China Isn’t Persecuting The Uighurs. It’s Saving Them From U.S.-Facilitated Jihadist Indoctrination.

Before explaining the core of my argument, I should establish these facts:

-The Chinese government’s relationship to the Uighurs, and to China’s Muslim population in general, has been wildly distorted by the Western propaganda machine. The widespread media claim that “1 million” Uighurs have been detained by China lacks real evidence; when the United Nations supposedly corroborated this charge last year, the authority which made it was in fact an independent commission that was using the U.N. as a platform. This commission’s “1 million Uighurs” accusation came solely from thinly sourced reports by a Chinese opposition group that receives funding from Western governments and is tied to pro-U.S. activists. In short, the estimate of the amount of Uighurs in detention has been dishonesty distorted by sources with a vested interest in undermining the Chinese Communist Party.

-To make these false portrayals of the Uighur situation more believable, the U.S./NATO propaganda machine has also promoted conspiracy theories about China harvesting the organs of its Muslim prisoners. These allegations have been thoroughly debunked by researchers, including ones from the typically anti-China publication the Washington Post. An investigative piece on Chinese organ transplants by the Post has stated that: “research and reporting by The Washington Post undercut these allegations [of abuses]. Transplant patients must take immunosuppressant drugs for life to prevent their bodies from rejecting their transplanted organs. Data compiled by Quintiles IMS, an American health-care-information company, and supplied to The Post, shows China's share of global demand for immunosuppressants is roughly in line with the proportion of the world's transplants China says it carries out.”

-The actual evidence supports the view that China is treating the Uighurs and other Muslims humanely and respectfully. China has a litany of laws which prohibit ethnic and religious discrimination, including equal representation for varieties of people in government, state-sanctioned use of ethnic minority languages in courts and media, and legal protection of indigenous customs. This has resulted in all of China’s Muslims, including the Uighurs, fully sharing in the democratic rights and high living standards that socialism has brought to the Chinese people. There are thousands of mosques in Xinjiang, there are popular Uighur musicians and TV hosts in China, and Uighurs and the others in Xinjiang enjoy an increasingly modernized society where poverty is close to being eliminated.

Under this in fact very liberal and humane set of laws around race and religion, Uighurs of both the moderate and more conservative leanings are treated equally by the state. The only Uighurs which China feels the need to give special attention are the ones who’ve shown themselves to embrace extremist and hateful views that encourage acts of terrorism.

If the Western media were really concerned about stopping the indoctrination of Uighur youth, it would be condemning not China but the United States. The Uighurs have created a very old and deep culture, and most of them are good and law-abiding citizens of the People’s Republic of China. Most followers of Sunni Islam worldwide aren’t terrorists either. But to further its interests, the U.S. empire has been working to turn these Muslims-
especially the ones in China-towards violent jihad.

For decades, the U.S. has been helping Islamic terrorist groups so that it can advance its goal of dominating the Middle East. It’s been proven that Washington officials have been complicit in the rise of ISIS as a result of their project for providing aid to the militant Islamic groups that have tried to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Last year, President Trump even came out in support of the Islamic terrorists in Idlib by urging Russia and Iran not to intervene in the jihadist-occupied city. This strategic willingness to side with the terrorists that America supposedly hates has manifested in a Western campaign to destabilize China using religion and terror.

According to a series of reports from the Chinese government, the U.S. and Turkey have been aiding and abetting Uighur separatists in Xinjiang. Upon critically examing China’s claims in an essay titled “Uyghur Militants in Syria: The Turkish Connection,” Dr Michael Clarke has concluded that “The apparent linkage of Uyghur militants not only to long-standing sanctuaries in the ‘Af-Pak’ frontier region but also to the jihadist ‘witches brew’ of Syria points to an unprecedented trans-nationalization of Uyghur terrorism. While the number of Uyghurs involved would appear to be small, the danger for Beijing is that some may either return to Xinjiang or seek to influence or recruit others.”

As a result, China has had to deal with a crisis of brewing violence. As the journalist on Syrian affairs Steven Sahiounie has observed, “Syria’s ambassador in Beijing, Imad Moustapha, declared up to 5,000 ethnic Uyghurs from China were in Syria fighting alongside armed jihadists as of May 2017. For anyone who has actually followed real reporting on the ground in Syria, you would know that Uyghurs are among the most violent of all the various fighting groups in Syria.” 

