| 摘要 | Last week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged Central Asian foreign ministers to “resist China’s demands to repatriate Uighurs” back to China, where the Communist government has subjected them to forced internment, cultural and religious “re-education,” and constant surveillance. Beijing claims to be fighting terrorism, but it looks more like an effort to wipe out a culture. In July Mr. Pompeo called Beijing’s campaign against the mostly Muslim Uighurs the “stain of the century.”
It isn’t extreme to call this process cultural genocide. And it is part of a larger campaign across China to “Sinicize religion,” including Christianity as well as Islam. In two weeks the U.S. will have an opportunity to do something about it.
At the World Bank’s annual meeting, which begins Oct. 14, the democracies that hold a majority of its voting shares can put financial weight behind a demand to stop the persecution. The abuse began in 2014, when President Xi Jinping transferred Chen Quanguo from his post as Communist Party secretary in Tibet to the equivalent post in Xinjiang, the Uighur province.
Mr. Chen has built a massive system of detention camps, which attempt to indoctrinate detainees to identify as Chinese and adhere to communism. Our knowledge of what goes on inside those camps is severely limited by Beijing’s secrecy. But Mihrigul Tursun, a 30-year-old mother of triplets, told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China last year that she saw nine women die in three months in her crowded cell in Xinjiang, which held 68. She said that authorities tortured her and forced her to take unknown drugs, that one of her sons died under mysterious circumstances, and that she and her two surviving children continue to suffer from the health effects of their confinement. Her family in China faces threats because of her testimony.
Outside the camps, Uighur families live under constant surveillance by both humans and machines. Han Chinese party members, who actually call themselves “big sisters and brothers,” invade homes in Xinjiang, spout Orwellian slogans like “Visit the People, Benefit the People” and “United as One Family,” and report on such “deviant” behavior as praying openly, reading the Quran, and speaking the Uighur language. Xinjiang is also a laboratory to perfect such technologies as facial recognition and artificial intelligence as part of a pervasive surveillance system, to be applied elsewhere in China and sold to dictators around the world.
Last July, to their credit, 22 democratic member countries of the United Nations Human Rights Council, issued a statement condemning the persecution of China’s Muslim minorities and calling on Beijing to allow meaningful access to Xinjiang for independent observers. The following month a bipartisan letter from the Congressional-Executive Commission questioned a $50 million World Bank loan supporting “education and training” in Xinjiang.
As a matter of both conscience and self-interest, free countries owe the persecuted Muslim minorities of Western China more than statements and letters. While abandoning these horrendous practices entirely would be a huge loss of face, Mr. Xi might be persuaded to moderate them if he was forced to pay a price. Even dictators who don’t respect “the opinions of mankind” care about economic consequences.
The World Bank is the most readily available means to make Mr. Xi pay a price. Over the past three years, the bank has lent Beijing $7.8 billion, made possible by taxpayers mostly from democratic countries.
The U.S. and the 22 signatories of the UNHRC statement hold a majority of the voting shares in the World Bank. At the annual meeting, they should lead an effort to lock the door to the bank’s vault until the Chinese government stops oppressing the Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minorities.
It’s questionable whether China should be receiving concessional loans from the World Bank at all. Three years ago the country’s per capita income reached the “graduation discussion” threshold, and Beijing has easy access to international financial markets.
Either way, the World Bank—which does admirable and important work for the world’s poor—cannot sustain its reputation for development and good works if it subsidizes, even if indirectly, China’s brutal repression of minorities.
Mr. Wolfowitz is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as ambassador to Indonesia (1986-89), deputy defense secretary (2001-05) and World Bank president (2005-07). |
