Editor’s note for Monday, April 5, 2021

My thoughts today:

Three things:

Should anti-Asian violence in the U.S. be seen as partly resulting from criticism of the Chinese Communist Party? Some say yes. Other points of view:

• Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state by Promise Li
• Abandoning criticism of China’s government isn’t the right way to end anti-Asian racism in the U.S. by Ho-fung Hung
• Twitter thread by Lǚ Pín 吕频

Beijing’s Xinjiang propaganda campaign is in overdrive. Two examples:

• The happy Xinjiang script is being happily followed by friendly foreign diplomats, such as the China ambassador of “iron brother” Pakistan, who has been tweeting about the “beautiful mosques in Urumqi and Kashgar [that] represent the religious freedom and cultural mosaic of China.”
• A new state-produced musical film set in Xinjiang “inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster La La Land has hit China’s cinemas, portraying a rural idyll of ethnic cohesion devoid of repression, mass surveillance and even the Islam of its majority Uyghur population.”

But no number of tweets nor an awful musical that no one will watch are much of a match for the detailed, first-person accounts of the camps that are coming out on a regular basis. The latest is a devastating testimony from Anar Sabit, an ethnically Kazakh Chinese citizen, in the New Yorker: Surviving the crackdown in Xinjiang.

Scholar Minxin Pei has a warning for Hong Kong’s one percent, a group that has tended to support Beijing even when ordinary Hongkongers have not. Pei writes: “The most serious concern for Hong Kong’s elites is the impact on their interests if China’s economic integration plan is fully implemented. Hong Kong’s tycoons may see this plan as a great opportunity and believe that their connections on the mainland will help them. But they may be in for a rude shock.

Our word of the day is maritime militia (海上民兵船 hǎishàng mínbīng chuán), a thing which does not exist in China, at least according to state media (in Chinese).

Upcoming events:

• April 7: Exploring esports: What is China’s role?
• April 9: “Is this patriot enough?” A conversation on Asian identity and anti-AAPI hate with George Takei and Lee Wong

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief