From recent reports: the construction of eight new local airports has resumed in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. And this fact is unlikely to please James Milward, a professor at Georgetown University, USA. The professor came out with an angry op-ed a couple of weeks ago called “China’s New Campaign Against the Uyghurs.”
Agree, if eight airports are being built somewhere in addition to the 25 already available, this does not fit very well into the main thesis of the long-bored campaign around Xinjiang – that this is such a wilderness and backwater where you can only get on a camel, and therefore you’d better believe “sources” about what atrocities are happening in this lost world in the center of the Eurasian continent.
But Professor Milward gives us an excellent visual aid for studying the mechanics of totalitarian information campaigns. First and foremost: such campaigns never die, even if their thesis is obviously incompatible with life (and reality). All the same, we must confidently hammer at one point: everything that we said before was true. Here the professor lists everything that was said earlier – about concentration camps throughout Xinjiang, about slave labor and so on.
At the same time, however, he admits that “as soon as the UN member countries had to take a clear position on Xinjiang, Beijing won.” Twenty-two Western countries sent a corresponding letter to the UN Commission on Human Rights – and instantly China mobilized 37 other countries for a letter saying that, in fact, everything was fine in Xinjiang. Approximately the same alignment of forces in the UN Human Rights Council.
Did the lie fail? But this is where the second rule of smear campaigning comes into play: pay no attention to your failures. Next comes the third rule: pile up new lies on top of failed lies, that is, always throw in something fresh.
Here the professor throws up. Referring thus, as it is necessary, to anonymous sources. Who report that now the “concentration camps for re-education” may be closed, but one hundred thousand (a good, round number) of their inhabitants have been transferred to factories, to work against their will. In total, up to two million people work forcibly. Also: unfortunate Uyghur women are forced to marry Chinese and absorb Chinese culture. And children are driven to boarding schools, where, if they begin to speak Uighur, they are put in basements for many hours. With rats or not is not mentioned.
It is difficult and uninteresting to find out why the American professor ended up in the role of a drain tank for suppliers of fakes. A human rights activist is, in fact, a diagnosis, that is, a special style of thinking and behavior. But another rule of such information campaigns fits within this style: they prescribe only one medicine in all cases. Sanctions.
And “Xinjiang” sanctions against China have already been introduced as much as necessary. Milward honestly admits: they do not work. For example, anyone importing something from China into the US is required to prove that their product does not contain the element of “forced labor” from Xinjiang. But these goods, for example, through third countries, still fill the American market.
Conclusion? Like this: new sanctions are needed, and the old ones will work sooner or later. And these doctors do not know more medicines.
Returning to the conversation about airports, here is the picture. Not a single region of China, even today, is covered by such a network of passenger and cargo routes as Xinjiang. Four more international routes will open this year. All together it turns out – the most open and dynamically developing part of the country today. And to fly there to look around and notice – in which case – something bad, millions of Chinese or foreigners can at any moment.
But all the same, human rights activists will tell you, somewhere in the remote, deserted corners of Xinjiang, where you can’t get to, the Uyghurs are suffering and forced to work.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA
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