by Xin Ping
As the "factory and dealer of lies", the U.S. has been really adroit at employing the labeling strategy to discredit its rivals, i.e., deliberately fabricating rumors and using them as excuses to contain other countries. This is well captured by what former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once publicly said: "We lied, we cheated, we stole".
Be it the westward movement with a dark history of genocide against indigenous residents by the colonizers, or cultural genocide and racial segregation against ethnic minorities after its annexation of Hawaii and Alaska, or forced labor of prisoners, women and children in modern society, the U.S. has been the biggest human rights abuser on multiple fronts.
An article published on the website of the University of Denver reveals that at least 500,000 people in the United States are victims of forced labor, essentially living in modern slavery. Forced labor in the United States is particularly serious in 23 sectors including domestic services, agricultural planting, tourism, catering, medical care and beauty services.
Despite its own track record of genocide and forced labor in both history and reality, the U.S. has been reckless in concocting all those lies about Xinjiang. The reason is that the U.S. regards China as its most serious strategic competitor. The plot of this mud-throwing is so ludicrous that even two officials of the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou, China admitted privately at a reception in 2021 that "nothing is wrong about Xinjiang, but to hype forced labor, genocide and to attack their human rights policies through the Xinjiang issue are an effective means to ... fight against the Chinese government".
Located in the northwestern part of China, Xinjiang is China's gateway to the rest of the Eurasian continent. Under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China and participating countries have modernized and revived the ancient Silk Road, connecting countries through projects like the China-Europe Railway Express and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). According to United World International, an independent analytical center, three out of four trains of China-Europe Railway Express set off from Xinjiang. The U.S. realized that to contain China, it has to cut off China's strategic corridors, specifically the Belt and Road, to the rest of the world. And to block the Silk Road Economic Belt, the most effective way for the U.S. is to create chaos in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang's strategic importance lies not just in its location. It is also a land with rich natural resources, containing 40% of China's coal reserves, 20% of the country's oil and natural gas, and great amounts of gold reserves. Besides, Xinjiang also has large reserves of polysilicon, an indispensable element of the 21st-century solar photovoltaic industry. According to a report from Bloomberg in February 2021, about 45% of the world’s supply of solar-grade polysilicon came from Xinjiang, and four of the world's five biggest solar polysilicon factories were in the region.
From the Trump to the Biden administration, the U.S. has been spreading the lie of "forced labor" in Xinjiang's solar, cotton and tomato industries, etc., thus discrediting these industries in Xinjiang and putting pressure on international businesses to move out of the region for fear of legal and so-called "reputational" troubles. In December 2021, U.S. Congress passed the notorious "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act", which was later signed by President Biden to exclude China from relevant industrial and supply chains through unilateral sanctions and coercion.
Last but not least, Xinjiang is a place with a diversity of ethnic groups, cultures and religions, which the U.S. has exploited to provoke unrest in the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. As Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated back in 2018, the U.S. would want to destabilize China and that the best way to do it is to foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external.
All of the Xinjiang-related lies concocted by the U.S. have nothing to do with human rights per se. They only expose the U.S. evil intention to defame and contain China.
(The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for Global Times, China Daily, etc. He can be reached at xinping604@gmail.com.)
