In the post-Iraq invasion era, where outright regime change invasions are hard to sell to the public and the war machine needs to conceal its global reign of terror, the U.S. imperialists almost always try to subdue nations which challenge them by waging hybrid warfare. By carrying out campaigns of inflammatory disinformation, proxy war, and economic strangulation within the targeted countries so that Washington can destabilize the existing states and fill the power vacuum with pro-imperialist puppet leaders. This is what Washington has succeeded at doing to Syria to a certain extent, with NATO’s aiding of ethnic Kurdish separatists serving to give the imperialists regional leverage against Assad while allowing the CIA to steal Syria’s oil with the help of the Kurdish forces.
Washington wants to do the same thing to China in Xinjiang, except with vastly more bloodshed. For decades, Washington has been fomenting terrorist attacks by Uyghur separatist jihadists within western China, propagating an ideology of religiously motivated violent hatred towards the Communist Party of China. As a consequence, for decades terrorist attacks used to regularly occur within the western part of the country. And in the last decade, the U.S.-instigated jihadist war against Syria has fortified a Syria-to-Xinjiang pipeline of Islamic fanaticism, with Turkey assisting in this campaign to export religious and ethnic terror. In the first few years of the regime change war in Syria, the annual number of terrorist attacks within Xinjiang increased to as many as several dozen, with 2014 being the year when the incidents peaked and 322 Chinese people were killed by terrorists within a single year’s time.
The stooges the U.S. has been using to foment this violence have explicitly stated that their goal is to Balkanize China for the sake of anti-communist subversion. The Uyghur militants who Washington backs in Syria have expressed that they’re looking to the genocidal settler-colonial project of Israel as their model for creating an ethnostate, a plan which no doubt applies to Xinjiang as well. And Erkin Alptekin, the inaugural president of the Washington-backed World Uyghur Congress and the son of the far-right Uyghur separatist leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin, proclaimed in 1995 that “Ten years ago no one believed that the USSR would fall apart now you can see that. Many Turkic countries have their freedom now. Today the same situation applies to China. We believed in the not too distant future we will see the fall of China and the independence of East Turkestan.”
The end goal of these efforts to inculcate China’s Uyghur youth with anti-communist fanaticism and incite bloodshed within China is the creation of a fascist breakaway state — situated in the western part of the country which serves as a crucial node for China’s Belt and Road Initiative — that opens the area up for the same neoliberal shock doctrine policies Washington has imposed upon the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the other places the imperialists have succeeded at destabilizing. Then, the imperialists hope, this manufactured state of “East Turkestan” can be used as a battering ram against the rest of China, as a tool for CPC proxy warfare. East Turkestan would be in the same vein as the U.S.-installed fascist state in Ukraine that Washington has been using to wage proxy warfare against Russia.
It’s a violent, impoverished, frightful future that the imperialists seek to create for the people of the region. But it’s also an absurd fascist fantasy, one that will never come true no matter how much the CIA tries to inflame further terrorism by spreading fabricated claims of Chinese “human rights abuses” against the Uyghurs. It will never come true because the People’s Republic of China has made Xinjiang’s conditions incompatible for such an imperialist-manufactured upheaval to be realized.
Firstly, the PRC has succeeded at disabling the propaganda tools through which the imperialists used to be able to persuade Xinjiang’s Uyghurs to commit violence. According to the Global Terrorism Database, 2017 is the last year in which any terrorism incidents have happened in China. As China’s Global Times assessed last October, “Xinjiang has reported no violent terror attacks for over 40 consecutive months with residents of different ethnic groups enjoying their rights to peaceful life and development. The hard-won stability and prosperity have come at a price that is being shouldered by people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang. But some Western media outlets never stopped their smear campaigns against Xinjiang realities in the past years.”
This recent era of peace following the previous era of escalating horrors has come about due to the Chinese government’s successful Uyghur deradicalization efforts, wherein China has dealt with Islamic extremism through education efforts designed to deprogram the destructive ideas which used to afflict so much of the area’s Uyghur population.
This contrasts with the U.S. government’s genocidal responses to Islamic extremism; in 2010, the U.S. used drones to extrajudicially assassinate two American citizens who were suspected of being associated with jihadism. Yet the lackeys of the U.S. empire continue to hurl baseless accusations of forced labor, mass killings, forced sterilization, millions-large Uyghur detentions, and “cultural genocide” against China, because this kind of projection and slander is all the imperialists have now that their plan to destabilize Xinjiang has been foiled. They have to paint it as a genocide, because otherwise the world will see the true situation in Xinjiang.
This is a situation where the Uyghurs, who enjoy numerous religious and ethnic protection laws, have been benefiting from the increasing prosperity of China’s socialist development right along with every other ethnic and religious group in the country. China is one of the only countries whose living standards have been rising amid this last year of rapidly expanding poverty for the capitalist world, with China having eliminated extreme poverty last year. And the Uyghurs in Xinjiang are sharing in this coming of ever happier times. As former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai said two years ago, “We’ve seen a lot of comments, a lot of media reports about Xinjiang. But I have visited Xinjiang many times over the years. I have found immense development taking place in Xinjiang, the prosperity there, and the well-being of the people of Xinjiang.”
This is the deeper reason behind why in all likelihood, the imperialists aren’t going to bring back the old era of terrorist attacks within Xinjiang or realize their desires for a Uyghur-led proxy war: under the phenomenal living conditions that Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has provided for Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, there’s no material incentive for them to want to create a breakaway state. There are no pressing contradictions for China’s Uyghur masses to get outraged about, so they have no reason to lash out like some among them used to do.
The worldview that Washington’s religious extremist propagandists promote, wherein the CPC is a threat to Islam which can only be responded to with violence, is shown to be nonsense by Xinjiang’s free and prosperous conditions. All the imperialists and their jihadist proxies have is a propagandistic picture of mass persecution of the Uyghurs, a picture which is so outlandishly divorced from reality that it can’t be taken seriously by anyone who has access to the facts. Least of all someone who lives in Xinjiang itself. The U.S. empire’s lies are simply too easy to see through.
Through this combination of cutting off the extremist brainwashing tools of the imperialists, and raising the living standards of the masses so that contradictions can’t exacerbate any potential discontent among Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, China has accomplished something incredible in these last several years: carve out a zone that’s safe from the violent subversion efforts of the empire. There are very few places on the planet that aren’t in some way vulnerable to the terroristic actions of Washington, and Xinjiang has become another one of them. For all their military strength and propaganda networks, the imperialists just got their reach cut significantly shorter.
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