Anglo-American institutions are leading anti-China campaign with false accounts of repression in Xinjiang, a special report found

A screenshot of the Special Report on the official website of the Australian Citizens Party

The Australian Citizens Party, formerly the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, recently published a 40-page Special Report, entitled Xinjiang: China’s Western Frontier in the Heart of Eurasia, which elaborates on China’s long and grueling battle against its convoluted domestic terrorism threat at home and in the wider region, while unraveling the Anglo-American sponsorship of “East Turkistan” separatism and the fostering of radical Islamist terrorism.

The report outlined its research into multiple terrorist attacks that occurred in China spanning the period from 1990 to 2016, during which “more than one thousand civilians were killed in thousands of terrorist attacks, committed by ‘East Turkestan’ groups in Xinjiang”, with attacks including “bombings, assassinations of government officials and Uygur and Muslim religious leaders, mass murders, and attempts to hijack and blow up planes.”

Artists prepare to perform during a culture and tourism festival themed on Dolan and Qiuci culture in Awat County of Aksu Prefecture, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region, Oct. 25, 2019. (Photo/Xinhua)

In referencing three horrendous attacks that were planned and committed “not in Xinjiang alone” between March and May 2014, the report highlighted that the terrorist threat facing China at the time had escalated towards “a new level of expertise, timing, and coordination.” Following terrorist attacks in Kunming, Yunnan Province on March 1 that killed 31 and injured 141, a knife attack and bombing on April 30 at the Urumqi Railway Station that took the lives of three and injured 79 more, and a vehicle-ramming attack in Urumqi on May 22 that left 39 dead and 94 wounded, the report added that the then-Xinjiang Communist Party chief Zhang Chunxian announced an “intensive counterterrorism and anti-extremism campaign”, with a warning that “Violent terrorist attacks have become the most immediate and realistic peril to social stability in Xinjiang.”

“The crescendo of terrorist acts up through 2014, as well as a different type of disturbance…made it clear that economic development would not deter the instigators,” the report read.

Participants of a joint drill perform an anti-hijacking exercise on Aug. 13, 2019. The joint drill "Cooperation-2019," held by the Chinese People's Armed Police Force (PAP) and the National Guard of Kyrgyzstan, concluded Tuesday in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Photo by Tian Xiaopeng/Xinhua)

China’s efforts to educate and rehabilitate individuals either guilty of crimes or being influenced by religious extremism, including by providing “vocational training, civics classes in Chinese law, improvement in the national language where needed, and religious education led by Islamic scholars” have proved successful in “ending the terrorist threat within China,” with all the vocational education and training centers having been transformed into public education facilities by 2019. And, after all is said and done, “there has not been a terrorist incident in China for the past three years [now four years as of 2021],” according to the report.

China’s painstaking counterterrorism efforts and its hard-won success in eliminating domestic extremism and radicalism, unfortunately and unsurprisingly has become a handy tool “to drive a narrative of indiscriminate oppression of Xinjiang’s Uygur Muslim population” for “the American, British and allied geopolitical strategists who are bent on conflict with China, and their helpers in the media.”

Adrian Zenz Photo: Screenshot of an online video

The baseless accusations against China soon morphed into extravagant revelries fed on by disinformation and fabricated reports, in which a cunning albeit third-rate academician could suddenly turn himself into a guru of statistical and investigative data, with dubious documents in hand worshiped as if they were the holy verse – taken upon face value as sacrosanct and immutable. A recent article co-authored by Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal exposed anti-China zealot Adrian Zenz, a German scholar who “testified several times before the US Congress in 2018-19 during the run-up to passage of the Uygur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020”, having uncovered “flagrant data abuse, fraudulent claims, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations” in Adrian Zenz’s works.

The same Anglo-American institutions that are leading the anti-China campaign, based on false accounts of repression in Xinjiang, had “weaponized ‘human rights’ issues long ago, for regime-change goals,” the report read. By deploying a support base “within the Uygur diaspora”, they aim at not only “destabilizing or even fragmenting a given country” but also “setting ‘thought rules’ for public opinion and political circles elsewhere—for example, in the USA or Australia.”

Graphic/People’s Daily Online

One of their tactics is to continuously fund separatist groups in Xinjiang. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious organization sponsored by the US Congress, has funneled “8.76 million dollars since 2004” to separatist groups operating in the autonomous region. According to its published Asia Program and Annual Reports, the NED in 2010 prioritized “the rights of ethnic minorities” in projects focused on “Xinjiang/East Turkistan”. In December 2020, NED’s Twitter account posted a map on which “Xinjiang was labeled as ‘East Turkistan’ and colored with the East Turkistan flag”.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both of which “have long records of selectively targeting their human rights campaigns in alignment with British and American foreign policy”, have also ganged up with NED in their targeting of China. Amnesty International’s founder, Peter Benenson, who had previously served in the UK’s Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, once said that “its ultimate objectives” were more or less aligned with “those of Her Majesty’s Governments”. On the other hand, in 2014, more than 100 scholars, including two Nobel Peace Prize laureates and a UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, “publicly called on Human Rights Watch to close the ‘revolving door’ through which it shares personnel with the US Government,” as pointed out in a statement published at the time.

Amnesty International has released two “reports” on Xinjiang, one in September 2018 and another in February 2020. The first report was compiled based on interviews with residents from Kazakhstan, with a Kazakh activist group named Atajurt having been responsible for arranging the interviews. Atajurt’s Xinjiang-born leader is known for his fiery statements, having once proclaimed that “If my brother works for the Chinese, if my brother sells himself to the Chinese, I would kill him”. The follow-up report published in 2020 was compiled by Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based China researcher for Amnesty International, which was based mostly on anonymous interviews and a questionnaire “circulated among a closed pool of trusted Uygur contacts”.

A September 2018 Human Rights Watch report rallying against China’s “campaign of repression” in Xinjiang also relied on related interviews, having been “arranged by the same Kazakhstan-based activists, with anonymous ethnic Kazakhs who had left Xinjiang,” according to the seventh section of the Special Report.

U.S. soldiers inspect the site of suicide car bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 17, 2015. Four people were killed and several others wounded when a suicide car bomb exploded near the airport of the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, sources and witnesses said. (Xinhua/Ahmad Massoud)

The final two sections of the 40-page Special Report, entitled “The ‘East Turkistan’ narrative”, was issued by the Australian Citizens Party on April 10, at a time when “the USA, UK, and European Union—with applause from the Australian government—slapped sanctions on China for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and the weighty term “genocide” was thrown around without evidence…”, and four days ahead of Joe Biden’s announcement that the US would withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by September 11, ending a “regime-change effort and aerial bombardment campaign” orchestrated by the US and supplemented by the UK government that has decimated the entire nation and “fostered the emergence of more terrorists than existed before.”