It is a crying shame that there is no abatement in the barbaric treatment meted out to the ethnic and religious minorities in China. Worse, in this day and age, the Chinese Communist Party is able to augment the scale, scope, and intensity of oppression and repression in the provinces it has brutally colonized for decades. A recent report by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) and news agency Reuters on a research conducted by its ethnic minority adviser, Professor Adrian Zenz, has suggested a large scale ‘Xinjiang-style’ programme of forced labor in Tibet.
Zenz, a leading global expert on the plight of minorities in China, wrote, “In 2019 and 2020, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) introduced new policies to promote the systematic, centralized, and large-scale training and transfer of ‘rural surplus laborers’ to other parts of the TAR, as well as to other provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the first seven months of 2020, the region had trained over half a million rural surplus laborers through this policy. This scheme encompasses Tibetans of all ages, covers the entire region, and is distinct from the coercive vocational training of secondary students and young adults reported by exile Tibetans.”
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Further, he wrote, “The labor transfer policy mandates that pastoralists and farmers are to be subjected to centralized ‘military-style’ vocational training, which aims to reform ‘backward thinking’ and includes training in ‘work discipline,’ law and the Chinese language. Examples from the TAR’s Chamdo region indicate that the militarized training regimen is supervised by People’s Armed Police drill sergeants, and training photos published by state media show Tibetan trainees dressed in military fatigues.”
This is reminiscent of the mass collectivization drives carried out by communist rulers in the Soviet Union, China, and other countries in the last century. Objective observers and researchers have presented a horrific picture of Stalinist Russia. Anne Applebaum is one such scholar who has meticulously studied Stalin’s Russia.
Her book, Gulag: A History, narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes he daily life in such camps. It makes extensive use of Russian archives, opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as various memoirs and interviews. Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, as also Britain’s Duff-Cooper Prize. It has appeared in more than two dozen translations, including all major East and West European languages. Speaking about the celebrated book at a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute on May 12, 2003, Applebaum said:
“Thanks to archives, we now know, for example that there were at least 476 camp systems, each one made up of hundreds, even thousands of individual camps or lagpunkts, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books. We know that with a few exceptions, the camps were not constructed in order to kill people—Stalin preferred to use firing squads to conduct mass executions. Nevertheless they were, at times, very lethal: nearly one quarter of the Gulag’s prisoners died during the war years. They were also very fluid: Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army or because they had been promoted, from prisoner to guard. There were also frequent amnesties for the old, the ill, pregnant women, and anyone else no longer useful to the forced labor system. These releases were invariably followed by new waves of arrests.
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“As a result, between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, some 18 million passed through them. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported, not to camps but to exile villages. In total, that means the number of people with some experience of imprisonment, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, could have run as high as 25 million, about 15 percent of the population.”
Applebaum further said, “In the Soviet Union of the 1940s, the decade the camps reached their zenith, it would have been difficult, in many places, to go about your daily business and not run into prisoners.”
Xi Jinping’s China is little different from Stalin’s Russia, which is not surprising. For he, like Stalin, believes in communism, the most dangerous ideology mankind has ever seen, responsible for the death of over 100 million people across the world.
Worse, Chinese communism has blended with nationalism, which has potential of becoming violent. The CCP is wedded to the most unconscionable form of communism. It stands for everything that is anathema to the civilized world: suppression of pro-democracy movement (Hong Kong), concentration camps (Xinjiang and now also in Tibet), disdain for individual liberty and human rights (“there is no universal path to human rights development in the world,” says Xi), support to rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea, theft of intellectual property, aggression against its neighbors, trade in human organs, currency manipulation, subverting institutions in other countries. And now, most conspicuously, there is the coronavirus which China willfully spread across the globe with the help of the World Health Organization.
The CCP thugs stop at nothing and know no scruples. Their ancestors are credited with the invention of compass. The psychopaths ruling China today, however, have not even heard of such a thing as moral compass..
