Socialist Action, a small but occasionally influential British group, has Trotskyist origins – but its politics are now flatly Stalinist. It specialises in long-winded and theoretically pretentious praise for China’s economic system and policies.
Periodically SA spews out something denying and / or justifying the Chinese state’s genocidal oppression of the Uyghur people. In August 2020, after they enthusiastically cited and republished the Stalinist-cum-conspiracy-theorist Max Blumenthal, we published this exposing their incoherence and dishonesty on the Uyghurs. I recommend reading it alongside this article.
In February 2022, SA spewed again. They have published a review of a book by an ex-member of the French Communist Party, Maxime Vivas (Ouïghours, pour en finir avec les fake news – Uyghurs: to put an end to fake news). “Vivas’s book provides an antidote to the anti-Chinese poison. Since Vivas’s book is only available in French, it deserves a summary in English.”
Either the summary / review does Vivas a disservice, or his book is very poor indeed.
I suspect the latter. “Though Vivas has visited Tibet and Sinjiang [sic] (twice), his inability to read or speak Mandarin or Uyghur naturally limited his research.”
For the most part the article simply asserts the Chinese government’s lying narrative, as if that proves its own case.
It blandly justifies 13,000 arrests, and by implication repression more generally, on the grounds of Islamist terrorism – using exactly the same “argument” as apologists for the “war on terror” in the West.
It lists a range of charges and then simply comments: “China has flatly denied these charges.”
Where the article (and presumably the book) appears to deal in facts, it uses careful selection to paint an utterly misleading picture of reality.
Citing researcher Adrian Zenz’s Christian fundamentalist politics to discredit him – though Zenz’s research is largely based on the Chinese government’s own published data – they take issue with his pointing out of falling Uyghur birth rates.
“Vivas points out that the death of Uyghur children has declined dramatically from 420 to 600 per thousand sixty years ago to 10.03 per thousand today. Also in the past four decades the Uyghur population has grown from 5,550,000 to 12,720,000.”
The infant mortality rate for the rest of China has also declined hugely since 1962 (though it was then significantly higher in Xinjiang, as you’d expect in a less developed and more rural society).
In any case, Zenz and fellow researchers do not claim that there is some attempt to kill off Uyghur children. And rebutting their arguments by citing long-term statistics is a disingenuous strawman argument. The point is about the new policies enforced in Xinjiang over more recent years - since about 2014. In 2015 the birth rate in the mainly Uyghur areas began to drop rapidly (and from 2017 this fed through into a dropping rate for Xinjiang overall). It quickly went from higher than the Chinese national average birth rate to lower. The drop in recorded birthrates from 2017-19 was more extreme than any global region at any time in the seven decades for which UN data exists, including during the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia (see here).
SA did the same in their introduction to the Max Blumenthal article in 2020: citing the last forty years, while ignoring the dramatic changes of the last seven or so.
Until 2015 China had a one-child policy which did not apply to the Uyghurs and other minorities, who were allowed two. The policy was changed to two and then three children across the board; and regardless of the theoretical right to have more children, since 2014 various measures have been implemented to suppress the Uyghur birth-rate, with evident success. (At the same time, the state has been actively promoting Han Chinese immigration into Xinjiang to alter the population balance.)
Similarly, the article claims that “in seventy years, the number of mosques in Xinjiang has increased from 2,000 to 24,400. In Xinjiang there is one mosque for every 530 Moslems [sic].” In fact there is recent research suggesting that about 30% of mosques have been severely damaged in some way since 2017 and 30% destroyed – bringing the number down to about 15,000. This is the lowest number since mass destruction of mosques during Mao’s 1966-76 “cultural revolution” (which this piece published by the Mao-adulating Socialist Action unsurprisingly does not mention).
The article cites two individual claims of abuse which it suggests were discredited, calling them “celebrated” – as if that eliminates the mass of evidence and testimony about what has been happening to the Uyghurs.
It says: “Moreover, when the United States tried to have the UN pass a resolution asking China to respect the rights of Uyghurs in Xinjiang only, 39 [sic] of the 193 member states of the UN supported it.”
In fact what happened (in 2019) is that 39 countries signed a statement to this effect; 45 signed an alternative statement supporting China’s line. (The numbers explicitly coming out on both sides has since grown.)
China has widespread support because of its growing economic power in many parts of the world and because there are many states with oppressed ethnic minorities or other human rights problems that would rather not see UN bodies condemn the treatment of the Uyghurs. In terms of oppressed minorities, the 45 states supporting China included for instance Myanmar (brutally oppressing the Rohingya) and Sri Lanka (the Tamils).
They include large numbers of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. Even if we leave aside the likes of Cuba (the authors of the statement), North Korea, Iran and Russia – of which SA and their ilk approve – note for instance Bahrain, UAE and Saudi Arabia. Not exactly support to be proud of!
The article makes great play of the fact that the World Uyghur Congress has received funding from the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy, as if that discredits everything it says. They call the NED “the soft arm of the CIA”. We should have no time for the NED, but this is absurd exaggeration. The NED’s funding of projects does not function as simply an arm of US foreign policy. For instance, the NED provides funding for the US union federation AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center”, which nowadays funds oppositional trade unions in multiple pro-US regimes.
The author dismisses “Radio Free Asian” (sic: it's Radio Free Asia) and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty as “CIA creations”. Yet SA and co. regularly treat propagandistic Chinese state media and its employees as reliable sources and allies. And in any case, the evidence of Beijing's abuses does not rest on assertions by these outfits, but on expert research and hard evidence.
To get an idea of the website from which SA republished the review, “New Cold War”, check out its article “Are the Uyghurs ‘slave labourers’?” This astonishing piece describes the 2009 “Shaoguan Incident” in Guandong - an upsurge of racism in which mob violence killed at least two Uyghur workers, and injured dozens, after false rumours spread that a group of Uyghur men had raped Han Chinese women - as “a violent clash between Han and Uighur workers” that justifies workplace repression of Uyghurs.
As we said in 2020:
“There is a particular irony here because Socialist Action typically present themselves as the best fighters against Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry. On this basis, they oppose any criticism of reactionary political Islam – as long it is in conflict with Western powers. When an “anti-imperialist” (read: anti-Western) or “socialist” (read: Stalinist) power is involved, they support brutal suppression of Muslims. They are seeking to cover up the oppression of the Uyghurs just as they covered for the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Afghan peoples in the 1980s and the Serb nationalists’ suppression of the Bosnian Muslims in the ’90s.
“The wider and essential political point is that for real socialists and internationalists it is possible and necessary to oppose domestic oppression and international sabre-rattling and aggression by the US, Britain, etc and by China. Our opposition to conflict between the Western powers and China should be founded on solidarity with struggles against oppression and exploitation in every country – including in China.”