China

I can't talk about every country, there's too much to say. But I have to talk about China. The good and the bad. Britain forced opium on it at gunpoint. Japan committed unspeakable atrocities in Nanking. Then it lifted 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years. And now it's putting a million people in camps. 

Transcript

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China. I can't talk about every country. There's just too much to say, and I think most of us are becoming aware in some form of what many states and regimes have done over the last 100 years and beyond. Britain has its empire to answer for. America has its wars and its coups. Russia has its gulags, pogroms and its invasions. Belgium has the Congo. France has Algeria. Japan has the territory I'm about to come to. And the list goes on Israel, Germany, Portugal, South Africa, Australia, Cambodia, there is virtually none that could be excluded. Every major power has skeletons, and a book that tried to catalogue all of them would be ten times the length of this one, and still wouldn't do the job. So I'm going to focus on one country, because the next chapter is about something I can't write without first explaining where it comes from. And I'll try to stay on point as much as I can. I'm going to talk about China, the good and the bad, because the story of China over the last 200 years contains every single theme this book has been looking at. Empire and exploitation, capture and recovery, growth and contradiction, and at the end of it, the reason why the t-shirt in your wardrobe costs four pounds. You cannot honestly talk about modern consumerism without talking about China, and you cannot honestly talk about China without first acknowledging what was done to it before you start judging what it does now. This is the part where I lose half of my readers, because as soon as I say anything balanced about China, the assumption is going to be that I'm a defender of the Chinese Communist Party. I'm not. By the end of this chapter, you'll see exactly what I think about what the Chinese state is currently doing to a particular minority within its borders, and it's not gentle, but I'm not interested in writing a hit piece either. I'm interested in the truth, and the truth as always is more complicated than the headline. Let's start with what most British school children are not taught. In the early 1800s, Britain had a problem. The British public had become utterly addicted to tea. Tea was the national drink. Every working family had it on the table three times a day, and almost all of it came from China. The trouble was that the Chinese didn't really want anything Britain was selling in return. They had their own porcelain, their own silk, their own everything. They weren't interested in British manufactured goods. So Britain was paying for Chinese tea and silver, and the silver was hemorrhaging out of the British treasury at a rate that was starting to threaten the entire economy. The East India Company, which was effectively the corporate arm of the British Empire, found a solution. They started growing opium on enormous plantations in their Indian colonies, processing it into a smokable drug, and shipping it into China in vast quantities. By the 1830s, Britain was selling roughly 1,400 tons of opium a year into China. Opium is one of the most addictive substances ever discovered. By 1840, by Britain's own estimates, there were millions of opium addicts across China. Entire communities were being destroyed. Family savings were being spent on the drug. Workers were turning up to fields and workshops too stoned to function. The Chinese economy was being hollowed out from the inside, and the silver that had previously been flowing from Britain to China was now flowing the other way, back into British and East India Company coffers in payment for the drug. The Chinese government did what any government on earth would do. It tried to stop the trade. The opium was illegal in China just as it had been illegal under earlier dynasties for the same reason. In 1839, the Chinese Emperor appointed a senior official called Lin Zeksu to enforce the ban. Lin wrote a famous open letter to Queen Victoria appealing to her conscience. He pointed out that opium was banned in Britain itself and asked how a country that protected its own citizens from a drug could justify making its merchants rich by forcing that drug on someone else's people. The letter never reached the Queen, and even if it had, it wouldn't have mattered. Lin then seized roughly 1,000 tons of British owned opium in the port of Canton and destroyed it in public, mixing it with lime and salt and washing it out to sea. Britain's response was to declare war. Read that again. Britain declared war on China because China tried to stop Britain from selling drugs to its people. The first opium war lasted from 1839 to 1842. The Royal Navy, with its modern warships and modern guns against a Chinese military that was still using equipment from two centuries earlier. It was a slaughter. The British sailed up the coast, picking off Chinese forts at will. Eventually they took Nanking, then the second city of the Qing Empire, and forced the Chinese to sign what became known as the Treaty of Nanking. It was the first of what the Chinese now call the unequal treaties. Under it, China had to pay 21 million silver dollars to compensate British merchants for the opium that had been destroyed and