CNN editors whitewash Chinese crimes in Xinjiang

As President Joe Biden prepared for his virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday evening, CNN continued a streak of minimizing and dismissing criticisms of the communist regime from current NBA star Enes Kanter, a former Chinese dissident, and the global business community.

CNN posted an “opinion” story by Nury Turkel last Wednesday titled “I was born in a Chinese ‘reeducation camp.’ I’m watching history repeat itself.” Turkel, a senior fellow at the right-of-center Hudson Institute, wrote that he was born inside a Uighur detention center during the Cultural Revolution, “a period of totalitarian zeal: Almost anyone suspected of not being adequately communist was beaten, jailed or killed. Religious and ethnic minorities were particular targets.” Turkel warned that modern-day China resembles his nightmarish childhood, and that “many of the products enjoyed by Western countries are made by interned Uyghurs in China. According to several reports, Uyghur forced labor contributes significantly to the world economy — particularly solar-panel manufacturing and cotton-growing industries.”

But CNN posted an unsigned “Editor’s Note” at the bottom of the article, essentially exonerating China of Turkel’s charges:

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied any allegations of crimes — including forced labor and forced sterilization — against the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples. It claims it is providing the Uyghurs with education at “vocational training centers” while assisting in deradicalization efforts to combat alleged terrorism.

Yet, few human rights authorities question the reality of China’s exploitation of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province. “The government of China has detained between one and three million Uyghurs—an ethnic and religious minority living in northwestern China—in detention camps and other facilities where they are reportedly subject to mistreatment, torture, and forced labor,” according to the human rights watchdog Freedom House. The U.S. State Department fleshed out the list of human rights abuses perpetrated against the nation’s Uighur population by the Chinese Communist Party to include “arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians; forced sterilization, coerced abortions, and more restrictive application of China’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained; forced labor; and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”