Australian Polity, Volume 10 Number 1 & 2

An independent inquiry into the persecution of
the Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang
concluded in London in September 2021 after
eight days of sittings, hearing from more than 70 witnesses
and reading from 500 witness statements. Chaired by Sir
Geoffrey Nice QC, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic
before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, the Uighur Tribunal has compiled the most
extensive data base on the issue. It is due to hand down
its judgement in December.
The reaction from the Chinese Communist Party was
predictable. Sir Geoffrey, who is a prominent human
rights defender, was described absurdly by CCP officials
as a ‘notorious human rights abuser and a British spy’.
Nice is one of several leading critics of the Chinese
regime to have been sanctioned by the CCP, including
parliamentarians, Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Lord David
Alton. IDS, as Smith is known, described the sanction as
a badge of honour.
Despite the bellicose rhetoric of the CCP, and its assertions
that the million people in concentration camps are being
educated voluntarily, it ignored multiple invitations to
present its case. Most damaging for the CCP is the
documentary evidence that links Xi Jinping directly to
the repression. Even if the camps were closed, China
has created a massive electronic surveillance network
across Xinjiang utilising facial and voice recognition,
monitoring every movement of people’s lives outside
their homes. Phone calls and text messages are recorded
by the state, as are downloads to mobile phones. The
contents are analysed using sophisticated algorithms.
Artificial intelligence and biometric data are used to track
the movements of 15 million people. People who switch
off their phones or leave them at home are tracked and
interrogated. Family members of diaspora groups who
criticise the regime from overseas are threatened, jailed
or paraded on state television to denounce their relatives.
Just as it is doing in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, the CCP
is enforcing a policy to eliminate the local language and
culture.
The conclusion of the Tribunal’s hearings comes at the
same time as Xi Jinping reiterated his assertion that
human rights are not universal. Foreign Minister Wang
Yi had previously told the UN Human Rights Council
that concepts of ‘peace, development, equity, justice,
democracy and freedom’ could not be universally
interpreted.
In an article in the People’s Daily on the ‘Study of Xi Jinping’s
Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’,
the President responded to the question: ‘Why should
we take a clear stand against the so-called “universal
values” of the West?’ The doctrinaire Xi repudiated
the values of freedom, democracy and human rights,
asserting they created an ideological fog. Applying his
strict Marxist-Leninist ideology, he argued these values
were instrumental in demolishing feudal autocracy but
are now just tools for maintaining the rule of capital.
Tellingly, he worries about how these values were used
to dismantle the Soviet Union and employed in the Arab
Spring and how they could be used to overthrow the
CCP! No wonder other totalitarian regimes, including
most Islamic autocracies, have sided with China over
the treatment of its Muslim population. In 2019, the
Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, representing 57
member states, commended ‘the efforts of the People’s
Republic of China in providing care for its Muslim citizens’.
Statements by such well-known citadels of freedom
and democracy – Cuba and Belarus – to the UN General
Assembly in 2020 and the UN Human Rights Council in
2021, commending China’s actions were supported by
Islamic autocracies. The latter statement was breathlessly
reported in the CCP mouthpiece the Global Times as
evidence of ‘the truth about Xinjiang’ as opposed to
‘rumours and lies made by the anti-China campaign’.
Xi’s increasing insistence on ideological purity – in schools
and universities, even in kindergartens, as well as public
and now private enterprises – should be a warning to the
West, including those who believe investment in China is
the same as buying shares at home. In addition to rejecting
universal values, the CCP has also proclaimed that Xi
Jinping’s ‘Thought on the Rule of Law’ is the central tenet
of the law itself. In a new five-year directive, the Central
Committee of the CCP and the State Council stated that
‘Party committees and governments at all levels should
study and understand Xi Jinping thought on the rule of
law to implement the whole process and all aspects of
the construction of the rule of law’. Xi Jinping ‘Thought’
is now infused into almost every aspect of Chinese life.
16 Australian Polity