Photo Above: Uyghur people perform a Uyghur cultural performance in a square in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The Uyghur people’s rich culture is flourishing in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China’s northwest.
Photo credit: China & Asia Cultural Travel website

The Firming of China’s Course Toward Socialism
Improves Uyghur People’s Lives

The Regimes Joining in Israel’s Gaza Genocide Are the Only Ones Claiming That China
is “Persecuting Uyghurs“

• Most of the world has refused to buy into the claim that China is “persecuting Uyghurs”.
• The one and only state in the entire Middle East that has signed on to this lying anti-China claim is … the truly genocidal Israeli regime!
• Uyghur people’s rich culture is flourishing in socialistic China.
• The political battle taking place within Xinjiang is a contest between on the one side, that small proportion of Uyghurs who are either consciously pro-capitalist or religious fundamentalist opponents of women’s rights, together with their imperialist masters; and on the other side, pro-women’s rights, pro-communist Uyghurs and their pro-communist Han Chinese allies.
• China’s vocational training schools are a more humane way of dealing with those who have had illegal, low-level association with banned terrorist groups than the Australian regime’s supermax prisons.
• Excessive market reforms weakened ethnic relations within China for a two decade period.
• In colloquial terms, because China has – in a zig-zagging way – become “more socialist” over the last decade and a half, Uyghur people’s lives have improved and ethnic harmony has been strengthened.
• The well being of Uyghur people closely depends on the well being of socialistic rule in China.
• Let us mobilise with all of our energy to defend the Chinese workers state against all the all-sided attacks that the imperialist ruling classes are unleashing against her.

3 April 2024: The Israeli regime is intensifying its genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people. In just the last six months, Israeli forces have killed more than 33,000 people in Gaza and hundreds more in the West Bank. Two-thirds of the people that the Zionist military have killed are women and children. The Israeli regime would not be able to commit these crimes without the massive support that it is getting from the U.S., Australian, British, German and other Western ruling classes. Do not be deceived by these Western imperialists’ appeals to their Israeli allies to “take greater care to minimise deaths of Palestinian civilians”. The imperialist rulers do not truly care one bit about the lives of Palestinian people. Their statements of “concern” are a cynical attempt to protect their self-created image as champions of “human rights”. They worry that their horrifying brutal nature is being exposed in the eyes of much of the world. Even while engaging in such window-dressing, the Western imperialist regimes are providing the Israeli forces with ever increasing military support. The Biden regime in the U.S. has sent Israel huge new caches of 155mm artillery shells and terrifying 900kg MK84 bombs – precisely the weapons that cause greatest destruction to Palestinian civilian lives and infrastructure. For its part, the Australian regime not only maintains its military ties with Israel, but greatly helps Israel direct its air and artillery strikes on Gaza through jointly operating – with its U.S. allies – the Northern Territory Pine Gap ground station for U.S. spy satellites. Australian troops have also joined those from the U.S. and other U.S. allies in a Red Sea operation designed to protect the Israeli onslaught by crushing actions in solidarity with the Palestinian people by Yemeni Houthi fighters.

The truth is that the capitalist ruling classes of the U.S., Australia, Britain and other Western countries are not only supporting Israel’s massacre of Palestinian people, they are participating in it. Yet these same ruling classes have the hide to attack China for supposedly persecuting her Uyghur minority that live in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. The Uyghurs are an ethnic group who speak a Turkic language and amongst whom the main religion present is Islam. Compared with China’s East Asian-looking Han majority ethnic group, Uyghurs generally have facial features and an appearance that somewhat more closely resembles those of white Europeans than do Han Chinese. In their most extreme allegations, the very same Western imperialists who are participating in the real genocide in Gaza claim that “China is committing a genocide of Uyghurs”. So, should we believe these claims? Let’s remember that the Western ruling elites that are spearheading the campaign to accuse China of persecuting Muslim Uyghurs are the very same people who have been lying through their teeth by telling us that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is a “legitimate act of self defence”; and by deceitfully giving the impression that Israel’s onslaught against the Palestinian people began with Hamas’ October 7 attack and not with the murderous 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. These Western ruling classes attacking China’s treatment of Uyghurs are the same ones who brand every act of resistance of the subjugated Palestinian people as “terrorism”. Twenty one years ago, these same Western ruling elites sold the world the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to justify their invasion of that oil rich country. During the course of that invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S., Australian, British and other Western militaries caused the deaths of over one million people. So we should not believe anything that they tell us! We should assume that everything that the Western imperialist rulers and their propagandists tell us is a lie … until proven otherwise.

It turns out that the Western capitalist rulers’ claim that “Communist China is committing a genocide of Uyghurs” has as much validity as their earlier claim that Iraq “has weapons of mass destruction”. That is none at all! China is not dropping bombs on Uyghur people, nor shooting Uyghurs. Not at all! Nor is China’s socialistic state killing Uyghur people in state custody – unlike Australia’s racist capitalist regime, whose cops and prison guards continue to kill, or otherwise cause the deaths of, Aboriginal people in custody with complete impunity. Realising that all this is obvious to most people in the world, imperialist propagandists then say that the “Communist Party of China is managing to genocide the Uyghurs without actually killing anyone.” To the people of Gaza who are actually suffering a genocide – whose children, mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and friends are being blown to pieces by Israeli shells and bombs, whose homes are being flattened and who now face mass starvation – this line must seem especially ridiculous. Notwithstanding this, the imperialist propagandists and their puppets tell a story that “China is committing genocide by extinguishing Uyghur culture.” The truth however is that the Uyghur people’s rich culture is flourishing in socialistic China. Uyghur language, theatre, music, dance, art, wedding and funeral customs, dress and food are not only thriving in China’s northwest but are being given much state support and encouragement. Especially flourishing is the traditional Uyghur art of Muqam, which integrates songs, dances, and folk and classical music. Backed by Chinese government subsidies, Uyghur Muqam artists regularly perform during festivals and celebrations in Xinjiang, in Uyghur towns and villages and on tours to major Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Meanwhile, millions of Uyghur people have been lifted out of poverty in recent years. Indeed, right now, the economy in the majority Uyghur-parts of China (in the southern part of Xinjiang) is literally booming, with the result that the living standards of Uyghur people are now growing faster than those in the rest of China.

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has introduced measures that give Uyghur people greater rights in some important domains than other Chinese citizens in order to make up for the historical disadvantage faced by people living in the geographically challenging, desert lands in the southern part of Xinjiang. Thus, whereas all China’s children are granted free education for the nine years of China’s compulsory education, in southern part of Xinjiang (and in the Tibet Autonomous Region) education is free for the entire 15 years of education. That means that children living in the majority Uyghur lands in the southern portion of Xinjiang have the special right to be able to attend three years of pre-school without their parents paying any fees, as well having to pay zero tuition fees if they choose to attend the three years of senior high school. Such measures are in sharp contrast to what Aboriginal people continue to face in 21^st century Australia. Here there remain laws that openly discriminate against Aboriginal people – such as laws that specially restrict many people living in several areas with high concentrations of Aboriginal people from having the right to decide how they spend their own incomes. Such compulsory “income management” measures targeting Aboriginal people were first imposed through John Howard’s 2007 Northern Territory (NT) “Intervention” and then expanded to other regions. Although the current Labor government has now made the scheme voluntary in some areas, it has imposed new measures that maintain (and even expand) draconian compulsory “income management” in several areas with high proportions of Aboriginal residents – including all of the NT, Cape York and Doomadgee in Queensland, the APY lands in South Australia and the Ngaanyatjarra lands and Kiwirrkurra Community in Western Australia.

The Western capitalist rulers’ accusations that “China is committing a genocide of Uyghurs” reached its height during the pandemic. This is no accident. Worldwide travel restrictions during the pandemic meant that people were much less able to travel to Xinjiang to verify what was really going on. That made China’s enemies feel that they could get away with making any claim about what was happening in Xinjiang. But now foreign tourists are once again travelling to China’s northwest. And these visitors are seeing with their own eyes what Xinjiang is really like. All this makes it harder for the Western rulers’ to sell their accusations about China’s actions in Xinjiang. So they have quietly, largely stopped claiming that China is committing a “genocide” of Uyghurs. Instead, they claim that China is “persecuting Uyghurs with the aim of extinguishing their identity”. If that were true, why would the Chinese state make a point of highlighting the Uyghur people’s particular identity by giving Xinjiang the official name of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)? Notably, for the last 44 years, every single chairperson of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region government has been an ethnic Uyghur. Uyghur identity is recognised in the leadership and official name of Xinjiang despite Uyghurs making up just 45% of the region’s population, with Han Chinese constituting a further 40% and non-Uyghur Turkic ethnic groups, Mongols, Persian-related Tadzhiks and the Muslim Hui group making up most of the remainder.

The Regimes Accusing Socialistic China of
“Violating Human Rights in Xinjiang”

The regimes spearheading the condemnation of China over her alleged “violations of the human rights of Uyghurs” are truly a who’s who of the countries that are supporting Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. They include the governments of the U.S., Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan. For a more detailed comparison between the countries accusing China and the ones supporting Israel’s onslaught, we identified the governments supporting Israel by those that voted for a pro-Israel amendment to a resolution at the 27 October 2023 UN General Assembly. That amendment, which was put by Canada, explicitly condemned Hamas and not Israel and sought to blame the suffering in Gaza on Hamas rather than Israel. This amendment was a despicable attempt to whitewash Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people. However, the amendment failed because it did not garner the required two-thirds majority to pass. Of the UN member states, 105 states did not vote for the amendment – either voting against, abstaining or not voting – while 88 voted for the pro-Israel amendment, including Israel itself.

So how do we identify the regimes supporting the claim of the Western powers that socialistic China is “violating the rights of Uyghurs”? To identify these states, we looked at the countries that signed a joint statement condemning China’s treatment of Uyghurs that was submitted to a UN committee on 18 October 2023. The statement, which was delivered by Britain, was signed by 50 countries (Fiji had initially been arm-twisted to sign but later withdrew its signature). That means that 142 countries refused to sign the China-bashing statement. Moreover, many of the states that did sign the statement are European and other states with very small populations. In population terms, the governments that signed onto the statement accusing China represent just 14% of the world’s population. Thus, although Australia’s mainstream media like to say that “the international community has condemned China’s treatment of Uyghurs”, it turns out that governments representing 86% of the world’s population have refused to buy into these false accusations. Moreover, in comparison with the regimes that have attacked China over the Uyghur question, a far greater number of states representing a far larger number of people have positively praised China’s treatment of Uyghurs. Most have done so after sending fact-finding trips to Xinjiang. This includes the majority of the governments heading Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, even several governments that are largely subordinate to the U.S. imperialists have hailed China for the rights and social progress she has brought to her Uyghur minority. Delegations of the Organisation of Islamic Countries and Muslim scholars from the World Muslim Communities Council have also praised China’s treatment of Uyghurs following inspection missions to the Xinjiang region. The Arab League has also denounced the attacks on China over “human rights” in Xinjiang.

It is notable that although the Western powers condemning China’s treatment of Uyghurs do so under the guise of “defending the rights” of a Muslim people, only one solitary government of a Muslim majority country is endorsing their claims. And that is the hopelessly Western-dependent regime heading the small European country, Albania. But the most striking feature of the regimes condemning China for supposed “human rights violations in Xinjiang” is that these regimes are also the strongest supporters of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Thus 48 of the 50 governments that signed the 18 October 2023 statement claiming that China was “violating the human rights” of Uyghur people went on to, just nine days later, vote for the pro-Israel, failed UN General Assembly amendment that disgustingly blamed Hamas and not Israel for causing the carnage.

The only two regimes that signed on to the 18 October 2023 anti-China statement that did not vote for the subsequent pro-Israel amendment at the UN were the ones heading the tiny countries of Eswatini and Liberia. It is noteworthy that the Eswatini regime is notorious for being not only the last African country to recognise Taiwan rather than the Peoples Republic of China as the legitimate rulers of China but for also being the last absolute monarchy on the continent. The last two and a half years has seen mass protests in Eswatini against the monarch – whose family live an opulent life in a poverty-stricken country where the average life expectancy is just 57 years. The Eswatini regime has attacked these protests with extreme brutality, killing over 50 protesters.

It should be noted that these only two states that signed the 18 October 2023 anti-China statement that did not also vote for the pro-Israel UN amendment did not actually vote against or abstain on that vote for the pro-Israel General Assembly amendment. Rather, they did not cast a vote at all. Given that these two regimes also did not cast a vote on the UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza that was voted on immediately after the pro-Israel amendment was defeated (unlike most of the other countries that did not vote for the Canadian-put pro-Israel amendment who instead overwhelming voted in favour of the ceasefire resolution), it may well be that the lack of a vote by the Eswatini and Liberian governments on the pro-Israel amendment was due to these regimes not being able to seat a representative at the UN General Assembly at the time rather than any conscious refusal to vote for the pro-Israel amendment. In any case, if one again compares the states that voted for the joint statement accusing China of “violating human rights in Xinjiang” with those that voted for the 27 October 2023 pro-Israel amendment but this time does so from the point of view of the populations that these governments represent, then 99.4% of those that signed the statement accusing China of “violating human rights in Xinjiang” voted for the pro-Israel UN amendment that sought to condemn Palestinian resistance forces rather than Israel. In other words, for all practical purposes, one can say that those regimes that attack China over her treatment of Uyghurs are made up entirely of regimes that support Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.   

Western Imperialism – Its Neo-Colonies and Semi-Colonies

It should be stressed that the fifty governments accusing China of “violating human rights in Xinjiang” is overwhelmingly made up of the Western powers in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Thus, and very tellingly, the one and only state in the entire Middle East that has signed on to this lying claim that China is persecuting Muslim Uyghurs is … the truly genocidal Israeli regime! The only other state in all of Asia to join the statement attacking China is the imperialist regime ruling Japan. In Africa, only the two previously mentioned governments of Eswatini and Liberia – who together represent less than 0.5% of Africa’s population – endorsed the statement attacking China’s human rights record in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, not one single state in South America signed onto the anti-China statement and just one state in Central America did – the U.S.-subservient regime of Guatemala. The only other states to sign onto the statement are four Pacific regimes that are neocolonial puppets of either Australian or U.S. imperialism.  This includes the government of Tuvalu, which in November effectively made the country an Australian protectorate, after agreeing to give the Australian regime veto power over Tuvalu’s security arrangements with any other country. Then there are the rulers of another Australian neocolony, Nauru. Since the start of the 21^st century, the Australian government has turned Nauru into an extremely brutal detention centre for refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia who sought asylum in Australia. This followed Australian and British companies destroying the island through phosphate mining during the period of direct Australian colonial rule (nominally done in concert with Britain and New Zealand). With the island thus becoming unsuitable for the islanders earlier means of subsistence through agriculture and aquaculture, the tiny country became even more dependent on Australia’s capitalist ruling class. This allowed Australia’s rulers to make islanders reliant on payments from Canberra for enforcing the mandatory detention of refugees and which, in practice, gave the Australian regime control over Nauru’s external policy (with the number of refugees coming by boat into Australia having fallen and thus the Australian regime’s use of Nauru for refugee imprisonment having diminished, the blood money that Nauru’s governemnt receives from Canberra for imprisoning refugees has recently plunged, pushing the country’s leaders to start to assert a degree of independence – we do not know whether this will later result in a change in their stance on Xinjiang but in January Nauru finally swapped its recognition as to who are the legitimate rulers of China from Taiwan to the Peoples Republic of China). The final two signatories to the statement accusing China of “violating human rights in Xinjiang” are the tiny Pacific states of Palau and Marshall Islands. These two states are basically “protectorates” of the U.S. regime and relentlessly downtrodden ones. From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. conducted massive nuclear testing on several of the islands that make up the Marshall Islands after forcing residents to leave their homes. To this very day, the U.S. uses the Marshall Islands as a major missile testing site. Both the radiation from the nuclear testing and the forced relocation caused massive damage to the health of the country’s people, resulting in them dying on average at a notably younger age than those in neighbouring Micronesia. Today, through a colonial-style arrangement, with the Orwellian title, “Compact of Free Association”, the U.S. has complete control over both the Marshall Islands and Palau’s defence and security. The Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru and Tuvalu signing onto the 18 October 2023 condemnation of China can hardly be considered independent acts!

The number of states that voted for the 27 October 2023 pro-Israel amendment at the UN General Assembly is considerably greater than the number that have signed onto the bogus attacks on China over human rights in Xinjiang. This is because a number of states that are dependent on the Western imperial powers and can be considered their semi-colonies – like India, Brazil and Mexico  – were pressed to vote for the Canadian-put, pro-Israel amendment. However, while the imperial powers have enough pull on these states to drag them into voting for an amendment that backhandedly excuses Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, these states retain enough independence to avoid making a total mockery of themselves by signing onto an anti-China statement on Xinjiang that is so openly a load of rubbish.

