The Communist Party of Britain is urging labour movement bodies not to rush to judgment on the Uyghur question in China.
The Beijing government has been accused of ‘genocide’ against the mostly Muslim population of 13 million people in the Xinjiang autonomous region, in north-west China.
But CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths told his party’s political committee on Wednesday evening that the charges of ‘genocide’ are ideologically motivated, lacked independent evidence, and are part of the ‘new Cold War’ being waged against China.
‘It is a strange sort of genocide which has exempted the Uyghur people from China’s one-child policy, so that their numbers have grown by 25 per cent since 2010, six times the rate for China as a whole and twelve times that for the smaller Han Chinese minority in Xinjiang itself’, Mr Griffiths declared.
He pointed out that a major programme of investment and training in the region have produced high levels of economic growth and lifted millions of Uyghurs out of poverty and unemployment.
Drastic security measures have put an end to a spate of terrorist attacks on Han and other ethnic minority people by fundamentalist and separatist elements in Xinjiang, he added.
Mr Griffiths said the reports of ‘genocide’ from a network of right-wing institutes and pressure groups funded by the US, British and Australian governments are recycled uncritically in the Western media.
As one of many international delegations to visit Xinjiang, he had seen for himself that mosques are open, the Uyghur language can be seen and heard everywhere, and the majority of top state and political officials are Uyghurs, not Han Chinese.
The CPB political committee urged labour movement organisations in Britain to undertake fact-finding missions to Xinjiang and other parts of China, rather than repeat the ‘fictitious propaganda’ of the labour movement’s longstanding enemies.