Xiism and China's crimes against humanity

Global silence on China’s gulag
By Brahma Chellaney

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the East Turkestan colony at one point or another. 

Yet, with the exception of a recent tweet from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on China to ‘end its repression’, the international community has remained largely mute.
In its reliance on mass detention, the Chinese Communist Party has followed the Soviet Union’s example. 

But China’s concentration camps are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors, and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.
Although independent researchers and human-rights groups have raised awareness of practices such as force-feeding Muslims alcohol and pork, the Chinese authorities have been able to continue their assault on Islam with impunity. 

Even as China’s security agencies pursue Uyghurs and other Muslims as far afield as Turkey, Chinese leaders and companies involved in the persecution have not faced international sanctions or incurred any other costs.
Chief among the culprits, of course, is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who in 2014 ordered the policy change that set the stage for today’s repression of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and members of other Muslim groups. 

The forcible assimilation of Muslims into the country’s dominant Han culture is apparently a cornerstone of Xiism—or ‘Xi Jinping Thought’—the grand ‘ism’ that Xi has introduced to overshadow the influence of Marxism and Maoism in China.
To oversee this large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities, Xi, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reassigned the notorious CCP enforcer Chen Quanguo from Tibet to East Turkestan and elevated him to the all-powerful Central Politburo. 

Though Chen’s record of overseeing human-rights abuses is well known, the Trump administration has yet to act on a bipartisan commission’s 2018 recommendation that he and other Chinese officials managing the gulag policy be sanctioned. 

In general, financial and trade interests, not to mention the threat of Chinese retribution, have deterred most countries from condemning China’s anti-Muslim policies.
With the exception of Turkey, even predominantly Muslim countries that were quick to condemn Myanmar for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims have remained conspicuously silent on China. 

Pakistan’s military-backed prime minister, Imran Khan, has feigned ignorance about the East Turkestan crackdown, and Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has gone so far as to defend China’s right to police ‘terrorism’.
Emboldened by the muted international response, China has stepped up its drive to Sinicise East Turkestan by demolishing Muslim neighbourhoods. 

In Urumqi and other cities, once-bustling Uyghur districts have been replaced with heavily policed zones purged of Islamic culture.
The irony is that while China justifies its ‘re-education camps’ as necessary to cleanse Muslim minds at home of extremist thoughts, it is effectively supporting Islamist terrorism abroad. 

For example, China has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against Masood Azhar, the head of the Pakistan-based, UN-designated terrorist group responsible for carrying out serial attacks in India, including on parliament and, most recently, on a paramilitary police convoy. 

As Pompeo tweeted, ‘The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. 

On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.’
An added irony is that while China still harps on about its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of foreign imperial powers, it has for decades presided over the mass humiliation of minorities in East Turkestan and Tibet. 

Ominously, by systematically degrading Muslim populations, it could be inspiring white supremacists and other Islamaphobes around the world. 

For example, Brenton Tarrant, the Australian extremist arrested for the recent twin mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared an affinity for China’s political and social values.

There has been a good deal of reporting about how China has turned East Turkestan into a laboratory for Xi’s Orwellian surveillance ambitions. 

Less known is how Xi’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is being used as a catalyst for the crackdown. 

According to Chinese authorities, the establishment of a surveillance state is necessary to prevent unrest in the province at the heart of the BRI’s overland route.
Like Marxism–Leninism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, which left millions of people dead, Xiism promises to impose significant long-term costs on untold numbers of innocent people. 

It is the impetus behind China’s ruthless targeting of minority cultures and communities, as well as its aggressive expansion into international waters and introduction of digital totalitarianism.
Thanks to Xiism, the world’s largest, strongest and oldest autocracy finds itself at a crossroads. 

As the People’s Republic of China approaches its 70th birthday, its economy is slowing amid escalating capital flight, trade disruptions and the emigration of wealthy Chinese. 

The Chinese technology champion Huawei’s international travails augur difficult times ahead.
The last thing China needs right now is more enemies. 

Yet Xi has used his unbridled power to expand China’s global footprint and lay bare his imperial ambitions. 

His repression of Muslim minorities may or may not lead to international action against China. 

But it will almost certainly spawn a new generation of Islamist terrorists, compounding China’s internal security challenges. 

China’s domestic security budget is already larger than its bloated defence budget, which makes it second only to the United States in terms of military spending. 

