Xu Zhangrun is not a name you hear often in South Africa. But we should know him since he is one of the world’s great literary proponents of democracy. Xu used to be a professor of law at Tsinghua University in Beijing but from March 2019 has been the subject of increasingly harsh measures by the Chinese state.
His plight, like the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, has not elicited a response from the ANC. Instead, the minster for social disintegration, Lindiwe Zulu, prances around in the red star cap of the Chinese army whilst three million lose their jobs and nine million children go hungry.
On February 2, Xu wrote an essay entitled Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear, which explains how Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, has altered the course of modern Chinese history. Xi has turned away from reform, instituted a Mao Zedong style personality cult, and is taking the country to what Xu describes in a 2018 essay (Imminent Fears, Immediate Hopes) as a “Thorough-Going Return to Totalitarian Politics.”
In Viral Alarm, Xu also states that, “I can all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last thing I write. But that is not up to me.”
He was arrested on July 6, released on July 12 and is now isolated under house arrest. Almost certainly, China’s vast system of prison and re-education camps awaits Xu.
And those camps are humming in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is home to the Turkic Uyghur minority who are mostly Muslim. Since 2017, the Chinese state has built a series of concentration camps in Xinjiang and has interned at least one million Uyghurs in them for ‘crimes’ such as praying, studying abroad, wearing a veil or having children. There are just over 11 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Despite the Chinese state’s efforts to control information, details of the repression in Xinjiang continue to leak out. There are tender documents for camp construction, internal memos on how to run the camps, survivor testimonies and satellite photos. The details are, to put it mildly, disturbing. Beatings, torture, rape, forced labour, indoctrination in the glories of the communist party and the evils of religion. On July 1, US Customs intercepted a shipment from Xinjiang of 11.8 tonnes of human hair, taken from camp inmates, to be sold as hair weaves.
Mosques, cemeteries and shrines have been bulldozed, including one of the holiest sites for Uyghurs: the Sultanim Cemetery in Hotan City was razed last year and a parking lot was built on top of it. The Uyghur population is subject to intense physical and electronic surveillance, what Xu Zhangrun calls “big data totalitarianism”, and overwhelming pressure to assimilate into Han Chinese culture and speak only Mandarin. Communist party cadre are sent to Uyghur homes to ‘live’ with families and Uyghur children are forcibly sent to state orphanages.
The Associated Press and China scholar Adrian Zenz have revealed an ongoing campaign of mass sterilisation. Zenz writes that, “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, targeting 14 and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties that year….By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries.”
Uyghur birth rates have plummeted.
This is genocide. The UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1949) states, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The following acts include “imposing measures intended to prevent births” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Xu Zhangrun’s core thesis is that, starting with the Qing dynasty in 1860, there have been three waves of reform in China, all leading towards democracy and freedom. The third wave of reform began in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping started the Reform and Open Door policy, and ended when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. In Viral Alarm, Xu states that since then, “a political culture has been nurtured that, in terms of the actual public good, is ethically bankrupt, for it is one that strains to vouchsafe its privatized Party-state…while abandoning the people over which it holds sway to suffer the vicissitudes of a cruel fate.”
The bulwark to totalitarian politics is according to Xu, “Freedom—that Transcendent Quality…that secular value that is the most divine aspiration of humankind.”
We should listen to this now gone silent voice. For Xu points out that when power becomes monopolised, information is withheld and liberty is cast aside, you get, “a system that turns every natural disaster into an even greater man-made catastrophe.”