Keating ignores genocide to defend his ‘China fantasy’

Paul Keating addresses the National Press Club from Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Every genocide in the 20th century had Western intellectuals willing to downplay it. Heidegger rallied in defence of Nazism and minimised the Holocaust. Jean-Paul Sartre dismissed reports of gulags when they emerged from Stalinist Russia. Michel Foucault was a committed Maoist and, when refugees described cities being emptied in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Noam Chomsky cautioned Westerners against listening.

Sometimes called “tyrannophiles”, due to their sympathy for tyrants, the reasons Western intellectuals have defended totalitarian regimes differ according to time and place.

Some intellectuals sympathised with Stalin because they believed in the promise of Marxist-Leninism. Others were naive, and could legitimately appeal to ignorance. Others simply possessed a contempt for the West.

ABC Foreign Correspondent shows a Chinese re-education camp.

On Wednesday afternoon in an interview at the National Press Club, former prime minister Paul Keating, was asked about the internment of the Uighurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Journalist Matthew Knott asked Keating if he could turn his characteristic invective against the CCP for its treatment of the Uighurs, to which Keating replied “there are disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uighurs are” and “what if the Chinese said … what about deaths in custody of Aboriginal people in your prison system. Wouldn’t that be a valid point for them?”.

Noam Chomsky.

A charitable interpretation of these remarks would be there is not enough evidence to gain a clear picture regarding the detainment of Uighurs, and it would be prudent to withhold judgment until more becomes available. It might also be prudent for Australians to consider their own treatment of ethnic minorities, acknowledging deaths of Aboriginal people are disproportionately high compared to their population size.

In reality, there’s a large body of evidence available detailing the Chinese “affront” to the Uighurs in Xinjiang, from aerial photos of detention centres, to witness testimonies of systematic torture and rape, to demographic data showing a sharp population decline in Uighur regions.

In September 2020, Geoffrey Nice QC, lead prosecutor of the trial against Slobodan Milosevic, chaired the Uighur Tribunal, set up to investigate claims of crimes against humanity. Testimony from former detainees in internment camps described mass torture, rape and gang rape, forced sterilisation and abortion, arbitrary arrest and detention, and child separation. On December 9 the Tribunal concluded China had committed genocide against the Uighur population according to Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention: criterion (d), imposing conditions intended to prevent birth. The tribunal concluded the Communist Party had “reduc(ed) the birthrates and population growth of Uighurs … (through) sterilisation by removal of wombs, widespread enforced insertion of … IUDs … and forced abortions”. Such policies are considered genocidal because they “will result in a partial destruction of the Uighurs”.

Jean-Paul Sartre.

In response to the Tribunal, China sanctioned those who participated in it, while dismissing its findings as “sheer fiction.”

While it is reasonable of Keating to point out witness testimony can be unreliable and there may be some dispute over key facts, to liken the situation in Xinjiang to Aboriginal deaths in custody is mendacious in the extreme. Last year Aboriginal deaths in custody claimed the lives of 24. The Australian government is open and transparent about these deaths. The number of Uighurs detained in re-education camps in Xinjiang is estimated to exceed 1.5 million. The Chinese government seeks to cover this up.

And while the Australian government works to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody, the detainment of Uighurs in Xinjiang is approved at the highest levels of government. In recordings of speeches given to party officials later leaked to Western journalists in 2014, Xi Jinping called on his apparatchiks to erect “walls made of copper and steel” and “nets spread from the earth to the sky,” while calling for the “optimisation” of population demographics. The Xinjiang Statistical Yearbooks shows what this optimisation looks like: a decline in population growth in the Uighur regions of 84 per cent.

Portraits of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong are seen at a market in Beijing.

Writing in Foreign Affairs last October, another former Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, explained that “at the very least, Xi’s embrace of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy should put to rest any wishful thinking that Xi’s China might peacefully liberalise its politics and economy”. After studying his speeches and writing, Rudd concludes Xi is much closer to Mao in his worldview than his three predecessors. Awarded a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University in September 2022 for his study of Xi’s ideology, Rudd now argues Xi’s synthesis of Marxist nationalism is an “ideological blueprint for the future” and “the truth about China that is hiding in plain sight”.

A key feature of rationality is the ability to update one’s beliefs in light of new evidence. Rudd’s attitude to China reflects this ability, whereas Keating’s does not. The belief China would open up and liberalise in response to globalisation has been described by scholars as “the China fantasy”. Like the Western intellectuals who could not give up their dream of a Marxist-Leninist utopia, adherents of the China fantasy now appear willing to dismiss genocide in order to defend it.

Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette.