Information wars: are we getting a fair view of China’s treatment of Uyghurs?

Genocide or puffery and clickbait? Independent journalism is the touchstone of MWM. So when a widespread narrative about China is challenged, who better than former China correspondent for The Australian, Michael Sainsbury, to sort the wheat from the propaganda chaff?

The media’s China narrative is apt to give the average reader whiplash. Once upon a time we read about a country where everyone wore green suits and rode bicycles, stopping to beat the sparrows out of the trees. Then everyone started getting rich, thanks to Deng ”To Get Rich is Glorious” Xiaoping. Tiananmen Square chilled every Australian from Bob Hawke down but the 1989 massacre didn’t stop us sending not-so-slow boats to China full of iron ore and coal. To get Australia rich was glorious. Now we hear a lot about misery being inflicted on minorities. Is the reporting as superficial as we have come to expect? It’s time for a serious examination.

The Five-Eyes/China Propaganda War

There is a propaganda war. It pits the China Communist Party against the West, led by the Five Eyes – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. To these we can also add Japan and South Korea, China’s mutually wary north Asian neighbours.

The latest battle in the war is being fought here in Australia over the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s report Uyghurs for Sale: ‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang.

Its main theme is the re-education camps in Xinjiang and subsequent sending Uyghurs out for what it describes as forced labour in factories in the east of China in tough conditions, although they are paid rather than enslaved.

Considering that many of these factories are used by well-known Western clothing and retail brands, the report has sent shockwaves through the industry, with some withdrawing work from these factories.

Lawyer and activist Jaq James has prepared a lengthy rebuttal. Her paper,  The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Uyghurs for Sale Report: Scholarly Analysis or Strategic Disinformation?, offers as a detailed unpicking ASPI’s reporting as loose/fudged and often second and third hand, as well as resulting in Uyghurs losing their jobs.

Lead author on ASPI’s report is analyst, journalist and comedian Vicky Xu. Xu and her work have received widespread publicity in mainstream media. Yet the coverage has been devoid of scrutiny. Scrutiny has come however in independent media, particularly in John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations, which has run stories by Jaq James and others questioning Xu’s claims.

An obliteration of ASPI’s ‘Uyghurs For Sale’ report: take two

The biggest problem with both the reports is a lack of context, so let’s start at the beginning.

For decades, the Australian government – and much of the media here – had often wilfully ignored China’s human rights abuses, now the pendulum has swung decisively, and too far, the other way. 

There is no question that the ruling Chinese Communist Party is authoritarian. It is utterly ruthless repressing its own people – most particularly anyone who dares to criticise it – in the name of order as it tries to manage an unwieldy population of 1.4 billion people spread across 31 provinces and municipalities. But it also needs to be recognised, as Australian governments have for decades that the CCP has done an admirable job of turning around China’s economy – now the world’s second biggest – creating a huge amount of wealth as well as often First World lifestyle choices for its citizens for the first time.

In Australia the general attitude of the mainstream media to China swung very quickly from one of general praise and excitement about the wealth China has and is creating in Australia – while turning a blind eye to China’s serial and ongoing human rights abuses with the aim of supporting trade – to one of one-sided vituperation that can drift into racism.

When I was The Australian’s China correspondent from 2009-2012, the message from the editor’s desk was to focus on business and trade. Getting stories about the Communist Party’s human rights abuses that did not involve Australians being locked up was almost impossible. The export story – the iron ore, minerals, food, wool and wine that Australia has sold in the hundreds of billions of dollars to China – was pretty much the only one to tell.

Since the Australia-China relationship began to deteriorate, only a couple of years after Tony Abbott and his trade minister Andrew Robb triumphantly signed the Australia China Free Trade agreement, the press has tuned in sync with our current Coalition masters who now demonise our largest trading partner.

The divisive black-and-white politics that have emerged on the back of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison have only emboldened the Murdoch press’ anti-China campaigns and this has bled into all the Australian mainstream media.

Uyghurs: pawns in the propaganda war

The latest pawns in this propaganda war are the already put-upon Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

This burst back into the media’s 24-hour cycle with the publication of the report by the well-funded and staffed ASPI, a so-called think tank funded by the Australian government, its allies and a slew of the world’s biggest arms dealers. 

