BEIJING: “The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has announced an imminent overproduction of cotton; main exporters being India, the U.S., and China. The U.S. has now launched a global smear campaign [against Xinjiang cotton] and if this proves successful, countries and companies alike will no longer be buying Chinese cotton,” explained French journalist and writer Maxime Vivas in an exclusive interview with Beijing Review, shortly after the Better Cotton Initiative—a non-profit, multi-stakeholder governance group based in Switzerland—initiated its so-called Xinjiang cotton boycott.
On March 19, Vivas shared a video of Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and former chief of staff to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in charge of the East Asia and Pacific sector, giving a speech in August 2018. Wilkerson said in the video, “If the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) wanted to destabilize China, that would be the best way to do it—to form unrest and join with those Uygurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal rather than external.” “Now retired, he admitted with a smile that the CIA had fomented conflict in Xinjiang,” the writer said.
In his latest book, Uygurs: Putting an End to Fake News, he gives readers a year by year, to the dollar, account of the financial amounts received by the so-called “Uygur World Congress.” And he adds “precisely what is requested of it in return.” This is not the first time Vivas has lifted the veil on the more “unwholesome” practices adopted by the West from time to time. The 79-year-old has always strived to broadcast China to the general public through objective reports and commentaries.
Vivas first visited China in 2008, while his son was living in Beijing. His knowledge of China was limited to the stereotypes the French media used to communicate. In Beijing, he found the reality to be rather different from those reports. The Chinese capital to Vivas was as up-to-date and fresh as Tokyo. He found himself taken aback by the limited knowledge the French apparently possessed about the most populous country in the world and thus set out on a journey to align and explain his views on China via his website: Legrandsoir.info.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
