This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Read this story in Uyghur: خىتاي پاكىستاندىكى بىر قىسىم ئۇيغۇرلارنى «ئىرقى قىرغىنچىلىق ساياھىتى» گە ئاپارغان
A group of 10 Pakistan-based businessmen who praised China’s policies during a trip to Xinjiang this month have been blasted by Uyghur activists for parroting Beijing’s propaganda and turning a blind eye to China’s oppression of the roughly 12 million Uyghurs living there.
The businessmen, most of whom were ethnic Uyghurs, came on the eight-day trip funded by the Chinese government from the Ex-Chinese Association Pakistan, established in 2007 with China’s support to promote the welfare of the Uyghur community in the country.
In social media posts, the delegation said they saw Uyghurs and other Muslims living happily and peacefully in the far-western region, and that China was actively developing the region. They also dismissed Western reports of Chinese atrocities.
Photos and videos from the trip, which began on Aug. 20 and included stops in Urumqi, Korla and Kashgar, show members of the delegation — two of whom wore doppas, or Uyghur skullcaps — raising Chinese flags, attending special banquets and participating in events organized by officials.
The posts showed them watching musical performances and proclaiming that “Muslims of all ethnicities are living happily in Xinjiang.”
The trip is the latest by officials from mostly Muslim countries organized by Beijing in an effort to dispel allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs in the region, activists say.
An estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs have been put into concentration camps scattered around Xinjiang, although Beijing has described them as job training facilities that are now mostly closed.
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But this was the first time that a foreign delegation with ethnic Uyghurs from a Muslim-majority country was invited to the far-western region, Uyghur activists said.
“Despite having relatives in prison, they remain silent about East Turkestan because they benefit from the Chinese consulate” in Pakistan, said Omer Khan, founder of the Pakistan-based Omer Uyghur Trust, which assists Uyghurs living in the country, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.
“Their actions bring shame not only to Uyghurs in their homeland, but also to Uyghurs worldwide,” he said.
RFA could not reach the Ex-Chinese Association Pakistan for comment.
Helping cover up?
Activists and Uyghurs abroad said they found the photos and videos disturbing, mainly because most Uyghurs living outside China cannot communicate with their relatives in Xinjiang or obtain information about those who have been detained there.
Uyghurs in Pakistan are outraged by the delegation members, seeing them as aiding and abetting China’s efforts to cover up the Uyghur genocide, Khan said.
Nearly 1,000 Uyghur families live in Gilgit and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where their ancestors migrated from Xinjiang 50 to 60 years ago. However, they are stateless and do not have Pakistani citizenship.
In Rawalpindi, nearly 100 Uyghurs who fled to Pakistan through Afghanistan years ago are still at risk of being deported to China or Afghanistan because of Pakistan’s failure to grant them citizenship — something activists say is due to Chinese pressure.
Members of the delegation — which included association chairman Muhammad Nasir Khan and Nasir Khan Sahib, former chairman of the Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry — began posting on social media in Urdu and English as soon as they arrived in Xinjiang, Khan said.
In Korla, the second-largest city by population in Xinjiang, they participated in the city’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage Week” as part of China’s “Xinjiang is a wonderful place” propaganda campaign designed to counter criticism of its policies in the restive, heavily Muslim region, he said.
The Chinese press covered the delegation’s visit, claiming that they witnessed peace, stability, economic development, religious harmony and cultural prosperity in the region.
State-controlled media reports publicized the delegation’s statement: “We can see people dancing happily all the time. We really feel that the life of the people in Xinjiang is sweeter than honey.”
Abdul Aziz, a Uyghur businessman from Gilgit who participated in the Xinjiang trip, posted short videos on Facebook titled “Xinjiang trip diaries,” showing the delegation visiting exhibitions on counter-terrorism and anti-extremism, the International Grand Bazaar and the Islamic Institute of Xinjiang in Urumqi and tourist sites in other places.
RFA’s attempts to contact Abdul Aziz via his social media platforms were unsuccessful.
