“China – Communist Slave State”

F​​ew cases better show how U.S.-China relations have deteriorated in the age of Big Data than the response Wang Jiang got when he offered, at the height of the pandemic, to set up labs for COVID-19 testing in the U.S.

Wang is a known quantity in the world of U.S. biotech. He cut his teeth as a genetics researcher at the major public research universities of Texas, Iowa and Washington. He’s now the snowy-haired, charismatic chairman of Shenzen-based BGI, the world’s largest biotech company, which for decades has been collaborating with some of America’s leading geneticists. BGI participated in the global effort to sequence the first human genome, formed a partnership with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to identify genes associated with pediatric diseases, and named an institute in China after Harvard’s George Church, a gene-editing pioneer, who continues to work with the company.

The US has welcomed a long-awaited report by the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, which concludes that China’s policies in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity. The BBC’s John Sudworth, who spent many years covering the story and was eventually forced out of China as a result, considers what it tells us about the country.

At the heart of the Xinjiang story is one of the most important questions of our time. What is China?

A rising superpower, growing ever more prosperous and now deeply embedded into our economies and supply chains, but one that runs a programme of draconian mass incarceration.

How do we understand the relationship between these two realities?

The UN has accused China of “serious human rights violations” in a long-awaited report into allegations of abuse in Xinjiang province.

China had urged the UN not to release the report – with Beijing calling it a “farce” arranged by Western powers.

The report assesses claims of abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, which China denies.

But investigators said they found “credible evidence” of torture possibly amounting to “crimes against humanity”.

China’s regime is torturing and killing critics, petitioners, activists, dissidents, and religious adherents in psychiatric hospitals, thereby bypassing its horribly misdescribed criminal justice system. The “barbaric practice,” as a Madrid-based NGO termed it this month, is still widespread.

Safeguard Defenders, in “Drugged and Detained: China’s Psychiatric Prisons,” details how police and government agents are sending Chinese citizens “for medically unnecessary involuntary hospitalizations” in the police-run ankang system, which was established in the 1980s.

Chinese military researchers recently called for the destruction of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, an extraordinary threat for a state to make against a private foreign enterprise.

In December 2021, China filed a complaint with the United Nations, claiming that two of Musk’s Starlink satellites had nearly collided with the Tianhe module of its Tiangong Space Station — in April and October of 2021– and that Chinese astronauts had been forced to maneuver the module of the station to avoid the collision. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the satellites are part of a plan to make internet coverage from the satellites available worldwide, with the goal of launching nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.

I dunno. Elon and the Communist Chinese seem to understand one another.