Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I value the opportunity to participate in this virtual round table on the human rights situation of the Uighur people in China. I will address that first, followed by my assessment of the Beijing regime.
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, which the local Uighur aboriginal people know as East Turkestan, is a very large area of 1.7 million square kilometres. It is relatively sparsely populated, very rich in natural resources and located most strategically at the heart of Xi Jinping's belt and road initiative.
China has a non-monotheistic culture where religion has always been subservient to the state, unlike the Uighur culture, where Islam is an integral part of life, as Buddhism is in Tibet. The pretext for anti-Uighur policies over the past decade is what Beijing calls separatism, extremism and terrorism.
These are the measures enforced since the so-called strike hard campaign against violent terrorism in Xinjiang in May 2014, and especially since 2016, when Chen Quanguo became Xinjiang Communist Party boss. There is relentless surveillance using closed-circuit television, artificial intelligence, facial recognition and biometric data. A new grid surveillance system, where each square contains 500 people for stronger surveillance, has just been completed. There are hundreds of so-called vocational re-education as well as forced labour camps, where around 1.2 million Uighurs, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, are incarcerated. The focus is on Mandarin training, intense Han Chinese nationalist indoctrination and strict discipline.
Many Uighurs are forced to host Han Chinese agents into their families as so-called family members who train their hosts in Mandarin and Chinese nationalism. Beards and hijab are very strongly discouraged. Contraception and the sterilization of women, as has been already referred to, are pushed. Muhammad and Medina are not allowed as names for new babies. All these steps aim at assimilation through sinification or monoculturalism. Sinification is accelerated through Han settlers moving into Xinjiang.
What kind of a regime is the “people's republic” in name only, ruled over by the Chinese Communist Party also by name only? In an intriguing case of dire history repeated, in a process launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and completed by Xi Jinping in March 2018, China has evolved from Maoist Communism to what I call, in a purely descriptive designation, fascism or Confucian fascism with Han Chinese characteristics for the new era.
To Mussolini's “everything within the state, nothing against the state and nothing outside the fascist state”, Xi Jinping's slogan is that the country, the military, society, schools, north, south, east and west, all belong to the Communist Party state. Weiwen, preserving social stability, is the foundation of the domestic policy of the regime, the Chinese version of Gleichschaltung.
Marxism and fascism differ only on one thing, and that's private property, which fascism allows. However, unlike liberal democracies, the Beijing regime, since 2012 lorded over by the never-elected strongman-for-life Xi Jinping, because of its overwhelming political power has the last word on large private businesses as well. Most of China's top businessmen are members of the Chinese Communist Party. Marx and Mao, Xi Jinping's heroes, are probably spinning in their graves.