. Or, in this case, the broader ambitions of the party.
If the embassy’s tweet and its associated policy seem evil, even Nazi-esque, that’s because they are.
