The Chinese Communists love to portray themselves in the media as modern Communists who have created the "perfect" society. So they don't like it very much when Westerners lift the veil on their gulag and show the world how just like the old Communists they truly are.
What's going on in Xinjiang is genocide, according to the U.S. State Department and many EU countries.
Forced labor, torture, forced migration, stifling freedom of religion, and generally trying to brainwash Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples trying to get them to abandon their beliefs, have shown the brutal side of the Communist regime in Bejing.
We wouldn't know as much about this oppression if it weren't for the work of some Western research and human rights companies that have exposed the brutality of the regime in Xinjiang province like the research and data analytics firm Kharon.
The Chinese government has taken the drastic step of sanctioning Kharon and two individuals for their work in exposing China's human rights atrocities.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was quoted as announcing late Tuesday night that Los Angeles-based research and data analytics firm Kharon, its director of investigations, Edmund Xu, and Nicole Morgret, a human rights analyst affiliated with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, would be barred from traveling to China. Also, any assets or property they have in China will be frozen and organizations and individuals in China are prohibited from making transactions or otherwise cooperating with them.
In a statement on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, Mao said the sanctions against the company, Xu and Morgret were retaliation for a yearly U.S. government report on human rights in Xinjiang. Uyghurs and other natives of the region share religious, linguistic and cultural links with the scattered peoples of Central Asia and have long resented the Chinese Communist Party’s heavy-handed control and attempts to assimilate them with the majority Han ethnic group.
“The Chinese government is undertaking a concerted drive to industrialize the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which has led an increasing number of corporations to establish manufacturing operations there. This centrally-controlled industrial policy is a key tool in the government’s efforts to forcibly assimilate Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples through the institution of a coerced labor regime," wrote Nicole Morgret in 2022.
China claims innocence. The Chinese say that they're brainwashing the Uyghurs for their own good, ridding them of their "extremist tendencies" and teaching them job skills.
Does a nine-year-old girl have "extremist tendencies"? The Communists start them young.
China has long denied such allegations, saying the large-scale network of prison-like facilities through which passed hundreds of thousands of Muslim citizens were intended only to rid them of violent, extremist tendencies and teach them job skills. Former inmates describe harsh conditions imposed without legal process and demands that they denounce their culture and sing the praises of President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party daily.
China says the camps are all now closed, but many of their former inmates have reportedly been given lengthy prison sentences elsewhere. Access to the region by journalists, diplomats and others is tightly controlled, as is movement outside the region by Uyghurs, Kazaks and other Muslim minorities.
There will be other research firms like Kharon and individuals like Nicole Morgret who will put it all on the line to tell the truth about the Chinese Communists. As totalitarians have found throughout history, oppression is always exposed because when someone armed with the truth is silenced, another rises to take his place.
Bejing will never be in the clear.
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