Investigative journalist Andre Vltchek has assessed the implications of exporting this violent cultural pathology to the Uighurs within China:

They are everywhere, where their Western, Gulf states and Turkish handlers want them to be. Their combat as well as political cells and units are based in Syria and Indonesia, in Turkey and occasionally in Egypt. When they are told to kill, they murder with unimaginable brutality; decapitating, or cutting to pieces priests, infants, old women. They are China’s worst nightmare. They are unleashing religious fundamentalism and foreign-sponsored militant nationalism and separatism. They are potentially the greatest obstacle and danger to President’s Xi Jinping’s marvelous BRI (Belt and Road Initiative).

The Western imperialists, in their endless operations of violent geopolitical strong-arming and gaslighting propaganda, have portrayed China’s response to the crisis as an Islamophobic atrocity. Western reporting on the Uighur educational training centers, even when it involves sending journalists to the centers, is slanted with the intent of painting the whole affair as a sinister Chinese plot. One BBC article about the centers which features interviews with Uighurs also includes the false claim that “more than a million” are being held, and the article subtly dismisses that religious extremism is the cause of China’s creation of the centers. One line from it even compares the centers to Nazi concentration camps, a suggestion that should be seen as offensive to the victims of an actual genocide where millions of people were targeted for nothing more than their religion or their ethnicity.

Yet even this article had to admit that the centers are kept very clean, that everyone in them is well-fed, and that people in them can take part in study programs and music and dance classes which bring them undeniable enjoyment. This is the environment that Uighurs in China are placed in after they’ve exhibited behaviors which portend to them picking up a weapon and bringing the horrors of the Syrian battlefields to China. China’s government has brought the dangerous situation that the U.S.-backed Islamic militants have created towards a peaceful resolution. Instead of killing their citizens with drones when suspected of terrorist affiliation (as the U.S. does), China is sacrificing a lot of resources and compassionate energy to help the at-risk Uighurs reach a better place in life.

No matter how much the U.S. and its allies distort these facts, they can’t stop the world outside of the core imperialist nations from recognizing the truth about China’s Muslims. In March, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation said upon sending representatives to Xinjiang that it “welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.” It also said that “Security had returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there had been safeguarded. There had been no terrorist attack there for three years and people enjoyed a stronger sense of happiness, fulfillment and security...Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers.”

This is why when 22 countries within the U.S./NATO alliance signed a letter this year condemning China for this fictitious persecution campaign against Muslims, no Islamic nations signed the letter along with them. America has isolated itself on the world stage by pushing this false narrative, with only the leaders of the U.S. empire’s remaining loyal countries being willing to entertain Washington’s transparent lies about China.

Our media is holding up a picture of an institutionally bigoted, aggressively militaristic, and fundamentally authoritarian country, and trying to make us believe that this picture depicts China instead of the U.S. As the 70th anniversary of China’s communist revolution comes up on October 1st, China has achieved unparalleled reductions in poverty, a democratized society, and an ambitious environmental action plan that’s set the country on track to meet its climate goals nine years early. But the Western media is convincing many people to ignore these marvels of Chinese socialism, and to see China as a force for evil.

This is reflected in these lyrics from the rapper Bambu’s tribute song to the PRC, which is titled “Chairman Mao”:

I study Mao Tse-tung's tongue, the young gun.

Lock, load, and bust one.

Champion with it like brraammp pomp pomp pomp!

Lebanon guerrillas that'll egg 'em from ten yards

with little pebbles, I call it strength in arms.

When it's broadcast on broadband, they savages like Tarzan.

They never get the background story, they'd rather jam

your frequency with trickery and headline news.

It's nothing new.

And if it's only half the truth, it ain't true.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

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China Isn’t Imperialist. It’s The Great Ally Of Global Socialism.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of China’s communist revolution, something unprecedented is coming from this event’s legacy: the decline of the U.S. empire is giving way not to its replacement by a new bullying hegemon, as has been the case after the fall of all past empires, but to the rise of a world power that seeks to advance peace and international cooperation. This historically exceptional nation is China.

You won’t hear the same from the Westerners who opportunistically seek to vilify China. You’ll hear them claim that there’s a threat of Chinese imperialism, that China is trapping countries in debt to carry out its ambitions for world conquest, that China is perpetrating neo-colonialism in Africa. If you believe what they say, the future looks bleak indeed; as climate change, extreme inequality, and other crises of capitalism envelop our world, the superpower that will overtake the United States is supposedly another capitalist empire.

