China's crimes against humanity

CHINA’S UYGHUR CONCENTRATION CENTERS AND THE GHOSTS OF SOVIET AND GERMAN EXTERMINATION CAMPS 

By MICHAEL CLARKE

It is now beyond doubt that China is undertaking a program of mass incarceration of the Uyghur population of its northwestern colony of East Turkestan in a region-wide network of detention and “re-education” centers.
Up to 1.5 million Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslim minorities) are caught up in the largest human rights crisis in the world today. 
Analysis based on Chinese government procurement contracts for construction of these centers and Google Earth satellite imaging has revealed hundreds of large, prison-like facilities that are estimated to hold up to 1 million of East Turkestan’s Turkic Muslims. 
One of the largest concentration camps, Dabancheng, could hold up to 130,000 people, architectural analysis suggests.
Many of these facilities resemble prisons, complete with barbed wire, guard towers and CCTV cameras.
Within them detainees are compelled to repeatedly sing “patriotic” songs praising the benevolence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), study Mandarin, Confucian texts, and Xi Jinping’s “thought.”
Those who resist or do not make satisfactory progress “risk solitary confinement, food deprivation, being forced to stand against a wall for extended periods, being shackled to a wall or bolted by wrists and ankles into a rigid ‘tiger chair,’ and waterboarding and electric shocks.”
This inevitably brings to mind the grim precedents of the Stalinist gulag and Nazi concentration camps. 
There are clear ideological and tactical parallels between those examples and what is occurring in East Turkestan.
China’s “re-education” centers reflect a similar totalitarian drive to not only use repression as a means of control but to mobilize society around an exclusive ideology, which, as Juan Jose Luiz remarks, “goes beyond a particular program or definition of the boundaries of legitimate political action to provide some ultimate meaning, sense of historical purpose and interpretation of social reality.” Under Xi, William Callhan suggests, the ideology centers on the “China dream” of “great national rejuvenation” which is not focused on the Maoist “class struggle” but rather on an “appeal to unity over difference, and the collective over the individual” as a means of achieving the country’s return to great power status.
Crucially, this approach blends aspects of the statism of the Leninist model and traditional Chinese statecraft, which, as James Leibold notes, have both long held a “paternalistic approach that pathologizes deviant thought and behavior, and then tries to forcefully transform them.”
Consider, for instance, the East Turkestan CCP Youth League official who asserted that the re-education centers are necessary to “cleanse the virus [of extremism] from their brain” and to help them “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Tactically, there are also parallels between the manner in which Beijing has sought to justify its actions to domestic and international audiences, and those of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. 
As both of those totalitarian governments did, Xi’s China has embarked on a multiphase propaganda strategy to manage the potential fallout from its “re-education” efforts: secrecy and outright denial giving way to justificatory counter-narratives, propaganda intended for domestic consumption, and “tours” of camps for select foreign observers.
However, crucial differences suggest a different model of state control of society in China.
This model is defined on the one hand by the idea that political and social “deviancy” should be proactively transformed rather than excluded, and on the other hand by the innovative use of surveillance and monitoring technologies that paradoxically have allowed more international scrutiny. Thus it is to be hoped that, unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, China will not succeed in obscuring its systematic incarceration and destruction of excluded populations.

From denial to justification
China has employed a strategy of outright denial about the "re-education" centers, followed by counter-narratives.
This approach is similar to those deployed by Stalin to defend the gulag labor camp system and by Hitler to defend the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The CCP has suggested that reports of mass “re-education” are the product of either ignorance or malicious “misinformation.”
Thus the state-run China Daily editorialized in August 2018 that “foreign media” had “misinterpreted or even exaggerated the security measures” China had implemented in East Turkestan.
These “false stories,” the article alleged, were being spread by those bent on “splitting the region from China and turning it into an independent country.”
Senior officials echoed such denials before international forums.
Shortly after the China Daily editorial was published, Hu Lianhe, a senior member of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, told the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination point-blank that “there is no such thing as re-education centers” in East Turkestan.
However, just over a month later Chinese officials and media changed their tune to deploy a narrative that framed the facilities as a necessary and benevolent measure to assist Uyghurs from succumbing to the scourge of “extremism.” 
The party’s discourse on “extremism,” as Jerome Doyon noted in War on the Rocks, “aims to legitimize mobilizing the population for a massive social transformation of the region” in the service of “a preventive approach to terrorism” that targets Uyghur identity.
In October 2018, the chairman of the East Turkestan government, Shohrat Zakir, told the state-run news agency Xinhua that China was simply pursuing an approach to counter-terrorism “according to their own conditions.”
In the first, if circuitous, admission of the existence of the “re-education” centers, Zakir stated that enduring terrorist attacks in East Turkestan required that authorities not only “strictly” push back against extremism but also address “the root cause of terrorism” by “educating those who committed petty crimes” so as to “prevent them from becoming victims of terrorism and extremism.”
In 1931, as Stalin embarked on his mass collectivization campaign, Maya Vinokour notes: “Russian papers began calling reports of forced labor ‘filthy slander’ concocted by an ‘anti-Soviet front’” before soon thereafter admitting forced labor was happening.
Vyachslav Molotov, one of Stalin’s key lieutenants, stated publicly in March 1931 that forced labor “was good for criminals, for it accustoms them to labor and makes them useful members of society.” 
Just as China has attempted to frame the “re-education” camps as positive and necessary, Soviet authorities expended great propaganda efforts to frame the gulag as a transformative “reforging” of former “class enemies” into ideologically committed Soviet citizens.
After Hitler’s ascent to chancellorship in 1933, his regime almost immediately established the first concentration camps for around 150,000 people — mostly those defined by the regime as irreconcilable political opponents, such as communists and social democrats.
Similar to Stalin’s strategy, these camps“were sold to the German people as reformatory establishments rather like penitentiaries for offending adolescents in 1950s America, where the public were told fresh air, exercise and skills training were on offer to discipline social deviants who could then be returned to the society.”

