China Thanks US For Human Rights Silence

You know it’s bad when China is praising you on your attitude towards human rights, but that’s just where the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton find themselves. On Tuesday, China thanked the US for its “moderate line” on the ethnic violence that rocked the Uighur community in Urumqi, Xinjiang province.

Despite President Obama’s stated support for human rights around the world, and his making that support a feature in recent keynote speeches in Cairo and Ghana, the US has been largely silent on the rioting that left nearly 200 people dead, saying it was an “internal matter” for China to resolve. Of course despots around the world all claim that oppression of a minority group is an “internal matter” and we usually don’t let them get away with it, but apparently the rules are different when it involves China.

The Chinese government has said that a majority of the people killed in Urumqi were Han Chinese (China’s biggest ethnic group), but Uighur exile groups claim that the actual death toll from the rioting was much higher than China’s official figure, with many more Uighurs dead than are being commonly reported. And following the riots, there were not mass arrests of Han Chinese like there were of Uighurs. But apparently all of that’s irrelevant to the human rights champions in the US government, as is this story from Time magazine documenting the latest target of China’s cultural genocide against the Uighurs, the historic of city of Kashgar.

Kashgar was once an important stop along the Silk Road - the ancient overland trade route that brought the riches of the Far East to Europe. It was also a center of religious and cultural life for centuries and most recently has been one of the top tourist attractions in Eastern China. But all of that will soon be gone, ground to dust under the tracks of Chinese bulldozers. Government officials are rapidly plowing under the mud-brick buildings of old Kashgar, which the Uighurs also happens to consider their spiritual/cultural capital. The official government excuse is that they fear that the mud-brick buildings, which have stood for centuries, could be vulnerable to earthquakes (I don’t know, they seem to have fared a lot better than the modern Chinese elementary schools that fell like dominoes during 2008’s Sichuan earthquake).

If the US government wants to have some credibility on the human rights front, they should start by taking on the biggest bullies on the block – China.