Palihapitiya is obviously an odious character, but he is probably one of the few among corporate elites honest enough to come out with what he actually thinks. In cultivating Western elites, the CCP recognizes that some of their targets might need to cover themselves with some pro forma comments to the effect that, yes they are disturbed by the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, the suppression of dissent more generally, and leave it at that. The CCP actually has a term for this kind of accommodation: "big help for little badmouth".
But don't expect to see any Hollywood movies in the foreseeable future about what is going on in Xinjiang, which is being turned into a giant open-air prison, a testbed for all the latest technologies of surveillance and repression. Too much potential to lose a slice of what is now the biggest movie market in the world.
It is no longer credible to say we don’t know what is happening to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. You can say you don’t care, as the billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya did in January when he said the plight of the Uyghurs was “below my line”. But we can no longer pretend the atrocities aren’t well documented.
The combined weight of satellite imagery, official documents and survivor testimony that has accumulated over the last five years sets out the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang in devastating and undeniable detail. The UK parliament, although so far not Boris Johnson’s government, has declared the situation genocide.
International attention on this issue tends to focus on the sprawling network of internment camps and prisons where between one and three million people have been confined. Rightly so. These mass detentions are shameful and those responsible must be held to account. Reports of forced sterilisation, systematic torture and rape must be urgently investigated. The severity of these alleged abuses cannot simply be shrugged off or deemed to be below some arbitrary line that might warrant concern.
But the horrors of Xinjiang are not confined to the high concrete walls of the camps. The entire region has been transformed into what amounts to an open-air prison for the Uyghurs and people from other ethnic minorities. Checkpoints and surveillance cameras blanket the cities. Facial recognition technology and mandatory location-tracking apps on mobile phones allow constant, real-time monitoring of the cities’ inhabitants. Party cadres from China’s ethnic majority Han population are encouraged to stay overnight with Uyghur families, who are predominantly Muslim, and monitor them for signs of “extremism”, which might include praying or declining to eat pork or drink alcohol.