Painting a rosy picture: The role of propaganda
Both the Soviets and the Nazis produced prominent tracts of propaganda in both print and film to justify the gulags and the concentration camps.
Most notable in the Soviet case was the 1933 History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal — a 600-page volume collectively written by 120 Soviet writers and artists under the supervision of Maxim Gorky, then the Soviet Union’s most famous writer.
This tome exulted in the fact that construction of the 227-kilometer canal used the forced labor of some 150,000 gulag inmates.
It was also accompanied by a film capturing Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Sergei Kirov undertaking a celebratory cruise on its official opening in July 1933.
Film was an even more important medium of propaganda for the Nazis.
During World War II, the regime produced the infamous film Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area — a supposedly “objective” depiction (hence the subtitle of “documentary”) of life in a Jewish concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The film included scenes of inmates training in baking, sewing and carpentry, watching a camp orchestra, and playing a soccer match. 
The film was carefully scripted and stage-managed and was intended for foreign audiences — for instance, it was screened for a delegation of the International Red Cross in April 1945.
China too has produced such stage-managed visual propaganda on its re-education camps. 
On the same day as Zakir’s interview with Xinhua, China Central Television (CCTV) aired a 15-minute story detailing interviews with “cadets” in the Khotan “Vocational Skills Education and Training Center” in southern East Turkestan.
Echoing Theresienstadt, the story depicts the center as an altruistic CCP endeavor to provide “education” through training in the Mandarin language and the Chinese legal code, along with “vocational skills” such as cosmetology, carpet weaving, sewing, baking, and carpentry. 
A young Uyghur woman interviewed on camera said, “If I didn’t come here, I can’t imagine the consequences. Maybe I would have followed those religious extremists on the criminal path.
The party and the government discovered me in time and saved me.”
The supposedly benevolent nature of such assistance is somewhat belied by one scene in the film — showing “cadets” taking Mandarin classes — that reveals the “classroom” is under constant surveillance with cameras clearly visible on the walls and microphones hanging from the ceiling.