to cover the cost of the war Britain had launched against them. Five Chinese ports were forced open to British trade, and Britain took permanent possession of Hong Kong Island, which it would hold for 155 years. The opium trade was not yet legal, so in 1856 Britain found another excuse and started a second war, this time joined by France. The Second Opium War lasted from 1856 to 1860. It ended with British and French troops marching into Beijing, looting the old summer palace, the imperial residence which had been one of the greatest collections of art and architecture in the world, and then setting it on fire. The flames burned for three days. Many of the looted treasures still sit in European museums and private collections today. The Chinese have been asking for them back for over 160 years. They are still waiting. The Treaty of Tianjin that ended the Second War fully legalized opium in China, opened ten more ports to foreign trade, gave foreigners freedom to travel anywhere inside the country, and granted Christian missionaries the right to spread their religion across Chinese soil. The British took the southern Kowloon Peninsula on top of Hong Kong Island. France, Russia, the United States, and Germany piled in for their own concessions, all under the most favoured nation clause that meant whatever any one foreign power got from China, all the others got too. China lost control of its own coast, its own customs, its own legal system over foreigners on its own territory, and its own ability to refuse a drug being shoved into the throats of its own people. That period from roughly 1839 to 1949 is what every Chinese schoolchild today learns about as the century of humiliation. It's not propaganda, it happened. And it didn't just happen at the hands of Britain. Over those 110 years, China was carved up by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, and Portugal in different ways and to different extents. Foreign powers had spheres of influence inside Chinese territory. Foreign warships patrolled Chinese rivers. Foreign citizens in China were exempt from Chinese law under what was called extraterritoriality, meaning if a British sailor murdered a Chinese villager, he was tried by a British court inside China rather than by the Chinese authorities. The Chinese were treated as a subject people inside their own country. Signs in Western controlled parts of Shanghai famously read no dogs and no Chinese. In 1900, after a Chinese uprising called the Boxer Rebellion tried to expel the foreign powers, an eight-nation alliance of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary invaded China together, defeated the Imperial Army, occupied Beijing, and forced the Chinese government to pay another massive indemnity that crippled the economy for a generation. The international force then spent weeks looting and burning Chinese towns on its way back to the coast. This is the history that almost no one in Britain learns. We were taught about the British Empire as if it was mostly a story of building railways and abolishing slavery. The opium wars are barely mentioned in most schools, and when they are mentioned, the framing is something like Britain fought a war in China over trade. That's like describing the conquest of the Americas as Spain visited the New World. The truth is that Britain was, for the better part of a century, the world's largest drug cartel, and we used the Royal Navy to enforce our right to be one. If the situation were reversed, if China today were forcing fentanyl into British schools at gunpoint, we would call it an act of war and a crime against humanity. We would be right. But that is what we did to them. I'm not telling you this, so you'll feel guilty about being British. You and I personally did none of it. I'm telling you this because if you don't understand what was done to China for 110 years, you can't understand why the Chinese state today behaves the way it does, why the Chinese Communist Party still has popular support even among Chinese people who know its faults, and why China is so suspicious of any Western criticism of its internal affairs. The century of humiliation isn't ancient history to them. It's the founding wound of the modern Chinese state, and every Chinese leader since Mao has built their legitimacy on the promise that it will never happen again. Then it got worse because then came Japan. In the 1930s, Imperial Japan had decided that it was going to build an empire of its own across East Asia. China was its first target. Japan invaded the northeastern Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931 and turned it into a puppet state. In July 1937, after a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of the rest of China. The Second Sino-Japanese War had begun. It would not end until Japan's surrender in 1945, eight years later. The total Chinese death toll across that war is estimated at somewhere between 15 and 20 million people, the majority of them civilians. In December 1937, after a brutal battle in Shanghai, the Japanese army marched on Nanking, then the capital of China. The Chinese government had already fled. The city was largely defenseless. What happened next is one of the most horrific atrocities of the entire 20th century. Over a period of roughly six weeks, Japanese soldiers methodically and systematically murdered, raped, and tortured the civilian population of the city. The estimates of how many people died vary depending on