- [Main Speaker] Every country on this planet has a story
about its founding,
whether it's about a group of rebels
trampling the global superpower.
- [Man] Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
- [Main Speaker] Or, a passivist delivering independence
for the second largest country on the planet.
- [Man] And, he's been called
the most powerful man of the 20th century.
- Or, some dude pulling out a sword from a rock.
Usually, somewhat fabricated and polished ideas
of where the country came from, what it stands for.
- [All] Hail King Arthur. Long live the king.
- But, China's story is different.
China's story is a new story and it is tightly controlled.
(people shouting)
It's a story that is being used as a weapon,
a weapon to subjugate millions of people,
to eliminate ancient cultures,
to expand China's borders farther
than they've ever pushed before.
It's a founding myth that can't be challenged within China.
And, it has been so heavily pedaled
and thoroughly implanted into the Chinese psyche,
that most people believe that China actually looks like this
and that it has always looked like this,
but China doesn't look like this.
China actually looks a lot more like this,
but only if you look at the real history, the facts,
and the evidence,
which is something you can't really do within China.
So, instead, the communist party has created
and weaponized the myth of this over the past 70 years
to erase these borders, to build islands,
to threaten neighbors,
and to undertake one of the largest assimilation projects
in human history.
It's a project that has cost them trillions of dollars
and has been responsible for countless,
horrific human rights violations,
all in the name of preserving a pretend version of history.
A version that China believes
will keep the communist party in power
and make China the richest, most powerful country on Earth.
And, what's scary is it just might work.
- [Narrator 2] This is the history of the CCP.
- [Narrator 3] Xi Jinping does not want you to know.
- Several mosques have been destroyed
in China's far Western region of Xinjiang.
- [Woman] Xinjiang, Xinjiang.
- [Narrator 2] One of Xinjiang's holiest sites...
- Is not only cracking down on Muslims,
but on other religions as well.
- [Female Reporter] One of the most common sites
is the Chinese leaders' smiling face.
- One of the world's most ambitious construction projects
is going on in secret.
- Will not let foreign journalists
visit those islands in the South China Sea.
(man speaking in Chinese)
- Okay, pause for a second.
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Now, let's dive into this kind of heavy
but important story about China.
Okay, before we dive in,
I wanna just make it clear
that I'm aware that all countries do this thing,
this thing of weaponizing their history
to make themselves look good
and totally justify terrible things.
- [Inigo] You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.
- This video is about China.
- [Westley] You seem a decent fellow. And, I hate to die.
- So, I keep talking about this Chinese narrative,
this Chinese myth,
what is it?
Well, you could hear me talk about it
or we could go right to the horse's mouth
and listen to this guy, Xi Jinping,
who's probably the best salesman for the Chinese story.
Here, he is giving a speech
where he starts out with his boldest claim of all
that China is this 5,000 year old civilization.
- [Female Interpreter] With a history
of more than 5,000 years,
our nation created a splendid civilization.
- But, according to his story, in 1840,
outsider Europeans came in
and tore apart his unified country
- [Female Interpreter] A China was plunged into the darkness
of domestic turmoil and foreign aggression.
- And, now, China is fighting back.
- [Female Interpreter] We must be ready to fight,
build our ability,
and keep striving to secure new victories in this struggle.
- So, the modern communist party of China
is engaged in a project to restore the greatness of China,
to make China great again.
Okay, right,
but this is just a political speech.
Why do we care
if this guy's romanticizing the history a little bit?
It doesn't really matter, right?
No, actually, it does matter.
- Pam, take a chill pill.
- What I wanna show you is that Xi Jinping
and the communist party use this story
to justify terrible things,
mass assimilation of people to be controlled
by the central government of Beijing.
So, to do this, let me just quickly go back,
and we can do a time lapse
of this region of Asia
and what it looked like over the past few thousand years
to sort of fact check Xi Jinping.
- [Male Narrator] Here is China,
cradle of civilization in Asia.
- What we think of as Chinese culture
or Chinese civilization
has indeed been around for thousands of years.
It was born here along the Yangtze River
where a lot of the language, political systems, writing,
art,
all of the traditions sort of originated.
But, from there, the idea of a contiguous unified China
becomes kind of a myth.
I'm gonna put the modern borders of China on this map,
so that you can see what really is happening here.
Over thousands of years,
if you were to look at this territory,
you would see all sorts of land configurations.
Looking at this,
you can see that China goes from these periods of unity
to periods of total division.
Over the past several thousand years,
China has gone from a bunch of divided kingdoms
to periods of total unity
where lots of good things happened,
technology, agriculture, unity, power.
During times of division, bad things happened.
The country was in chaos,
there was destruction, there was war, there was lawlessness.
And, this just keeps on happening for thousands of years,
a seemingly endless cycle of unity and then division.
