In the land where thugs drag metal poles through the streets to haunt protesters with the sound of the weapons they are soon to be beaten with, police are accused of ignoring cries for help as democracy advocates are brutalized and intimidated in front of their eyes.
Yet this land is not that of Urumqi, Lhasa or even Hong Kong, but the United States of America, a.k.a. Land of the Free, where activists and dissidents allege that they are suffering threats and attacks from coordinated gangs of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) supporters, while the State Department, F.B.I. and other law enforcement do little of substance to protect them.
Such is the picture that emerged at a December 12 press conference organized in Washington, D.C. by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), where representatives of the organizations Human Rights in China (HRIC), Students of a Free Tibet (SFT) and the Uyghur-American Association (UAA), as well as individual direct victims of apparent violence, unanimously described a growing atmosphere of surveillance and unsafety in the United States due to transnational repression orchestrated by Beijing.
As the UAA’s Elfidar Iltebir gave the example of an internment camp survivor from East Turkestan (Xinjiang) being forced to move homes twice on U.S. soil as a result of receiving threats, the HRIC’s Zhou Fengsuo (周鋒鎖) directly warned, “[The CCP] do it because they can with the help of the negligence from law enforcement on the ground. If they can harm us like this, they can do this to everyone in this country.” He, Iltebir and their counterparts then illustrated the point with the patterns of physical and psychological violence that were visited upon protesters during China President Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco last month.
There, groups of pro-Beijing supporters were allegedly using large flags to screen attacks on human rights and democracy supporters, trailing and performing pincer movements on people leaving protests, and destroying victims’ phones to eliminate evidence. The organized nature of the various incidents, not to mention their co-occurrence with police visits to the families of activists back in China, is indicative that instructions may well have been coming from Beijing or its embassies. According to Pema Doma of SFT, perpetrators of beatings were deliberately targeting students in order to maximize the ripple effect of their attacks, too.
Damningly, the San Francisco police were again accused by several speakers of failing to intervene in the violence or follow up on evidence of assaults, about which Zhou expressed a lack of surprise as he has personally experienced intransigence from the same force in similar circumstances dating back to the Olympic torch relay of 2008. Suspecting complicity from U.S. authorities, Representative Christopher Smith, chair of the CECC, demanded an investigation from the attorney general and opined, “Police know how to do their job, and they would do their job if they weren’t told not to.”
Given this dire state of affairs in a global superpower half a planet away from the Middle Kingdom, it is terrifying to imagine the precariousness of existence for exiles in countries that neighbor China like Mongolia, where The Washington Post has reported on how such people are being hounded by the Chinese Communist Party so that they will not provide evidence of its crimes to the international community. Several who have eloped with their culture over the border from Inner Mongolia to avoid it being gutted by the Chinese government are now at risk of detention and involuntary return under bilateral arrangements signed between Ulaanbaatar and Beijing.
On the same day as the Post’s report, the human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders released another expose of China’s harassment techniques, specifically the use of collective punishment to silence activists or manipulate them from afar. These comprise of denying medical care to family members, expelling children from school, ensuring that spouses are fired from their jobs, refusing travel documents to relatives, and forcing them from their homes.
Getting a message out of China is thus extraordinarily tricky and risky, requiring ingenuity or careful planning. Payback forecaster Moody’s Investors Service, for example, was so concerned about reprisals after downgrading China’s sovereign credit rating to negative on December 5 that it preceded the announcement by telling staff in the country not to go into the office and warning those in Hong Kong not to travel to the mainland at all.
Meanwhile, the appearance of a prisoner’s identity card inside the lining of a coat made in China by the English clothing retailer Regatta suggests that the card’s owner may also have been trying to alert the wider world of realities in the Middle Kingdom, this time in relation to forced labor.
Under pressure to explain the incident, Regatta released a statement to the effect that, following what it considered to be a “thorough investigation,” it had discovered that an unnamed former prisoner, who was on the payroll, had somehow placed the card in the coat with an unknown motivation at an unnamed factory before subsequently leaving the company for an unexplained reason in a country notorious for jailing innocent people and compelling them to work without any choice in the matter. From this, Regatta concluded that there had been “no breaches of its policy,” which apparently includes “zero tolerance for forced or prison labor.”
