Pro-China ‘Engagement’ and Genocide Denial Go Hand in Hand on Communist Party’s 100th

W ith July 1, the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, on the horizon, some people are taking the opportunity to highlight its brutal conduct over the past century. Pro-China apologists in the West, such as British politician Vince Cable, however, are using the moment to defend the world’s most powerful adversary of human freedom.

At the Independent, Cable, who led the U.K.’s Liberal Democrats from 2017 to 2019, marks the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary with a maliciously ill-informed article downplaying its atrocities against Uyghur Muslims. Basically, for the occasion of the Party’s celebration, he has refitted arguments he made in a February 2021 book advocating engagement with Beijing. Although he writes that “there is little doubt that serious human rights abuses have taken place in Xinjiang,” his piece doesn’t take much stock of them; he instead exonerates Chinese officials of the most serious allegations that have been leveled against them.

Cable joins an ignominious group that includes Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs and other pro-Beijing Westerners who have attempted to discredit the global awakening to the Party’s crimes by simultaneously downplaying them and pointing a finger at liberal democracies for historical abuses and contemporary racial reckonings instead.

When we think of apologists for Beijing’s party line, we might first think of people who are paid off, or otherwise integrated into a vast system of dubious political influence. As Cable shows with his paean to the Party’s anniversary, that’s not the only motivation for defending Beijing; one can also do so to justify, as Cable does at the end of his piece, a policy of “engagement” (more accurately, appeasement) on climate, nuclear proliferation, global public health, and trade. They’re held hostage not necessarily to any form of compensation, but principally to a sort of logic that sees cooperation with Bejing, at any cost, as the way to prevent a destructive military conflict.

These defenders of Beijing’s conduct have become only more deranged in recent months. They’re losing the political fight. Faced with an increasingly compelling legal, diplomatic, and moral case against the crimes of Party officials against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, their position has become an outlier. Specifically, since the start of 2021, the U.S. government and the parliaments of several other Western and European countries have recognized the atrocities — which include forced sterilization, mass detention, forced labor, torture, and other offenses — in Xinjiang as genocide and crimes against humanity.

While there’s reasonable debate to be had over the precise determination of genocide, which must be supported by the criteria set out under the U.N.’s 1948 Convention on Genocide, anyone dealing in good faith ought to be able to discern that the Party is perpetrating crimes against humanity, a different legal classification for crimes just as grave as genocide. As the outgoing Trump administration argued, these include the torture, mass arbitrary imprisonment, and other acts inflicted on Uyghurs. That much is not disputed by reputable experts.

That’s where Cable comes in. It’s just not true, as he argues, that genocide can’t be proven without mass murder. Deliberately destroying an entire people, as numerous legal experts have argued that the Party is attempting to do here, fills the bill under the convention, especially in light of Chinese officials’ own pronouncements about destroying the Uyghur people. Here, horrific comparisons abound of Uyghurs and Islam with communicable diseases, invasive crops, and tumors.

Like other bad-faith observers, Cable, in his Independent op-ed, fails to acknowledge the crimes against humanity, likely because he primarily makes a case defending the Party. He goes further than merely questioning a policy determination. He’s not disputing the label to argue that “crimes against humanity” is more accurate; he’s arguing that genocide can’t be proven because criticism of Beijing’s policies is based on falsehoods and lies by Beijing’s Western antagonists: Donald Trump and other Western politicians who implemented policies critical of China.

Worst of all, the main thrust of his op-ed bolsters the Party’s most egregiously false claims: that the support of authoritarian, non-Western governments shows that China’s Xinjiang policies are sound and hardly abuses. “One would have thought that democratically elected governments in Muslim majority countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Pakistan might have been quick to join in” Washington’s allegations, he writes, ignoring other factors, such as Pakistan’s religious repression and its massive debts to Beijing. Then, he backs the Party’s claims that China is merely implementing a policy to preserve the identity of its minority groups amid a surge in terrorism attacks.

But if you wonder what the forcible internment of well over 1 million people has to do with stopping a terrorist threat, he argues that this figure itself is probably false, as it “consists largely of reports by plausible academic researchers” that have been “contradicted by other reports by other plausible academic researchers.” The word “plausible,” as it relates to the latter group of academics, is doing a lot of work. Cable backs up his claim with an anonymously drafted document, a mysteriously sourced 18-page dossier whose authors apparently decided to remain anonymous so as not to “receive hate mail, letters sent to their employees, or additional risks to securing tenure.” Forget plausible; it’s not even clear that the document was drafted by academics at all, let alone independent experts without an interest in supporting the Party.

Cable was apparently relying on the same document cited by Australian National University professor Jane Golley during a high-profile event in April when she claimed that allegations of genocide against Beijing have been “debunked.” In fact, the allegations have not been debunked, and the anonymous paper contains several obvious inaccuracies. The whole thing was an embarrassing episode for Golley and pro-engagement types in Australia.

And thus, the British politician joins the Australian academic (and many others) in attempting to cover for a regime so evidently engaged in horrific acts that it should shock the world. The crux of the problem with their comments is that they use their credentials to launder damaging, unserious arguments. If these Westerners do not necessarily sympathize with the Party’s ruling ideology, they attempt to justify the unjustifiable to preserve a policy of engagement that can’t be supported when widespread recognition of genocide is on the table — which is why Cable concludes, “Shouting at [the Party] is unlikely to get us very far.”

On the 100th anniversary of the Party’s reign, the lesson these apologists teach us about their preferred engagement is more instructive than ever.