Pakistan under pressure
Hena Zuberi, director of the human rights group Justice for All, described the situation as deeply saddening, saying Beijing is using such visits to justify its genocidal policies under the guise of China-Pakistan friendship.
Pakistan has come under pressure from Beijing because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a 3,000-kilometer (1,800-mile) Chinese infrastructure network project under the Belt and Road Initiative to foster better trade with China, and secure and reduce travel time for China’s Middle East energy imports.
“If they took a stance and they said and asked the hard questions and demanded to know what was happening to those Muslim people in the Uyghur region, I think the situation would be different,” Zuberi said of the visiting delegates.
“But Pakistan is so economically imprisoned by China, they can’t,” she said.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Two years after the U.N.’s human rights chief said China’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang may constitute “crimes against humanity,” her successor on Tuesday called for a full investigation into the charges, while rights groups called for more pressure on Beijing.
On Aug. 31, 2022, in a long-awaited report issued on her last day on the job, then U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said that “serious human rights violations” were committed in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in the context of the Chinese government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies.
Her successor, Volker Türk, has repeatedly called on China to address concerns documented in the damning, 46-page Bachelet report, including China’s arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and the separation of children from their families. UN efforts, however, have met angry denunciations and stonewalling by Chinese diplomats.
Workers are seen on the production line at a cotton textile factory in Korla, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China April 1, 2021. (cnsphoto via Reuters) 
On Tuesday, Türk’s office in Geneva repeated its call for action.
“On Xinjiang, we understand that many problematic laws and policies remain in place, and we have called again on the authorities to undertake a full review, from the human rights perspective, of the legal framework governing national security and counter-terrorism and to strengthen the protection of minorities against discrimination,” the office of UN rights chief said in a statement Tuesday.
“Allegations of human rights violations, including torture, need to be fully investigated,” said Ravina Shamdasan, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.
“We are also continuing to follow closely the current human rights situation in China, despite the difficulties posed by limited access to information and the fear of reprisals against individuals who engage with the United Nations,” added Shamdasan.
The statement also urged Beijing to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty, and to clarify the status and whereabouts of those whose families have been seeking information about them.”
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The new statement was welcomed by human rights groups and experts, but they also urged more pressure to overcome Chinese resistance that had prevented progress on the issue since the August 2022 report.
“Two years ago, we welcomed OHCHR’s report on the human rights situation facing the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China. Since then, sadly, we have seen little else to raise awareness of, or improve, their plight,” said Kat Cosgrove of the U.S. watchdog group Freedom House.
“The United Nations has a responsibility to continue to use all the tools at their disposal to push the CCP to end their persecution and repression, including allowing independent investigators full access to Xinjiang,” Cosgrove, Freedom House’s deputy director of policy and advocacy, told RFA Uyghur.
The International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), a human rights advocacy group, also gave a guarded welcome to the High Commission’s statement, but urged concrete actions from the UN agency, including setting up a monitoring and reporting outfit to “put an end to China’s exceptionalism.”
Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet attends the II National Assembly of Women Mayors in Tegucigalpa, Aug. 22, 2024. (Orlando Sierra/AFP)
The ISHR, based in Geneva and New York, quoted Uyghur human rights lawyer Rayhan Asat, as saying the new statement that Türk’s office was “committed to tangible change in China is heartening.”
“Yet, China has not implemented any OHCHR recommendations, and independent investigations are still limited or blocked,” she added.
The U.S. government has since 2021 accused Beijing of carrying out a campaign of “genocide” against Uyghurs and other Muslims in far-west Xinjiang, including by sterilizing women, banning the exercise of culture and imprisoning many Uyghurs in high-security internment camps.
The UN and Western governments have remained steadfast in their condemnation of China over its harsh policies affecting Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hongkongers, though Beijing has angrily denied accusations of abuses and continued maintaining an iron grip on them.
