by Willy Wimmer, former State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defence

These days, when you perceive the massive pre-arrangement of the press for a Western confrontation with China, you will experience some kind of déjà vu. The old conf licts are
brought to emerge in order to destabilise China. These are disturbing signs. In connection with the war in Afghanistan and the deployment of the German Armed Forces, a former German Defence Minister blustered that “Germany will be defended at the Hindu Kush”, but now it is getting serious against China. The guns of the press are positioned along the obvious lines of conflict by the headquarters in Washington. The Chinese province of Xingjiang and the Turkic peoples living there are brought into position against the central government in Beijing.

The situation is downright prepared for a major conflict. A conflict, by the way, whose skeleton
has developed muscles for almost thirty years. With these is now being played because the Chinese mega-project of the “Silk Road” is visibly bringing Euro- Asian continent together. This will weaken permanently the American dominance of global trade routes and the business
of sanctions for the destruction of states in peacetime. The events in Hong Kong show impressively that the corners and edges of China are being shaken forcefully. Anglo-Japanese plans to carve out at least eight new states of the large and unified China have been known for a long time. This would put the growing global factor China temporarily on hold. In the foreseeable future, we will be able to see on the well-known “hot spots” in China, where there still will be played with fire and the greatest possible global involvement can be organised behind transparent rivalry manoeuvres. In Xingjiang and in connection with the Uyghurs in particular, the basic global conflict between the United States and the “rest of the world” is becoming almost exemplary. Since the fighting decades ago on the Ussuri River between
the then communist powers of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the world has been aware of the sensitivity of this region. That is why particularly President Naserbayev, who has been President of Kazakhstan for many years, made an effort to develop a mechanism
for conflict prevention between the states according to the model of the “Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe”. By the way, with great success, as the current “Shanghai Cooperation Group” shows. To the east of Moscow, the states are participating because they prefer the laborious work for peace to any war. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union these
concepts have been worked on, as I was able to experience at first hand as a participant in the preparatory conferences in Almaty. It should be prevented at all costs that the process of disintegration of the Soviet Union on Chinese territory could develop into a violent war. The border issues were settled and new autonomy rules created to prevent war in a dramatically
complicated situation. From day one, the United States was massively opposed to developing a mechanism for peaceful conflict resolution. The “Shanghai Group” conference project was
sabotaged wherever possible. When the states on the ground nevertheless agreed, the United States left the conference project. Since then, anyone who wants to can follow how the two rival concepts wrestle with each other.

Since the construction of the “Three Gorges Dam” on the Yangtze River, the Chinese central government has been trying to change the basic demographic structure in Xingjiang in favour of the Chinese population. In the past decade, German magazines have not been too sorry to write about CIA-led uprisings in this province. How the American-Chinese global conflict dominates the present time can be seen in the attacks from the United States against Chinese investments in Pakistan in connection
with the Silk Road. And we in Germany? Imperial Germany knew by its scientists and expeditions in this region what was going on there. Already at that time in rivalry with
other powers. At the present time, it was a foreseeable strategic decision on the part of the United States to locate the world headquarters of the Uyghurs in Munich at the time the “Shanghai Group” was being prepared. The mechanisms that can be derived from this are well known from other conflicts that ended in war. •