Moreover, while the likes of India, Brazil and Mexico were pushed into voting for a pro-Israel amendment at the UN General Assembly, they have not been providing concrete military support to the Israeli military. The regimes providing actual material support to Israel’s war on the Palestinian people are exclusively the Western powers. These include Israel’s main backer the U.S. regime, the Australian regime, the German regime which has been providing Israel with huge stocks of arms over the last few months and the regimes participating in the U.S.-instigated Red Sea operation to protect the Israeli onslaught by attacking pro-Palestine actions by Houthi rebels. The latter include not only the U.S. and Australia but also Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway as well as the European Union (which includes most European states) – all of whom have forces in the Red Sea arrayed against the Houthis whether they be in concert with the U.S. or under independent national command. In summary one can say that, for all practical purposes, not only are all the regimes that falsely accuse China of persecuting Uyghurs supporters of Israel, these regimes that are spreading these anti-China lies are basically the only ones that are actually giving concrete military support to Israel’s war on Gaza. These are essentially also the very same regimes that invaded and occupied Iraq, that committed horrific war crimes during their failed two-decade occupation of Afghanistan, that brought disaster to Libya’s people through their brutal 2011 regime change war and that waged a brutal proxy war and then deadly bombing campaign in Syria. These Western regimes lying about China’s treatment of her majority Muslim, Uyghur population are also the very regimes that have regularly demonised and incited hatred against their own Muslim minorities whenever they have needed to find a scapegoat or diversion for their masses’ economic and social grievances.

What is Driving the Western Powers to
Both Support Israel’s Bloodbath and to Make
Lying Accusations Against China

To understand why support for Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and false accusations that China is persecuting Uyghurs go hand in hand, one has to examine the nature of the Western rulers who are guilty of both these crimes. Currently, in all the Western countries, economic and actual political power lies in the hands of a super-rich class that owns the banks, factories, mines, transport nodes, communication infrastructure and major retail and service enterprises. The wealth and power of this capitalist class is such that all the state institutions and governments serve their exclusive interests. In the modern world, the capitalists of the richer countries not only exploit the workers of their own countries but gain fabulous profits from exploiting labour in the poorer countries at an even greater rate. They loot the natural resources of these poorer countries, seize control of their markets and mercilessly leach interest payments from the peoples of these lands. Thus the ruling classes of the richer Western countries are not only capitalist ruling classes but also imperialist ruling classes. Australia’s capitalists for example gain huge profits from plundering the natural wealth of South Pacific countries and through broader profiteering in these and neighbouring southeast Asian and South Asian countries. To the most powerful imperialist ruling classes, the Middle East is especially important because of its oil wealth and its strategic location. That is why the, by far, strongest imperial power, the U.S., has enlisted Israel to be its enforcer in the Middle East. And that in turn is why the U.S. rulers back Israel. In protecting Israel they are protecting their reliable and vicious attack dog in a highly strategic region. The Australian rulers back Israel because they want to protect the power of their U.S. senior partner whose might is what underwrites Australian imperialist exploitation in the Asia-Pacific region. Similarly, smaller imperialist states such as Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden are especially keen to do whatever it takes to uphold U.S. power, because not being militarily strong enough to single-handedly enforce their own imperialist plundering, they rely on U.S. might to maintain the Western-dominated world “order” that enables them to get a slice of the imperialist looting of poorer countries.

OK, so the above explains why the Western regimes back Israel. But where does China fit into all this? To answer this we first need to point out that a good part of what enables the imperial powers to rape the poorer countries is through their control of world markets, their ownership of capital and their jealously-guarded possession of the most advanced technology. This allows them to demand that developing countries hand over a big chunk of their income in order to get access to the markets, capital and technology that they so badly need to develop. And here is where China acts as a big disruptor. You see although there are unfortunately still capitalists operating within China, unlike in the West the capitalists do not rule China. Instead, albeit in an imperfect and indirect way, it is the working class that rules China – a rule that was established through a heroic toiling people’s revolution in 1949. As a result, in China, the backbone economic sectors – including all the major banks, the steel, aluminum, cement and glass industries, the energy and power sector, the major mines, the major infrastructure companies, the ports, the shipping lines, the three big telecommunications firms, the shipbuilding, train manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing and space sectors, the majority of the auto industry and more – are collectively owned by the people through public ownership. The success of China’s socialistic system means that China and her giant state-owned enterprises are increasingly able to offer developing countries the capital and technical expertise that they need, alongside access to China’s huge market. And here’s the key point, they are able to offer all this without ripping off the people of these countries. This is possible because China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises are fundamentally not profit driven. To be sure, China is not collaborating with developing countries out of charity. They benefit too from these exchanges. Chinese operations in the developing world bring additional employment prospects for Chinese engineers, technicians and skilled workers, brings opportunities for Chinese public sector enterprises to gain experience operating in different environments and allows Chinese companies to increase their scale of operations. Meanwhile, the cooperation with countries in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America helps China win more friends in the developing world. Moreover, by helping friendly poorer countries to improve their incomes, China is growing the market for its own exports while improving the capacity of these countries to supply the imports that China needs. The cooperation is indeed mutually beneficial. The key point however is that although China’s state-owned enterprises do seek benefits from their operations in developing countries, they are not pursing big profits. Indeed, many of the big infrastructure projects that China’s public sector companies have successfully delivered to developing countries have barely made any profit at all and sometimes even run at a loss. As a result, poorer countries are increasingly turning to socialistic China and her state-owned enterprises to help them develop. In doing so they are turning their backs on profit-driven Western companies or using the threat of turning to China to demand a fairer deal from Western investors. All this is causing Western corporate bigwigs, bank owners and investors to lose part of the profits that they had previously been able to plunder from developing countries. And this has these imperialist exploiters and the regimes that serve them hopping mad!

The China-caused loss of some of the exorbitant profits that they attain from plundering the poorer countries is more than annoyance to the ruling classes of the richer Western capitalist countries. With their own economies ridden by repeated crises – witness the soaring inflation and low or even negative economic growth in most of their countries right now – the imperialist rulers cannot stave off the collapse of their domestic capitalist economies without super-exploiting the developing world. Indeed, for their obsolete capitalist economic systems to survive, each of the imperialist ruling classes need to actually drastically increase the number of toilers that they exploit in the Global South and the amount of natural resources that they plunder from these lands. However, the continuation of socialistic rule within China prevents these imperialist ruling classes from exploiting workers in a country with nearly one in five of the world’s people the way that they super-exploit workers in the rest of the developing world. Therefore, whether it is through her mutually beneficial cooperation with developing countries (inadvertently) obstructing imperialist looting of these countries or through its workers state preventing China itself from being turned into a giant sweatshop for exploitation by Western capitalists, socialistic rule in China presents an existential threat to the rule of the imperialist classes. And that is why the capitalist rulers in the West are working tirelessly to crush socialistic rule in China. Their means range from funding and training anti-communist forces within China, to providing propaganda support for these groups, to placing restrictions on high-tech exports to China, to provocatively sending naval armada’s into China-claimed waters in the South and East China Seas, to threateningly engaging in massive military buildups aimed against Red China. To justify amongst their own populations these highly expensive means of exerting all-sided pressure on socialistic China, the Western capitalist ruling classes use every opportunity to demonise China. Their lie that China is brutally persecuting Uyghurs is one of their key means of slandering Red China. And Australia’s ruling elite are at the very forefront of disseminating this lie. Indeed, one prominent Australian ruling class think tank, ASPI has become the international spearhead of Western imperialism’s propaganda campaign against China over the treatment of Uyghurs. The Australian ruling class’ vigour in promoting these anti-China slanders is in proportion to the resistance that they are facing to their imperialist plunder of the Pacific and Southeast Asia as a result of socialistic China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with countries in these regions.

The Capitalist Ruling Classes’
All-Sided Campaign to Denigrate Red China

There is another, still more fundamental, reason why capitalist exploiting classes seek to denigrate China. With many working-class people in Australia and other capitalist countries ground down by unaffordable rents, steeply rising prices and growing homelessness, capitalist rulers fear that these people will look favourably upon China’s socialistic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last few decades. Capitalist ruling classes are especially worried that workers in their own countries infuriated that their wages are not keeping up with prices will notice that, in the last fifteen years, real wages in China have almost tripled – with socialistic China’s workers enjoying a rate of real wage growth that in more than four times faster than that of any major capitalist economy! And the U.S.’s rulers, in particular, are scared that their own masses, frustrated at the high cost and inaccessibility of health care, will realise that average life expectancy in Red China is now two years higher than it is in the U.S. … after being 32 years below that of the U.S. (36 years then in China compared to 68 years then in the U.S.) at the time that China had her socialist revolution in 1949!  In short, the rulers of the capitalist countries are fearful that the obvious successes of socialistic rule in China will encourage the increasingly dissatisfied masses in their own countries to demand socialism at home. That is why capitalist ruling classes look for every possible opportunity to slander China.

For example, once it became clear that socialistic China had responded far more effectively to the COVID pandemic than the capitalist countries, capitalist ruling classes and their media went on a hysterical campaign to attack China’s COVID response. They promoted the “possibility” that COVID “could have” leaked out of a Chinese lab – a nutty conspiracy theory refuted by most genuine medical experts. They alternately claimed that China’s pandemic response was either way too harsh or way too lax … and sometimes even made both claims simultaneously! They did their best to hide or downplay the truth that socialistic China’s COVID death rate per person was way lower than in nearly all the rest of the world. And when they had to grudgingly acknowledge this truth, capitalist ruling elites claimed that this was only because China had severely restricted her people’s freedoms. The truth however was that China’s COVID success was because her socio-economic system – where the key sectors are dominated by public ownership and where even larger private companies are ultimately subordinated to the workers state – was able to organise mass COVID testing of people, build brand new hospitals and makeshift hospitals and produce PPE (personal protective equipment) and other pandemic response materials far more quickly and comprehensively than in the capitalist world. As a result, although the mainstream Western media tried to give people the impression that all of China was locked down for the entire three years of the pandemic, the truth is that China was able to very effectively protect her people from COVID death while ensuring that most people in the country were locked down for far shorter periods than in either Melbourne or Sydney. Indeed, the majority of people living in two of China’s biggest cities, Beijing and Guangzhou, never had to endure a single compulsory lockdown during the entire pandemic. That is why, almost uniquely in the world, socialistic China never went into recession during the entire pandemic. More importantly, China was one of the only countries in the world where workers enjoyed significant real wage growth during the pandemic.

The Western capitalist media has now switched the main focus of their efforts to make socialistic China seem a less palatable model from attacking China’s COVID response to claiming that her economy is “in deep trouble.” They have flooded their newspapers and TV news bulletins with accounts selectively focusing on the few sectors of the Chinese economy that are doing less well, while avoiding like the plague any mention of the sectors that are truly booming in China – like electric car manufacturing, wind and solar power projects, high-speed rail construction, shipbuilding and satellite launching. Notably, these Western mainstream media somehow “report” on the Chinese economy without actually mentioning its actual GDP (gross domestic product) growth rate – which is the most commonly used measure of an economy’s strength! There is a reason for that! For contrary to capitalist media reports, China’s economy is actually growing at an excellent rate. Last year, China GDP grew by an impressive 5.2%, which is nearly twice the growth rate of the other large country with a similar per capita income to China, Brazil. China’s 2023 GDP growth rate was also more than 50 times greater than the growth rate of the stalling British economy, infinitely higher than the growth level of the German economy, which, actually went backwards last year, and three and a half times faster than the 2023 economic growth rate in Australia. Notably, per capita incomes in China grew at a rate comparable to her economy, while they actually fell in Australia and Britain, which were both only prevented from falling into an official recession by population growth. Socialistic China was able to make these economic achievements while keeping her people’s living costs under control. Average prices rose just 0.2% in China last year, compared to a 4.6% rise in Brazil, approximately 6% rises in both Australia (it is only at the end of last year that inflation here has fallen to just above 4%) and Germany and a 7.3% surge in annual average inflation in Britain. As a result, unlike in Australia and many other capitalist countries where real wages plunged downwards, workers in China continued to enjoy surging real wages in 2023.

Despite her striking successes, China is still catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949, capitalist days, when she was a subjugated neo-colony exploited by the imperial powers. As a result, average incomes in China are still some three to four times lower than in the richest of the imperialist countries. While this remains the case, the attractive power of China’ socialistic example to workers in, especially, the richest countries will be less than it would otherwise be. However, what if socialistic China’s economic growth continues to outpace that of the capitalist world for the next two or three decades? Then real wages in China will catch up to or even overtake that of the richest countries. Workers in the West will then see that a socialistic state is able to lift incomes in a once poverty stricken country to amongst the highest global levels and to do it in a way that leaves no one in poverty, provides an abundance of low-rent public housing and creates a society that is far more harmonious and far more filled with hope than in the capitalist world. What worker in the West would then want capitalism with all its lack of job security, its unaffordable rents, its rising income gaps, its growing homelessness, its social decay, its divisions and its bigotry? It is the fear that their own exploited working classes will come to this conclusion that capitalism should be replaced with socialism that terrifies the capitalist ruling classes. That is why their propaganda war against Red China has taken on an increasingly desperate, panicked and hysterical character. They realise that they may have only about two decades left to either smash socialistic rule in China or greatly curb its development. The ludicrous nature of their claims about China’s treatment of Uyghurs should be seen in this context. It is not some isolated campaign by the imperial powers but part of an all-sided crusade that they are waging against China – a crusade whose frenzy is proportional to the imperialist ruling classes’ awareness that failure in this crusade will spell doom for their own tyranny.

The Means Through Which
Imperialist Propaganda is Disseminated

The wealthy capitalist classes ruling Australia and other imperialist countries have gigantic resources with which to spread propaganda. Firstly, they have the regimes that serve them. These capitalist regimes are not only able to disseminate propaganda through government institutions but through the schools and universities that they fund. The capitalist regime’s control of universities and thus of the staff that they hire ensures that students enrolled in subjects like politics, history, social science, journalism and economics are mostly taught by anti-communist lecturers. To maintain the pretence of balance, university administrators do hire a smaller number of nominally leftist intellectuals as well. However, control of the universities by capitalist regimes ensures that for such leftist intellectuals to hold down careers in university academia they must bend to the wishes of the capitalist class on the most crucial questions. The most effective way for a left-leaning academic in Australia, who teaches in a politics-related area, to show that they are ultimately loyal to the capitalist establishment and thus “worthy” of maintaining their well paying job is by enlisting in the imperialist propaganda campaign against socialistic China. And by giving such anti-communist propaganda a “leftist” colour – most tiresomely by denying China’s socialistic character – such nominally leftist academics can further emphasise their value to their university bosses by showing their ability to add “fresh” and “unique” perspectives to the anti-Red-China political campaign. For example, there are prominent left social-democratic academics in Australia who have been able to keep lucrative university positions and respect from the mainstream establishment, all while eking a certain political space to express a leftist viewpoint in fields not too damaging to the capitalist establishment, by proving their value to the latter through devoting themselves to “scholarly work” that helps popularize the myth that “China’s is oppressing Uyghurs.”

The capitalist regime is also able to disseminate their propaganda by the media that they own. In Australia, the regime owns SBS and ABC media outlets. The latter is notorious for recently sacking a journalist of Lebanese heritage, Antoinette Lattouf, because she merely made a social media post critical of Israel’s conduct in its war on Gaza; and for causing another of its reporters of Lebanese heritage, Nour Haydar to resign due to the broadcaster’s anti-Palestinian coverage of the war. As for the rest of the media, it is owned directly by the capitalists and often by some of its richest tycoons such as the Murdochs and Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes. Capitalist billionaires also directly own the internet search engines and social media platforms. And given that the most used platforms – Facebook, X/Twitter, Youtube and Google – are all owned by people whose net wealth each exceeds $170 billion (!!), it is unsurprising that these platforms are biased to favour the dissemination of views favourable to the capitalist order and therefore hostile to socialistic rule in China! To be sure, these social media platforms allow some dissemination of alternate views. They do so in order to maintain their number of users. However, their algorithms are biased to favour the spread of Western imperialist propaganda and to retard the reach of ideas, information and users sympathetic to Red China. Furthermore, they ban outright many pro-China sites and postings. Meanwhile, capitalist regimes seek to censor any social media platforms that do not impose such pro-imperialist, anti-Red China bias. It is for this reason that feuding Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. are coming together to try and ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok. A year ago, the Albanese Labor government here banned Australia’s public sector employees from accessing TikTok on government devices. Encouraged by this censorship and Washington’s moves to ban TikTok, the right-wing Coalition is now pushing for a complete ban on the hugely popular, Chinese-owned app.

As well as through the media and social media platforms that they own, the Western capitalist classes also spread their lies through the “independent” think-tanks that they establish. In Australia, the original source for much of the attacks on socialistic China over her treatment of Uyghurs comes from these think tanks. These include the Lowy Institute controlled by billionaire Frank Lowy and his children and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The latter was co-founded by Rupert Murdoch’s father in 1943 with the explicit aim of “resisting the trend towards socialism” and which in recent years has received a good part of its funding from Australia’s richest person, mining heiress Gina Rinehart. The think tank most fanatically attacking China’s treatment of Uyghurs is ASPI (the Australian Strategic Policy Institute). ASPI’s imaginative “work” in this field has made it the original source for many of the attacks on “China’s treatment of Uyghurs” by capitalist politicians and media outlets in the U.S. and other Western countries. This pro-war “independent” think tank is funded not only by the Australian and U.S. governments but by giant capitalist-owned defence corporations like Lockheed Martin, SAAB, Thales and BAE and by other capitalist companies, including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Mark Zuckeberg’s Meta, an Australian subsidiary of the Amazon company owned by the world’s third richest billionaire Jeff Bezos, as well as by the Property Council of Australia. Yet it is not only rabid right-wing think tanks like ASPI that the capitalists fund. Australia’s most prominent “left-leaning” think tank, the Australia Institute, was also built up by filthy rich capitalists. Indeed its main source of funding was from none other than the sister of Rupert Murdoch, Anne Kantor and her children! With big-time capitalists behind it, it is little wonder that the Australia’s Institute’s “progressivism” never extends beyond schemes to tinker with the existing capitalist order. And it is also why the Australia Institute, while it may sometimes be at odds with the shrill Cold War tone of the likes of ASPI, nevertheless takes a negative attitude to Red China’s social system, including by echoing the lie that China is persecuting Uyghurs. It is telling that the founder of the Australia Institute and its head during almost the entire first half of its existence, Clive Hamilton, is today one of Australia’s most extreme China-bashing “public intellectuals”.

