Bearing Witness to China’s ‘Orwellian Dystopia’

By Bari Weiss

Earlier this month, Patrick Wack got a boost any photographer would dream of when Kodak’s Instagram account — 841,000 followers and counting — decided to feature ten photographs from his forthcoming book. It’s called “Dust,” and it chronicles the transformation, over the past half-decade, of the Xinjiang region, the cradle of Uyghur civilization, at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Then, a few days after Kodak shared the photos, the company deleted them. 

It didn’t just delete them. It replaced Wack’s haunting pictures with its corporate logo and a statement that reads, in part: 

“Kodak’s Instagram page is intended to enable creativity by providing a platform for promoting the medium of film. It is not intended to be a platform for political commentary.” It went on to “apologize for any misunderstanding or offense the post may have caused.”

Instagram is banned in China, so Kodak put out an additional statement on WeChat, a Chinese social-media platform. This one was more abject:

For a long time, Kodak has maintained a good relationship with the Chinese government and has been in close cooperation with various government departments. We will continue to respect the Chinese government and the Chinese law.

We will keep ourselves in check and correct ourselves, taking this as an example of the need for caution. 

To appease Chinese Communist Party officials, other Western  brands — Apple, Airbnb, the NBA, Marriott, Dior and Valentino, to name just a few — have issued similar apologies. 

Kodak’s Instagram faux pas most closely resembles that of Mercedes-Benz, which, in 2018, posted a #MondayMotivation ad on its Instagram account that included a quote from the Dalai Lama: “Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.” The line sparked an uproar in Beijing, and the German carmaker quickly apologized.

Wack’s images are far more threatening to the CCP. The photographer calls the situation in Xinjiang, in the northwest region of the country, an “Orwellian dystopia.” He would know. He traveled there six times from 2016 to 2019, documenting the province as it became, in his words, “an open-air prison.”

In today’s newsletter, we are proud to reprint Patrick Wack’s stirring images. They are accompanied by a conversation, edited for length and clarity, with him. You can preorder his book here. 

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 My Take - I've shown three comments below, go to the article to see the rest.  Worth the time.  

1. Here in America, corporate oligarchs, feckless politicians, and sycophantic celebrities endorse and sponsor marching, looting, burning, and killing to protest slavery that ended 150+ years ago.When it comes to China, those same corporate pashas, loathsome politicians, and unctuous celebrities ignore the slavery and atrocities that are happening now, right before their uncaring eyes. The slavery and barbarity visited on the Uyghurs could easily happen in America; such a society is the ultimate dream of the woke and hyper-liberal.
2.  Thank you for shining on light on this tragedy ~ powerful images. Shame on Kodak for their apologist comments and for bending a knee to Communist China."China is a country where so many products are manufactured. It’s a country that the whole world has business and diplomatic relations with. And they are trying to re-engineer and disappear a people and their culture. I hope to bring light to this and what kind of a regime this is. "We American consumers can all do our part to stop this human tragedy by shunning products made in China ~ especially American brands who ignore the efforts to disappear a culture by Communist China.
3.  Did you hear Nike and LeBron James' and the NBA, and MLB and the NFL and Woka-Cola and Kodak's full-throated condemnations of these atrocities against the Uyghur in China? I didn't. Neither did anyone else. Shame on us. Shame on us for drinking on deciliter of Coke. Shame on us for watching one second of MLB, NBA, NFL and for buying their merch. Shame on us for watching one frame of John Cena et al and FF9 and every other Hollywood property cleansed, purged and whitewashed of anything offensive to the CCP, lest its gazillion dollar market be disrupted. Shame on us for selling out the Uyghur and our own souls for cheap, mediocre crap from China. The shame is on us. Shame on us.