All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing everybody's favorite Spaghetti-O on Twitter, Peter Lee, the China hand.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
It's great to be here, Scott.
Great to talk to you again, and everybody, you know what you can do, is you can find Peter Lee's China Threat Report on Patreon, patreon.com, and also on his blog, which I can't find the tab for at the moment, but it's the China Hand blog.
What's the URL for that?
I'm sorry.
It's China Matters, but I must confess, I don't update that anymore.
I do everything on my Patreon.
Okay, great.
But there's lots of old stuff to read there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's my gold and oldies.
So I read parts one through six, I guess, last night, man, catching up on this Uyghur thing.
Boy, I got to turn over to my giant page of notes here.
The question is in regards to the Xinjiang Uyghurs, and by the way, it just got off the line right before you one moment ago with Larry Wilkerson, and he had some things to add to this, but I'll bring those up later.
First of all, can you just, let me say, I can tell from your writing here that you've been writing all about this for a very long time before it was a big fad and a war party talking point and all of this.
So the purpose of this is just to get to exactly what is the truth about the Chinese government's persecution of the Uyghurs, and what ain't true, and all of that.
So first of all, what's a Uyghur, and what's a Xinjiang province, and how do I get there from here?
Okay.
So a big swath of Northwest China is the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.
It's about, there are 10 million or so people of Uyghur ethnicity out there, which is a Turkic Muslim ethnicity, and probably by now there's somewhere around the same number of Han Chinese who have moved in as immigrants or been there for a while.
It's always been the Chinese frontier, in fact, as I'm sure your educated readers know, the word Xinjiang means new frontier, and incorporation of Xinjiang into the Chinese empires has always been a problematic issue, even up to and including the present day.
So the current ruckus about the Uyghurs has to do with the fact that the People's Republic of China under Xi Jinping has pretty much abandoned its previous laissez-faire policy toward letting Xinjiang sort of drift along, and they're working aggressively to incorporate Xinjiang into the People's Republic of China and integrate the Uyghurs into Chinese society.
And then, so to cut right to the chase, the U.S. government says that's genocide, is that right?
Yeah.
It's not, well, there's two angles to this thing.
The first thing is that, of course, there's in the popular conception, you know, genocide means hurting people into camps based upon an ethnic identity and murdering them.
The second part is not going on.
Even Team Uyghur, the people determined to advertise the sufferings of the Uyghurs in China have not made any claims of mass executions.
What makes it a little more complicated is, as I put it on Twitter a while back, genocide convictions are like what we say in the United States about a grand jury, you know, it can indict a ham sandwich.
And the genocide laws are, the genocide case law is vague enough that pretty much anything that you do out there could be construed as genocide.
Basically the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide in several ways above and beyond, you know, the mass killings of people.
It does not include cultural genocide, which is what the Chinese program in Xinjiang looks a lot like.
It does, however, allow for convictions of genocide on the idea of restriction of birth rates and reproduction.
Adrian Zenz came out with a rather, to me, convoluted and unconvincing statistical massage where he tried to claim that the Chinese were practicing reproductive genocide out there in Xinjiang.
So, you know, it really depends on the venue where you go in and, you know, who the judges are in that.
So, you know, if they're willing to take, you know, the Chinese side, it would be not genocide, but if they're going to take Adrian Zenz's side, then it is genocide.
Yeah.
Well, and then, I mean, the question of Zenz brings up of whether his stats are completely wrong or somewhat close or what.
Okay, so here's a good way to get into this.
How many people do you think are in these so-called camps and just what is it like in there?
Well, A, nobody knows how many people are in the camps out there.
You know, the numbers have been thrown around basically what's in something of an Adrian Zenz special.
You know, when he gives us, when he puts out his estimates, he says up to, he said up to a million.
And then, of course, the up to qualifier was dropped out and everybody ran with a million.
And then he said maybe two to three, they drop out the maybe and so now it's two to three million.
I tend to doubt that there's as many as a million people in the camps.
