Washington Deploys Proxies to Xinjiang to Scuttle China’s Giant Infrastructure Project

[image error] Mike Whitney

A Uyghur separatist group that helped to topple the government of Bashar al Assad has declared its intention to return to Xinjiang in order to conduct military operations against the People’s Republic of China. The announcement suggests that Washington and its allies are preparing to open another front in a war that has already plunged large parts of eastern Europe and the Middle East into chaos. The announcement was mostly ignored by the western media, but analysts believe we may have entered a new phase in America’s struggle to preserve its waning hegemony, a phase in which the probability of a direct clash between the United States and China has increased dramatically.

Also, if we assume that Washington’s sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline was designed to prevent the economic integration of Russia with the European Union, then we must assume that the same blueprint will be applied to China. Washington will use its Uyghur proxies to sever the critical arteries that link China to Europe, thus, blocking the rise of a free trade Superstate that would severely undermine US regional influence. This means we should expect a wave of asymmetrical attacks on vital infrastructure aimed at preventing the development of China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative.

[…]

Central Asia is the hill on which the US empire has chosen to die. Even so, a “cornered” Superpower that is armed to the teeth and led by ravenous warhawks can do considerable damage before it is brought to heel. That said, Washington’s focus on Central Asia is thoroughly understandable given the fact that the area is on-track to become the most populous and prosperous region in the world.

[…]

[image error]

Bottom line: The Uighur genocide is a human rights hoax that has been concocted in order to justify future hostilities against the PCR.

 

[image error]

Ron Unz’s view of the Uighur genocide is further reinforced by the group’s suspicious relationship to the CIA which suggests that the militants have been groomed for carrying out Washington’s geopolitical agenda. Check out this excerpt from an article at Global Research:

[…]

High profile Uyghur separatists, like the Xinjiang-born Anwar Yusuf Turani, founder of the East Turkestan Government in exile, is himself living in the state of Virginia, on America’s east coast. Turani has been a willing tool in Washington’s power game with China; in June 1999, he met with president Bill Clinton and asked him to back political movements seeking independence for Xinjiang; and Turani later enjoyed dialogue with Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who promised to support the “fundamental human rights” of “Uyghurs and others living in China”….

Further prominent Uyghur exiles living in America have called for Xinjiang’s independence from China, such as Rebiya Kadeer, a five-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, born in Xinjiang, and who also resides in the US state of Virginia.

[…]

So, a number of Uyghur separatists are “living in Virginia” (as guests of the CIA?) and we are expected to believe that Washington’s only interest is human rights?

Nonsense. The US is obviously arming, training and funding another vicious terrorist organization it intends to use to inflict a “strategic defeat” on China, the same as it is doing to Russia in Ukraine.

This is from an article at the Asia Times:

The rapid collapse of the Syrian Arab Army in the face of the advance of Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham… has drawn attention to the foreign fighters within their ranks. First and foremost among those foreign fighters are the Uyghurs from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They used to fight China as part of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement but rebranded as the Turkistan Islamic Party some years back.

Regardless of whichever name they go by, the… organization has a history of collaborating with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda in support of the quest to carve out a Uyghur state from China. That’s why it was designated as a terrorist group by the UN Security Council….

attacks against Belt and Road projects there or in Pakistan….

[…]

Another factor for observers to keep in mind is the role of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency. The Washington Post reported that GUR played a role in HTS’s blitz across Syria. …Nevertheless, the contemporary GUR is also a CIA project, as the Washington Post reported in late 2023.

The possibility thus arises of the CIA using GUR as a plausibly deniable proxy for managing or at least encouraging the Turkistan Islamist Party’s expansion to the geostrategic Central Asian region between Russia and China. Uyghur separatist threat could reach beyond China’s Xinjiang,Asia Times

[image error]

Of course, this is exactly what’s happening. The CIA is directly involved in hybrid war on China that will include the destruction of soft targets that are essential to complete Beijing’s massive infrastructure project. And what other choice does Washington have? Like Israel, Washington cannot preserve its privileged place in the world order by competing on a level playing field with China that has already overtaken the US in nearly every area of commerce, science and technology. The only way the US can maintain its tenuous grip on power is obliterating anything that threatens its global dominance and then convincing the world that it is just fighting for human rights. Here’s more from the Times of Israel:

Uighur militants have killed hundreds, if not thousands, in attacks inside China in a decades-long insurgency that initially targeted police and other symbols of Chinese authority but in recent years also included civilians. Extremists with knives killed 33 people at a train station in 2014. Abroad, they bombed the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan in September last year; in 2014, they killed 25 people in an attack on a Thai shrine popular with Chinese tourists…..

China is just like the West, its officials say: the country is a victim of terror, and Uighur men are pulled by global jihadi ideology rather than driven by grievances at home.…. Seyit Tumturk, a Uighur activist in Turkey who often speaks to fighters in Syria… said it was impossible for Uighurs militants to liberate Xinjiang…. But he said Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitious project to develop railway lines, ports, and other infrastructure linking various regions to China makes Beijing vulnerable to militant attacks abroad.

