A young Uyghur man says he has turned his dream into reality by opening a popular coffee house at the heart of Kashgar’s historic Old City to “blend the old and the new.”

A young Muslim woman moves from her remote village to the city for a “well-paid” factory job that enables her to provide a comfortable life for her family.

A Uyghur businesswoman challenges stereotypes to help young women in her community to pick Western-style wedding dresses for their big day.

They all purport to be content with prosperous lives, freedom of choice, and abundant opportunities they say they enjoy in their home region of Xinjiang in China’s northwest.

That is how a new Chinese documentary, Beyond The Mountains: Life In Xinjiang, depicts the lives of ethnic Uyghur and other Muslim minorities — mostly ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz — in the region.

The film makes no mention of China’s brutal crackdown on Xinjiang’s Muslims that has seen more than 1 million people forced into a notorious network of massive internment camps, often run in prison-like conditions, since 2017.

The documentary was released by the state-owned China Global Television Network in mid-April in several languages — including English and Russian — in a bid to push Beijing’s narrative of Xinjiang to global audiences.

It seeks to counter multiple accounts by natives of Xinjiang who say Muslims live in a climate of fear and oppression as authorities target their culture, religion, family life, and traditions.

The documentary emphasizes opportunities the government has allegedly created for young people to pursue their dreams in sports, music, business, and other areas.

Xinjiang activists who spoke to RFE/RL condemned the documentary as blatant Chinese propaganda that is a gruesome distortion of reality.

The Kashgar Coffee House Tale

The documentary depicts a coffee shop in a traditional two-story building with a flat rooftop on the backdrop of Kashgar’s scenic Old City.

Kashgar Corner Coffee & Tea is a startup business owned by young Muslim entrepreneur Mardan Ablimit, who describes himself as a “genuine Kashgar boy” with a big dream.

Ablimit says his idea of a coffee shop was to mix his community’s history and culture with modern elements.

He describes his drinks as a perfect “blend of Western coffee and local herbs.”

The coffeehouse features colorful cushions and carpets along with traditional teahouse-style furniture.

Ablimit calls his coffeehouse a “miniature version of Kashgar” where “the older generation is trying new things” and young people like him “are pursuing their dreams.”

“I don’t see any conflicts or contradictions here,” he says, alluding to the official Chinese line of “peace and harmony” in the region.

People in Kashgar are “discarding the old way of thinking” and embracing change, Ablimit claims.

It’s difficult to verify Ablimit’s story of success in a business that he says pays tribute to his community’s history, culture, and traditions.

In reality, the Chinese government has shut down Xinjiang Muslims’ cultural centers, damaged or razed thousands of mosques and historical Muslim structures, and imprisoned community leaders.

Muslims are barred in many areas from entering mosques until they reach the age of 18.

Thousands have been jailed for performing Islamic prayers, celebrating holidays, or having traditionally large families.

Many Muslim children have been separated from their families and placed in special boarding schools — a move activists say is aimed at brainwashing the younger generation.

Beijing has also reportedly embedded more than 1 million civil servants from the country’s majority Han Chinese population to live with Muslim families in Xinjiang as part of the assimilation effort as well as to monitor their movements and contacts.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote in its International Religious Freedom Annual Report issued on April 28, 2020, that “individuals have been sent to the camps for wearing long beards, refusing alcohol, or other behaviors authorities deem to be signs of ‘religious extremism.’”

‘Grateful To My Factory’

A large segment of the Chinese documentary is dedicated to young Muslim women who — according to the video — have challenged their conservative community’s stereotypes to embrace modern life.

Zileyhan Eysa is introduced as a farmer from the rural county of Kuqa who gets a job at a factory in Bole in the relatively affluent northern part of Xinjiang.

Eysa makes about $600 a month, enough to support her impoverished family in Kuqa and her own life in the city.

With Eysa’s remittances, her mother, Tursungul Rejep, has paid her medical bills while her father is able to buy a car.

“I’m grateful to my factory,” Eysa says.

Eysa has “learnt many new things” in the city, the video says. She has no intention of moving back to her village and doesn’t think of getting married anytime soon.

In traditional Uyghur families, marriages are usually arranged by the parents. But Eysa’s family “will accept whomever she chooses to marry,” says Rejep, speaking in her native Uyghur.

Eysa — like all other young Muslims depicted in the documentary — speaks Mandarin.

The film shows the family’s spacious house in Kuqa, with Eysa, her parents, and two younger siblings — all exceptionally well dressed — happily chatting as they eat watermelon.

Samira Arkin is another Muslim woman who has broken with her community’s traditions and “set an example for many other young people.”

Arkin owns a bridal shop in Kashgar where she helps Muslim brides to choose fashionable white dresses for their wedding.

Arkin recalls how she decided to wear a Western-style gown for her own wedding in 2010 despite misgivings by her relatives.

Modern wedding dresses were frowned upon in her community, she explains.

Like many others in the documentary, she doesn’t say words like Muslims, Islam, or Uyghur.

Arkin says she was unhappy to see how some women “covered their faces” and didn’t even have “the right to go out” on their own.

She says she turned her protest into a business opportunity and opened her shop.

“I wanted to change how [Kashgar] brides dress and how they think about it,” Arkin says. The businesswoman claims she enjoys support from many people who tell her she has “made the right choices.”

China has banned the Islamic veil as a sign of religious extremism.

In vaguely worded legislation, Beijing has also outlawed certain Islamic names and other unspecified “extremism signs.”

Some Muslim women have reported being harassed by police for wearing long dresses.

Forced To Speak?

It’s impossible to know if Arkin, Eysa, Rejep, and others in documentary were speaking their minds or were ordered to repeat what authorities told them to say.

People are forced to “follow orders” from the Communist Party, says Qairat Baitolla, an activist from Xinjiang who lives in Kazakhstan.

“If they refuse, they face imprisonment, harassment, and even being shot dead,” Baitolla says.

One ethnic Kazakh man, who currently lives in Altay in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, has told his relatives abroad that authorities were forcing him to denounce on video former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s condemning comments about Xinjiang.

In January, Pompeo declared that China was committing “ongoing” genocide against Muslims in Xinjiang.

The man from Altay also said that Chinese police demanded he denounce and divorce his wife, Altynai Arasan. Arasan lives in Kazakhstan and attends anti-Beijing protests in front of Chinese diplomatic offices.

According to Arasan, police warned her husband he would be killed if he refused to make the video statement.

But “there are also many people” among the Muslim minorities who “blindly trust the Communist Party,” says Bekzat Maqsutkhan, an activist from Xinjiang.

“Authorities select ignorant, trusting, and low-educated people who have never seen the outside world to participate in such propaganda,” he told RFE/RL.

Maqsutkhan, who now lives in Kazakhstan, says some members of Muslim communities take part in the state propaganda for financial gain or to advance their careers.

But the activists say the majority, including many children, have no choice but to read into the camera the scripted texts that proclaim support for Beijing’s version of events.

China denies all of the reports of widespread rights abuses in Xinjiang and insists that the internment camps are educational and vocational training centers aimed at preventing religious extremism.

But many survivors say many of the detainees at the internment camps are subjected to torture, rape, and forced labor — mainly working in textile factories and picking cotton. Some women have reported being forced to undergo an abortion and others say they were forcibly sterilized.

The documentary comes as the United States, Britain, Canada, and the European Union imposed sanctions on several Chinese officials over the reported rights abuses in Xinjiang.

On April 22, the British House of Commons approved a parliamentary motion declaring crimes against humanity and genocide are being committed against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslims in Xinjiang.

RFE/RL Kazakh Service correspondent in Almaty, Nurtay Lakhanuly, contributed to this report

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

When 67-year-old pensioner Qalida Akytkhan decided to join a small protest outside the Chinese Consulate in Almaty, it was three years after three of her sons were detained at a so-called “reeducation camp” in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

Akytkhan has since become a mainstay at the pickets that, despite police intimidation, have endured outside the consulate since early February. She has joined dozens of other protesters who say their relatives are missing, jailed, or trapped in China’s ongoing crackdown.

United Nations human rights officials estimate that a million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities are detained at camps in a vast Chinese internment system.

Sometimes Akytkhan travels by bus to make the 50-kilometer journey from her home to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. Other times she commutes in a shared taxi to the Chinese Consulate, where a loudspeaker at the compound warns protesters they could face prosecution for violating COVID restrictions.

