Weaponizing Palestine against China: the “Uyghur genocide” psyop’s use for socdem neocons

This is an excerpt from the book that I’m writing, titled “When tears can’t save them: Why the pro-Palestine movement failed to stop a holocaust, & how it can still win.”

In January 2026, after Trump had kidnapped President Maduro and before he would soon start the Iran war, “human rights” discourse actors made an inflammatory charge against China. A charge that reiterated the narrative about China committing a “genocide” against the Uyghurs inside the Xinjiang province, which these actors had made a similar claim about shortly following October 7. Both statements were published by the UN’s Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, with the UN association serving to give a sense of credibility to researchers who were profoundly biased.

The timing of these kinds of statements is never a coincidence. In this case, the timing was indicative of two goals: to escalate tensions with China, and to turn support for Palestine towards “Uyghur solidarity.” This narrative has not been refuted in the consciousness of the public, meaning it’s critical to explain why the narrative is wrong and why its propagators have a motivation to lie.

It was at the start of 2026 when U.S. foreign policy began to pivot towards China in an unprecedented way, and when the social-democratic wing of U.S. politics started being pushed towards taking an active role in this preparation for war. At the Munich Security Conference in February, when Ocasio-Cortez was asked about countering China’s efforts to retake Taiwan, her response was a long hesitation followed by a vague statement about avoiding conflict. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t sure what position on China would be best to take, but the U.S. empire is absolutely headed for war with China. The Iran war is supposed to be a step towards aggressing against the PRC, with the Democrats only opposing this war because they want to prioritize the larger imperial project. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made this clear when in May, he accused Trump of being too conciliatory towards China, and warned him not to “sell out” Taiwan.

This is the context in which the NGO-industrial complex tried to inflame outrage against China, and turn solidarity with Muslims into a means for advancing Washington’s geopolitical designs. We know this is what motivated the January 2026 report, and all other Uyghur persecution claims from the official “human rights” sources, because these reports are consistently not truthful. This becomes clear when one pays close attention to their rhetoric, which employs highly manipulative rhetorical techniques. For example: the January 2026 statement said that according to the researchers

“There is a persistent pattern of alleged State-imposed forced labour involving ethnic minorities across multiple provinces in China,” the experts said. “In many cases, the coercive elements are so severe that they may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity.”

According to the experts, forced labour in China is enabled through the State-mandated “poverty alleviation through labour transfer” programme, which coerces Uyghurs and members of other minority groups into jobs in Xinjiang and other regions. They are reportedly subjected to systematic monitoring, surveillance and exploitation, with no choice to refuse or change the work due to a pervasive fear of punishment and arbitrary detention. Xinjiang’s five-year plan (2021 to 2025) projects 13.75 million instances of labour transfers. The actual numbers have reached new heights.

Take note of the last part. Pointing to the number of labor transfers is not any kind of evidence for the accusation being made; it’s not directly connected to the subject of the report, because labor transfers are an entirely different thing from forced labor. This was only included to make the charge appear more credible. This is part of a pattern in these assertions about Xinjiang’s Uyghurs.

Such misleading techniques were also present in the report from October 2023:

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) relied extensively on China’s own records when it published its Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

This independent and authoritative assessment found evidence of large-scale arbitrary detention and systematic use of invasive surveillance on the basis of religion and ethnicity; severe and undue restrictions to legitimate cultural and religious practices, identity and expression, including reports of destruction of religious sites; torture, ill-treatment and sexual and gender-based violence, including forced abortion and sterilisation; enforced disappearances and family separations; and forced labour.

It says that this is all supported by China’s records, but where did the researchers get their information that supposedly showed abuses? I do not ask this to argue that an idea must be false simply because of the source behind it; if the organizations and individuals behind these abuse claims were to have actual evidence for their assertions, they would of course be correct regardless. But because they don’t have this evidence, and have only made empty assertions, in this case the sources do matter to the question of whether the claim is true.

In both the 2026 and 2023 statements, it’s clear that the OHCHR and its experts drew heavily or even exclusively from sources other than on-the-ground investigations by the researchers involved. The 2026 statement describes the experts as having “concern regarding persistent allegations of forced labor,” while the one from 2023 says the researchers largely got their information from China’s internal records (which is another way of framing unrelated data as evidence for the desired narrative).

They didn’t get the information through going to Xinjiang and documenting evidence, or from video and photographic footage of abuses against Uyghurs (since none exists). They got it through compiling allegations made by the organizations that have led the effort at popularizing this narrative. These organizations and their spokespeople have come out to tell the “genocide” story about Xinjiang many times in the past, and this has provided the U.S. war machine’s “human rights” wing with a standard playbook for whenever the Uyghur accusation becomes opportune to repeat.

Both of these statements copied from a series of allegations that were put forth during the early 2020s by the Worker Rights Consortium, the supposedly pro-worker organization that pressured U.S. apparel companies to leave Xinjiang. In June 2020, when the WRC announced the creation of the Organization to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region, the formation’s steering committee brought in numerous anti-China organizations that were directly funded by the U.S. government; in addition to Uyghur diaspora groups like the World Uyghur Congress, these orgs included entities that present themselves as allies of the workers movement, such as Anti-Slavery International and International Labor Rights Forum.

