Zhao particularly applauded Party officials in the region for their work in “transformation through education,” a reference to the “vocational training” concentration camps. He claimed that as many as 2 million people in the region “have been influenced by pro-Xinjiang independence and “Double-Pan” [pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist] thinking,” effectively calling millions of people terrorists.
Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore’s ‘Woke’ Firm Invests in Chinese Slave Labor
Former vice president Al Gore runs a $36 billion investment fund dedicated to environmental and social sustainability. The "mission-led firm" that claims to "seek transformational change needed in climate and social action" has investments in companies that profit from Chinese slave labor and help the Chinese Communist Party censor the internet.
Generation Investment Management, which Gore formed in 2004, has stakes in Tencent, Anta, and Alibaba, according to its investment reports. Tencent, a tech conglomerate, routinely censors the internet at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party and has surveilled foreign users of its WeChat messaging app. Anta, a sports apparel company, has faced accusations of using cotton sourced from labor camps in Xinjiang. Alibaba, which operates China's equivalent to Google, has links to the People's Liberation Army.
Generation's investments are part of a growing trend of firms touting social justice causes while profiting off companies that aid the authoritarian regime in Beijing. Coca-Cola, Delta, and Major League Baseball came under fire last year for criticizing voting laws in Georgia while raking in billions of dollars from China. The baseball league pulled its All-Star Game from Atlanta over the voting laws, but days later signed a licensing agreement with Tencent. The league entered the deal even though Tencent had blocked NBA games from airing in China because a league executive defended pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Gore has followed a similar playbook. He accused Republicans last year of passing "truly un-American" voting laws while he profited from investments in China, which is led by unelected Communist Party bureaucrats.
Generation defends its Chinese investments on the grounds that the companies have pledged to curtail carbon emissions. The firm also cites the companies' "significantly higher upside" than other investments in its portfolio.
Generation has worked closely with Tencent and Alibaba for years to develop its carbon emissions standards. The companies "have leapfrogged Western peers" by announcing plans to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, Generation said in a letter to shareholders last month. Generation voted to reelect Yang Siu Shun to the Tencent board of directors last year. Yang is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory committee for the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party.
Generation likes Anta because of its "successful brand platform, excellent management team, and long runway for growth." But Gore's firm is well aware of longstanding concerns about the apparel giant's link to slave labor.
"Sustainable investing can at times raise challenging issues, and we have recently been grappling with one at Anta Sports," Generation said in its investor letter, acknowledging allegations that the apparel maker uses cotton made from slave labor in China's Xinjiang province. Generation said it has discussed the issue with Anta management, and says the company is "well-intentioned" in its purported efforts to remove slave labor from its supply chain.
"In these situations, there can be a temptation to divest and move on," the letter reads. "We believe this is the wrong thing to do with a management team that is engaged and well-intentioned, and where we feel our ownership can help to deliver change."
Its claim notwithstanding, Anta has rebuffed calls from human rights groups to leave Xinjiang, where the Chinese government carries out genocide against Muslim Uyghurs. And in a particularly bold move, Anta said last year it uses cotton from Xinjiang and will continue to do so.
Gore's compromise on Chinese firms for the sake of environmental sustainability bears similarity to another failed Democratic presidential candidate. John Kerry, the Biden administration's climate czar, has refused to criticize China over human rights abuses out of concerns it would derail climate talks with Beijing. And like Gore, he has investments in controversial Chinese firms, including one linked to labor abuses against Uyghurs.
Both Gore and Kerry are in Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum. The annual conclave has long drawn criticism for attendees who fly on private jets halfway across the globe to lament the effect of climate change.
New evidence shows severe persecution at the hands of the Chinese communists
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a family member who fancies herself to be on the left end of the political spectrum. Her thought process is based upon emotion rather than truth and logic (as is the case with most, if not all American "progressives"), so her political views are completely predictable. Somehow, the topic of discussion wound up at China's well documented gruesome practices of organ-harvesting.
Her response was genuine — she was in disbelief. She said something to the effect of "Olivia, that doesn't make any sense. How is a government allowed to do that?" I told her, "Well, they're communists. They don't have a government based upon Judeo-Christian morality as we do." Like a good denier-of-fact American "liberal," she said, "I don't believe that" and wrote it off — I was the Trump-loving conservative, and as Snopes had told her so many times before, I was guilty of disinformation.