Despite the long journey, constant surveillance by consulate guards, and a steady police presence, Akytkhan says she has no plans to stop joining the group of mostly women protesters. They gather there to demand safe passage home for their relatives — many of whom are Chinese-born ethnic Kazakhs who’ve become naturalized Kazakh citizens or permanent residents of the Central Asian country.

“I will keep going until I get even a tiny piece of information about my children,” Akytkhan tells RFE/RL. “I told these guards, ‘When it is warmer, I will come here with a blanket and will lie down.’”

The plight of ethnic Kazakhs and other groups interned in Xinjiang has been a source of uproar within Kazakhstan. The testimonies of former detainees, and family members like Akytkhan, fueled a guerrilla advocacy campaign that focused international attention on the issue — turning Kazakhstan into an unlikely window to document rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Akytkhan’s perseverance and the ongoing protests outside China’s consulate showcase that activism continues in Kazakhstan over the Chinese camps. But the situation today is a far cry from the groundswell of activity around the issue in 2018 and 2019 that forced the Kazakh government to walk a tightrope between appeasing Beijing and quelling an exasperated segment of its own population.

Since then, the government has led a swift crackdown against activists working on Xinjiang issues in the country. It has shut down organizations, arrested activists, and intimidated high-profile figures into exile, leaving only a small but devoted segment for public protests.

“The Kazakh government has long been trying to balance between these two problems,” says Temur Umarov, an expert on China in Central Asia at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Xinjiang is an incredibly sensitive issue for Beijing and [the Kazakh government] knows it needs to keep ties with such an important economic, and increasingly political, partner strong,” Umarov tells RFE/RL.

Shining A Spotlight

Akytkhan, an ethnic Uyghur who married an ethnic Kazakh man, moved from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and became a Kazakh citizen. One of her sons also moved across the border to Kazakhstan. But her other three sons, daughters-in-law, and 14 grandchildren stayed in China. All were eventually taken to the detention camps.

Now a widow, Akytkhan continues to campaign for her family. She received word from a local official in Xinjiang that her sons were transferred from the camps and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for crimes that she is not aware of.

Her daughters-in-law have since been released from the camps to take care of the children. But they remain under house arrest.

Complicated family connections across the border, like Akytkhan’s, are part of what made Kazakhstan a home for swelling activism about Xinjiang. It has been Kazakhs with relatives among Xinjiang’s ethnic Kazakh minority that have taken up the mantle.

Perhaps the loudest critic on the issue was Serikzhan Bilash. His Almaty-based Atajurt Eriktileri group was on the front lines of documenting and raising awareness about the mass detentions.

The group’s volunteers, with relatives detained or missing in Xinjiang, proved to be unusually effective in spreading information about China’s rights abuses. They worked with international media and rights groups by hosting regular press conferences and posting video testimony of recently released detainees.

“Only a small percentage of the Kazakhs that have been in camps have actually shared their stories publicly,” Bilash told RFE/RL. “It’s important to keep collecting more and more firsthand facts about what is happening in Xinjiang.”

But it didn’t take long for Kazakh authorities to become nervous about Bilash and Atajurt’s activities. The group’s attempts to be officially registered with the government were repeatedly denied. That was followed by a series of fines that ultimately culminated in the dramatic March 2019 arrest of Bilash on extremism charges, a common allegation in Kazakhstan for jailing government critics.

Bilash and Atajurt helped attract international attention to the case of Sairagul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizen who crossed illegally from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan in 2018 after working at a camp. She was fleeing detention herself.

Sauytbay’s legal status in Kazakhstan was drawn out, as the government appeared to use her unresolved asylum request as a means to prevent her from speaking about her experiences as a camp worker in Xinjiang. She eventually left Kazakhstan in 2019 for Sweden, where she was granted asylum.

“The Kazakh government is more and more tied to Beijing and now the Kazakh government has lost its independence,” Bilash said. “They sold their independence to China.”

Bilash eventually accepted a plea bargain that required him to end his activism and keep a distance from Atajurt.

Shortly after, a splinter group made up of some of Bliash’s disaffected former associates was officially registered as Atajurt Eriktileri. But it has not continued the tactics of the previous group to raise awareness of Chinese rights abuses — choosing instead a far less vocal approach.

Yerbol Dauletbek, head of the officially registered group, told RFE/RL the organization will continue to help those affected by the crackdown in Xinjiang. But he said many people affected are now too scared to come forward and share their ordeal.

