The article «Absolutely No Mercy» about the Chinese government’s policy of oppression of the Uyghur people was recently published in the New York Times and has already become a global sensation, including in the Russian-language media. It is only appropriate to welcome the coverage of this issue at such a high level and the response of the global community. However, it must be acknowledged that, overall, this publication could only have a bombshell effect on those who learned for the first time about the deliberate state policy of «breaking» the Uyghur people in modern China. For those who have known about it for a long time, such as regular readers of our website, it can only confirm the obvious — the genocide of the Uyghurs in China is true, not fiction, and it is a deliberate policy of Beijing, not «excesses on the ground». This article is further corroborated by a reference to 24 documents, including 200 pages of internal speeches by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, 150 pages of directives and reports by Chinese officials and mid-level leaders, and 161 pages of testimony from witnesses and human rights organizations.
One of the Uyghur projects in the Russian-speaking community has announced that it intends to translate and publish the entire compendium in Russian, after which «Voice of Islam» will be happy to present it to our readers. However, in addition to new facts confirming the already evident reality of the Uyghur genocide, we believe that the NYT material contains a number of details that we would like to focus on.
First, according to numerous testimonies, the current anti-Uyghur policy is not something that inevitably stems from China’s policies in general or Communist China in particular, but is the initiative of the current leadership and Xi Jinping personally. This is a very important point, because until now many people had the idea of a two-stage history of Communist China, which can be roughly divided into two eras: Mao Zedong with his political and cultural revolution and mass terror based on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Deng Xiaoping with his market reforms and pragmatic policies under the banner of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which many believed had lost its ideological essence. The NYT material, in its part on Xi Jinping’s views, gives us an understanding that under his rule, a reaction by a section of China’s communist leadership against the liberalization processes in Chinese society that led to market reforms and the preceding pragmatic course of Deng Xiaoping began. This fully explains the «peculiarities» of recent years, such as not only the mass re-education camps for Uyghurs, which are the main topic of this article, but also the introduction of social credit systems, universal facial recognition, the suppression of religions (mainly Islam, but also Christianity), etc. According to people close to him, Xi Jinping, as the son of a communist leader who adhered to liberal approaches, holds the latter responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears a similar scenario in China due to the growing prosperity of the population and the displacement of bourgeois consumerist values by communist ideology. In order to prevent this, he decided to launch an ideological offensive against the «creeping counterrevolution,» targeting a significant portion of the CCP leaders who hold moderate and pragmatic views and approaches. In other words, the third stage in the history of Communist China is emerging — neo-Maoism, which combines the ideological and political intolerance of the first stage with the capitalist development path of the second.
Second, Xi Jinping’s offensive is not only against the Uyghurs, but also against Islam in the country as a whole, which has its own local reasons (see below). However, it is part of a global Islamophobic trend whose roots go back to the American «war on terror» policy after 9/11 under George Bush. Xi Jinping appeals directly to this experience, while criticizing Western democracies for their spinelessness in their commitment to human rights, clearly believing that he can bring it to its ideal completion, i.e., realize a dystopia that is only possible under the conditions of a totalitarian regime. An odious external enemy (religious extremism), a totalitarian socio-political system, and modern identification and control technologies (cameras, fingerprints, DNA tests, etc.) against a backdrop of economic success and development — these are the components of the «success» of the new Chinese model, which inspires many far beyond China, especially when it comes to its use for the «re-education» of Muslims.
Third, the authors of the material write that the transition of Chinese policy in East Turkestan to totalitarian rails occurred after a series of terrorist attacks committed by Uyghurs in 2014 during Xi Jinping’s visit to the region, preceded by interethnic clashes there in 2009. According to the testimonies they cite, these events deeply impressed the new Chinese leader and prompted him to change the «carrot and stick» policy toward the Uyghurs that had been pursued before him to a new «stick and carrot» policy. In our view, in this case we can only speak of a change in the degree of repression of Chinese policy in East Turkestan. It is well known that the repression of Uyghur activists and intellectuals, along with the resettlement of the region by Han colonists, has been going on for decades and has led to terrorism and religious extremism, which have become convenient pretexts for its intensification.
Therefore, of course, the question can and should be raised once again about the consequences for those whom it is supposed to protect (i.e. Islam and Muslims) caused by the blind, ruthless terrorism committed in their name and in the name of their interests. However, it is still necessary to understand the causes and consequences in order to avoid the distorted picture that liberal Chinese Communists are simply reacting to «Islamic extremism». This issue must be divided into two parts. Beijing’s more liberal and tolerant policy, starting with Deng Xiaoping, was only toward Chinese Muslims, and it was fully justified because they did not cause any problems. As for the Uyghurs who did cause problems, they were reacting to decades of occupation and colonization after the destruction of the East Turkestan Republic in 1949 and its incorporation into the PRC. Now the neo-Maoist leadership has simply decided to «finally resolve the Uyghur issue» under the guise of the need to combat «Islamic extremism». After reading this NYT article, in our opinion, every Muslim, as well as every thinking and freedom-loving person, cannot help but feel a strong sense of unease. A totalitarian anti-utopia, equipped with the latest technical means, is being implemented against tens of millions of people before our very eyes. And considering that this is happening in a country that aspires to be the world’s leading power, there is no certainty that the same thing will not happen everywhere tomorrow…