The young Uyghurs knew exactly what to do. On the country lane leading to their village, when they saw a couple of young city dwellers, from the majority Han ethnic group, approaching, with backpacks, they smiled at them and said “I love China!” and above all “I love Xi Jinping”! It was the right reflex. They were perhaps not fully aware of the cultural genocide to which their ethnic group, Muslims, had been victims since the beginning of the century, but they had clearly been well informed about the obsequiousness essential to their survival.
Big brothers. Beijing has sent in waves over the past decade no less than a million young Hans to travel through the Uyghur countryside, to stay with locals, to instruct the minority ethnic group in the right way to be good subjects of the Communist Party and its chief. Canadian anthropologist Darren Byler investigated the phenomenon of “big brothers and big sisters” who came to “transform” the Uyghurs. He describes the typical day imposed on the villagers: “In the morning, they sang together during daily flag-raising ceremonies [chinois] In front of the village party office in the evening, they attended classes on Xi Jinping’s vision for a “New China”. Teaching “culture” would occupy the rest of the time: conversations in Mandarin, watching authorized TV shows, practicing Chinese calligraphy and patriotic songs. » Visitors take notes: do two villagers greet each other in Arabic? Is there a Koran in the house? Prayers on Friday? “And why didn’t anyone play cards or watch movies?” » So many symptoms of religious deviance which could earn their author a re-education camp.
Vloggers. This can work in the village, but what can be done in the city to reach Uyghur teenagers who, like all their contemporaries, have their noses glued to their phones? Offer them modern, trendy Uyghur vloggers, whose videos are of high quality and their comments are congruent with the themes of Chinese re-education. Anthropologist Rune Steenberg has listed dozens of these vloggers active since 2018 and whose production is relayed by state networks. Among the themes covered: how to pick up a Han boy? Are Uyghurs good drinkers (Islam prohibits alcohol)? In the thousands of videos produced, they represent, Steenberg writes, “the modern Uighur woman as the Party wants her to be: beautiful, smiling, accommodating, speaking Mandarin fluently, wearing fashionable clothes and makeup, loving music, dancing and good restaurants and determined to advance Chinese society.”
Super-spies. We knew that Chinese legislation forced any Chinese company established abroad to share its data with the secret services. Blackmail was known to be used on overseas Chinese residents to force them to spy for China. According to the head of Canadian spies, David Vigneault, Chinese law has just evolved to oblige all Chinese abroad to participate in the collection of information. The pressure is particularly strong on high-tech research. “If you’re at all tech-savvy, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you,” warned the head of British domestic intelligence, Ken McCallum. The heads of the Five-Eyes spy services met this week in Stanford, California, to take stock of what they believe to be the most ambitious Chinese data theft effort in history.
The empire of genes. The next big medical discovery could come from China. So is the next miracle drug. Or the first genetic missile. Beijing is engaged in the world’s largest genetic intelligence harvesting enterprise. These data make it possible to test, on a computer, on which profiles, ages, medical predispositions, a new molecule can act positively or negatively. Its purchase of the American company Complete Genomics in 2013 was a first step in this accumulation. COVID presented him with a golden opportunity. China has deployed pre-fabricated COVID testing laboratories in 20 countries, including Canada, Australia and South Africa, which have been used to accumulate DNA samples. Another Chinese product, Nifty, however, boasts of having already reached eleven million women in 100 countries. This is a prenatal test that determines whether the unborn child will have Down syndrome or genetic problems. DNA samples must pass through the laboratories of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). Norway, Germany and Slovenia are concerned about these unauthorized exports of DNA. BGI denies it, of course, even though it is identified by Beijing as a military company.
THE Washington Post, from which I derive this science, cites a paper from the Chinese Defense University discussing the future importance of “ethnic-specific genetic attacks.” An offensive, one professor writes, “that destroys a race, or a specific group of people, or a specific person; its potentially enormous war effectiveness can bring extreme panic to human beings.” He adds: “It has high technological content, low cost and high threat. » The only consolation: the inhabitants of Taiwan would be spared, being Hans themselves. Not us.
Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. He has just published Through the mouth of my pencils published by Somme Tout/Le Devoir. [email protected].