MEMBERS OF THE UYGHUR minorities in China are treated shockingly badly, attendees at an international gathering this week agreed.
The products, rights, jobs, of Uyghur people were being hit hard – by deeply unfair sanctions and policies from the United States and their allies. While the regional authorities provided training and funding for new industries in Xinjiang, the west is harming the people they are claiming to defend.
- The US has forced the closure of export firms in China’s northwest, directly causing Uyghur job losses.
- The west is banning entire product lines simply because they come from Xinjiang in northwest China.
- And worst of all, unfair laws from the US Commerce Department mean that every item from Uyghur areas is classified by default as a production of slave labor, even if it is produced entirely by machine.
200 REPRESENTATIVES
The western campaign to harm the Uyghur community was discussed by delegates at the International Symposium on Employment and Social Security in Xinjiang this week. More than 200 representatives from 44 countries, regions and organizations attended the event.
“This is an international campaign against China using the lies and distorted facts about Xinjiang,” French writer Maxime Vivas told a Xinhua reporter at the meeting in Urumqi.
An American, Mark Levine, said: “What I learned about life in Xinjiang and all I saw runs counter to what those who wish to detour China’s progress want us to believe,” he told the press.
THIS WRITER’S TESTIMONY
The present writer knows this to be true. I have personally talked to business people, Asians and westerners, who have been doing business in Xinjiang for years.
One big American export buyer told me that whenever he dealt with a Chinese company, he now had to ask whether they employed any Uyghurs – and if they did, he would sadly cross them off his list.
“They [the US authorities] say they are doing this to help the Uyghurs, but it is clearly doing the opposite,” he told me.
DEMONIZATION CAMPAIGN
From 2018, the US and its “five eyes” allies stepped a campaign to demonize China. Lurid tales of millions of people being locked up “concentration camps” were widely circulated by the media from 2019 to about 2021. Since then, hundreds of millions of people have visited Xinjiang and many people, including journalists, know the stories aren’t true. But sanctions remain in place.
In addition to the “catch-all” policies about products from Xinjiang, more than 40 enterprises from the region have been directly sanctioned, with some being forced to reduce production or close down, causing many Uyghur workers to lose their jobs.
‘EVERYONE LOSES‘
The US-led attack is an “everyone loses” policy, attendees at the event this week said. To take one example, Xinjiang cotton is regarded as being among the best in the world – and now westerners have no access to it. It’s bad for them, and bad for the workers making it.
The US Commerce Dept says the cotton is produced “by slave labor”. Yet cotton farming is now almost entirely done by machine. “The mechanization rate of cotton harvesting in Xinjiang has reached 97 percent,” Chen Quanjia, dean of college of agricultural sciences, Xinjiang Agricultural University, told Xinhua.
LURID REPORTS
But how to overturn this? It’s hard to get the real story out there, many attendees say. The dominant international media IS the western media, and they are so invested in the Five Eyes narrative, that none of them will correct the earlier lurid reports.
And sadly, they don’t seem to care that the lies are having a harmful effect. Because it’s not just the cotton industry that is under attack. Xinjiang is also one of the world’s top tomato growing areas. Businesses there make export quality solar panels, wigs, and chemicals.
“The businesses under sanctions are all Xinjiang’s basic industries and sectors that are essential to the region’s development and stability,” said Li Juan, director of the legislative affairs committee under the standing committee of the regional people’s congress.
Levine, an academic who has done a lot of travelling through the country over many years, said that the negative portrayal of the Chinese authorities in general has been unfair. “I saw the successful eradication of extreme poverty through my many travels to cities and the countryside,” he said.