Well, just this week, a human rights organization, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, leaked new documentation of China's persecution against the ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs. Sourced from domestic police and government entities in China, the files were compiled into a searchable website, which details exactly what you'd expect from a communist regime and its foot soldiers: mug shot–type photographs of those detained without due process, police instructions detailing a "shoot to kill" protocol, and images of prisoners subject to "hooding" while handcuffed. With the data dump, Chinese citizens with missing family members pored over the photos of the detainees, hoping to find their missing loved ones.
Marx's doctrine of communism emphasizes the need to throw off religion — and specifically given the context and era of his writings, the need to throw off the Christian religion. When speaking of the proletariat, Marx wrote, "Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests." How could a communist revolution of a proletariat uprising succeed without the "radical rupture" from pesky Christian tenets like the sanctity of human life, monogamous nuclear families, and a hard work ethic?
Communism rejects the idea of a moral arbiter greater than man — the communist is the standard of morality, and anything goes. Communist regimes throughout history share a commonality — they all batted a thousand for oppression and murder. But so many don't, or refuse to see! Of these unwitting comrades, Yuri Bezmenov said this:
They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power — obviously they get offended — they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.
When will "certain Americans" favor intellectualism and historical scholarship and rebuke their identity of "useful idiot"? Time is of the essence.
DO A SEARCH FOR THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND RED CHINA!
Governors Say ‘No Way’ to Biden Plans To Empower Pro-China Health Organization
Gov. Kristi Noem: Power over personal health choices 'is not President Biden's to give away'
Republican governors Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Glenn Youngkin (Va.), and Kristi Noem (S.D.) denounced the Biden administration's proposed amendments to the World Health Organization's International Health Regulations.
"We in Florida, there is no way we will ever support this WHO thing," DeSantis said Monday. "No way."
The amendments would change WHO's surveillance methods, allowing the organization to "develop early warning criteria for assessing and progressively updating the national, regional, or global risk posed by an event of unknown causes or sources." WHO would provide member nations with assessments that indicate "the level of risk of potential spread and risks of potential serious public health impacts, based on assessed infectiousness and severity of the illness."
The amendments would also change how WHO determines public health emergencies. While the previous regulations task the organization's director-general and each member nation with determining a crisis, the amendments delegate that power solely to the director-general. The amendments also allow the director-general to issue an intermediate public health alert if he deems that a crisis requires international awareness, even if it doesn't meet international public health emergency standards.
DeSantis is not the only governor wary of the amendments.
"South Dakota will continue to trust our people to exercise personal responsibility over their health," Noem said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. "That power is not President Biden's to give away—the 10th Amendment reserves it for the states and for the people."
A spokeswoman for Youngkin called the Biden administration's plans "incredibly concerning" and said "giving WHO sovereignty over U.S. health decisions" is "not something Governor Youngkin condones or supports."
WHO has a history of working against U.S. interests. Under the leadership of Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization repeatedly allowed the Communist regime in China to hold sway over official health decisions. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO followed Beijing's lead and falsely claimed for weeks that human-to-human transmission was unconfirmed. A top WHO official in July 2020 promoted an anti-Taiwan conspiracy theory about the virus. Under former president Donald Trump, the United States withdrew from the organization, but President Joe Biden reversed Trump's decision.
Delegates from almost 200 countries have gathered this month in Geneva, Switzerland, for the 75th World Health Assembly, where they are discussing the changes.
Member nations are allowed to reject WHO's emergency assistance, but they must alert WHO of their rationale within 48 hours of the rejection.
The Biden administration's proposals would establish "compliance committees" in each member country to gather information and promote compliance with regulations.
Members hope to establish a new pandemic agreement in addition to the International Health Regulations, which legally bind countries to detect and report potential health threats. If approved, these amendments are not expected to take effect until 2024.
In his Monday remarks to the World Health Assembly, a meeting of WHO's legislative body, Health and Human Services director of global affairs Loyce Pace said the United States is pleased "with the consensus reached this week on concrete action and further work to strengthen existing tools available to the WHO and to all Member States."
"This includes strengthening the International Health Regulations from 2005 to clarify roles and responsibilities, increase transparency and accountability, share best practices, and communicate in real-time with our global partners," Pace said.
Member nations have until August to decide on initial drafts of the amendments.
‘Soft on China’: Blinken To Unveil Biden Admin’s China Policy at China-Friendly Org
After months of buildup, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will outline the Biden administration’s China strategy on Thursday. His venue: an event hosted by a group friendly to the Chinese Communist Party.
Blinken will give his much-anticipated speech at an event hosted by the Asia Society, a U.S.-based nonprofit that aims "to build bridges of understanding between Americans and Asians." The speech comes as the administration weighs whether to relax Trump-era tariffs imposed on China and prepares for diplomatic talks in Asia.
