By Dong Feng
Upon reading the news the US Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 to sanction China over Xinjiang affairs, Jerry Grey looked online to see how many members of Congress have been to China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. “The answer Zero. EU tried – US objected; UN tried – US objected,” he tweeted, asking, “Why [the US] legislate on something with no knowledge?”
While talking to the Global Times about his views on the US bill on Xinjiang, Grey said, “I feel this is a gross miscarriage of justice – first of all, the US has no right to involve itself in China’s affairs and secondly, if they are going to purport to be a ‘world police service’ they should surely attend the ‘scene of the crime’ before making decision on how to react to it.”
The 62-year-old retiree has drawn his own conclusions about the region after cycling about 5,000 kilometers across Xinjiang for charity in 2019.
He said that while security may be heavy, the Xinjiang government has every reason to take precautions so its people feel safe and can live a better life.
Grey, a British born Australian citizen, currently lives in Zhongshan, South China’s Guangdong Province. In August 2019, Grey and his wife, Ann Liang Yuhua, decided to initiate the charity ride from Urumqi to Zhongshan. Along with Grey’s friend Bevan Cobbe, they rode for a charity project called “Riding for love,” which raises money to help disabled people in Zhongshan.
The team of three flew to Urumqi to begin their ride. “We assembled our bikes in the hotel car park and then the next morning we started riding out of Urumqi back toward Gansu,” Grey said.
“It is a long distance of course. It is quite common for me to ride 70 kilometers in one day. Over the long ride, you do it more regularly. So we rode out of Urumqi for three or four days, then we stopped in Turpan. We had a night and day off there,” he said, speaking of his experience in Xinjiang.
After Turpan, they then headed to the city of Hami. Every three or four days they took a day to rest. The climate in Xinjiang was “really really extreme; it’s a desert and quite mountainous.”
As for his impression of Xinjiang, Grey shared his observation based on his experience working as a police officer for 10 years in London. Referencing the bombing campaigns by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) he witnessed in the 1970s, Grey said he knows “what terrorism looks like.”
“I’m realistic enough to know that the military, the police, the government, they have a reason for putting people in prison. If somebody bombs civilians, if somebody wants to put a bomb outside the police station, that person deserves to be in prison.
That’s all the reason to it in my opinion,” Grey stressed. When he was working as a police officer, he saw the damage a bomb can do to pedestrians and to people in shopping centers, so he does not want to see that again. “If the Chinese government says ‘This is our way to stop it,’ I’m quite happy with that.”
–The Daily Mail-Global Times news exchange item