China’s gulag ‘tourism’
The final plank in China’s propaganda effort is what amounts to Potemkin tours of the East Turkestan camps for foreign observers.
This, too, has clear Soviet precedents. 
Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, sponsored what historian Jeffrey Hardy has dubbed “gulag tourism” whereby Soviet authorities carefully managed visits for foreign delegations to major penal institutions throughout the 1950s.
This was an attempt to both negate the predominant Western narrative of the gulag as a slave labor system and demonstrate the positive social benefits of the system.
China’s preparations for its own version of “gulag tourism” have been characterized by both secrecy and deception. 
As authorities anticipated visits of international observers late last year, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service reported that detainees had been required to sign “confidentiality agreements” to ensure that they did not divulge details of their experiences, while obvious manifestations of security and surveillance — such as barbed wire and heavily-armed police — were either removed or scaled back. 
Moreover, according to Bitter Winter, local authorities have been ordered to compile more detailed information on the seriousness of individual detainees’ “crimes” to determine which detainees could be transferred “to facilities that are less obviously prison-like, appearing more like low-cost housing.”
With such preparations made, Beijing permitted a tour of the facilities by some diplomats and international media.
From Jan. 3 to 5 officials chaperoned diplomats from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Thailand and reporters from Kazakhstan’s state-run agency, Kazinform, Sputnik News, Associated Press of Pakistan, and Indonesia’s national news agency Antara to facilities in Urumqi, Kashgar, and Khotan.
The diplomats and journalists were told an identical narrative as the one detailed above: The centers were implemented to “assist those affected by extremism” by provision of education in Mandarin, Chinese laws, and “vocational skills.”
Three European Union officials toured a number of facilities the following week.
Beijing obviously hoped its managed tours of “re-education” camps would deflect international criticism.
But it appears the efforts have not achieved their objective.
Neither set of visitors seems to have been deceived by the Potemkin tours. 
A report published by Kazinform, for example, concludes by dryly noting the similarities in testimony provided by “trainees” and that “throughout the press tour in all cities and locations, interviews were taken in the mandatory presence of Chinese authorities.”
Pakistan’s response was a notable exception (Pakistan is a long-term ally of China).
Islamabad’s charge d’affaires in Beijing, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, asserted that “I did not see any sign of cultural repression” and during her visit to three facilities she “observed the students to be in good physical health” while “living facilities are fairly modern and comfortable.”
The European Union delegation, by contrast, noted that while “the sites that were visited were carefully selected by the authorities to support China’s official narrative,” they judged what they observed to be “consistent” with what international media, academics, and nongovernmental organizations have documented over the past two years — i.e., that “major and systematic human rights violations” are in fact occurring in East Turkestan.
For both Stalin and Hitler, domestically-oriented propaganda was arguably more important than staving off international criticism, as the former contributed to regime legitimacy and served as a means of mobilization of support. 
In the Soviet case, as Steven Barnes demonstrates, the gulag played a central role in the “construction of socialist society and the new Soviet person” by emphasizing key ideological tropes including struggle as the motivating force of history, labor as the defining feature of humanity, and the redeemability of class enemies.
In the Chinese context, much of the CCP’s propaganda plays directly to what Brandon Barbour and Reece Jones describe as a “discourse of danger” erected around the Uyghur since 9/11.
Through this narrative, state media “seek to de-humanise the Uyghur, creating the perception that the Uyghur identity category is filled with a backward people” susceptible to “extremism.” 
In this way, Beijing implies that disorder and violence would ensue if it didn’t forcefully penetrate East Turkestan with the state’s security and surveillance capabilities.
Like their Soviet precedents, however, official statements on the “re-education” centers also emphasize their objective of redeeming actual or potential extremists.
The March 2019 white paper, “The Fight against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in East Turkestan” released by China’s State Council, asserts that while “a few leaders and core members of violent and terrorist gangs who have committed heinous crimes or are inveterate offenders will be severely punished in accordance with the law,” those “who have committed minor crimes under the influence of religious extremism will be educated, rehabilitated and protected through vocational training, through the learning of standard Chinese language and labor skills, and acquiring knowledge of the law.”
In this manner such individuals will “rid themselves of terrorist influence, the extremist mindset, and outmoded cultural practices.”
This is not simply about preventing attacks.
It’s also a means of demonstrating to the region’s Han population that the state will ensure “security” and “stability.”
“People feel less uncomfortable,” Tom Cliff argues, “when they are told that the police on the streets are there to protect them from dangerous ‘others’, rather than to protect the state from them or other Han.”

