Despite various blatantly nefarious actions by Washington to disrupt the Beijing Olympics, the event commenced on schedule with impeccable organization by the Chinese authorities. Heads of state, high-ranking officials, representatives of public organizations and corporations arrived in Beijing.
The “diplomatic boycott” initiated by the White House and their “hawks” and obedient vassals went awry and failed to destroy the bright Olympic ideals and the aspirations of the world’s best athletes to demonstrate the highest level of excellence. Even UN Secretary General Guterres arrived in Beijing, despite persistent attempts by US Permanent Representative to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield to talk him out of this trip to the Chinese capital, as reported by UN sources and Foreign Policy.
The White House has also failed to obtain the desired effect that he expected to achieve via the provocative statements of the US Permanent Representative to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who in an interview with CNN falsely accused Beijing of genocide of the Uighur Muslim minority, along with committing crimes against humanity. In response, China’s permanent representative to the UN, Zhang Jun, on February 7 reminded Washington of the US exterminating the indigenous population of the United States, its countless war crimes along with an unprecedented number of people who perished in the United States from COVID-19, with those remarks striking a chord with viewers in a great many countries around the globe.
The two-year ban on Russian government representatives participating in any way in the Olympics tournaments, organized by the US through the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in December 2020 for blatantly political reasons, was a failure as well. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing for the opening of the Olympics at the personal invitation of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, using the exceptions to this ban provided for in the CAS decision: “a Russian official may attend if they are personally invited by the head of the organizing state or the prime minister of that country.” Moreover, the results of Putin and Xi Jinping’s private conversation and their joint statement even overshadowed the opening of the Olympics in the international media, which tried to highlight “the essence of the matter” in their news feeds.
And such attention to this meeting is hardly surprising, since in the face of Washington’s destructive policies of the recent period, Russia and China declare complete unity in their attitude to the plans and actions of the West and their assessment, and make no attempt to hide their intention to undertake collective efforts to thwart the implementation of hostile plans of the West. In contrast to the narrow dictatorial views held by the White House on the prospects of civilization, Russia and China put forward their concept of a multicultural world, with equal rights of access to material goods, and with an understanding of democracy as a variable system of governance based on the power of the people and without the dictate of the “hegemon.” This joint statement emphasizes Beijing and Moscow’s common understanding of a forward-looking system of collective security that encompasses all of humanity, without any special privilege for the West. Russia and China have openly listed what they will fight for and against, without identifying any country as an “existential enemy,” unlike Washington’s position. In doing so, Moscow and Beijing have shown their openness to cooperation with all comers and to the joint resolution of existing problems.
The consolidation of Beijing and Moscow’s positions during the meeting of Chinese and Russian leaders at the opening of the Olympics was especially feared in Washington, which tried its best to disrupt the process.
Fearful of publicly acknowledging this, the White House tried to criticize China for pseudo human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur region as justification for its actions on the eve of the opening of the Beijing Olympics. And on this issue, the USA tried to enlist its “allies,” which resulted in the parliaments of England, France, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, and Lithuania passing resolutions on the recognition and condemnation of the “Uyghur genocide” under the direction of the White House.
It is worth recalling that the Uyghurs, whose rights are of such concern to Washington, are a Turkic Muslim people, whose closest kin are the Uzbeks. In Xinjiang province there are about 12 million of them, or 46% of the population. Besides them, there are also large communities of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. Over the past decades, a powerful separatist movement has emerged in Xinjiang, not without Western insistence, supported by Islamic extremists, in particular the Taliban (banned in Russia); according to some estimates, some 5,000 Uighurs have fought among the Daesh terrorists (also banned in Russia). The most radical of the Uigur organizations are the “Islamic Movement of East Turkestan” (or “Islamic Party of Turkestan”), banned in Russia, whose fighters with Syrian and Afghan combat experience tried to proclaim a state of “East Turkestan” in north-west China. US diplomats have been in regular contact with representatives of these extremist groups, discussing “cooperation” in confronting Beijing. And 2020, the US State Department even removed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement group from its list of terrorist organizations.
In response, the Chinese authorities launched a resolute campaign to eradicate any sympathy for radical Islam by imprisoning anyone suspicious in “re-education schools,” which are essentially labor camps. However, no Muslim government shares the West’s concerns about this. Delegations from Islamic Malaysia and Afghanistan visited these “re-education schools” and found their existence justified. Even the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia spoke in favor of China.
As for the “infringement of Uighur rights,” it should be noted that the PRC Constitution guarantees Uyghurs a number of preferential rights, stipulating, in particular, that the autonomous government must be headed by a representative of one of the indigenous ethnic groups inhabiting the territory. And such a head of the Xinjiang administration is now an ethnic Uighur, Shevket Yimin. The autonomous region also enjoys the right to independent financial policy and independent economic planning. Uyghurs are guaranteed the preservation of their own culture, language, and traditions. The autonomy controls the police, the same “repressive” body that the West accuses of pursuing a policy of “Uyghur genocide.”
In fact, however, it is not Uyghur rights that the United States has been so concerned about as of late.
The fact is that China is the largest holder of debt obligations of the Federal Reserve, which, by the end of 2021, amounted to $3.21 trillion. Their reduction goes on in parallel with a constant increase in gold reserves, which have doubled over the past 7 years in China, reaching a record figure of 900 tons. This increase in gold reserves was mainly due to domestic production, making China the world’s largest producer of the yellow metal since 2007. And one of the main gold mining regions is Xinjiang, where there are more than 600 gold mines. Understandably, this situation is of great concern to the owners of the US Federal Reserve, as it threatens to deprive them of the largest market for the sale of US “green candy wrappers.”
And therefore, the real reason the White House and the current US political establishment are so ardent in their defense of the Uyghurs, especially in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, is fairly evident.
Vladimir Odintsov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