The event could undermine the Biden administration’s attempt to talk tough on China. Several Chinese state-owned companies—including the China Investment Corporation and State Grid Corporation of China—are part of the Asia Society’s global corporate network, which helps members engage with "corporate leaders, policymakers, and influencers." One of the Asia Society’s trustees is Ning Gaoning, a Chinese Communist Party official whose company, Sinochem, has been blacklisted by the United States government over its ties to the Chinese military.
The Asia Society also has ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine. It helped establish dozens of Confucius Institute classrooms across the country. U.S. government officials have warned that the Chinese government uses Confucius Institutes to disseminate pro-Beijing propaganda at American colleges and high schools. Another Asia Society board member is an official with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a think tank that directs the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas influence activities.
"It's unclear why Blinken chose Asia Society as a host," said Anders Corr, an intelligence analyst and publisher of the Journal of Political Risk. Corr said Asia Society’s "soft-on-China reputation" and financial ties to state-controlled companies means it "should be avoided by U.S. government officials at any cost."
Blinken is not expected to announce any major policy shifts toward China at the event, which he postponed earlier this month after contracting COVID-19. His speech comes amid intense debate in the Biden administration and business community over Trump-era tariffs against Chinese companies. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and officials on the National Security Council want to maintain tariffs while Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and others want to ease some in order to lower prices amid high inflation, the New York Times reported. Blinken is not expected to explicitly address how the administration should handle tariffs, according to the Times.
The Asia Society and many of its corporate sponsors support a rollback of tariffs. Anna Ashton, an official with the Asia Society Policy Institute, recently said the Chinese government had exercised "a great deal of patience" in hoping that American policymakers "would come to their senses" about the economic relationship between Washington and Beijing.
The State Department and Asia Society did not respond to requests for comment.
Massive Data Hack Reveals Thousands of Photos from China’s Uyghur Concentration Camps
A huge trove of documents and photographs from police in Xinjiang province, obtained by hackers and released in an extensively vetted report on Tuesday, offers further documentation of the Chinese Communist Party’s horrific human rights abuses.
The files include photographic evidence of mass detention and abuse, including of very young children from the oppressed Uyghur Muslim minority.
The trove, collectively referred to as the Xinjiang Police Files, was originally obtained in 2018 by hackers and provided to Dr. Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC).
Zenz, one of the world’s leading investigators of the Uyghur genocide, enlisted an international media consortium to painstakingly validate the pictures and documents over the ensuing years, resulting in the bombshell report release on Tuesday.
Zenz said the “revelations are very disturbing,” as they provide “frank police implementation directives” and proof of the “personal involvement” of top Chinese officials, including dictator Xi Jinping.
Photos taken inside the camps bear little resemblance to the “voluntary vocational training centers” China portrays them as:
“For the first time, the files provide researchers with thousands of images of detained Uyghurs, as well as photos of police guards wielding automatic weapons and handcuffing and shackling detainees during camp security drills,” the VOC noted.
“The Xinjiang Police Files prove that China’s so-called vocational training centers are really prisons. These documents conclusively demonstrate that Beijing has been lying about its gross human rights violations in Xinjiang. The international community must take immediate and concrete action to hold China accountable for these atrocities,” VOC President Andrew Bremberg said on Tuesday.
The Xinjiang Police Files include over 5,000 “mug shots” of Uyghurs, over 2,800 of them confirmed as concentration camp detainees. Some of them were visibly in distress when photographed by their Chinese captors, who often appear in the photos wielding batons to keep the detainees in line.
Fifteen of the detainees photographed by the Xinjiang police have been confirmed as minors, the youngest just 15 years old.
15-year-old Rahile Omer, the youngest confirmed detainee in the Xinjiang Police Files (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
Photos of even younger children appear in the Xinjiang Police Files, but researchers were not able to determine if they were detained in the camps:
On the other hand, many of the detainees were elderly, some in their seventies:
73-year-old Anihan Hamit, oldest confirmed detainee in the Xinjiang Police Files (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
“In terms of visual evidence that evokes sympathy and an emotional response, this collection of documents stands apart from what we’ve seen so far,” professor Tim Grose of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology told Foreign Policy on Wednesday.
“The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of ‘re-education’ camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both,” said the BBC, which has been reviewing the Xinjiang Police Files since the beginning of this year.
“The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith – and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping,” the BBC wrote in an extensive pictorial essay.
