Everything Wrong With China Right Now

For a long time, I have used ignorance as an excuse to keep quiet about the atrocities being committed within the corrupt government in mainland China, known as the Communist Party of China (CPC).

I did this pretty unknowingly as well - defending mainland China and downplaying its actions for years, despite not even being fully aware of all that was going on there.

Pervasive surveillance and censorship? Ah well, those things happen to an extent in any developed country, haha.

I’ve asked idiotic rhetorical questions such as, “Is the government in China really so bad? Everyone seems happy to blindly worship secretary Xi Jinping so… whatever works over there, we shouldn’t interfere. Plus capitalistic America comes with its own problems, so are we really one to judge?”

Boy, was I wrong.

China’s government is extremely problematic, for several reasons. For one thing, the surveillance we are talking about in China is not only used to quickly catch common criminals (even publicly shaming offenders of petty jaywalking!) but to racially profile and identify the Uighur Muslims living in the Xinjiang region.

Right now the illegal detainment of the Turkish ethnic minority in the country is comparable to a modern day genocide, paralleling the methodical structure of Nazi concentration camps that murdered an estimate of 17 million people total.

Within these Uighur “work camps,” continously rising in number since over 85 of them have been identified in 2017, occurs rampant abuse: torture through electrocution, beatings, rape and sexual assault, alongside death of Uighur prisoners.

Currently, around 3 million Uighur Muslims are being forced to undergo strange rituals where they must declare their utter commitment to party leader Xi Jinping, denounce their own faith, drink alcohol and eat pork - or face drastic consequences.

I had once believed the Communist Party of China when they denied accusations of abuse in what they called “reeducation camps,” and I even reassured my friend of this when she brought the news to me.

Don’t make the same mistake that I did. Please.

The CPC claims that they are “not anti-Muslim,” and have justified their abuse of the Uighur Muslims by pointing out terrorist attacks from 2013 and 2014 carred out by Uigher extremists.

This targeted incarceration of Muslims for the crimes of a few is similar to America’s mass detainment of Americans with Japanese ancestry during World War 2, after the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked Pearl Harbor. Not only is the CPC being blatantly racist, but also incredibly discriminatory towards religion.

When dealing with terrorism, we must first recognize violent radicals as separate from the religion that they associate with. This is a mistake in history that we cannot afford to repeat. Islamophobia continues to rise in the US, Europe and the rest of the world, when the sad truth remains that most victims of terrorism are Muslims.

Western media also has a tendency to over dramatize attacks committed by Muslims, revealed by a 2019 study done by the Georgia State University and the University of Alabama. Their research shows that Muslim perpetrators receive up to 357% more media coverage than attacks committed by other groups, which is trully appalling.

I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of anti-Muslim propoganda is being spread in mainland China, if this is the case in America.

I was also horrified to find out that America has played an active role in supplying Beijing with the surveillance tools used to spy on Uighur Muslims.

This has helped allow the CPC to get away with their detainment of the Muslims. Uighur Muslims are prevented from speaking with their family members for years, as doing so would likely result in phone calls being overheard by Chinese party officials and land any one that they contact into the camps. Activists are also under constant danger from being imprisoned as well.

The censorship in China is alarming for this reason - the CPC are ruthless when it comes to censoring any material or content that they deem a threat to their political system and single party way of life. They have even kept facts about the recent COVID-19 hidden from the rest of the world, contributing to its spread all over the globe, costing us money, time, resources, and lives - all of which could have been prevented, according to studies noted in The New York Times.

Doctors from Wuhan as well as Chinese journalists who sought to expose the truth about the rising number of cases were promptly shut down by censorship from local bureaucrats and the government. Perhaps the party did this because they genuinely believed that they had the situation under control, but I doubt it. For China, it is all about keeping the peace of the country and trying to keep up an appearance of unity and strength - this is what all of their actions come down to, after all.

In fact, mainland China is now seeking to dominate Hong Kong, an extension of China that has been formally allowed to act as its own separate entity - up until this point. Why is Hong Kong’s fight for freedom important to Americans?

Because the people in Hong Kong, right now, are struggling to maintain their democracy and if they lose the fight against China’s authoritarianism, over 7 million people will be subject to the CPC’s tyrannical rule. This equates to even more religious persecution, suffering, unlawful surveillance and loss of basic human rights across the globe.

We must support Hong Kong’s fight for democracy, in a time where all major media outlets are focusing on the COVID-19 and the upcoming presidential election in America. As people are distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, China has already begun to encroach on its original promise of allowing Hong Kong to be autonomous until 2047.