That would be 10% of the Uyghur population.
A lot of hay has been made in the Uyghur sphere using satellite photographs to identify detention facilities and extrapolate from that the number of people who are currently detained.
But the problem with that is that when China embarks upon one of these extensive programs, everybody gets money and everybody starts building.
But exactly how many people were held in those camps and how many have actually been cycled through the system and released into society or into factories or something like that is something that nobody knows.
But I think that one of the issues is that the Chinese government always regarded these camps as an arena for education, socialization, training, and eventually emptying out the camps and releasing the Uyghurs to a new lifestyle, which is more urban, embedded in the factory system and not rural, peasanty and liable to be more amenable to subversion and more conservative Islamic practice.
So long story short is the thing that always bugged me about the data that I was able to look at is that it's either from 2017 or 2018 or it doesn't have dates on it at all.
So there's really no good time-related thing that I've seen that talks about the levels of people detained in the camps and how many have actually come out.
And it sounds like you're saying too that this is part of the overall policy of building giant cities and then forcing millions of peasants from the countryside to move there and try to somehow make it work.
Well, you know, the Chinese have been puzzling over the Xinjiang issue for a while.
The main problem is in the oasis cities of southern Xinjiang.
Southern Xinjiang is not a traditional Uyghur homeland.
The main action is down in the south and it's poor and they tried this thing of bootstrapping and laissez-faire and the issues of economic activity and that sort of stuff.
But what happened instead was that the Xinjiang from the PRC point of view turned into a major governance crisis.
The Chinese like to talk about terrorist activity there, which means, you know, the stuff that Islamists with the jihadi bent are doing down there in terms of violence against state targets.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
You know, there was a lot of poor government, a lot of dissatisfaction, a lot of local hacking and chopping.
And so the Chinese idea is that this whole program that they're doing down there is part of an overall effort to not only increase the government's reach into the daily lives of Uyghurs, but also to improve governments and, you know, try to attain a higher level of Uyghur loyalty to the PRC via that method.
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All right, so I guess part of the Adrian Zenn stuff was, you know, really focused on birth control and the idea was that they were, that the Uyghur women were being forced to get these IUD implants or whatever, that kind of thing.
And it seems like, well, because it is government health care, there is a question of just how free the people are when their doctor's a cop to tell him no or whether that, so in other words, if you just made more birth control available to people in a free society, there wouldn't really be a question there.
But it's not a free society in the first place, so then the question is, are they forcing these women to get these IUD implants and especially in these massive numbers the way that he claims?
So that way they're not, you know, rounding people up in camps, they're just preventing them from ever being born, this kind of thing.
Yeah, well, you know, the Gareth Porter caught Zenn's out on his bad math and his miscalculation where he radically overestimated the number of people in the rate of IUD insertion in Xinjiang and actually Zenn's quietly retracted that a while back, actually yesterday, I think it was.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll, I'll have to dig out the link and put it on my, put it on my Twitter.
I'm threatening to sue Landis for tweeting it.
Yes.
I mean, that was a few weeks back, I guess when the article first came out.
We're talking about Gareth Porter, Max Blumenthal in the gray zone regarding Adrian Zenn's.
Those are your search terms, everybody.
Yeah.
If you're trying to catch up here.
So anyway, yeah, I saw yesterday on Twitter that he had quietly made a correction to some of his, to one of his materials relating to the level of IUD insertion.
The birth control priorities have less to do with controlling the overall growth of the Uyghur population than trying to reduce the number of children in peasant families.
Again, as part of this thing where, you know, if you're a poor sod buster, you're just cranking out the kids, you know, to provide social security and work in the fields.
But if you have a prosperous factory job and you want to go out dancing, you're only going to have one kid.
So certainly from the point of view of the Chinese government, it is preferred that rural women in Xinjiang, you know, will get IUDs put into them.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some coercive thing to it, but it's, it's like I said, it's, it's probably has to do with, you know, coercive birth control in, in certain rural contexts rather than an overall desire to control Uyghur numbers.
