Revealed: new evidence of China's mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang - "It is one of more than two dozen Islamic religious sites that have been partly or completely demolished in Xinjiang since 2016, according to an investigation by the Guardian and open-source journalism site Bellingcat that offers new evidence of large-scale mosque razing in the Chinese territory where rights groups say Muslim minorities suffer severe religious repression.Using satellite imagery, the Guardian and Bellingcat open-source analyst Nick Waters checked the locations of 100 mosques and shrines identified by former residents, researchers, and crowdsourced mapping tools... Another major community mosque, the Yutian Aitika mosque near Hotan, appears to have been removed in March of last year. As the largest in its district, locals would gather here on Islamic festivals. The mosque’s history dates back to 1200.Despite being included on a list of national historical and cultural sites, its gatehouse and other buildings were removed in late 2018, according to satellite images analysed by Zhang and confirmed by Waters. The demolished buildings were likely structures that had been renovated in the 1990s.Two local residents who worked near the mosque, the owner of a hotel and a restaurant employee, told the Guardian the mosque had been torn down. One resident said she had heard the mosque would be rebuilt but smaller, to make room for new shops... Activists say the destruction of these historical sites is a way to assimilate the next generation of Uighurs. According to former residents, most Uighurs in Xinjiang had already stopped going to mosques, which are often equipped with surveillance systems. Most require visitors to register their IDs. Mass shrine festivals like the one at Imam Asim had been stopped for years.Removing the structures, critics said, would make it harder for young Uighurs growing up in China to remember their distinctive background... Beijing is open about its goal of “sinicising” religions like Islam and Christianity to better fit China’s “national conditions”. In January, China passed a five-year plan to “guide Islam to be compatible with socialism”. In a speech in late March, party secretary Chen Quanguo who has overseen the crackdown since 2016 said the government in Xinjiang must “improve the conditions of religious places to guide “religion and socialism to adapt to each other”... Experts say the razing of religious sites marks a return to extreme practices not seen since the Cultural Revolution when mosques and shrines were burned, or in the 1950s when major shrines were turned into museums as a way to desacralise them.Today, officials describe any changes to mosques as an effort to “improve” them... Critics say authorities are trying to remove even the history of the shrines. Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uighur academic who documented shrines across Xinjiang, disappeared in 2017. Her former colleagues and relatives believe she has been detained because of her work preserving Uighur traditions."
The CIA has a really big budget to be able to fake satellite data!
Public Toilet Erected on Former Site of Razed Xinjiang Village Mosque - "A public toilet has been erected on the site of a demolished mosque in Atush (in Chinese, Atushi) city, in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to a local official, as part of what some observers believe is a campaign aimed at breaking the spirit of Uyghur Muslims... “People have toilets at home, so there weren’t any problems like that,” he added, when asked if there had been a need for the public toilet in the local community.The committee chief said that with Suntagh located about three kilometers (1.85 miles) outside of central Atush, the area sees few to no tourists who would require access to a washroom.He conceded that the toilet was likely built to cover up the ruins of the destroyed Tokul mosque, as well as for the needs of inspecting groups or cadres visiting the area."
Blanked-Out Spots On China's Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang's Camps - "In the summer of 2018, as it became even harder for journalists to work effectively in Xinjiang, a far-western region of China, we started to look at how we could use satellite imagery to investigate the camps where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were being detained. At the time we began, it was believed that there were around 1,200 camps in existence, while only several dozen had been found. We wanted to try to find the rest.Our breakthrough came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satellite imagery tiles loading in the vicinity of one of the known camps while using the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps. The satellite imagery was old, but otherwise fine when zoomed out — but at a certain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp location. They disappeared as you zoomed in further, while the satellite imagery was replaced by the standard gray reference tiles, which showed features such as building outlines and roads... We analyzed the masked locations by comparing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub, and Planet Labs... We quickly began to notice how large many of these places are — and how heavily securitized they appear to be, compared to the earlier known camps. In site layout, architecture, and security features, they bear greater resemblance to other prisons across China than to the converted schools and hospitals that formed the earlier camps in Xinjiang. The newer compounds are also built to last, in a way that the earlier conversions weren’t. The perimeter walls are made of thick concrete, for example, which takes much longer to build and perhaps later demolish, than the barbed wire fencing that characterizes the early camps.In almost every county, we found buildings bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, plus new facilities with the characteristics of large, high-security camps and/or prisons."
The CIA must have hacked Baidu to fake their satellite data too!
China's still building detention camps in Xinjiang — and they're getting even bigger - "Researchers for ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre have used satellite imagery to locate and analyse a total of 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang. And despite Beijing's claim late last year that all detainees had "graduated" from the facilities, the thinktank said major detention camps were still in operation across Xinjiang... Despite denying the existence of the camps for years, Chinese officials later took to describing the detention facilities as "vocational education and training centres", where would-be terrorists were to be reformed and turned into productive members of society.However, survivors, family members and camp whistleblowers have told a very different story, describing a system of arbitrary detention, political indoctrination, human rights abuses and forced labour."
China's UK ambassador denies abuse of Uighurs despite fresh drone footage - "he was confronted with footage of shackled prisoners being herded on to trains in Xinjiang... As well as the drone footage, Liu was played an interview with a woman who said she had been subjected to forced sterilisation. He responded by blaming such reports on “some small group of anti-China elements”."
Tibetan-Canadian student politician, Uyghur rights activists come under attack by Chinese students in Canada - "Some simply wished for her to die or be raped.“People like u deserve a gunshot. Hope you go to hell immediately,” said a poster named caesssar_hsu on Instagram.“Why we elect a person who don’t love her own country,” asked Ziyu Wang, one of almost 11,000 petition signers, though Lhamo is Canadian.Meanwhile, in nearby Hamilton, a coalition of Chinese students’ groups protested a talk Monday at McMaster University about well-documented human-rights abuses against China’s Uyghur minority. The presentation promoted “hatred” against China, the groups argued in a statement, adding that they had reported the presentation to the Chinese consulate in Toronto and asked McMaster to ensure the “dignity of Chinese students is not infringed”.The two episodes come amid increasing concern about Beijing’s attempts to extend influence into countries like Canada, helped by some of the thousands of Chinese citizens who attend colleges and universities here."
Presumably it is "racist" to be concerned about Chinese students
Hui Muslims Detained in Xinjiang's Uighur Camps - "in contrast to their Turkic neighbors—such as the Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz—the Hui have, while maintaining their identity as Muslims, been traditionally much closer to the country’s majority ethnic Han, in language, culture, and often even appearance... the perceived interned Hui population was usually on the same order of magnitude as the local Hui population in general. And yet, the fundamental question remains: If the Hui really have been subjected to mass internment, then why aren’t we hearing more about it given their significant presence in Xinjiang?... The likely explanation lies in the fundamental nature of victim-oriented reporting for Xinjiang—i.e., that it generally comes from friends and relatives outside of China. While the ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz both have states that neighbor Xinjiang, and while the Uighurs have no state but a well-dispersed and influential diaspora, the Hui have neither, leaving the (very sporadic) reporting largely to foreign journalists, activist organizations, and other ethnic groups, as evidenced above."