The role of pro-ruling class intellectuals like Hamilton in the capitalist propaganda system is enormous. Although they for the most part do not speak directly to the masses, it is they who provide the arguments and the distorted “facts” to arm the journalists, commentators, capitalist politicians and lecturers that in turn directly blast the masses with anti-communist propaganda. In return, the ruling class fetes these pro-capitalist-order intellectuals with huge “research” grants, a celebrated social status and lucrative positions in the upper ranks of think tanks, “research” institutes and university study centres. By granting such privileges, the ruling class not only rewards those who are doing great service for them but ensures that their crucial chief propagandists are kept conservatised and in the fold so that any social conscience that they may have does not lead them to politically “stray”.

These pro-capitalist-order intellectuals can be very sophisticated. The most effective make some acknowledgement of the weaknesses of the capitalist system in order to retain credibility. However, they all sell either one or both of two key points which the imperialist rulers absolutely need us to believe: that the revolutionary socialist overthrow of capitalism is either impossible or undesirable and that existing states created by the overturn of the capitalist order should not be supported. Thus a major role of these ruling-class intellectuals is to spread the blatant lie that workers revolution is “impossible” in the richer, Western countries because the masses there will supposedly always be too “comfortable” and bought off and thus their political consciousness cannot decisively change. Others focus on disseminating the line, some even while being very critical of the capitalist order, that as bad as the current system is, existing states created by the overturn of capitalism are even worse … or in fact merely a different form of capitalist state. Given that Red China is by far the biggest example of a state created through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule and the one whose achievements in poverty alleviation are best known, pro-establishment intellectuals in the West are required to devote a great part of their energy to denigrating socialistic China.

Bogus “Human Rights” Organisations and
Irresolute Sections of the Far Left

Of all the different type of capitalist-funded think tanks and institutes where imperialist-apologising intellectuals operate, the most devious are the supposedly “independent”, “human rights” organisations. For while the political line coming out from the likes of ASPI, the IPA and the Lowy Institute is often obvious, the capitalist ruling classes’ “human rights” organisations are more able to clothe themselves in the cover of “even handedness”. The most influential and sinister of these “human rights” NGOs is Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW has played a lead role in selling the lie that Red China is “persecuting Uyghurs”. Although HRW would like to portray itself as a “grassroots” organisation standing up for “human rights”, it is the very opposite of that. Headquartered in the U.S., HRW is a multi-million dollar operation funded by super wealthy Americans and other Western donors and corporations whose exact identities the shadowy organisation keeps secret.

From the very beginning, HRW’s main purpose has been to provide the “human rights” cover for Western imperialism’s drive to destroy socialistic states. Today, HRW not only targets Red China and the DPRK (North Korea) but devotes much energy to attacking socialistic Cuba who they accuse of having an “abysmal human rights record”. However, to give themselves credibility, HRW will occasionally also report on human rights violations by the U.S. and other Western ruling classes. But they will mostly only report problems that everyone already knows about and which have been substantiated many times over. That way their “expose’s” of human rights atrocities of Western capitalist regimes do minimal damage. In contrast, when HRW launches an attack on China, Cuba or other socialistic states they will produce either entirely new claims or spread, as fact, highly disputed claims made by others – all of which are usually completely unsubstantiated or simply plain lies. Moreover, whenever attacking supposed human rights violations in a workers state or other country in the firing sights of Western imperialism, HRW will not only use as extreme language as possible but will always make their shrill statements in the context of accusing the targeted state of having an “abysmal human rights record”. By contrast, whenever HRW feel compelled to acknowledge human rights problems in Western capitalist countries they use moderate language and emphasise that the issues occur in the context of the state having an otherwise “strong record of protecting civil and political rights”. This is how HRW and other pro-imperialist “human rights NGOs” deceive the people of the world!

Take a look at the HRW’s statements on Israel’s heinous war on the Palestinian people. With Israel’s genocidal attacks evident to most of the world, HRW knows that it will lose all credibility as a “human rights organisation” if it does not criticise Israel. However, HRW then deliberately muddies the waters by severely attacking Palestinian resistance forces and their allies in the Middle East. In this way, HRW pushes their audience to draw the conclusion that what is needed is not solidarity with the Palestinian people but a neutrality between the Israeli occupying forces and the Palestinian resistance. In the context of Israel committing genocidal mass murder of the people of Gaza, such apparent “neutrality” in practice means acquiescence to Israel’s genocide. In fact HRW’s agenda on the Palestine issue is even worse than a “neutrality”. Thus, despicably, HRW denounced the brave pro-Palestinian actions of Yemeni Houthis (who blocked Israel-linked shipping traversing the Red Sea) as a “war crime”. In doing so they provided the “human rights”, propaganda preparation to the airstrikes that would shortly thereafter be launched on Yemeni pro-Palestine forces by the U.S., British, Australian and other imperialist regimes. By its extreme denunciations of all Palestinian and pro-Palestinian resistance forces, HRW’s actual stance on Israel’s war on Palestine is not too dissimilar to the line taken by Washington and its allies. This should be little surprise. The same wealthy capitalists and other well-heeled Americans and other Westerners funding HRW are part of the same social classes that uphold the likes of Biden and Albanese and whom the latter serve. HRW’s attacks on Yemeni pro-Palestine actions and other pro-Palestinian resistance is ultimately driven by the same interests that guide them to make lying denunciations against socialist China over her treatment of Uyghurs; and over every other issue that HRW can twist into a “human rights” attack on Red China.

Echoing the lies about China’s treatment of Uyghurs spread by the imperialist ruling classes and their media, think tanks and NGOs are Australia’s three most active far-left groups, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), Socialist Alliance (SA) and Solidarity. To excuse such capitulation to the imperialists’ anti-China Cold War, these groups ridiculously claim that China is just another “capitalist” country. Sadly, many others on the Left also make take this same claim. Thus the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), which, in contrast to the likes of SAlt and Solidarity, correctly exposes U.S. rulers for “cynical championing of `human rights’ in support of right-wing, separatist tendencies in Xinjiang”, nevertheless claims that China is engaging in a “fiction that it is building `socialism with Chinese characteristics’”. Whereas for the likes of SAlt, SA and Solidarity, the claim that China is just another capitalist state becomes an excuse to support imperialist, anti-China narratives about Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and COVID, for the SEP it is a rationale to take only a perfunctory opposition to these narratives, while giving themselves the wriggle room to capitulate to the Cold War offensive when it gets too powerful to comfortably resist. The latter was the case during the anti-China uprising by pro-colonial, rich-kids in Hong Kong in 2019. At the height of Hong Kong’s anti-China riots that were being supported and egged on by the Western ruling classes, the SEP backed the anti-communist movement – albeit with less enthusiasm than the likes of SAlt, SA and Solidarity. They even joined a 30 August 2019 rally at Sydney University in support of the anti-Red China forces in Hong Kong – a demonstration that we in Trotskyist Platform counter-protested against – where the SEP distributed a leaflet providing critical support to the anti-communist Hong Kong movement. Three days later, an SEP statement on the Julian Assange case disgracefully compared China’s stance on the Hong Kong issue to the far-right Indian government’s brutal repression of the people of Kashmir, ranting that: “In China, the Stalinist regime, which defends the interests of the corporate elite and super-rich, is sending police to brutally attack protesters in Hong Kong.” It was only when the pro-colonial Hong Kong uprising started to wane and the Western propaganda hype in support of it diminished that the SEP retreated somewhat from its support to the anti-communist movement. Yet, to this very day, the SEP continues to join the imperialists in calling for “overturning the CCP regime”- which, in practical terms, means a call for the counterrevolutionary smashing of the Chinese workers state.

To be sure, those irresolute sections of the Far Left that, to a more or lesser extent, back anti-communists movements and propaganda targeting Red China do not cravenly capitulate to imperialism on every single issue. After all, if they did so they could not be considered part of the Left. For example, SAlt, SA and Solidarity, who all join the imperialist propaganda campaign against China over Uyghurs, have at the same time been working hard to build actions in support of Palestinian people against Israel’s Western-backed terror. However, by lining up behind imperialism’s political offensive against the Chinese workers state they are doing much harm to the Palestinian cause. Any weakening of socialistic China would leave the U.S.-led imperialists more unchallenged – and thus powerful – and therefore even more able to pour arms, money and political capital into their Israeli allies.

There is a reason that many Far Left groups are able to be on the right side of the fence on the Palestine struggle yet be squarely on the side of imperialism in its political war against Red China. The reason is that although Western propaganda excusing Israel’s war on the Palestinian people is thick, the political pressure pushing groups to bend to the anti-China Cold War is even stronger than that pushing them to side with the Israeli regime. For while backing their Israeli attack dog in the strategic Middle East is an important tactical imperative for the U.S.-led imperialists, crushing socialistic rule in China is an absolute necessity for these ruling classes. That is why in terms of harassment and repression that one can expect from the capitalist state, blowback from bosses (and sometimes politically backward individual workers) at the workplace and hostility from “average” public opinion – shaped as it is by the propaganda of the ruling class – it is even more difficult to be known as a supporter of the Chinese workers state than to be known as a supporter of Palestine. Yet those nominally Marxist groups who are not resolute enough to resist the anti-China Cold War pressures will have little hope of fulfilling the even more difficult mission that history has called on us Marxists to undertake – the mission to lead the toiling masses in the revolutionary overturn of capitalist rule in Australia and all other capitalist countries.

The issue of what stance groups take towards Red China is more than just a crucial test question for avowed socialists. The China question is one that will shape world history over the coming period. If the imperialist powers succeed in destroying socialistic rule in China then the worldwide struggle for socialist revolution will be set back decades. That is precisely what happened after the Soviet and East European workers states were destroyed by Western-backed capitalist counterrevolution in the 1989-1992 period. The extreme suffering that the Palestinian people are today suffering can be partly traced back to the weakening of Palestinian liberation forces and reduced international backing for the Palestinian resistance that resulted both directly and indirectly from the counterrevolutionary destruction of socialistic rule in the former Soviet Union and East Europe. On the other hand if, through solidarity from the workers movements in the capitalist world, Red China is able to resist the hostile pressure of the imperial powers and continue to catch up in economic strength with these powers, then socialistic China will become exactly what the capitalist powers fear that it will become – if only by the example of successful socialistic advancement that it provides – an existential threat to decaying, genocidal world capitalism.

The Accusations Against China Over Treatment of Uyghurs
Just Don’t Stack Up

Those who have been somewhat swayed by the incessant claims by the Western ruling classes, their media and their NGOs about the situation in Xinjiang and are unsure what is really happening there should ask themselves a couple of questions. Firstly, if the PRC is so cruelly subjugating Uyghurs, why is there no propaganda from any sections of the PRC state or its broader ruling circles demonising the Uyghur people? This matters because when a ruling group oppresses a particular ethnic or community group it must both, on the one hand, incite its own state enforcement personnel to enforce this subjugation and on the other, justify this persecution amongst its own population. Therefore, no matter what the particular stripe of the rulers and the particular form of the regime that they run, they must accompany their oppression with intense racist propaganda vilifying the targeted community. For example, to motivate its horrific genocide of Jewish people, the Nazis portrayed Jews as “subhumans” responsible for all of Germany ills. Today, to justify their genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza, Israel’s leaders spout extreme racist depictions of Palestinian people. In announcing a total siege of Gaza last October, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant branded the Palestinian people of Gaza as “human animals”. Similarly, when Australia’s colonial regime was openly mass murdering Aboriginal people through shooting massacres and poisonings it depicted Aboriginal people not as humans but as “flora and fauna”.

Today, as Australia’s ruling class continues to brutally oppress Aboriginal people, key figures and institutions of Australia’s capitalist establishment continue to portray Aboriginal people in a racist manner. Less than ten years ago, Australia’s then prime minister Tony Abbott disgustingly asserted that Sydney was “nothing but bush” prior to the arrival of the First Fleet – effectively erasing pre-1788 Aboriginal society and culture and thus implicitly justifying the genocidal colonial conquest of this land under the fiction that it had previously been “terra nullius”. During the lead-up to last year’s referendum on enshrining an Aboriginal “Voice” to parliament, right-wing forces within the ruling class hurled a torrent of disgusting racist insults at Aboriginal people. Conservative politicians and commentators in the Murdoch media used the cover of the “Voice debate” to spread, thinly veiled, racist portrayals of Aboriginal people as a people incapable of running their own affairs who are especially prone to violence against women and child abuse. At last August’s right-wing CPAC conference, attended by the leading conservative figures within Australia’s ruling class, one speaker referred to traditional Aboriginal owners of the land as “violent black men.” Meanwhile, a coronial inquest into the 2019 death of Warlpiri-Luritja Aboriginal teenager, Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot three times by a police officer revealed that not only did the police officer who killed the 19 year-old Aboriginal man make despicable racist insults against Aboriginal people in text messages, it showed that such abuse is very common within the NT Police. NT cops refer to Aboriginal people as “animals” and insultingly mock Aboriginal people by having a “Coo_ of the Year” award to officers for the “most Coo_-like behavior”!

The Australian ruling class also accompanies its oppression of other people of colour with statements and propaganda attacking those communities. In 2019, then NSW Labor leader Michael Daley incited hostility towards people of Asian heritage by dishonestly claiming that: “Our young children will flee and who are they being replaced with? They are being replaced by young people from typically Asia with PhDs … our kids are moving out and foreigners are moving in and taking their jobs.” And let us never forget how the then most listened to radio announcer in Sydney, 2GB’s Alan Jones, incited the 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach against people of Lebanese and other non-Anglo backgrounds, even reading out a text message calling to “… get down to North Cronulla to support the L_b and w_g bashing day”. The question then is if China’s rulers are really oppressing Uyghurs, why has there never been similar calls from any section of China’s mainstream media for a “Uyghur bashing day”? Why have China’s ministers and police officers never referred to Uyghur people as “animals” or “human animals”? Why has Xi Jinping or other high-ranking Chinese politicians never blamed Uyghurs for social or economic ills or made comments erasing Uyghur people’s unique culture?  You can bet that if any one of these things happened in China, even once, to the slightest degree, the Western imperialist media would be hyping it up to the maximum and reminding us of the incident in high profile pieces for months and years on end!

Instead of offending Uyghurs and other minority peoples, China’s politicians and state-owned media make it a point of emphasising the existence and contribution of “Chinese people of all ethnic groups” in all major speeches. Just as the derogatory comments and scapegoating attacks that Australia’s ruling class often unleash against Aboriginal people – and residents of Asian, Middle Eastern and African backgrounds – and the insulting racist way that Israel’s ruling class refers to Palestinian people are both an “indispensable” driver and inevitable by-product of the Australian and Israeli establishment’s racist persecution of the targeted peoples, the complete lack of any such racist propaganda against Uyghur people from China’s politicians, media outlets, mainstream think tanks and police is a sign that racist, state-driven subjugation of Uyghur people in China simply does not exist to any sizable degree.

The second question that those who have been somewhat influenced by the imperialist narrative about China’s treatment of Uyghurs should ask themselves is, if China is in fact so brutally oppressing Uyghurs why is she encouraging people to travel to the Uyghur-majority parts of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region? If the accusations against China were in fact true, would she not instead try to hide what is happening by minimising the gaze of tourists, traders and transport workers? After all, the Australian ruling class does not encourage tourists to visit the parts of this country with high concentrations of Aboriginal people like Brewarrina, Bourke and Walgett in NSW, Cherbourg, Yarrabah and Palm Island in Queensland, the APY lands in South Australia and in NT, the Aboriginal Town Camps of Alice Springs. Australia’s capitalist rulers do not want too many people to see their failure to adequately provide these regions with the basic public facilities and services that they provide to other parts of the country. Nor do they want to draw attention to the lack of economic opportunities available to Aboriginal people and the grinding poverty with which Aboriginal people in these areas are forced to live with. If one argues that no tourist wants to see economic deprivation anyway – which is true – and that these Aboriginal-majority areas do not have much tourist facilities, then those two points are themselves a reflection of the severe oppression that Aboriginal people face.