The Soviet Union once held the same position—until it collapsed.

A Chinese Hero: Brenton Tarrant

Brenton Tarrant finds support in China's Islamophobic propaganda
By Isabella Steger & Echo Huang

Xi Jinping's most famous fan

Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian gunman who carried out the deadly mosque shooting in New Zealand on Friday (March 15), said in his screed that “the nation with the closest political and social values” to his own is China, and that he admired “non-diverse” nations.
While Tarrant, who now faces one charge of murder, didn’t elaborate on his views of China, his hatred of Islam certainly has support from corners of China’s internet.
One anonymous post (link in Chinese) on social network WeChat titled “The words on the New Zealand shooter’s guns reflect the deep anxiety of European white men”—a reference to the white supremacy markings on Tarrant’s rifles, and his grievances over Muslim immigration to western countries—has garnered at least 100,000 views at the time of writing, the maximum number of views on a post displayed by the platform. 

The piece lays blame on Christchurch officials for allowing the construction of mosques, and claimed this resulted in more Muslims coming to the city. 

It even alleged that the shooting was staged by left-wing politicians.
Some of the comments under the post suggest that followers of the “green religion“—a sometimes derogatory term often used on the Chinese internet to refer to Islam because of the significance of the color to the faith—brought the attack upon themselves. 

“The green religion launches terrorist attacks everywhere, and now the attack finally comes to them… Green religion is backwards, stupid, barbaric, and violent,” said one such comment.
Elsewhere, on social network Weibo, many comments reflected the view that the shooting was a by-product of the West’s excessive political correctness, a perspective that has found increasing support on China’s internet in recent years as part of what’s known as the baizuo, or “white left” movement, a derogatory term used to describe Western progressives that is roughly analogous to the term “social justice warrior.”
One Weibo user wrote (link in Chinese), “This is a rare act of resistance from a white man. We need to find a way to prolong this and encourage white men to apply for all kinds of honors for the gunman, including a Nobel peace prize.” 
Another wrote (link in Chinese) that “this so-called ‘darkest day‘ is simply political correctness. A reminder to the "greens": not everyone is willing to tolerate your outrageous actions.”
The comment was a reference to remarks by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who said the attack would be remembered as one of the country’s darkest days.
Anti-Islam sentiment has become widespread in China amid resentment over what some believe to be preferential government policies toward minorities, as well as over attacks carried out by a handful of Muslim Uyghurs from the country’s far west.
One prominent expression of it is in comments about “halalification,” as people express their anger that offering halal products could undermine China’s unity.
A decision last year by one of the country’s biggest food-delivery apps, Meituan, to offer halal food packaging drew an outcry from people in China who said the practice was discriminatory against non-Muslims, as did a Beijing university’s move to offer halal mooncakes at its celebration of the Mid-Autumn festival.
Another indicator of that sentiment is the extraordinary popularity of the Israeli embassy’s account on Weibo, which last year ranked as the foreign mission with the most followers on the social network, according to a study last year by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The reason for the embassy’s popularity is that its followers in China see its account as an outlet for sharing Islamophobic comments. 
One of the most liked comments under a Weibo post by the Israeli embassy on the US relocating its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was “Put the boot into the cancer of humanity”—a reference to Muslims.
The rise of Islamophobia on China’s internet comes against a backdrop of the government’s intensifying crackdown on the country’s 23 million Muslims. 
Most of China’s Muslims are Turkic Uyghurs in East Turkestan, but another minority known as the Hui, who belong to the dominant Han ethnicity in China, live in the Ningxia autonomous region and have long been regarded as well-assimilated, model Muslims.
In January, China passed a new law that could rewrite how Islam is practiced in the country.
China has in recent years constructed large-scale concentration camps in East Turkestan where 1.5 million Muslims are incarcerated, while those living outside the camps are subject to unprecedented levels of surveillance in an ever-growing police state.
China has likened those camps to “boarding schools” or training institutes, and says its measures are necessary in order to preventive radicalization of Muslims and to thwart "terrorist" attacks—an argument which has widespread support in China, following attacks carried out by a group of Uyghurs in Kunming in 2014 which killed 31.
Beijing’s suppression of Islam has also extended to the Hui minority, where reports say that authorities are snuffing out Arabic and Islamic symbols and practices.