Previously, China apologists were saying there was nothing to be worried about: the Uighers were not being targeted for their religion, since Hui Muslims were untouched. And that supposedly showed that if a people didn't engage in terrorism they wouldn't be touched
How Turkey is sending Muslim Uighurs back to China without breaking its promise - "Turkey has, it has been proud to say, been good for the Uighurs. An estimated 50,000 of them are refugees here, and they have flourished under Erdogan, who in recent years has cast himself as a protector of Muslims across the world... Now lawyers say Beijing is manipulating extradition agreements to drag Uighurs back to the re-education camps. And, activists argue, Ankara’s growing economic dependence on Beijing is compromising its ability to withstand Chinese pressure and to protect Uighurs who have fled Xinjiang.While Turkey refuses to send Uighurs directly back to China, campaigners say there are those willing to send them to third countries, like Tajikistan. From there, it is easier for China to secure their extradition.So why would Turks be complicit in this? Money, comes the answer, and ensuring Chinese investment in Turkey continues."
Xinjiang and Uyghurs — What You’re Not Being Told | World Affairs
Hilarious article beloved of China shills. If nothing else, the article contradicts itself: "Western media won’t talk about the billions of dollars that China has invested in Xinjiang"
"The BBC admits that the “communist” (gasp!) government has spent $1.2 billion in the last five years on upgrading and building new schools for children in Xinjiang"
Or another claim that even China shills must admit is unquestionably false: "no Muslim country is buying the “concentration camps” narrative." Yet, "On February 9, the Turkish government issued a stern statement denouncing China for “violating the fundamental human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”",
and "During its recently concluded 14th Regular Session held in #Jeddah from 02-06 December 2018, @OIC_IPHRC was briefed on the #humanrights situation of #Uighur #Muslims in #China's #Xinjiang region, which shows rising discrimination on the basis of their religion."
Dispropaganda on Twitter - "Today is #HumanRightsDay. Putting people at the center, China makes tireless efforts to protect and promote #HumanRights for all its people:
ensuring subsistence for 1.4 bil people
lifting over 850 mil people out of poverty
providing jobs for 770 mil people"
"Lemme finish that "human rights" list for u:
murdering 60-100 million ppl.
occupying Tibet.
rolling tanks over protesters in Tiananmen.
oppressing Hong Kong.
Muslims in concentration camps.
denying basic human rights to 1.4 billion ppl."
Xinjiang government forces unproven medicine on people in COVID-19 lockdown - "One Han Chinese woman with the last name of Wang posted photos of herself drinking traditional Chinese medicine in front of a medical worker in full protective gear. “Why are you forcing us to drink medicine when we’re not sick!” she asked in an Aug. 18 post that was swiftly deleted. “Who will take responsibility if there’s problems after drinking so much medicine? Why don’t we even have the right to protect our own health?”... One Han businessman working between Urumqi and Beijing told the AP he was put in quarantine in mid-July. Despite having taken coronavirus tests five times and testing negative each time, he said, the authorities still haven’t let him out – not for so much as a walk. When he’s complained about his condition online, he said, he’s had his posts deleted and been told to stay silent... He, too, is being forced to take Chinese traditional medicine, he said, including liquid from the same unmarked white bottles as the Uighur woman. He is also forced to take Lianhua Qingwen, a herbal remedy seized regularly by U.S. Customs and Border patrol for violating FDA laws by falsely claiming to be effective against COVID-19. Since the start of the outbreak, the Chinese government has pushed traditional medicine on its population. The remedies are touted by President Xi Jinping, China’s nationalist, authoritarian leader, who has advocated a revival of traditional Chinese culture. Although some state-backed doctors say they have conducted trials showing the medicine works against the virus, no rigorous clinical data supporting that claim has been published in international scientific journals. “None of these medicines have been scientifically proven to be effective and safe,” said Fang Shimin, a former biochemist and writer known for his investigations of scientific fraud in China who now lives in the United States. “It’s unethical to force people, sick or healthy, to take unproven medicines.”... But the new measures in Xinjiang forcing some residents to take the medicine is unprecedented, experts say. The government says that the participation rate in traditional Chinese medicine treatment in the region has “reached 100%”, according to a state media report. When asked about resident complaints that they were being forced to take Chinese medicine, one local official said it was being done “according to expert opinion.”... With Xi’s ascent, critics of Chinese traditional medicine have fallen silent. In April, an influential Hubei doctor, Yu Xiangdong, was removed from a hospital management position for questioning the efficacy of the remedies, an acquittance confirmed. A government notice online said Yu “openly published inappropriate remarks slandering the nation’s epidemic prevention policy and traditional Chinese medicine.”... in May, the Beijing city government announced a draft law that would criminalize speech “defaming or slandering” traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the government is pushing traditional Chinese remedies as a treatment for COVID-19 overseas, sending pills and specialists to countries such as Iran, Italy, and the Philippines."
Addendum: Covid hystericists must cheer that scientifically proven covid treatments are being forcibly given to patients for their own good. Those who refuse to take the medicine are contemptible plague rats
Imran Khan: Pakistan won't criticize China on Uighurs - "Khan first claimed to not "know much about" the scale of the abuse. He then acknowledged that his government is indebted to Beijing because "they came to help us when we were at rock bottom."... Despite reports about Uighur abuse, many Muslim-majority countries, afraid of incurring China's wrath, have stayed mum. The 57-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in December mentioned "disturbing reports" of China's Muslim crackdown in a series of tweets. It then backpedaled by releasing a report saying that it "commends the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China."... He then compared Uighur persecution to that of India's retraction of Kashmir's semi-autonomous status. China's campaign against the Uighurs is "nothing compared to what's happening in India, in Kashmir. You cannot compare the scale""
China Video Ad Calls for 100 Uighur Women to ‘Urgently’ Marry Han Men - "Reports about China's promoting intermarriage between Uighurs and Han Chinese go back to as early as August 2014 when local authorities in Cherchen county of Xinjiang announced, “Incentive Measures Encouraging Uighur-Chinese Intermarriage.”The measures laid out a set of incentives by the government, including a 10,000 yuan ($1,450 US) cash reward annually for five years to the intermarried couples. The incentive package also included preferential treatment toward employment, housing and free education for the couples, their parents and offspring."Our advocacy of intermarriage is promoting positive energy,” said Zhu Xin, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Cherchen county, while introducing the incentive measures... Years into the announced policy, Uighur activists on social media have shared dozens of videos, reportedly showing Uighur women “forcefully” wedded to Chinese men. The videos sometimes show the gloomy Uighur brides appearing to begrudge their grooms... Zumrat Dawut, 38, a Uighur female activist, told VOA that her neighbors, the Nurehmets from Mekit, Xinjiang, had to agree to wed their 18-year-old daughter to a Han Chinese out of fear that they could be sent to internment camps... Beijing in the past has launched similar intermarriage campaigns, targeting other ethnoreligious minorities in the country. The government announced such measures in Tibet in 2010.Vanessa Frangville, a China studies professor at the University Libre of Brussels, said China’s intermarriage is a part of “ethnic blending theory” that has been developed by Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe from Tsinghua University since early 2000s. The theory calls for measures such as co-residence, intermarriages and mixed-ethnic schooling as a way to enforce a more united Chinese identity.“The end goal of such policy is clearly to enforce or accelerate ethnic fusion — minzu ronghe, in their words,” said Frangville, adding “the idea is that, to create a cohesive and united China, it is necessary to encourage people from various ethnic backgrounds to mix together.”"