Similarly, even before its renewed assault on Palestinian people these last six months, Israel has never sought to make Gaza or still Palestinian-occupied areas of the West bank centres of tourism! Quite obviously, they are trying to hide from the world what they are doing to the Palestinian people. And while Rafah in Gaza is usefully located as a gateway to Egypt, as is Jericho in the West Bank to Jordan, Israel has never tried to make those occupied cities centres of trade and transport. However, it is very, very different in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The PRC government made Kashgar, a city that is more than 85% Uyghur and which is considered to be the main centre of Uyghur culture, a special economic zone in 2010 – the first city in Western China to be granted this designation. Then just last November, Kashgar was made one of the three components of a new free trade zone in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. For these reasons, very large numbers of traders and transport workers flock to Kashgar from both the nine countries that border the Autonomous Region and beyond, as well as from other parts of China.

Moreover, the PRC has made the entire Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – including its Uyghur majority areas – a centre for tourism. For example, during last year’s May Day (International Workers Day) public holiday in China, the Uyghur people’s cultural centre, Kashgar received more than a quarter of a million tourists. That means that a quantity of tourists numbering nearly one-third of the city’s entire population visited Kashgar on just one public holiday alone! Meanwhile, during China’s eight-day public holiday for Chinese Lunar New Year, the entire Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region received an average of nearly one million new tourists per day! Despite the best efforts of Western mainstream media outlets to pretend that China wants to stop them showing the “true” Xinjiang, the truth is the very opposite. The PRC is actually going to great efforts to encourage people to visit and conduct trade in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and using that to bolster the region’s anti-poverty and economic development campaigns. The PRC clearly thinks that they have nothing to hide in Xinjiang! Those swayed by imperialist propaganda about the region should go there and see for themselves!  

What is Really Happening in Xinjiang?

Faced with obvious truths about life in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, more sophisticated, left-leaning opponents of the PRC will concede the China does not persecute Uyghurs in the brutal way that the Israeli regime subjugates the Palestinian people or the Australian regime oppresses Aboriginal people. However, they then claim that the PRC is quietly oppressing Uyghurs by trying to extinguish their ethnic and cultural identity as a people distinct from the ethnic Han majority of China. However, this claim also turns out to be false when one actually explores the real situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Take the crucial question of the status of Uyghur language. The fact is that all Uyghurs living in China’s northwest are able to speak their own language. Furthermore, as part of a bilingual education system, Uyghur children are thought their language in all schools in the southern Xinjiang region of China where most Uyghurs live. This is very different to capitalist Australia where the very real genocidal subjugation of Aboriginal people has meant that most Aboriginal people have been cut off from their own tongue and only a small percentage of Aboriginal children have the opportunity to learn their own languages at school. By contrast, China has several TV channels broadcasting in Uyghur language as well as dozens of newspapers, magazines and book publishers publishing in Uyghur. Indeed, even outside of the Uyghur people’s traditional homeland in China’s northwest, shop signs and other street signs (like signs pointing to the location of mosques) in those parts of China frequented by Uyghurs can be seen in the Uyghur language, which is written in a modified Arabic-derived writing system.

We should add here a little anecdote that gives a sense of the status of the Uyghur language in China. In all of China’s currency notes, Uyghur writing is used in the notes (to identify the issuer of the currency – the Peoples Bank of China), alongside that of Han Chinese and three other minority languages in China: Mongolian, Tibetan and Zhuang (the latter is a language related to Thai and Laotian spoken by the Zhuang people who live in the southern part of China). This is despite China’s Uyghur population of around 12 million making up less than one percent of the country’s entire population. By comparison, around 4% of people in Australia speak Chinese at home, 1.4% Arabic, 1.3% Vietnamese and nearly 1% Punjabi. But you won’t find any of those languages in any of Australia’s currency! Meanwhile, in the U.S., over 13% of the population are native Spanish speakers. Yet you won’t find a word of Spanish in any U.S. currency notes! But this doesn’t stop the U.S., Australian and other Western capitalist regimes ranting that “China is suppressing the Uyghur language”.

Even more significant than the recognition of the Uyghur language in Chinese currency is the fact that Uyghur (alongside Mandarin Chinese) is an official language of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. That means that Uyghur is used in not only schools but in government departments and courts. Indeed, if one wants to speak of people not having language rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, then this would definitely not be true of the Uyghur people but rather of the ethnicities with much smaller populations in the region. Due to their very small populations, these ethnic groups living in Uyghur majority parts of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – like Tajiks, Xibo, Uzbeks and Russians – are often “forced” to learn the Uyghur language at school or to use Uyghur language when interacting with government departments. 

Claims by China’s enemies that she suppresses the rights of Uyghur Muslims to adhere to their religion also do not stack up. Those Uyghurs who are pious Muslims are able to go to mosques and practice their religion; and that is what they indeed do. To be sure, the Chinese workers state is a secular state. Very correctly, no religion is thought in Chinese public schools. All religions in China are pushed to adapt to her socialistic society by shedding those fundamentalist practices that contradict socialist principles of egalitarianism, unity between people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds and equality between women and men. The PRC state applies these policies with the assistance of the pro-socialist religious groups and congregations that exist amongst all the main religious denominations present in China – Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. The policies are applied to all religions in China – for example Christian churches are prevented from teaching Chinese children the anti-scientific myth of creationism.

Any truly unbiased observer who visited the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region would realise that accusations that China has suppressed the rights of Muslims to practice their religion are false. For such an observer would immediately be struck by the widespread presence of mosques in the region. It is notable too that in Xinjiang, the government of the Autonomous Region has made four days official public holidays for the whole region to mark Muslim celebrations. Thus in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a one day public holiday is stipulated for the end of Ramadan Eid al-Fitr celebration (also known by Muslims in China as the Rouzi Festival), while people are given a whole three days off work and classes for Eid al-Adha (also known by Muslims in China as the Corban Festival).

It is worth comparing the language, autonomy and religious public holiday rights enjoyed by China’s, mostly Muslim, Uyghur minority with the situation in one of the Western countries accusing her of “violating the human rights of Uyghurs”, Bulgaria. The comparison between Bulgaria and China is made here because, alongside tiny North Macedonia, Bulgaria is the only country accusing China of “violating the human rights of Uyghurs” that like China also has a historically Muslim, ethnic minority that forms a large proportion of the population in a particular geographical region/s of the country. That is if we leave out Israel (i.e. occupied Palestine) … and we all know what happens there! Like with China’s Uyghurs, in Bulgaria the predominantly Muslim ethnic group that forms a big proportion of the population in a part of the country is also a Turkic-based people – the Bulgarian Turks. Thus a comparison between the respective treatments of the geographically concentrated, predominantly Muslim, ethnic minorities in Bulgaria and China is an effective way to rate how well the Western capitalist regimes accusing China of “violating the human rights” of her Uyghur people treats its own minorities in comparison with socialistic China. So what is the situation in Bulgaria? In two provinces of Bulgaria, Razgrad and Kardzhali, Bulgarian Turks form an absolute majority of the population. Yet in neither of these provinces does the pro-Western Bulgarian regime grant the Turkish language any official status whatsoever. Unlike in China’s Xinjiang, where Uyghur is an official language used in schools, courts and government departments, Turks in even the provinces and muncipalities of Bulgaria where they are a majority of the population must use Bulgarian. This is despite Turks making up over 8% of Bulgaria’s overall population in comparison to the less than 1% of the Chinese population made up by Uyghurs. Needless to say, Bulgaria’s Turks have no autonomy rights in even the provinces where they form an absolute majority of the population, whereas Uyghurs who make up only a plurality and not a majority of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s population have special autonomy rights. Indeed Bulgaria’s constitution specifically states that “no autonomous territorial formations shall be allowed to exist.” It follows that, unlike in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, there are no public holidays for Muslim festivals in even the majority Muslim provinces of Bulgaria. Yet the Western-aligned, Bulgarian capitalist regime and its bosses in Washington and Berlin have the hide to accuse China of “violating the human rights of Uyghurs”. Then again if the genocidal Israeli regime and the Australian ruling class that so brutally oppresses Aboriginal people – and causes much of this country’s First Peoples to live in poverty – can make this accusation against Red China … so can anyone!

Opponents of Socialistic Rule
Within the Uyghur Population

Anti-communists claim that most of the Uyghur population resents being part of China and hates “Communist rule.” There is some opposition to the PRC within the Uyghur population. However such sentiments are present in only an ever dwindling minority of the Uyghur people. To this fact, Western propagandists retort that the existence of any significant opposition to PRC rule from within the Uyghur population is a sign that they are being “cruelly oppressed”. However, the truth is that these forces oppose the PRC not because Uyghur people are being oppressed but because they resent socialistic rule. The demand for separation from China is just a cover for these right-wing forces within the Uyghur population. What is really driving them is opposition to socialism. Thus, to the extent that they actually want to separate from the multi-ethnic PRC and establish a Uyghur state – or what they call East Turkestan – these anti-PRC forces want to do so mainly in order to escape from socialistic rule and establish a capitalist state. And for the majority of these anti-communist forces their aim is to establish a specifically, anti-secular, religiously fundamentalist form of capitalist state. For this quest they are getting massive backing from the imperialist ruling classes.

The Western capitalists will do anything to weaken socialistic rule in China and to exacerbate internal tensions within the workers state. The U.S. regime’s agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), openly admits to providing some $A4 million every year to fund several “East Turkestan” anti-communist groups. This NED backing is dwarfed by the covert funding given to these groups by the U.S. and other imperialist states and by the even huger amounts directly poured into these counterrevolutionary groups by capitalist bigwigs around the world and by anti-communists within the affluent upper-middle classes of Western countries. Then there is the gigantic propaganda support that imperialist ruling classes provide to the “East Turkestan” anti-communist groups. This is not only through the media, think tanks and “human rights” NGOs that they own but through sinister, covert “misinformation” operations. Just three weeks ago, the pro-imperialist Reuters news agency had to admit that in 2019, Donald Trump ordered the CIA to conduct a covert campaign to turn public opinion against China. Three former U.S. officials proudly told Reuters that the CIA created a team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread harmful stories about the PRC government. They would also leak anti-China information to overseas news outlets using false covers. The operation not only sought to create hostility to the PRC state within China but targeted public opinion in Southeast Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. The CIA operation especially disseminated lies against China’s Belt and Road initiative claiming that it was a “debt trap”. You can bet that misinformation about “China persecuting Uyghurs” is also high on the list of the lies spread by this massive CIA operation. Reuters reported that two intelligence historians told them that when the White House grants the CIA covert action authority through an order known as a presidential finding, it often remains in place across administrations. In plain speak, this CIA operation to covertly spread lies that demonise Red China continues today under Biden.

Given how beholden the entire “East Turkestan” anti-communist movement is to imperialist support, you can be that if these forces succeeded in creating an “independent”, capitalist East Turkestan it would be hopelessly subordinated to the U.S. and other Western powers – just like for example Palau, Marshall Islands, Eswatini and Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s Philippines is. Thus the main question posed for the Uyghur people in northwestern China is not whether they will be part of China or nominally “independent”. Rather it is whether they will continue to live within a socialistic state – moreover one that has successfully lifted all Uyghur people (and all China’s other people) out of extreme poverty – or whether, through a capitalist counterrevolution in the region where they reside, they end up living in a pseudo-independent, imperialist-puppet, capitalist state, where millions would be returned to poverty and the social position of women would be cruelly driven back. We say that working-class rule, as incomplete and insecure as it currently is within China, must be defended within all parts of the PRC through any means necessary. The question of whether Uyghur people choose to live as part of socialistic China or in an independent Uyghur workers state is secondary. We defend the right of peoples to self determination, including the right of a geographically-concentrated minority people within a workers state to separate from that state and form their own workers state. However, this is not in the least what the imperialist-sponsored, current Uyghur separatist forces want. They are entirely about overthrowing socialistic rule. In that light, to raise the issue of national self determination when speaking about the current situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region can only divert from what the dispute between the PRC and the imperialist-backed “East Turkestan” anti-communists is actually about. To raise the issue of “national self determination’ in this context would only play into hands of those seeking capitalist counterrevolution.

It should be said that the Chinese government’s rhetoric has sometimes unwittingly helped anti-communist propagandists obscure what the quarrel between the PRC and the imperialist-backed “East Turkestan” groups is all about. For although Beijing very rightly points to the economic and social achievements made in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region since the founding of the PRC, the Chinese government has sometimes also posed opposition to the “East Turkestan” anti-communist forces as a question of “opposing separatism.” Similarly, in defending PRC rule over all of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the PRC government points to evidence of the area being historically part of China. However, to authentic communists – that is true Leninists – whose goal is the worldwide triumph of socialism and who defend the right to national self determination, whether or not a region was historically part of a particular state has no relevance whatsoever. And we have absolutely no objection per se to “separatism” – that is to a minority people living in a particular geographic area of another state wanting to breakaway and establish their own state. What we object to is to those seeking capitalist counterrevolution in a region of a workers state using the cover of “national independence” to push to breakaway in order to form a separate, capitalist state. That is what today’s East Turkestan “separatists” are all about! And that is the reason – and indeed the sole reason – why they must be resolutely opposed. Therefore, we call on the PRC government to present the question of the fate of the Xinjiang region entirely as a question of, socialism versus capitalism; and more precisely as one of, socialism versus anti-secular, imperialist-subjugated capitalism. The Chinese government’s sometimes incorrect presentation of the question is largely an attempt to win the acceptance of overseas capitalist states for PRC rule over the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. By not posing the issue as one of defending socialistic, working class-rule and instead speaking of opposing “separatism”, they hope not to offend capitalist regimes worldwide and gain the approval of these regimes. However, in doing so, they obstruct politically aware working-class activists worldwide – including in the imperialist countries – from being won to the defence of PRC-administered, socialistic rule over the Xinjiang region. Moreover, the PRC government’s wish to sometimes present the Xinjiang – and also Tibetan (Xizang) and Hong Kong – questions as matters of opposing “separatism” leads them to a wrong international policy of opposing “separatist” movements worldwide. This standpoint not only violates Lenin’s insistence on socialists defending the right to national self determination (provided the application of that right does not harm the overall interests of the international working class) but leads Beijing to wrongly oppose several just national liberation movements within capitalist countries – like that of the Eelam Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Catalans in Spain and the Kurdish people in Turkey. Most harmfully, by sometimes posing the question of what’s at stake in Xinjiang without making the class line clear (that is the line between a working-class ruled socialistic path and the tyranny of a small number of wealthy, imperialist-beholden capitalists) the Chinese government’s presentation makes the Uyghur masses more susceptible to being swayed, on a nationalist basis, by the propaganda of the counterrevolutionary “East Turkestan” forces. This danger is accentuated by Beijing’s assertions about the area being historically part of China. Such rhetoric can be offensive to Uyghur people, because it identifies with pre-1949, capitalist-semi-feudal Chinese rulers who – themselves subservient to the then Western imperialist overlords of China – often truly did treat minorities as second-class citizens. In contrast, if the PRC government made it clearer to Uyghur workers and cooperative and small individual farmers that their interests as a class – separate from and opposed to the class interests of Uyghur capitalists and would-be capitalists and their imperialist masters – lie with defending socialist rule, the Uyghur masses would be won over even more decisively to supporting PRC-administered, socialistic rule.

Anti-Communist “Separatism” and
Capitalist Counterrevolution

The use of the cover of “national independence” by those seeking to undermine a multi-ethnic workers state is far from a new strategy. It goes back to the days of the former Soviet workers state. Even in the early years of the Soviet workers state, when it was led by Lenin, Trotsky and other truly internationalist communists who fiercely opposed any concessions to “Great Russian” chauvinism, counterrevolutionary forces within minority ethnicities used the cover of “national independence” to try and restore capitalist rule to the areas where “their” people resided. They and their imperialist backers seized on the inequalities inevitably present in a country just beginning its path to socialism to win support for their cause. And they manipulated the mutual hostilities remaining from the earlier capitalist times, when the non-Russian peoples were indeed brutally subjugated by the racist, “Great Russian”-based, capitalist regime. Like their “Great Russian”-based counterparts, these counterrevolutionaries were mostly defeated by the Soviet Red Army during the 1918-1921 Civil War that followed Russia’s October 1917 socialist revolution. However, they gained a new relevance from the mid-1920s onwards when, under intense capitalist pressure on the Soviet Union, a more conservative layer was squeezed up into the political administration of the workers state and went on to implement more Russian-centred policies than the revolutionary internationalists whom they displaced. After this bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workers state, anti-communist “separatist” movements were able to point to – fluctuating – degrees of Russian-centredness in the Soviet government to build support for their cause. This is despite the fact that even post-1924, the Soviet workers state had a level of ethnic equality and harmony – especially in the three decades from the mid-1950s onwards – greater than any comparable capitalist country. From the late 1980s onwards, as the Soviet workers state started crumbling under decades of relentless imperialist pressure, the inequalities engendered by new pro-capitalist economic policies re-ignited long-suppressed feuds between ethnic groups. This enabled “Great Russian” chauvinists within the ethnic Russian population and anti-communist separatists within non-Russian peoples – like the Ukrainian Rukh movement and the Baltic separatist movements that harked back to the Nazi-aligned regimes that were swept away by the Soviet Red Army at the end of World War II – to become key forces in the drive for capitalist counterrevolution. With massive assistance from the U.S. and other imperialist powers, this push for capitalist restoration culminated in the destruction of the Soviet workers state in 1991-92. Similarly, extreme nationalists based on the different peoples of the former Yugoslavia became the main forces that destroyed the workers state there, while themselves becoming the putrid by-products of the counterrevolution. Meanwhile, in the former East European workers states, capitalist counterrevolutionary forces used the call for “independence” from the Soviet Union, which led the Warsaw Pact bloc of the East European and Soviet workers states, as one of the main mantras of their movements.