Over a dozen democracy activists, including 81 year old Martin Lee, were arrested on the same day this month, and Beijing officials have now called for a “national security law” that would allow mainland China to supervise Hong Kong - violating the agreement between the two territories. It is no coincidence that the CPC has decided to take these actions now, during a time in which the movement for independence has been weakened by police brutality and the impacts of the coronavirus.

Residents of Hong Kong fear that the CPC ramping up its offense against the city could mean the “death of the ‘two systems,” as voiced by student Eric Cheung at the University of Hong Kong. Cheung explains,“It is quite clear that they are now bringing the mainland system, the mainland idea of supervision and rule of law, here.”

This might have been China’s plan all along - to give Hong Kong the illusion that they possessed freedom and autonomy while slowly encroaching on their rights as the years passed.

Jake Tran describes this process of manipulating a population perfectly in his video, “China: A Masterclass in Controlling the Population,” in which the government repeatedly steps over the boundaries of its peoples, to gauge how much the public is able to take.

Firing officials who disagree with their policies as well as locking up and/or blocking out any dissent is also a well known tactic that mainland China and other successful dictatorships have used in the past to keep their population under control, and it is still being used today.

The authoritarian government repeats the process of manipulation until the country’s citizens are way past the line of comfort and adjusted to a new way of life - one isolated from the rest of the world.

We see this with several instances of visa and entry denial to foreign journalists and activists “for unstated reasons,” again in an effort to minimize damaging press made about the CPC and keep the country contained.

China is also known for penalizing organizations such as the Human Rights Watch, for supporting Hong Kong’s fight for democracy. If this isn’t evidence that mainland China is incredibly anti-human rights, then I don’t know what is.

As an 18 year old Chinese American, the fight against the Communist Party of China is a difficult one. While the CPC are indeed effective in neutralizing external threats and the average, well off Chinese citizen has nothing to fear (so long as they follow all of the rules imposed on them) countless other people are being subjected to inhumane conditions and abuse.

I admit that I haven’t yet figured out the balance between urging the Chinese government to stop their atrocities, while still respecting the millions of loyal citizens living in the country - generations of families and workers. These are real people who have grown up brainwashed - who are taught that no other way of life outside of their own society should be accepted. Nor do I have a compelling solution that would solve all of the problems mentioned in this article.

One might be quick to say, “Just stop trading with them!” but it is more complicated than that.

China has grown extremely powerful. According to Industry Week, we depend on China more than China depends on the United States. America continues to be China’s #1 consumer as they provide us the cheap products that low income Americans buy in order to sustain daily life. On top of that, our country also looks to China for funding towards budget deficits. They are “the largest foreign holder of the U.S. Treasury securities – some $1.3 trillion in direct ownership and at least another $250 billion of quasi-government paper.”

If China were to stop buying, our own economy would also likely be impacted in a major way.

So no, we can’t just stop trading with the Chinese. Anyone who blindly goes around making that statement is ill informed of the reality that we face. Even if our country were able to stop endorsing China completely, this doesn’t change the fact that several other countries are allied with China - so much so that 37 countries have actually publicly defended the internment camps of the Uighur Muslims that I spoke about earlier.

These countries have praised China for its “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights,” in July of 2019, and even prominent Arab leaders such as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has condoned China, expressing that it was China’s “right” to imprison Muslims for the sake of anti-terrorism. He then went on to sign major commercial contracts with China. Wow.

Other Arab nations followed suit in their support of China, similarly for economic and financial purposes, which was extremely disappointing to hear about - but can we really be surprised at this point?

None of this is new information. A few Google searches will lead you to the several articles that I’ve referenced to within this piece, so it is not as if there is a lack of information in the United States about these issues. The problem is what gains traction and attention from viewers.

Not enough people are aware of the extent of damage that the CCP is causing as it continues to get away with literal crimes against humanity, and not enough people care.

But there is strength in numbers - we, the people, decide what makes the big news and we are the ones who can affect change. The one thing that we can do to support the Uighur Muslims and Hong Kong’s fight for freedom is to continue to spread information and reach out to your local politicians. Write to your Senators and the White House. Support the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and ask your community leaders to speak about these issues too.

By staying silent, we are falling right into the trap of allowing and essentially encouraging the rights of countless people to be taken away.

I fear that what we’re seeing right now, still early into 2020, is only the start of something much more horrifying. It pains me to think that 20, 40, 60 years down the line, we will deeply regret having let this humanitarian crisis fly right under our noses. We cannot allow China’s government to get away with this.

There cannot be a second Holocaust.