Report: Uyghurs in China subject to arbitrary arrests determined by AI programs - "Human Rights Watch (HRW), a US-based NGO, exposed the Chinese government's use of a program called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform... over 2,000 people have been detained in China's Aksu prefecture alone due to the AI technology. Many of the victims were only detained for the stated reason that they were flagged by the technology, with no other reason being provided... The report comes the same day as the Washington Post leaked documents related to China's use of AI technology to commit genocide. According to documents leaked from Huawei, the company has provided the Chinese government with technology that can analyze the ethnicities of individuals and sends off "Uighur alarms" when members of the ethnic group are detected. Another Chinese company, Megvii, was also implicated in the creation of this technology."
'Our souls are dead': how I survived a Chinese 're-education' camp for Uighurs - "At her signal, we all stood up as one. “Lao shi hao!” This greeting to the teacher kicked off 11 hours of daily teaching. We recited a kind of pledge of allegiance to China: “Thank you to our great country. Thank you to our party. Thank you to our dear President Xi Jinping.” In the evening, a similar version ended the lesson: “I wish for my great country to develop and have a bright future. I wish for all ethnicities to form a single great nation. I wish good health to President Xi Jinping. Long live President Xi Jinping.” Glued to our chairs, we repeated our lessons like parrots. They taught us the glorious history of China – a sanitised version, cleansed of abuses. On the cover of the manual we were given was inscribed “re-education programme”. It contained nothing but stories of the powerful dynasties and their glorious conquests, and the great achievements of the Communist party. It was even more politicised and biased than the teaching at Chinese universities. In the early days, it made me laugh. Did they really think they were going to break us with a few pages of propaganda?But as the days went by, fatigue set in like an old enemy. I was exhausted, and my firm resolve to resist was on permanent hold. I tried not to give in, but school went steamrolling on. It rolled right over our aching bodies. So this was brainwashing – whole days spent repeating the same idiotic phrases. As if that weren’t enough, we had to do an hour of extra study after dinner in the evening before going to bed. We would review our endlessly repeated lessons one last time. Every Friday, we had an oral and written test. By turns, beneath the wary eye of the camp leaders, we would recite the communist stew we’d been served up.In this way, our short-term memory became both our greatest ally and our worst enemy. It enabled us to absorb and regurgitate volumes of history and declarations of loyal citizenship, so we could avoid the public humiliation dished out by the teacher. But at the same time, it weakened our critical abilities. It took away the memories and thoughts that bind us to life. After a while I could no longer picture clearly the faces of Kerim and my daughters. We were worked until we were nothing more than dumb animals. No one told us how long this would go on... When the nurses grabbed my arm to “vaccinate” me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilising us. That was when I understood the method of the camps, the strategy being implemented: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice. We were ordered to deny who we were. To spit on our own traditions, our beliefs. To criticise our language. To insult our own people. Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shadows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my husband and my daughter, were terrorists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhausted and alienated, that I almost ended up believing it. My husband, Kerim, my daughters Gulhumar and Gulnigar – I denounced your “crimes”. I begged forgiveness from the Communist party for atrocities that neither you nor I committed. I regret everything I said that dishonoured you. Today I am alive, and I want to proclaim the truth. I don’t know if you will accept me, I don’t know if you’ll forgive me.How can I begin to tell you what happened here? I was held in Baijiantan for two years. During that time, everyone around me – the police officers who came to interrogate prisoners, plus the guards, teachers and tutors – tried to make me believe the massive lie without which China could not have justified its re-education project: that Uighurs are terrorists, and thus that I, Gulbahar, as a Uighur who had been living in exile in France for 10 years, was a terrorist. Wave after wave of propaganda crashed down upon me, and as the months went by, I began to lose part of my sanity. Bits of my soul shattered and broke off. I will never recover them. During violent interrogations by the police, I kowtowed under the blows – so much so that I even made false confessions. They managed to convince me that the sooner I owned up to my crimes, the sooner I’d be able to leave. Exhausted, I finally gave in. I had no other choice. No one can fight against themselves for ever. No matter how tirelessly you battle brainwashing, it does its insidious work. All desire and passion desert you. What options do you have left? A slow, painful descent into death, or submission. If you play at submission, if you feign losing your psychological power struggle against the police, then at least, despite it all, you hang on to the shard of lucidity that reminds you who you are. I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying to them. I simply did my best to be a good actor.On 2 August 2019, after a short trial, before an audience of just a few people, a judge from Karamay pronounced me innocent. I barely heard his words. I listened to the sentence as if it were nothing to do with me. I was thinking about all the times I had asserted my innocence, all those nights I had tossed and turned on my bunk, enraged that no one would believe me. And I was thinking about all those other times when I had admitted the things they accused me of, all the fake confessions I had made, all those lies.They had sentenced me to seven years of re-education. They had tortured my body and brought my mind to the edge of madness. And now, after reviewing my case, a judge had decided that no, in actual fact, I was innocent. I was free to go"
China's Xinjiang camps: Leak reveals alleged manual for re-education centers - "Beijing has repeatedly insisted that the massive camps are voluntary vocational training centers, and throughout the documents the centers are referred to as “training facilities” and the inmates as “students.”But the documents also refer extensively to high security, locked doors and an insistence that inmates must not be allowed to escape. Surveillance cameras and 24-hour guard rosters are mandated... It adds that the detainees “may not contact the outside world” during their time in the facilities. The document finishes by stating that all work at the centers is “highly” sensitive and called for strict secrecy... Islamic beliefs are only mentioned in one document based around the sentencing of a Communist Party member in 2018. In what is alleged to be a judgment from a local court, the unnamed cadre was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “inciting ethnic hatred.”According to the documents, his crime was telling his colleagues to pray before eating, as well as urging them not to use dirty words or watch pornography. "
Yet some people still imagine that these are just re-education camps for economic reasons
China’s Xinjiang camps: Leaked records expose how Uyghurs are judged and detained - "Rozinsa Mamattohti couldn’t sleep or eat for days after she read the detailed records the Chinese government had been keeping on her entire family.She and her relatives, most of whom live in China’s western Xinjiang region, aren’t dissidents or extremists or well-known. But in a spreadsheet kept by local officials, her entire family's lives are recorded at length along with their jobs, their religious activity, their trustworthiness and their level of cooperation with the authorities. And this spreadsheet could determine if Mamattohti's sister remains behind razor wire in a government detention center.Her family’s records, and hundreds of government reports like them, have been leaked to journalists by a patchwork of exiled Uyghur activists.The document reveals for the first time the system used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to justify the indefinite detention on trivial grounds of not only Mamattohti’s family but hundreds -- and possibly millions -- of other citizens in heavily fortified internment centers across Xinjiang. It is the third major leak of sensitive Chinese government documents in as many months, and together the information paints an increasingly alarming picture of what appears to be a strategic campaign by Beijing to strip Muslim-majority Uyghurs of their cultural and religious identity and suppress behavior considered to be unpatriotic. The Chinese government has claimed it is running a mass deradicalization program targeting potential extremists, but these official records, verified by a team of experts, show people can be sent to a detention facility for simply “wearing a veil” or growing “a long beard.” For Mamattohti’s sister, 34-year-old Patem, the crime for which she was detained, according to the document, was a “violation of family planning policy,” or put simply, having too many children. Under the countrywide policy, which rarely if ever is cause for imprisonment, rural families in Xinjiang are limited to three children. Patem had four... about 114 of the detainees in the leaked records were sent to the camps for having too many children, 25 for having a passport without having traveled internationally and 13 for having “strong religious traditions” in their family.Some were detained simply for reading or owning “illegal books” or having a family member who used to be in jail... Through interviews with Uyghurs outside China, CNN was able to verify the cases of eight relatives, friends or acquaintances identified in the document... holding an unused passport, which is not an official crime under Chinese law"
How China spooks Uighurs without them even entering the country - "Several members of the Uighur diaspora told Business Insider they've also been spooked by China without even having to step foot in the country.Rushan Abbas, a Uighur activist living in Herndon, Virginia, discovered last September that her sister had been disappeared by Xinjiang authorities six days after she spoke out against China's human rights record. She still has no idea of her whereabouts... Shortly after the raid, police officers further questioned his colleagues, shut down his office, storage warehouse, and corporate social media accounts, he said."The police warned my partners to stop communicating with me and told them I was the enemy of the country living overseas," Sintash said."I couldn't get my money back from the region," he added. "I can no longer contact any business partners or my teammates or my customers."... His mother blocked him on WeChat last year for fear of getting in trouble with authorities, and all his phone calls to regional authorities about his father have gone unanswered... Uighurs living in the US and France also told The Daily Beast and Foreign Policy last year that they had been asked for personal information including license plate numbers, bank details, ID photos, and marriage certificates — and threatened harm to their families in Xinjiang if they did not comply."
