The Chinese Embassy attempted to spin their concentration camps and genocide of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities as progress after The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on hacked Xinjiang police files Wednesday.
“The issue Xinjiang faces is not about ethnicity, religion or human rights,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy, told TheDCNF. “Rather, it is about fighting violence, terrorism and separatism.”
TheDCNF received an over 600-word email response from Liu after sending the Chinese Embassy questions related to the recently hacked documents found within Xinjiang police network computers obtained by Dr. Adrian Zenz, senior research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Without directly addressing China’s concentration camps, Liu defended China’s practices, saying that “[t]he people of Xinjiang have been working hard together and have achieved a historic transformation.”
“Thanks to the preventive counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts, Xinjiang, a place that once suffered gravely from terrorism, hasn’t encountered a single violent, terrorist incident over the past three years,” Liu said. “Local people’s right to life, health and development has been effectively safeguarded. Our measures have been endorsed by all ethnic groups.”
However, hundreds of internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents leaked to The New York Times in 2019 revealed the Chinese government referred to Muslim Uyghurs as a “virus” who are “infected” with religious and ideological “symptoms.” Additional leaked Chinese government documents published in 2020 revealed that the CCP had criminalized the cultural and religious features of ethnic minorities, listing “wearing a veil” and having a “beard” as imprisonable “offenses.”
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Liu told TheDCNF that under the CCP, Xinjiang had achieved “moderate prosperity in all respects,” making reference to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s July 2021 announcement that the CCP had allegedly ended “extreme poverty.” Citing the development and modernization of “agriculture and animal husbandry” as well as “digital and smart technologies,” Liu told TheDCNF that “all ethnic groups enjoy equal rights to participation and development.”
Yet Zenz’s analysis of the recently hacked Xinjiang police documents estimates that “over a million” ethnic minorities have no rights and are unable to participate in society due to their imprisonment in China’s concentration camps.
Likewise, although the Chinese government reportedly banned the Uyghur language from schools in 2017 and currently forces imprisoned Uyghurs to speak in Chinese, Liu told TheDCNF that all ethnic groups “have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages.”
“Xinjiang promotes standard Chinese, and encourages ethnic groups to learn spoken and written languages from each other, so as to promote communication and unity among all peoples in the region,” Liu said.
Liu did not comment upon the Pair Up And Become Family program which requires Uyghur homes to lodge CCP members and has allegedly resulted in rampant sexual assault upon Uyghur women, according to the State Department.
LifeNews Note: Philip Lenczycki writes for Daily Caller. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.
