Top Stories

President Xi’s cultural dialogue fails to unite Arab, Persian, Indic, other Asian nations

FORUM Staff

Chinese President Jinping Xi’s first Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations (CDAC), held in mid-May 2019 in Beijing, failed to bring together leaders and citizens across Asia and beyond despite claims by the government to the contrary.

According to Xinhua, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) state-run newspaper, Xi’s “take on civilization has won broad support from conference attendees.” Zhai Kun, a Peking University professor told Xinhua, “When he talked about discarding arrogance and prejudice to treat each other as equals, there was a round of applause.”

Xi’s news conference, however, failed to attract leaders of key nations, refuting such assertions of wide support for Xi’s views on governance. Heads of state from only four of the 47 countries invited participated, The Asia Timesnewspaper reported. Attendees were  from Cambodia, Greece, Singapore and Sri Lanka, the paper said.

Many factors potentially underlie the failure of the conference to attract or unite leaders from India, the Middle East and much of South and Southeast Asia, analysts said. For starters, Xi’s comments on culture equality seem insincere, given the PRC’s treatment of Uighurs in China, where there are roughly 20 million Muslims. The PRC’s creation of so-called reeducation camps in the Xinjiang region patently contradicts Xi’s urging during his keynote address for various countries to respect the cultures of others.

“Over a million people are in these camps,” Scott Busby, deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, told Radio Free Asia in a May 2019 interview. “They are held there against their will, some of them are subject to torture, some of them are subject to cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment. We know that some people have died in the camps. So, clearly, what’s happening in the camps is horrific.”

The theme of CDAC, which was to run May 15-22, was “exchanges and mutual learning among Asian civilizations and a community with a shared future,” according to conference promotional literature.

The PRC’s encouragement of anti-Muslim behavior in general and denigration of religion contradicts Xi’s CDAC pronouncements, as does the May 2019 report in The Guardiannewspaper of the destruction of 31 mosques and two major shrines in Xinjiang between 2016 and 2018.

“Unfortunately, what’s occurring in Xinjiang is consistent with the history of what the Chinese Communist Party has done since it has taken power. The Chinese Communist Party has shown extreme hostility toward all religion since it took power, and that continues to be of great concern to us,” Busby said.

Xi, pictured, put forth a proposal at CDAC, according to Xinhua, to “consolidate the ‘cultural foundation’ of jointly building a community with a shared future for Asia and humanity; treating each other with respect and as equals; appreciating the beauty of all civilizations; adhering to openness, inclusiveness, mutual learning; and keeping pace with the times.”

The PRC also touted CDAC asa platform to pursue “people-to-people exchanges” to promote its One Road, One Belt (OBOR) policy, which further casts doubt on the motives for CDAC, analysts said. OBOR, the PRC’s infrastructure development program, is increasingly being revealed internationally to be a form of “neocolonial diplomacy” that typically ends in debt and strategic entrapment and a long-term PRC presence that often entails military bases in host countries.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button