China

Chen Ying writes from Hong Kong

Within an explosive period of six weeks, we have seen protest marches totalling close to five million people, together with the most heavy-handed use of police firepower since 1997.

The invasion of the Legislative Council building went viral around the world. This level of sustained social protest has not happened since the march of 1.5 million people in Hong Kong against the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989.

After protesters stormed Hong Kong’s (largely unelected) Legislative Council on 1 July, there is a real risk that China will invade the territory.

To international outcry about plans to ease extradition from Hong Kong to China — in effect, to give legal cover to the Chinese government “disappearing” dissidents, as it did with five bookshop workers in 2015 — Xi Jinping’s government has replied that all the issues in Hong Kong are China’s “internal” business, and no outsiders should comment.

Throughout the recent dramas in Hong Kong, Britain’s “socialist daily” the Morning Star, said precisely… nothing. No coverage at all until after the Hong Kong government had backed down. Then that after-the-event coverage was (as we shall see) even more revealing than the previous noncoverage.

Perhaps the people who run the paper (i.e. the Communist Party of Britain – the CPB) thought their readers wouldn’t be interested — but then, the paper recently carried a lengthy and highly diplomatic report of a CPB delegation to China.

From the Morning Star (07/06/2019) it seems that their people had a wonderful time on a recent visit to what they describe as “the world’s socialist super-power.”

The Times (18 May) has splashed our denunciation of the wearing of the old Russian imperial emblem, the St George Ribbon, by some members of Lewisham Momentum. The incident is only a specially gaudy display of the general political trend of the section of the Labour supposed-left which gravitates around the Morning Star.

A group of Labour Party members, has launched a campaign to cut the standard working week to four days rather than five, with no loss of pay.

It’s a good initiative, at a time when, for almost the first time since the early 19th century, and despite all the talk about new technologies displacing human labour, average work hours per week are now increasing.

The Marx Memorial Library’s annual oration at the grave of Karl Marx will be given, bizarrely, by Minister Ma Hui a senior official from the Chinese Embassy in the UK. The Chinese government is by no stretch of the imagination Marxist or socialist.

A protest outside the Chinese Embassy in London on 5 February indicted the “ethnic cleansing” and “cultural genocide” of the Uyghur people, a Turkic Muslim oppressed group in China.

Many Uyghurs see their battle as one for self-determination for what they call “East Turkestan, but the Chinese authorities have clamped down heavily. About 70 people came, mostly Uyghurs. Chants included “Freedom for East Turkestan” and “End the Torture”, and emphasised that the protest was about “being human, and everyone’s concern”, not about religion.

Jen Kirby, writing for American news website Vox, has described the system of surveillance and repression in Xinjiang put into place since 2016, when Chen Quanguo was appointed head of the regional government. Xinjiang, in the north west of China, is home to ten million Uighur Muslim people.

“Increased surveillance and police presence accompanied [Quanguo’s] move to Xinjiang, including his ‘grid management’ policing system.

News of state repression against China’s Uyghur people have become prominent in recent months. Reports at the UN estimate up to a million are held in internment camps.
China denies the mass detention and points to constitutional guarantees of equality and religious freedom, but the mounting evidence is discrediting such pretences.