The Islamic State took credit in June for kidnapping and killing two Chinese teachers in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, which is a cornerstone of Beijing’s so-called Belt and Road infrastructure project….

Chinese officials and Western analysts alike say that the Uighurs’ experience in the Syrian jihadi melting pot will likely exacerbate violence against “soft” targets outside China. China’s foreign ministry called the Turkistan Islamic Party a security threat for the Middle East. Uighur militants in Syria look to Zionism as model for their homeland,Times of Israel

So—according to the Times of Israel—the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is a ruthless group of bloodthirsty mercenaries who are motivated more by “global jihadi ideology rather than driven by grievances at home”. This is the organization the US has decided to back in its quest to destabilize China. And, notice that the authors of the Times article have drawn the same conclusion as the author of the Asia Times piece, that the Uyghurs MO will be to attack soft targets that will impact critical infrastructure in order to isolate China from the West while US military bases and Pacific alliances tighten the noose on China’s maritime trade.

And what targets will these Asian jihadis choose?

Some analysts like Andrew Korybko think that they will “carry out attacks against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor….. (which) is considered to be the Belt and Road Initiative’s flagship project, Asia Times

But IMHO, I think Washington will attack critical nodes on the China-Europe Freight Train (CEFT) system. Keep in mind, the United States remains fully-committed to preventing the re-emergence of a rival in a region it considers vital to its national security (Central Asia) so, logically, we should expect that it will take extraordinary steps to separate China from Europe and, thus, lay the groundwork for economic strangulation. Here’s more from the The European Financial Review:

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will officially be ten years old in 2023…. A crucial precursor to the BRI, and arguably its most prominent flagship project, the China-Europe Freight Train (CEFT) has already run through its first decade of 2011-21. With 82 routes currently connecting nearly 100 Chinese cities to around 200 cities across 24 European countries and more than a dozen Central, East, and Southeast Asian countries, the CEFT has formed a vast transcontinental freight system spanning both ends of Eurasia. While only 17 freight trains ran from China to Europe in the CEFT’s inaugural year of 2011, 60,000 trains cumulatively will have traversed the Eurasian landmass and its maritime margins by October 16, 2022 when the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) opens in Beijing.

As the CEFT enters its second decade poised for continued growth, a critical question looms: Is Russia’s war against Ukraine disrupting the CEFT, and how? On the one hand, the CEFT has depended heavily on Russia as both the most important terminus and through-corridor accounting for 37 percent of all CEFTs through 2021, leading Germany at 24.3 percent and Poland at 23.4 percent. On the other hand, the CEFT is anchored to a vast network of major and minor cities with grounded flexibility and resilience to weather the Ukraine storm.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 threw a big geopolitical wrench into the CEFT-enabled Eurasian freight network….. The disruption appears major as the war is the biggest European conflict in eight decades, with severe geopolitical consequences…… Some disruption might arise…. as European companies avoid using the Russian Railway, fearing economic sanctions….

As the war in Ukraine keeps geopolitical tensions high, the extensive city-based CEFT network has acquired sufficient resilience from its continued expansion, improved infrastructure, and operational adaptability. These qualities may ensure the CEFT’s sustainability as a Eurasia-wide freight system. Eurasia’s Freight Infrastructure vs. Russia’s War in Ukraine, Chicago Council on Global Affairs

[image error]

While economic sanctions on Russia have reduced freight traffic along the northern route by roughly 50 percent, the makeshift blockade in the Red Sea by the Houthis has dramatically impacted shipping through the Suez Canal. These growing threats to global security have shifted traffic to the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)—which is a trade route from the Black Sea and the Caucasus to the Central Asian steppe. This so called Middle Corridor which ” follows the route of the ancient Silk Road” offers a viable alternative to the northern route but also faces its own security and infrastructure challenges.

Regrettably, we think US foreign policy strategists will focus on this Middle Corridor as a prime chokepoint for disrupting China’s freight service to Europe. Once again, the US cannot prevail in its war against China unless it is able to weaken the country via sanctions, isolation and persistent proxy warfare. Washington is positioning itself to either block or sabotage China’s trade-flows to Europe just like it sabotaged the flow of Russian gas to Europe. We believe that Uyghur jihadists will be used to help conduct these operations.

We also think that Washington will use any overreaction by Beijing as an excuse to deploy the U.S. Navy to block energy shipments to China, thereby preventing the country from accessing the resources it needs to heat its homes and fuel its industries. China imports over 70 percent of its oil which makes it vulnerable to hostile interdiction.

The US used this same strategy against Japan just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, so it fully understands the implications of its actions.

[…]

Via https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/washington-deploys-proxies-to-xinjiang-to-scuttle-chinas-giant-infrastructure-project/