Concerns over communist China should not be overlooked

Concerns over communist China should not be overlooked

There’s perhaps no greater threat to freedom today than the communist regime in Beijing. One observer described Chinese communism as a system where the average Chinese subject “lives from birth to death under the eye of [the state]. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent… He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever.” Actually, that’s how George Orwell described life in Oceania in his dystopian novel 1984. But it could just as easily describe life in China today.

No one suffers the oppressive weight of Chinese communism more than the predominantly Muslim minorities of far western China-especially the Uighurs, currently detained in a modern-day gulag archipelago-run by a different communist power but no less wicked, atheist, and materialist. Xinjiang Province is home to just 1.5 percent of China’s total population, but 21 percent of China’s arrests. It would be as if one in five arrests in America happened in South Carolina. By some estimates one-inten Uighurs is currently detained.

Residents who’ve so far been spared these concentration camps are nonetheless subjected to Orwellian security and assaults on their privacy, religious faith, and way of life. The Chinese government is spending tens of billions on facial recognition, electronic spying, and coercive DNA collection, to create a database capable of tracking a person’s every move.

I’m a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Last November the Commission heard the testimony of a brave Uighur woman and mother of triplets, Mihrigul Tursun. After living abroad for some years, Mihrigul returned to Xinjiang with her three infant children in 2015. What awaited her was a nightmare. Almost immediately Mihrigul was separated from her children and detained, seemingly for no reason.

Mihrigul described the horrendous conditions she and her fellow Uighurs were subjected to in the re-education camps. By her account, nine of her 68 cellmates died within a span of three months. They were starved, confined in tight spaces, injected with unknown drugs, and electrocuted-and all the while forced to sing patriotic Chinese songs and repeat slogans like “Long live Xi Jinping”-not unlike the Ministry of Love’s indoctrination of Big Brother.

Beijing’s crimes against a tiny minority in a remote land may seem excessive, but it may also seem unimportant to our lives. But Xinjiang holds great cultural, strategic, and ideological significance to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s critical to understand the regime’s motives and plans to see why it matters to us.

So ever since Mao took over the country in 1949, the regime has done everything it can to bring these territories to heel-not least by overwhelming and erasing the native minorities through population transfer. The regime has relocated millions of Han Chinese to Xinjiang and Tibet.

Of course, the plight of the Tibetan people has been well publicized for decades. I commend Speaker Nancy Pelosi for speaking out against Chinese oppression in Tibet. Now it’s time to shine the spotlight on Xinjiang, which is directly to Tibet’s north-and is being persecuted for many of the same reasons.

The most important reasons for China’s clampdown are strategic. Xinjiang is the largest province in China, and also the richest in energy: One-fourth to one-third of China’s petroleum deposits lie in Xinjiang, as well as an abundance of natural gas and coal.

Paradoxically, western regions like Xinjiang are also important to China’s aspirations on its eastern shores.

China seeks total control over its own western territory so that it can project power and create a sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. This is another reason we must care about the fate of Xinjiang: China’s repression at home enables aggression abroad against America and our allies.

The Chinese Communist Party believes the way to guard against such threats is to purge them ruthlessly from the minds of its subjects. And that’s precisely what we’re observing in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is steamrolling any sign of cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity and attempting to replace it with the deadening uniformity of communism.

Xi Jinping believes he has the world to gain from the “New Silk Road” he’s building across Eurasia, but he fears China won’t be able to control its empire if its minorities hold to their religious beliefs and traditional cultures. So Xi has decided to take no chances by eradicating those inconvenient artifacts of humanity.

Today the Chinese government is purging every vestige of its subjects’ freedoms at home to pave the way for its economic, military, and political expansion abroad. China has a plan for the world, and it’s as concrete as the prison cells where it keeps dissenters.

Make no mistake: The brutal police tactics in Xinjiang are not just an assault on that province’s native people, although they’re surely that. They’re also an assault on the American-led world order, and a disturbing premonition of an alternative world order-one controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. 1984 may be 35 years in the past now, but for China, 1984 is still the future.

From U.S. Senator Tom Cotton