In a recent London Telegraph article titled, “The British travel bloggers ‘sugarcoating’ China’s Uyghur problem to the delight of Beijing,” readers are told that “more than one million Uyghurs are believed to be detained in re-education camps,” in Xinjiang and that Western tourists traveling to the region and seeing no evidence at all of this or other claims made by the Western media for years, are simply toeing the line of the Chinese government for clicks and cash.
To refute what tourists have seen with their own eyes and relayed through their travel vlogs, the Telegraph quotes Daria Impiombato, “a cyber analyst” at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) who claimed, “vloggers with large platforms had a responsibility to inform themselves and to be sceptical.”
By “inform themselves,” the ASPI analyst almost certainly means toeing the line of the US government ASPI itself helps define because unlike the tourists the Telegraph obliquely smears throughout its article but ultimately admits, “there is no suggestion any of the vloggers are acting at the behest of the Chinese government or receiving its money,” ASPI receives the bulk of its funds (PDF) from the US government, other Western governments, and Western arms manufacturers (PDF) like Lockheed Martin, Thales, Saab, and Boeing.
China Responded to Very Real, Very Extensive Terrorism…
For years, the US government, mainstream Western media outlets, and a large network of US government-funded organizations – including ASPI – have attempted to perpetuate the myth of a “Uyghur genocide” taking place in China’s western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This followed years of US government-sponsored separatism and terrorism that shook the region, spread across both China and the rest of Asia, before spanning half the globe and reaching battlefields in Syria.
In 2014, the BBC would report on the vicious terrorism plaguing China:
In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew.
There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year, 27 people died in Shanshan county after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings.
At least 31 people were killed and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a “violent terrorist incident”.
It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi’s south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others.
In July, authorities reported an attack on government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China’s largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later.
In September, about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear, and activists have contested some accounts of incidents in state media.
Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The BBC also noted:
China has often blamed ETIM – the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – or people inspired by ETIM for violent incidents both in Xinjiang and beyond the region’s borders.
ETIM is said to want to establish an independent East Turkestan in China. The US State Department in 2006 said ETIM is “the most militant of the ethnic Uighur separatist groups”.
“East Turkestan” (sometimes spelled East Turkistan) refers to a proposed independent region separatists seek to carve Xinjiang off from China to create.
The US government, through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds a multitude of organizations who officially pursue independence, referring to Xinjiang as “East Turkistan” and as being “occupied” by the Chinese government. This includes the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Campaign for Uyghurs, and the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database Project.
The World Uyghur Congress on its website, for example, claims it declares an “opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkistan.” Despite openly pursuing separatism in China, it is listed as a grantee of US NED money.
In response to US-sponsored separatism and the brutal terrorism used to achieve it, China initiated sweeping security measures, infrastructure projects, education and training initiatives, and job placement programs to root out extremism and the poverty in the remote region that made many among the population susceptible to extremism to begin with.
In turn, the US government has used claims of “genocide” and “forced labor” as a pretext to level sanctions against China and in particular businesses across China hiring Uyghurs from Xinjiang. In addition to hurting China’s economy overall, the objective is to reintroduce the socio-economic conditions across Xinjiang amid which extremism, terrorism, and instability can once again flourish.
Two Different Approaches to Terrorism
Despite the Western media having openly and eagerly reported on rampant violence consuming Xinjiang a decade ago, it now attempts to depict any mention of terrorism and the need to address it as Chinese propaganda. The Telegraph article at one point questions claims by British tourists traveling in Xinjiang who concluded security measures were for everyone’s safety by claiming it, “rams home the government line that enhanced security in Xinjiang “is not an overreaction” due to the threat of terrorism from religious extremists and ethnic separatists.”
Just one terrorist attack was all it took before the US embarked on its “Global War on Terrorism,” including the invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, despite neither nation playing a role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Half a million Iraqi children alone would die from US sanctions in the lead up to the 2003 invasion, another 1 million Iraqis would perish in the war and occupation that followed.
And even as the US lectures China on its far more constructive response to terrorism within its own borders, the US itself had bombed the very terror groups hiding in Afghanistan China was trying to reform and put to work on the other side of the border.
As recently as 2018 NBC News in its article, “U.S. targets Chinese Uighur militants as well as Taliban fighters in Afghanistan,” would report:
The U.S. military says it carried out a series of punishing bombings last weekend of Taliban militant camps that also support a separatist Chinese terror group.
A bombing raid Sunday on a region bordering China and Tajikistan set a record for the number of precision-guided munitions launched at one time from a B-52 bomber, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. James Hecker, who spoke to reporters at the Pentagon.
While the US accuses China of having detained “more than one million Uyghurs,” the US in its response to terrorism tortured, displaced, and killed millions around the globe. The areas ravaged by America’s global war remain to this day mired in violence and ruination, while China’s Xinjiang region thrives.
Believe US Lies, Not Your Own Eyes…
Associated Press in its 2021 article, “Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains,” admitted finding no evidence of mass concentration camps, torture, or mass murder, or even “cultural genocide” and instead found training programs to give locals viable employment, scholarships for young prospective imams to travel abroad to learn more about their faith, and mosques where AP photographed Muslims answering the call to prayer.
The article begins by admitting:
The razor wire that once ringed public buildings in China’s far northwestern Xinjiang region is nearly all gone.
Gone, too, are the middle school uniforms in military camouflage and the armored personnel carriers rumbling around the homeland of the Uyghurs. Gone are many of the surveillance cameras that once glared down like birds from overhead poles, and the eerie eternal wail of sirens in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.
If AP visited Xinjiang in 2021 and admittedly found no evidence of “genocide” or “abuses” in its still heavily biased reporting, why does the Telegraph find it difficult to believe Western tourists traveling through Xinjiang find the situation has only further improved since then?
In essence, the Telegraph and the special interests its narratives serve seek to convince the public not to trust their own eyes and experience, but instead defer to narratives they themselves present, often with little or no evidence.
Unironically, the Telegraph’s article concludes by complaining that China has “seized and is controlling the narrative.” China did this by opening up Xinjiang for the world to see for themselves the truth and enabling people to compare and contrast what their own eyes see versus what the Western media and the US government have claimed.
What the public is concluding is that the same US government that has lied its way into the various wars that constituted its “Global War on Terror,” is also lying about China, admittedly a nation the US seeks to undermine, threaten, and if possible, divide and destroy as it has done to nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. While the Telegraph seeks to reassert Western control over “the narrative,” it is quite clear that through a combination of waning credibility in the West and growing transparency in China, that will be difficult, if not impossible to currently do.
Just as is the case with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the West’s inability to sell its version of reality to the global public has resulted in waves of increasingly tightened censorship across Western-controlled social media platforms. As the US government directs platforms like Meta and YouTube to purge accounts challenging US propaganda regarding Ukraine and Russia, it is only a matter of time before those challenging US propaganda regarding China are likewise silenced.
This applies not only to geopolitical commentators, but even apolitical travel vloggers.
There is an imperative now more than ever for the multipolar world to develop alternatives to platforms like YouTube and Meta (banned in Russia) and even X, where the global public can share information, grow their audiences, sustain their work, all out of the reach of growing Western censorship.
Smear pieces like that in the Telegraph are merely the first shots across the bow of what will certainly be an increasingly bigger and more desperate information war. It is important that governments and individuals alike across the multipolar world prepare for the many more shots to follow
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