“An Unanswered Telephone Call” A Personal Story of Uyghur persecution in China - "I haven’t spoken to my parents for several months, even though my father is unwell, and I stopped calling my other relatives and friends several years ago. The police told my mother not to answer her son’s calls. They said there was an order from the regional police department that nobody should take international telephone calls. The police told my mother that if she didn’t obey this rule she would be punished.”... "Please can you stop calling us for a while? Over the last few weeks, whenever you call us, within an hour two or three policemen arrive in our home. They first ask about the content of our conversation on the phone, then they say I must stop speaking to you. Now they’re saying I shouldn’t answer your phone calls. It’s more than two years now since the township police asked me to report to them each time I received a telephone call from you. I kept telling the police about your telephone calls, but now this seems to be not enough.”... I called my parents’ number, but there was no answer. Then I tried my mum’s mobile, but the result was the same: no answer. I listened to a Chinese language Red Song coming from her mobile for a while, then the mobile signal slowly died away. It was pretty clear: my mother was obeying orders and had left my call deliberately unanswered."
The CIA budget to bribe so many Uighers to make up malicious lies about China is huge. Soon the US will collapse from the financial strain
Uighurs forced to eat pork as China expands Xinjiang pig farms - "It has been more than two years since Sayragul Sautbay was released from a re-education camp in China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang. Yet the mother of two still suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from the “humiliation and violence” she endured while she was detained.Sautbay, a medical doctor and educator who now lives in Sweden, recently published a book in which she detailed her ordeal, including witnessing beatings, alleged sexual abuse and forced sterilisation. In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, she shed more light on other indignities to which the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were subjected, including the consumption of pork, a meat that is strictly prohibited in Islam... Testimonies from Sautbay and others provide an indication of how China has sought to crack down in Xinjiang by taking aim at the cultural and religious beliefs of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority, implementing widespread surveillance and – from about 2017 – opening a network of camps it has justified as necessary to counter “extremism”... Arslan Hidayat, a Turkey-based Uighur rights activist and secretary-general of the Uyghur Revival Association, told Al Jazeera that whether it is breeding pigs, or eating pork and drinking alcohol, the Chinese government is attempting to “normalise” prohibited practices for Muslims in Xinjiang... The documents seen by Al Jazeera are among a cache that also detailed the alleged sterilisation programme reported by AP... Dawut, the Uighur businesswoman now living in exile in the US, says she stands by her story of what happened to her inside the camps."
Apparently Western sources cannot be trusted. But non-Western sources say the same thing
China Should Replace Xinjiang Cotton Fields With Pig Farms: Think Tank - Bloomberg - "China should build more pig farms in Xinjiang as its cotton industry is under threat from declining soil fertility, according to a government researcher, commenting after some international companies avoided fiber produced in the region over allegations of forced labor... The suggestion comes after the U.S. banned imports of textile products containing cotton from Xinjiang in protest over alleged ill-treatment of its ethnic Uighur Muslim minority, and several western countries slapped sanctions on China over the same issue."
Xinjiang cotton row puts Burberry, Nike and other Western brands in a quandary – and pushes Hong Kong’s patriots to walk the talk | South China Morning Post - "For patriots scratching their heads over why Burberry, Nike, H&M and other Western brands are now taboo, allow me to explain. These brands have said they will not source Xinjiang cotton they believe is produced by forced Uygur labour in what Beijing calls “re-education camps” . Nationalistic Chinese netizens have already demanded a boycott of these brands. They need to remind their nation’s athletes not to use Nike or other shamed brands at the upcoming Olympic Games. Only you can decide if “sinicising” Muslim Uygurs is morally right, or if the camps human rights groups say imprison about 1 million Uygurs are re-education centres or gulags, even though Beijing has denied sinicising or violating human rights. But local loyalists need not soul-search over such issues. Their mainland compatriots don’t. Moral soul-searching is trivial in the nobler quest to prove one’s patriotism. The question is what to do with all those Burberry, Nike, H&M and other taboo products . Some on the mainland have reportedly been burning them... It is time Western companies wanting a slice of China’s market search their souls. Money or morals? To make mainland money, they need to sacrifice their morals and bow to Beijing, its state-controlled media and netizens. If they ask you to jump, you must ask how high. If it’s not high enough, expect a boycott by state-controlled nationalistic netizens. The choice is clear. You must do what they order regardless of your conscience or lose your slice of the market."
Western brands in 'blind panic' as they struggle to confront China over its persecution of Uyghur Muslims - "While some companies have stood their ground, others have removed criticisms from their websites. In one example, VF Corporation, which owns The North Face brand, removed a statement about Xinjiang that referenced the use of forced labour. It now has a section on its website about forced labour that does not mention Xinjiang and a separate section on the region that does not refer to forced labour. It said its policy had not changed but did not respond to requests to explain the recent change... Jewher Ilham, an activist whose father Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur rights advocate jailed for life by China on widely denounced separatism charges, said it was “extremely concerning” that some brands were emboldening Beijing... H&M was accused by China’s Communist Youth League of “boycotting” Xinjiang cotton, after which the Swedish retailer stopped appearing in search listings on major e-commerce platforms... A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a bill that would ban imports unless companies can certify they are not using forced labour. Support for the bill — which is similar to one that easily passed the House of Representatives last year — points to rapidly growing concern in Congress about China that matches rising investor focus on social and geopolitical risks. “Companies are frozen like rabbits in the headlights,” said Alison Taylor of New York University’s Stern business school. “The supply chain oversight nightmare is coming to a head.”... China had a new statute that lets Chinese companies sue foreign companies with business in China that comply with U.S. sanctions. “It’s kind of a perfect storm”"
No excuse for silence on China’s camps for Uighurs: exiled leader | Uighur News | Al Jazeera - "The exiled leader of China‘s minority Muslim Uighurs is pressing countries to cut trade links with Beijing, saying the time for business as usual is over."