Dauletbek said he believes ethnic Kazakhs in the camps and those calling for their release have been “quietly abandoned” by Kazakhstan’s government. The episode highlights the government’s evolving strategy to impede Xinjiang activism in the country.

“Now the government is succeeding in intimidating and scaring people from coming forward,” Bilash says. “It is a signal and a warning to scare people from their activism and make them stay silent.”

Bilash eventually left Kazakhstan for Turkey before moving on to the United States. He says he plans to continue his activism there and register a U.S.-based organization focused on Xinjiang.

The Global Stage

China’s internment-camp system has received increased scrutiny and political pressure in recent years. The U.S. State Department recently accused China of committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” against Uyghurs. The Canadian and Dutch parliaments have both declared that the situation in Xinjiang is genocide.

The Chinese state has also been accused of an array of abuses in the region under the guise of the internment system, including forced labor, sterilization, torture, and rape.

But Beijing has also become more forceful in its pushback. Not only does China deny the genocide allegations. It says the camps are “reeducation” facilities for combating terrorism. And it has gone about intimidating and targeting those who speak out publicly about what they’ve witnessed in the camps.

Women who made allegations of rape and sexual abuse in February to the BBC were singled out by Beijing. In a series of press conference in March, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin and Xinjiang regional official Xu Guixiang held up photographs of women who gave firsthand testimony of sexual assault in camps. They insulted the women, calling them liars of “inferior character” and accusing them of adultery.

The Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan, Zhang Xiao, has been outspoken in pushing back against accusations that Beijing is mistreating Kazakhs. The embassy’s Instagram page has taken to posting content meant to discredit Sauytbay, accusing her of fabricating the stories about her experiences in Xinjiang.

“[China] is trying its best to change this narrative about what is going on in Xinjiang,” the Carnegie Center’s Umarov says. “But it hasn’t changed much in Central Asia. I don’t think that Beijing has a well-thought-out strategy of how to cope with this problem.”

Kazakhstan’s Tightrope

The Kazakh government has avoided criticizing China and has publicly toed Beijing’s line about the camps — eager not to anger its main investor and strategic partner in the Belt and Road Initiative.

The authorities have elected a new approach to keep Xinjiang activism at bay. Following the high-profile case of Sauytbay, the government elected to avoid drawing international attention to another case. Instead, in October 2020, it granted temporary asylum to four ethnic Kazakhs who’d illegally crossed the border from Xinjiang into Kazakhstan.

Two of those Xinjiang-born asylum seekers who received temporary asylum, Qaisha Aqan and Murager Alimuly, were attacked the same day in January. Aqan was returning home from grocery shopping near Almaty when she was attacked. Alimuly was stabbed in the capital, Nur-Sultan.

In both instances, nothing was stolen. The perpetrators have never been apprehended.

Aqan says she believes the attacks were a politically motivated warning against becoming outspoken about Xinjiang, although she is not sure who was behind the attacks. “It was not random. In one day, [Alimuly] was stabbed and I was attacked,” she told RFE/RL. “The light [on the street] was switched off for two hours. All the [security] cameras stopped working [during my attack]. What a coincidence, right?”

Bekzat Maksutkhan, an associate of Bilash’s, runs a successor group to their original organization called Naghyz Atajurt, or “Real” Atajurt. But it remains unregistered and currently does not have an office.

Maksutkhan has followed the attacks on Alimuly and Aqan, as well as the protests outside the consulate. But he says it’s difficult to keep the organization going given financial pressure and growing intimidation from Kazakh authorities.

“We’ve never interfered with the government. We don’t have any economic interests, nor do we have any political interests. We just deal with human rights issues,” Maksutkhan told RFE/RL. “But we still face a lot of pressure and police often question us.”

With few grassroots organizations left to advocate and increased scrutiny from the authorities, protesters like Akytkhan feel that demonstrating outside the Chinese Consulate in Almaty is their last resort. Despite her age and health concerns that caused her to faint outside the consulate during one protest, Akytkhan says she won’t stop until she gets answers about her sons.

“At night, I take a photo of my three sons and hold it to my chest,” she says. “I can’t sleep without it. I put it next to my head on my pillow. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep until 5 a.m.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.