Uyghur exile and advocacy groups believe that the United Nations and individual states have failed to take concrete measures to punish China for severe rights violations in Xinjiang, including mass detentions, torture, cultural genocide, forced labor and the forced sterilization of Uyghur women.
China denies it has committed rights abuses against the 11 million Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking group that refers to Xinjiang — the vast mountainous and desert region traversed by the Silk Road — as East Turkestan.
Reporting by Gulchehra Hoja for RFA Uyghur. Translated by Alim Seytoff. Editing by Paul Eckert.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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China’s promotion of tourism in the far-western region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has sought to hide its persecution of the 11 million Uyghurs who live there, has parallels to the Nazis’ practice of “genocide tourism,” a Swedish anthropologist and former diplomat writes in the online current affairs magazine The Diplomat.
After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and its herding of Jews into concentration camps, a popular German travel guide in 1943 offered tours of the Wilder Osten, or the Wild East, the article by Magnus Fiskesjö recounts.
It spelled out a vision of Lebensraum, or living space, and new resources for Germans after forcing out Jews, Slavs and other undesirables from Central and Eastern Europe.
And even as the Nazis set up death camps to murder Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto became an attraction on orchestrated tours, writes Fiskesjö, who teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University in New York state.
Likewise, in China’s efforts to promote Xinjiang as a tourist destination, it has sought to cover up its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs by sprucing up buildings, installing new infrastructure and constructing fake historical sites, Fiskesjö writes.
It’s all meant to promote China’s narrative that Uyghurs are living happy, prosperous lives and and benefiting from China’s development, when in fact about 1.8 million of them have been detained in concentration camps and thousands have been sent to prison, often on flimsy charges — behavior that United States and some Western parliaments have labeled a genocide.
China denies those accusations and claims the camps were training facilities and are now mostly closed.
Tourists are flocking to Xinjiang — mostly from within China — and tend to see a sanitized version of life there. Last year, 265 million tourists visited the region, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.
Beijing has arranged for dozens of diplomats and journalists, mainly from Muslim countries, to visit Xinjiang to take orchestrated tours of the region — without letting them freely roam around or talk with local residents.
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Chinese officials have adopted similar practices embraced by the Nazis, who allowed tourists to go to an “occupied zone … under the military and police control so they can channel tourists to safe places where they only see what the government wants them to see,” Fiskesjö told Radio Free Asia.
“It was their attempt to present the situation as normal,” he said. “The Nazi government would say, ‘We have everything under control. There is nothing to worry about, and you can be a tourist.’”
Resettlement strategies
There are other similarities, Fiskesjö says.
Beijing’s strategy of settling Han Chinese in Xinjiang and the forced assimilation of Uyghur children into Chinese culture also mirrors the Nazis’ relocation of people from Germany to occupied territories and their forcible assimilation policies for children taken from their parents to be raised as German, he said.
“Both of these aspects are equally happening in Xinjiang today,” he said.
Fiskesjö and Rukia Turdush, an independent Uyghur researcher from Canada, published a report in July titled “Mass Detention and Forced Assimilation of Uyghur Children in China,” which provides evidence of Beijing separating children from their families, preventing them from being reunited with their parents, and restricting their use of the Uyghur language.
Fiskesjö also pointed to the ongoing arrests and detentions of Uyghurs, and Chinese settlers taking over farms and homes of those held in camps or prisons.
Most tourists on government-sponsored or designed trips to Xinjiang will stick to designated areas and stay in the same hotels, he said.
“It’s about inviting people and tricking and fooling them into [seeing] this as a normal area, controlled and safe,” Fiskesjö said.
Visitors pose for photos with a giant plastic sculpture of a piece of Uyghur naan bread at the International Grand Bazaar in Urumqi in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, during a government organized visit, April 22, 2021. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Tourists who go to Xinjiang are convinced that the criticism of China’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs isn’t true, he added.
“This is what is encapsulated in the slogan ‘seeing is believing,’ which the Chinese government has been recycling again and again” with regard to Xinjiang, Fiskesjö said.