Mass repression and the constraints of propaganda in the 21st century
Skeptics of the comparison between China’s current practices and those of the Soviet and Nazi regimes might argue that, to date, there has been no evidence of physical elimination of those detained, and that the state remains committed to integrating Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslims) into Chinese society.
These two counter-arguments do not invalidate the comparison, however.
The purpose of the “re-education” centers and the discourse that has developed around them clearly overlap with both the Soviet and Nazi precedents. 
The purpose of the centers echoes the Soviet focus on the gulag’s potential to “reforge” enemies through labor, married with the Nazis’ racialized conception of political and social deviancy in determining who should be “re-educated.”
The counter-narratives that Beijing has deployed to combat international criticism also shed further light on the three regimes’ thinking about social control.
First, these narratives play to what have become the defining characteristics of the state’s discourse with respect to the Uyghurs and East Turkestan: that a deviant religious extremism is inherent to Uyghur identity. 
It can only be overcome through “education” and assimilation into prevailing Chinese culture.
Here, there’s a crucial contrast to be drawn with Stalin’s gulag and Hitler’s concentration camps.
As Richard Overy notes, these were products of binary ideologies of belonging and exclusion.
They were conceived of as instruments of “ideological warfare” aimed at the “redemptive destruction of the enemy.” 
For Beijing, however, the Uyghur (and other Turkic Muslim minorities) are still integral parts of the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu).
The re-education endeavor, James Leibold argues, emerges as a means of standardizing behavior to achieve a cohesive, state-sanctioned national identity.
Unlike the Soviet and Nazi precedents, Beijing’s camps appear to be designed to facilitate the destruction of Uyghur culture rather than physical destruction of individuals.
This, of course, is cold comfort to the Uyghur people.
Second, China’s propaganda offensive, largely externally-oriented, demonstrates clear parallels with Soviet and Nazi attempts to deflect international criticism by presenting misleading and falsified accounts of the detention facilities. 
But here, too, there is an important difference: Beijing has not succeeded in deceiving the international community. 
Indeed, it is undertaking this propaganda effort in an environment in which, paradoxically, innovations in surveillance and data collection technologies enhance the state’s capacity to monitor and control individuals while also helping reveal it to the outside world.
China has sought to ensure the “comprehensive supervision” of East Turkestan with the “Skynet” electronic surveillance system in major urban areas; GPS trackers in motor vehicles; facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations, and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material.
Yet, the Chinese state’s own internet records of contract bids for construction of detention facilities, advertisements recruiting new public security personnel to man them, and open-source satellite imagery have enabled international media and researchers to expose the full scope of Beijing’s systematic repression. 
Adrian Zenz, for instance, has analyzed official advertisements for security personnel to staff the camps and construction bids and tender notices for the construction of the centers online.
University of British Columbia student Shawn Zhang has similarly used information gleaned from Baidu (China’s version of Google) searches about the location of centers to plug into Google Earth to obtain satellite imagery.
The continued vigilance of such external observers can ensure that China does not follow the worst precedents of the 20th century.
Of even greater significance, however, may be the model of social control that has been implemented in East Turkestan.
The fusion of the Chinese state’s technological innovation with its longstanding desire to “transform” individuals or groups who don’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy augurs a “digital totalitarianism” defined by “a static model of centralized, one-way observation and surveillance.”
The “comprehensive supervision” implemented in East Turkestan, as Darren Byler recently detailed, not only enables the state to identify those it deems in need of “re-education” but also makes sure that those that remain outside are not only transparent citizens seen by the state but fixed in place and inherently controllable.
This model of social control suggests a significant evolution in the nature of the party-state.
The CCP under Xi Jinping, as Frank Pieke has argued, is now not simply a traditional Leninist state that has adopted technological innovations as a means of augmenting its hold on power.
It is rather a regime that has developed an innovative set of “governmental technologies” that proactively seeks to mold and direct the behavior of citizens.

Xi Jinping's Pope

Another Vatican Diplomatic Blunder on the 85th Anniversary of the Reichskonkordat
By GEORGE WEIGEL

The malfeasant Francis

Eighty-five years ago, on July 20, 1933, a concordat defining the legal position of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich was signed by Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) and German vice chancellor Franz von Papen.

The Reischskonkordat was then ratified by the Nazi-dominated German parliament some six weeks later, on September 10. 

Pope Pius XI, under whose authority Cardinal Pacelli had negotiated this treaty, was under no illusions about German National Socialism.

And unlike some Vatican diplomats who seem to have imagined that the Third Reich would be a short-run thing, the pope likely thought that Hitler and his gangsters would be in power for some time. 

So he wanted to negotiate legal protections for the Church so that it could operate pastorally under a totalitarian regime that, with the passage of the notorious “Enabling Act” of March 23, had assumed virtually dictatorial powers. 

That one condition for the Reichskonkordat was the de facto destruction of the Catholic-based Center Party was evidently a price Pius XI thought worth paying if the result were the protection of Catholic institutions and pastoral life.
This legal-diplomatic strategy — which seems to have been based on the belief that even a totalitarian regime would honor a treaty commitment — didn’t work. 

The Third Reich began violating the Reichskonkordat shortly after the ink dried on the treaty. 

Then after some two dozen stiff diplomatic notes to Berlin (drafted by Pacelli) had not produced results, an irate Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge [With Burning Concern] in 1937, had it clandestinely printed in Germany, and ordered that it be read from all German pulpits. 

In the encyclical, Pius denounced an “idolatrous cult” that replaced belief in God with a “national religion” and a “myth of race and blood,” and his stress on the perennial value of the Old Testament made it quite clear what he thought of the Nazi swastika and what it represented.
It is beyond ironic, and it borders on the scandalous, that the lesson of this debacle — paper promises mean nothing to totalitarians — has not been learned in the Vatican, which now appears to be on the verge of repeating its mistake by completing a deal with the government of the People’s Republic of China, on the 85th anniversary of the Reichskonkordat.
Vatican sources are calling the deal “a historic breakthrough,” but the only thing “historic” about it is the inability of Vatican diplomacy to learn from history. 

