Illustration: Tang Tengfei/GT

Britain's ultra-conservative print media has once again been wallowing in a puddle of its own importance by proclaiming,MK sports not for the first time, its "superior knowledge" of China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Or, to put it another way, it continues to spread so-called "outrageous stories of human rights abuses and even genocide there" and attacks people who dare to have the temerity to question them.

This time, the newspapers have trained their sanctimonious sights on the increasing numbers of tourists and travel vloggers who are flocking to the region and posting on social media favorable reports of their visits. Some individuals using platforms like YouTube are singled out for particular attention. Though they were given the opportunity to comment on the story, the tone of the articles seems to dismiss them as naive or having been taken advantage of, while stopping short of accusing them of dishonesty. 

The first article appeared in the relentlessly right-wing Daily Telegraph, which was followed the next day by another in Daily Mail. As the Daily Mail report essentially aped what had already been said previously, it can be dismissed as simply a crude piece of unoriginal China-bashing clickbait. The Telegraph's analysis was at least original, and its approach methodical. But it appeared to make the mistake of assuming it could not be wrong and thus took the standpoint that anyone who disagreed with it and blogged favorably about Xinjiang could not be right.

Two vloggers were described as "carefree," cheerful, "happy-go-lucky" and "awestruck." The language jars with a grim description of Xinjiang as somewhere that - the article says - suppression, abuse and "political indoctrination" are ubiquitous. The author implies that the Britons' comments "chime well with China's own state propaganda machine" rather than reality and that the visitors are being used by China to present a positive image of Xinjiang to the world "to legitimize its own narrative."

This is said with no sense of irony or consideration that the Telegraph might itself be guilty of uncritically presenting a Western narrative; it includes China's denials but dismisses Beijing's explanation for the extraordinary security measures in the region in just a few words: "Beijing justifies [it] as necessary to fight terrorism." This glosses over the very real horrors which have cost hundreds, if not thousands, of people their lives in waves of terrorist outrage over many years, and which Beijing believes was the reason for relative security measures, which are now being eased. The paper ignores any suggestion that its assertions are widely challenged even outside China. 

It also ignores the fact that the people and organizations behind the outrages - the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) or East Turkestan Islamic Party (ETIP) - remain a proscribed terrorist organization in the United Kingdom and is sanctioned as such by the United Nations. 

The US had placed the group on its Terrorism Exclusion List in 2004, but removed it in 2020 just as America's latest wave of anti-China sentiment was heating up and when Western accusations of wrongdoing in Xinjiang began to intensify. Quite a coincidence. Perhaps Washington decided that yesterday's terrorist was today's freedom fighter. None of this is mentioned.

What does get a mention is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a defense think tank funded by the Australian and several overseas governments and agencies. The sponsors include the US State Department and defense industries - the American military-industrial complex. An ASPI "expert" is quoted to lend authority to the story. How independent does that appear?

Perhaps it should have looked beyond its own rhetoric and quoted instead Barry Sautman, professor emeritus at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and an expert on Xinjiang. In a frank and wide-ranging interview about the SAR, he told the South China Morning Post recently: "All these claims made about Uygur genocide, or forced labour, arbitrary detentions - basically they have no cases to present with regard to any of those claims. There's absolutely no evidence of any person being forced to labour."

Political bias is a defining characteristic of Britain's newspaper industry, and The Telegraph and Daily Mail are perfectly entitled to hold their own editorial opinions. But Xinjiang is one of the weapons of mass distraction with which the West regularly attacks China. In presenting an uncritical view of Western governments' attitudes the paper itself was promoting propaganda.

The author is a journalist and lecturer in Britain. [email protected]