Shadows of death fly over the skies of Taiwan, grim messages of invasion and enslavement to a conqueror; yet the people faced with promises of destruction by one of history’s true monsters, a state of faceless and dehumanized bureaucrats of totalitarian force and control which having gobbled up Hong Kong now casts a covetous eye to the next stepping stone in its plan of Conquest of the Pacific Rim, those whom the shadows brand victims to be commodified and assimilated into the Chinese Communist Party’s vast machine of profit for the elite hegemony of the ideological elect or killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing as we have witnessed in Xinjiang, the people of Taiwan reply not with the subjugation of learned helplessness but with glorious defiance and resistance.
It’s a lesson humankind and the peoples of China in particular should have learned at Nanking; in the calculus of fear which is politics, there is a point past which strategies of terror and force become meaningless, for when there is no hope the people have nothing to lose by Resistance. This is the great lesson of Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. And it is the principle by which I have lived for forty years of Resistance to fascism and tyranny beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden; as Jean Genet said to me in Beirut in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
And they do not stand alone in this, for America and the free nations of the world stand with them. And like Liberty bearing her Torch as a guarantor of democracy, universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world, Nancy Pelosi has come to perform our role as an embodiment of the values and ideals of a free society of equals, and to proclaim our solidarity
As written by Nancy Pelosi in The Washington Post, in an article entitled Why I’m Leading a Congressional Delegation to Taiwan; “Some 43 years ago, the United States Congress overwhelmingly passed — and President Jimmy Carter signed into law — the Taiwan Relations Act, one of the most important pillars of U.S. foreign policy in the Asia Pacific.
The Taiwan Relations Act set out America’s commitment to a democratic Taiwan, providing the framework for an economic and diplomatic relationship that would quickly flourish into a key partnership. It fostered a deep friendship rooted in shared interests and values: self-determination and self-government, democracy and freedom, human dignity and human rights.
And it made a solemn vow by the United States to support the defense of Taiwan: “to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means … a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.”
Today, America must remember that vow. We must stand by Taiwan, which is an island of resilience. Taiwan is a leader in governance: currently, in addressing the covid-19 pandemic and championing environmental conservation and climate action. It is a leader in peace, security and economic dynamism: with an entrepreneurial spirit, culture of innovation and technological prowess that are envies of the world.
Yet, disturbingly, this vibrant, robust democracy — named one of the freest in the world by Freedom House and proudly led by a woman, President Tsai Ing-wen — is under threat.
In recent years, Beijing has dramatically intensified tensions with Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has ramped up patrols of bombers, fighter jets and surveillance aircraft near and even over Taiwan’s air defense zone, leading the U.S. Defense Department to conclude that China’s army is “likely preparing for a contingency to unify Taiwan with the PRC by force.”
The PRC has also taken the fight into cyberspace, launching scores of attacks on Taiwan government agencies each day. At the same time, Beijing is squeezing Taiwan economically, pressuring global corporations to cut ties with the island, intimidating countries that cooperate with Taiwan, and clamping down on tourism from the PRC.
In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.
Our visit — one of several congressional delegations to the island — in no way contradicts the long-standing one-China policy, guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the U.S.-China Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances. The United States continues to oppose unilateral efforts to change the status quo.
Our visit is part of our broader trip to the Pacific — including Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan — focused on mutual security, economic partnership and democratic governance. Our discussions with our Taiwanese partners will focus on reaffirming our support for the island and promoting our shared interests, including advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific region. America’s solidarity with Taiwan is more important today than ever — not only to the 23 million people of the island but also to millions of others oppressed and menaced by the PRC.
Thirty years ago, I traveled in a bipartisan congressional delegation to China, where, in Tiananmen Square, we unfurled a black-and-white banner that read, “To those who died for democracy in China.” Uniformed police pursued us as we left the square. Since then, Beijing’s abysmal human rights record and disregard for the rule of law continue, as President Xi Jinping tightens his grip on power.
The CCP’s brutal crackdown against Hong Kong’s political freedoms and human rights — even arresting Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen — cast the promises of “one-country, two-systems” into the dustbin. In Tibet, the CCP has long led a campaign to erase the Tibetan people’s language, culture, religion and identity. In Xinjiang, Beijing is perpetrating genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities. And throughout the mainland, the CCP continues to target and arrest activists, religious-freedom leaders and others who dare to defy the regime.
Indeed, we take this trip at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy. As Russia wages its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine, killing thousands of innocents — even children — it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats.