To make matters worse, others in the Vatican are conceding that the deal is “not a good agreement” but then go on to suggest that it might pave the way for something better in the future. 

Really? 

Haven’t we been down that road before? 

Isn’t the failed Reichskonkordat a cautionary tale? 

Is history taught at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the Church’s graduate school for papal diplomats?
According to the deal as described in various media sources, candidates for bishop in China will be chosen by the priests and laity of a diocese, from a list of potential bishops presented by Chinese authorities. 

The result of these “elections” will be sent to Beijing, which will then submit a candidate to the Vatican. 

Rome will then have time to check out the nominee, which it can accept or decline. 

If it’s the latter, a “dialogue” will ensue, presumably to get Beijing to submit another name. 

But that other name will have been produced by the same rigged system, for it is impossible to imagine that any candidate proposed by the Chinese authorities at the local level will not have been thoroughly vetted for reliability as a Communist puppet.
As described in press reports, this deal is a clear violation of current Church law. 

Canon 377.5 in the Code of Canon Law states flatly that “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities” — an unambiguous stipulation that gives legal form to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in its Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church. 

Even worse, responsibility for Church affairs in the PRC has now been taken from the Chinese state and given to a bureau of the Chinese Communist Party — which means that the Vatican is proposing to give a right of “presentation of bishops” to Communist bureaucrats, whose interests, it may be safely assumed, are not those of the Church and its mission of evangelization.
Worse still, in terms of the eroding moral authority of a Vatican fumbling its response to clerical sexual abuse and malfeasant bishops, this deal comes at a time when the Chinese government is ramping up the persecution of religious groups throughout China, demolishing Catholic churches, stripping others of religious statues, consigning leaders of Protestant house churches to slave-labor camps, and conducting a campaign of genocide against the Uighur Muslims. 

China intensifies religious persecution and the Vatican signs an agreement with the PRC?
Please.

As for the notion that this deal will help bridge the gap between a largely underground Catholic Church loyal to the bishop of Rome and the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA), there is no known voice from the persecuted Church in China that supports the proposed agreement. Why? 

Because the persecuted Church knows that the PCA is, functionally, a regime tool, even if some of its clergy are, in their hearts, loyal to Rome. 

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that a deal whereby Communist-party authorities “nominate” bishops through faux elections conducted by PCA-approved bodies from candidate lists prepared by other Communist authorities is a deal that further empowers the PCA while disempowering the persecuted Church.
So why is this happening? 

Two explanations occur.
The first is that this misbegotten deal represents the continuing influence in Vatican diplomacy of the Casaroli Gang — the disciples of the late Cardinal Agostini Casaroli, architect of the 1970s Vatican Ostpolitik, which was supposed to make life better for persecuted Catholics behind the Iron Curtain through deal-making with Warsaw Pact regimes. 

The Ostpolitik did nothing of the sort. 

It turned the Hungarian Church into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian Communist party; it did serious damage to the Church in what was then Czechoslovakia; and it facilitated the deep penetration of the Vatican itself by East Bloc intelligence agencies. 

This massive policy failure has been quite well documented with materials from former Warsaw Pact secret-police archives. 

I have written about it extensively, in books readily available in Italian. 

Yet not a murmur of dissent from the legend of Casaroli the Great is permitted in important Roman circles. 

And it is second- and third-generation Casaroli acolytes who are the drivers of the reported China deal. 

They are, it seems, uneducable. .
Then there is Francis. 

John Paul II gave the Catholic Church real moral leverage in world politics. 

Benedict XVI offered the post–Cold War incisive commentaries on the political challenges of the 21st century. 

That legacy has been squandered through one ill-advised move after another over the five and a half years of this pontificate: 

• a Syrian initiative that gave Obama an excuse not to enforce his putative “red line” and thus strengthened the murderous Assad regime; 
• disastrous and counterproductive kowtowing to the Maduro regime in Venezuela and the Communist dictatorship in Cuba that has demoralized the opposition in both countries; 
• a refusal to use the words “invasion” in reference to Crimea and “war” in reference to what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine; 
• an approach to Russian Orthodoxy that refuses to concede that the Church’s principal interlocutors in that “dialogue” are agents of Russian state power first, and churchmen somewhere down the line; 
• an absolutist approach to the migrant crisis in Europe that has shrunk the space in which a reasonable political compromise could take shape; 
• a lot of papal moral capital expended on ephemera like the threat posed by plastic bottles and straws in the oceans. 