Japan gave key intel on China's Uyghur crackdown to U.S. and Britain | The Japan Times - "Japan provided intelligence to the United States and Britain last year showing evidence of China’s forceful detainment of the Muslim Uyghur minority on condition of keeping the source confidential, a person close to Japan-U.S. relations said"
Uyghurs in Japan call for action to end forced labor in Xinjiang | The Japan Times - "Afumetto Retepu, a 42-year-old Uyghur from Tokyo who hasn’t been able to contact his family for three years, worries that they may have been forced to work at labor factories in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.As reports shedding light on the forced labor of Uyghurs in China continue to emerge, Uyghurs in Japan and rights advocates are urging Japanese firms to take notice of their plight and are calling for more attention to be paid to China’s repressive policies toward the Muslim minority group.“People in Japan may think that Japan has nothing to do with this problem, but it’s not true,” Retepu said. “I have no words to describe how painful it is to know that my relatives or family members of other (Uyghurs living in Japan who) we haven’t been able to reach over the past two or three years may be working there to” make a profit for Japanese companies.During a news conference in Tokyo on Aug. 28, a group of Uyghurs and supporters called on Japanese firms with factories in China to thoroughly investigate their supply chains to see if they are connected to the ongoing repression of Uyghurs."
Uyghurs living in Kansai try to deal with the stress of a crisis back home | The Japan Times - "There are an estimated 3,000 Uyghurs living in Japan today, many of whom have been a part of the international community here for years. Over the past few years, however, some in this community have been sliding into a state of paranoia and depression as they have found it harder and harder to make contact with family members back home.I met with eight such Uyghurs at a small community center in Osaka earlier in the year. All of those who were present asked that their real names not be revealed in order to protect family members living in China.“The Chinese authorities can easily identify us,” “Samil” explains to me when asking for anonymity on behalf of the group. “And that will only bring more suffering to our families.”With the curtains in the room drawn, each of them begins to share how it feels to live in their new home while, according to the group, a “human rights crisis” plays out in their old one. Many of their concerns are similar, the main one being that contact with relatives living in Xinjiang has been completely severed. In cases where they have been able to regain contact, communication is so tense that those living in Japan are afraid to push for detailed explanations as to what is going on... In January of this year, Ilan was at home with a friend when she noticed her phone suddenly came to life.“Someone was controlling my WeChat account, moving through it,” she recalls. “They were going through my contact list. I was so surprised, I kept asking my friend ‘What’s going on, what’s going on?'”Ilan and her friend looked on in disbelief as they watched someone access the phone remotely and parse through her chat records in real time. They pulled up photos, videos and documents written in Arabic. She then shows me the video that her friend took of the entire incident.Ilan then immediately deleted her WeChat account and deactivated her phone.The rest of those gathered at the community center in Osaka recount similar stories of strange interactions with their social media accounts and relatives. Samil mentions that in 2017 one of his family members asked for pictures of Samil and anyone in his family in Japan, as well as photos of his passport. Later, he was asked to send a picture of himself holding a newspaper in Japan to prove he was here."
As loved ones in China disappear amid crackdown, Uyghurs in Japan speak out | The Japan Times - "As the global outcry over China’s crackdown on the Uyghurs grows, members of the same ethnic minority in Japan are calling for help out of desperation to discover what has happened to their families back home.At a symposium in Tokyo last month, 10 ethnic Uyghurs spoke out about their dilemma and the dangers they still face outside China... Nine of the 10 Uyghurs who spoke at the symposium alleged that family members were or are being detained at re-education camps where they were all forced to denounce Islam.Mizutani, who conducted a survey of 84 Uyghur students in Japan, said she found that nearly all of them have been unable to locate family members, and that many believe their kin were sent off to the camps."
‘Psychological torture’: Uygurs abroad face mental health crisis over plight of relatives who remain in Xinjiang | South China Morning Post - "across two 2018 surveys of members of the Uygur diaspora, conducted by a medical researcher at a prominent US university, more than 94 per cent of respondents said they experienced some form of mental health disorder, including depression, agitation, fatigue and inability to focus.While not scientific, the online surveys garnered some 1,900 responses from Uygurs around the world, the majority adults. Fearing that his family members in Xinjiang could face reprisals for his work, the researcher who conducted the canvasing, a Uygur, did not want to be named... As Uygurs’ communications with relatives back in Xinjiang have been stymied, they have been stripped of a critical source of “moral support”, says the researcher, who himself has not spoken with anyone in his family since April 2017... The Qaraqash Document, as it came to be known in the international press, detailed authorities’ evaluation of hundreds of residents and their relatives in the southern Xinjiang county, including determinations of whether they should continue their forcible “re-education” or could be released. An abridged and redacted excerpt of the list was published widely in February. Scouring its 137 pages, Ayup came across the name of his friend, identified as the owner of a kindergarten Ayup had visited before. The friend’s younger brother had been arrested and sent for “re-education” for violating family planning policies, notes in the document, seen by the South China Morning Post, said."
Uygurs in Xinjiang didn’t choose to be Muslims, China says in white paper | South China Morning Post - "Uygurs became Muslims not by choice but by force, and Islam is not their only religion, Beijing said in a white paper published on Sunday, as it continued its propaganda campaign to justify its controversial policies in the far western province of Xinjiang.“The Uygur people adopted Islam not of their own volition … but had it forced upon them by religious wars and the ruling class,” according to the document released by the State Council Information Office."
What happened to our parents? Uygur sisters seek answers | South China Morning Post - "Zumret and Humar Isaac lost contact with their parents in November 2018. Since then, the two Uygur sisters from Xinjiang, China, have been on a quest to find out what happened. A phone call from someone claiming to work for the community affairs centre led the sisters to believe that their parents were sent to one of Xinjiang’s “re-education” facilities, where according to the UN, an estimated one million Uygurs are being held. The sisters launched a social media campaign calling for their release. In late March, their parents resurfaced and resumed contact, but the sisters were left with more questions than answers."
China changes law to recognise 're-education camps' in Xinjiang | South China Morning Post - "Chinese officials had earlier denied the existence of such arbitrary detention and enforced political re-education bases"
Mea culpa
Speaking out: Uygurs in the United States break silence on China’s crackdown | South China Morning Post - "Zulpiya Jalaleddin is not a political person, according to her husband. “She doesn’t hate the Communist Party,” Jurat Nizamidin said in the living room in his small Virginia condo. “Yet she’s in prison.”In January, after visiting her husband and their son, Ezmurat, in the United States, Jalaleddin returned to northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region and was promptly imprisoned for reasons unknown to Nizamidin. He said she had been swept up in the Chinese government’s broad crackdown on the Turkic Muslim population in the region, an operation reported to involve the mass detention and re-education of between several hundred thousand and one million Uygurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities... Along with all the other US-based Uygurs who spoke to the Post for this article, Nizamidin has come to the conclusion that keeping silent has done nothing to improve his wife’s situation.“The only thing we can do now is to all stand up and seek journalists like you so we can expose these things,” he said.“The more you stay silent, the worse it is for yourself, and worse for the Uygur people,” he added. “I hope and yearn for all Uygurs abroad to stand up and speak out. Don’t keep your mouth closed just for your own or your family’s benefit.”"
Canadian measures against Xinjiang forced labour a ‘farce,’ China says - The Globe and Mail - "Evidence of forced labour in China’s western Xinjiang region comes from numerous sources, including Muslims who have been compelled to work in factories, state media reports that indicate former detainees have been put to work, Chinese government quotas for the relocation of workers and even the co-location of industrial parks with prisons and training centres surrounded by electric fencing.But Beijing, which initially denied the construction of political-indoctrination and skills-training internment centres in Xinjiang before acknowledging their existence, says the human-rights violation does not occur in China – a country where the law requires healthy prisoners to work.“There is no forced labour in China, there is no forced labour in Xinjiang,” Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said."
