Australian Polity, Volume 10 Number 1 & 2

crimes,” he said. “I think we have a responsibility to take
care of our own backyard first, and then we can go and
basically morally tell other people how they should be
running their own countries.” The remarks prompted an
immediate response from Salih Hudayar, the elected
prime minister for the East Turkistan Government in
Exile group. “You can’t compare what China’s doing to
the Uyghurs to what’s happening in the United States,”
he said. “As a Uyghur, I would be a million times grateful
if our situation was like the … human rights [situation]
here in the United States.”
Opposition to China’s human rights abuses continue to
grow. Last week, the French National Assembly passed
a resolution by 169 votes to 1, recognising the plight of
the Uyghurs as genocide. It became the 8th country to
pass a similar motion. Businesses with connections to
slave labor are increasingly being identified and criticised,
including UK’s biggest bank, HSBC, which holds millions of
pounds of shares in a subsidiary of a sanctioned Chinese
paramilitary organisation responsible for human rights
abuses of Uyghurs.
The CCP is increasingly sensitive to global criticism.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin recently
used more than 20 slides in an attempt to refute
disinformation and rumours made by anti-China ‘scholars,’
the US government, western media and the Uyghur
Congress. Yet satellite images reveal factories inside
more than 100 ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang.
The CCP has also replaced Chen Quanguo, the party chief
in Xinjiang under whose directions the brutal persecution
of the Uyghurs occurred. Interestingly, his replacement
is Ma Xingrui, the former governor of Guangdong
province, one of the nation’s economic powerhouses.
The appointment of Ma, who has a background in the
aerospace industry, may reflect the growing economic
significance of the western province and an indication
that the global campaign against the CCP is effective.
This article was first published in the Spectator Australia.
“The CCP is increasingly sensitive to
global criticism.”
38 Australian Polity