Mistake after mistake, now seemingly on the verge of being compounded by the betrayal of persecuted Catholics in China through a deal that empowers the Chinese Communist party in its efforts to make the Church an instrument of the state.
The pope could still call a halt to this, and he should. 

A bad deal in these circumstances is far worse than no deal, for a bad deal further compromises the moral authority of the Church, which is then further weakened in its evangelical mission. 

That is the lesson that should have been learned from the Reichskonkordat of 1933. 

Eighty-five years later, it is long past time for Vatican diplomacy to get on a learning curve.

Chinazism

Under Xi Jinping, China is seeking to control not just the bodies, but also the minds of its inhabitants.

By Michael Clarke

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has proclaimed that his signature “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) that seeks to link the Chinese economy with the major continental and maritime zones of the Eurasian continent will “benefit people across the whole world,” as it will be based on the “Silk Road spirit” of “peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness.”

The lived reality of the people of China's vast East Turkestan colony—the hub of three of the six “economic corridors” at the heart of BRI—could not be further from this idyll.
Rather, China has constructed a dystopic vision of governance in East Turkestan to rival that of any science-fiction blockbuster.
East Turkestan’s geopolitical position at the eastern edge of the Islamic and Turkic-speaking world and the ethno-cultural distinctiveness of its largely Turkic-Muslim ethnic groups such as the Uyghur have long constituted a challenge to Chinese authorities.
The Chinese Communist Party has since 1949 pursued a strategy of tight political, social and cultural control to integrate East Turkestan and its people into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

This has periodically stimulated violent opposition from the Uyghur population who chafe against demographic dilution, political marginalization and continued state interference in the practice of religion.
“Stability” in East Turkestan is however now a major strategic imperative for the Party, driven by periodic violent attacks in, or connected to, East Turkestan by Uyghurs that Beijing blames on an externally-based organization, the “Turkestan Islamic Party” (TIP) and the region’s role as hub of key elements of the BRI.
This obsession with “stability” in East Turkestan has seen the regional government’s expenditure on public security balloon, with provincial spending on public security in 2017 amounting to approximately $9.1 billion —a 92 percent increase on such spending in 2016.
Much of this expenditure has been absorbed by the development of a pervasive, hi-tech “security state” in the region, including: use of facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material.
This system is not only reliant on technology but also significant manpower to monitor, analyse and respond to the data it collects. 

Its rollout has thus coincided with the recruitment of an estimated 90,000 new public security personnel in the region.
This is consistent with the Party’s move toward tech-driven ‘social management’ throughout the rest of China. 

However, in East Turkestan it has become defined by a racialized conception of “threat” in which the Uyghur population is conceived of as a “virtual biological threat to the body of society.”
From government officials describing Uyghur “extremism” as a “tumour” to equating religious observance with a virus , the Party’s discourse frames key elements of Uyghur identity as pathologies to be “cured.”
The Party’s “cure” for such pathologies is a programme of mass internment of Uyghurs — up to one million people according to some estimates — in prison-like “re-education” centres based on analysis of the data harvested through its system of “predictive policing.”
Here, receiving a phone call from a relative studying or travelling overseas or attendance at a mosque result in an almost immediate visit from local police and indefinite detention in a “re-education” centre.

The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy—while divergent ideologically were united by their drive to make a “total claim” on the individual. 

“They were not content,” as historian Ian Kershaw reminds us , “simply to use repression as means of control, but sought to mobilize behind an exclusive ideology to ‘educate’ people into becoming committed believers, to claim them soul as well as body.”
The goal of China’s “re-education” of Uyghurs, according to a East Turkestan CCP Youth League official, is to “treat and cleanse the virus [of “extremism”] from their brain” and “restore their normal mind” so that they may “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China is thus arguably pursuing a “total claim” on the bodies and minds of the Uyghur people via a twenty-first century, technologically-enabled version of this—a “totalitarianism 2.0.”

Pius XII bis or Xi Jinping's Pope?

• Francis's deal with China betrays Christ, says Hong Kong cardinal
• Senior Catholic Joseph Zen says the pontiff ‘may not know the Communist persecutors who have killed hundreds of thousands’

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong and Tom Phillips in Beijing

Cardinal Joseph Zen, a former bishop of Hong Kong, says supporters of the Vatican deal do not truly know China.

The most senior Chinese Catholic has slammed a rapprochement between the Vatican and Beijing, saying it would be “betraying Jesus Christ”, amid a thaw in more than six decades of bitter relations.
Talk of a deal between the two sides has been building for months, with some saying the diplomatic coup for Francis would be resolving the highly controversial issue of allowing China’s Communist government to have a hand in selecting bishops.
But Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 84-year-old former bishop of Hong Kong, has been an outspoken critic, saying any agreement where Beijing would have a hand in approving clergy would be “a surrender”.

