When Washington shifts towards open war with China, this will come at a moment when “humanitarian” imperialism has made a comeback. Trump 2.0’s policy of brazen imperial aggression will soon be counteracted by the “progressive” Democrats, who merely represent a different version of this intensified warfare; the difference is that they promote this warfare with pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric. They embody the liberal NGO wing within imperialism, which seeks to inflict destruction on China by reviving an old psyop: the “Uyghur genocide” lie, where the CIA has used Zionist Christian evangelicals to conduct phony studies “proving” China’s vocational centers are about erasing Uyghur culture.
The context behind this psyop is that for decades, the network of Turkish-based Islamist radicalization was able to gain dangerous influence within China’s Xinjiang province, persuading certain Uyghur Muslims to commit religious murders on a regular basis. Then the Communist Party implemented a policy of rehabilitation for the people who had been caught up in this violent ideology, which ended the terror attacks in what was the most humane way possible. The response from the bourgeois-minded elements within the Uyghur diaspora was predictably to vilify China’s response, with figures such as Rebiya Kadeer serving as the voices for this supposed Uyghur human rights cause.
This anti-communist movement had been active for a long time prior to when Washington escalated its cold war on China, and the far-right evangelical Adrian Zenz began providing “evidence” for the supposed genocide in 2019. And it’s within these diaspora propaganda efforts that the psyop will be able to find its long-term basis, because “human rights” imperialism gets its greatest narrative power from testimonies by individuals who claim to speak for their peoples.
The reality of the actual Uyghur masses inside Xinjiang is that they’ve been experiencing unprecedented economic development alongside the rest of China; where they’re at is where the overwhelming majority of Chinese people are at, and this place is certainly not petty-bourgeois resentment against the Chinese government. So when the Uyghur genocide myth gets brought back into the forefront of the discourse, the propagandists will have to work in overdrive, compensating for the spectacular successes of Chinese socialism.
The Uyghur genocide lie is completely absurd, but the lie poses a unique challenge to the communist and anti-imperialist movement; because propaganda of its kind was not something that the original Marxists had to deal with. And unfortunately, there is a major element of “Marxists” who want to keep communism in a past phase, one where it didn’t yet need to reckon with the conditions of the post-World War I world.
The “Uyghur genocide” is propaganda that’s suited for the era when the colonial powers have come to be challenged on a major scale, and entire countries have begun breaking away from monopoly financial control. This rupture didn’t start to happen until the Soviet Union was formed; and when the bourgeoisie began fabricating accounts of atrocities by the USSR, they were able to get many of the world’s “socialists” to believe these narratives. This was because like the “democratic socialists” who vilify China, they had interests which conflicted with the goal of global proletarian unity, and therefore with anti-imperialism.
This material conflict is also why we have sectarian “Marxist” factions, mainly the Trotskyists, who claim to uphold Lenin yet demonize all existing Leninist projects. They’re aligned with a certain element inside the left wing of imperialism, this being the element which solely identifies with the urban proletariat while viewing the bulk of the masses as incompatible with socialism. Because they’re confined to this bubble within the workers movement, they end up opposing any real mass politics, such as the politics which brought Chinese socialism into being. Thereby, they embrace the narratives of the “progressive” imperialists, and of the outright fascists who work alongside them.
In 1924, during the early stages of this propaganda shift, Stalin described the ideology of imperialism’s left wing:
As for what the pacifists and democrats want, as for the policy of the imperialists, they have only one aim in resorting to pacifism: to dupe the masses with high-sounding phrases about peace in order to prepare for a new war; to dazzle the masses with the brilliance of “democracy” in order to consolidate the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; to stun the masses with clamour about the “sovereign” rights of nations and states in order the more successfully to prepare for intervention in China, for slaughter in Afghanistan and in the Sudan, for the dismemberment of Persia; to fool the masses with highfaluting talk about “friendly” relations with the Soviet Union, about various “treaties” with the Soviet government, in order to establish still closer relations with the counter-revolutionary conspirators who have been kicked out of Russia, with the aim of bandit operations in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Georgia. The bourgeoisie needs pacifism as a camouflage.
This camouflage constitutes the chief danger of pacifism. Whether the bourgeoisie will succeed in its aim of fooling the people depends upon the vigour with which the Communist Parties in the West and in the East expose the bourgeoisie, upon their ability to tear the mask from the imperialists in pacifist clothing
These were the foundations of the psyops the liberal interventionists employ, where they generate concern for “human rights” among the people who mainly care about defending and spreading bourgeois “democracy.” This propaganda isn’t the most effective on conservatives, who (when they are convinced to be pro-war) tend to be more receptive towards language about “American greatness.” Liberals view foreign policy as a way to advance humanity’s common interests, which they attach to universalist concepts about “justice” and “anti-authoritarianism.” It’s a perversion of socialist internationalism, which also cares about the collective global experience but does so with an actual class analysis.
What we are tasked with is purging this liberal interventionist ideology from the socialist movement, which includes many liberals who claim to have a class analysis while promoting the lies of the liberal order. Without our guidance, “socialism” will be made into another tool for the anti-China war effort, with the only “Marxist” voices in mainstream discourse being ones which mindlessly affirm the accounts of the Uyghur imperial collaborators.
The great contradiction which could undermine these “socialist” stooges for empire is that at this stage, the bourgeoisie and its false “socialist” allies can no longer pretend to be pacifist, like they could during that era after World War I. For U.S. hegemony to be maintained, Washington will have to sustain a long-term series of wars against China and its partnered countries, and the empire has only begun to ramp up these wars. The anti-China left find themselves on the side of military aggressions that they can barely distance themselves from, and that will soon become impossible for them to disavow as Washington pivots from Iran towards China itself.
There is no longer a way to have an anti-China position that appears separate from the war against China; inevitably the anti-China leftists, or the “dissident” right-wingers who vilify China, will be absorbed into the unholy alliance that the neocons are building. Then the masses will be met with a choice: stay in the pro-imperialist political camps that our ruling class has cultivated, or break out of the old paradigm and embrace revolutionary politics.
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