Chinese Tensions
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Do you believe all these atrocity stories about what the Chinese government is supposed to be doing to the Uighers? They seem to be giving them a hard time but rape and murder and genocide?
They seem to be exaggerations put around by the US rulers (and their poodles in Britain) as they have come to realise that Chinese capitalism is a real threat to their domination.
And the Uighur nationalists are not all goodies. They are Islamist who want to establish an Islamic state in what they call East Turkestan and provided more than their share of ISIS terrorists. In fact I think they still have a band operating in Syria.
I think we should be wary of jumping on the pro-Uighur bandwagon and believing all of the stories they are putting around.
You could take a look at this:
Genocide in Xinjiang? A Discovery Zoom Panelhttp://hamiltoncoalitiontostopthewar.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Updated-Poster.png
or here:
An evidence-based approach.
absolutely, ALB. it’s obviously one of those new cold war campaigns. what’s interesting, and overlooked, is the economic aspect. china has just mechanised cotton production in the area, putting vast numbers out of work. no wonder the locals are pissed!
An earlier post on this topic placed what i think was a nuanced observation. It reminds readers that we have not jumped on any band-wagon having had an article on the situation in the Standard way back in 2014.
page5 #post-215661
And the blog recently reminded its visitors of the Uyghurs who were imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay by the American as terrorists.
But genocide is not gas chambers and extermination of people. Under international law it is the destruction of cultural identity. I think the evidence is strong that the Chinese government are endeavoring to do that. Personally i prefer the term persecution rather than genocide and again the evidence is there of such a policy. But of course so has other nations with multiculturalism and assimilation policies of minorities.
And then there are the third-way approach of Turkey which understand the dependency on Chinese trade to constrain their criticisms of the persecution of a Turkic Muslim people
There is an information war and it is two-sided
But genocide is not gas chambers and extermination of people. Under international law it is the destruction of cultural identity.
I checked and you’re right. That is how the UN define it but it’s not what most people would understand by it or that those who use it for propaganda purposes intend that people should.
In all other contexts the suffix “cide” implies killing, so genocide should mean mass killing of a whole people. Given the new definition you might conclude that all Hitlerite Germany was doing was trying to destroy Jewish cultural identity.
In any event, I don’t think we should misuse the word in this way.
The Chinese government may be persecuting the Uighur but they are not trying to kill them all off. No wonder they are pissed off by the likes of Sir Ian Douglas Smith, who appears to be the MP for Washington DC, who suggests that they are.
wikipedia has a page entitled “Uyghur genocide” but strangely enough doesn’t list any deaths on “Lists of genocides by death toll”. what a peculiar omission – and quite unique. much as we all hate state capitalism (although china hasn’t been state capitalist since 2004 or so), piggybacking on new cold war propaganda is daft.
i would say that genocide here is applied in the same way that antisemitism is applied to critics of israel.
20 minute video:
> https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-27/British-researcher-exposes-Western-propaganda-against-China-YWOT0TEG2I/index.html
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> British researcher exposes Western propaganda against China
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> “We don’t have to look back very far in history to see that there’s this pattern where the media pushes forward a particular narrative around a specific piece of foreign policy, in those cases of full-scale wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, or Syria or Yugoslavia,” said Carlos Martinez in an interview with CGTN.
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> Martinez is a researcher, anti-war activist and co-founder of the No Cold War campaign based in London.
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> He said the currently escalating negative portrayal of China and baseless accusations toward Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Western mainstream media is the same process that had people believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it could use against London or Washington 18 years ago.
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> “These established methods of building a public consensus to build public support for an attack. In this case, in terms of all the kind of basically pretty hysterical propaganda around Xinjiang and around Taiwan and around the South China Sea and around Hong Kong, it’s about building support for the new Cold War,” he added.
> A resident asks about the price of goods in Kashgar, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, April 12, 2019. /VCG
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> In 2019, Martinez toured across China, visiting places including Beijing, Gansu Province and Xinjiang. Not only did he not see any oppression on Muslims or Uygurs in Xinjiang, but also the “backward, authoritarian state” that Western media tend to portray China as was nonexistent.
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> However, the contrast with what he saw in New York, where he traveled to the same year, is particularly interesting.
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> It would not take too much effort for him to see countless homeless people in big cites like New York or his hometown London, yet he failed to see any homeless people in any cities of China.
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> “The U.S. considers itself as being the quintessential, successful, advance capitalist democracy. Yet there’s a huge proportion, literally tens of millions of people, who live in abject poverty, who don’t know where the next meal is coming from,” Martinez said.
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> He also pointed out racism, treatment of indigenous people and incarceration are also huge problems that exist in the American society.
