Probably the most interesting and most powerful is the effort to counter the criticism of and change the perception of China’s treatment of the Muslim Uyghur minority.
This was chronicled by the NY Times in its April 5, 2021 online edition and the print edition of April 6, 2021. (See: https://nyti.ms/2Ovbnn1, which is also a photo source).
The Chinese employ every method they can. The picture above shows a propaganda sign in Xinjiang.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations “More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China’s Xinjiang region. The reeducation camps are just one part of the government’s crackdown on Uyghurs.” (See: https://on.cfr.org/3rT5cqo, which is another photo source). The March 1 article highlights three key points:
- About eleven million Uyghurs—a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group—live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
- The Chinese government has imprisoned more than one million people since 2017 and subjected those not detained to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labor, and forced sterilizations.
- The United States sanctioned officials and blacklisted dozens of Chinese agencies linked to abuses in Xinjiang. In 2021, it determined that China’s actions constitute genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Sound of Music it's not - but maybe you can fool some of the people some of the time. The Business Insider (see: https://bit.ly/3dHbIvi, a photo source) headed their April 6, 2021 article "China made a 'La La Land' - inspired propaganda musical about the life of Uyghur Muslims, which omits all mention of mass surveillance and oppression.
The “Bollywood” style musical is designed to portray an idealistic picture of the Uyghurs and their loving assimilation as part of China. “The notion that Uyghurs can sing and dance so therefore there is no genocide — that’s just not going to work,” said Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American lawyer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “Genocide can take place in any beautiful place.”
The movie is thorough in it staging. While it tells the story of three young men from different ethnic groups – Uyghur, Kazakh and of course the majority Han Chinese, it does a great job of eliminating any hint of Islamic influence because … “Young Uyghur men are clean-shaven and seen chugging beers, free of the beards and abstinence from alcohol that the authorities see as signs of religious extremism. Uyghur women are seen without traditional head scarves.”
The movie is only one element of the campaign. Social media is particularly active on FaceBook and Twitter.
Not even textbooks are spared and are also a target of the propaganda. The China Global TV Network (www.cgtn.com) or CGTN released a documentary purporting that textbooks which had been approved and used in Xinjiang elementary and middle schools for over a decade were suddenly deemed subversive.
The People’s Republic certainly knows how to synergize their information related capabilities to push their point across.
From the relentless nature of the campaign, it would appear
that the PRC is far more concerned with Measures of Production (MOP) rather
than Measures of Effectiveness (MOE). Perhaps an indication of how the program is not working would be the population count of the reeducation camps shown on the map and photo below.
