‘1984’ in China
Communist leaders engage in modern-day totalitarian
brainwashing, bizarre lies and industrial-level indoctrination to suppress
Muslims.
By The Editorial Board of The New York Times
“Ying shou jin shou” — “Round up
everyone who should be rounded up.”
The echo of “1984,” “Brave New World” or “Fahrenheit 451” is
unmistakable. But this is not dystopian fiction. It’s a real bureaucratic
directive prepared by the Chinese leadership, drawing on a series of secret
speeches by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, on dealing ruthlessly
with Muslims who show “symptoms” of religious radicalism.
There’s
nothing theoretical about it: Based on these diktats, hundreds of thousands of
Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in the western Xinjiang region have been
rounded up in internment camps to undergo months or years of indoctrination
intended to mold them into secular and loyal followers of the Communist Party.
This
modern-day totalitarian brainwashing is revealed in a remarkable trove of documents leaked to The New York Times by an
anonymous Chinese official. The existence of these re-education camps has been
known for some time, but nothing before had offered so lucid a glimpse into the
thinking of China’s bosses under the fist of Mr. Xi, from the obsessive
determination to stamp out the “virus” of unauthorized thought to cynical
preparations for the pushback to come, including how to deal with questions
from students returning to empty homes and untended farms.
The latter script is eerily Orwellian:
Should students ask whether their missing parents had committed a crime, they
are to be told no, “it is just that their thinking has been infected by
unhealthy thoughts. Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their
thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”
That someone from within the
unforgiving, secretive Chinese leadership would take the enormous risk of
leaking 403 pages of internal documents to a Western newspaper is in itself
amazing, especially since the documents include an 11-page report summarizing
the party’s investigation into the activities of Wang Yongzhi, an official who
was supposed to manage a district where Uighur militants had staged a violent
attack but who eventually developed misgivings about the mass detention
facilities he had built. “He refused,” said the report, “to round up everyone
who should be rounded up.” After September 2017, Mr. Wang disappeared from
public view.
It becomes clear from the documents
that Mr. Xi is far more concerned by any challenge to the Communist Party’s
image of strength than foreign reaction. Already in May 2014 he told a
leadership conference, “Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile
forces malign the image of Xinjiang.” Accordingly, the Chinese government made
no effort to deny the leaked documents, but rather portrayed the crackdown in
Xinjiang as a major success against terrorism and accused The Times of smearing China’s
“antiterrorism and de-extremism capabilities.”
What the documents really reveal is not
an effective antiterrorism campaign, but rather the paranoia of totalitarian
leaders who demand total fealty in thought and deed and recognize no method of
control other than coercion and fear. Mr. Xi and other top government
officials reveal in these papers a conviction that the Soviet Union collapsed
because of ideological laxity and spineless leadership, and a top security
official attributed terrorist attacks in Britain to the British government’s
“excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security.’” And Mr. Xi argued that
new technology must be part of the broad campaign of surveillance and
intelligence-gathering to root out dissidence in Uighur society, anticipating
Beijing’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in Xinjiang.
International
outrage could turn that into a wake-up call for China’s leaders, despite their
totalitarian swagger, if the world begins to see them as pariahs, not just
trading partners. The whistle-blower, and the untold thousands of Chinese
Muslims suffering under the yoke of Mr. Xi, deserve that.
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