China accused of spending $620,000 to hide human rights abuses against Uyghur people

Beijing: According to an investigative report published in The Australian Financial Review, an Australian-based publication, China is paying influencers and production companies to spread propaganda against Uyghur Muslims, a minority community in the country.

The report points out that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is spending as much as USD 620,000 to create and spread propaganda and counter global efforts to expose human rights abuses against the Uyghur people.

The publication also revealed that the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin is one of the companies that has also received finance from the government.

Xinjiang local government tenders for operations on Douyin include a 306,000-yuan (USD 64,000) contract won in July 2021 by a company whose founder is a member of multiple organisations linked to the United Front Work Department, an arm of the CCP that conducts influence operations outside the party.

Among various activities, the body has created short films and novels to push CCP lines about Xinjiang.

To counter global efforts and to white-wash its image, China has come up with a tender, across a range of media formats in late 2020, for a project named 'Xinjiang is a good place,' and other multiple projects. They also come up with the project, 'tourism promotional film' which was won by Xinjiang Yaci Culture Development Co. for nearly 3 million yuan.

The Financial Review worked with cybersecurity and intelligence company Internet 2.0, which compiled many of the tenders from publicly available sources, known as open-source intelligence. Wai-Ling Yeung, a Perth-based researcher, former head of Chinese studies at Curtin University and professional translator helped translate many documents from Mandarin to English, according to The Australian Financial Review.

Eight tender documents, most of which are associated with the Xinjiang government and various local party entities, reveal hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on campaigns to drown out dissenting voices against the CCP and paint a propaganda picture of harmony in the region.

The censorship is not limited to China's boundaries as TikTok and Douyin's parent company, ByteDance, have sparked concern because of the company's links to the CCP and its censorship practices.

This has included the shadow-banning of videos on topics such as Black Lives Matter and the blocking of accounts that spoke out about the detention of Uyghur Muslims in China.

Earlier, on December 2, Forbes magazine reported that TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the CCP accumulated millions of followers and views critiquing American politics ahead of the midterm elections without any disclosure the posts were by a foreign government.

"What you're seeing open on the Douyin side points to a very significant problem with China-based social media apps, where it's just normal, it's expected, and it's not even hidden that they would run propaganda. It's a common understanding of how China's social media apps have to support the narrative," reported The Australian Financial Review.

China is often criticized for its genocidal policy against Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic Turkish group that inhabits Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the country.

-IANS Inputs