“Is China committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims? Interview with Jerry Grey” (Citizens Insight / Australian Citizens Party, 28 October 2020)
Here is a very fascinating interview conducted by Research Director Robert Barwick of the Australian Citizens Party with British-Australian citizen Jerry Grey who had a varied life as a police officer and security officer in the 1980s – 1990s. He then retrained as a teacher and found a teaching job, initially for a year, in China. Grey enjoyed living in China so much that he ended up staying there permanently, establishing a charity with his wife whom he met in China, and began travelling around the country. His cycling travels took him to and through Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Grey is thus in a good position to be able to confirm whether the Chinese government has singled out Uyghur Muslim people for discrimination, harassment and incarceration, including incarceration in concentration camps where they are supposedly forced to perform hard labour in factories or on farms. In particular Uyghur Muslims are supposed to be subjected to cultural genocide, being forced to give up their own language and much of their traditional culture and religion.
Grey describes his experiences of travelling and living in Xinjiang with interviewer Robert Barwick, demolishing as he does so the Western propaganda narratives of Uyghur Muslims being singled out for discrimination. Grey gives an example of how such propaganda may be generated in the case of an Albanian journalist who visits a school in China, asks various questions of the teacher in a class, records the teacher’s answers and then returns to Albania to present the Q&A session with his television station employer in such a way as to remove the context in which the teacher replies to the journalist. Of course religion is not taught in school if the school is not a religious school, yet the journalist presents the teacher’s answer of “No’ to suggest that religious education is banned in China. A second example of propaganda misusing information is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s use of satellite imagery showing large building complexes surrounded by fencing to insinuate that these complexes are concentration camps when in fact the buildings may be senior high schools with boarding facilities or other major institutions. (Later in the interview Barwick notes that ASPI itself is funded by the US government and corporate sources that employ slave labour in the US.) Since Xinjiang region has been experiencing numerous terrorist attacks – in ten years up to 2017, the area suffered 800 deaths from terrorist incidents – many major building complexes now have elaborate security systems and travellers are subjected to many security checks. While the surveillance may be very intrusive, in the context of terrorist incidents occurring in areas as far apart as Xinjiang and Yunnan, the vigilance is often welcomed by local people. Interestingly in Xinjiang region, the police force is made up of Uyghurs themselves.
On the issue of terrorism in Xinjiang, Barwick and Grey discuss Beijing’s response to preventing more terrorist attacks in the form of a massive poverty alleviation scheme which has reached out to the most remote and / or impoverished communities in China and provided them with access to markets, transport and education for their children. Children of senior high school age are enrolled in city schools with boarding facilities (which media sources hostile to China misinterpret, deliberately or otherwise, as concentration camps) where they learn and study the Mandarin language which will enable them to find work in China. The youngsters are allowed to visit their families on weekends and are brought back to school by bus.
Significantly Grey notes there are no Western journalists on the ground in Xinjiang; furthermore most news about Xinjiang appearing in the MSM can be traced back to three sources, all of which source their information from the US State Department, and thus their information is highly suspicious as the US has an interest in destabilising China and breaking it up. One of these three sources often consulted by the Western MSM is German-American Christian fundamentalist theologian Adrian Zenz who believes in The Rapture (when true-believing Christians will be suddenly and physically drawn to Heaven by God and the rest of humanity will burn on Earth) and regards himself as having been appointed by God to pursue and expose China’s supposed crimes. He is a member of a far-right organisation known as Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which was founded in 1983 by the US government and had a connection to Ukrainian ultra-right nationalist Yaroslav Stetsko, a former associate of Stepan Bandera, former head of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera faction) and a Nazi collaborator during the 1940s. The other sources include the aforementioned ASPI and the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an organisation founded by the US government.
Grey talks about his personal experiences with security in Xinjiang, noting that entry into and exit out of the region is monitored closely by Beijing to the extent that the region is locked down against unauthorised entry by outsiders. He notes that his movements around Xinjiang, which included taking cameras with him, have been unrestricted. People curious about his reasons for travelling around Xinjiang turn out to be generous with their time and hospitality when he tells them; no-one tells him he can or cannot travel to particular parts of Xinjiang.
An interesting detour is taken by Barwick when Grey talks about Uyghur expatriates complaining to mainstream Western media that they are not allowed to contact relatives in Xinjiang: Grey says this happens because the expats have broken Chinese law, which itself explains why they are expats in the first place – they have fled justice by going overseas and finding asylum as “refugees”. Barwick says many Uyghur organisations in Australia have “East Turkestan” as part of their names; in doing this, they declare themselves to be enemies of China, as “East Turkestan” implies that these organisations are encouraging separatism and working towards breaking Xinjiang away from China.
The interview finishes up with Grey describing his experiences of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. He notes that the Chinese government used the lockdown to mobilise healthcare resources in hospitals, relying on government bureaucrats of all levels to lead the response, and to introduce an effective contact tracing and testing scheme which has resulted in the disease being stopped dead in its tracks early in 2020.
While the interview frequently meandered from one topic to the next, it makes clear that allegations of discrimination, harassment and imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims on the basis of their religion and ethnicity are baseless and are part of an agenda to raise support for a US-led war and possible invasion of China among Western publics. Unfortunately the interview does not clearly identify the main sources of disinformation about China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims (incidentally not all Uyghurs are Muslims and Muslims in China are a highly diverse religious community with the majority of Muslims being Han Chinese themselves) though viewers familiar with the issue will be aware that ultimately the US government and the supposedly humanitarian and human rights NGOs it funds feed these sources and in turn rely on them to spread the propaganda.
It would appear that much Western resentment directed at China’s treatment of its Uyghur population stems from Western awareness that what China is doing for its underprivileged is exactly the programs and policies that Western nations should have pursued for their impoverished minorities. Fake narratives such as the concentration camp narrative feed on real facts and distort them into an evil mirror image that exploits Western public guilt over and horror of Nazi German atrocities and genocides of targeted groups like Jews, Roma and Sinti, Slav peoples, homosexuals and people born with mental and physical disabilities. It can be no coincidence that increasingly Chinese Communists and the former Soviet Union are being equated with Nazi Germany through deliberate distortions of the 20th-century histories of China, Russia and Germany.