the source. Japanese revisionists put the number as low as a few thousand. The most rigorous academic estimates put it at well over 100,000 and possibly closer to 200,000. The Chinese government's official figure is 300,000. The number of women and girls raped is estimated at between 20,000 and 80,000, with many of them mutilated and killed afterwards. Babies were bayoneted, elderly men were beheaded. There were killing contests held by Japanese officers, recorded in their own diaries. Soldiers competed to see who could behead the most prisoners with a sword. Pregnant women had their bellies cut open. Entire families were burned alive in their houses. Roughly a third of the city was deliberately set on fire and destroyed. A small group of Western businessmen and missionaries, led by a German Nazi Party member called John Raab, set up what they called the Nanking Safety Zone in part of the city and used their foreign passports to shelter as many Chinese civilians as they could. It is estimated they saved around 200,000 lives. Raab himself wrote in his diary about what he was witnessing, and later wrote letters to Hitler personally appealing for the German government to intervene and stop the atrocities. Hitler, who was an ally of Japan, did nothing. I want you to sit with that for a second. The thing that was happening in Nanking was so bad that an actual member of the Nazi Party was begging Hitler to intervene on humanitarian grounds. That is how bad it was. Most British people have never heard of Nanking. Every schoolchild in China knows about it. Every schoolchild in China is taught about it the way every schoolchild in Britain is taught about the Holocaust. It is an active, present, raw wound in the relationship between China and Japan to this day, almost 90 years later. Japan has, depending on which government and which year, alternately apologized, half apologized, denied parts of it, and removed mentions of it from school textbooks. There are still active political disputes between China and Japan about how Nanking should be remembered. The wound has not healed. When the war finally ended in 1945 with Japan's surrender, China had been devastated, tens of millions dead, much of the country in ruins, the economy destroyed, and 110 years of foreign domination still fresh in living memory. What came next was the Chinese civil war between the communists under Mao Zedong and the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists won. On the 1st of October 1949, Mao stood in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. His most famous line from that speech is one every Chinese person knows. The Chinese people have stood up. That's the line that explains everything that came after, because for the previous 110 years, in the eyes of every Chinese person alive, they hadn't been allowed to stand up. They had been pushed around, drugged, invaded, humiliated, raped, and murdered by foreign powers in their own country. Whatever else you think about Mao, and there is a lot to think about, the moment in which he stood in that square and said those words was a moment of genuine national release. It was the end of the century of humiliation. It was the moment China became its own country again. Now here's where I have to be honest about the other side of the story, because this isn't a defense of the Chinese Communist Party either. Mao's rule from 1949 to 1976 was a catastrophe in many ways. The Great Leap Forward, his attempt to industrialise China overnight by forcing peasants off their farms and into communal steelmaking and grain collectivisation projects between 1958 and 1962 caused one of the worst famines in human history. The estimates of how many died range from 15 million at the lowest end to 55 million at the highest, with most academic studies converging on a figure somewhere around 30 to 40 million people. To put that in perspective, that's the entire population of Canada starving to death because of one man's economic experiment. Then came the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, in which Mao unleashed a generation of teenage redguards on Chinese society to destroy what he called the four olds, old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Universities were closed for years, teachers, intellectuals, and writers were beaten in the streets, paraded through their towns wearing dunce hats, sent to labor camps in the countryside, or driven to suicide. Ancient temples and historical sites were smashed, books were burned, families were torn apart, with children encouraged to denounce their parents to the authorities. The estimates of how many died directly from violence during the Cultural Revolution range from around 500,000 to several million, with vastly more lives ruined. This is the corruption cycle this whole book has been describing in its rawest possible form. The signal of the Communist Revolution had been about lifting ordinary people out of foreign domination and poverty. Within ten years it had been captured and corrupted into something that was killing tens of millions of those same ordinary people in the name of the same ideology. Mao himself, in his final years, became something close to a god emperor, with his face on every wall and his little red book of quotations carried like scripture. The institution had eaten its own original purpose, exactly the way every institution this book has examined has done. Mao died in 1976. The country he left behind was