Many of the photo records highlighted by the BBC included detention files that did not even bother to invent a reason why the Uyghur man or woman in question was sent to the camps. Some were imprisoned for nonsensical “crimes” such as visiting other countries, practicing their Islamic faith, or merely being related to other detainees with “strong religious leanings.”
A 58-year-old man named Tursun Kadir was sentenced to 16 years in detention for “growing a beard under the influence of religious extremism.” Photos from the Xinjiang Police Files showed that his Chinese captors shaved off his beard.
Tursun Kadir, sent to the Xinjiang concentration camps for growing a beard, which was removed in detention (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
The BBC noted that the file names given to these photos suggested the Chinese state was feeding them into a “huge facial recognition database.”
In December 2020, independent researchers discovered Chinese telecom giant Huawei was designing a race-based “ethnic identification system” that could pick Uyghur faces out of crowds. At least a dozen Chinese police departments have been caught using A.I. systems designed by other companies that can visually profile Uyghurs based on their ethnic features.
Australia’s ABC News interviewed Uyghur refugees who spent Tuesday night frantically searching the Xinjiang Police Files for photos of their vanished friends and relatives.
“I couldn’t stop my tears. All of them look like my dad or my brothers. Every [pair of] eyes looks like [they are] asking me, ‘Please help me,’” a woman named Rayhangul Abliz told ABC after spending the night vainly searching for photos of her missing family.
Some Uyghurs felt relief that China would no longer be able to whitewash the atrocities of Xinjiang in the face of such overwhelming photographic evidence, while others were horrified by the thought that so many missing Uyghurs were not included in the massive trove of documents and pictures. Five thousand photos cover just a tiny fraction of the estimated 1 to 3 million detainees in the Xinjiang camps.
The release of the Xinjiang Police Files brought condemnations of the Chinese Communist regime from across the civilized world, as chronicled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ):
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock addressed the new findings in a video conference with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and “called for a transparent investigation” into the allegations, according to a ministry statement.
“This is not something that can be ignored, and it is also not something that can be kept quiet about,” Baerbock told reporters in Berlin.
Speaking at a daily press conference, the U.S. State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, said the new reporting shows China’s ongoing “genocide and crimes against humanity” targeting Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.
The release comes at a tense moment for the international community, as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet is making her long-delayed visit to China. Human rights activists fear the visit will be a farce stage-managed by the Chinese Communist Party, but the bombshell release of so much documentation could make a whitewash harder to pull off.
According to Chinese state media on Tuesday, Bachelet has done nothing so far except praise China for its “important achievements in economic and social development and in promoting the protection of human rights.”
In this photo taken May 24, 2022, and released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, second from left, holds a virtual meeting with Vice Minister Du Hangwei of the Ministry of Public Security, seen on screen at right, in Guangzhou, southern China’s Guangdong Province. (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights via AP)
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin labored furiously to spin the documentary evidence of Xinjiang atrocities in his Tuesday press conference, dismissing the extensively verified report as “the latest example of the anti-China forces’ smearing of Xinjiang.”
“It is just the same trick they used to play before,” Wang sputtered. “The lies and rumors they spread cannot deceive the world, nor can they hide the fact that Xinjiang enjoys peace and stability, its economy is thriving and its people live and work in peace and contentment.”
Wang said on Wednesday that dictator Xi Jinping spoke with U.N. High Commissioner Bachelet in a virtual meeting, but refused to answer questions about whether the Xinjiang Police Files were discussed.
U.N. Implicitly Accuses Chinese Government of Misrepresenting Human Rights Chief
(CNSNews.com) – The Chinese government and state media said Wednesday that U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet during a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping “expressed admiration for China’s efforts and achievements … in protecting human rights.”
But according to Bachelet’s office, she did not say that.
The incident is the latest controversy in a visit already dogged by criticism over restrictions agreed between Bachelet’s office and her Chinese hosts, as Beijing continues to reject accusations of mass-scale atrocities against minority Muslims in Xinjiang.
After Bachelet’s video call meeting with Xi, the foreign ministry said in an English-language statement – without quoting her directly – that she “expressed admiration for China’s efforts and achievements in eliminating poverty, protecting human rights and realizing economic and social development.”
The same language appeared in reports by the state news agency Xinhua and the Chinese Communist Party organs People’s Daily, Global Times, and China Daily.
State-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN) used slightly different wording, saying Bachelet had “acknowledged China’s achievements in eliminating poverty [and] protecting human rights."