China expanding mass labour programme in Tibet while denying forced labour exists in region - "China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural labourers off the land and into recently built military-style training centres where they are turned into factory workers, mirroring a programme in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded coercive labor.Beijing has set quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet and to other parts of China, according to over a hundred state media reports, policy documents from government bureaus in Tibet and procurement requests released between 2016-20 and reviewed by Reuters. The quota effort marks a rapid expansion of an initiative designed to provide loyal workers for Chinese industry."
EU’s request to meet criminals of splitting China for visit in Xinjiang a provocation to China’s judicial sovereignty: FM - "China welcomes diplomats from the European Union to visit its Xinjiang region, but the EU delayed the visit again and again and put forward unreasonable requests, including meeting criminals who have been sentenced for splitting the country, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a press conference... “This is a provocation to China’s laws and judicial sovereignty. The door of Xinjiang is always open and China’s invitation and sincerity have not changed. But the visit should not be an ‘investigation with the presumption of guilt’”"
China shills pretend that the EU keeps refusing China's invitations to visit Xinjiang. Yet the Global Times admits that China refuses to allow the EU to meet certain individuals. Clearly, China has something to hide
China invites EU leaders to ‘see real situation in Xinjiang’ amid claims of Uygur detention and abuse | South China Morning Post - "the EU had rejected the offer because China had set unreasonable conditions – such as saying the delegation could not discuss human rights issues – and refused to allow a meeting with Xinjiang’s top official, Communist Party boss Chen Quanguo. A previous request by 15 Western diplomats to meet Chen in late 2018 was condemned by Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying as “interference in China’s internal affairs with malicious intentions”... A video published last year by British broadcaster BBC that documents one such government-led tour of the re-education centres shows reporters blocked from doing their own reporting outside the itinerary. Journalists on independent reporting trips in Xinjiang are regularly harassed by local authorities."
It is telling that Ch1na refuses to allow diplomats to meet Xinjiang's top official, saying it's “interference in China’s internal affairs with malicious intentions” - it seems they're afraid that he'll let something slip
China Wants the World to Stay Silent on Muslim Camps. It’s Succeeding. - The New York Times - "The trips do not always go as planned. Two reports — one by a Malaysian diplomat and another by European Union officials — were highly critical after their visits. The private account by the Malaysian diplomat, reviewed by The New York Times, contradicted China’s contention that the Uighurs were voluntarily attending the re-education centers.“Delegates could actually sense fear and frustration from the students,” the Malaysian wrote after his December visit with a dozen other diplomats from mostly Muslim nations. “China may have legitimate reasons to implement policies intended to eliminate the threat of terrorism, especially in Xinjiang. However, judging by its approach, it is addressing the issue wrongly and illegitimately, e.g. preventing Muslim minors from learning the Quran.”The diplomat referred to two cities in Xinjiang — once-bustling Kashgar and Hotan — as “zombie towns,” saying the streets were virtually empty and that China was probably “using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to ‘sanitize’ Uighur Muslims until they become acceptable Chinese citizens.”... Three diplomats from the European Union visited Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, this year in what one of the participants said turned out to be a “Potemkin village tour.” The officials were shown a hastily built display of weapons that the Chinese guides said Uighurs had used in terrorist attacks; a mosque where there was no sign of religious observance; and a kindergarten where the children sang songs praising the party." At one camp, the class sang the Communist Party anthem. As they did, one Uighur man caught the eye of a diplomat and held up his wrists as if clamped together by handcuffs.Afterward, the European Union circulated an internal document saying that the visit “does not invalidate the E.U.’s profound concerns about human rights in Xinjiang, including in relation to mass detention, political re-education, religious freedom and Sinicization policies, as well as concerns that similar measures could be applied in other regions of China with notable Muslim minorities.”"
China shills who pretend that the EU refuses to visit Xinjiang to see what has been going on apparently are unaware that the EU has visited and found strange happenings
China’s pressure and propaganda - the reality of reporting Xinjiang
China shills keep claiming that people should visit Xinjiang to see for themselves, but in reality foreign journalists trying to visit get harassed, sometimes violently, they're forced to delete footage and they need an escort. I wonder what they're not supposed to see
China hackers use Facebook to target Uyghurs abroad, company says - Nikkei Asia - "Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it had blocked a group of hackers in China who used the platform to target Uyghurs living abroad with links to malware that would infect their devices and enable surveillance.The social media company said the hackers, known as Earth Empusa or Evil Eye in the security industry, targeted activists, journalists and dissidents who were predominantly Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group facing persecution in China."
China shills are going to claim that Facebook is in on the massive global conspiracy to defame China too
Hot Takes Nobody Asked For - Posts | Facebook - "If you're a "leftist" who demonizes China, supports the HK protests, spreads misinformation about the nonexistent "concentration camps” for Uyghurs, HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU ANY DIFFERENT THAN A REPUBLICAN???"
"ew dont compare me to a republican"
"You are Trump. You are Bush. You are Nixon. There is literally zero meaningful distinction as far as I'm concerned."
Ahh... tankies! Still pretending Adrian Zenz has fabricated everything, despite corroborating evidence from perhaps hundreds of Uighers, satellite images and leaked documents
The fact that leftists are essentially silent on China shows that they don't care about human rights - they just hate the West/white people
Patrick Maguire on Twitter - "Tory mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey just tabled a motion in the London Assembly to de-twin London and Beijing over Hong Kong and the treatment of Uighurs in Xianjing Fell nine votes to eight with Labour voting against and Greens abstaining"
China has created a dystopian hellscape in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says - "In a report published on Thursday, Amnesty called on the UN to investigate, saying China had subjected Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims to mass detention, surveillance, and torture. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, accused Chinese authorities of creating "a dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale"... In a 160-page report based on interviews with 55 former detainees, Amnesty said there was evidence the Chinese state had committed "at least the following crimes against humanity: imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; and persecution." The report follows a similar set of findings by Human Rights Watch, which said in an April report that it believed the Chinese government was responsible for crimes against humanity... The "tiger chair" - the existence of which has been reported elsewhere - is said to be a steel chair with leg irons and handcuffs designed to shackle the body in place. Several former detainees told Amnesty they were forced to watch others locked immobile in the tiger chair for hours or even days at a time."
