THE BIG STORY
this year by a journalist about the plight
of his co-religionists in Xinjiang, he pre-
tended to know little about it. It’s no coin-
cidence that Pakistan is the ‘ jewel in the
crown’ of the BRI, having received more
infrastructure investment than any other
country.
The persecution of the Uyghurs has
also revealed a lesser-emphasized aspect
of modern China: the centring of ethno-
nationalist politics. Xi has defined the
‘Chinese dream’ as ‘fulfilling the great
renaissance of the Chinese race’. China
is a multi-ethnic soceity, but the Han
majority have come to stand in for the
‘real’ face of the nation. Those tides of
virulent nationalism – from Ferrari-
riding expats in Canada to ‘angry youth’
groups who share nationalistic memes
on the internet – are nourished by this
narrative which ‘identifies pernicious
foreign influences’, including ‘internal
foreigners’, as the cause of China’s down-
fall in previous centuries.^12
Perhaps the most chilling sign of what
this newly assertive China will look like
came from the editor-in-chief of the
Global Times, a state-run tabloid. After
22 Western nations officially censured
China for its treatment of the Uyghurs,
he took to Twitter to gloat: ‘22 countries
jointly criticized China’s governance in
Xinjiang, but they only represent the
face of the West. Why didn’t you unite
the large number of developing coun-
tries to sign the open letter? Because you
couldn’t. You are a small, isolated part of
the world.’
The dragon awakes
China’s rise to pre-eminence is unpar-
alleled. Between 1990 and 2017, GDP
per person grew by 903 per cent. The
top four biggest banks in the world
are already Chinese. As analyst Bruno
Macaes puts it, ‘Suddenly every global
story has a China angle, whether it is
the growing instability in the Balkans,
the coup in Zimbabwe or domestic
politics in Australia.’ This is an epochal
shift, and it’s not one that is going to be
accepted easily by that ‘small, isolated
part of the world’.
The shift towards a multipolar world,
rather than the unipolar dynamic of the
1990s and 2000s, when the US was the
only sheriff in town, should be seen as a
positive. The challenges that organized
life face in the 21st century require col-
laboration between state actors that can
mobilize serious resources. For example,
with the White House executive effec-
tively run by climate deniers, a signifi-
cant part of the outcome of humanity’s
struggle against climate breakdown will
be decided by bureaucrats in Beijing. The
worry is not so much China’s rise then
but, as China expert Martin Jacques puts
it, the West’s inability to come to terms
with its own relative decline.
But these grand pronouncements
about tectonic shifts in international
relations drown out what unaccountable,
powerful states act like on the ground.
In neighbouring Kazakhstan, life under
Chinese hegemony is already here –
as Serikzhan Bilash, a Chinese-born
Kazakh, can attest. Bilash co-founded
a human rights organization called
Atajurt, which has been campaigning
against the nightmarish repression in
Xinjiang, in which Kazakhs as well as
Uyghurs are targeted.
On the night of 9 March 2019, Bilash
was violently arrested by what is pre-
sumed to be Kazakh state intelligence
agents in the hotel where he was hiding
and spirited away to the capital, Astana.
After a punishing trial and campaign
of harassment against his lawyer, Bilash
eventually agreed to a plea bargain for
charges of ‘inciting ethnic discord’. It
is no secret that the state was doing the
bidding of Beijing, which has invested
billions in Kazakhstan.^13 Stories of suf-
fering and resistance like this must not
get lost amid starry-eyed and breathless
accounts of a new Chinese century. O1 Various authors, ‘Sorghum and steel: the socialist
developmental regime and the forging of modern
China’, Chuang, 2019, nin.tl/sorghum; Rachel
Leow, ‘China’s health transitions’, The Lancet,
August 2014, nin.tl/health 2 Various authors, ‘The
hermit and the empire: China after the collapse of
the developmental regime’, Chuang, 2019, nin.tl/
developmental 3 Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying
Big Brother, Verso, 2018. 4 David Harvey, Marx,
capital and the madness of economic reason, Oxford
University Press, 2018. 5 Walden Bello, Paper
dragons: China and the next crash, Zed, 2019.
6 Richard McGregor, ‘How the state runs business
in China’, The Guardian, 25 July 2019, nin.tl/
statebusiness 7 James Meadway, ‘Definitely Maybe:
What People Are Missing About China’s “Imminent”
Financial Crisis’, Novara Media, 26 July 2019, nin.tl/
chinatech 8 David Dodwell, ‘Be afraid: China is on
the path to tech dominance’, South China Morning
Post, 24 March 2017, nin.tl/techdominance
9 Various authors, ‘Winter is coming: China 2018-
2019’, Chuang, 7 June 2019, nin.tl/wintercoming
10 Derek Watkins et al, ‘The world, built by China’,
The New York Times, 18 November 2018, nin.tl/
builtbychina 11 Ching Kwan Lee, ‘The spectre of
global China’, New Left Review, Sept-Oct 2014.
12 John M Friend and Bradley M Thayer, ‘The rise of
Han-centrism...’, Studies in ethnicity and nationalism,
April 2017, nin.tl/hancentrism 13 Ben Mauk, ‘Diary:
prison in the mountains’, London Review of Books,
September 2019.20 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
CAMPAIGNING
World Uyghur Congress
(uyghurcongress.org)
Munich-based group representing
UyghursAtajurt Kazakh Human Rights
(twitter.com/atajurt)
Human rights group registered in
KazakhstanStand with Hong Kong
(standwithhk.org)
One of many pro-democracy
organizationsHong Kong Labour Bulletin
(clb.org.hk)
Pro-worker NGOdeCOALonize
(decoalonize.org)
Opposing Chinese-financed coal in
KenyaGreenpeace East Asia
(greenpeace.org/eastasia)
One of the largest international
NGOs in ChinaREADING
SupChina (supchina.com)
Independent platform with good
reportingChina Dialogue
(chinadialogue.net)
Excellent China-based
environmental publicationChuang (chuangcn .org)
Long-form analysis from a Marxist
perspectiveChina Channel
(chinachannel.org)
Imprint of Los Angeles Review
of BooksTAKE
ACTION