Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

Secrecy was China’s goal, at least. But by the second half of 2018, the circumstantial evidence was so strong, the world could no longer ignore the camps and China could no longer deny their existence. The confrontation that resulted would expose the naked truth of China’s bid for international power—and the implications for ordinary people the world over, in China or beyond.

“You Shouldn’t Talk About the Uyghurs”

After UN ambassador Nikki Haley mentioned the plight of the Uyghurs publicly at the UN for the first time in the summer of 2018, the Chinese permanent representative Ma Zhaoxu asked to see her. He came to Haley’s residence the very next day for a meeting she was hosting for the representatives from all the permanent security council members, but asked to stay after to talk with Haley one-on-one. Once he had her alone, he handed her a thick dossier of information. Here’s how the conversation went, according to Haley:

MA: You shouldn’t talk about the Uyghurs. You don’t understand. You need to understand why we do this.

HALEY: Help me understand why you were putting them into this situation and forcing them to think differently.

MA: But you don’t know who these people are.

HALEY: Who are they?

MA: They’re criminals.

HALEY: What crimes have they committed?

MA: They do bad things. They rob, they steal.

HALEY: Are you saying they’ve been arrested?

MA: Yes.

HALEY: So, they have all committed acts of crime?

MA: Well, some have, and some we know will.

Haley described the meeting as “bizarre.” The Chinese leadership had seen the outrage in the international community about the reporting on the internment camps, and this is what they had instructed their UN representative to tell people. Ma went on about how they were teaching the Uyghurs a trade, for their own good, so they can steer clear of a life of crime.

“It was a very telling conversation,” Haley told me. “He wasn’t honest, but this is how they were selling it.”

Despite Xi’s best efforts, over the course of 2018 the awareness and alarm steadily rose about the Chinese government’s ever-tightening control over its own citizens and its brutal mass internment of over one million Uyghur and other ethnic minorities. Large proportions of the adults in towns and cities across Xinjiang Province were being swept into prison camps that were popping up all over the place.

The Uyghurs in Xinjiang already lived in an open-air prison, monitored 24/7 by the most invasive and pervasive technological and human surveillance system ever deployed on a civilian population. The Chinese government had already sent one million or so Han Chinese to Xinjiang to live with Uyghur families in their homes without their consent, so they could spy on them and report back. The CCP called the program Pair Up and Become Family. One day, a new Han Chinese “relative” would just show up at a Uyghur household and start taking notes. The government was also attempting to snuff out the Uyghurs’ religion by leveling hundreds of mosques and making the practice of Islam on a daily basis grounds for being thrown into a camp. Using the guise of fighting terrorism, the CCP waged war on all non-Han Chinese in the province.

The Chinese government was trying to sinicize the region and dilute, if not extinguish, the religion, identity, and culture of over eleven million people. The Uyghurs saw this as ethnic cleansing; the Tibetans prefer the term “cultural genocide.” The stories of torture in the camps, forced sterilization, political indoctrination, and family separation are too numerous to recount, but they make a strong case for the charge of crimes against humanity. So many children were effectively orphaned after their parents were sent to the camps that the authorities began shipping them to orphanages in other parts of China by the thousands. Some parents got their kids back when they got out; many didn’t. Thousands of innocently imprisoned civilians, meanwhile, were “released” only to be sent to work at factories in other provinces, without being offered any choice. That’s called mass forced labor—just one crime against humanity on the long list of offenses for which China will someday have to answer.

Trump may not have objected to China’s human rights depredations, but in Congress there was a unique bipartisan coalition coming together to call for sanctions. Steven Mnuchin fought against them tooth and nail. Whenever the subject of sanctioning Chinese officials or entities came up, the Treasury Department would have an objection. Sometimes, Mnuchin used delay tactics, like withholding documents from the White House that were necessary for sanctions to go forward. Sometimes he would call for a meeting of the principals committee, which caused a delay and gave him a chance to weigh in personally against a sanctions measure. Sometimes, Mnuchin would have his allies on Capitol Hill throw a wrench in a sanctions bill on his behalf. He had a full box of tools for protecting Beijing from sanctions, and he used them liberally.

Orwell on the East Side

The Chinese government was so sensitive about even discussing the situation in Xinjiang, it worked in March 2018 to bar the head of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, a German citizen, from even speaking at the annual UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at UN headquarters in Manhattan. The Chinese UN office had Isa flagged as a terrorist by the UN security office to keep him from entering the building.

It took two days for Kelley Currie, a top US UN official, to convince the UN security apparatus that Isa was not a terrorist but in fact a dissident and human rights activist. Isa was allowed to speak on the final day. But that was not the end of it for Beijing. The Chinese delegation then tried to revoke the consultative status of the German nongovernmental organization that sponsored Isa, the Society for Threatened Peoples, essentially trying to throw them out of the UN as well.

In a heated exchange, Currie called out the Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan that had defended the Chinese position, just out of blind loyalty, and she called on the Chinese representative to produce evidence of his charges.

“This is a very sad and disappointing day to see this committee and particularly members of this committee who espouse to uphold the tenets of Islam indulging in the Chinese delegation’s islamophobia today, in which they conflate the efforts of an individual to advance the religious and human rights of a persecuted minority in China with terrorism,” she said.

The Chinese delegate scolded Currie for “using very bad words” and said, “I can’t understand why she was so emotional.” The Chinese government has always paid attention to and protected the rights of all the ethnic minorities, including the Uyghur people, he said. Beijing, he said with a straight face, respects their religious freedom and their freedom of speech. “A long time ago we have abolished the reeducation through labor system,” he said. “The Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have seen the best protection of their human rights in history.”

China didn’t just want the world to ignore its atrocities in Xinjiang; Beijing actually tried to change the international human rights rules to avoid accountability and justify their actions. In March 2018, China introduced a resolution at the Human Rights Council called “Promoting the International Human Rights Cause Through Win-Win Cooperation.” It would encourage “dialogue” and “cooperation” to resolve human rights complaints, rather than punishment.

Currie traveled to Geneva to oppose it. She referred to Xi Jinping’s “win-win” mantra and accused Chinese diplomats of using the resolution “to glorify their head of state by inserting his thoughts into the international human rights lexicon.”