Bachelet’s department in Geneva, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), did not directly accuse the Chinese government of misrepresenting her.
But it implied as much, in an email with the subject line, “Clarification of remarks by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet today in China.”
“In response to widely reported remarks attributed to High Commissioner Bachelet, please find here a link to her actual opening remarks at her meeting with the President of China,” it said.
The transcript that followed contained no reference to Bachelet voicing administration for China’s “efforts and achievements” “in protecting human rights.”
It reads in full:
“I have been committed to undertaking this visit – the first visit by a UN Human Rights High Commissioner to China in 17 years – because for me, it is a priority to engage with the Government of China directly, on human rights issues, domestic, regional and global. For development, peace and security to be sustainable – locally and across borders – human rights have to be at their core.
“China has a crucial rule to play within multilateral institutions in confronting many of the challenges currently facing the world, including threats to international peace and security, instability in the global economic system, inequality, climate change and more. I look forward to deepening our discussions on these and other issues, and hope my Office can accompany efforts to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights, justice and the rule of law for all without exception.”
‘The human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before’
According to the Chinese government statement on the meeting, Xi had told Bachelet that, “[a]fter decades of strenuous efforts, China has successfully found a path of human rights development in keeping with the trend of the times and China’s national reality.”
“We have been advancing whole-process people’s democracy, promoting legal safeguard for human rights and upholding social equity and justice,” it said. “The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights. The human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before.”
Xi also told her, according to the readout, that “countries do not need patronizing lecturers; still less should human rights issues be politicized and used as a tool to apply double standards, or as a pretext to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”
The 862-word statement made no reference to Xinjiang, where CCP officials are accused of subjecting Uyghurs and other minorities to mass incarceration, forced labor, forced sterilization, and other abuses. The U.S. government has determined that atrocities there amount to crimes against humanity and genocide.
At a press briefing in Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin was asked whether Xinjiang was mentioned during the Bachelet-Xi call.
“China has already released the readout on that,” Wang replied. “You may refer to it.”
Wang was also asked to respond to State Department spokesman Ned Price’s assertion on Tuesday that it had been “a mistake” for the OHCHR to agree to the restrictions Beijing placed on Bachelet’s six-day visit.
He said the U.S. had “flip-flopped,” initially pushing for a visit by the high commissioner, but now criticizing it.
“The U.S. is worried that their lies about ‘genocide’ and ‘forced labor’ will be debunked in front of the international community,” Wang charged.
“No matter how many lies the US spreads, they cannot hide the fact that Xinjiang enjoys stability and prosperity, and its people live a happy and fulfilling life.”
Price said on Tuesday, “We think it was a mistake to agree to a visit under these circumstances, where the high commissioner will not be granted the type of unhindered access, free and full access, that would be required to do a complete assessment, and to come back with a full picture of the atrocities, the crimes against humanity, and the genocide ongoing in Xinjiang.”
It took more than three-and-a-half years for the OHCHR and Beijing to reach agreement on a visit, which Bachelet first expressed interest in arranging soon after taking up her post in the fall of 2018.
She has come under criticism from human rights activists and the U.S. government for not releasing a report compiled by the OHCHR on the situation in Xinjiang, despite it being finalized eight months ago.
Genocide: Police Hack Shows Xi Jinping Ordered China to ‘Break the Lineages’ of Uyghurs
A massive trove of Chinese Communist Party internal documents, including photos of thousands of concentration camp victims, from the Uyghur heartland of East Turkistan, published on Tuesday, revealed that officials in charge of the Uyghur genocide regularly cited dictator Xi Jinping as personally ordering genocidal policies.
In one document, a 2018 speech, China’s Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi applauded Party officials and police in East Turkistan for working to “break the lineages, break the roots, break the connections, break the origins” of the region’s people, claiming it necessary to end terrorism.
The “Xinjiang Police Files,” published by researcher Adrian Zenz and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, including speeches by high-ranking Party officials, PowerPoint presentations used to train Chinese police in working in East Turkistan, thousands of photos and profiles of concentration camp victims in East Turkistan, and instructional documents teaching concentration camp guards how to handle prisoners. Zenz verified the documents through coordination with academics and experts on East Turkistan – the region China calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” – in a peer-reviewed journal article published by the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies.
This photo, taken on May 31, 2019, shows the outer wall of a complex which includes what is believed to be a concentration camp where mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Zenz wrote in the article that he “unexpectedly” received the thousands of files from an unnamed “third party.” The individual, requesting anonymity for his or her safety, reportedly acquired the documents “through hacking into computer systems operated by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) of the counties of Konasheher (shufu xian 疏附县), located in Kashgar Prefecture, and Tekes (tekesi xian 特克斯县) in Ili Prefecture” in East Turkistan.
