[GUEST POST] Consider Yourself a Rebel? Then Rebel Against China...

By Daniel Bulford 

"Our media is beholden to the PRC’s state censors. It must fall to counter-culture to protest its injustices."

Uighur protest taking place in Brussels.
Credit: Aris Oikonomou / AFP Via Getty Images

The vast Xinjiang territory is Western China’s frontier land, bordered by Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and India. It covers an area more than twice the size of France. A land of rich heritage, where East and West have collided throughout history, it has always been a melting pot for Chinese, Tibetan and Turkic cultures. Two other pertinent facts have proven, in recent years, to be unfortunate for its Uighur inhabitants: it has historically been predominantly Muslim; and it’s key to Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Tension has existed within Xinjiang for decades. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a combination of mass emigration to the Soviet Union, alongside mass migration of Han to the region, driven by state propaganda, changed the region’s ethnic makeup from only about 7% Han to about 40%. Among the Uighur, this has long been seen as part of an effort by the Communist Party to stamp out Islam and Uighur cultural identity. The result has been an increasing hostility between both parties that has frequently led to terrorist attacks and state crackdowns.

In 2014, President Xi announced the beginning of the ‘people’s war on terror’ in China, in response to several terrorist attacks, mostly within Xinjiang, that had taken place over the preceding years. In practice, this so-called war on terror has, in fact, proven to be nothing more than a process of horrifying mass persecution against the Uighurs and other Muslims of the region. It has been argued that these measures are designed to protect the huge rail and road infrastructure that will be passing through Xinjiang, connecting China to crucial economic interests abroad as part of the BRI.

What’s happening to the Uighurs of Xinjiang is absolutely appalling, and it’s both strange and sad that it’s hardly ever a topic of conversation in the West.

If any other country on Earth was currently detaining more than one million members of an ethnic minority in what can only fairly be described as concentration camps – where forced labour, sterilisation of women and even organ harvesting are known to take place – we would hear about it constantly. What about if, on top of this, the same minority was under constant surveillance, with facial recognition cameras covering all public space, and each family having an attached government official ready to drop in at any moment, or if every aspect of their culture was being routinely stamped out, with language and many religious customs banned outright?

Prison camp for Uighur inmates located in
Western Xinjiang. Credit: BBC

It’s not just about the Uighurs, of course. China has been enacting similar policies in Tibet, and against the Falun Gong religious minority, for decades now. Even in Hong Kong, where the Chinese government is not supposed to have true legal jurisdiction, it has engaged in the secretive kidnapping and torture of its critics.

Here’s the problem. China, home to more than 1.4 billion people, is the largest market for goods and services on Earth. Any large Western company that sells virtually anything will eventually want to sell it in China, and to do so effectively, it realistically has to appease its government.

This is especially true in media; the PRC’s state censors simply will not allow any Western film or other form of media to be shown in China if they do not thoroughly approve of its contents, and there’s little doubt that the same corporations will do whatever they can to please them through whatever other means they need to.

Huge conglomerates, with multiple interests, will have no problem toning down any potentially critical rhetoric about China in any possible facet, whether it be in films, TV, games or news reporting. Sure, we get the occasional token story about Xinjiang or Hong Kong, but it’s usually kept fairly quiet, with any critical tone muted, and for a reason.

We’ve seen examples of this phenomenon recently that almost defy belief. In late 2019, Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and almost instantly, NBA games were pulled from Chinese state television. Other figures in the NBA quickly distanced themselves; he issued an apology and retracted his comments shortly thereafter. At around the same time, an e-sports star known as Blitzchung won a match in a gaming competition, but during the course of the livestream, he also made the mistake of expressing his support for the Hong Kong protesters. He was banned from competing in similar contests and had his prize money revoked. Activision Blizzard, the company promoting the event, sees expanding into the Chinese market as one of its core business objectives.

Such examples are clear and obvious, but the effects behind the scenes could stretch much further than we can see. Without realising, we may have allowed most of our media to be censored by the Communist Party of China.

