It’s time for the world to stand up to China on human rights abuses
The world cannot keep ignoring China’s grave human rights abuses and military expansionism just to keep access to cheap consumer goods and export markets, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Imagine if, instead of using Germany’s vast industrial base to make weapons with which to conquer the world, Hitler set his factories to making cheap consumer goods to lull it into complacency instead?
Because while there are plenty of differences between China under Xi Jinping and Germany under the Third Reich, anyone who has been watching over the past decade will have noticed a worrying number of similarities, too.
Without diminishing the unique horror that was the Holocaust, everything from Beijing’s military bumptiousness to an increasingly official racial chauvinism should be sounding alarm bells among anyone who has been watching.
This week drone footage surfaced, which may have been taken as long as a year ago, of Uighur prisoners being loaded onto trains somewhere in China for points unknown.
As The Guardian reported: “The video … shows what appear to be Uighur Muslims or people from other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police.”
This comes amid increasing reports that ethnic Uighur women are being forced to undergo compulsory abortions and birth control procedures, and that men are rounded up for forced labour, as part of an official program of persecution against the Muslim minority, which makes its home in the northwest Xinjiang region of China.
Apologies if this sounds trite, but I think we’ve seen this movie before.
And it doesn’t end well.
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Perhaps most disturbing are the reports of forcible organ harvesting.
Last June, a tribunal in London handed down a damning report, which received startlingly little attention in the world press, which found that China regularly harvests organs from prisoners and detainees.
As Aaron Sarin reported in the invaluable web journal Quillette.com earlier this year: “Throughout most of the world the disparity between donor numbers and patient numbers leads to long waiting lists, but in China it is possible to get a heart transplant
within a matter of days, and some individuals have been told that they can travel to the mainland on a specific date and immediately receive their transplant.
“In other words, the Chinese authorities know exactly when a particular person is due to die, and they can guarantee that a healthy heart will be found in the to-be-deceased … this could only occur if there was an available bank of potential living donors who could be sacrificed to order.”
Add to this Beijing giving Hong Kong the full iron boot treatment, their illegal expansionism in the South China Sea (what’s Mandarin for “lebensraum”?), and the Chinese Communist Party’s seemingly wilful mishandling of the coronavirus.
It is increasingly obvious that the biggest challenge we face with China isn’t how much of our iron they will buy or how many students they will send.
To put it another way, history may not always repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
All of which poses a serious challenge for the rest of the world.
Because while a realist foreign policy understands that not every government conducts itself with the greatest respect for a free press or elections, neither are those nations harvesting organs for profit or enslaving ethnic populations — and using the products of their cheap labour to buy off their critics, no less.
In short, it is now well past time for the world to look at what is going on in China as something that is uniquely evil and which demands our attention.
Yet far too many of us in the West are gulled by the promise of access to Chinese markets. There was a telling example out of the US this week which illustrates the point.
There, the NBA, which has lent its support to every left-wing social and racial justice cause imaginable, was found to have blocked fans on one of their official sites from customising jerseys with the words “FREE HONG KONG”. Those who tested the site found that “FREE AMERICA”, “FREE MEXICO”, and that eternal
rallying cry, “FREE CANADA”, were all OK, however.
This is the same NBA which also had fans bundled out of the stands for holding up signs promoting Hong Kong freedom, lest they lose their rights to beam games into the mainland.
But it’s not just the NBA.
Whether it is Hollywood censoring films to crack the lucrative China market or local Australian resources barons telling Beijing’s critics to cool it, too many are still willing to look the other way.
China’s appalling behaviour is also a challenge for many on the left.
So committed are they to the narrative that Donald Trump’s America is the worst place in the
world, in no small part for the way he has talked about Muslims, they cannot process the idea that he has picked a fight with a nation that is actually trying to eliminate its Muslim population.
It’s not all bad news.
Plenty of large corporations have begun to move their manufacturing out of China.
Economic reports suggest that the country’s growth trajectory may never allow it the dominance Xi seeks.
And whispers in the intelligence community suggest their hypersonic wonder weapons may not, at the end of the day, be all that.
Hopefully we never have to find out. But we must increasingly prepare for the day we do.