The U.S., Australian, British and other Western imperialist rulers are now using the same playbook that they used to destroy the Soviet and East European workers states in their drive to destroy socialistic rule in China. After Tibetan and Chinese communists and the PRC workers state helped Tibet’s serfs to overturn the brutal feudal system that existed in the previous Dalai Lama-run Tibet and liberate themselves in 1959, the CIA armed Tibet’s overthrown feudal exploiting class to wage an armed struggle to retake power. After this armed campaign was defeated, the Western imperialists funded and organised the overthrown serf owners and their descendants to wage a political campaign to regain power under the slogan of “Tibetan independence.” Meanwhile, ever since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, the Western imperialists have been backing “Hong Kong separatists” and those in Hong Kong who demand greater autonomy from China. These pro-colonial forces represent those sections of Hong Kong’s upper class and wanna-be-capitalist, upper-middle class youth who fear that the PRC workers state will eventually start implementing socialist measures in Hong Kong. Australia’s capitalist ruling is very active in backing these forces. This includes through media support, statements of encouragement by Australian government leaders – with a few visiting Australian politicians even marching in the anti-communist protests in Hong Kong – backing for exile Hong Kong, anti-PRC groups based in Australia and repression of pro-PRC Chinese students that campaign against the anti-Red China forces.

The Two Components of the
“East Turkestan” Anti-Communist Forces

Over the last decade, alongside the Hong Kong anti-PRC movement, the “East Turkestan” counterrevolutionaries have been the anti-communist force opposed to the PRC that has received the greatest level of imperialist backing. This force consist of two main trends that are united by their common hostility to socialism. One trend is relatively less religiously fundamentalist than the other. It is led by big-time Uyghur capitalist exploiters and would-be capitalists who long to overthrow socialistic rule over the Uyghur-majority parts of China so that they can become the capitalist overlords of their “own” people. The main organisation representing this faction of the “East Turkestan” anti-communists is the NED-funded World Uyghur Congress (WUC). By far the most prominent and main leader of the WUC is filthy rich capitalist, Rebiya Kadeer. Rebiya Kadeer is a favourite of former U.S. president and war-criminal, George W Bush. Through her real-estate and multinational trading conglomerate that was based in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Rebiya Kadeer leached an absolute fortune. She became China’s richest woman and one of her richest people overall. She was China’s Gina Rinehart! But given that the PRC is a workers state, Rebiya Kadeer – like other capitalists in China – came under pressure from PRC state authorities to give more back to the community, including by paying more tax and by reducing the amount of extreme profiteering in her business activities. This angered her and sent her into opposition to the PRC state. It made Rebiya Kadeer realise that attaining the full “freedom” for Uygur “entrepreneurs” to exploit the masses like capitalists have in capitalist states would require PRC rule over southern Xinjiang to be overthrown, or at least greatly weakened. She ended up in exile in the USA from where she led the WUC and received enormous backing from the U.S. and other Western ruling classes.

Ironically, Rebiya Kadeer is a walking refutation of her own claims. For example, despite the fact that Uyghur and other minorities were always allowed to have more children without financial penalty than China’s Han majority during the period of China’s one-child policy (now a three child policy), she claims that the PRC especially restricted the birth of Uyghur children through that policy. Except, Rebiya Kadeer herself has … eleven children! And all her eleven children were born in China! So much for that claim! Rebiya Kadeer also claims that the PRC suppresses the Uyghur language and forces Uyghurs to learn Mandarin Chinese instead. Yet Rebiya Kadeer herself, who grew up in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, can speak Uyghur fluently but only speaks Mandarin in a broken way! As for her claim that Uyghur people face severe discrimination in China, that is undercut by the fact that she, a Uyghur person who cannot speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, was able to become China’s richest woman. Could you imagine say an Arab background woman here, who cannot speak fluent English, displacing Gina Rinehart to become Australia’s richest woman? Or could you imagine an Aboriginal woman who can speak Walpiri (the language of an Aboriginal people whose traditional land is in the Northern Territory area north and west of Alice Springs) perfectly but who is not fluent in English similarly becoming Australia’s richest woman? Very unlikely! Not given the racist nature of Australia’s capitalist society and the lack of economic opportunity that the Walpiri and other Aboriginal peoples have today! Much of Rebiya Kadeer’s life actually shows how much better the relative social status of Uyghur people in China is compared to that of Aboriginal people in this country.  

The second component of the “East Turkestan” anti-communist forces are extreme religious fundamentalists. The main reason that they want to secede from the PRC is because they oppose the secularism of the socialistic PRC and to the high status that it gives to women. They hate the reality that in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region women participate in mixed gender schools with their male counterparts, are able to attend universities, can choose to dress “immodestly” if they so choose, generally have full legal equality with men and can attain high office in government and industry. These ultra-right-wing reactionaries would be incensed by the fact that right now the highest government position in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – the Director of the Standing Committee of the region’s People’s Congress – is held by a woman, Zumret Obul, who is a Uyghur native of Kashgar. They would no doubt be livid too that, like in the rest of China and unlike in some bordering countries, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region women have the right to abortion on demand and lesbians and gays are able to conduct sexual activity according to their inclination without facing any criminal penalties. Moreover, the extreme anti-secular wing of this anti-communist movement opposes many of the expressions of Uyghur culture that are widely practiced in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – including Uyghur traditional and street dancing, Uyghur music and Uyghur Muqam – especially when they are performed by women. All these they consider heretic. So much for the “East Turkestan” anti-communists’ claims to be defenders of Uyghur culture!

As the above makes clear, the political battle that is – and mostly we can now say was – taking place in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is very different from how Western propagandists would like to present the issue: a clash between Uyghurs and the PRC state. Rather it is a struggle between on the one hand, those Uyghurs who are either consciously pro-capitalist or anti-secular opponents of women’s rights and on the other hand, communist Uyghurs. Or more fully we can say that the political battle taking place within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a contest between on the one side, that small proportion of Uyghurs who are either consciously pro-capitalist or religious fundamentalist opponents of women’s rights, together with their imperialist masters and their anti-communist Han Chinese allies; and on the other side, pro-women’s rights, pro-communist Uyghurs and their pro-communist Han Chinese allies. Ultimately this is a clash between conflicting class interests. The anti-communist side is fighting for the immediate economic interests of capitalist and wanna-be capitalist Uyghurs and most of all their imperialist masters; and the pro-communist side represents the interests of working-class Uyghurs and cooperative and small farmer Uyghurs, alongside with working-class Chinese people of all ethnicities.

Imperialists Back Extreme Opponents of Women’s Rights

The most prominent group within the religious fanatic wing of the “East Turkestan” anti-communist forces is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)/ Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). The ETIM has long-time close links with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and bin Laden provided much of the initial funding for the organisation. The ETIM/TIP later became an Al Qaeda affiliate. In a high-profile speech in 2016, then Al Qaeda leader, bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, hailed the ETIM’s activities and urgent them to wage terrorist attacks on the PRC in order to combat “communist occupants”  and a “torrent of atheism”. The ETIM/TIP also had one-time close ties with the Afghan Taliban and remains closely linked with the Pakistani Taliban, the latter having its stronghold in northwest Pakistan’s North Waziristan District that borders Afghanistan. It is important to recall that Al Qaeda is a creation of Washington and its Saudi allies that was built up in 1988 to organise religious fundamentalists from Arab countries and beyond to join the Western-funded war against the then leftist Afghan government and its Soviet allies. The Taliban were one faction that emerged from this Mujahideen that turned on the other Mujahideen factions and seized power in Afghanistan in 1996. Thus the ETIM/TIP has been very closely associated with forces built up by the U.S. and other Western imperialist powers from the very start.

Then, as is well known, for a several-year period before and after the 11 September 2001 attack in New York and the Pentagon, the interests of Al Qaeda – and with it their then Taliban allies – clashed with those of their creators in the CIA. When the U.S., NATO and their Australian imperialist allies used the September 11 attacks as an excuse to seize Afghanistan, they ended up fighting against not only the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda but also to a small degree with the ETIM forces that the latter groups had been hosting and training in Afghanistan. The U.S. captured twenty-two Uyghur ETIM members and sent them to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Under China’s pressure, the U.S. Treasury department finally listed the ETIM as a terrorist organisation in 2002. Twenty-two years ago, when the PRC’s economy was much weaker relative to that of the richest capitalist countries than it is now, the imperialist ruling classes did not fear the rise of socialistic China anywhere near to the same extent that it does now.

However, before long, Washington was reversing back towards support to the ETIM. Prisoners of the group were given favourable treatment at Guantanamo Bay. Instead of the ETIM prisoners being extradited back to China, within a few years they were cleared of all terrorism charges and set free in either the U.S. or allowed to go to Albania, Bermuda, Palau, Switzerland and Pakistan. Then came a pivotal event that shaped the attitude of the capitalist powers towards Red China – the late noughties Great Recession. That financial crash led to a deep recession in all the major capitalist economies. In contrast, the PRC stormed through the crisis with just a small temporary blip in her economy, achieving a fast annual GDP growth rate. The socialistic PRC’s strength relative to the capitalist powers gained a big boost. This reality, together with the glaring contrast between the performance of the capitalist and socialistic states during the crisis, made the imperialist ruling classes realise that the rise of the socialistic PRC and the potential that has to shape the political attitudes of the masses of the world would in future present an existential threat to their domination of the world – and indeed their own rule at home. Meanwhile, the fact that the PRC strengthened the socialist aspects of her economy in order to defy the Great Recession made imperialist strategists realise that their previous hopes that China would organically evolve in a capitalist direction were misplaced and that extreme pressure needed to be applied upon the PRC if socialistic rule was to be crushed there. Thus by the end of the noughties, imperialism’s new Cold War against the PRC was ramped up several notches. Alongside this, they returned more quickly towards support for the ETIM/TIP.

Alongside this, important events were happening in the Arab world in parallel. Following protests against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad in 2011, the U.S., France, Britain and other imperialist powers turned the initially diverse, multi-directional protests into an armed, imperialist proxy war to subjugate Syria – the least subordinated to Western imperialism and most pro-Palestinian of the Arab states. Initially, the Western imperialists backed the Free Syrian Army and other relatively less, religiously fundamentalist sections of the anti-government forces. But these forces were largely defeated in battles with the Syrian Army and proved to be ineffectual. The main military forces opposed to the Syrian government became extreme religious fundamentalists – in particular the Al Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) and their allies and the ISIS breakaway from Al Qaeda. Washington and Co. therefore provided huge amounts of weapons and training to allies of the Al-Nusra Front and sometimes, very secretly, to the Al Qaeda affiliate itself. Australia’s imperialist rulers provided political and diplomatic support for this proxy war against Syria. Meanwhile, longtime ETIM/TIP fighters and those in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that they managed to newly recruit flocked to Syria’s northwest to fight alongside the Al-Nusra Front in imperialism’s proxy war against Syria. The ETIM/TIP’s participation in imperialism’s proxy war against Syria allowed the U.S. and its allies to more and more directly back these extreme right-wing, anti-PRC reactionaries. Given that much of the Western imperialists’ meddling in the Middle East and Asia was being done under the cover of the “war on terror” this is not something that they wanted to publicly broadcast. However, by the time that COVID ravaged the world – and the PRC’s far greater success than the capitalist countries in protecting her people (and economy) from the disease clearly revealed for all thinking people to see – the capitalist powers had become so terrified by socialistic China’s rise and therefore escalated their anti-PRC propaganda offensive to such a degree that they felt that they could justify supporting any anti-China force. Thus, in October 2020, the U.S. formerly dropped their designation of the ETIM as a terrorist organisation – a reflection of the reality that they had already been covertly backing the group for years. Here in Australia, the regime also does not proscribe the ETIM/TIP as a terrorist group. Instead, the Australian imperialist regime bans as “terrorist” two groups that, while we have a vastly different political outlook to them, we recognise as waging a just armed resistance against Israel’s genocidal subjugation of Palestine and violent meddling in Lebanon – Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah. The Australian capitalist state similarly also proscribes the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is waging a just struggle against the brutal national oppression of the Kurdish people by the NATO-inhabiting Turkish regime.

Western backing for the ETIM/TIP makes a mockery of these imperialist regimes’ complaints today about the oppression of women and minorities by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Given their stated positions and their affiliation with Al Qaeda, if the ETIM/TIP and their ilk were to seize power in what is today China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, they would even more brutally subjugate women and non-Sunni Muslims than the Afghan Taliban. However, such hypocrisy is the norm rather than the exception for these imperialist ruling classes! In 2011, among the most prominent of the forces that NATO brought to power when they violently overthrew the Gadaffi government were extreme religious fundamentalists and Al Qaeda supporters. Then, from 2012 onwards, they provided massive support to extreme anti-woman reactionaries in their proxy war against the secular Syrian government. And as for Afghanistan, the Western ruling classes only started pretending to be concerned about women’s rights there when their interests started clashing with those of the Taliban. They are the ones mainly responsible for the brutal oppression that Afghan women suffer today and have indeed endured for the last 32 years. In 1978, when the leftist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan, they enacted not only land reforms in defence of the poor but instituted measures to protect women from forced marriage and to enable girls to be educated. Afghan women and girls then truly had hope in a brighter future. But the U.S. and other Western imperialists and their allies ruling conservative Arab states poured massive amounts of arms and money to back an insurgency against the PDPA government by fanatical, woman-hating reactionaries and big landowners who were incensed at both the advances made for women’s rights and the progressive land reforms. When the Soviet Union responded to a desperate request from the PDPA and rightly sent troops to back up the embattled leftist government, the imperial powers and their allies increased their support for the anti-woman fundamentalists even further. After the Soviet leadership sold out Afghan women and poor tenant farmers when they withdrew their troops in 1989, the Afghan leftists held on for a further three years. However, starved of all material support after the Soviet Union started fully collapsing in August 1991, the leftists were defeated by the Western-backed, Mujahideen reactionaries in 1992. This resulted in a gigantic deterioration in the social position of Afghan women – even before the Taliban faction of the Mujahideen gained the ascendancy four years later. Even after the U.S, NATO and Australian imperialists overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and occupied the country, most women remained cruelly subjugated in Afghanistan. After all, the Western powers had merely brought back the non-Taliban factions of the woman-oppressing, former Mujahideen to power. Yes, in some urban areas, largely for show, the imperialist occupiers and the puppet regime enacted some modest measures that improved the position of women relative to what it had been under the Taliban. However, in most of the country there was no improvement from the Taliban days. Moreover, the extreme cruelty of the war-crime-ridden Western occupying forces and the rampant corruption of the puppet regime caused many Afghan women to suffer even more than they did during the 1996-2001 Taliban regime. The imperialist occupying forces turned a blind eye as corrupt police and officials – and the warlords and big landowners that they protected – seized many young women to be sex slaves and bought and kept adolescent boys for sex and entertainment in the notorious ancient practice called bacha bazi that flourished during both the periods of pro-Western, Mujahideen rule.

The 1990s, Noughties and Early 2010s –
The High-Point of Anti-Communist Forces
Inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

Given the unpalatable nature of the religious fundamentalist wing of the anti-communist forces in Xinjiang, imperialist regimes, media outlets and NGOs try to downplay their significance. Indeed, they like to pretend that this wing of the anti-PRC movement does not even exist. However, the fanatically anti-secular factions of the Uyghur anti-communists have greater support than their, nominally, more secular counterparts. During the hay day of the anti-communist forces inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the 1990s, noughties and early 2010s, it was the extreme religious fundamentalists who were more active. Among their actions were the assassination of communist Uyghur officials and the murder of Uyghur imams who did not adhere to their fanatical and warped interpretation of Islam. The ETIM and their ilk also carried out random terrorist acts on civilians – including through bombing buses, exploding car bombs and knife attacks. In the worst of the latter type of attack, in March 2014 a knife-wielding gang of religious fundamentalist, Uyghur anti-communists went on a rampage stabbing to death 33 people at a railway station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming in Yunnan province. However, it was billionaire Rebiya Kadeer’s, nominally more secular, WUC that launched the biggest single act of terror against the people of China and her Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In July 2009, they incited right-wing thugs and supporters of the extreme fundamentalist wing of the anti-communist movement to unleash a horrific rampage against non-Uyghur civilians living in the region’s capital Urumqi. These rioters murdered over 150 civilians. The anti-communist rioters not only killed Han Chinese people but slaughtered at least eleven members of another Muslim minority in China, the Hui.