The Trotskyists, anarchists, and general left-wing Sinophobes who hold this cynical view about China are falling for a dangerous piece of propaganda from the U.S./NATO empire. The Western capitalist class wants global socialists to revile China and the other socialist states, because if the international proletariat were to unite behind China and its guiding ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the anti-capitalist movement would unanimously stand behind a nation that represents an unparalleled threat to capitalism and imperialism.

Despite the unfortunate absence of a pro-China consensus within the Western First World Left, China is carrying through this revolutionary agenda. Without China’s military protection from the threats of the U.S., Venezuela may have been invaded by now. China has also used its armed might to help prevent Western aggressions against the DPRK. China, being the strongest nation within the anti-American alliance, is acting as a global defender against the growing belligerence of the United States.

If China is doing all of this simply to further its imperial ambitions, the term “imperialism” has lost its meaning. It no longer means “the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world,” as Lenin defined it. It now has a ridiculously broad and unfair definition, one where any nation that globally utilizes its military or financially engages with other countries is “imperialist.”

This is how China’s foreign policy, especially as it relates to Africa, is portrayed within conventional Western thought. Since it’s difficult to argue that China’s very restrained protective military actions in countries like Venezuela are imperialist in and of themselves, they’re conflated with the claims about China dominating and exploiting countries through financial manipulation. The term “neo-colonialism” (which Western propagandists never use to describe America’s violently aggressive neo-colonial actions throughout the last century) is supposedly applicable to what China is doing in Africa.

Unlike is the case with what America has done with its neo-colonial projects, China hasn’t used violence to carry out its economic goals in Africa, because China’s relationship with African countries isn’t coercive or exploitative. As Kwame Nkrumah wrote in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, “The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.” This is most definitely not what’s happening with China’s involvement in Africa. 

All African countries have governments that are very much independent of China. Unlike the United States and its political allies in the IMF, China hasn’t engaged with poorer countries by seeking to become the guiding force behind their economies. China’s international business projects and foreign loans are mutually beneficial; a report from the McKinsey consulting firm has found that “89 percent of employees were African, adding up to more than 300,000 jobs for African workers. Scaled up across all 10,000 Chinese firms in Africa, these numbers suggest that Chinese-owned business already employ several million Africans.” China has also helped colonized countries pull themselves out of the debt peonage of Western imperialism, with China having provided Laos with $49 million in 2013 and given it $32 million in free interest credits. China’s foreign investments aren’t designed to make short-term speculative deals based on the profit motive (as U.S. investments are), but to gain needed commodities for China’s economy. This arrangement benefits the Chinese people while helping the job markets in other countries, and while even making these countries freer from the actual imperialism of the U.S.

The Western effort to delegitimize everything that China does abroad has the common theme of portraying China as “imperialist” when it’s taken action to liberate lands from Western colonialism. Not only has China helped lift nations out of financial servitude to the Western empire, but it’s freed territories that were formerly controlled by American/European powers. Mao’s liberation of Tibet from the U.S.-backed Dalai Lama, who enslaved his people through a horrific serf system, has been followed up by efforts from China to not make such oppression reappear in Tibet. Barry Sautman of East Asia Forum has written that “The point to stress is that there is no repression of Tibetans simply for being Tibetan. Nor does the Chinese government repress religion per se. Instead, Tibetans receive a range of preferential policies, and authorised religions in China receive state support. Where religious organisations pose no political threat, they are regulated by the state and can generally function openly, especially among ethnic minorities.” 

This is the paradigm that’s come after China’s insistence that Tibetans have full economic and civil rights, which the capitalistic anti-Chinese U.S.-backed factions within Tibet evidently don’t agree with. China has done much to improve the livelihoods of those in Taiwan as well as Xinjiang, two supposedly oppressed autonomous regions which both have higher annual wages than most Chinese provinces. This is what the West calls “imperialism” and “colonialism.”

To a lesser extent, China has freed Hong Kong. China has taken Hong Kong out of the possession of Britain, and the island will eventually also be freed from capitalist control when China’s socialist government gains full policy-making authority over it in 2047. The decline in Hong Kong’s living standards that have provoked widespread protests throughout the island isn’t China’s fault, as China has little or no power over the actions of Hong Kong’s corrupt, hyper-capitalist government. The only imperialism that’s going on in Hong Kong comes from the U.S./NATO empire, which is funding the anti-China protests in a bidto recolonize the island.