“The pope is a little naive, he doesn’t have the background to know the Communists in China,” Zen said at the Salesian school in Hong Kong where he still teaches. 

“The pope used to know the persecuted Communists in Latin America, but he may not know the Communist persecutors who have killed hundreds of thousands.”
Chinese Catholics are free to go to mass and attend government-sanctioned churches, but barred from proselytising. 

The state-controlled China Catholic Patriotic Association controls the church and appoints bishops, currently without any input from the Vatican.
An “underground” Catholic church exists, with some estimates saying it is larger than the official one, and its members and clergy have faced persecution by authorities.
Protestant Christians also face similar challenges, and a recent campaign by authorities in eastern China has seen more than 1,200 crosses removed from buildings and churches demolished.
Zen complained that most supporters of the deal did not truly know China, lacking first-hand experience with the state of the church under the Communists. 

He spent seven years frequently teaching in cities across China in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that was followed by severe tightening of freedom of expression and religion.
One motivation for the Vatican is the relatively small number of Catholics in a country filled with people who are increasingly searching for meaning in their lives. 

There are roughly 10 million Catholics, just a 10th of the overall number of Christians in the country.
With “fake freedom” under a proposed deal, priests could more easily preach and more churches would open, Zen predicted, but “it’s only the impression of freedom, it’s not real freedom, the people sooner or later will see the bishops are puppets of the government and not really the shepherds of the flock.”

“The official bishops are not really preaching the gospel,” Zen added.

“They are preaching obedience to Communist authority.”
Francesco Sisci, an Italian scholar and journalist who is based in Beijing, said “a very wide-ranging agreement” appeared to be on the horizon but that it remained unclear exactly when the deal would be unveiled. 

No observers expected it to lead to full diplomatic relations.

“The church doesn’t want crusades … and doesn’t want to start a new one with China,” he said.

“The pope may be naive but it is his job being naive, being a man of faith,” Sisci added.
But that naivety could harm the Catholic church in China for decades to come, according to Zen, and the pope is pushing a pact he may not fully understand.
“You cannot go into negotiations with the mentality ‘we want to sign an agreement at any cost’, then you are surrendering yourself, you are betraying yourself, you are betraying Jesus Christ,” Zen lamented.
“If you cannot get a good deal, an acceptable deal, then the Vatican should walk away and maybe try again later,” he added. 

“Could the church negotiate with Hitler? Could it negotiate with Stalin? No.”
Ordinary Catholics who attend the government-controlled church welcome the negotiations as any deal would legitimise what is essentially a schismatic church.

“If they could really strike a deal, not only would us Catholics be happy, but all of the Chinese people should rejoice,” said Zhao, 36, who has been a Catholic for 20 years and works at the oldest Catholic church in China, close to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 

He declined to give his full name because of the sensitivity of discussing religion.
But Zen warned that gains, diplomatically and in the number of faithful, could be short-lived.
In the long run people would leave the church as they became disillusioned with the “fake” institution, Zen said, adding “the clergy need to side with the people, the poor and the persecuted, not to government”.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of new Christians,” Zen said. 

“If that blood is poisoned, how long will those new Christians last?”

XI JINPING'S POPE

THE SECRET HISTORY OF FRANCIS

JOHN GORNVELL

Duterte's flirting with Beijing is disaster for the US

Rodrigo Duterte claimed that a new alliance of the Philippines, China, and Russia would emerge: "There are three of us against the world." 

By Max Boot

Xi Jinping, right, with Duterte during a welcome ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

International relations theorists of a "realist" persuasion like to claim that states are rational actors pursuing their strategic interests in an anarchic world where power alone matters. 

Ideology and domestic politics do not much concern these thinkers; they believe that a nation's foreign policy is much more likely to be shaped by factors such as geography, demography, and economics.
This was the viewpoint of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who famously tried to realign China from being a foe of the United States to a friend — never mind that the Chinese leader they had to deal with was Mao Zedong, the worst mass murderer in history. 

"Nixinger" believed, correctly, that China's interest in countering Soviet power would lead it to draw closer with the United States.​
But even in the case of China the applicability of realist insights was limited. 

China did not begin the transformation that would make it a leading economic force and trade partner of the United States until Mao had died, replaced by the reformist Deng Xiaoping. 

Even today China is more foe than friend of America.
Today, the Philippines is Exhibit A in illustrating the limits of the realist conceit that some unvarying strategic logic governs foreign policy. 

The Philippines has seen a vertigo-inducing change in its foreign-policy orientation since Rodrigo Duterte became president this year. 