They'll be happy to have lots of Uyghurs as long as they're docile, urbanized and working in the factory.
All right.
Well, listen, I mean, there's a huge fad going on right now about being very, very concerned about this.
And I've seen, you know, plenty of people, even libertarians saying, oh no, we said never again.
And yet here we are turning away from it happening again when, I mean, clearly they don't know anything about it other than it's a big fad to be very, very concerned about this right now.
What's behind that do you think?
Is it something happened?
It's just Adrian Zenz put out a report that got him on Democracy Now!
Or?
Well, you know, I should say is that, you know, for me in terms of outrages committed by governments against civilian Muslim populations, I doubt that the, the Uyghurs plight would make it into my top five.
You know, I think of things like Palestine, I think of things like Yemen, Libya, Syria, you know, the Rohingya.
And the thing that's the closest analog to what China is doing, which is the Indian security operation in Jammu and Kashmir.
So yeah, I know I, I am rather bemused at the fervor in which the, with which the Uyghur cause has been taken up, but you know, it's, it's, it's obviously a, it's an orchestrated thing to, you know, to go after China and, and strip it of its allies and, you know, help with the whole economic decoupling thing.
And you know, the United States has been quietly nudging along with the, the Uyghur aspirations for decades, you know, in terms of harboring Uyghurs from Rabia Qadir on down and, you know, providing funding to the World Uyghur Congress and that.
So it's always been a project just like, you know, we, we always keep, you know, Tibetan, emigres, you know, on the string so that if and when it becomes, you know, there's a chance to turn the crank, you know, and, and scale it up into a, into a bigger campaign, we go ahead and do that.
And I think that the core reason why we decided to unleash the hounds on the Chinese over the Uyghurs was, was a couple of things.
The first of one is that we were staying our hand because the United States was committed itself to a narrative of, of Islamic unrest and security threats.
And the Chinese piggybacked on that and it was harder for us to go after that until, of course, we decided that the global war on terror was bygones.
And it was time to switch to China containment as the, you know, China is the main security threat that we're facing.
And so it's no coincidence that, you know, as we pivoted towards China as the health of the state, you know, for, for the military industrial complex that, you know, the Uyghurs, which are, you know, were considered to be a, a rather useful resource for us in terms of public opinion and potentially subversion in China got pushed to the front.
Well, you know, so I was just talking with Larry Wilkerson and he was clarifying that, which that's Colonel Larry Wilkerson, U.S. Army, retired, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, making up for it ever since.
Anyway, he gave this speech where he said something about American support for these guys.
The Intel guys thinks it's smart.
They can use the Uyghurs against the Chinese.
And he clarified that he was saying in the event of a major war, we would put them into action.
He didn't say anything to them of using, you know, the CIA being behind anything going on with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang now.
But he did say that apparently he knows that the Uyghur fighters, by some counts, thousands of them who went to fight under Turkish control and allied with the CIA and al-Qaeda in the war in Syria, which you've written about in some detail, that they're now coming home and that the Chinese are very worried about what they're going to do and whose control they might be under.
Yeah, the the, you know, Recep Erdogan, you know, he was he had a whole rat line, as Seymour Hirsch called it, of exfiltrating Uyghurs to Turkey and then onward to Syria.
Now there's a nice little colony.
He actually gave them their own town in Idlib, which they run.
And, you know, when it was thought that we would actually let Syria recover Idlib, there was a lot of concern about where those guys were going to end up.
And it was pretty obvious that they were not going to go back to Turkey.
They would probably try to sneak them into Afghanistan, you know, sort of close to home.
Now that it seems that Idlib is going to be a permanent feature of, you know, as an independent enclave, those Uyghurs, I think, for the most part, are staying put.
But Afghanistan is, I think, you know, a the obvious venue for it, not only because it's next to it's next to Xinjiang, but also because the Taliban has had a covert, you know, alliance with al Qaeda.