exhausted, traumatized, and still desperately poor. And then came the most extraordinary economic transformation in recorded human history. In 1978, two years after Mao's death, the new leader Deng Xiaoping made a famous speech in which he said, poverty is not socialism. Socialism means eliminating poverty. Dung was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution. He had been purged, sent to work in a tractor factory for years, and brought back. He had no romantic illusions about ideology. He had a single stubborn idea, which was that the actual job of government was to make ordinary people's lives better, and that whatever worked was acceptable. He famously said it didn't matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. Starting in 1978 and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s, Dung and his successors gradually opened up the Chinese economy. They allowed farmers to keep what they grew above their state quotas and sell it on the open market. They let small private businesses operate again. They created special economic zones along the coast where foreign companies could come in and set up factories. They invested massively in roads, railways, ports, electricity, and education. They encouraged hundreds of millions of rural Chinese to move to cities and work in the new factories. They sent their best students abroad to learn, with the explicit expectation that they would come home and apply what they had learned. They didn't democratize. They kept the political system tightly controlled by the Communist Party, but they opened up the economy in a way that was unprecedented in scale and speed. What happened next is, in pure numerical terms, the largest reduction in human poverty ever recorded. According to the World Bank, in 1981, around 88% of the Chinese population were living in extreme poverty as defined by the international standard of$1.90 per day. By 2015, that figure was 0.7%. Almost 800 million people in a single human lifetime were lifted out of extreme poverty. That accounts for more than 75% of all global poverty reduction over the same period. China's share of the world economy went from 1.5% in 1978 to over 15% by the late 2010s. Per capita income increased roughly 25-fold from around$300 a year in 1978 to over$7,300 a year by 2017 and has continued rising since. I know there are honest debates about how to measure this. Some economists argue that the World Bank's figures are too optimistic. Others argue that a lot of the improvement was simply undoing the damage Mao had caused. Both points have some truth to them. But even allowing for every reasonable caveat, what happened in China from 1978 onwards is something the world has never seen before. Cities of 20 million people were built from rice fields in 30 years. High-speed rail networks were laid across the country that put British and American infrastructure to shame. A country that in 1978 had almost no private cars now has hundreds of millions. A country that 50 years ago was largely rural and illiterate now has more graduates than any country on earth. More patents filed per year than any country on earth, and more internet users than any country on earth. The change in lived experience for an ordinary Chinese person between, say, the 1960s and today is more dramatic than the change in lived experience for an ordinary British person between the year 1500 and today. I'm telling you this not because I think the Chinese system is some sort of model to copy, it isn't, and I'll come to why in a moment. I'm telling you this because if a chapter about China only listed the bad things, it would be lying by omission. The same country that put one million people in the camps I'm about to describe also lifted 800 million people out of starvation. Both things are true at the same time. Pretending otherwise turns this into a propaganda exercise, and propaganda is exactly what this book has been written against. But here is where it turns, because the same system that achieved the economic miracle has also done some of the worst things any government on earth is currently doing to its own people. And the longer the system stayed in power, the more it consolidated, the more it surveilled, the more it crushed any threat to its monopoly on power. In 1989, students and workers gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing for weeks of peaceful protest, calling for democratic reforms, freedom of the press, and an end to corruption. The protest spread to dozens of other Chinese cities. The Communist Party leadership was split on how to respond. Eventually, on the night of the 3rd to 4th of June, the People's Liberation Army was sent in with tanks. Soldiers opened fire on the crowds. The estimates of how many died range from a few hundred to several thousand, depending on whose figures you trust. The most credible recent estimate from a leaked British diplomatic cable puts the figure around 10,000 killed. The most famous image of the entire event is a single unknown man. In a white shirt standing alone in front of a column of tanks, refusing to move. We don't know what happened to him. He was almost certainly killed. Today, inside China, the Tiananmen Square massacre has been almost completely scrubbed from public memory. If you search for it on the Chinese internet, you get nothing. Young Chinese people often genuinely don't know it happened. The date June 4th is censored. The famous tank man image is blocked. An