‘China’s rulers aren’t those we partnered with a decade ago’: Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman TOM TUGENDHAT says it’s time to confront the reality we’ve ignored for too long
As in written in the Mail on Sunday, Tom Tugendhat said:
The past decade has been kind to China’s princes, but its people have paid the price.
As Beijing’s new Communist aristocracy have grown rich and increased their global influence, the rights of the people, particularly those from minority communities, have suffered. The rise in forced labour, arbitrary detention and mass surveillance has turned the nation into a prison for many.
For millennia, the Chinese emperors built powerful states by conquest and control. Today’s heirs to the Forbidden City are using technology and torture to achieve the same.
This Conservative Party Human Rights Commission report coming out this week details how China’s Communist Party has transformed the nature of state power and deployed its repressive tools in recent years. It highlights the violation of rights widely reported in the Xinjiang region, where Uighur culture is being erased, and historic sites bulldozed to the mass incarceration of citizens for Orwellian re-education.
It goes into detail on the erosion of Tibetan culture and the repression of rights in Hong Kong, ending the self-government promised at handover in 1997. This report pulls no punches in highlighting the mass torture and repression, the disappearances and silencing of any form of dissent in today’s Communist state. The catalogue of crimes seems more at home in Stalin’s 1930s than in the 2020s. Only the technology has changed.