The situation is similar for Taiwan, another capitalist U.S.-aligned state that China is trying to retake. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which has come close to eliminating poverty within mainland China, is the system that Hong Kong and Taiwan need in order to get out of their inequality crises. But the Western media is painting China as a malicious aggressor against them in order to manufacture consent for America’s escalating economic and diplomatic war against China.

The ultimate goal of the West is the complete destabilization of China and the dismantling of all of the gains in living standards that the Chinese Communist Party has made. If the U.S. gets its way, China and many of its allies will be overthrown and replaced with American proxy states. 

Yet year after year, as American global power declines and China grows stronger, this wish looks more and more like an absurd fantasy of a dying empire. If the best efforts from the U.S. regime change machine can’t even win out within the tiny island of Hong Kong, it’s clear that China is winning the battle for 21st century dominance. 

China’s vastly powerful military will continue to grow throughout the next decade or so, and the heightened belligerence of the U.S. only motivates China to take greater steps towards protecting the other regime change target countries; since Obama’s efforts towards pivoting to Asia in order to tighten the screws on containing China, China has been strengthening its alliance with its fellow anti-imperialist state Russia and has become willing to intervene on behalf of its allies. This trend will get more pronounced as the years go by.

China’s detractors of both the neoconservative and leftist varieties will keep calling this rising global Chinese presence “imperialist.” But all evidence points to the contrary. China’s new role in the world will be one that’s managed peacefully, and that’s done with care to not abuse China’s power. As China has stated in a White Paper that it released yesterday: “From the mid-19th century, China was abused by the Western powers and left with indelible memories of the suffering brought about by war and instability. It will never impose the suffering it has endured on other nations.”

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

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We’re Witnessing The Beginning Stages Of A Class Insurrection

Throughout the 2010s, particularly the last two years, poor and working people have been increasingly coming together to try to take power away from the ruling class. The teacher strikes of 2018, which spread across five continents, won multiple victories against public school austerity. This has correlated with the emergence of additional worker struggles, which have most recently been prominent throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This year, strike actions in the United States alone hit a 32 year high, and the current strike of General Motors workers shows how this labor movement continues to gain momentum.

All of these events are a symptom of the half-century long campaign of neoliberal privatization, austerity, regressive taxation, and undone workers’ rights that’s made the capitalist world as unequal as it’s been in a century. A middle class no longer exists in America, and most people haven’t recovered from the Great Recession; by and large, the situation of the American people is one of ever-growing household debt and a living arrangement that’s only sustained by functioning paycheck to paycheck. For 1 on 8 Americans, there’s not even a reliable supply of food. As inequality keeps rising, and as the global economy moves towards a new downturn, a lot more people will also start finding themselves unable to access basic resources.

The super-rich, whose three dozen wealthiest members now own more money than the poorest half of the global population, don’t want to end the suffering of the global poor. They view the world’s impoverished, exploited, and colonized people the same way that the capitalist character in Marcel Cartier’s song Mr. Bourgeoisie does:

For people who poor and really have nothing, 

A dollar a day really is something.

And still they complain; they’re talking change!

They lack intelligence they can never regain.

Control of their land, control of their lives,

their best option is to put their fate in mine.

They ain’t smart enough to run this shit themselves.

A rich white man needs to be at the helm.

That’s why I’m their savior. This is my burden.

Truly, helping people is what I’m concerned with.

In the hope of maintaining their power, some parts of the capitalist class seek to ease the plight of the proletariat throughout the First World. Oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg propose instituting a universal basic income, and others like Warren Buffet would prefer that the top 1% be taxed higher. Social democrat politicians like Bernie Sanders are working to coordinate with these “reasonable” elites in enacting measures that would expand aid to the proletariat in certain areas, but would leave in place the systems of capitalist control and imperialist exploitation of the global south. They hope that by co-opting the language of socialism, they’ll stop people from taking the actions that would actually make society free and equal.

These actions consist of building revolutionary institutions that are independent from the Democratic Party and other capitalist power structures, and of using these institutions to destabilize the capitalist state. Such institutions will not include Democratic appendages like the Democratic Socialists of America; they’ll be made up of radical socialist organizations like the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the African People’s Socialist Party. They must be used to organize strikes (of both general and concentrated types), traffic blockades, and other types of civil disobedience. Their short term goal must be to pressure corporations into submitting to the demands of the workers, and their ultimate goal must be to oust the leadership of the capitalist governments and build new worker-controlled states.

