The “Legal Framework and Measures for Counterterrorism” attacks Western critics and hail the Chinese way of “reeducating” dangerous religionists.
by Massimo Introvigne
Last week, China’s human right record was under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations. China’s UPR is always more interesting for side events and documents filed by China’s opponents, which do get some media coverage, than for the official UN reports, documents usually of interest mostly to the Chinese media. Beijing easily manages to control these reports through friendly countries that command a majority in the Human Rights Council.
Not coincidentally, China published a white paper “Legal Framework and Measures for Counterterrorism” on January 23, right in the middle of its UPR. The document is, again, mostly intended for domestic consumption, propaganda, and preaching to the converted, i.e. to the fellow travelers of the CCP and the friendly countries prepared to hail China as a beacon of human rights.
Several chapters are pieces of involuntary humor, such as the one claiming that even terrorists are treated humanely in China. “Agencies handling cases of terrorism have abided by the provisions of the Constitution and the law that personal dignity shall not be violated,” the white paper proclaims. “They have ensured that suspects and defendants are provided with necessary food and rest time and are safe from physical abuse and insults. Interrogations that utilize violence, threats or intimidation, obtainment of evidence through torture, threat, enticement, deceit, and other illegal means, and forced self-incrimination are all prohibited. Confessions extorted by torture or other illegal means shall be excluded.”
Uyghurs and others accused of extremism and terrorism will not be amused. There are thousands of testimonies and massive evidence of the use of torture against Uyghurs, Tibetans, Southern Mongolians, Falun Gong practitioners, Church of Almighty God devotees, and many others. Denial sounds like a bad joke.
The core of the document is the claim that China had to face a massive problem of terrorism, particularly in Xinjiang, justifying harsh counter-terrorism measures (although allegedly “respecting human rights”). The problem is that the claim is false. Did some Uyghurs join the Islamic State terrorist organization? Yes, as there were Americans, French, and Italians who did the same. China claims there were some 300 Uyghurs in the ISIS. More reliable sources concluded they were slightly more than 100. That any Uyghur was connected with al-Qa’ida is a matter of speculation. Twenty-two ended up in Guantanamo, but American courts later concluded that none of them had fought with al-Qa’ida or the Taliban and had them released. They had simply been arrested based on false information provided by China or by Afghan villagers who wanted to pocket the $5,000 reward offered by the American troops for any terrorist turned over to them.
What China calls “terrorist attacks” in Xinjiang were mostly riots between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. Police repression was surely more deadly than any attack, real or alleged. Chinese intelligence agents were also caught red-handed trying to organize fake “Uyghur terrorist organizations” in Afghanistan.
Even if we would take Chinese accusations at face value, we should conclude that a few hundred Uyghurs were terrorist sympathizers or militants. As opposite to this, “counter-terrorism” measures including deportation to the dreaded “transformation through education camps” and arrest targeted at least one million Uyghurs and other Turkic inhabitants of Xinjiang, more probably several millions. China adopts a very broad definition of terrorism. “Buying land for a mosque, sending children to underground religious schools, growing a beard and wearing Islamic style clothing” have all been considered as indicia of terrorist connections.
And indeed the white paper perpetuates the confusion between “terrorism” and “religious extremism,” noting that the latter is not a Uyghur or Xinjiang problem only but extends to many other groups and to China as a whole.
There is a very interesting passage in the white paper about how to “eradicate the ideological foundation of terrorism.” We read that, “While striking hard at unlawful and criminal terrorist activities, China attaches greater importance to the education and rehabilitation of victims of extremist teachings …. For people falling under different levels of extremist influence, relevant government departments … collaborate to offer targeted intervention measures, in order to protect them from further harmful impact.” China “makes consistent law-based efforts in deradicalization. It has succeeded in containing the influence and spread of religious extremism.”
What does it mean, exactly? “Jiaoyu Zhuanhua” (教育转化) is normally translated as “transformation through education,” although “zhuanhua,” in fact, literally means “conversion.” The camps in Xinjiang created what scholar Adrian Zenz called “the most intense campaign of coercive social reengineering [in China] since the end of the Cultural Revolution.” The gentle name “transformation through education” is misleading. These camps are not schools. Inmates are supposed to work, in addition, to be continuously indoctrinated, day and night, and “education” may be brutal. Zenz reports that “several detainees have died, and others have suffered mental breakdowns as a result of the apparently inhumane conditions in these centers.”
The “Jiaoyu Zhuanhua” was originally used against Falun Gong practitioners and is a state-managed form of what in the West was called deprogramming, a practice where adult members of “cults” were kidnapped, confined, and submitted to various forms of physical and mental violence trying to “de-convert” them away from their religious movements. Deprogramming, now banned as a criminal activity in the U.S. and Western Europe, was carried out by well-paid private deprogrammers, hired by their victims’ parents. In China, as in Russia, deprogramming is sponsored and managed by the state. It is not just a similarity. American anti-cultists involved in early deprogramming activities such as Rick Ross (despite his heavy criminal record) were invited to China to advise on how to deprogram Falun Gong practitioners.
“Cultists” in China are deprogrammed in the notorious “Love Homes” (the CCP does have a culture of the euphemism), where they are compelled to sing for days and months (and in some cases years) “Glory to the Chinese Communist Party!” “No Communist Party, no new China!” The best deprogrammers, such as Liu Yanfu, even receive national awards. Once the system had been created for Falun Gong practitioners, devotees of The Church of Almighty God and other groups banned as “xie jiao” (“heterodox teachings,” sometimes incorrectly translated as “evil cults”), importing it to Xinjiang for the “conversion” or “deradicalization” of the Uyghurs was comparatively easy. What changed was the scale, as millions of Uyghurs had to be deprogrammed. But the CCP just loves large-scale projects.
As for Western criticism, the white paper claims in its conclusions that “Regrettably, some countries often disregard others’ right to choose their own path of counterterrorism under the rule of law. These countries impose their own will upon others and pass judgment on them. They even interfere in others’ internal affairs and infringe on their national sovereignty under the pretext of defending the rule of law and human rights.”
We are told that China has “its own path” to define and repress “terrorism” and those who criticize it “interfere in Chinese national sovereignty.” As for the fact that victims of deprogramming have no human rights, Western (and Japanese) anti-cultists believed just the same. However, they were stopped by courts of law, while in the “Chinese path” to deprogramming the judges themselves offer to the deprogrammers their victims.