entire generation has been raised to believe that something either didn't happen or was a minor disturbance that the government bravely put down to preserve stability. The institution rewrote its own history because it could. Tibet has been under Chinese control since 1950, with periodic uprisings and ongoing suppression of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan language and the influence of the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India in 1959 and has lived there ever since. There is mass surveillance of the Chinese population at a scale that makes the worst fears of the Western dystopian novelists look quaint. Hundreds of millions of cameras with facial recognition. A social credit system in some regions that tracks individual behaviour and assigns scores affecting people's ability to travel, get loans, or send their children to certain schools. Internet controls so comprehensive that an entire generation has grown up unable to access Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC, or basically any independent foreign news source. And then there is what is happening to the Uyghurs. In the far northwest of China, in a region the Uyghurs call East Turkestan and the Chinese government calls Xinjiang, which is a Mandarin word that literally means new frontier or new territory, there are about 12 million Uyghurs. They are a Turkic people. That means ethnically and linguistically they are far closer to Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen than they are to Han Chinese. They speak Uyghur, which is in the same language family as the languages of Central Asia, not in the family of Mandarin or Cantonese. They look different from Han Chinese, they dress differently, they eat differently, they sing differently, they dance differently, they marry differently. They are, in every meaningful sense, a separate civilization that happens to live within the borders of modern China. The very name Xinjiang is an admission. You don't call a place the new bit if it's been part of you forever. China formally annexed the region in 1759 under the Qing dynasty, and even after that governed it as a separate territory for over a century before fully incorporating it. The Uyghurs and their ancestors have lived in the oases of the Tarim Basin and along the foothills of the Tienshan Mountains for at least 1,300 years and almost certainly far longer. When you stand in the old city of Kashgar, you are standing in a place that was a major hub of human civilization when London was a swamp. The Uyghurs are predominantly Muslims today and have been for several centuries, but Islam is not their original religion, and their religious history is one of the most varied of any people on earth. Long before they were Muslims, the population of this region practiced Buddhism, and the area was a major center of Buddhist civilization for around a thousand years. The cave temples at Bezeklik and Kizil contained some of the most important Buddhist art anywhere in the world. They also practiced Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian faith, which spread along the Silk Road trading routes that ran through their oases. For about 200 years, between roughly 762 and 840 CE, the Uyghur Kaganate, their original kingdom, made Manichaeism its official state religion. Manichaeism was a syncretic faith founded by the Persian prophet Mani in the 3rd century, blending ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Gnostic traditions. The Uyghur Kaganate is the only state in human history to have ever officially adopted it. Then there was Nestorian Christianity, which was widespread among the Uyghurs' ancestors in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. By the year 1009, around 200,000 of them had been baptized as Christians. Then in the 14th century, Christianity disappeared from the population almost completely, and the Uyghurs converted to Islam, which is where they have stayed for the last 600 years. Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, five major religions across roughly 1,500 years, all carried by the same people in the same place. The rapping kept changing, but the people kept being decent farmers, traders, poets, musicians, weavers, and craftspeople, getting on with the same lives their grandparents had. The form of Islam they ended up with is moderate, deeply cultural, rich with music and poetry and Sufi mysticism, blended with the older traditions that came before it. Women generally don't cover their faces. Men don't typically have huge beards. There's singing and dancing at weddings. There are saints and shrines that people visit. It's a relaxed, lived, gentle faith that is woven into Uyghur identity rather than imposed on top of it. There has been Uyghur violence, it's not a Chinese fabrication. Between roughly 1990 and 2016, a small number of Uyghurs carried out attacks against Chinese civilians. The worst of them was in March 2014, when eight attackers walked into Kunming Railway Station, hundreds of miles from Xinjiang, dressed in black, armed with knives and cleavers, and started slashing at random commuters. They killed 31 people and injured 143. In April that year, attackers detonated bombs at Urumki Railway Station, killing three and injuring 79. In May, five men drove SUVs into a market in Urumqi, throwing explosives out the windows, killing 43 people, including four of the attackers. In October 2013, a vehicle was driven into Tiananmen