And most of these guys fall on the al Qaeda side of the fence, you know, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, excuse me, they've been quite ferocious about repressing ISIS.
But I think the idea with the Uyghurs was, you know, they were kind of, they came in there, they, you know, they were part of the IQ system.
And, you know, the Taliban says, you know, don't make trouble here, go over to Syria and kill somebody.
So, you know, there is the definite possibility that they will come back.
And I would think that, you know, under the right circumstances, they would not necessarily be using Afghanistan as an active base to attack Xinjiang, I think it's more likely that they would be warehoused there, you know, against, you know, a future opportunity.
And in terms of the enough already thing, I'd be interested to, you know, to get your thoughts on it.
I don't think we're ever leaving Afghanistan for the reason that it's not only because it's a, it's a nice American foothold in Central Asia, but also the Pentagon is pretty much under the sway of the pro-Indian as well as pro-Japanese factions there.
And giving up Afghanistan to the Taliban, and that means to Pakistan, is something that India abhors.
And I think that in the debates in the Pentagon, they're probably saying, well, you know, we can't screw over India by leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban.
So we better stick around and keep stirring things up there.
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So in terms of all this great game stuff and in preventing China from building their highway through and all these kinds of things, I mean, to me, that's just completely crazy.
And just the fact that anyone would even entertain that as a worth it, you know, as a worthy policy is just even from an imperialist point of view, the costs are not worth it.
One thing that he said to me that did make sense from the Pentagon's point of view, not from mine, but at least is reasonable, is that they need to stay there in the event they need to seize Pakistani nukes.
And I pressed him on that and said, why can't they just do that from the Indian Ocean, you know?
And he says, because from the Bagram airbase, they can invade and they can send reinforcements in a way that you can't just do with Navy ships.
So in other words, it wouldn't just be special operations forces preventing a couple of kooks from getting a couple of nukes.
The idea would be a full scale invasion of Pakistan if worse came to worse and they were going to use their nukes against India, I guess.
We try to invade and prevent that from happening.
And so, I mean, that still sounds like a line of BS to me in a way, but I can see them convincing themselves of that in any way, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you know, that gives a compelling official rationale.
By the way, do you recall in GI Joe, The Rise of Cobra that the movie started with, you know, a seizure of nukes, I think it was from Pakistan by the Joes.
So why don't we just put them on the case?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It seems like a good idea.
I mean, Ronald Reagan at least turned a blind eye to them building nukes the whole time when he could have stopped them.
Hell, the CIA turned a blind eye to AQ Khan when he stole the blueprints from them centrifuges in the first place.
Hey, let's see where he goes.
Let's see what he does.
Oh, he went straight to a photocopy machine.
Oh, no.
Anyway.
You know, there's always an American antecedent to all of this stuff, always.
All right.
So there's so many issues here, but back to whether either of us are apologists for a genocide or just how bad it really is.
It sounds like it's pretty bad for for I mean, are people rushing to line up to go to the work camp or they're being rousted out of their homes by armed gunmen or what is going on here?
You know?
Yeah.
Well, there's a there's a three tier system there.
I'm pretty sure it's three tiers.
But under the you know, there's there's, of course, you know, formal incarceration for people who have actually committed acts, you know, that are criminal under the terrorism law.
And but also at the lower end of the spectrum, there's something that I would I would characterize as under the terrorism law as supervision.
And that means that if you know, if you're deemed to be a to have been tainted by, you know, Islamist or separatist thoughts, then you're then you're invited to go to a camp and receive indoctrination for a couple of years.
So exactly, you know, probably, you know, the the way the Chinese work is that, you know, there's there's non official quota system, you know, but, you know, it's probably something more like the lines of if, you know, you haven't, you know, if you haven't been in this area, if you haven't cycled like 10% of the population through the camp, you know, they're they're probably going to be asking the local boss, man, if he's being too lax.
And they probably go in there and, you know, with, you know, denunciations and administrative procedures to push up the numbers.
So well, you know, you talked about how they're kind of laissez faire approach before kind of backfire because people just got rich and stronger and more independent from them.