However, over the last fifteen years, the anti-communist forces have progressively lost more and more support amongst the Uyghur people. They have gone from having the allegiance of a significant minority of the Uyghur people to having the support of only a tiny minority of Uyghurs living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Today, most of their support amongst actual Uyghurs is based on the Uyghur populations living in exile in Afghanistan and in Western countries. However, these exile populations are very small. This is despite the much more favourable treatment that Uyghur anti-communists seeking asylum and residency in the West are given compared to Tamil, Palestinian, Afghan, Iraqi, Somali and Sudanese asylum seekers. The last Australian census in 2021 found that there were only 1,674 people identifying as being of Uyghur ancestry living in the whole of Australia. Thus, despite the number of Uyghurs living in China being more than double the number of Palestinians living in Palestine and more than five times the number of Eelam Tamils living in Sri Lanka, the number of people in Australia identifying as being Uyghur is more than nine times less than the number of people identifying as being Palestinian and around 30 times fewer than the number of Eelam Tamils in Australia. The relatively tiny size of the Uyghur populations living in exile in the West – despite the huge size of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s external boundary with neighbouring countries that makes travel for those who want to leave China from the region very easy – is itself an indication that most Uyghurs living in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region either actively support, or accept, being part of the socialistic PRC.

Notably, there has not been a single terrorist attack in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for the last more than seven years. One reason – although not the most important one – for this is that the PRC has implemented a successful program to re-orient and integrate into the PRC’s socialistic society those Uyghurs susceptible to religious fanaticism and other forms of anti-communist extremism. Those enrolled in the courses are taught the fundamentals of China’s pro-socialist constitution and secular and socialist values – including gender equality, egalitarianism, anti-colonialism, loyalty to the socialistic PRC and the need to treat with respect people who are either atheist or who have a different religious persuasion or different interpretation of Islam. Participants in the program are housed in boarding schools for the duration of the course and enjoy sporting and leisure pursuits as well as cultural activities involving both secular Uyghur culture and broader Chinese culture. As well as values education, a key aspect of the program involves providing vocational training to the students to improve their career prospects. The PRC, quite correctly, sees economic hardships and the lack of career prospects as a key factor that was driving some Uyghurs into the arms of the anti-communist, anti-PRC forces. Those participating in the constitution education and vocational training schools are also taught the national language of China – Mandarin – since this increases the opportunities for participants to both get jobs outside Uyghur-majority areas of the country and land jobs that require communication with firms and departments in non-Uyghur parts of China. It should be noted that the fact that many attendees even need to be taught Mandarin Chinese makes a mockery of the claim by anti-PRC propagandists that Uyghurs in China are prevented from learning their own language and as a result are only able to speak Mandarin Chinese.

China’s Constitution Education and
Vocational Training Schools
Versus Australia’s Supermax Prisons

The imperialist ruling classes have created and spread a big lie that the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s constitution education and vocational training schools are like prisons. However, every international delegation that has visited these schools without a pre-prejudiced mind has found the very opposite. These include representatives from the Organisation of Islamic Countries who visited China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region last August; and a World Muslim Communities Council delegation of thirty Muslim scholars from fourteen Muslim-majority countries that conducted an inspection tour fourteen months ago. They have found that the schools house students in good, supportive conditions and allow students much freedom – including the opportunity to travel homes on weekends and receive visits from family members at any time. Most of the schools are headed by ethnic Uyghur principals.

Western governments, mainstream media and ruling class-funded “NGOs” promote the lie that participants in the constitution education and vocational training centres are “forced” into the program. However, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of participants enrol in the programs voluntarily. To be sure, many participants have experienced much pressure on them to attend the courses. However, this pressure comes not from the threat of legal persecution but from the considerable social and moral pressure that can be exerted by family members, friends, neighbours, Imams, teachers and community leaders. This is not fundamentally different to the social and family pressure that youth seen as wayward in any country may experience pushing them to finish school or attend vocational training colleges. Many who joined the courses did so after their family members, friends, neighbours or teachers determined them at high risk of being recruited into religious extremist terrorist groups after they exhibited behavior such as, preventing their children from joining singing and dancing activities at school, or, in the case of husbands, uncompromisingly forcing their wives to stay at home and not work. Many referred to the constitution education and vocational training centres had committed acts that are illegal under PRC law – like withdrawing their daughters from school (on religious extremist grounds) and preventing their wives from going outside their homes without being accompanied by them.

There is a small minority of participants in China’s training centres who are indeed forced to attend. These are people who have committed low-level, terrorism-related offences. They have not committed actual acts of terror (in which case they who would be imprisoned) but have instead committed relatively minor deeds in support of terrorist groups – such as donating to the groups, spreading their propaganda online or attending meetings of the banned terror groups. PRC authorities give such people the opportunity to avoid imprisonment by instead successfully completing a constitution education and vocational training course. Such forced “admission” into the training centres is actually a more humane “punishment” than the harsh sentences meted out to people who commit equivalent offences in imperialist countries. In Australia, many religious fundamentalist Muslims who have not committed or planned to commit any terrorist acts whatsoever but who associate with groups deemed terrorist – or provide them with low-level material or moral support – are being locked up for years in harsh conditions. Many are imprisoned at the notorious “supermax” prison in the NSW Southern Tablelands town of Goulburn. Most of these prisoners have been jailed for showing support for groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS – that is the very same groups that the Uyghur-based ETIM/TIP terrorists are linked with. Many of these Muslim prisoners in Australia endure jail for periods much longer than their formal sentence, through the Australian regime’s use of an authoritarian Continuing Detention Orders (CDOs) scheme that allows courts to potentially lock up prisoners indefinitely through repeated imposition of CDOs. Others are subjected to repeated imprisonment through being hit with highly restrictive Control Orders when they are released from jail. These draconian Control Orders then provide trip wires for their subsequent imprisonment. For example, a 23 year-old Toongabbie man who was jailed for 18 months in 2019 for simply associating with ISIS – despite not having participated in any actual or planned terrorist attack – was re-arrested, only days after his release at the end of his sentence, because he allegedly breached a Control Order by merely browsing on the internet material deemed to be “violent extremist”. The man was then sentenced to a new term of two years and three months in prison. In China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region such a person might not have spent even a week in prison. Instead he would have been referred for “forced” admission to a constitution education and vocational training school.

The comparatively harsher treatment that the Australian regime gives to Islamic fundamentalists who commit minor acts in support of terrorist groups compared to what the PRC does is one aspect of the discrimination that Muslim people are facing in Australia. Australia’s ruling class and its enforcers – from its politicians, to its media, to its police and ASIO secret police – often insinuate that Australia’s entire Muslim community are either especially prone to terrorism or are not doing enough to combat it. The Australian regime is subjecting Muslim people and organisations with absolutely zero connection to violent religious fundamentalism to over-bearing surveillance and infiltration.

The bias of Australia’s legal system against Muslim people is evident by comparing the sentences and judgements that alleged Islamic fundamentalist extremists have been hit with versus those meted out to violent far-right white supremacists. To illustrate this point, we compare some specific cases. In 2004, Australian Muslim man Faheem Lodhi was arrested and eventually convicted of terrorism offences for possessing a document in the Urdu language about how to make bombs, collecting two maps of the electrical supply system in Sydney and collecting information about the availability of materials that could allegedly be used to make bombs. He did not actually conduct any attack or make or acquire any bombs. If one was to accept the Australian regime’s contention that he intended to actually carry out an attack, it is apparent that this was to be an act of economic sabotage rather than an action aimed at killing civilians. Yet Faheem Lodhi was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Let us compare his sentence with that given to two of the neo-Nazi racists who have been charged with similar acts. One of the latter is white supremacist Michael Holt. Holt, who was arrested in 2015, had stockpiled a large number of firearms and other weapons and openly stated his wish to carry out racist violence and mass shootings at shopping centres and other sites. Despite making threats to directly murder large numbers of people, unlike Lodhi who only allegedly wished to damage infrastructure; and despite collecting a large arsenal of weapons – unlike Lodhi who only researched materials that could be used to make weapons – Australia’s courts handed neo-Nazi Holt less than one-third of the sentence that they hit Faheem Lodhi with. Indeed, Holt was not even charged under terrorism laws. Instead, he received a six year sentence under firearms laws (his total sentence was seven years due to an additional child pornography offence). Then last Thursday, Cameron Brodie-Hall, an Adelaide man known for making Nazi salutes and being part of a violent far-right group dedicated to “preserving white Australia” and who was found by police to be in possession of a book that detailed how to conduct assassinations and terror bombings was acquitted by a magistrate of one count of possessing a document for terrorist acts and one count of possessing extremist material. So while Muslim fundamentalist Faheem Lodhi received ten years jail out of his total 20 year sentence for possessing a document about how to make bombs, Nazi-supporting white supremacist Brodie-Hall got absolutely zero punishment for possessing a book that even more explicitly explains how to kill people through terrorist attacks.

The discriminatorily severe treatment being meted out in Australia to Islamic fundamentalists and the broader Muslim community is a reflection of not only the racist nature of the Australian regime but the very purpose of the Australian ruling class’ anti-terror measures. This purpose is quite different to the aims of the PRC’s crackdown on anti-communist terrorists in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. For the PRC, its measures against the likes of the ETIM/TIP and its constitution education and vocational training centres are aimed at protecting people against terror attacks, defeating threats to ethnic harmony, rehabilitating those who have been drawn into the terrorist groups, preserving China’s territorial integrity and protecting the PRC’s socialistic system. In Australia, part of the regime’s crackdown on extreme Islamic fundamentalists is indeed aimed at stopping terror attacks. However, the Australian regime’s “war on terror” also has a very sinister purpose. By using the pretext of opposing the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS to greatly strengthen repressive laws and boost the powers of the police and ASIO secret police, Australia’s ruling class is building up its weapons for future attacks against its main targets: militant workers rights activists and leftist opponents of capitalism and racist oppression. Already, the anti-terror laws that the Australian regime nominally brought in to combat violent Islamic fundamentalists has been used to convict three supporters of a progressive group: the Tamil Tigers. Although we have very different politics from the Tamil Tigers we acknowledge that they have waged a just struggle for the liberation of the oppressed Tamil nation living in the north and east of Sri Lanka.

The Australian regime’s high-profile crackdown on so-called “Islamic terrorism” is also in large part driven by the Australian ruling class’ wish to demonise the entire Muslim and Arab communities. Australia’s capitalist rulers want to divert the masses frustrations over unaffordable rents, insecure jobs and the high cost of living away from themselves and onto soft targets. Their regime’s overbearing “anti-terror” surveillance of the entire Muslim community and the excessively severe punishments it gives to those within the Muslim community with even a low-level association with terror groups cannot be separated from the plethora of statements made by ruling class politicians attacking the Muslim community and other Middle Eastern, Asian and African communities. Let us recall how opposition leader Peter Dutton, when he was immigration minister in the previous Liberal government, whipped up hatred against Muslim and Arab communities by disgustingly saying that it was a mistake to allow Lebanese Muslims to migrate into Australia.

All this official racism and discrimination against Muslim and Arab communities has incited more extreme, violent racists on the streets. This is what happened on 11 December 2005, when some 10,000 screaming racists at southern Sydney’s Cronulla Beach went on a rampage brutally bashing anyone of Middle Eastern or South Asian appearance that they could find. NSW Police, who today mobilise in huge numbers to violently protect Israel’s ZIM Shipping against pro-Palestinian protesters holding actions at Sydney’s docks, were conspicuous by their failure to mobilise adequate resources to protect non-white beach goers – despite it being obvious to all at the time that huge numbers of racists would be gathering that day with the intent of unleashing violence against darker-skinned people. About a decade after the Cronulla riot, white supremacists started holding hundreds-strong “Reclaim Australia” rallies throughout Australia that vilified Muslim people and other non-white communities. Several prominent parliamentarians from the then ruling Liberal-National Coalition and the far-right parties participated in – and even spoke at – the demonstrations.

The remorseless attacks that the Australian and other Western ruling classes have unleashed against the Muslim and minority communities in their own countries – and around the world – has not stopped them one bit from slandering the PRC’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs. Their favourite refrain is that China is “forcibly imprisoning” a huge number of Uyghurs in re-education “camps”. As the imperialists become more and more desperate to vilify Red China, they keep on increasing the number of Uyghur people that they claim are “detained” in the “camps”! They have gone from saying that “hundreds of thousands” are detained there, to saying “one million” are detained to sometimes even, “two million”. These claims are completely ridiculous!  The amount of Uyghur people whom the imperialists claim are being “detained” in the re-education and vocational training centres amount to between 10% and 20% of the entire population of Uyghur people within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It would be simply impossible to forcibly detain such a high proportion of any particular ethnic group in areas of a country where they form the majority of the population – as Western propagandists claim that China is doing in the southern part of Xinjiang – without the practice leading to a revolt, or at least a massive social upheaval. This would be the case no matter which country this was happening in and irrespective of its political system. Yet during the last several years, which is when the imperialists say that such huge numbers of Uyghurs have been detained, there has been no sign of revolt or upheaval within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Moreover, if such a gigantic proportion of the working-age population were truly detained in “forced-attendance” schools it would lead to economic collapse – not only because of the huge numbers of people taken out of productive work but because of the gigantic number of personnel and resources needed to detain between 10% and 20% of the Uyghur population. This is doubly so because the main parts of the region’s economy – cotton farming, sheep herding, grain crops, oil and gas production, mining, metal smelting and pressing, renewable energy production and services – are sectors where labour and production cannot be carried out within campus grounds. However, the economy of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has been undisputedly booming over the last several years. This fact itself makes the imperialists’ claim that ten to twenty percent of the Uyghur population is being detained in re-education camps completely implausible. 

By the end of 2019, most of the students at the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s constitution education and vocational training schools had completed their courses, found meaningful work and been successfully re-integrated into the broader Uyghur community and Chinese society. Most of the schools have since been closed but a few continue to operate to re-orient and train new participants. It is useful comparing this reality with what is happening here in Australia. Details about the number of people jailed in Australia under accusations of involvement in Islamic fundamentalist terrorism are very hard to find. The justice system in supposedly “democratic” Australia is very opaque! However, a document released by the Australian government two years ago, titled Australia’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy 2022, indicated that at the time there were around 100 people in Australian prisons convicted or charged with terrorism offences – and we know that nearly all these people are people accused of involvement in Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The Australian regime does not make available compiled statistics as to what proportion of these detainees are being jailed under accusation of the kind of very low-level association with terror groups that in China would allow them to attend a constitution education and vocational training school as an alternative to prison. However, an examination of a 2013 study by a University of New South Wales researcher that was published in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy showed that of the 26 people up to then convicted of terrorism-related offences in Australia, 11 had been convicted of only either being a member of a banned group or of providing funds to such a groups. They had not been involving in conducting or even preparing any terrorist attack. They made up just over 42% of the people convicted then. If we apply that same percentage to the approximately 100 people in Australia’s jails today accused of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism-related offences, then we can estimate that around 42 inmates are accused of these lower grade offences. Given that the people accused of such offences have varying degrees of involvement with the proscribed groups, we cannot say for sure that all of the estimated 42 such prisoners in Australia accused of these lower level terrorism-related offences would in China be given the option of avoiding prison through enrolment in a constitution education and vocational training centre. However, even if half would be given such an opportunity, we can estimate that there are about 21 Muslim fundamentalist people accused of very low-level association with terror groups who are languishing in Australia’s jails who in China could avoid jail through participation in a constitution education and vocational training course. And given that the total population of Muslim background people in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is around 20 times that of the total population of Muslims in all of Australia, this number of about 21 Islamic fundamentalist prisoners unnecessarily imprisoned in Australia is in proportionate terms equivalent to 420 people in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region who would avoid prison through instead being “forcibly” admitted to a constitution education and vocational training school. It is very unlikely that this number is any less than the number of remaining students in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s constitution education and vocational training schools who are actually forced to attend. And these people in China who have committed offences of very low-level association with terror groups are only made to attend boarding schools – where they have the right to go home on weekends and holidays, the right to receive visits at other times, abundant sporting, leisure and cultural participation opportunities – whereas their counterparts in Australia are locked up under extremely harsh conditions in supermax jails.

Excessive Market Reforms Weakened Ethnic Relations
Within Socialistic China for a Two Decade Period

Enemies of socialistic China would argue that no matter how reactionary may be the anti-PRC forces within China’s Uyghur population, the fact that these forces have been able to win any significant popular support is itself a sign that Uyghurs are oppressed within China. However, such a line of argument has become, in good part, outdated. Much of the support that the anti-communist, anti-China groups had within the Uyghur population has disappeared. Nevertheless, it is true that the significant degree of support that anti-PRC forces once had within a significant minority of the Uyghur population reflected real grievances felt by a portion of the Uyghur population – grumblings that right-wing forces were able to exploit. Those grievances felt by some Uyghur people were mainly disgruntlement at the poverty and lack of decent job opportunities that they had and anger at their lower standard of living compared to other residents of China.

To understand why such economic hardships and inequality were faced by Uyghur people, we have to understand the political and economic course of the entire PRC. China’s toiling classes seized state power in a heroic anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. At the time, China was one of the poorest countries in Asia. More than hundreds years of subjugation by imperial powers and a form of capitalist rule impacted by many remaining elements of feudalism had combined to keep the Chinese masses in poverty, oppression and backwardness. In 1949, per capita income in China was only 53% of the per capita income of India. However, through building an economy centred on public ownership and central planning, the workers state created by the 1949 Revolution was able to greatly improve the lives of the Chinese masses. This is despite two periods of sharp economic setbacks – the late 1950s-early 1960s Great Leap Forward disaster and the most frenetic two years of the Cultural Revolution in 1967-8. By 1978, socialistic China had achieved a miracle in social progress. In less than three decades she had almost doubled her people’s life expectancy from 36 years in 1949 to 67 years. By 1978, average per capita income in China had caught up to that of India’s, while socialistic China had far surpassed that of capitalist India in terms of literacy of the people, average life expectancy, social position of women and level of industrial development. At the time, despite the bureaucratic deformations of the workers state, China, in terms of material standard of living, was then one of the most egalitarian societies (other than for hunter-gatherer tribal societies) that has ever existed in human history.