‘False narrative’
Experts on Xinjiang concurred with Fiskesjö’s assessment.
“By shaping the tourist experience either through what people see, what people read [and] who they can speak to, China believes that it can use individuals who come to the region to amplify its own narratives,” said Henryk Szadziewski, director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
When visitors go to Xinjiang, they feel safe and see Uyghurs dancing or participating in other performances; then, after they leave, they will tell others about their experiences, which are meant to counter the arguments of genocide, he said.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington, issued reports in August 2023 and a January 2024 about Western travel companies offering tours to sites in Xinjiang connected to the repression of religious beliefs, the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage, surveillance, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault and deaths in custody.
U.S. columnist, author and lawyer Gordon Chang said some visitors are willing to whitewash the persecution of the Uyghurs and spread the Chinese government’s narrative that there is no genocide.
“They see what the Communist Party wants them to see, and they know what is occurring,” he told RFA. “Some foreign tourists are just naïve, but many are propagating a narrative that is false. We know that because there is evidence that shows that China is engaging in these crimes against humanity.”
Anders Corr, principal of the New York-based political risk firm Corr Analytics, compared the Xinjiang visits to Soviet propaganda “Potemkin villages” — selected sites designed to demonstrate a façade of success of the Soviet system to outsiders.
Beijing wants to promote ideological beliefs that there is no genocide, that everything is fine, and that the locals are happy and allowed to practice their religion and cultural traditions, he said.
“They’ll try out some Uyghur actors to act happy, and they will try out Uyghur dancers to look happy and tell them to smile, but if [they] don’t smile wide enough, [they] are sent to concentration camps.”
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uyghar for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Chinese officials claimed that the Uyghur population in China’s autonomous territory Xinjiang increased at a “significantly higher rate” than the Han population since the first national census in 1953.
But the claim is false. Multiple official sources reviewed by AFCL show that the Han Chinese population growth rate in Xinjiang outstripped Uyghurs both over the decades since 1953 and most recently between 2010 and 2020
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on July 1 that China’s census data showed that the Uyghur population in Xinjiang had grown from “3.6076 million to 11.6243 million” between 1953 to 2020, adding that the growth rate for the Uyghur population was “significantly higher” than the increase of the Han population in the region.
Mao made the remarks in response to a question from a journalist from Japan’s public broadcaster NHK regarding the International Religious Freedom Report released in June by the U.S. State Department that criticized the Chinese government for continuing “genocidal practices” in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region in northwest China at the crossroads of Central Asia and East Asia.
The Uyghurs are an ethnic Turkic people originating from, and culturally affiliated with, the general region of Central Asia and the broader Muslim world. They are recognized as the titular nationality of Xinjiang.
The Han Chinese, or the Han people, are an East Asian ethnic group native to Greater China. They represent more than 90% of the population of mainland China.
There have been disputes in Xinjiang between Uyghurs and Han Chinese over cultural, religious, and political issues.
Many Uyghurs claim that the Chinese government has engaged in systematic discrimination and ethnic repression in Xinjiang, while Beijing claims that the region needs strict oversight following several attacks carried out by Uyghers who it terms terrorists and extremists.
In 2009, for instance, rioting in Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi, broke out as mostly Uyghur demonstrators protested against state-incentivized Han Chinese migration to the region and widespread economic and cultural discrimination.
But Mao’s claim about the Uyghur population growth is false.
Chinse official census
A review of China’s official census figures cited by Mao shows that the rate of growth of the Han Chinese community in Xinjiang exceeded that of the Uyghers.
Chinese census data is based on the number of “permanent residents” of an area, defined as both people born there and long-term migrants settled in a given province or region for more than six months who may or may not decide to settle there permanently.
Although China conducted seven national censuses from 1953 to 2020, AFCL could only find detailed data on the Uyghur and Han populations in Xinjiang from the third census in 1982 to the seventh in 2020.