Uyghur imams targeted in China's Xinjiang crackdown - "China has imprisoned or detained at least 630 imams and other Muslim religious figures since 2014 in its crackdown in the Xinjiang region, according to new research by a Uyghur rights group. The research, compiled by the Uyghur Human Rights Project and shared with the BBC, also found evidence that 18 clerics had died in detention or shortly after... Extremism charges were being issued on a "flimsy legal basis" in Xinjiang for "offences that shouldn't even qualify as offences", said Donald Clarke, a professor at George Washington University who specialises in Chinese law. "Setting to one side for a moment whether you accept 'propagating extremism' as a valid charge, the question is do the facts make a plausible case for that charge?" he said. "And the alleged offences we have seen — things like having a beard, not drinking, or travelling abroad — suggest they don't."... A spokesman for the Chinese government told the BBC that Xinjiang "enjoys unprecedented freedom of religious belief"... Targeting of the Turkic ethnic groups in north-western China is not a new phenomenon. Muslim minorities suffered long periods of repression between the 1950s and 1970s, when Qurans were burned, mosques and cemeteries desecrated, and traditional dress and hair styles prohibited... Tursun's two-year stint in a "re-education through labour" camp marked the beginning of a two-decade ordeal at the hands of the state, his niece told the BBC from outside China. Her uncle was freed from the labour camp in 2002 but constantly harassed by police, she said, and frequently taken away again for two-week periods of "study". Then in 2005, he was detained again but this time sentenced to four years in prison. "We were not given any notice from the court," his niece said. "My family went to the police station to enquire about his fate and the police gave them a handwritten note containing information about his prison sentence and the address of the prison."... As appears to be the case with other imams in the region, Tursun's family was subsequently targeted en masse, said his niece, who had left China by that time. "After I heard the news of my uncle and his wife's arrests, I heard that my mother and many of my relatives were also arrested. Anyone over 14 was taken away," she said. "For the last four years I have been trying to find information regarding their whereabouts, especially my mother."... Some that disappear into detention never come out. Eighteen imams named in the database were reported to have died while in custody or shortly after. Nurgazy Malik, a father of two, graduate of the official Xinjiang Islamic Institute and editor-in-chief of a state-approved religious magazine, reportedly died in detention in November 2018. Unconfirmed reports say Chinese authorities acknowledged his death to his family, but did not produce a body — a situation echoed in other, similar reports. Malik's friends and relatives held a funeral for him in Kazakhstan all the same. In late 2019, as its network of "re-education" camps drew intense international scrutiny, China claimed it had released everyone from the system. Significant numbers had been released, into house arrest or into the otherwise controlled environment of Xinjiang, but rights groups say many were simply transferred to formal prisons. There is also evidence that many thousands had been in prison all along. Incarceration rates exploded in Xinjiang in 2017 and 2018, according to reporting by the New York Times and others, sweeping up at least 230,000 people — about 200,000 more than in previous years. According to Chinese government data, criminal arrests in Xinjiang accounted for 21% of the country's total in 2017, despite the region having about 1.5% of the population. Unlike the "re-education" system, formal prison sentences should create a paper trail. But the court documents are "nowhere to be found", according to Gene Bunin, the researcher behind the Xinjiang Victims Database... Where official documents are available and contain details, offences can be shocking in their innocuity. In one 2018 verdict, now deleted from the government records but archived by the Xinjiang Victims Database, a 55-year-old Uyghur farmer already serving 10 years for "propagating extremism" had his sentence doubled after he "used a disguised and simplified method to perform the namaz prayer in the prison dormitory". Essentially, Ismayil Sidiq secretly prayed in prison. He was reported by a cellmate and charged with "illegal religious activities" and "inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination" — the latter charge for allegedly shouting that Uyghurs should not inform on one another. He will be eligible for release in 2038."
China's Xinjiang government confirms huge birth rate drop but denies forced sterilization of women - "Chinese officials have officially acknowledged birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by almost a third in 2018, compared to the previous year, in a letter to CNN in which they also denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide by authorities in the far western region... official Chinese documents showing a surge in the number of sterilizations performed in the region -- from fewer than 50 per 100,000 people in 2016 to almost 250 per 100,000 people in 2018... the government didn't dispute the rise in sterilizations or the gap in the ratio of new intrauterine devices (IUDs) between Xinjiang and the rest of mainland China. While IUD implants have plunged in China overall, falling to just 21 per 100,000 people in 2018, in Xinjiang they are becoming increasingly common. According to local government statistics, there were almost 1,000 new IUD implants per 100,000 people in Xinjiang in 2018, or 80% of China's total for that year. The Xinjiang government said in its response that the birth rate in the region had dropped from 15.88 per 1,000 people in 2017 to 10.69 per 1,000 people in 2018. The fax said that the drop was due to "the comprehensive implementation of the family planning policy." Up until 2015, the Chinese government enforced a "one-child" family planning policy countrywide, which allowed most urban couples no more than one baby. Ethnic minorities, such as the Uyghur people, were typically allowed to have up to three... The government insisted that those who complied with the family planning policies did so voluntarily. The government attributed the remaining 40,000 fewer babies to increased education and economic development, resulting in fewer children in the region. The Xinjiang government did not include the 2019 birth figures for the region... changes to the natural birth rate should take place over several years or even a decade, not in the space of 12 to 36 months... how likely it was that "17 times more women spontaneously wanted to be sterilized." "Han Chinese academics from Xinjiang have themselves written that the Uyghurs resist any type of contraceptive (and especially sterilization)"... The Xinjiang government also zeroed in on claims made by two female Uyghurs quoted in CNN's article -- Zumrat Dawut and Gulbakhar Jalilova. Dawut said she had been forced into sterilization by the local government in Xinjiang when she went to a government office to pay a fine for having one too many children. Dawut also said she had been in a detention center in Xinjiang for about three months from March 2018. In their response, the government said that Dawut had never been inside a voluntary "education and training center," the name used by the Chinese government for the alleged detention centers, and that she had signed a form agreeing to the procedure known as tubal ligation. In CNN's article, Jalilova, who is a citizen of Kazakhstan and an ethnic Uyghur, said she was held in a detention center for 15 months after being arrested suddenly and without explanation during a business trip to Xinjiang in May 2017. Jalilova claimed she suffered humiliation and torture while inside the camps and said she was raped by one of the guards. The Xinjiang government confirmed Jalilova's claims that she had been detained for 15 months from May 2017, alleging she was arrested "on suspicion of aiding terrorist activities." In August 2018 she was released on bail, after which she returned to Kazakhstan. In their statement, the government denied that Jalilova had been raped or tortured, saying that all of her "rights were fully guaranteed" and the staff who were in her cell could prove it. When asked to respond to the Chinese government's statement, Jalilova stood by her claims and demanded the Xinjiang authorities provide their proof. "Why don't they show a video? Why don't they show a photo during my time in prison showing that I was well fed and not beaten. The cameras were working 24 hours," she said. "I am a citizen of Kazakhstan, what right did they have to detain me for a year and a half?""
