Failure to respect human rights as a possible link between China and Russia

The visit to China by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, highlighted how Beijing understands respect for human and civil rights. The occasion was the trip to try to ascertain the treatment received by the ethnic Uyghurs, a Chinese minority of Muslim faith, which is being re-educated by the Chinese authorities. The fact-finding investigation was due to repeated complaints from non-governmental organizations, which reported repeated episodes of violence and oppression by the police; in particular, there have been reports of repression involving numerous incarcerated people including children. The prison regime is marked by an unprecedented harshness, which includes psychological and physical violence, which often leads to the death of people, whose only fault is that of not integrating with the will of the Chinese regime. The accusations are often spurious and constructed and devoid of legal presuppositions, not even those of Chinese law. This struggle in Beijing against the Uighurs has been going on for some time and aims to wipe out the Chinese Muslim culture, interpreted as an alternative to the aims of the Communist Party and the Chinese nation. Beijing justifies the prisons where Uighurs are imprisoned, as vocational training centers, where the forced labor of incarcerated people is exploited at no cost for productions also destined for the Western market. Officially, China claims that most of these facilities have changed destination or even been closed, but, according to several foreign NGOs, they are still fulfilling their original function of prisons to reprogram the Uighur people. The Chinese president’s claim about this situation, even Xinjiang, the land of the Uyghurs, was not mentioned is that the development of human rights in China is in accordance with national conditions. This statement implies a relativism for China’s own use and consumption, regarding a subject that should not allow for exceptions, at least on the minimum basic standards regarding personal freedoms, civil rights and the freedom to exercise one’s political and religious ideas. Obviously China is an authoritarian dictatorship and cannot allow such freedoms, precisely because they threaten the very basis of the country’s power; rather, what must be understood as national conditions is the freedom to produce and consume, always respecting what the state wants; all this brings back to the importance of subsistence and development as the only effective rights granted by the Communist Party. Going beyond this vision would mean, in fact, arriving at disastrous consequences for the Chinese state system: replicating models from other countries is seen as a threat to the established order. Now these statements do not represent anything new, the failure and functional consideration of the Chinese government for the respect of civil rights is known, however after the tragic and current Ukrainian experience, relations with a state, which although it is an economic superpower, should be reviewed by part of western countries; in addition, the progressive approach of Beijing to Moscow, despite the aggression in Kiev in open violation of every rule of international law, could favor a further tightening of the Kremlin, precisely on the establishment of Chinese repressive methods linked to the possible declaration of martial law. The preconditions, already very close, of two states would be created, where civil rights are strongly neglected, capable of mutually supporting each other and extending this contiguity to reasons of international order. The Taiwan question has already been compared by similarity to the Russian claims on Crimea and Ukrainian territories on the border with Moscow. For China and Russia, the legitimacy of the conflict against the West will take on the meaning of justifying the denial of democracies, not only as such, but also as carriers of respect for civil and political rights, which represent the obstacles for the legitimation of forms of authoritarian state. The only alternative for the West is to create greater industrial and energy autonomy in the long term and immediately defend the democratic concept of respect for civil rights and international laws, with a more concrete defense of Ukraine and with concrete commitment. to force the naval blockades that prevent the export of grain and promote hunger in the world. This can make it possible to increase a somewhat compromised prestige for Western nations, especially African countries, and remove them from Russian and Chinese influence, in order to progressively isolate Moscow and Beijing.