cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/17926173

Archived version

China has exploited the crisis in Gaza to present itself as a defender of the Palestinians and a champion of the oppressed. That posture appears to be benefiting China in its geopolitical competition with the United States—even though Beijing is guilty of human-rights abuses against a Muslim community within its own territory. The Uyghurs of China suffer mass detention, population suppression, and cultural assimilation under a brutal authoritarian regime. Yet few protests on university campuses demand their freedom, nor do major diplomatic efforts seek to alleviate their misery.

How does China get away with it? The widespread indifference to the Uyghurs’ predicament exposes double standards, not only among today’s prevailing political ideologies, but also within the international politics of human rights. And it flags the danger that China presents to the very principle of universal values.

The issue is not a matter of which group—Palestinians or Uyghurs—is more worthy of the world’s concern. Both suffer, and their suffering is awful. The Palestinian cause is important and deserves the attention it receives. Yet the Uyghurs could use some outrage too. Isolated in remote Xinjiang, their historical homeland in China’s far west, the Uyghurs have no hope of defending themselves against Beijing’s repression without support from the international community.

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Even Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, took Beijing’s position on Xinjiang during a visit to China in 2023. In a joint statement he issued with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Abbas asserted that Beijing’s policies toward Muslims in Xinjiang have “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.”

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“The suffering of Palestinians reverberates with a familiar pain,” Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human-rights lawyer, recently wrote on the website of Dawn, an organization dedicated to human rights in the Middle East. “The dehumanization of the Palestinian people and the collective punishment they endure from Israel’s war have shattered the very fabric of their society, much like what China has inflicted upon my [Uyghur] people.” The Georgetown scholars Nader Hashemi and James Millward, in a recent essay on the same site, weave a parallel narrative of colonization, repression, (sometimes violent) resistance, and more repression. That world leaders deny the true brutality of one group’s repression or the other—depending on their geopolitical perspective—“reveals the hole at the heart of the supposedly rules-based international order,” they wrote.

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Xinjiang was conquered in the mid-18th century by the Qing dynasty (around the same time the British were marching on India) and then claimed by the current People’s Republic of China after its formation in 1949. Now the Communist Party insists that Xinjiang is an integral part of China. Beijing has imposed its political system and Chinese language and culture on the Uyghurs, who are a Central Asian people and speak a language related to Turkish. The community of less than 12 million is also under pressure from an influx of migrants (you could call them “settlers”) from the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group. Official census data from 2020 show that the Han population in Xinjiang expanded by 25 percent over the preceding decade, while the number of Uyghurs grew by only 16 percent.

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[China’s] Xi Jinping] has greatly intensified repression of the Uyghurs in recent years in an effort to tighten his control of the region. A million or more Uyghurs were arbitrarily detained in “reeducation camps” and then imprisoned or pressed into a system of forced labor. The Israelis keep the Palestinians something of a people apart; Xi seeks to assimilate the Uyghurs into a broader “Chinese” identity by suppressing their language, history, and religious life. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute described the strategy as a “systematic and intentional campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage” of the community. Perhaps the most chilling element of Beijing’s program is a concerted effort to curtail the growth of the Uyghur population through forced sterilization and other means. The pressure has contributed to a sharp reduction in the number of Uyghur births. The goal of these policies, as one Chinese official put it, is to “break their lineage, break their roots.”

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The Chinese government denies that it commits these human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and insists that it is merely rooting out terrorism. A concerted propaganda campaign on state-owned media platforms presents Xinjiang as a model of peaceful economic development. Meanwhile, Beijing has erected a police state that has effectively sealed off the region from international scrutiny. With journalists, activists, and officials from international agencies unable to freely investigate or monitor conditions, the stream of stories and images that might fuel anger is limited, and the Uyghurs’ plight is kept largely out of sight. Beijing’s “slow, horrifying obliteration of cultures and peoples,” Hannah Theaker, a historian of Xinjiang at the University of Plymouth, explained to me, “does not produce images of destruction that are likely to seize attention in a crowded news environment.” By contrast, she said, “the horror of Gaza is unfolding in real time to the international public eye.”

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Still, the evidence of Chinese abuses is substantial, and the reasons for ignoring it run deep into ideologies about the injustices of a postcolonial world, at least among some elements of the political left. Israel, from this viewpoint, is an outgrowth of European colonialism; it represses and displaces a local people, with the backing of the United States, which is seen as the successor to the empires of the West. China doesn’t fit neatly into this narrative. As a socialist state (or so many believe) also victimized by Western imperialism, China is perceived by elements of the left as less malign than Israel, however terrible its human-rights abuses might be.

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The Uyghur cause is also hampered by the hard realities of Chinese global wealth and power. Unlike Israel, which is largely diplomatically isolated beyond a handful of major supporters, China is a growing force in international diplomacy. Many world leaders’ silence about Xinjiang has, in effect, been purchased. These governments know that China could cut off the gravy train of aid, investment, and financing if they publicly criticized Beijing’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs. Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, admitted as much in a 2021 interview. Asked why he criticizes the West’s attitude toward Muslims but not China’s abuse of the Uyghurs, he responded, “Whatever issues we have with the Chinese, we speak to them behind closed doors. China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times. When we were really struggling, our economy was struggling, China came to our rescue.”

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China has aimed to capitalize on the turmoil in Gaza in order to win international support in its geopolitical competition with the United States, especially in the global South. Beijing’s diplomats have vociferously supported the Palestinians throughout the Gaza conflict and carefully avoided criticism of Hamas and its October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians, in sharp contrast to Washington’s backing of Israel, which is widely unpopular around the world. The strategy has succeeded in bolstering China’s image. A survey of public views in the Middle East by Arab Barometer found that China’s standing in the region has risen since the Gaza crisis began, while the U.S. is seen less favorably.

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The fact that China’s leaders even attempt to champion the Palestinians while treating Muslims in their own country as enemies of the state is an indication of how steep the Uyghurs’ climb will be to win international support and sympathy. For now, advocates for the Uyghurs will find it hard to overcome this combination of ideological certainties and raw Chinese political and economic power. The Uyghurs will remain outsiders to the global outrage machine, and some injustices will be considered less unjust than others.