This crude populist is now transforming the Philippines' relationship with the United States in a fundamental and worrying manner.

The Philippines is America's oldest ally in Asia, and until recently one of the closest. 

The United States ruled the Philippines as a colonial power from 1899 to 1942 and implanted its culture in the archipelago. 

In World War II, U.S. and Filipino troops fought side by side against the Japanese occupiers. 

In 1951, Washington and Manila signed a mutual defense treaty. 

For decades afterward, the Philippines hosted two of the largest U.S. military installations overseas at Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. 

Those bases were closed in 1991 amid a wave of anti-Americanism, but the U.S. military presence has been ramping up again as the Philippines felt increasingly threatened by Chinese military expansionism. 

In 2014, Barack Obama signed an agreement with then-President Benigno Aquino III that would allow U.S. forces more regular access to bases in the Philippines and increase the tempo of training exercises and military cooperation between the two countries.
Now that achievement looks like a dead letter. 

Duterte journeyed to Beijing this week to announce his "separation from the United States" in military and economic terms. 

"America has lost," Duterte said. 

He claimed that a new alliance of the Philippines, China, and Russia would emerge — "there are three of us against the world." 

His trade secretary said the Philippines and China were inking $13 billion in trade deals; that's a pretty hefty signing bonus for switching sides. 

Duterte said he will soon end military cooperation with the United States, despite the opposition of his armed forces.
What could account for this head-snapping transformation? 

Manila's strategic and economic interests have not changed. 

While China is the Philippines' second-largest trade partner, its largest is Japan, a close American ally and a foe of Chinese expansionism. 

The third-largest trade partner is the United States. 

The fourth-largest is Singapore, another U.S. ally that is concerned about China's vast territorial ambitions and aggressive behavior. 

Taken together, the Philippines sends 42.7 percent of its exports to Japan, the United States, and Singapore, compared with only 10.5 percent to China and 11.9 percent to Hong Kong. 

The Philippines gets 16.1 percent of its imports from China; almost all of the rest comes from the United States and its allies, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. 

So it's not as if there is an especially pressing economic case for the Philippines to realign from the United States to China.
There is a pressing strategic case, however, not to do so. 

China continues to assert sovereignty in the South China Sea in violation of Philippine claims, as an international court ruled in July in a case brought by Duterte's predecessor. 

China wants to grab for itself what could be billions of dollars' worth of natural resources, from fish to oil, in the South China Sea.
Moreover, the Philippine people remain largely pro-American. 

English is the lingua franca of the Philippines. 

The Armed Forces of the Philippines have many decades of cooperation with the United States and have been built in the image of the U.S. military; they have no experience working with China's People's Liberation Army. 

Moreover, and despite Duterte's nasty rhetoric and ad hominems, the United States continues to express its desire to protect the Philippines.

This massive geopolitical shift is entirely Duterte's doing. 

It cannot be explained any other way. 

It is a product of his peculiar psychology.
He has long been ideologically hostile to the United States — he has called Obama a "son of a whore" — and he feels an ideological affinity with China's authoritarian rulers. 

Although elected democratically, Duterte is a strongman in the making. 

He has already violated the rule of law to unleash death squads that are said to have killed at least 1,900 people, including a 5-year-old boy, in the name of fighting drugs. 

He has cited Hitler as his role model: "Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is 3 million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them." 

He has also said "I don't give a shit" about human rights. 

China's rulers don't put their worldview quite so crassly, but they, too, don't care much for human rights. 

The Duterte-Xi Jinping marriage thus seems like a natural match.
Duterte's flip-flop — assuming it leads to a lasting strategic shift — is a potential disaster. 

Aligned with the United States and its regional allies, the Philippines can provide a vital platform to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China and East China seas.
If the Philippines becomes a Chinese satrapy, by contrast, Washington will find itself hard-pressed to hold the "first island chain" in the Western Pacific that encompasses "the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and the Philippine archipelago." 

Defending that line of island barriers has been a linchpin of U.S. strategy since the Cold War. 

It now could be undone because of the whims of one unhinged leader.

China could either neutralize this vital American ally or even turn the Philippines into a PLA Navy base for menacing U.S. allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. 

At the very least, the U.S. Navy will find it much harder to protect the most important sea lanes in the world; each year $5.3 trillion in goods passes through the South China Sea, including $1.2 trillion in U.S. trade.
The opposition is already making hay over Duterte's China trip. 

A Supreme Court justice in Manila has warned the president that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, it could result in his impeachment. 

The only good news from the American standpoint is that what Duterte is doing could be undone by a more rational successor, assuming that democracy in the Philippines survives this time of testing.