ASPI is well run and staffed by smart, educated and eloquent people. Much of its work is worthy but its aim on China is squarely and relentlessly negative. Although bereft of nuance, its reports are gobbled up by a thinly stretched mainstream media who know anti-China stories sell.

The irony, and there’s plenty to go around here, is that ASPI performs precisely the role that it critiques weekly, sometimes daily about China’s own massive propaganda machine. 

Indeed, ASPI departing head honcho Peter Jennings is now a star columnist at The Australian, regularly taking a front-page spot. His latest offering this week was headlined: “We must ditch peacetime mindset”, enough said. This is the same Peter Jennings who was an adviser to John Howard around the time he backed Australia into the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The skeleton staff left at Australia’s once mighty mastheads, after revenues were decimated by the internet, are less experienced than in previous decades and dangerously time-stretched with no nuanced insights into China. This has only been exacerbated by the exit of all the Australian press on the ground in China who used to fulfil a balancing role.

I was one of them and I can tell you there is no replacement for on-the-ground reporters no matter how restricted they might be. It doesn’t help that no one in the Australian government is talking to their counterparts in China, as Beijing attempts to use Australia as an exemplar of what economic pain it can inflict. This is very much a work in progress.

Unfortunately, neither the ASPI report nor James’s response has proved the necessary context to the situation in Xinjiang. So let me start with some from on the ground. James, critically, does not concede at all that there has been wholesale repression of the Uyghurs (along with Tibetans and many other minorities). This is very real. 

China’s Xinjiang strategy is all about security  

In December 2009, I travelled to Xinjiang province in the far north-west of China. It was five months after ethnic violence in the province’s major cities Urumqi, Kashgar and other towns – between the majority Han Chinese who have been migrating to the province steadily over decades and now form a majority, and Turkic, Muslim Uyghur people who consider it their homeland. For a brief time in the 20th century before the rise of the CCP a swathe of the province was an independent East Turkestan. The violence saw hundreds of people die and thousands injured – and official tolls are rarely real in China.

We visited the capital Urumqi, itself 4000 kilometres from the Beijing, and Kashgar – the spiritual home of the Uyghurs and famed Silk Road entrepot that is nestled close to the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the Muslim Indian state of Kashmir. In the north and east – Russian and Mongolia.

The place – especially Kashgar – felt like Central Asia, rather than China. This has never been lost on Beijing.

Since then, Beijing has increasingly stifled the native population of a province that is strategically essential for China. The CCP, in the same way as the West, sees Islamic fundamentalism as an existential threat – and there are five Islamic countries right on Xinjiang’s border. Beijing’s greatest fear is a 9/11 type attack on its home soil.

Indeed, it was some ham-fisted attempts by rogue Uyghur groups in the years following the 2009 strife with some random knife attacks that gave Beijing more licence to repress them, imposing on Xinjiang the party secretary who had successfully quelled the locals in Tibet.

Xinjiang is also incredibly rich in resources, home to 40% of China’s coal and about a third of its oil and natural gas reserves. Its massive deserts are being put to good use as China ramps up its renewable energy output. On my second visit in 2011 we saw vast solar and wind farms. So, as well as external security, internal resource security is key.

The security context is what drives Beijing’s action in Xinjiang and is a vital contextual point that both the ASPI and Jaq James reports missed to both their detriments. Their arguments are all about the effects rather than the causes.

The irony, of course, is that a think tank funded by arms dealers and foreign governments – the epitome of the military industrial complex – has perhaps deliberately missed the reason for Beijing’s Xinjiang crackdown in its report. Beijing’s reasons are precisely the same as the West when it began the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – to crush Islamic terrorism.

The satellite imagery used in the ASPI report, too, is reminiscent of the blurry images used by the late US secretary of state Colin Powell to justify the invasion of Iraq, later found to be fake/wrong. Satellite images have improved vastly, along with people with on-the-ground experience in Xinjiang however, and it is not just the ASPI report but multiple studies into what’s happening in Xinjiang that lends this more credence.

Are the Uyghurs worse off than any other minority?

The other crucial piece of context missing is that, as awful as the treatment of Uyghurs has been – it is straight out of the CCP playbook. As noted, the West – and especially Australia – turned a cynical blind eye to China’s treatment of its own people for decades as they built lucrative trade relationships. James introduces this element as part of her critique.

There is no question the Chinese government has badly treated the Turkic Uyghur minority – whose homeland Xinjiang was – since finally annexing the territory in 1953. But it has meted out similar treatment to other ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and women – particularly those who breached the one-child policy during decades of horrific forced abortions, often very late term.