Like the WUC, ILRF is sponsored by the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, while ASI is funded by the U.S. State Department and the European Commission. These are the connections that show what motivates the NGOs which have popularized the “Uyghur genocide” story.

A critical figure in the origins of Washington’s Uyghur narrative is Adrian Zenz. He was the Christian Zionist who, during Trump 2.0’s solidification of the anti-China cold war effort, helped spread the notion that China had detained millions of Uyghurs. When the time came to lobby companies into leaving China, Zenz did something that indicated he wasn’t as confident in his assertions as he claimed to be: in March 2020, he sent a letter to international labor monitoring bodies requesting that they stop doing any new audits inside Xinjiang.

The letter’s argument was that “worker interviews, which are essential to the methodology of any credible auditor or certification body, cannot generate reliable information about labor conditions.” Yet when Zenz was trying to find proof for the Uyghur genocide, his most direct research had been individual interviews. Zenz got the idea about millions of Uyghurs being detained from the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which in 2018 came out with a report that relied on interviews with only eight individuals. This was the extent of the report’s truly hard investigations. Everything else was about framing the facts to fit a predetermined conclusion, like every other one of these studies has done.

When it’s made clear how poor the foundational research behind the Uyghur narrative is, the tactics of the propaganda campaign’s participants become easier to overcome. The perceived strength of their evidence comes from how frequently they tend to cite each other, and recycle the same unfounded assertions so that their list of sources can appear to be abundant.

Everything that they say traces back to a handful of studies which are inherently shoddy, because the anti-China agitators who’ve conducted them have actively discouraged listening to Uyghurs other than the ones who have a bias against China’s government. Zenz and his partners showed this hostility towards honest empirical investigation when they said that more interviews of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs shouldn’t take place; and we know that Zenz’ view on this represents the attitudes of the other core anti-China Uyghur researchers, because they’ve also ignored the great support for the Communist Party among the Uyghur population.

Within the narrative, it’s not important that China’s ethnic minorities have benefited from the economic explosion alongside the Han majority, or that the CPC has instituted major initiatives to raise up these minority communities. It doesn’t matter that these communities have been exempt from restrictions like the one-child policy. It doesn’t matter that preserving the traditions of Chinese civilization’s local cultures has been a core part of Chinese policy goals from the PRC’s start. Any aspect of history or present conditions that doesn’t fit the narrative is viewed as covering up a dark hidden reality.

“Certainly there are going to be differences of opinion, there are going to be problems sometimes in policy implementation,” said Professor Kenneth Hammond in 2021 about Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, “but to suggest that these things rise to the level of something that could in any way be characterized as genocide goes against not only the formal policies, but also all the practical experience that we can actually document…This is reflected in the attitudes that people have in Xinjiang. We’re not talking about what does the Chinese government tell us about the attitudes of people in Xinjiang, but even western public opinion surveys, studies like the Ash Foundation [cited here], a Harvard study of public opinion in China, which includes Xinjiang, includes Tibet, includes these areas that are sometimes problematized in western accounts, where there’s clearly overwhelming support for the central government, for the policies of that government.”

These policies include the educational projects and vocational training centers for the Uyghur people, which have given ample new opportunities to the youth in these communities—and thereby ended the Islamist terror attacks that used to regularly occur in China. Washington, and its partners in Turkey’s Uyghur Salafist radicalization network, have still been unable to reintroduce this violence to Xinjiang. All that they can do now is try to use Palestine as a cynical vehicle for advancing their goals, like Erdogan does through his false declarations of solidarity with Palestine.

To interpret the assertions that the empire’s NGO wing makes about Xinjiang, simply apply the principle that “every accusation is a confession.” This is the observation that’s become popular in relation to the state of “Israel,” and to defend the pro-Palestine cause from co-optation, we must recognize that it’s also true for the United States government. This is how one graduates from anti-Zionist consciousness to anti-imperialist consciousness. And many of the workers can be turned against the empire’s propaganda machine in this way, if they’re exposed to the reality of which class interests are behind the Uyghur narrative.

This is a propaganda campaign that’s been led by the same capitalist saboteurs who make unions hostile towards the laborers they’re supposed to represent; when the Coalition to End Forced Labor put forth testimonies before Congress in September 2020, one of the coalition’s speakers was the AFL-CIO’s international director Cathy Feingold. Feingold is the former foreign policy director of the Ford Foundation, the nonprofit which assisted in CIA destabilization campaigns against Indonesia and Chile on behalf of its billionaire donors. Because of these testimonies, the U.S. business pullout from Xinjiang left much of the Uyghur workers jobless, which fits with everything we know about the figures who crafted the “forced labor” lie.

The false leaders in the working-class movement, from the labor bureaucrats to the socdem politicians, seek to portray themselves as allies of Palestine. In reality, they’re filling a critical role in a global war on the working class. A war which is most pronounced within Gaza, and will only keep intensifying unless we fight back against it.

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