WHY XINJIANG IS EMERGING AS THE EPICENTER OF THE US COLD WAR ON CHINA
By Vijay Prashad and Jie Xiong, People's Dispatch.
April 18, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The US Government's Information Warfare Against China Has Produced The
"Fact" That There Is Genocide In Xinjiang.
Once this has been established, it helps develop diplomatic and economic
warfare.
On March 22, 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized sanctions
against Wang Junzheng, the secretary of the Chinese Communist Party
Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), and Chen
Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB). These
sanctions, Blinken said, have been put in place against Wang Junzheng and
Chen Mingguo because they are accused of being party to "genocide and crimes
against humanity in Xinjiang." The US Treasury Department followed suit with
its own sanctions.
Both Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo responded by condemning these sanctions
that were not only imposed by the US but also by Canada, the UK and the EU.
Wang Junzheng said that the sanctions "are a gross slander," while Chen
Mingguo said that he was "very proud of being sanctioned by these
countries."
The United States Pivots To Asia
In October 2011, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced a
"pivot to Asia," with China at the center of the new alignment. While
Clinton had said on numerous occasions-including in Hawaii in November
2011-that the administration of former US President Barack Obama wanted to
develop "a positive and cooperative relationship with China," the US
military buildup along Asia's coastline told a different story. The 2010 US
Quadrennial Defense Review noted "China's growing presence and influence in
regional and global economic and security affairs" and called it "one of the
most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape." In 2016, US
Navy Admiral Harry Harris, head of the Pacific Command, had said that the
United States was ready to "confront China," a statement given strength by
the US military buildup around China.
The Trump and Biden administrations have largely followed the "pivot to
Asia" policy, with a special emphasis on China. The United States has been
struggling to keep up with China's rapid scientific and technological
advancements and has few intellectual or industrial tools in place to
compete. This is the reason why it has tried to stall China's advances using
diplomatic and political power, and through information warfare; these
elements comprise what is called a "hybrid war."
Focus On Xinjiang: Information Warfare
Prior to a March 2019 event co-hosted by the US Mission to International
Organizations in Geneva, most people in countries like the United States
were largely unaware of the existence of the Xinjiang region in China, let
alone of the 13 million Uyghur people (one of China's 55 recognized ethnic
minorities). Given that the Uyghurs are the demographic majority in this
westernmost province of China, the official name of the administrative unit
is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The March 2019 event featured Adrian Zenz, a German researcher and a senior
fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an
organization founded in 1993 by the US government to promote anti-communist
views. In April 2020, this foundation-against all evidence-accused China of
being responsible for the global deaths resulting due to the spread of
COVID-19. Zenz is also associated with the conservative defense policy think
tank the Jamestown Foundation, founded by William Geimer, who was close to
the Reagan administration.
Zenz and Ethan Gutmann, another researcher at the Victims of Communism
Memorial Foundation, would continue to repeat their conclusions regarding
the genocide in Xinjiang to the US Congress and in a range of mainstream
publications. Hosted by the BBC and Democracy Now, Zenz provided what
appeared to be documentation of atrocities meted out by the "Chinese
authorities" against the Uyghur population. Zenz and Gutmann would be joined
by organizations funded by Western governments but which-as NGOs-pose as
independent research and advocacy groups (such as the Global Center for the
Responsibility to Protect and the Uyghur Human Rights Project; the former is
funded by Western governments and the latter by the U.S. government's
National Endowment for Democracy).
In June 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the Chinese
government, basing his statements on Xinjiang on the "German researcher
Adrian Zenz's shocking revelations." Zenz, who is a US government-funded
researcher from the intelligence-connected Jamestown Foundation, provides a
set of scientifically dubious and politically charged papers, which are then
used as fact by the US government in its information war against China.
Anyone raising questions about Zenz's claims is, meanwhile, marginalized as
a conspiracy theorist.
Diplomatic And Economic Warfare
The US government's information warfare against China has produced the
"fact" that there is genocide in Xinjiang. Once this has been established,
it helps develop diplomatic and economic warfare.
On March 22, 2021, the same day as the US sanctions, the Council of the
European Union unilaterally imposed asset freezes and travel bans on four
Chinese government officials, including Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo, as
well as Wang Mingshan and Zhu Hailun. The United Kingdom and Canada also
joined in this venture that day. It appeared to be a coordinated diplomatic
assault on China in order to portray China as a country violating human
rights. This assault came soon after China had achieved a major human rights
goal, lifting 850 million people from absolute poverty. The US government
and its media outlets tried to challenge this remarkable human rights
achievement.
Trump had pushed a trade war with China as soon as he came into office in
January 2017; his policy framework remains in place under Biden. To draw
together the trade war and the Xinjiang information war, in mid-December
2020, Adrian Zenz and the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy
(formerly the Center for Global Policy) released an intelligence brief on
"coercive labor in Xinjiang." The claims in this briefing-building on a 2019
Wall Street Journal article on the supply chains and Xinjiang-created a
media firestorm in the West, amplified by Reuters and then picked up by many
widely read outlets; it led to the US government ban on Xinjiang cotton.
A third of the world's textiles and clothing come from China, with the
country accounting for $120 billion in exports of these products per year
and $300 billion in exports of all merchandise annually. According to
China's National Bureau of Statistics, 87% of China's total cotton output
comes from Xinjiang. Most of the high-quality Xinjiang cotton-and the
textiles produced from it within China-go to Western apparel companies, such
as H&M and Zara. In 2009, many of these companies created the Better Cotton
Initiative (BCI), which has-until last year-been upbeat about developments
in Xinjiang (including co-ops of small farmers in Xinjiang). As recently as
March 26, 2021, the BCI made a clear statement: "Since 2012, the Xinjiang
project site has performed second-party credibility audits and third-party
verifications over the years, and has never found a single case related to
incidents of forced labor."
Despite the BCI's recent confident statement and its optimism, things are
rapidly changing for Xinjiang cotton farmers as the BCI appears to get on
board with the US's intensifying hybrid war on China. The BCI closed down
its page on its work in China, accused China of "forced labor" and other
human rights violations, and set up a Task Force on Forced Labor and Decent
Work.
Officials from Xinjiang's government contested these claims, saying that
much of the field labor for cotton in Xinjiang has already been replaced by
machines (many of them imported from the US firm John Deere). A recent book
edited by Hua Wang and Hafeezullah Memon-Cotton Science and Processing
Technology-confirms this point, as do a range of media reports from before
2019. Facts like these don't seem to stand a chance in the overwhelming
information war. Xinjiang-two and a half times the size of France-is now at
the epicenter of a cold war not of its own making.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing
fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of
LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for
Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20
books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book
is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
Jie Xiong is a Chinese technologist, translator and editor. He has
participated in the digitization process of multiple leading enterprises in
China. He is a founder of Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Ltd., a
company that introduces China to Global South readers. He is a senior
researcher at the Sichuan Institute for High Quality Development. He has
written and translated more than 10 books. His latest translation is
Cybernetic Revolutionaries.