The Chinese Communist Party is currently engaging in a genocide against the Uyghur people – and other Turkic groups, such as Kyrgyz and Kazakh people – in East Turkistan, as established by a wide range of experts and multiple governments, including the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The evidence leading to the conclusion that China is intentionally attempting to destroy these ethnic groups includes the use of over 1,000 concentration camps to indoctrinate, torture, enslave, and rape victims; the mass sterilization of non-Han ethnic women; and a concerted effort to eradicate Islam in the country by destroying mosques or forcing them to preach only communist indoctrination and promote Xi Jinping’s personality cult.
Of tantamount importance regarding the enforcement of international law, where genocide is considered a peremptory norm that any court can prosecute, is understanding who has ordered the genocidal policies currently being implemented so as to know who should face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or another similar venue. The senior officials whose remarks appear in the Xinjiang Police Files repeatedly, and clearly, credit Xi Jinping personally for mandating a campaign to erase the indigenous people of East Turkistan.
In a transcript of remarks by Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, for example, Chen consistently calls genocidal strategies like trapping Uyghurs in concentration camps “the Party Central Committee’s strategy for governing Xinjiang with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core.” Zenz refers to the document containing these remarks, made in June 2018 following a visit by Public Security Minister Zhao to the region, in his academic article as “perhaps the most important document of the Xinjiang Police Files because it very directly implicates the central government – and Xi Jinping himself – in the campaign of mass internment.”
The strategy Chen detailed, which he directly credits “the General Secretary” (Xi Jinping) with implementing, is a five-year plan that began in 2017 and is expected to end this year that includes the creation of “vocational training centers” – China’s euphemism for the concentration camps – in addition to the infiltration of all mosques with communist propaganda, “the seizing of wild imams,” and a policy of ethnic erosion both Chen and Zhao in his remarks referred to as “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins.”
Chen applauded his team in his remarks for having successfully implemented Xi’s ideas.
“The sources of extremism have been controlled well, the seizing of wild imams has been done well, the investigating of two-faced persons has been done well,” he praised. “the ‘Digging, Reducing, and Shoveling,’ the ‘Four Breaks’ (breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins) have been done well.”
Chen also praised the promotion of “ethnic unity and the idea that all ethnicities are one family has been done well [through] cadres living [with ethnic minorities],” an apparent reference to both mass surveillance of civilians through the East Turkistan police state and potentially to the “Becoming Family” program. The program forces Uyghur families to accent an ethnic Han Communist Party member living in their homes and spying on them. The new “family member” often replaces the male head of household, forced into a concentration camp, and sleeps in the same bed with the matriarch. Uyghurs have reported widespread rape and sexual abuse through the program.
“Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core,” Chen later repeats, “our Party Committee cannot stop the anti-separatist struggle for even a single minute, even if basic stability will be achieved in five years [2017 to 2021], we will continue to strike hard on it in the next five years [by implication 2022 to 2026].”
In Public Security Minister Zhao’s remarks, some days before Chen’s speech, the top national-level official similarly repeats the mantra of “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins” and repeatedly credits Xi with the campaign to erase the cultural heritage of Xinjiang.
“This investigation study visit to Xinjiang was approved by General Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang; fully reflecting the great importance, concern and support of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core for the work in Xinjiang,” Zhao insists at the top of his remarks. “The purpose of the investigation study visit is to implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s strategy for governing Xinjiang.”
This photo, taken on May 31, 2019, shows a Uighur woman (C) going through an entrance to a bazaar in Hotan, in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
“General Secretary Xi has presided over several meetings to study and deploy Xinjiang work, delivered a series of important speeches, issued a series of important instructions,” Zhao narrated, “clarifying the Party Central Committee’s strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era and the general goals of Xinjiang work.”
Zhao went on to explain that Xi was micromanaging even how many staffers should work in each concentration camp and ordered the government to continue “enlarging the capacity” of concentration camps.
Zhao particularly applauded Party officials in the region for their work in “transformation through education,” a reference to the “vocational training” concentration camps. He claimed that as many as 2 million people in the region “have been influenced by pro-Xinjiang independence and “Double-Pan” [pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist] thinking,” effectively calling millions of people terrorists.
American government estimates suggest that as many as 3 million people were forced into concentration camps in East Turkistan at the peak of the campaign.
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