When I led a congressional delegation to Kyiv in April — the highest-level U.S. visit to the besieged nation — I conveyed to President Volodymyr Zelensky that we admired his people’s defense of democracy for Ukraine and for democracy worldwide.
By traveling to Taiwan, we honor our commitment to democracy: reaffirming that the freedoms of Taiwan — and all democracies — must be respected.”
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2020, Taiwan’s Election Reaffirms Independence from Communist China; President Tsai Ing-wen, who campaigned on the slogan “Resist China, Defend Taiwan”, has seized victory yet again in Taiwan’s elections, which reaffirms independence from the rapacious and brutal tyranny of Beijing’s Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
The free people of Taiwan need only look to the repression of democracy in Hong Kong, the racist campaign of sinofication against the Islamic ethnic minority of Xinjiang which is a vast laboratory of state terror, surveillance, and thought control, or the conquest of Tibet and annihilation of its faith and culture to see clearly what the Chinese Communist Party intends for anyone it gobbles up.
America must reverse course on the policy of recognition, loans, and trading status regarding the balance of power between China and Taiwan; the CCP must become a pariah state with whom no free nation will trade until it renounces its declared goal of capturing Taiwan, and abandons Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, to their sovereign independence.
Taiwan would find common cause with a liberated Hong Kong and perhaps with Singapore as well; Beijing’s long range plans for the conquest of South Asia and the Pacific Rim, and the occupation of the world’s capital cities through military enforcement of its Overseas Chinese policy beginning with the imposition of rule on Chinatowns globally, seems glaringly obvious to me and cannot have escaped the attention of those of its neighbors such as Malaysia and Brunei who would be first to fall in a campaign whose initial objective will be control of the sea lanes of trade.
The CCP already controls the Panama Canal through commercial fronts, a third of India’s landmass through its enormous Maoist insurgency, and has a belligerent ally in North Korea; if allowed to complete construction of their strategic archipelago of island fortresses they will be able to interdict shipping in the South China Sea and bring enormous pressure against the target nations they plan to conquer; Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Brunei, and Australia.
This will only be the initial phase of the Chinese Communist Party’s conquest of the Pacific Rim; any nation with a population of Overseas Chinese, whom the CCP claims as citizens regardless of their own will and citizenship, any city like San Francisco with a Chinatown, will be occupied when and if the CCP has the power to do so.
What would a Pacific Rim under the imperial dominion of the Chinese Communist Party look like? For such dystopian visions of our future we need only look to her conquests of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.
Here is a future we must free ourselves from while it remains possible.
We must help Taiwan keep its freedom, help Hong Kong to seize theirs, and together help the nations of the Pacific Rim to secure their independence from conquest by the Chinese Communist Party.
As I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
A Washington Post report looked at the plight of one Uighur woman, Zumrat Dawut, who spent more than two months in a cell that was so cramped that the women there had to lie down in shifts. During the day, they recited propaganda slogans that included praise for Xi.
“When she was let go, she was forced to sign documents agreeing not to practice her religion and not to tell anyone what had happened in the camps,” my colleagues Emily Rauhala and Anna Fifield wrote. “After her detention, she was forced to pay a fine of more than $2,500 for breaking China’s family planning rules by having three, not two, children.”
Terrified by what would happen if she resisted, she complied with a suggestion to submit herself for a sterilization. Dawut, unlike countless of her brethren, managed to escape the country alongside her children and Pakistani husband and made her way to the United States, where she’s hoping to receive asylum. Her troubles captured the attention of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who cited her as a victim of religious persecution.
But Washington’s focus on the horrors in Xinjiang also comes at a time when the Trump administration has made it dramatically harder for refugees and asylum seekers to find sanctuary in the United States. Locked in a trade war with Beijing, President Trump has remained conspicuously silent on pressing matters of human rights, both in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. And, indeed, the protesters in Hong Kong, where clashes with police are turning all the more violent, see China’s unrelenting, unflinching approach taken in Xinjiang as an omen of darker days to come under Beijing rule.
The New York Times report does point to small acts of resistance. In 2017, Wang Yongzhi, a local official in a prefecture in southern Xinjiang, quietly released 7,000 camp inmates of his own volition. As a result, he was stripped of his position, prosecuted and later pilloried as a “corrupt” official. “I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” Wang wrote in a signed confession he may have given under duress. “Without approval and on my own initiative, I broke the rules.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong’ It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and wretched of the earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/02/nancy-pelosi-taiwan-visit-op-ed/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/02/pelosi-oped-defends-taiwan-visit?CMP=share_btn_link
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