Square in Beijing and set on fire, killing two bystanders. There were other incidents going back to a bus bombing in Urumqi in 1992. The total death toll from all Uyghur attacks combined over roughly 25 years runs into the hundreds of civilians killed. These were real attacks against real people who had done nothing wrong. Any honest book has to say so. If your child or your mum had been on that train platform in Kunming, you would not care about the historical context. You would just want the people responsible found and punished. That has to be acknowledged. But the question this chapter is asking is what those attackers said they were doing it for, because the answer matters. And when you actually read the academic studies, the testimonies, the statements from Uyghur exile groups, and even what was found at the scene of the attacks, the reasons given are almost never about religious extremism in any meaningful sense. They're about something else entirely. The attackers in Kunming, according to investigators, came from a town in Hotan in southern Xinjiang, where in June 2013 the police had violently suppressed a peaceful demonstration against the closure of a mosque and the arrest of its Imam. Fifteen Uyghurs were killed at that demonstration, and 50 more were injured. Eight months later, some of the people from that town walked into a railway station with knives. That's not a justification. But it is a chain of events. The deeper grievances, the ones that come up over and over in interviews with Uyghurs and in academic research, are these. First, the demographic transformation of their homeland. In 1949, Xinjiang was around 75% Uyghur and 6% Han Chinese. By 2010, it was roughly 46% Uyghur and 40% Han Chinese. That wasn't an accident. The Chinese state actively encouraged Han Chinese migration into Xinjiang for 60 years through tax breaks, job offers, and a paramilitary corporation called the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which built entire Han only cities on what had been Uyghur land. The Uyghurs watched their homeland being demographically replaced inside a single lifetime. Second, economic exclusion. Xinjiang sits on enormous reserves of cotton, oil, natural gas, coal, and rare earth minerals. The profits from those resources flow to Beijing and to Han Chinese-owned companies. Job advertisements in Xinjiang historically excluded Uyghurs explicitly with phrases like Mandarin speakers only or Han preferred. Uyghurs in their own homeland found themselves locked out of the best jobs in industries built on their own land's wealth. Third, the suppression of their language and culture. By 2017, the Uyghur language had been formally banned as a language of instruction in Xinjiang schools. Uyghur poets, historians, and writers were being arrested and given long prison sentences for inciting separatism if they tried to preserve their cultural heritage. The novelist Nurmamet Yassin got ten years in prison in 2005 for writing an allegorical short story about a blue pigeon that the authorities decided was secretly about Uyghur freedom. Hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals and cultural figures have been disappeared. Fourth, the religious restrictions. Long before any of the attacks, the Chinese state was already cutting back Uyghur religious practice. By 1966, it had reduced the number of mosques in Xinjiang from 29,000 to 14,000. Children under 18 were banned from entering mosques. Government employees were forbidden from fasting during Ramadan. Beards were restricted. Headscarves were banned. Praying in public could get you arrested. Fifth, and this is the one that scholars keep coming back to, the complete absence of any peaceful political voice. There was no legitimate recognized channel through which Uyghur grievances could be heard inside China. The World Uyghur Congress, which is a non-violent advocacy group based in Germany, is banned in China and labelled a terrorist organization. Anyone who spoke out publicly was arrested. Any peaceful demonstration was met with force. Professor Willie Lam at the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it plainly. Northern Ireland, South Africa, Palestine, Kosovo. When peaceful avenues close, some people pick up weapons. It is never a justification, it is always a pattern. The Chinese state's response was to do what it had been planning to do anyway, which was to attempt to assimilate, dilute, and ultimately erase an entire people whose culture had survived in that place for 1,500 years. The attacks gave it political cover. Since around 2014, but escalating dramatically from 2017 onwards, the Chinese government has been putting Uyghurs in camps. The official name for the camps is Vocational Education and Training Centres. The official purpose is de-extremification. The actual function, according to leaked Chinese government documents, satellite imagery, testimony from hundreds of former detainees, and investigations by the UN, the International Labour Organization, the US State Department, the Canadian Parliament, the Dutch Parliament, and multiple academic institutions, is mass internment, indoctrination, forced sterilization, cultural erasure, and forced labour. Estimates of how many people have been through these camps range from one million to over 1.8 million. The UN has described what's happening as potentially amounting to crimes against humanity. The United States, Canada and the Netherlands have formally