China Takes a Page from Hitler’s Play Book

“Without equivocation, the PRC Government is among the worst abusers of religious freedom in the world. One of the other worst abusers is the Government of North Korea. There’s no question that these two governments stand, unfortunately, together in this hall of shame,” according to Daniel Nadel, a senior State Department official in the Office of International Religious Freedom. What is happening in western China goes beyond Nadel’s concern about eliminating religious freedom. Lives are at stake. President Xi Jinping intends to fundamentally alter the social and physical landscape of Xinjiang. The communist government has built hundreds of detention centers in the autonomous region. Minority women, including Uyghur, Kazakh, and other indigenous nationalities, are losing their reproductive rights. Whole families are placed indefinitely in detention centers.

Secrecy and disbelief helped enable the Germans in WWII to commit widespread atrocities. Today, the Chinese government is taking a page from Hitler’s notebook and committing genocide in northwestern China under a 21^st century style cloak of secrecy suppressing social media accounts of the atrocities. President Xi is methodically wiping out the Uyghur Muslim minority inside China’s borders, while millions more allegedly remain in detention camps.With a population of 25.8 million, Xinjiang is three times the size of France, and sits on the country’s western border just north of Tibet.

Reports coming out of China from human rights groups and others who have visited the region reveal that Beijing is forcibly sterilizing women, imposing forced labor, raping, torturing and killing individuals, and refusing Muslim Uyghurs the right to practice their religion, among other abuses. The only thing more amazing is China’s arrogance this week when it publicly insisted the United States, Germany, and Britain cancel an upcoming video conference covering Beijing’s crackdown on the Uyghur Muslim minority. Beijing went so far as to call on other UN members not to attend the event, claiming that the world is “interfering with China’s internal affairs.” This is an ongoing theme for Chinese government personnel. In April a Chinese diplomat speaking to the British press said that people outside China “should mind their own business.”

The world, however, is not obeying China’s warnings. Adrian Zenz, of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said “we know it’s mass internment.” In June 2020, The Jamestown Foundation issued a report on the incarcerations and atrocities in the region, saying they met the UN criteria for classification as “genocide.” This week the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released an in-depth report describing Chinese efforts to reduce the size of the indigenous population in Xinjiang, saying that Beijing is calling for a decrease in the birth-rate in southern Xinjiang by at least 4.00 per thousand from 2016 levels.

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The CCP crackdown has led to an unprecedented and precipitous drop in official birth-rates in Xinjiang since 2017, according to the report. “The birth-rate across the region fell by nearly half (48.74 percent) in the two years between 2017 and 2019.” The largest declines, however, have been in counties where Uyghurs and other indigenous communities are concentrated. Across counties that are majority-indigenous the birth-rate fell, on average, by 43.7 percent in a single year between 2017 and 2018. The birth-rate in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by 56.5 percent, on average, in that same year.

The Chinese government’s systematic efforts to reduce the size of its Muslim population in Xinjiang includes a range of coercive birth-control policies. Its own publicly available statistics of county-level birth-rates (natality) across 2011-2019 indicate a dramatic change after the crackdown began in 2016. Unlike the majority Han population, which is experiencing a loosening of family planning rules, CCP Party officials in Beijing are cracking down in Xinjiang. Together with the other abuses and detention camps, which can be seen by satellite, China is facing increased scrutiny for its genocidal policies toward its minorities. Now is not the time for the world to cower to China’s demands that we look the other way.

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

China’s Tech Targets

Chinese technology is changing and its leadership is using it, along with espionage, to challenge the West in a number of critical areas. The United States is only one of its targets. Previously, Beijing’s spies primarily sought Western technologies as a way to skip generations of develop cost and time to modernize its economy. Today, its acquisition of advanced technologies, and now also its indigenous development, makes the communist giant a threat to freedom-loving people everywhere. This week Nan Mulchandani, the CIA’s chief technology officer, said Director William Burns is preparing for an “infinite race” with Beijing for artificial intelligence and advanced technologies. He argues the US must pivot toward providing American spies with the latest transformative technologies to outcompete China. Mulchandani says this means updating everything the agency does “from operations to the analytic function, support functions and other piece there.” America, he suggests, needs to alter its thinking toward viewing this not as a race with a finite end point, but as an ongoing competition. Mr. Mulchandani predicted that the next area of competition would “be primarily a software war that is powered by something like AI” rather than hardware fueled by software. That competition, however, is not confined to simply acquiring critical technologies for use in the future. China is also challenging the US in space. China announced today it launched a groundbreaking mission to retrieve samples from the far side of the moon. The space capsule will arrive in four days and collect 4.4 pounds of moon rocks and regolith, or moon dirt. Beijing’s desire to one day become a space power and scientific force is for pragmatic purposes in 2024 a fait accompli. Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said during a NASA budget hearing this week, that “while the US remains the global leader in space exploration, we face increasing challenges internationally.” Referring to China’s space station, Lucas said: “We cannot allow China to become the front-runner in space exploration… There are too many consequences for our competitiveness, our national security, and our continued ability to explore space.” A new report released this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says that the United States, to further its geopolitical interests and maintain a strong domestic economy, must approach every aspect of economic and trade policy through the lens of global technology competition. The Biden Administration’s approach, it says, discounts the landscape of competition between China and the US and may “jeopardize US advancements in emerging technologies… which could cede the advantage to China….” In particular, the report recommends that the US take action now because quantum and artificial intelligence (AI) need a federal policy to ensure the country can spur the entrepreneurship and R&D efforts foundational to the strength of the technology sector. As China’s Communist Party (CCP) becomes more hostile to the United States and other Western nations, its aggressive activities abroad expand and intensify. Chinese spy cases far outnumber those of Russia and every other nation. CSIS reports that since President Xi took over in 2012 there have been 224 incidents of spying. Estimates of the long -term economic, scientific, and national security cost to the US run into the billions and have “created immeasurable damage to national security with the theft of weapons technology, including nuclear weapons test data… China has added the theft of massive quantities of personal information, political coercion, and influence operations, to its espionage activities.” The CSIS reports says that 49% of incidents of spying in the US directly involved Chinese military or government employees, with private Chinese citizens accounted for 41%. In 29% of the espionage cases the person involved was attempting to acquire military technology, while in 54% of the incidents it was related to commercial technologies. Almost half of the cases involved cyber espionage, usually by state—affiliated actors. No matter where one turns today China is challenging the West, from the depths of our oceans to outer space. The United States cannot count on China to be a good global citizen and refrain from attempting to enforce its vision of world order with Beijing at the apex. The time is growing short for the West to take action. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.