So now we're trying to clamp down.
But it seems like if you round up a bunch of people and put them in these brainwashing camps and things that would just make them angry, I mean, brainwashing doesn't really work.
Right.
That's not really a thing.
Like I said, I don't think that, you know, the basically the by the way, one thing I should say is that I think one of the areas that makes the United States and others extremely nervous is that China has studied every other coin and reprogramming and incarceration thing.
You know, everybody's doing.
I mean, the Saudis have a big program right now.
The French are trying to, you know, to institute, you know, de-Islamization stuff.
You know, we did a great job at Abu Ghraib and, you know, there's Chechnya and there's Kashmir.
The Chinese have looked at all of this and yet foreign policy dot com.
They say the entire American right has got to go through this.
Their de-radicalization program.
China's China's got the experience.
And I think what scares the United States is there's a good chance that for the Chinese it'll work because it's not just it's not because the Chinese are smarter, but they have looked at the previous errors, which are reef, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, a lot of errors.
And also they're putting massive resources in there.
So, you know, the I think it's right.
Right.
Thank you.
So anyway, so it's it's, you know, I think what scares them is that the idea is that yes, you know, the Xinjiang population will become docile and tractable, you know, and, you know, what do we do then?
Yeah.
How are we supposed to use them in a war if this works, you know?
But yeah, you know, it's a you know, they have a whole you know, the Chinese have this whole, you know, ethnic this new ethnic policy theory and all this sort of stuff that's feeding into that.
And, you know, you know, the West has not been putting the points up on the board when it becomes to when it comes to de-radicalization and the Chinese, I think they I think they think they have a pretty good chance.
So it's not it's not just, you know, brainwashing.
The whole idea is to remake the economic and social matrix of Xinjiang so that the things that fed into these these attitudes and these resentments, they'll be removed from that context and they'll be put into a new context where they'll be getting better paid, they'll have better work and their material conditions will improve.
And within the bounds of the current system, they'll have, you know, greater mobility.
So that's the thing for the Chinese, the camps, you know, the reeducation or training camps or, you know, just one link in a holistic program to remake Xinjiang society.
I think it's one of the bigger social engineering programs ever attempted in the in modern history.
Crazy.
Well, and I mean, it certainly sounds like the end result would be wiping out a way of life, if not all the people who lived it.
Well, you know, the I would say that as far, you know, like the Chinese, you know, stay away from the whole cultural genocide thing, you know, they've always got happy Uyghurs dancing and that sort of stuff.
But in terms of, you know, by the way, it's a rather astounding statistic that, you know, I think it's like 700 million people in China have moved overall have moved from agricultural and rural to urban and semi-urban contexts over the years of reform.
Same thing's happening in Tibet.
Same thing's going to happen in Xinjiang.
You're going to have fewer sodbusters and nomads.
And that to the Chinese, you know, with the improved living standards and social services and retirement benefits and health care and all that stuff is what they define as progress.
So yeah, you know, the I would say that the traditional ways of life associated with Uyghur ethnic culture are definitely at risk.
But by the way, one thing I mentioned in one of my pieces is that you'll probably remember why cultural genocide is not in the Genocide Convention was that Canada insisted that it be removed because they had an ongoing program of forced removal of First Nation children to church run religious schools in the 1950s, in the 40s and 50s when the Genocide Convention was being negotiated.
Genocide accusations are not retrospective or retroactive.
But at the time that the Genocide Convention was being fixed, Canada had a explicit program of cultural genocide for its First Nations.
Yeah.
Again, the American antecedent there.
North American.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I'm all out of time and I got to go.
But thank you so much.
That's the China Hand, everybody.
Peter Lee.
Check out the China Threat Report.
Peter Lee's China Threat Report at Patreon.com.
Really appreciate it.
OK.
I also just want to add that I give it away free on Twitter at China Hand.
Oh, you can also follow me there.
China Hand.
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All right.
Appreciate that, man.
OK.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