Xi Jinping is very right
that out of this region,
during some of these unified periods,
came like real serious advancements
in shipping, and math, and like gun powder,
and all of these things that like have informed
how we've all developed as a world.
This part of Eastern Asia was definitely on the forefront,
but it was never one contiguous China
for thousands of years.
And, the upshot was very clear.
Unity meant prosperity, and technology,
and all these good things.
And, disunity equals chaos and bad things.
Okay, so it's now the 1700s,
and, over in Europe,
the new fad is imperialism.
- Imperialism.
- [Man 2] Imperialism.
- [Man 3] Right, yeah.
- As European countries
who are looking for more land
so that they can expand their borders,
send their armies, and everyone's doing it.
It's the French, it's the British,
it's the Spanish,
it's even the Japanese are starting
to get on board with this.
And, over here, in today what we call China,
they had once again slipped into a period
of serious disunity.
They were divided, but this time it came
with an extra dose of humiliation.
- [Narrator 3] It's not for nothing
that the period stretching around a hundred years
from the 1840s to the 1940s
is known as China's century of humiliation.
- This era of disunity in China came from outsiders.
You can see this political cartoon,
all of these barbarians at the door,
vying to carve up and slice up China for their own profit.
China was once again in the dumps,
and it was here,
while European and Japanese powers
were dividing up their land,
that China learned its second crucial lesson,
not just that unity is better,
but that if you want to survive in this brave new world,
you have to play by the new rules.
And, those rules were very clearly laid out by
these European empires,
defined borders, a patriotic agenda,
assimilating other cultures into their own.
This was the playbook the Europeans were playing by
and it was working.
Okay, so fast forward now.
It's like the 1900s.
It's the beginning of the communist revolution
that would eventually envelop this entire country.
The communist leaders were small still at this point.
And, they used this century of humiliation, and division,
as well as this general lesson of unity equals prosperity,
to rally the people for a new cause.
The revolutionaries like we've been sliced up
and divided by all of these foreign powers.
And, when we're divided, we fail,
remember, exhibit A, B, and C.
So, these communist leaders went off
and created this grand vision of a united China.
A story that China had actually always been united.
They framed it in terms of this former glory
of what China used to be,
what it was before the outsiders came in,
a grandiose vision of the past that never really existed.
I mean, again, this sounds pretty darn familiar.
- We will make America strong again, proud again,
safe again, great again.
- And, that became the grand plan
of the communist revolution in China,
to make China United again,
despite the fact that China
had never really been fully united,
not like this,
but the story, this vision,
was a potent rallying cry.
China would never be cut up again, never humiliated.
It would have defined borders
ethnic purity, cultural assimilation.
And, so for the last 70 years,
that's the great project that China
and the communist party have been undertaking,
creating their own great empire,
controlled by a central authority.
This project has coincided with China getting rich,
pulling a hundred million people out of poverty,
and becoming a global superpower all just in a few decades.
All of this has given the government
a lot of resources with which to execute their project
of forcefully uniting a swath of land
that isn't and has never been united.
And, I wanna show you what that looks like.
- The issue of China ruling over autonomous regions
is controversial.
So, what are China's autonomous regions?
And, are they really all that autonomous?
- This is the map that most people
are familiar with when they think of China.
But, this outline doesn't tell you the whole story,
because nearly half of this land is considered autonomous,
super jargony term.
What does that even mean?
There are over 56 ethnicities in China.
Most of them concentrated far away from Beijing,
like over here in Tibet, or over here in Xinjiang.
When those communist leaders
were setting up their new unified China empire,
they kind of admitted like, okay,
there are a lot of cultures, and languages,
and identities within this country,
we should let these people govern themselves.
Not entirely, of course.
They'd still have to answer to Beijing with certain things,
but they would have autonomy, autonomous regions,
but many of these semi autonomous regions, like Xinjiang,
Tibet, and southern Mongolia,
these places were never originally a part
of any conception of China.
They were forcefully absorbed by the Chinese communist party
during its nation building project
like in the past 70 years.
Okay, let's get specific here.
Xinjiang is a region that is very far from Beijing,
not just geographically,
but also culturally.
It is a huge region, roughly the size of Alaska,
has 25 million people,
and half of those people identify as Uyghur
which are mostly Muslims who are from a Turkic descent
not like a Han Chinese descent.
They come from a different culture.
The street signs are not in any Chinese language.
They're in like the Uyghur Turkic language.
The architecture looks a lot more at home in like Istanbul
than it does in Beijing.
And, five times a day,
the streets fill with the sound of prayer.
Xinjiang was an independent Republic twice before,
but eventually it was overthrown by China.
Eight years after China grabbed Xinjiang,
the Chinese government did the same thing
to an even more remote region
at the highest plateau in the world, Tibet.