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> “The U.S. has more than 2 million people in prison, which is by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. They are actual incarceration rate, the number of people per capita in prison is six or seven times higher than it is in China,” Martinez said after comparing data.
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> Although accounted less in the overall population in the U.S., the African American, Native American and hispanic community accounted the majority of people live in poverty or in incarceration.
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> “But the media portrays China as a prison nation, and they portray the U.S. as the land of the free,” Martinez laughed.
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> After his research and trip into those countries, he together with other activists from around the world decided to found the No Cold War campaign in order to stop the American and British governments from escalating aggressive actions toward China.
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> “As a campaign, we really believe that those major problems we face in the world have to be solved on a global level. And any kind of Cold War stands in the way of that when we stand for global cooperation, mutual understanding, and against decoupling against Cold War,” Martinez said.Janet, there is a propaganda war and we should not take things at surface levels. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of either castigating the Chinese government for its actions or whitewashing it. Both sides cry crocodile tears.
It is all another re-play of the game of Great Powers engaged in since the 18thC.
For sure, there are the many quasi-governmental think tanks who will use genuine discontent and unrest for their own interests and evidence can be provided to support that.
I have also read the criticisms that the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is merely the pawns for the China’s rivals, financed by Taiwan and the West’s NGOs.
Why else does the UK government offer such a generous immigration invitation to Hong Kong residents. (It is forgotten that Canada because of HK migrants settling in Vancouver has even closer links than the colonial ones the UK boasts of.)
Our task is to stand on the side of the oppressed and i have no doubt that we have identified the Uyghurs as such a group. We definitely do not agree with their preferred solution as ALB has indicated but neither do we endorse all the Palestinian’s choices made by them while still able to recognise the repression of Israel.
In Myanmar we can condemn the coup knowing that if its peoples prevail it will be only lead to a return to Aung San Suu Kyi government and the continuance of sweat-shops and the exclusion of minorities.
I think we will be forever positioned in what is sometimes called the Third Campists. And we have to craft our message very carefully to reflect that.
“Our air and sea assets are ready to protect our sovereignty and sovereign rights”
The Philippines is sending fighter aircraft to fly over hundreds of Chinese vessels in disputed waters in the South China Sea, its defence minister said, as he repeated his demand the flotilla be withdrawn immediately. It will also beef up its naval presence in the South China Sea to conduct “sovereignty patrols” and protect Filipino fishermen.
Placing the comment here because i think the Covid investigation is being politicalised by the West.
I’m had an uneasy feeling when i read the international response to the WHO Covid investigation which i felt was using rhetoric reminiscent of the Iraq WMD search.
Would the US permit any foreign nation “unfettered access”
I have no doubt that a bureaucratic-bound country like China balls-up its coronavirus action and are trying to cover-up its incompetence. But a conspiracy concerning a lab-leak – sufficient evidence is still lacking.
New York Times tells lie with deliberate misquote
NYT writes, ‘China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law. Such a system “does not represent the will of the international community,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Russia’s, Sergey V. Lavrov’
What he actually said was:
‘ Wang Yi said, the so-called “rules-based international order” by a few countries is not clear in its meaning, as it reflects the rules of a few countries and does not represent the will of the international community.’He didn’t mention democracy or human rights in the statement; as for the rule of law, he said, “We should uphold the universally recognized international law.”
That is what some individuals call a communist newspaper. Probably, they have not read the Socialist Standard to understand what a real socialist/communist newspaper is. The New York Time is just another mouthpiece of the USA ruling elite
The language of diplomacy become increasingly bellicose
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/8/us-warns-china-over-moves-on-philippines-taiwan
“An armed attack against the Philippines’ armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea, will trigger our obligations under the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters
Price voiced “concern” about Chinese moves, “The United States maintains the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardise the security or the social or economic system of the people on Taiwan.”
He was using language from the Taiwan Relations Act, under which the US is obliged to provide the island with the means to defend itself against mainland China.
“The US move to send warship to sail through the Taiwan Strait and hype it publicly is an old trick to ‘manipulate’ the cross-Strait situation,” Senior Colonel Zhang Chunhui, the spokesman for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theatre Command, said in a statement. “China is firmly opposed to that,” he said.
Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Sunday the US is concerned about China’s aggressive actions against Taiwan and warned it would be a “serious mistake” for anyone to try to change the status quo in the western Pacific by force.
“What we’ve seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the Straits,” Blinken told NBC
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/11/antony-blinken-china-aggression-taiwan
Twenty-five Chinese military jets breached Taiwan’s defence zone on Monday. The incursion was the largest in a year and came after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on Sunday warned China not to attempt to change the status quo around Taiwan, saying to do so would be a “serious mistake”.
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