Farage Compares Communist China to Nazi Germany over Treatment of Minorities, Dissenting Voices

A man drags a Chinese flag daubed with a Nazi swastika along the ground during a protest b
Leon Neal/AFP via Getty Images

Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has said that the West must confront China over its human rights abuses, saying that Communist China’s treatment of minorities and those with dissenting voices is comparable to conditions under Nazi Germany.

Speaking to supporters on Sunday, Mr Farage said that while it is essential that the West fights Chinese hegemony on economic and security fronts, the Communist State’s human rights abuses must also be exposed, warning that unchallenged, China could become the dominant world power.

Sino-sceptics, Mr Farage said, “have not been making the argument, properly, and fully, about the plight of the Falun Gong, the plight of the Uighurs”.

“The brutal truth that it is utterly right to compare the way the Chinese government treats minorities, treats different points of view, within its country… with what the National Socialists did between 1933 and 1945.

“There is a form of state-sponsored genocide that is going on in China, and we’ve done too little to expose this.”

The Brexit Party leader related reports from Thursday’s BBC radio episode of David Aaronvich’s The Briefing Room entitled: What is happening to the Uighurs in China?

Up to 1.5 million of the 12 million population of the northwestern province of Xinjiang — home to the Sunni Muslim-majority Uighur population — is believed to have been imprisoned in ‘reeducation camps’ in the past decade.

Oppression against the minorities started at around the rise of the Communist revolution, with greater the crackdowns increasing in the past decade, according to the report.

Josh Chin, Deputy China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, told the BBC of the “ubiquitous” nature of the surveillance. Chin said that there are not just police checkpoints every 200 yards, but visual and audio surveillance throughout the city. Entry into public spaces and building requires identity card scanning and facial recognition. Virtually every movement by citizens is tracked; there is not a moment where Uighurs are not being observed when out in public.

Asked of the major tech players involved in the Communist State’s business of surveillance, the WSJ bureau chief named Huawei, the Chinese State-controlled tech firm that Britain has recently frozen out of its 5G.

It is not just in public that minorities are observed, however, with Dr Jo Smith Finley, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University, detailing the Communist State’s “visit” programme. Communist Party officials move into the homes of Uigur families for nine to 14 days a month to observe them, where, in many cases, the men had already been interred in a reeducation camp. Visitors are trained to encourage the Uigurs “to open up and reveal their disloyalty to the State”.

Assessments are made whether individuals should be sent to reeducation camps, where they are indoctrinated and made to renounce their religion. Former detainees have said that those deemed not reformed are either sentenced to long prison terms or sent off for slave labour in another part of China. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute released a report in February that claimed Uighurs had been forced into slavery to make products in the supply chains for well-known Chinese brands like Huawei, as well as Western brands Volkswagon, BMW, Apple, and the Gap.

BBC journalist Andrew Marr grilled Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming on Sunday over footage of people being shaved, blindfolded, and forced onto trains in Xinjiang. The ambassador refused to give a clear reaction, other than to blame “Western intelligence” for “making up this false accusation against China”.

Mr Farage also raised the reports by the China Tribunal of “forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience” belonging to the Falun Gong, a meditation and spiritualist movement.

One Falun Gong former prisoner who escaped having her organs harvested told the MirrorOnline last month: “The western world funded this persecution by investing in China.”

“The (Chinese Communist Party) now has the power to expand this mass murder to Uighur and the people of Hong Kong,” Jennifer Zeng warned.

Mr Farage again called for a boycott of Chinese products, if not to campaign for technological and medical independence from Chinese producers, then to at least stop funding the oppressive regime.

“If you go on buying Chinese goods, this evil regime will get richer and will spread itself across and become the dominant player in the world. It’s up to us,” Farage warned.

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