Over the 38 years between the third and seventh censuses, Xinjiang’s Uyghur population increased from 5,955,900 to 11,624,300 with a net growth rate of 95.17%. During the same period, the Han population in the region grew from 5,286,500 to 10,920,100, resulting in a net growth rate of 106.57%.
The population growth of Han Chinese in Xinjiang between 1982 and 2020 was greater than that for Xinjiang’s Uyghurs. (Data from China National Census Reports, Graphics by AFCL) A closer look at the population changes between individual census years reveals that Uyghur growth rates significantly exceeded those of the Han Chinese in the 1980s and slightly in the 2000s. However, during the 1990s, the Han population increased at more than double the rate of the Uyghurs and also significantly outpaced them in the 2010s.
When asked to clarify Mao’s remarks, a representative from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to answer directly, referring the AFCL to the Chinese Embassy in the United States.
The embassy has not responded to AFCL’s inquiries as of this writing.
Trends in official statistics
In order to obtain data on demographic changes within Xinjiang in the years before 1982, AFCL consulted the book 1949-2009: A Report on the Development of Ethnic Minorities in Xinjiang, a monograph published by the Xinjiang People’s Publishing House in 2009.
Written by Wu Fuhuan, the former president of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences and a leading expert on Xinjiang history, the book has been recommended by official publications such as Studies on the History of the Chinese Communist Party.
The report contains year-by-year statistics on the population growth for ethnic groups within Xinjiang from 1949 to 2007, citing the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook as its source of demographic data.
The report’s findings summarized in the below chart show a Han growth rate significantly higher than that of the Uyghers between 1949 and 2009.
Separate official statistics released by Xinjiang show Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Xinjiang between 1949 and 2007. (Data from 1949-2009: A Report on the Development of Ethnic Minorities in Xinjiang, Image by AFCL) The report shows that between 1949 and 2007, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang nearly tripled, growing from 3,291,100 to 9,650,600. In contrast, the Han population increased over 28-fold during the same period, rising from 291,000 to 8,239,300.
Academic study
The shift in Xinjiang’s ethnic demographics has also been a focus of academic study, such as a 2013 paper by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, a professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
Joniak-Lüth explained how several waves of Han migrants were brought to Xinjiang following various historical events in the decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
She noted that in 1949, Han Chinese made up just over 6% of Xinjiang’s total population, while Uyghurs comprised nearly 75%.
But in the 1950s, China established the state-owned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, recruiting large numbers of Han migrant workers, especially from the People’s Liberation Army.
This internal migration was further fueled by nationwide famine in the early 1960s, which brought another influx of Han refugees from eastern China to Xinjiang.
Additionally, during the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of young Han intellectuals were sent to live and work in Xinjiang.
Han growth rates in Xinjiang saw a noticeable decline in the decade following major Chinese economic reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, they once again significantly outpaced Uyghur growth rates in the 1990s.
Joniak-Lüthi described post-1980s Han migration to Xinjiang as being “driven by the search for economic profit,” largely organized by individuals and mostly voluntary.
She also noted that due to these waves of Han migrants, Uyghurs likely became a minority in Xinjiang by the mid-2000s.
While China’s official statistics currently show the Uyghur population in Xinjiang as larger than the Han population, some scholars suggest that the actual number of official Han residents is considerably higher, as many Han attempt to delay registering their households in the region for a considerable time after migrating there.
Meanwhile, China’s state-run outlets such as The Global Times, China News and Tianshan Network reported that the Han population in Xinjiang grew by 24.86% over the previous decade, while the Uyghur population increased by only 16.2%, following the release of data for China’s seventh national census in 2021.
Census data used in this fact check was taken from the following sources:
- Date for 1953 and 1964: 1949-2009: A Report of the Development of Ethnic Minorities in Xinjiang
- Data on the Uyghurs from 1982 to 2020 – Xinjiang Population Dynamics and Data
- Data on Han Chinese for 1982 – Third National Population Census, Volume IV: Population of Various Ethnic Groups
- Data on Han Chinese for 1990 and 2000 – Bulletin on the Fifth Population Census in Xinjiang
- Data on Han Chinese for 2010 and 2020 – Bulletin on the Seventh National Population Census in Xinjiang
Edited by Taejun Kang.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shen Ke for Asia Fact Check Lab.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Authorities in Xinjiang rearrested the son of a prominent Uyghur businessman two days after he was released from “re-education” in March and days before before his wedding, two relatives with knowledge of the situation told Radio Free Asia.