They annexed this place
that is three times the size of Texas.
It has its own very distinct language, culture, identity,
and does not identify or connect with Beijing.
And, back in the day, again,
when China wasn't rich and powerful,
they couldn't really wrangle these regions
until suddenly they got rich really fast.
- [Female Reporter 2] Second in GDP,
only to the United States.
- And, for the past 30 to 40 years,
China has been pouring money
and people into these two regions
to make them more like China.
It's kind of like the geopolitical version
of gentrification.
It's basically where non-Chinese societies
are subsumed by societal norms of Han Chinese culture,
because of a bunch of militarization and money.
So, in Tibet, you see this in the Tibetan schools
that are only teaching in Mandarin
not in the traditional Tibetan language
or you see it in Xinjiang,
where the mosques are torn down
for being too Islamic,
and are rebuilt in traditional Chinese styles.
Oh, and it starts to get a lot worse.
In Xinjiang, the Uyghurs are literally taken away
by the millions
and forced into concentration camps
where they're supposedly forcibly taught Chinese values.
The government is involved
in a mass sterilization project
where they are forcibly inserting IUDs
and other birth control forms
to basically run them into extinction.
And, not just like 10 people, like millions of people.
China originally gave these people autonomy,
because they recognized that they had their own culture
and they wanted to retain it.
But, now, they've totally thrown that deal out the window.
The way this presents most commonly in these regions
is just the presence of military and police.
There are checkpoints everywhere.
There's restricted movement, there's constant surveillance.
And, every year that passes by becomes harder.
These people resist, they fight back.
They commit acts of terror.
And, in response, China sends more military, more police,
and more surveillance equipment.
In 2018, China spent $10 billion in security in Xinjiang.
That's almost double the year before
and 10 times as much as it was 10 years previous.
3 billion of those dollars go into these reeducation camps.
That's four times more than the previous year.
I mean, it's ramping up.
They're pouring money into these regions.
Per person, China spends 3,100 Yuan on security in Tibet,
2,400 in Xinjiang,
per person.
Compare that to the national average of 763 Yuan per person
and you can see that every single person in these regions
is worth a lot more in terms of the cost
of making them assimilate.
So, the question is why?
Why is China doing this?
Why are they investing so much money
into occupying and forcibly assimilating these people?
Well, there are several geopolitical
and economic reasons why
the communist party wants to do this.
First off, the resources.
Xinjiang produces 87% of the country's cotton, for example.
And, when it comes to Tibet,
you can see that they provide a buffer
between China and India.
Tibet also has the largest fresh water supply in the world,
given where they are, so high up.
China also uses these regions
as a part of their big infrastructure initiative,
the belt and road initiative.
They use infrastructure to connect these regions
to continue to fortify their economic standing in the world.
But, I believe the real reason is this myth,
this myth of a united China,
because a United China is a strong China.
A divided China is a chaotic China.
This has been the rallying cry for 70 years,
but it's not just assimilation within their borders.
This myth has also fueled and justified
China's adventures in expansion elsewhere.
- [Male Reporter] This is the South China Sea.
- China says it will fight to the very end
to prevent Taiwan from being declared independent.
- [Male Reporter 2] The former British colony
is being smashed into submissions.
- So, now you have China building islands
in the South China Sea
claiming that this entire ocean belongs to them.
Oh, that's just China reclaiming what was rightfully theirs,
because, after all,
this ocean's been theirs for 5,000 years,
they're just reclaiming it.
Violating its promise to let Hong Kong stay independent
and absorbing it into China piece by piece,
oh, that's just China restoring sovereignty
over these islands
that Britain stole in like the 1800s.
How about an invasion of Taiwan to unite it forcibly
with China?
All they're doing is restoring China back to the way it was.
But, again, this was never the case.
This is a story constructed 70 years ago
to unify a country that was on the brink of collapse.
This story today is weaponized
and used by Xi Jinping and the communist party
to justify almost everything that they're doing.
- [Female Interpreter] A Xi Jin national rejuvenation
will be no walk in the park.
It will take more than drum beating
and the gong clanging to get there.
Everyone of us in the party
must be prepared to work even harder toward this goal.
- Okay, so to end this, I just wanna say one last thing,
which is I have no interest in bashing on China
and Chinese culture.
There is so much beauty
that comes from this region of the world.
And, as I mentioned, every one of the countries out there
including my own
are guilty of a weaponized history.
The reason I'm concerned and focused on this
is because this mythical fake story that China is using.
It can't be fact checked within China.
So, instead, the Chinese government
is able to use this story as a weapon
to justify the oppression of its people,
the grabbing of land,
and, honestly, looking at it,
how it's playing out,
it's just a modern day version
straight out of the old European imperialistic handbook.