China would have you think that there's no such thing as concentration and labor camps for their ethnic Uighurs and that western sanctions expressing opposition to them don't bother them, either.

But then ... there's this:

BEIJING, Dec 26 (Reuters) - China has replaced Chen Quanguo, who as Communist Party chief in the Xinjiang region oversaw a security crackdown targeting ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims in the name of fighting religious extremism.

Chen, in his post since 2016, will move to another role and Ma Xingrui, governor of the coastal economic powerhouse Guangdong province since 2017, has replaced him, the official Xinhua News Agency said on Saturday. It gave no other details.

United Nations researchers and human rights activists estimate more than one million Muslims have been detained in camps in western China's Xinjiang region. China rejects accusations of abuse, describing the camps as vocational centres designed to combat extremism, and in late 2019 said all people in the camps had "graduated".

...which pretty well tells us that yes, the camps exist, and yes, the sanctions are working.

Congress last week added to those sanctions by passing on a bipartisan vote more restrictions on buying slave-labor-produced goods from Xinjiang. While authentic China experts, such as Steven W. Mosher at the Population Research Institute, have pointed out that the move was largely a repetition of laws already on the books, this response signals that it certainly was unwelcome news to Beijing.

That said, Beijing responded about like one would expect Beijing to respond. They got rid of a particular face, a party operative, a functionary, a hack, while leaving in place the guy Chen answered to, none other than Winnie the Pooh of delicate sensitivities himself, Xi Jinping. Anyone who thinks anyone acts on their own in a top-down communist regime is full of nonsense.

What's more, we didn't see the words 'fired' or 'jailed' coming as the next chapter in this party hack's life from the Chicom press releases. Chen's been moved to some other position, a promotion for all we know, some kind of kicked upstairs. Goons who've done the dirty work tend to get rewarded, not punished, given that they know where all the bodies, literally, are buried. 

The removal of this thug is nothing but public relations, a move from the old gray men of Beijing to claim that they've changed their ways.

Nobody sane should believe this for a minute. The jailing of Uighurs is still happening and they've gotten away with it. The only thing they don't want from this horrible state policy, so redolent of Stalin's mass imprisoning and dislocating of entire populations and classes of peoples is for anyone to criticize them about it. Therefore, more criticism, not less, is the only serious response. Congress should hit them again with another round of sanctions just to show them that shady P.R. gestures will get them into harder sanctions than they've already gotten. Nobody wants to buy slave-produced goods from a vile system that imprisons whole nationalities of people.

Image: Daniel Lobo, via Protesta, on Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0

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