Abuzer Abdughapar, 24, who worked at a car dealership in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, was rearrested on March 25 by public security authorities, said his uncle Abdusattar Abdurusul, citing information from other relatives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
He was supposed to get married on May 11, an event to which his relatives in Almaty had been invited, Abdusattar said.
The reason for Abuzer’s arrest is unknown, and authorities have not informed Abuzer’s family about his whereabouts.
Abuzer was first arrested and detained in 2017 in his hometown of Ghulja – or Yining in Chinese – after spending a year studying Turkey. He was sent to a “re-education” camp and released nearly a year later.
His rearrest is an example of how authorities are apprehending Uyghur detainees, who have already served time in “re-education” camps or prisons, under various pretexts to eliminate what Chinese authorities deem “threats to national security.”
Among those rearrested are entrepreneurs and philanthropists, and Uyghurs who have traveled abroad, especially to Muslim countries.
Abdughapar Abdurusul in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Abdusattar Abdurusul)
“I heard there [was] a 100-day clearance going on which entailed the rearrest of people who were arrested and released before,” Abdusattar said. “The Chinese government is trying to erase us.”
Mutallib, the Almaty-based older brother of Abuzer’s grandmother, confirmed the young Uyghur’s rearrest.
“We heard he was arrested on March 25 and that he has not been released,” he said. “The wedding was paused as well. Up to now, we don’t know his whereabouts or the reason for his arrest.”
Chinese police officers at the Public Security Bureau in Urumqi refused to answer questions about Abuzer’s rearrest when contacted by RFA.
Father arrested in 2018
His father tried to bribe authorities in Urumqi to release Abuzer, but they lied to him and disappeared after receiving the money, Abdusattar said.
In 2018, authorities also arrested Abuzer’s father, Abdughapar Abdurusul, a prominent philanthropist and owner of a multimillion-dollar import-export company in Ghulja that does business with Kazakhstan, for taking an unsanctioned Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and “tax evasion,” Abdusattar said. They also detained Abuzer’s mother, Merhaba.
The family’s fixed assets, companies and houses worth more than several hundred million dollars were confiscated, he said.
Merhaba later died in a “re-education” camp. Abdughapar had been sentenced to death, but was released in 2020, said his older brother Abdusattar, a businessman who lives in Europe.
Abdusattar said he believes that Abuzer and Abdughapar were released after he went public about their detentions via Western media, including RFA.
Authorities re-arrested Abdughapar a second time in summer 2021, but released him a few months later, his brother said. The cause of his arrest is unknown.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A well-known Uyghur entrepreneur who set up an international trading company in Xinjiang is serving a life sentence for his alleged involvement with extremists abroad, people with knowledge of the situation told RFA Uyghur.
Ablikim Kurban, who would now be about 46 years old, established the Xinjiang Sesame Seed International Trade Co. in Urumqi in April 2017 and began selling imported seeds.
Prior to setting up his business, Kurban had visited factories and companies in Egypt. While there, he also met with Uyghur students from his hometown of Kumul, called Hami in Chinese, who were attending Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
Muslim-majority Egypt is among several countries blacklisted by Chinese authorities for travel by Uyghurs because of a perceived threat of religious extremism.
Chinese authorities pointed to Kurban’s trip and his alleged involvement with “terrorists” as the reason for his arrest on July 8, 2017, a Xinjiang police officer and a security chief on the neighborhood committee where Kurban previously lived in Kumul told RFA.
Relatives said they still don’t know his whereabouts.
