The Saudi royal house prides itself on being the guardian of the Muslim faith and strives to be certain that on a regular basis life within the Arabian Peninsula is dominated by Islamic practices. Two of Islam’s holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, are under his care and he’s welcoming tens of millions in a COVID-free era Hadji — Muslim pilgrims from all around the world — to those cities every year.
In other words, the holders of the keys to the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest temple, aspire to play the identical role within the Islamic faith that the Vatican plays within the Catholic faith.
One would think that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Riyadh in December can be a possibility for the Saudis to lift the problem of China’s brutal treatment of Muslim minorities. But despite signing cooperation agreements with China on almost the whole lot conceivable, the Uyghurs have apparently been ignored.
![Thousands of Uyghur men like these are being held in mass open-air prisons in China's northwestern Xinjiang region as part of an effort to erase their unique Muslim culture and faith.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/uyghur-prison-camp.jpg?w=1024)
As a substitute, the press was stuffed with comforting stories about how Xi did it brought rain to Riyadh and how The Arab world was pouring in to learn Chinese.
Frankly, the Vatican has not been heroic in defending Catholics in China either.
However the slow destruction of the Christian faith in China was not accompanied by mass incarceration, involuntary slavery, sterilization and abortion campaigns, and forced organ transplants.
![In addition to forced sterilization and illegal organ harvesting, mosques - such as the one in the city of Kashgar - have been destroyed during the Chinese campaign against the Uyghurs.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/id-kah-mosque.jpg?w=1024)
![Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went so far as to call China's atrocities against Uyghurs a formal act of genocide last year.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/mike-pompeo-1.jpg?w=1024)
As readers of those pages know, each of these items happens to the Uighurs of their historic homeland in China’s Far West. Uyghurs are locked up en masse in labor camps, and younger Uyghurs of each sexes are sold to seaside factories in slave-like conditions.
Uyghur women are sterilized, their unborn children aborted – authorities consider they’ve too many children – while those Uyghur children who’re born are sometimes sent to boarding schools to be sinicized. That’s, brought up to think about themselves as Chinese.
Perhaps the worst crime on this long litany of abuses is forced organ harvesting. This involves killing prisoners to acquire their organs, that are then sold to those, often foreigners, who’re willing to pay a higher price for a latest heart, lung or kidney.
![Mecca, the holiest place in Islam, is located in Saudi Arabia. Despite being the custodians of the Muslim faith, the Saudis have made huge deals with the Chinese who persecute their Islamic brethren.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/mecca.jpg?w=1024)
The massive prison population of the Uyghurs almost guarantees that a matching fabric may be found amongst them for potential buyers. Not to say that their organs are especially prized by Middle Easterners because their former owners followed a halal eating regimen, meaning their organs are “halal” as well.
All that is to say that what is occurring within the homeland of the Uyghurs isn’t just discrimination or persecution, although there’s loads of that too. Moderately, it’s a full genocide, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on January 19, 2020.
![Like the Chinese Pres. Xi, US President Joe Biden also visited Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But instead of securing an agreement to increase oil production in Saudi Arabia, Biden (here with MBS in July) was merely punched.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/joe-biden-mohammed-bin-salman.jpg?w=1024)
So what can be so necessary to the Saudis that they’d abandon their fellow Muslims and welcome a communist leader with open arms?
While China could be very thirsty for Saudi oil, sheikhs will not be as eager to sell it. In an effort to maintain demand at its most optimal – and lucrative – level, the Saudis sit on vast reserves of black gold and firmly control the pivot. They even turned away customers, as they did before the mid-term, when Biden asked Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to extend production. All he got from the trade was a punch.
China has repeatedly asked for payment in Chinese yuan for its oil purchases, but Saudi Arabia has to date refused to agree, continuing to insist on payment in “petrodollars”. The Saudis, in exchange for US security guarantees, have long since agreed to guard the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
![Although Saudi Arabia has long kept its promise to keep the U.S. dollar as the global oil trading currency, China is pushing hard for the Saudis to do business in the Chinese yuan.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/chinese-us-currency.jpg?w=1024)
But which will soon change.
In a speech in Riyadh, Xi Jinping himself revealed the outline of the deal he offered the Saudis. were, he said, two areas that should be prioritized. The primary was the transition to using the Chinese currency for all oil and gas purchases by China from Arab League countries. The second was the introduction of Chinese nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
Through the years, the Saudis have repeatedly asked america for access to their nuclear technology, but they’ve been refused. Now the Chinese are stepping in to supply theirs.
![Controlling about 17% of world production, oil fields in Saudi Arabia such as these produce what China needs most - oil to fuel its vast economy.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/saudi-oil-fields.jpg?w=1024)
After all, each Beijing and Riyadh will insist that this technology is just used for peaceful purposes, such as powering the national electricity grid. But it surely must be obvious that the Saudi oil barons have absolutely no need for nuclear power plants – or windmills, or solar panels, or anything – to power anything. Within the desert kingdom, gas is literally cheaper than water.
What other use would the Saudis have of nuclear technology than constructing breeder reactors to provide fissile material for nuclear weapons?
![An all too common scene in Xinjiang, ethnic Uyghurs beaten by Chinese authorities. Despite pleas from other Muslims for help, Saudi Arabia has yet to intervene on behalf of the Uyghurs.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/embattled-uyghurs.jpg?w=1024)
In actual fact, Saudis may feel they don’t have any selection. In any case, their staunch sectarian enemies, the Iranian mullahs, will soon have nuclear weapons themselves. Despite ongoing protests across Iran, Biden himself he confessed that his efforts to lure the mullahs back into the 2015 nuclear deal are “dead.”
At the guts of Xi’s success in Riyadh are Biden’s failures, which lead US allies within the region to hunt support elsewhere in an increasingly chaotic world – even from the Chinese who torture other Muslims.
Steven Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and writer of Bully of Asia: Why China’s dream is a latest threat to world order.