China pushes back against critics of its policies in Xinjiang

NOT LONG before the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the Chinese government carried out a vicious crackdown on demonstrations in Tibet. Foreign media drew attention to it, and people outside China held protests. A Chinese academic popularised the idea of “three afflictions”: two that China had faced in the past (“being beaten” by foreign powers and “being starved” by poverty) and a third that it faces now: “being scolded” by the rest of the world. Later President Xi Jinping adopted the concept, arguing that China faces a “fight for international discourse”.

On no subject has China been more scolded than Xinjiang, where it has interned some 1m Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group, for such things as being too pious or talking to relatives overseas. Media in democracies uniformly portray this as a grotesque abuse of human rights. The Communist Party is pushing back, in an effort to break what it calls the “discourse hegemony” of the West. To treat the “third affliction” it has marshalled vast resources, including official media, think-tanks, diplomats and security organs, and spent billions of dollars over the past decade.