However, the PRC still faced big political challenges then. The lack of genuine workers democracy in the socialistic state stifled the creativity of workers. It also made it harder to motivate workers to work hard for the socialistic society – especially given that workers knew that the workers state was (rightly) guaranteeing every one of them a secure full-time job. Moreover, in the absence of socialist revolution having spread by then to the richest countries, the disastrous Sino-Soviet split had cut-off the PRC from access to advanced technology via the Soviet bloc. In response to these challenges, the bureaucracy administering the workers state decided to introduce pro-market reforms at the end of 1978 in a policy dubbed “reform and opening up.” To stimulate innovation and hard work, greater income differentials were to be permitted. Each workplace and region would be able to keep more of the income generated in their terrain for themselves rather than returning it to the public coffers for shared use by the entire socialistic society. The emergence of a limited capitalist private sector was allowed. Eventually foreign capitalists were allowed to set up factories within China, initially in joint ventures with PRC state-owned firms and later, in some cases, wholly by themselves.

The bureaucrats decision to introduce pro-market reforms in the late 1970s was not entirely driven by the desire to boost the productivity of the Chinese economy. They also knew that given their privileged position they and their children would be in prime position to take advantages of the greater inequality being permitted by the reforms and the limited allowance of capitalists that the reforms allowed. Nevertheless, the “reform and opening up” policy did to some degree spur production. However, it is very wrong for some to claim that China’s economic miracle is only because of the pro-market reforms. Indeed, in the two years leading up to the start of the reforms being implemented in 1979, China’s GDP grew at a very fast 7.6% and 11.7 % per annum respectively – faster than her economy grew in the first several years after the pro-market reforms commenced. Nevertheless, the reforms did bring benefits. In particular, the factories established by the capitalists from the richer countries allowed the workers and technical staff of China to acquire new skills and for the PRC to gradually learn the technology of the more advanced imperialist countries.

The cost of the “reform and opening up” was much greater inequality within China. Moreover, the emergence of a small new class of capitalists as well as a layer of executives and managers who had acquired affluence through being the enforcers of the interests of Western, Hong Kong and Taiwanese factory owners within China, created a social stratum that pushed for still greater openings for capitalist investors. Backed by right-wing sections of the CPC bureaucracy closest to them, this layer managed to push the reforms further than they had originally been intended to go and certainly much further than was needed for the social and political health of the workers state. To be sure, China remained a workers state – as it still is today – where the backbone sectors of her economy are still under socialistic state public ownership. But unemployment had re-emerged in China as had the exploitation of workers in some enterprises. Moreover, while overall the PRC continued to pull people out of poverty as she had been doing since 1949, smaller numbers of other people were now being pushed into extreme poverty.

The increased role of the market in determining production and investment meant that areas with favourable geography got richer in comparison with other areas. In particular, coastal areas, with their more moderate climate and their easier access to shipping to bring in raw materials and transport finished products, got richer than more remote interior areas. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was the latter and so became poorer relative to coastal and other parts of China with a more favourable geography. In 1992, before the market reforms had taken their full effect, socialist planning, which favoured more disadvantaged regions, had ensured that the average per capita income in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was actually 6% higher than the average for all of China. However, as figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics show, by 2009 average per capita incomes in the autonomous region had fallen to 25% below that of China as a whole. Moreover, even within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region the market reforms increased disparities in wealth depending on how favourable is the geography and climate. These natural conditions are unkind to the economic well being of the Uyghur people, who have always mostly lived in the southern part of the region, where the desert landscape dominated by the Taklamakan Desert is even drier and with fewer river sources of water than the northern part of the autonomous region, where a greater proportion of Han Chinese, Hui Muslims and Kazakhs live. As a result, relative to other ethnic groups within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the standard of living of the Uyghur people fell. For example, in the poorest of the Uyghur majority prefectures (districts), Hotan, the average per capita income relative to that of the Han-majority prefecture that includes the regional capital of Urumqi, fell from nearly 30% of Urumqi prefecture incomes in 2005 (the earliest year that we could find statistics for) to around 24% of Urumqi prefecture incomes in 2011.

To be sure, Uyghur people as a whole were still slowly being lifted out of poverty during this period. However, especially given that a sizable proportion of the Uyghur people still lived in poverty by the late noughties, the market reform-caused, growing inequality in standard of living within both the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and within all of China led to the lower-income Uyghur people developing resentments towards the Han, Hui Muslim and other better off ethnic groups. These were seized upon by anti-communist groups brandishing the banners of “East Turkestan independence” or extreme religious fundamentalism. Still more harmfully, as is the case all over the world when there are marked differences in economic strength of people of different ethnic groups, the deteriorating relative economic position of Uyghurs led to better-off ethnic groups developing a condescending and arrogant attitude towards the Uyghur people. Han chauvinist attitudes towards Uyghur people among China’s Han Chinese majority emerged. Meanwhile, the fact that there was now less job security than in pre-“reform and opening up” China and the fact that the atmosphere in the new, profit-driven private sector was less friendly only heightened the intensity of mutual suspicions and resentments.

It was indeed an awful display of Han chauvinism that was the trigger for the horrific July 2009 Urumqi riot by far-right Uyghur gangs. In late June, a false rumour that Uyghur workers at a Hong Kong-owned toy factory in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan had raped a young Han co-worker was spread online by a Han man disgruntled that he had been turned down for a job in the factory and that hundreds of Uyghur workers from Xinjiang had instead been given jobs in the factory at the insistence of CPC authorities. The false rumour led to a despicable attack on Uyghur workers by some prejudiced Han Chinese workers. In the ensuing brawl, two Uyghur workers were killed and dozens of workers of both ethnicity injured. Capitalist tycoon Rebiya Kadeer and her World Uyghur Congress greatly exaggerated the death toll and spread the lie that PRC police had refused to protect the Uyghur workers. The WUC used such means to help them prepare and incite the July 2009 Urumqi slaughter of Han Chinese and Hui Muslim people. In fact, completely contrary to the WUC’s claims, PRC police stopped the Shaoguan factory attacks soon after they arrived on the scene and cracked down hard against the rampaging Han Chinese attackers. One of the offending Han workers was later executed, another Han worker given a life sentence and others given lengthy jail sentences. Nevertheless, the Shaoguan toy factory incident showed the extent to which the pro-market reforms and the intrusion of a degree of capitalism into the Chinese workers state had harmed ethnic relations, fostered Han Chinese chauvinism and played into the hands of right-wing counterrevolutionary forces within the Uyghur community. Moreover, although the CPC does make efforts to curb Han chauvinism within the PRC government machinery, given that these efforts are not high profile, public campaigns and given that the CPC’s membership makes up almost one in ten of China’s adult population, it is inevitable that Han chauvinist attitudes within the broader Han population, to some degree, seep into the CPC and into PRC state organs.

Uyghur Peoples’ Lives Improve and Ethnic Unity
Strengthens As China Becomes “More Socialist”

The most dangerous aspect of the excessive implementation of the PRC’s “reform and opening up” was that it strengthened the forces pushing for outright capitalist restoration in China. A new class of capitalist exploiters had been created in China who constantly lobby for the “right” to freely exploit as in other “normal” – that is capitalist – countries. Alongside them, a bigger upper middle class layer has emerged who have benefited from the inequality fostered by the market reforms – many of whom want further reforms allowing still greater inequality. This layer includes managers, lawyers and financial advisers working for Western, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and local capitalists, self-employed brokers, lawyers and accountants whose practices have been lucky enough to succeed; and those academics, economists and other “experts” close to or in awe of the new capitalists and their affluent, upper-middle class side-kicks. Indeed, if the PRC leadership’s pro-market reforms had gone unchallenged it would have already led to a capitalist counterrevolution in China. This is not because those implementing the policies actually wanted capitalist restoration. No, the PRC’s leaders saw pro-market reforms, at least to some extent, as an indirect means to enhance China’s drive towards socialism. However, by creating a class of capitalists and a larger, pro-capitalist upper-middle class layer surrounding this new class, excessive market reforms created the social forces that were pushing for still greater openings to capitalism. With every concession to the demands of these forces their numbers and influence would have increased, allowing them to lobby still harder for more pro-capitalist policies. Just as happened in the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a downward spiral strengthening pro-capitalist forces would have occurred that would have eventually allowed them to grab state power.

However, politically aware Chinese workers and leftist intellectuals within the CPC had other ideas. When the CPC leadership began a scheme of mass privatisations of smaller and medium-sized state-owned enterprises in the mid-late 1990s, workers unleashed a wave of strikes and protest against the privatisations and against the job cuts and loss of pension benefits that resulted from them. Many of the protest marches were headed up by portraits of Chairman Mao, reflecting workers nostalgia for the pre-reform period of greater job security and more favourable workplace culture for workers. As a result of these actions, the PRC bureaucracy did not go as far in the privatisations as their more right-wing elements wanted. Then in May 1999, after the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Chinese leftists within and outside the CPC held mass protests within China. They not only denounced the bombing but denounced the Western imperialists and any softness towards them. As a result, the influence of those Chinese leaders seen as accommodating of the Western capitalists and of capitalism more generally was weakened – especially that of China’s then number three-ranked leader, rightist premier Zhu Rongji. Five years later, agitation by Chinese leftists within the CPC and academia resulted in an important victory: the PRC government headed by Hu Jintao banned management buyouts of state-owned enterprises, which had often been the main means of privatisation.

The tide was turning in China. By the mid noughties, the pace of the rightist economic reforms had slowed. Nevertheless, there remained a slow growth in the size of China’s capitalistic private sector relative to that of the socialistic state sector. However by the end of the noughties that trend started to reverse and the PRC moved decisively to the left. There were multiple reasons for this – each feeding into each other. For one, when anti-communists in Western countries held anti-PRC protests to disrupt parades of the Olympic torch relay for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, tens of thousands of PRC international students in Australia, Britain and other countries mobilised to defend the torch relay. This gave encouragement to leftists within China. Then the PRC ‘s successful hosting of the 2008 Olympics and her continuing economic resilience in the face of the capitalist world diving into their deep, late noughties Great Recession increased the confidence of Chinese communists in the socialist path. Moreover, in order to protect China’s economy from the global economic crisis, the PRC leadership was compelled to enact measures – like increasing investment by state-owned enterprises and greatly boosting state-led infrastructure construction – that had the effect of strengthening the socialist foundations of her economy. However, what most pushed PRC government policy in a pro-socialist direction in this period were several militant, mass struggles by workers against privatisation. Most spectacularly, when there was a July 2009 attempt to privatise a steel plant in the city of Tonghua in northern China’s Jilin Province, thousands of workers took over the factory in protest and beat the greedy new capitalist boss to death, leading to the cancellation of the privatisation.

By the late noughties, all significant privatisation in China had stopped. When the U.S.-based Carlyle private equity group bought out a PRC state-owned construction machinery manufacturer, Xugong, opposition by Chinese leftists within the CPC – which we in Trotskyist Platfom are proud to say that we took action here in solidarity with – revoked the privatisation. What started happening in China instead of privatisation was significant nationalisation – and often renationalisation – of private-owned firms. Such nationalisations especially took place in the coal-mining, steel and dairy industries. For a period of several years from the late noughties onwards, it was the PRC’s socialistic state-owned enterprises that were growing relative to that of the capitalistic, private sector. Meanwhile, the Hu Jintao government’s massive program to increase the amount of low-rent and low-cost public housing was significantly improving the lives of low-income, urban dwellers.

However, in 2012, buoyed by the partial recovery of major capitalist economies, right-wing factions within the CPC pushed back. They were able to get the most openly leftist, CPC Politburo member, the CPC leader of the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, Bo Xilai removed from office on corruption claims. The Right within the PRC bureaucracy seized on Bo’s public humiliation to begin to reverse the leftist course of the previous few years. The right-wing inclination continued into the first few years of Xi Jinping’s leadership of the party that began in late 2012. The entry of minority private stakes into state-owned enterprises was then being pushed. 

But in the mid-noughties a new strike wave by workers in private and Western and Japanese-owned factories started to reverse the political direction once again. At the CPC party congress conducted at the end of 2017, the mood was noticeably to the left of the congress held five years earlier. Reducing the income gap and accelerating the drive to reduce poverty were emphasised. To achieve both these goals, the socialistic state sector was called on to play the lead role. The system of “pairing” – where particular large state-owned enterprises were made responsible for poverty alleviation in particular regions of poverty – was given extra emphasis and political support. Without being openly stated, this represented the PRC’s reversion to greater use of socialist planning as opposed to allocation of resources on largely market – that is profit – principles. Given that the rates of poverty were higher in the Uyghur-majority areas of the southern part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region than the average in China, the Uyghur people especially benefitted from the “pairing” and poverty alleviation campaigns. Sacrificing the opportunities for greater profits elsewhere, the PRC’s state-owned firms established numerous urban and rural industrial operations in southern Xinjiang as well as Uyghur cultural and handicraft enterprises. Similarly, the PRC’s giant state-owned policy and commercial banks financed infrastructure construction, water conservation, renewable energy and housing development projects in the Uyghur majority areas of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Meanwhile, given that a main route of the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative to establish infrastructure connectivity with, especially developing, countries to China’s west passed through Uyghur-majority cities like Kashgar, Uyghur-majority cities were especially boosted by the state-led investment associated with the Belt and Road Initiative.

Through these socialist methods, China successfully lifted all her people – including all her Uyghur people – out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the absolute standard of living of the Uyghur masses, alongside that of the rest of the Chinese masses, continued to improve. By 2022, average real wages in urban workplaces of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had more than tripled from what they were just fourteen years earlier. With the most basic needs of nearly all Uyghur people now being met and Uyghur youth now having hope in their future career prospects and confidence that their standard of living would continue to improve, resentments and grievances amongst Uyghur people naturally became less intense. Crucially, the PRC’s greater emphasis on poverty alleviation and the increased relative economic role of her socialistic state sector over the last few years has also reduced income disparities. Uyghur people have especially been the beneficiaries. This can be seen by comparing the change in average GDP incomes in the three prefectures of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region where most Uyghurs live relative to that in the rest of China. In the poorest of these three prefectures, Hotan, the average income has gone from just 16% of average incomes in all of China in 2008 to 22% of China-wide incomes in 2021 (the last year that figures are available) and on a decidedly upward trend. In the most populous of the Uyghur-majority prefectures, Kashi, the average income has gone from 26% of average incomes in China in 2008 to 36% in 2021. And in the wealthiest of the Uyghur-majority prefectures, Asku, the average income has gone from 47% of average incomes in China in 2008 to 77% in 2021. Notably, the average income in the Uyghur majority, Aksu prefecture (which has a population of over 2.7 million) has now caught up with that in the Han-majority, Urumqi prefecture that includes Xinjiang’s thriving regional capital. It is this dramatic, both absolute and relative, improvement in the standard of living of the Uyghur people and the greater hopes that they have in their future prospects that has most undercut the support for anti-communist forces operating within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The PRC’s constitution education and vocational training centres have also played a role but only a supplementary one. Put in crude, colloquial terms, because China has become – in a zig-zagging way – “more socialist” over the last decade and a half, ethnic harmony has been strengthened.

The Well Being of Uyghur People
and the Well Being of Socialistic Rule in China

It should be noted that the relative economic standard of living of Uyghur workers is better than per capita GDP income figures for Uyghur-majority prefectures show. The outsize role of the PRC’s socialistic, state enterprises in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s development means that workers’ wages relative to that of per capita GDP is higher in the region than in the rest of China. Thus, while per capita income in the whole of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is about 18% below that of the China-wide average, average urban workers’ wages in the region are just 10% below that in all of China. Notably, in the poorest of the Uyghur-majority prefectures, Hotan, although per capita GDP was 22% of the China average in 2021, average Hotan workers wages in the same year were 81% of average wages in all of China. Nevertheless, the figures comparing the average per capita GDP for the Uyghur-majority prefectures with that of the China-wide average also show that there remains a long way to go to achieve complete regional and ethnic, economic equality in China. And as long as there are significant differences between the standard of living of different ethnic groups – in other words as long as China has not reached complete socialism – then there will not be complete ethnic harmony within China.