recognized it as genocide. The Chinese government calls it poverty alleviation. Here's what the poverty alleviation looks like in practice. Yugas are rounded up sometimes for offences as minor as praying, wearing traditional clothing, or having relatives living abroad. They're held in the camps, forced to learn Mandarin, forced to renounce Islam, forced to sing praises to the Communist Party. When they're released, many are transferred directly into factory work under what the Chinese government calls labour transfer programs. Some are sent to factories inside Xinjiang, others are shipped thousands of miles to factories in other provinces, where they live in guarded dormitories, work 12-hour shifts, have their wages withheld, and are forbidden from practicing their religion. They can't leave, they can't go home. If their families want to see them, they have to apply to the state for permission. Since 2017, around 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang have been demolished or damaged, which is roughly 65% of the region's total. Uyghur language instruction has been banned in schools. The Uyghur birthrate has plummeted with reports of forced sterilizations and forced contraception. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur children have been placed in state-run boarding schools and separated from their families. Between 2009 and 2023, the Chinese government changed over 600 Uyghur village names that held historical, religious or cultural value, replacing them with neutral Chinese names. The crackdown intensified massively from 2017 onwards. The last significant attack in Xinjiang was in December 2016. So the period of mass internment camps, the demolition of 16,000 mosques, the language ban, the forced sterilizations, the family separations, and the forced labour transfers all happened during years when there was no terrorism to respond to. The anti-terrorism framing was the public justification. But the timing proves the project was always about something else. It was always about completing the long project of cultural assimilation that some scholars and the US, Canadian, and Dutch parliaments now formally describe as genocide. The terrorism just gave it political cover. A few hundred civilians were killed by Uyghur attackers over 25 years. That is awful. The IRA killed more in a single decade in Northern Ireland, and the British response, while heavy-handed and very often unjust, was nothing remotely like what is happening in Xinjiang. A normal country handles a few hundred deaths through criminal justice, intelligence work, and addressing the grievances that drove the violence. China decided to put 1 to 1.8 million people in camps. You do not put a million people in camps because of a few dozen attackers. You put a million people in camps when you've decided that the people themselves are the problem. The terrorism framing was a story the institution told the world to buy time while it did what it had been planning to do all along. So this is the country I'm trying to describe in a single chapter. A country that was savaged by Britain and France and Japan for over a century and rightly resents it. A country that fed its own people through Maoist madness that killed tens of millions of them. A country that then performed the largest and fastest poverty reduction in recorded human history, lifting 800 million human beings out of starvation in 40 years. A country that has built infrastructure and cities and technology at a scale and pace that the West can only watch, with a mixture of envy and unease. And a country whose government, having achieved all of that, is currently doing things to its own minorities that the international community has formerly described as genocide. Both of those things are true at the same time. China is not the cartoon villain that some Western coverage makes it out to be, and it is not the heroic developing nation standing up to Western imperialism that Chinese state media presents either. It is a real place with real history, real achievements, real crimes, and 1.4 billion real people just trying to get on with their lives, most of whom love their country, are proud of what it has built, and have very little say in what their government does in their name, just like you and me. The corruption cycle this book has been describing runs through every chapter of China's modern history. The signal of national independence got captured by Mao's personality cult and turned into mass starvation. The signal of economic reform under Deng got captured by the Communist Party's monopoly on power and turned into a surveillance state. The signal of bringing the Uyghurs into the modern Chinese economy got captured into forced labour camps. Each time something that started with a real and arguably good intention was eaten by the institution that was supposed to deliver it. And now we come to where this chapter has been heading from the start, because the same country that built itself up through 40 years of frantic manufacturing, the country that became the workshop of the world, the country whose factories make a huge proportion of everything you and I own, including the t shirt I'm wearing as I write this, is the same country that is currently using forced Wigger labour to pick its cotton, weave its fabric, and sew its clothes. And those clothes are then being shipped to a website on your phone where you scroll through them in bed, see the£4 price tag, and click buy.