If we go about this with the liberal mentality of practicing nonviolence at all costs, we’ll be crushed by the brutal security forces of the state. While nonviolent movement strategies can be effective to an extent, nonviolent activism is a luxury that can’t always be exercised. Armed struggle was a necessary part of the fight for liberation from apartheid South Africa, to name just one among countless cases where the oppressed have had to use violence to gain their freedom.

In the U.S. alone, the capitalist class has an increasingly deadly militarized police state that’s used violence to put down the protesters in Occupy Wall Street and Standing Rock, so all evidence points to such violent confrontations appearing during our own revolutionary process.

Whether it’s necessary to use violence at a given moment will depend on the circumstances. Right now, the growing armed American left-wing organizations obviously wouldn’t be able to defeat the government in guerrilla warfare. But these organizations have so far become vital resources in the resistance against white nationalism. Our task in this area is to work to keep growing these militant anti-fascist groups, and to get more members of the proletariat armed and trained. The more the state crackdown escalates, and the more bold the right-wing paramilitaries get, the more necessary it will be to have a left that’s armed.

This will be the stage of revolution that’s described in the next part from Mr. Bourgeoisie:

Oh, they have the nerve, huh? They have the nerve to organize? To come together?

I have word that my workers are organized

and guerrilla movements in the countryside.

These damn savages remain ungrateful!

It’s time for a lesson, it may seem hateful.

But fuck with my cash, fuck with my shops, I gotta have the government make bodies drop.

They call them “death squads.” A better term

is justice, and hopefully it’s only short term.

My friends in the CIA tell me it’s cool.

Wouldn’t be the first time that they had to do something like this.

India shows us what America will look like further down the line in its progress towards revolution. Early this year, around 200 million Indians went on strike against their country’s corporatist government. In May the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, which is led by the Communist Party of India, seized control of the town of Timurpalli by overthrowing the local government. Despite the lack of a major presence for India’s communists on the electoral level (which the ruling fascists are taking advantage of by progressively dismantling India’s democracy), the country’s crisis of inequality continues to stir up the popular will for class struggle. 

What happened in Timurpalli is proof that no matter how much the capitalists fortify their control over India’s existing government, the people will still have the option of taking power non-electorally. India’s Maoist guerrillas may be engaged in an arduous struggle against the state, but history’s trajectory is in their favor; an Oxfam report this year on Indian inequality predicted that “If this obscene inequality between the top 1 per cent and the rest of India continues, then it will lead to a complete collapse of the social and democratic structure of this country.”

This collapse, which in ways is already in play, will bring in a lot of supporters of India’s forces for proletarian revolution. This month, the guerrillas began preparing for this by carrying out a project to radically expand their amount of new recruits and to win more territory in the process. The growing vigor of Indian communism is also apparent from this week’s thousands-strong communist rally in the town of Burdwan.

India’s situation parallels how events will develop as late-stage capitalism continues throughout other countries. In the U.S, the coming recession is going to provoke more and more of the poor and working classes towards political radicalization. Interest in socialism is inevitably going to increase in the coming years. The task of those who seek to build a serious revolutionary vanguard is to get these disaffected individuals educated about Marxism-Leninism, and thereby to make them recognize the legitimacy of the actions of people like the Indian Maoist fighters. The members of the proletariat must understand that we’re engaged not in an attempt to compromise with the ruling class, but to overthrow it-and that this fact makes drastic insurrectionary measures necessary.

America’s situation is far from matching the outright civil war that’s going on between capitalists and communists in India, and ideally such a civil war will be avoided here. But it’s essential that we prepare ourselves for all potential scenarios, because this is how we’ll assure our progress towards what’s described in these lyrics from Mr. Bourgeoisie:

Things are getting worse; the news was leaked

740s of my employees...looks like it made more rebels than that,

I think it’s People’s Army or something like that.

I fly down there for emergency talks,

government security wherever I walk.

It’s time to check out my main sweatshop (I mean factory. It’s where the bodies had dropped).

Nothing suspect here, everything looks good.

They assure me it’s business as usual.

We still got people who willing to work

and understand that a dollar is what they’re worth…

But at that stage, where the workers have by and large defected to fighting on the side of the revolution, the capitalist power structure will be too weakened to survive for much longer. It can take only 3.5% of the population to be engaged in civil resistance in order for a government to be deposed. If we build a revolutionary vanguard that manages to mobilize this proportion of society, and if we mobilize them with tact and intelligence, we’ll succeed.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744