President Xi Jinping
Credit: Aris Messinis

Therefore we, as individuals living outside her grasp, must take up the cause of protesting China’s injustices. Our media won’t, and China’s own people can’t. Most other governments, terrified of losing out on trade, will do virtually nothing. In particular, we must begin to use our long tradition of politically driven counter-culture in our arts to disseminate this message.

With China’s power and influence across our world increasing, a discussion needs to happen now, and it seems it can only truly happen at the most grassroots level. It’s time to delete our TikTok accounts, boycott manufacturers that utilise slave labour in the Xinjiang camps, and protest our own leaders’ subservience to this menace.

I’m partly writing these words because I’m considering my audience. Punk and related artistic subcultures have had a long-standing relationship with the anti-fascist movement. While mainstream voices call for ‘reasoning’ with fascists, this movement has provided the opposition that is truly required in many cases. Of course, it’s great that we’re stamping out overt nationalism in the West, but this has nothing to do with the true threat of fascism in our time. It’s time to realign our gaze.

First of all, the comparison between the Xinjiang camps and Nazi concentration camps is one that may seem natural to make here. I’ll leave up to you whether you think it’s appropriate to do so – it’s enough of an elephant in the room in this discussion to be worth addressing, but I don’t believe the horrors of the Holocaust should ever be invoked lightly.

Instead, consider such hyper-nationalist measures within the context of China’s overall strategy. A recent opinion piece by LBC presenter Maajid Nawaz made the bold claim that China’s economic strategy is driven primarily by preparation for total war. I’m not sure I’m fully convinced by this idea just yet, not least because the Thucydides’ Trap argument is flawed in the nuclear era (as the Cold War showed us) but there’s no doubt in my mind that China’s state capitalism is by far the closest modern comparison to the fascist economies of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s.

The objective is simple. By consorting with big business, and shaping it to fit its own agenda, the PRC can expand its dominance over global markets and maintain self-sufficiency, all while maintaining an iron grip over the whole process – as well as its people. Combined with the state’s other nationalistic measures, including occupation of foreign land and brutal ethnic cleansing of minorities, it’s hard to call it anything other than a modern fascist superpower.

Protesters in Hong Kong take to the streets in resistance
to the overstepping of the Chinese government.
Credit: Lam Yik Fei, NY Times.

This is more relevant now than ever before. We’re starting to really see just how much of a role the CPC has been playing behind the scenes in the current coronavirus pandemic. Early on, it silenced doctors trying to warn us about what was happening in Wuhan. A US intelligence report recently claimed that the Chinese government deliberately withheld the dangers of the disease from the world while it hoarded medical supplies. This backed up earlier reports that China waited a crucial six days to inform the world of the outbreak. And estimates made by Wuhan residents on social media in late March put the city’s death toll at over 42,000, a far cry from the approximately 3,200 that the state was reporting at the same time. Testing kits and other key supplies sent from China to the rest of the world proved to be faulty or below standards.

Who knows how many lives would have been saved by now had the Chinese government been honest from the start? Plenty of criticism is due elsewhere, of course, but properly informed, there’s no way governments across the rest of the world would have shown such a limp response.

I’m not going to entertain wild speculation or conspiracy theories here. Science shows us that the coronavirus probably wasn’t created in a lab. But the facts alone are damning enough. China’s response has left the rest of the world woefully unprepared, to the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives (at least) and huge economic damage. At best, this shows an incredibly selfish, chauvinistic attitude, in which the interests of the nation-state supersede both the need for international cooperation and even basic humanitarianism. At worst, it is a hostile, warlike act, weaponising a crisis towards the goal of weakening the country’s rivals and extending its influence even further.

It seems that the first step, right now, is getting the message across as to what the People’s Republic of China truly is, boldly and unafraid: it is a powerful, threatening, genocidal, fascist state. And one we should all be paying far more attention to than we are. Make no mistake: there’s only one reason we don’t hear it called what it is, in plain terms, and that’s that those with a platform are afraid of the consequences. Only those with no vested interest or fear of repercussions can speak up here, and it’s our duty to do so.