Can China reverse the disadvantage of Xinjiang public opinion on the 12th anniversary of the July 5th Incident?

Following the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China on July 1, 2021, the arrival of July 5 marks the low-pitched cry of another major historical event: the 12th anniversary of the "7.5" incident.

On July 5, 2009, a serious premeditated violent incident occurred in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Large-scale beating, smashing, looting and burning resulted in the death of 197 people. The terrorists were killed on the spot. Such an incident not only shocked the Chinese public opinion, but also made various Western institutions feel happy, and began to arm the public opinion in Xinjiang, shaping it into another chaotic frontier of China after Tibet. The so-called "national self-determination" and "" The CCP's tyranny" duel arena.

Then, with the introduction of the system of "vocational skills education and training centers" (often called "re-education camps" by outsiders), the West intensified its discourse offensive, such as "concentration camps", "genocide", "forced labor", "living organ harvesting" ” and other narratives danced across the sky, as if Xinjiang were being ruled by the Nazis. While carefully examining the accusations, they are full of subjective speculations and exaggerated "testimonies" without evidence, but with the collective endorsement of European and American media, think tanks and scholars, they have become popular in the West. Political correctness has also become popular in non-Western worlds such as Taiwan. Taking root in China, we have woven a huge network of public opinion against China.

However, the west wind will not always prevail over the east wind. With the gradual stabilization of Xinjiang, the impact of the refugee crisis on liberalism, and the revelation of the genocide of the aborigines in the West, the once solid human rights discourse has finally cracked, and China has gradually stabilized the pace of counterattack.

Why has China been beaten for so many years?

On July 5, 2021, the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China held a ceremony of awarding the "Honorary Title" at the Bayi Building in Beijing. General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping awarded the title of "Anti-Terrorist Knife Squadron" to a special operations squadron of the Xinjiang Corps of the Armed Police Force. The Xinjiang government also Held a press conference on Xinjiang-related issues in Beijing, emphasizing that "safety can protect human rights", and arranged for the families of the victims to tell about the experience and impact of the "7.5" incident, which can be described as an active defense of the characterization of the incident.

Looking back at the beginning of the "July 5" incident, when Turkey had not yet clarified the incident, it condemned the Han Chinese for the massacre of the Uyghurs and reversed the essence of the incident. Such a reaction was not only intended to cater to the political sentiment of "Pan-Turkism", but also largely based on the The “Armenian Genocide” is the past situation of the massacre of ethnic minorities; European and American countries have almost unanimously demanded that the CCP restrain the use of force and deal leniently with the perpetrators and participants. Organizations such as Amnesty International have even called for the release of the “peaceful assembly” ", and demanded that an "independent investigation" be opened and even sanctions against China. The Chinese embassies in the Netherlands and Norway were also attacked by violent demonstrations a few days after the incident.

In the following years, the West frequently used the excuse of "valuing human rights" to repeatedly tear China's national wounds on the "July 5" incident. "Overseas organizations that played a certain role in the incident also called the incident the "Urumqi Massacre". They wanted to expand their visibility among the overseas Uyghur groups by confounding right and wrong, and at the same time cater to the West and strive for more. Multi-resource injection.

In all fairness, the reason why China has been beaten on this matter for many years is that, in the early days, it was not familiar with the number of offensive and defensive methods of public opinion warfare. It is feared that the sensitive nerves of ethnic issues will be stimulated again, and years of hard work will be in vain, and this is exactly what the West's drunkard means: as long as the chaos in Xinjiang is difficult to resolve, the West will always have the words to snipe China.

However, China eventually withstood the test of time with its governance effectiveness, and after stabilizing the turmoil in Xinjiang, it turned its low-key stance from the past and began to throw in the hail of bullets of public opinion. It released four Xinjiang anti-terrorism documentaries in 2020 and 2021, revealing many horrors The details and images also reflect on the past ineffective governance of Xinjiang. The "Honorary Title" ceremony on the 12th anniversary of the "July 5" incident also conveys a signal to actively defend the right to speak in Xinjiang.

The battle lines continue

On the other hand, in the West, despite having such a "superior" starting point for intervention as the "July 5" incident, it has not been able to make the subsequent development as it intended.

In the face of Xinjiang, which has not had any terrorist incidents for many years, it can only sink deeper and deeper into the groundless "genocide". Although such a discourse attack is indeed fierce, and it is easy to arouse the sympathy and empathy of the audience, it cannot be without a key premise, that is, the absolute moral superiority of the West. However, looking back on the history of Europe and the United States, almost all countries have committed genocide against the indigenous and colonial peoples. The sea of corpses and blood is so huge that it is impossible to hide it forever, not to mention at a time when the liberal camp is split and the West is declining day by day. , it is only a matter of time before it is exposed and condemned.

In other words, when the West made up its mind to attack Xinjiang, it also started the countdown to the human rights time bomb. The controversy over the "Aboriginal boarding school incident" in Canada at this time is one of the classics. Other pioneers such as Australia, although they have not been condemned for their whitening policies in the past, were countered by China through economic and trade means, and the scandal of the Australian army massacred the poor in Afghanistan was exposed. It can be said that they suffered a double blow.

However, although the corrupt state of the West is gradually emerging, the eradication of discourse structure cannot be achieved overnight. Take Taiwan as an example. During the "July 5" Incident in 2009, the ruling Kuomintang government strongly condemned those involved in inciting violence, and called on the CCP to "be as lenient and tolerant as possible when dealing with the aftermath". At that time, Taiwanese society was also relatively unfamiliar with the Xinjiang issue and did not know much about it, so it was mostly explained in the framework of ethnic conflict.

Today, however, Taiwan, where anti-China populism is rising, has gradually adopted the "Urumqi Massacre" argument of the World Uyghur Congress, arguing that whenever violent terrorist incidents and ethnic conflicts occur in Xinjiang, it must be the massacre of the Uyghurs by the Han Chinese. The "Xinjiang blood cotton" agenda instilled by the West has been accepted. Such a paranoid reaction just exposed his subconscious indifference to Xinjiang, but blindly took the Western-led agenda as a sacred decree; and because of this, political correctness has been popular for too long, and society has lost the flexibility of multiple discourses, anti-China and Xinjiang. Discourses such as genocide are intertwined, reinforce each other, and are difficult to dissolve for a moment.

Such a Cold War-style oppositional structure of Xinjiang discourse does not only take effect in Taiwan, but spreads across Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially the intellectuals and elites. Half a century ago, Europe and the United States conquered a large number of Soviet intellectuals with the offensive of public opinion warfare of freedom and democracy, and ignited the internal fire for the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union; whether the CCP can now remember the lessons of the Soviet Union, hold on to the fortress and regain lost ground in the public opinion war in Xinjiang, With the two-pronged approach of maintaining stability and words, only perseverance and walking on thin ice can achieve the final victory.

The original text was published on 2021/7/6 " Multidimensional News "