And in terms of surveillance, the entirety of China’s urban areas –  and some beyond is now the world’s first fully fledged surveillance state, it’s not just the Uyghurs.

It’s worth noting that regular Chinese people have little sympathy for the Uyghur or many of the minorities, particularly because they were allowed to have normal families (i.e., more than one child during the years of the country’s one-child policy).

While the ASPI report was clearly a detailed piece of work by five experts, it is light on the social and historical context. Its presentation is very much simple headlines. For sure, it was assiduously footnoted and referenced but it was also clearly aimed at being easy to use by international media. It certainly found its mark as ASPI claims it is its most downloaded piece of work.

Grubby practices of CCP

None of that detracts from the fact that it has shed light on the grubby practices of the CCP – which are now finally becoming news in an once trade-obsessed Western press. The accuracy of its findings will remain a matter of conjecture of course because of the extreme difficulties faced inside China with getting verifiable information. But as noted above, ASPI are hardly the first researchers to explore what’s happening in Xinjiang.

James appears to have a problem with the fact that the report is designed for widespread use and has been exceptionally well marketed – welcome to the 21st century! But she nails the fact that it is horribly decontextualised.

Her own paper would have been more compelling if only she had presented context: Beijing’s security concerns and the plight of the Uyghurs.

James takes a very different and very legalistic approach to the claims in the ASPI report. It’s a “would this stand up in court” argument and she prosecutes it well enough. It may well be technically correct in terms of the often arcane and dense definition of rights. But it’s not going to change any minds or turn heads as it’s not as earth shattering as she clearly thinks it is, particularly as she failed to concede any wrongdoing on the CCP’s part.

She leans often on ultra-dry International Labour Organisation definitions. That’s fine in a way but gives her report an arcane flavour. Some back-up commentary from the ILO – or indeed other well-known China academics – would have significantly bolstered her arguments.

Cultural genocide clickbait

James takes strong issues with ASPI’s focus on “cultural genocide”. She is right in noting it is not a crime (where would Hollywood be if it was!). More could have made more of the general bandying about of the term “genocide” by the media  that is taking the meaning out of the word – it’s terrific clickbait.

I have seen first-hand the CCP’s early efforts of said cultural genocide, including the razing of 90% of the old town in Kashgar. It’s reprehensible.

James makes worthwhile points about evidence of the strong security around both factories and camps, the use of facial recognition technology etc being commonplace in a China that is now a proto-police state. But in doing this she spotlights the repression of the CCP: it is doing over all Chinese: Uyghur and non-Uyghur. This weakens James’s arguments for all their potential technical merit.

Overall, James’s critique that the ASPI report is not scholarly or academically sound may well be largely true – even though some excellent scholars including the admirable James Leibold from LaTrobe University worked on the document. She mistakenly focuses on the lead promoter Vicky Xu, herself a credible China-born journalist.

But it’s clear, as noted above, that the ASPI report was designed for a media audience.

The propaganda war goes on

As someone concerned with Western propaganda, James would have found a more fruitful row to hoe there if she wants the attention, she, like ASPI, clearly does.

James’ end piece attempts to torpedo not just some but all ASPI’s claims. Her attempts at unpicking ALL the evidence in the report is a stretch and I think a mistake. She does this with varying degrees of efficacy but she, like ASPI, is unable to get to the truth as the sources simply are not available. Her analysis is weakened by the fact she did not punch a few very solid holes in it, thereby leaving the entire exercise in question.

She decries the ASPI report as deliberate misinformation, and I think she errs in this. It is selectively presented information that is, by and large, backed up by other studies and journalism. 

ASPI has been asked for a response by Pearls and Irritations but has been silent. Calls and emails sent by this writer have been unanswered. James has feedback from one of the authors, a junior researcher, but that’s it.

If people like James want to try and balance the ledger, contextualise events in China and provide some balance, something sorely lacking in the Australian media, they need to learn to play the propagandists – both in China and the West at their own, slick, well-funded and well marketed game. 

Funding and the distribution it bring, of course, is often the key to winning a propaganda war and ASPI has it in spades. thanks in a big part to the Australian taxpayer.

Defamation disaster: bid to muzzle journalists, teachers, no more than a lawyers’ fee-fest