Today marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heavily criticized China and Russia’s authoritarianism, comparing both countries to Germany during World War II. Pompeo said:
Today Russia – led by a former KGB officer once stationed in Dresden ‒ invades its neighbors and slays political opponents. It suppresses the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In Eastern Ukraine and occupied Crimea, Russian authorities use police raids and torture against Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians who oppose Russia’s aggression. In Chechnya, anyone considered “undesirable” by the authorities simply disappears.
In China, the Chinese Communist Party – the CCP – is shaping a new vision of authoritarianism. It uses tactics and methods to suppress its own people that would be familiar to former East Germans. The People’s Liberation Army encroaches on the sovereignty of China’s neighbors. The Party denies travel privileges to critics – even German lawmakers – who condemn its abysmal human rights record. The CCP harasses and surveils activists from Xinjiang and Hong Kong who have sought refuge in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.
Pompeo had previously criticized China by comparing it to George Orwell’s “1984.”
“The Chinese Communist Party is detaining and abusing more than one million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in the Xinjiang. It’s the western region of China,” Pompeo said at an event in October. “The pages of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ are coming to life there. I wish the NBA would acknowledge that.”
Pompeo at that time explained some of what the Trump administration has done to punish China’s authoritarian behavior:
Just this week, the United States made a decision. We put visa restrictions on those responsible for the some of the human rights violations that took place in China and that continue to take place today.
And we’ve stopped American companies from exporting certain products to Chinese tech companies that are enabling these very human rights abuses. We did these things under President Trump’s direction for the simple reason that we know Americans do not want their companies building the machinery of a totalitarian surveillance state.
China has garnered increasing news coverage in the past few months as reports about its Uyghur and other Muslim-minority internment camps makes its way to the West. As The Daily Wire has previously reported, China has more than 1 million people in re-education camps, which it claims are educational facilities and not prisons.
But those who have escaped from the country tell a different story. One woman recently said that prisoners are routinely tortured and sexually abused. She said other prisoners who react in any way to the abuse are punished.
Another recent report suggests the camps are being used to harvest organs for the communist country’s lucrative transplant industry, which performs upwards of 100,000 transplants a year, thanks to “medical tourism.” People fly to China and spend tens of thousands of dollars for an organ transplant that would be more difficult to obtain elsewhere.
China has claimed the organs are from death-row inmates who voluntarily provide them, but the number of transplants performed each year and the ease at which an organ can be obtained in the country suggest this explanation is not possible.