The Chronicles Of Olc:
Silver City – Education About China
Part Two

September 8, 2020

A caravan of military transport trucks was photographed traveling in Kashgar, Xinjiang on July 18, 2009.
According to the photographer, there were “machine guns mounted behind the truck tailgates.”
(This photograph was provided courtesy of Mr. Richard Beck through Flickr, July of 2009.)

Silver City residents may not expect to see their streets occupied by the military with automatic weapons, but that is not the situation in some places within China. This includes communities throughout Xinjiang, officially known as “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.”

Please note that the wording for a major ethnic group in this region is spelled at least three different ways in the English language: “Uygur,” Uyghur,” and “Uighur.” Within these news columns, the spelling of “Uyghur” will be used unless one of the other spellings is used directly in the name of an organization or in a quote from an individual or an organization.

For decades, the leadership of China has strived to assimilate various ethnic groups into one. The Uyghurs have been no exception to having to live with this policy. The Chinese “government’s discriminatory ethnic assimilation policies” against Uyghurs were explicitly noted in a report by the United States Department of State in 2020. At times, the treatment endured by the Uyghurs has resulted in individuals engaging in civil disobedience and more.

Ethnic Uyghurs attacked mainly ethnic Han Chinese individuals during several days of violent rioting that began on July 5, 2009, in Ürümqi, the capital city of Xinjiang. Ethnic Han Chinese fought back against ethnic Uyghurs. The leadership of China deployed its military in this region. In a news release dated July 2, 2010, Amnesty International noted that the violence in Ürümqi the year earlier occurred “following a police crackdown on a peaceful demonstration over government inaction following killings of migrant Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, [in] southern China. The protests took place against a back-drop of Uighur resentment, built-up over years of official repression and discrimination.”

In the years since, there have been determined efforts by the Chinese leadership to further control life – all aspects of life – within this region. Reports from a number of sources indicate that upwards of one million Uyghurs have been detained in concentration camps. According to multiple sources, the detainees are not in these concentration camps because they engaged in terrorism. Instead, these sources indicate that the Uyghurs are in these concentration camps because of their religious beliefs and ethnic heritage.

“The Chinese government’s rampant abuse of the human rights and religious freedoms of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang is an urgent issue impacting the broader region,” stated David Ranz, the then-Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the U S Department of State. He was speaking at a conference entitled “Confronting Atrocities in China: The Global Response to the Uyghur Crisis” that was held on June 6, 2019, at the U S Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, District of Columbia. “We call on China to end this campaign of repression, and immediately release the approximately one million arbitrarily detained in camps. We urge other governments of the region and the world to join us.”

Mr. Ranz spoke of the efforts of the Chinese communist leadership to stifle the free exercise of religious beliefs by Muslims, in particular, in China.

“The deteriorating state of religious freedom in China, including the government’s increasing persecution of the Uyghurs and other Muslims minorities, is not only a bilateral issue with China; it is a regional and global one as well,” commented Mr. Ranz. “It is a crisis that has engaged all corners of the State Department as we seek to build a global response to the Chinese government’s program of oppression.”

Then-Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary Ranz also spoke of his visit to Kashgar, the same city in Xinjiang pictured in the photograph above that shows the traveling caravan of military vehicles with mounted machine guns.

“I was privileged to visit Kashgar myself 25 years ago,” Mr. Ranz detailed. “I marveled at the vibrancy of its markets, the beauty of its mosques, the charm and culture of the old city, the incredible food, and of course the warmth and kindness of its residents. It is difficult to comprehend the changes that have taken place on Kashgar’s streets since that time, and across the region.”

“As Ambassador Brownback [Sam Brownback, the United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom] has said, the United States is deeply concerned about the Chinese government’s repressive campaign against Muslim minority groups,” Mr. Ranz continued. “The Chinese government’s detention, monitoring, and intimidation of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang represent a deliberate attempt to suppress the identity of these groups. This campaign of mass detentions and internment; pervasive surveillance and collection of personal data; compulsory stays by Chinese officials in Uyghur homes; and controls on cultural and religious expression are shocking in their scope and devastating in their impact on individuals, families, and entire communities.”

Mr. Ranz noted a key point about the situation with evil in China: “Claiming ignorance or looking the other way is not credible in the face of such egregious atrocities as those we see in Xinjiang. As a Uyghur idiom goes, ‘A man can’t be blamed for not knowing, but [can be blamed] for not asking.’”

Then-Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary Ranz stated that it is wrong for China to indicate that individuals who are peacefully practicing their religion and expressing their beliefs are the same as individuals engaged in acts of terror: “The United States will continue to call on China to reverse its counterproductive policies that conflate terrorism with peaceful religious and political expression, to release all those arbitrarily detained, and to cease efforts to coerce members of its Muslim minority groups residing abroad to return to China to face an uncertain fate.”

Mr. Ranz now serves as the Consul General of the United States of America in Mumbai, India. He assumed that position on August 27, 2019.

This news column is the second of several news columns that will focus on other aspects of how President Xi Jinping and China implement and maintain a system that allows evil to thrive and harm the Chinese people.

Do you have questions about China and the olc of the Chinese leadership?

How Christians are persecuted? How Muslims are “re-educated”?

How journalists are imprisoned? How members of Falun Gong are tortured?

Your questions may be used in a future news column.

Contact Richard McDonough at chroniclesofolc@mail.com.

© 2020 Richard McDonough