China Uses State-Controlled ‘Civil Society’ Organizations to Protest U.N. Scrutiny of Uyghur Genocide

The brutal Chinese Communist government is still fighting to suppress the publication of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) report on the genocidal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims.

Beijing’s latest pressure tactic involved roping a thousand Chinese “civil society” organizations – from roller skaters to dart players – into signing a letter demanding UNCHR scuttle the report.

The Diplomat derisively noted that “civil society” simply does not exist in China – everything is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and the all-powerful State, so the fiction of amiable sporting groups and scrapbooking clubs voluntarily coming together to petition the U.N. is ridiculous. The letter to outgoing U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet was written because Communist officials wanted it; it was signed because Communist officials ordered the signatories to do so.

The Diplomat nevertheless worried Bachelet and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres would pretend to take the letter seriously, as they have been “silent and deferential to the interests of the Chinese party-state” so far.

The U.N. report on Uyghur human rights has been delayed since at least September 2021 with constant promises of imminent release by Bachelet. She now has less than one month remaining in office, having announced she would not seek another term after her disastrous visit to the Uyghur province of Xinjiang in May – a mission clearly and clumsily stage-managed by the Chinese Communist Party.

China escalated its campaign to suppress the U.N. human rights report on Xinjiang in July, as the clock ticked down on Bachelet’s term, and she faced relentless pressure from human rights groups to release the report. On July 19, China sent Bachelet a letter expressing “grave concern” about the report and bluntly pressuring her not to release it.

“The assessment, if published, will intensify politicization and bloc confrontation in the area of human rights, undermine the credibility of the OHCHR, and harm the cooperation between OHCHR and member states,” the Chinese letter threatened.

The open letter from Chinese “civil society” groups like the Xinjiang Roller Skating Association, Chinese Darts Association, and Beijing Crafts Council unsurprisingly parrots Beijing’s rhetoric, right down to hysterical babbling about “anti-China forces” and threats that releasing the letter would “seriously undermine the developing countries’ confidence in constructive cooperation with the OHCHR.”

The letter notably does not introduce a single argument against the overwhelming evidence of the Uyghur genocide. It simply dismisses all that evidence as false information spread by “anti-China forces out of ulterior political motives.” Among those nefarious forces are “overseas anti-China separatists,” a backhanded smear of Taiwan.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on a furious “behind the scenes” lobbying effort from China at the U.N. to kill the human rights report. An unnamed senior European diplomat thought it had a good chance of working since “the U.N. system today is very dependent on China, which is a problem.”