At the same time, given that China is not ruled by an exploiting class that has an interest in scapegoating minorities for the hardships caused by their own exploitation, as long as the socialist foundations of China’s economy continue to be strengthened and income disparities thus continue to be reduced, ethnic harmony in China should continue to improve. However, whether this more strongly pro-socialist course will continue is a question that is still being fought out in an intense political contest. This is a bout with many rounds left to go! Even in the last four years this contest has swung from one side to the other. In mid-late 2020, the PRC moved decisively even further to the left in the start of an exciting new period. The PRC’s much greater success in protecting her people from COVID than the capitalist countries, the fact that she had been able to do so, almost uniquely, without going into recession and the key role that state-owned enterprises had played in the COVID response effort gave much encouragement to Chinese leftists. They called for curbing profiteering by capitalist corporations and restricting exploitation of workers in the tech sector. The PRC top leadership responded to these calls. They launched a crackdown on prominent capitalists in the tech sector. This included a famous bringing to heel of one of China’s richest people, Alibaba founder Jack Ma. The PRC hit privately owned tech companies with huge fines and restrictions on their operations. Meanwhile, several years before Australian governments even mooted such measures, the PRC instituted laws guaranteeing a minimum wage and greater rights for food delivery workers and other gig economy workers in China. The slogans of the CPC leadership was then, “curbing the irrational expansion of capital”, which meant restricting excessive profiteering and influence of Chinese capitalist firms; and “common prosperity”, which meant boosting the incomes of lower-income groups and curbing excessive incomes of the super-rich. However, by early 2022, the right-wing of the PRC establishment – including private sector bosses, liberal academics and pro-private sector elements within the CPC – pushed backed hard. They demanded that “unfair” prosecutions of private sector “entrepreneurs” stop. They also called for a “level playing field” for private firms with that of state-owned firms – which to us communists is an obscene concept since privately owned companies operating for the profits of a few wealthy individuals should never be considered the equal of state-owned enterprises in a workers state that are collectively owned by all the people. But the right-wing push back had some success. The PRC leaders quietly dropped the call to “curb the irrational expansion of capital” and now speak less often of “common prosperity”.

The content of the PRC’s annual parliamentary sitting of the National Peoples Congress a few weeks ago showed that the two basic sides in China – the one’s pushing for a stronger pro-socialist orientation and the other for greater openings to the private sector  – are at the moment fighting each other to a stalemate. The outcome of the congress had measures that both sides could take comfort from. For the Right, there was a promise to allow a “level playing field” for the private sector and greater openings for this sector. For the Left, there were measures to significantly boost state-led investment and a further emphasis on public housing as well as a promise to support rural collectively-owned enterprises. Overall, given the previous pro-socialist measures, the trend in the PRC is still towards the strengthening of the socialistic state sector relative to the capitalistic private sector. For 2022, the last year that figures are available for, the revenue of state-owned firms listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (which made up 83% of the revenue of the listed firms) grew by 7% as against 5% for privately owned listed firms. Today, these socialistic state-owned enterprises continue to outgrow their private counterparts. Thus, for the first two months of this year, total fixed asset investment by the PRC’s state firms grew by 7.3% year on year, as against just 0.4% for the private sector. Moreover, the dominance of the socialistic enterprises in the real estate sector has been consolidated. Just two years ago, although state-owned enterprises made up six of the ten biggest real estate enterprises in China, private firms took up three of the top five positions, including the top two. Today, state-owned enterprises make up eight of the top ten real estate firms, including all the six biggest ones.

Nevertheless, as long as their remains a significant private sector in China and as along as the richest countries of the world remain under capitalist rule there is an imminent danger that China’s course towards socialism could be reversed and, more disastrously, that outright capitalist counterrevolution could occur. That is why we call for staunch communists in China to fight for urgent measures to decisively strengthen the socialistic state sector at the expense of the private sector. Although a limited private sector can be utilised in some sectors during the transition to socialism – especially in order to learn new technology from investments by high-tech firms from more advanced countries – the private sector should be limited to those areas where they are absolutely needed. We say that the internet, big retail and light manufacturing sectors should be confiscated from the capitalists and brought them into public ownership. No more tax and financial concessions for private capitalists! For state takeover of promising small enterprises in financial trouble!

The increased role of the socialistic sector, with its focus on serving the people, will necessarily reduce income disparities and thus improve ethnic relations. However, this alone will not be sufficient. The PRC also needs to wage a conscious and very public crackdown against any signs of Han chauvinism. Those committing harmful acts of Han chauvinism should face harsh punishment and others committing more minor offences should be admitted into political re-education schools. In this way the PRC will not only curb the form of ethnic chauvinism – which as the chauvinism of the majority ethnic group – that is the most harmful but also gain the authority among ethnic minorities to more firmly stop anti-communist groups claiming to stand for them (like the World Uyghur Congress and the ETIM).

The Fate of Chinese Socialism and the Uyghur People
Will Be Ultimately Decided in the International Arena

For leftists in Australia and other imperialist countries concerned about the wellbeing of Chinese socialism and the rights of workers and ethnic minorities in China, our number one task is not the advocacy of particular policies within China – as much as it is an internationalist duty for communists everywhere to take an interest in what policies communist abroad should fight for. Rather, our central task is to relieve the immense hostile pressure being exerted on China from the capitalist classes that rule our “own” countries. The best way to do this is by advancing towards the removal from power of these imperialist ruling classes by the revolutionary action of the working class. On the way to doing so, we must do everything possible to counteract the hostile external capitalist pressure bearing upon China and to support committed Chinese communists in their endeavours to defend socialistic rule. We in Trotskyist Platform are working hard to fulfill this mission. When the 70th anniversary of the PRC occurred in 2019, during the midst of the anti-PRC, rich kid revolt in Hong Kong and massive anti-PRC propaganda in the mainstream media, we joined with the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) in building an action that saw over 60 people march through the streets of Sydney behind the slogans: “Working Class People in Australia & the World: Stand With Socialistic China!” and “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist Movement!” When Chinese communists hear of such solidarity it gives them greater strength and confidence to push for a strengthening of China’s course towards socialism.

On the other hand, every bit of hostility that socialistic China receives from abroad, strengthens those internal forces within China seeking to steer her away from a socialist path. For it allows right-wing elements within and outside the CPC to say: “See, if we keep to our same course we will be surrounded by hostile forces – we cannot continue on the same path, we must accommodate the powerful capitalists that rule the world.” Any greater influence gained by such forces would hurt especially hurt the Uyghur masses. For the resulting weakening of socialistic state-owned enterprises and the undermining of planning of production based on need would lead to greater income disparities, a rollback in anti-poverty measures and setbacks for regions – like southern Xinjiang – faced with unfavourable geography. Many Uyghur people would be driven back into poverty and their standard of living relative to other people in China would fall. As a result, Han chauvinist attitudes towards Uyghur people would increase. Moreover, in order to present the Uyghur question in a manner that accommodates the now more powerful Chinese capitalists, the Chinese state would be compelled to refer less to the advances made by socialistic rule in Xinjiang and to instead appeal more to pure, non-socialist-based Chinese nationalism – which given that China is more than 90% populated by the Han people will inevitably be alienating to Uyghurs and other minority peoples. All this means that the imperialists – and the irresolute sections of the Far Left echoing them – who use feigned concerned about Uyghur people to attack the PRC are in fact exerting anti-communist pressure that would actually worsen the position of the Uyghur people.

More fundamentally, if hostile imperialist pressure and the agitation of China’s own internal capitalists succeeds in destroying the Chinese workers state, it will not only be a disaster for all the masses of China but be an especially awful catastrophe for the Uyghur people. While a small number of filthy rich capitalist Uyghurs like Rebiya Kadeer would re-enter the region and make a greater fortune by buying up big chunks of her economy, huge numbers of the Uyghur masses would be thrown back into poverty. And most of the economy of Uyghur majority regions would end up being taken over by the Western imperialists, who would again become the defacto masters of all of China as in the pre-1949 days. Meanwhile, ethnic and national oppression of Uyghur people would greatly intensify. We only have to look at the fate of national and ethnic minorities in Asia’s other hugely populous country in Asia, capitalist India, to see this.

In capitalist India, the Sikh people living in the north are denied their right to self determination. Although Sikhs form an absolute majority of the population of the Indian provincial state of Punjab, there is no Sikh autonomous region in India unlike the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomus Region for Uyghur people in China. In 1984, the Indian Army, with secret assistance by British imperialism, infamously stormed the holiest site of the Sikh people, the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar to target Sikh activists. India’s military killed thousands of civilian Sikh pilgrims in the attack. Then four months later, after two of the then Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in protest at the attack on the Golden Temple pilgrims, racist gangs in Delhi and other parts of India went on a killing spree against any Sikh people they could find. Incited and organised by leaders of the ruling Indian Congress Party and supported by the police, the mobs slaughtered over 10,000 Sikh people. Very, very few of the perpetrators were ever punished. Today, the Sikh people continue to be brutally oppressed by India’s capitalist rulers.

India’s Kashmiri people have faced still more violent oppression. Like the Uyghur people in the southern part of China’s Xinjiang, India’s Kashmiri people are a Muslim-majority ethnic group in a non-Muslim majority country, who have their own distinct language and who form a majority of the population in a particular region of the country that they reside in. Therefore, understanding the plight of the Kashmiri people in capitalist India is important for understanding the fate that awaits the Uyghur people should capitalist counterrevolution occur in China. The Indian regime has responded to the decades-long struggle by the Kashmiri people for independence from India with extreme brutality. On 21 January 1990, Indian paramilitary troops opened fire on unarmed Kashmiri protesters who were shouting pro-independence slogans. The troops killed over 100 people in what became known as the Gawkadal massacre, which triggered the start of a civil war in the region. The Indian regime followed up this crime with several other horrific massacres in subsequent years. Then in 2019, to further subjugate the Kashmiri people, the Indian capitalist regime revoked the partial autonomy that the Kashmiri people previously had in the provincial state of Jammu and Kashmir. The region was put under the direct rule of the Indian central government. To quell unrest to the draconian move, the Indian regime imposed a stay at home curfew in the region, cutoff phone communications and completely cutoff the internet – the blackout lasting for a year and a half! During the course of the Kashmiri people’s 35 year-long militant independence struggle, India’s security forces have killed some 50,000 Kashmiri civilians – many of whom have been shot execution style and then dumped in unmarked graves. This is where the real genocidal oppression of a Muslim-majority people in Asia (if one excludes Israel) is occurring – not in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region!

Although the Muslim-majority Kashmiri people are oppressed in India as an ethno-linguistic group, other Muslims in capitalist India also face discrimination and violence. Just four years ago, far-right thugs incited by India’s ruling Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) attacked Muslim shops and neighbourhoods in Delhi, shooting, hacking and burning to death up to 50 Muslim people. India’s police largely stood by as the slaughter took place and in some cases even joined in. Exploiting their own toiling classes and acting as agents for the powerful Western imperialists who exploit Indian labour and manipulate the markets for both Indian exports and imports, India’s capitalist rulers seek to make Muslims the scapegoat for the extreme poverty and economic despair that their rule causes. India’s current prime minister Narendra Modi, when he was chief minister of Gujarat state, personally encouraged and abetted India’s worst anti-Muslim pogrom – the 2002 Gujarat riot. Then fascistic Hindu mobs beat and burned to death over 2,000 Muslim people as police looked on or assisted the attackers. They committed the most horrific atrocities during this highly organised pogrom. Shouting Hindu chauvinist slogans, the far-right thugs burnt a large number of Muslim children alive and conducted mass gang rapes of Muslim women before burning to death their victims. Ten years earlier, the BJP and its even more extreme allies led a large group of Hindu fanatics to tear down the 16th-century Babri Masjid mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. This sparked inter-communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims in which thousands of, mainly, Muslims were killed in highly organised pogroms launched by fascistic Hindu parties. Now, a lavish Hindu temple has been built on the site of the demolished mosque. In January, in a move that highlights the brutal oppression that Muslims in today’s India face, prime minister Modi opened the new Hindu temple in a reception featuring some of India’s best known tycoons, Bollywood stars and cricket legends. Effectively, they were celebrating the tearing down of the mosque and the horrific anti-Muslim slaughter that occurred 32 years earlier!

In Asia’s next most populous country, Muslim-majority Indonesia, it is Christians and other non-Muslims who face persecution and violence. Also especially targeted is Indonesia’s Chinese minority. In May 1998, after the then Suharto government was rocked by huge protests against food shortages, massive unemployment and corruption, Indonesia’s ruling capitalist elite moved to make the Chinese minority the scapegoat. They organised for thugs to go on a rampage killing Chinese people and burning Chinese homes, shops and religious shrines. Over a thousand ethnic Chinese people were killed and over 400 Chinese women and girls raped. Indonesia’s current president elect, Prabowo Subianto, when he was head of the Indonesian Army Strategic Reserve Command, was the main person who facilitated the anti-Chinese pogrom. Meanwhile, in a manner similar to India’s subjugation of Kashmir, the Indonesian capitalist regime cruelly oppresses the independence-seeking Melanesian people of the West Papua region. This includes through the large-scale torture and execution of Papuan youth and children and the burning of homes, crops and livestock in villages accused of having sympathy for the Papuan rebels.

Regardless of which particular religious or ethnic group is in the majority, capitalist rule spells brutal persecution of minority ethnic groups and nationalities. When the perpetrating regimes are acting as agents or part-agents for the rich Western imperialist overlords, their terror is all the more ruthless. In Buddhist majority Sri Lanka, it is non-Buddhists who are persecuted – often in violence partly incited by Buddhist monks. The most violently oppressed community there are the Tamils living in the island’s north and east. In the mid-1950s, fearing a powerful and burgeoning multi-ethnic working-class and socialist movement, Sri Lanka’s capitalist rulers consciously created a plan to divide the country’s working-class by setting the majority Sinhalese community against the Tamil people. Their governments introduced laws that very openly discriminated against Tamils in language, employment and education. When Tamil people resisted – eventually through fighting for a separate Tamil state – the Sri Lankan regime put down the struggle with heinous terror. They killed some 150,000 Tamil civilians during the course of the country’s 26 year-long civil war that erupted after the July 1983, regime-incited anti-Tamil pogrom.

Even in Asia’s richest country, Singapore, ethnic and racial oppression takes place. There it is non-Chinese people – especially the Indian and other South Asian communities – who face discrimination in the Chinese-majority country. To be sure, Singapore’s fortuitous wealth – that comes from being a country with a tiny population whose location allows it to become a shipping, banking and tourism hub that creams off part of the wealth generated by workers in neighbouring populous countries – does round off the sharpness of ethnic conflicts. Nevertheless, in capitalist Singapore the country’s Indian and other South-Asian based communities face discrimination in hiring, job promotion and housing. As a result, they have a second-class economic and social status despite living in the same geographical area as the majority Chinese community. Ten years ago, this oppression led hundreds of Singaporean and migrant labourers of Indian and Bangladeshi background to rise up in militant actions against Singapore police after an Indian construction worker was run over and killed by a bus in Singapore’s Little India district.

The brutal oppression of Kashmiris and Muslims in capitalist India, West Papuans in capitalist Indonesia and Tamils in capitalist Sri Lanka give a taste of what the Uyghur people would face should capitalism be restored in China. Even if capitalist counterrevolution in China were to be accompanied by a break-up of China into separate countries along ethnic lines, this would hardly mean peace for the Uyghur and other peoples of the region. Instead, each of the new, inevitably Western-subordinated, ruling classes would need to whip up aggressive nationalism and xenophobia against both neighbouring states and their own internal minorities in order to deflect mass grievances over the poverty caused by the new system based on capitalist exploitation. This would lead to fratricidal war between neighbouring states and pogroms against internal minorities – just like the horrific wars and inter-ethnic bloodbaths that erupted in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union as a result of the early 1990s capitalist counterrevolutions there. Moreover, given that Uyghur people are far outnumbered by Han Chinese, a future separate Uyghur capitalist state would be on the losing end of any conflict with a future Han Chinese capitalist state.

So there are very good reasons why many Uyghur people in China support socialistic rule and proudly call themselves communists. We must stand with them and with all the people of China fighting to defend socialistic rule. Capitalist counterrevolution and all the poverty, inequality, wars and inter-ethnic violence that it will bring must be prevented. Our role as leftists living in an imperialist country is critical in this regard. Despite the PRC’s huge population and growing strength, the reality is that if the international working class does not relieve the intense imperialist pressure on the workers state through either sweeping away capitalist rule in their own countries or seriously counteracting the capitalist pressure on the PRC, then China will succumb to capitalist counterrevolution – just like the also once powerful Soviet Union did. On the other hand, if the workers in the imperialist countries can come to the defence of the Chinese workers state and thus allow the PRC to catch up to the per capita incomes of the imperialist countries, then, just as the Western rulers fear, socialistic rule in China and the example it will offer will make her an immediate existential threat to capitalist rule. We badly need such an existential threat to capitalism! The Western-supported genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza, the plunder of the ex-colonial countries by the Western imperialists, the brutal oppression of Kashmiris, Sikhs and Muslims in the world’s now most populous country, capitalist India and the skyrocketing rents, unaffordable prices and lack of secure jobs for youth in Australia, all prove this.

So let us mobilise with all of our energy to defend the PRC workers state against all the all-sided attacks that the imperialist ruling classes are unleashing against her. Let us build mass actions to demand: U.S./British/Australian militaries get out of the South China Sea! End Western military assistance to China’s rogue, capitalist-ruled province of Taiwan! Down with the U.S./Australia military build up targeting China! U.S. bases out of Darwin! Scrap AUKUS! End imperialist funding and assistance for forces opposing socialistic rule in China – whether they be anti-communist, pseudo-“pro-democracy” activists, Hong Kong pro-colonial anti-PRC forces or the WUC and TKIP Uyghur anti-communists. Down with the lying imperialist propaganda vilifying China over Taiwan, her treatment of Uyghurs, Hong Kong, COVID, Tibet and a whole lot of other issues!