Jeff Brown discusses his recent articles on Xinjiang, climate change, and more. Jeff J Brown is the author of The China Trilogy, editor of China Rising Radio Sinoland, and China Tech News Flash!, and curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library.
Excerpt:
It's almost Ramadan and there's been a lot of propaganda in the West about a supposed genocide in Xinjiang. Now, of course, Chinese people have been posting side-by-side pictures of Gaza and Xinjiang and asking which one looks like there's a genocide going on there.
It's pretty obvious that some of those reports out of Xinjiang have been grossly exaggerated.And you just wrote a piece about this.
So it's almost Ramadan. Please reassure us Muslims that the Muslims in Xinjiang are going to be able to fast and they won't be forced to eat pork.
Absolutely. That's all just straight out of Langley. It's just the most grotesque propaganda that they're forced to eat pork. GULAGS and concentration camps. And as I even pointed out, the United States, even in WikiLeaks, they admit that it's a joke. They admit that it's fake news, but they use it to try to destroy the Chinese economy and China's image around the world.
And then a couple of years ago, people from the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, where we were living in Xinjiang, our last three years were in Xinjiang across the border from Hong Kong, and she even publicly admitted that we know it's not true, but we are doing this as leverage to try to harm China, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These were representatives from the U.S. consulate. So everybody knows it's a complete and total fabrication.
The Chinese have had thousands and thousands and thousands from every predominantly Muslim country around the world. Clerics, professors, doctors, lawyers, politicians, diplomats, leaders have come to Xinjiang and they poured across that province and they are just totally blown away by how the people are living. As I pointed out, so none of them could report anything close to gulags or concentration camps.
And what happened is, and as I explained, after the USSR collapsed, the CIA and George Soros and Ned and USAID and the whole deep state used the Russian territory to infiltrate hundreds and later thousands of terrorists trained in Libya, Syria, Turkey, Waziristan and Afghanistan and Pakistan. China had thousands, not hundreds, thousands of terrorist attacks. I didn't realize there were that many. So that means most of them were not reported. Only the most sensational ones were reported.
And Jeff, what kinds of attacks were these? Were these attacks on the authorities, on military outposts, or just ordinary people?
No, ordinary people like train stations, bus stations, public squares, markets, and not just in Xinjiang, but in the rest of China, too. And they were highly trained and highly skilled. Hundreds of people were killed over that time. And so the Chinese realized that they had to do something. In 2016 they passed an anti-terrorist law and so the supposed gulags in concentration camps are actually re-education or education schools to re-educate the Xinjiang people because they were completely just brainwashed. The Wahhabis were pouring money into Xinjiang and paying for mosques that were teaching fake Islam, violent Islam, etc. And those mosques were closed down. But there's still 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang.
So they haven't closed all the mosques. They're not forcing people to eat pork during Ramadan.
No, or drink alcohol. It's just a grotesque propaganda. The economy is booming. It's the hub of the Belt and Road Initiative to connect China to the rest of West Asia, and the double-digit economic growth.
And this is the key, Kevin. This is the key. China has not had a terrorist attack since 2016. That's eight years ago. How many countries can say they have not had a terrorist attack in eight years? The United States can't. I don't think any of the countries in Western Europe can.
And so they have literally through massive education, economic development, infrastructure have literally stamped out terrorism in China because it's bottom up from the people getting the people involved and it's a collective effort between Muslims and non-Muslims…
Doesn't this get to the issue of the relationship between the Chinese state and different sort of ethnicities, right? China does have a lot of different ethnic groups and the Xinjiang region, of course, has these sort of Turkic speaking peoples. And what we really had here was more of a sort of a separatist nationalist problem than an Islam problem, wasn't it?
Yeah, exactly. George Soros and the CIA and their ilk created this East Turkmenistan independence movement. There's another one, but it's not quite as important. And they got them into the United Nations. And of course, they've got offices in Western capitals all over the place. There are people that work there, have chairs, you know, anti-communist, anti-Chinese. Think tanks, professorships in Ivy League schools.
I had a representative on the show at one point and she didn't convince me She was a little too hysterical and a little too fast and loose with her factoids.
