For four decades, Western foreign policy experts assured the world that if nations engaged with China, traded and, above all, were patient with it, having drunk from the cup of capitalism and dined out on free trade, the communist regime would grudgingly relinquish power to endorse the inexorable logic of liberal democracy.
Things did not go to plan.
As the world greased the communist machine with investment and trade, far from liberalizing, China took the opposite path from that anticipated by the foreign policy elite.
Today, China has degenerated into not just a hyper-authoritarian police state, but a Han Chinese-centric, ethnic-nationalist state.
Any doubters should take note of events unfolding in the Xinjiang region, Tibet and Inner Mongolia.
On Thursday last week, British broadcaster ITV News published the testimony of a Uighur physician living in Istanbul, Turkey.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said that during a 20-year career as a doctor in Xinjiang, she performed at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women, including forced contraception, forced abortions, sterilization and even removal of wombs.
As part of a team that would go from village to village, herding women onto tractors, the doctor said that young women were fitted with contraceptive implants, while others were given forced abortions then sterilized.
Abortions were routinely carried out at full term, with babies born alive killed by lethal injection.
The doctor said that she initially believed she was helping the Chinese government to enforce its one-child policy, but now bitterly regrets her actions.
“Their [the Chinese government’s] clear intention was ethnic cleansing,” she said.
This is backed up by data: Birthrates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018, the latest available statistics from China’s government showed.
The evidence shows that, in addition to the cultural genocide being carried out in Xinjiang’s concentration camps — designed to reprogram Uighurs and other ethnic minorities so that they jettison their religion, traditions and ways of life — a parallel demographic genocide is being orchestrated by Beijing.
Protests broke out in Inner Mongolia last week in response to new rules requiring the region’s schools to teach all subjects except the Mongolian language in Mandarin Chinese.
This is cultural genocide: Language forms the backbone of any culture and without it a culture cannot hope to survive. This is exactly what Beijing wants.
The situation in Tibet, already unremittingly dreadful, looks set to become worse.
Last month, Xinhua news agency published “remarks” by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in which he called on Chinese Communist Party officials to build a “united, prosperous, civilized, harmonious and beautiful new, modern, socialist Tibet” and “plant the seeds of loving China in the depths of the hearts of every youth.”
Beijing appears to be gearing up to inflict a new campaign of Sinocization on the region to wipe out the last vestiges of Tibetan culture as its decades-long population displacement program, which incentivizes Han Chinese to migrate to Tibet, continues.
Join the dots and a clear pattern of premeditated cultural and demographic genocide is occurring within China’s borders.
The world has for decades turned a blind eye to Beijing’s barbarism, too busy gorging on the fruits of China’s booming economy and collecting Chinese “funny money.”
Governments and businesses must hasten their disengagement from what is unquestionably an ethno-fascist state, or keep feeding a monster.
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