Category Archives: Human Rights

Block China With An Independent East Turkistan

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019 

Uyghur protest Berlin, July 2009. Source: Claudia Himmelreich via Wikimedia Commons.

Rukiye Turdush
Uyghur Research Institute

People of East Turkistan, called Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party, have endured the long and oppressive colonisation of China for many years. Although China did not round up people of East Turkistan and shoot them with machine guns in front of the world, they have locked them up and are eliminating them one by one in concentration camps. [1]

Every Uyghur living outside China is searching and asking for the location of their disappeared family members.  Uyghur girls are forced to marry Han Chinese as a part of their gene washing policy. Uyghur children are forcibly removed from their families as Chinese officials with genocidal intention proclaim, “cut the lineage, cut the roots, cut the connection.” [2]

Around three million Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims are currently locked up in concentration camps and are being subjected to torture and death.[3] The religion, culture and identity of Muslims in East Turkistan are now entirely banned. The world has remained silent in its moral obligation to do something about this tragedy.

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Biden’s Embrace of Globalism Includes Waltzing with China

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shake hands with U.S Vice President Joe Biden (L) inside the Great Hall of the People on December 4, 2013 in Beijing, China. Source: Li Jilin via Flickr.

William R. Hawkins
International Economics and National Security Consultant

Joe Biden drew considerable attention when he said at a campaign rally in Iowa “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Many wanted to just dismiss this as another one of the former Vice President’s many gaffes. But there is reason to accept this statement as a true expression of his beliefs.

Biden’s soft approach to China is at the core of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, which opened its Washington DC offices in February 2018. The stated aim of the Penn Biden Center (the Penn refers to the University of Pennsylvania which provides the group’s institutional home) is to “Address Threats to the Liberal International Order.” These threats are set out as follows: “The postwar order that America built together with our allies is under attack. The siege comes from multiple directions—from authoritarians who strangle liberty in the name of security to terrorists who radicalize across borders and nationalist leaders who fuel fear and division at home.  Powerful illiberal states are capitalizing on this moment by filling the vacuum of leadership with values that do not match our own. They perceive the success of our system as a threat to theirs—fashioning a zero-sum world.” This is a fine statement, but leaves out who these authoritarian and illiberal adversaries are. China clearly fits the description, but is not mentioned. Russia, however, is: “In particular, under President Putin, Russia seeks to return to an era when the use of force prevails and the world is carved into spheres of influence.” The ethereal menace of “climate change” is also mentioned along with terrorism, cyber attacks and epidemics. So if a list is presented, why isn’t the Beijing regime on it?

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Great Power Political Convergence and UN Reform: Solving the Democratic Deficit

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 4, April 2019

A bronze sculpture titled “Non-Violence” by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd stands to the north of the United Nations Building in New York. It depicts the knotted barrel of a Colt Python .357 Magnum. Reuterswärd designed the sculpture following the murder of songwriter John Lennon. Source: Mira via Flickr.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

The international system operates across military, economic, and diplomatic hierarchies of states situated in competing alliances and international organizations. The major powers assert the predominance of influence in these alliances and international organizations, leading to a severe and global democratic deficit. Huge numbers of people, most notably the approximately 18% of the world’s population living in China, and 2% of the population living in Russia, have no democratically-appointed representation at the United Nations or influence in the world’s most important alliance systems.

The global democratic deficit leads to critical inefficiencies and unfair policies. States use unequal access to military, wealth, and knowledge resources to influence international organizations and alliance systems for individual state gains that lead to global inefficiencies and trade-offs where individual major power goals contradict the public good, or the national interests of other states. Perhaps the most dangerous such inefficiency is the rising risk of nuclear war, as countries like the U.S. and China compete to impose their competing visions of the future on the world.

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State Sponsorship of Uyghur Separatists: the History and Current Policy Options for East Turkestan (Xinjiang, China)

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

A 1922 map of China. Source: John Bartholomew, The Times Atlas, London, 1922.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 25, 2019, in Oxford, England. The associated university is not named at the request of the host organization’s president, who was concerned about possible repercussions.

I would like to thank the Terrorism Research Society (TRS) for kindly hosting this event. 

The historical map shown here is from 1922, and shows what China looked like when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 in Shanghai. It shows East Turkestan and Tibet in the west as autonomous regions — much more autonomous than they are today.

East Turkestan is now occupied militarily by China and officially called the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. In Chinese, “Xinjiang” means “new frontier”. But Xinjiang has an ancient history as a culturally diverse crossroads of trading on what the Chinese call “the silk road”, but which was actually more Iranian than Chinese. It was central to the ancient Persian trading areas called the Sogdian network by historians. It has been home to Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, to Mongolians, Indians, Greeks, Koreans, Buddhists, and Christians. Since at least the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933 is has been called East Turkestan by Turkic Muslim residents. The Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has indiscriminately labeled Uyghurs who support an independent East Turkestan today, as separatist and terrorist in their goals and means. The acronym of the Chinese Communist Party is the “CCP”. The CCP seeks to colonize and extinguish all linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity in Xinjiang today, in order to assimilate the territory under its own preferred Han Chinese race, and their own atheist communist ideology.

In the face of such extreme repression, some Uyghurs have indeed advocated separatism and utilized terrorism and violence, including street riots, as a means.

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China’s Heavy 5G Hand in the Classroom: Combining its Social Credit Score with the latest IT by 2020

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019

Young students at their desks all with mobilephones. The mobilephone has become seen as a ‘must have’, an item of necessity among the Chinese people and China as the world’s largest country is now recognised to have the most mobilephone users. Source: Pixabay.

Victor Mair, Ph.D.

University of Pennsylvania

I recently had a good, long talk with a young American who is teaching at a major Chinese university on behalf of a top American university.

He kept saying that life in China now is becoming more and more “intense” (he repeated that word many times).  The politicization of life is felt in countless ways.

He said that the Communist Party Secretary of his school marched into his classroom one day without announcing it ahead of time and without even saying anything to him when she barged in.  She started inspecting everything he’d written on the blackboards and that the students had written in their notebooks.  She had her camera out and was taking pictures the whole while.

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