Uyghurs Aren't Safe From China Even Outside Xinjiang - The Atlantic - "Those who have left Xinjiang face imprisonment if they return home and persistent insecurity abroad. Some have been hounded and threatened with deportation by immigration officials of countries seeking to improve ties with Beijing... I spoke with half a dozen Uyghur women who had left Xinjiang, and corroborated their accounts with travel and asylum documents, as well as posts on social media. Despite their different backgrounds and income and education levels, their stories of life in Xinjiang and their experiences abroad follow a widely documented pattern of abuse and fear, say analysts who closely follow China’s detention system"
Surveillance of Uyghurs Detailed in Chinese Police Database - "Details of the investigations are contained in a massive police database obtained by The Intercept: the product of a reporting tool developed by private defense company Landasoft and used by the Chinese government to facilitate police surveillance of citizens in Xinjiang. The database, centered on Ürümqi, includes policing reports that confirm and provide additional detail about many elements of the persecution and large-scale internment of Muslims in the area. It sheds further light on a campaign of repression that has reportedly seen cameras installed in the homes of private citizens, the creation of mass detention camps, children forcibly separated from their families and placed in preschools with electric fences, the systematic destruction of Uyghur cemeteries, and a systematic campaign to suppress Uyghur births through forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control... The database itself repeatedly uses a marker to query for Uyghur people, “iXvWZREN,” which groups them with terrorists and ex-convicts. There is no marker for Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China. The surveillance in Xinjiang was known to be extensive, creating one of the most watched regions in the world... an August 2017 police report said that “due to overly frequent phone inspections conducted by certain checkpoints, which caused some people to be inspected over 3 times, people complain about this work.” An October 2017 “social opinion intelligence report” stated that “some people reflected that the current checkpoint is too overpowered. Often they would be checked 3 times during one night. It wastes their time when they are in an emergency.” The documents discuss people who switched to older phones to prevent the inconvenience of these phone checks. Rune Steenberg, an anthropologist in Denmark focusing on Xinjiang and Uyghurs, who spent time in Kashgar as a researcher as late as 2016, said he switched to using a simple phone rather than a smartphone in 2014 and that many Uyghurs did the same. “It’s not just about them discovering stuff on your phone,” he said. “They can place stuff on your phone in order to incriminate you. And there’s no way you can afterwards prove that that was placed on your phone and it wasn’t from you. So it became really dangerous, actually, to have a smartphone.” And, Steenberg said, police would often scam people into giving up their smartphones, falsely stating the phone had religious content and asking people if it was theirs, knowing they would disown the device. “They would be like, ‘No, that’s not my phone, no, I didn’t bring my phone here,’” said Steenberg. Then, he said, the police would hold onto the phones and sell them afterward... Even holding a passport is considered suspicious. Documents in the database indicate Uyghur passport holders are checked on by authorities more frequently than those without passports. Indeed, any knowledge of life outside of Xinjiang can be flagged as suspicious. For example, police in Weihuliang took note in one weekly report, among “people who need special attention,” of four people who had traveled to Beijing “to reflect local issues.” “The rest have never left the region, so they’re seen as safer,” Byler said... Ayup said mosques have cameras inside too, and people are surveilled for the way in which they pray. “If people use a different style of praying … the camera takes a picture,” he said, adding that a friend was arrested for this. Ayup said that some Uyghurs pray in very old styles, and some use new styles. “In the Chinese government’s eyes, the new style is threatening, is extremism,” he said... One illustration of how policing became increasingly aggressive and ubiquitous in Xinjiang is a police report discussing how one knife at a dumpling shop was not chained to a secure post, as per regulation. The report said the violation needed to be rectified within a day. Laws in Xinjiang require not only the chaining of knives, the document indicated, but that knives also have QR codes identifying their owners. “It’s just a way of showing how tightly everything is controlled, that even knives that are used in cooking have to be thought of as potential weapons,” said Byler... Informants are rewarded for passing along information, but people are also rewarded for more specific actions. Linking their WeChat account, passing a verification, and posting an image can all result in a cash reward. All of this is tracked and reflected in the database. One document, a public announcement from police, indicates that police and auxiliaries faced pressure to submit large quantities of intelligence to authorities. It chastised citizens in the high-tech zone within Ürümqi’s Xinshi district for sending in tips that are “filler created just to make report numbers seem large, and cannot be used, and occupy a large amount of manpower and time to process.” For example, “residents reported that there are often kids urinating in the elevator” of one building. Also: “A few citizens reported that they are scammed while buying crabs or mooncakes online. Quantities lost are generally not big.”"
Report: Online Uyghur Slave Trade Booming in China - "Unspecified sellers in China are increasingly using online venues to advertise Uyghurs for sale in “batches of 50 to 100 workers”... “Baidu, the company hosting the job postings, did not respond to a request for comment.”... it contacted some of the phone numbers included in the Uyghur labor advertisements. “One agent told us that workers from Xinjiang needed to be ‘examined politically’ before they could be transferred”... “The local government of the receiving province would also do a ‘political examination,'” the labor agent told Sky News, adding, “All workers would be accompanied by ‘supervisors’ … and ‘under half-military management.'” Another agent contacted by the news outlet “said that without local government approval, workers could not be arranged because ‘the ethnic minority issue is a severe problem.'” A third labor agent contacted by Sky News said “the salary of the ‘supervisors’ was paid by the Personnel Bureau of the Xinjiang government.”"
Anti-racists' silence on the Uyghurs speaks volumes - "when I saw a Zoom event organised by the pleasant-sounding ‘Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding’ (SACU), discussing how we can fight anti-Asian hate, I was keen to attend. What I was served, however, was a dish close to Chinese state propaganda. Anti-racists’ silence on the Uyghurs speaks volumes Share Topics Politics UK World With the recent spike in anti-Asian hate crime, it should be a comfort for us anti-racists to see organisations standing up in defence of the dignity and civil rights of Asians in Britain and beyond. So, when I saw a Zoom event organised by the pleasant-sounding ‘Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding’ (SACU), discussing how we can fight anti-Asian hate, I was keen to attend. What I was served, however, was a dish close to Chinese state propaganda. Perhaps I should have been more cynical: SACU does trace its roots to the Communist Party-aligned ‘Britain-China Friendship Association’, only splintering off in 1965 due to disagreements over the Sino-Soviet Split. Its website even says the SACU has been ‘dismissed by critics as being “uncritically Maoist”‘, without any attempt to rebut the accusation. It did not take long for this event (which is currently available on YouTube) to go awry. After a 15-minute history of the caricature ‘Fu Manchu’, and a commendably inoffensive lecture on the context of British structural racism against Asians from Dr Yeh, Ms Chen began her speech. Perhaps I should have expected a woman whose blog is titled ‘Madame Miaow’ to be a touch eccentric, but I was not ready for the one-eyed invective. She claimed that the US is committing a ‘pogrom’ of Chinese people, conveniently ignoring the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the Uyghurs; engaging in a ‘neverending’ series of wars, including those in Iraq and Yugoslavia, a list near the end of which China will probably end up; and that its social unity is predicated on hatred of the People’s Republic. Her thesis blamed Western capitalism ‘entering a geriatric old age’ for anti-China hatred. This, she said, had allowed the ‘billionaire class’ (unheard of in China, of course) to suck the wealth of the nation dry. China, meanwhile, had produced the country with ‘the world’s only positive GDP growth’ (apart from 94 others, according to the IMF). She then went on to describe how ‘Live long and prosper might well be the motto of modern China’. In a country with forced abortions and more executions than all other nations combined, this seemed unlikely. It was, however, the Q&A session that exposed the SACU. ‘How do you think Sinophobia has influenced Western commentary on the situation in Xinjiang?’, went one question. Ms Chen was unrepentant. She denied there was any persecution of the Uyghurs and said that life expectancy was actually increasing in Xinjiang (ignoring the 60 per cent decline in fertility due to forced contraception and abortions). She also suggested the media are denying people a ‘360 degree view’ of things. Chen’s response was troubling, but not surprising. Sabby Dhalu’s answer bothered me more. In her speech, she had reminded us of the importance of unity in opposing all forms of racism, arguing that an attack on one racial community is an attack on all of us. So, what of the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang? She sidestepped this question, declaring it essential to avoid ‘difficult debates’ of an international nature and focus only on racism at home, otherwise it might pit racial communities against each other. Leaving aside her assumption that all Asian people would be offended by criticism of the CCP, it stunned me that a senior representative of both Unite Against Fascism and Stand Up To Racism, two of Britain’s most prominent anti-racist organisations, seemed content to abandon the Uyghurs and oppose even discussion of the genocide. I wonder whether her call for avoiding ‘difficult debates’ includes Israel-Palestine? I doubt it."