Yeah, well, she probably hasn't been there in 10 years. I visited Xinjiang back in the 90s. The Chinese, after independence with Mao Zedong, et cetera, adopted the Leninist, Vladimir Lenin's philosophy that minorities should be, stay, they should keep their language, they should keep their alphabet, they should keep their religion, they should keep their culture, they should keep their history and their civilization and not necessarily integrate with the rest of the country. And so this turned out to be a big mistake. Because in the long run because what happened is after 1978-80 after Mao died and the reform and opening up during the Deng Xiaoping era all of a sudden these people in Tibet and Xinjiang couldn't get jobs with companies, you know, in Shenzhen, etc.
And then, of course, what does the West do? “Oh, they're trying to crush their culture.” And, you know, they can't win.
But now they are teaching Mandarin and Uyghur in Xinjiang and Mandarin and Tibetan in Tibet equally. And all the signs are in dual language. If you go to Xinjiang they're in Mandarin and Uyghur and if you go to Tibet they're in Mandarin and Tibetan. And so now the people are bilingual and they're plugged into the economy they're plugged into the education system they're plugged into jobs and and they're migrating to other parts of China to seek work, just as well as Chinese are migrating to those areas to seek work. So that has been a big help because now they're more of a daily part of life in China than before when they were kept in their native environment.
So from a Muslim perspective, you can understand why people are kind of split on this. On one hand, we have the West using these tactics against the Islamic world and also against China and training terrorists in U.S. vassal states like Saudi Arabia. And the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago admitted that the whole Wahhabi terror thing was all forced on Saudi Arabia by the U.S. as a tool of American foreign policy. So Islam is under attack from the West using all of these different kinds of divide and conquer tactics, including the creation of crazed mercenaries to be used against the empire's enemies. But on the other hand, there's a legitimate kind of historical grievance, shall we say, in that the Islamic world sees itself as a single Ummah, a single Islamic nation. And that nation has been carved up into bits and pieces over the centuries. And some of it's ended up in what's now Russia, some of it's ended up in what's now China, and some of it's in what's now India, and so on and so forth. So there is that sense that people who are at least as much a part of the Muslim nation as of the Chinese nation, in the case of the Muslims of Xinjiang, maybe more so, that that's just an intractable problem. So I don't think we should 100 percent blame the Turks for sort of seeing Xinjiang as being that should be part of the Muslim nation. I mean, it should, shouldn't it?
Well, it is part of the Muslim world. Chinese go to Mecca every year. They go to all of the Islamic councils and international meetings. Muslims from all over the world come to China to attend meetings. There is no abridgement of any religious belief in China as long as you do not try to use your religion to overthrow the government. And that's the limit. That's why so many of the, a number of Christian churches, you know, there's 50 million Christians in China and they closed down a bunch of these churches because they were being financed by fundamentalist Christian groups in the United States to try to be political and try to create tension with the government and go against the government and go against the way of life of the Chinese people.
And that's true for Buddhists. It's true for the Muslims. And I've never seen any problem with Muslims anywhere in China. We lived in Beijing. We lived literally catty corner from a Muslim enclave in Beijing, the Hui minority. They're in Ningxia, up by Inner Mongolia. They're much, much further east towards Beijing, about halfway between Xinjiang and Beijing. And the Hui people, I mean, they had Halal restaurants we used to go to. We used to go to the Halal market. They had a mosque, you know, about 200 or 300 meters from where we lived and people would go to the mosque whenever they felt like it. It was open 24 hours a day. They didn't have to have any guards or anything. They had total freedom to go to the mosque whenever they felt like it. And everywhere I've traveled, I mean, there are Uighurs all over China. The Uyghur restaurants are incredibly popular all over China. So there's Uyghurs everywhere in China because the people love Uyghur food. And so there's no problem.
In Shenzhen, I mean, you know, just north of Hong Kong, there's six mosques. You know, I mean, how many mosques are there in, you know, in cities in the United States and Europe? They have a hell of a time even trying to get one built. Whereas in China, they're everywhere. Everywhere you turn, there's mosques all over the country. And so, Muslims have absolutely no limitations to practicing their beliefs, fasting, praying, going to prayers on…Well, in China, it's going to be probably on a Saturday or Sunday because they do the Western Civil Week, Monday through Friday.
The mosques are full, the people go, there's no problem. And you can buy Qurans and, you know, in all the minority languages, you can buy Qurans in Chinese and all, you know, in bookstores. I would say that Muslims in China have a better quality of spiritual practice than Muslims do in some other countries, that's for sure.
Jeff Brown on Xinjiang, climate change, Gaza genocide