To some degree, it was backed up in this assertion by the U.K.’s Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), an umbrella group formed by companies, NGOs and trade unions in 1998 to combat unethical supply chain activities. It defended Regatta as a firm that “fully understands their responsibilities with respect to workers in their supply chain” and promised to “work with them to ensure their investigation of this situation establishes a clear picture of conditions at the factory and that any necessary mitigating and or remedial human rights actions are taken.”
Nonetheless, the ETI also pointed out that, regarding China, “even enhanced human rights due diligence faces significant limitations in the country, and it remains difficult to guarantee the absence of Uyghur exploitation and state-imposed forced labor from supply chains based there. Similarly, audits in China are very unlikely to pick up these issues and can put auditor and company staff at serious risk in attempts to expose them.” The basis of its confidence in Regatta’s supply chain is not, therefore, exactly solid.
Regatta, however, was not the only one in the clothing industry under the spotlight due to concerns that products may not be manufactured by people who can freely decide upon or leave their employment. The Uyghur Rights Monitor, Uyghur Center for Democracy and Human Rights and Sheffield Hallam University, also in the U.K., have just released “Tailoring Responsibility,” a comprehensive analysis that draws upon “shipping data, corporate financial and media reporting, journalism, state propaganda, remote sensing data, and maps” to trace how fabric and apparel winds its way from East Turkestan (Xinjiang) to the European Union.
In East Turkestan, Uyghurs and other minority peoples are subject to policies such as labor transfers, under which they are taken by the Chinese Communist Party and distributed to workplaces under the guise of poverty alleviation. Their ability to refuse such transfers does not credibly exist, since doing so could land them in an internment camp, which itself may be attached to premises where work is compelled from detainees. Tailoring Responsibility finds that 39 European Union companies have supply chains that potentially reach back into this murky world, including Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren Europe, Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger Europe, Calvin Klein Europe, H&M and Inditex, which is the parent company of Zara.
Not surprisingly, the report concludes that “EU policy is not protecting its consumers from buying products made with Uyghur forced labor.” However, it also exposes how Chinese firms are hiding links to suspected involuntary labor hotspots by creating subsidiary companies with different names and supplying to the wider world through them; saving face for the international brands with whom they do business by discontinuing disclosures of their customers; erasing public traces of their participation in labor transfer programs; and shielding themselves from scrutiny with membership of certification schemes that claim to be screening supply chains for abuses, despite relying on methodology that is limited, outdated or otherwise deficient.
Such limitations surfaced also this month with Volkswagen whose determination to continue operating in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) risks writing a new chapter in its corporate history of complicity in the destruction of peoples. On December 5, the German automaker boasted that an audit conducted on its factory in the Chinese colony had found no evidence of forced labor, a conclusion that may well have been aimed at boosting its stock price.
However, the move backfired spectacularly and confidence in the findings cratered, when Loening Human Rights & Responsible Business GmbH, the company responsible for giving Volkswagen the all-clear, clarified, “The human rights situation in China and Xinjiang and the challenges in collecting meaningful data for audits are well known and are also present in this project.” The same statement disconnected all but two of Loening’s staff as having not “participated in, supported or backed this project,” after what the Financial Times identified as a “rebellion” among angry workers, who could not stand behind the audit and did not want to be associated with it.
Elsewhere, as respiratory illnesses surge once more in the Middle Kingdom, China has seen the reawakening of COVID-19 testing. According to China Digital Times, restriction-imposing health codes, which were previously abused to quell protests, seem to have mysteriously resurfaced as well.
In an interview with Radio Free Asia published in English on December 4, a former project manager for China Southern Power Grid named Huang Guoan (黃國安) detailed exactly what this can signify: After his health code went red during extreme disease control in October 2022, he endured a month of dwindling food supplies, before suffering torture as the price for joining “White Paper Revolution” protests to end the zero-COVID policy. He also witnessed the freshly dead body of one of the COVID-era suicides that China sought to hide by blocking the publication of related statistics.
Huang is currently seeking asylum in New Zealand. One hopes that Xi Jinping’s brutality will not be waiting for him there.
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