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Kurban was one of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs arrested during China’s roundup and mass detentions of Muslims in “re-education” camps across Xinjiang, which began around 2017, in the name of fighting terrorism and religious extremism.
Uyghurs like Kurban who traveled to other Muslim-majority countries were especially at risk of being detained on unproven grounds that they had been in contact with what Chinese authorities claimed were terrorists or extremists.
A police officer who is based in Kumul’s Taranchi coal mine district, where Kurban used to work, told Radio Free Asia that authorities detained him in 2017 because of his trip to Egypt.
“They didn’t tell us the reason prior to his arrest, we only learned about it after he was arrested,” she said.
“He was arrested for getting involved with an extremist organization in Egypt,” she said, adding that the information came from state security police.
During Kurban’s visit to Egypt, Chinese authorities ordered Uyghur students enrolled in schools there and in other countries, including Turkey, France, Australia and the United States, to return to their hometowns in Xinjiang for “registration.”
In some cases, authorities held parents hostage by locking them up until their children returned, and some students who did go back disappeared or were jailed, sources in Xinjiang and Egypt told RFA in a May 2017 report.
Authorities in Egypt collaborated with Chinese authorities to round up scores of Uyghur students — many of them studying religion at Al-Azhar — and detain and deport them, according to the report.
A resident of the Taranchi coal mine district told RFA that Kurban was focused on his business and his family and had no interest in politics.
The resident, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said authorities also arrested Kurban’s wife, Gulshan Tohti, a month after detaining him, leaving a grandmother to care for the couple’s three children.
Tohti was released in August 2023, though it is unknown what she was charged with and whether she spent six years of detainment in an internment camp or prison.
Kurban initially followed in his father’s footsteps after graduating from high school and became a miner in Taranchi, which is in eastern Xinjiang.
He had greater ambitions though, and in the early 2000s he founded a factory in Kumul that produced plastic doors and windows, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in his hometown.
In 2015, Kurban decided to shift his business to food imports. But his arrest and detention in 2017 cut his plans short, and Xinjiang Sesame Seed International Trade was shut down.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Jim Snyder.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Uyghurs marked the 15th anniversary of deadly ethnic violence in Xinjiang by demonstrating outside U.N. offices in Switzerland and Chinese diplomatic missions in various cities around the world, demanding that the international community stop China from committing genocide in the far-western region.
The protests came on July 5, a day after member states blasted China over its human rights record — and particularly about its persecution of mostly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which Uyghurs refer to as East Turkistan — during a review of China’s rights record at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Uyghur exile and advocacy groups believe that the United Nations and individual states have failed to take concrete measures to punish China for severe rights violations in Xinjiang, including mass detentions, torture, cultural genocide, forced labor and the forced sterilization of Uyghur women.
China denies it has committed rights abuses against the 11 million strong Uyghurs.
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In Istanbul, Turkey, which has a sizable Uyghur community, protesters gathered outside the Chinese consulate, waving the blue-and-white flag of East Turkistan and shouting, “Get out of East Turkistan” and “East Turkistan, not Xinjiang!”
“We insist that the truth of the genocide in East Turkistan must be recognized by all countries and the U.N. General Assembly, and it should be acknowledged under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration on the Prevention of Genocide,” Hidayatullah Oguz Khan, chairman of the International Union of East Turkistan Organizations, said at a press conference at the protest.
“To end the genocide and occupation, and to achieve results for the legitimate struggle of the East Turkistan people, it is imperative to accept and support the legitimacy of this struggle,” he said.
Uyghurs also rallied on July 5 in front of Chinese diplomatic missions in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and in various European countries to commemorate the 2009 crackdown in Urumqi, where some 200 people died and 1,700 were injured in a three-day rampage of violence between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, according to Chinese government figures. However, Uyghur human rights groups believe the actual number killed was about 1,000.
The event became a catalyst for the Chinese government’s efforts to repress Uyghur culture, language and religion through a mass surveillance and internment campaign.
Mixed reviews
At the review of China’s human rights record in Geneva on July 4, some Human Rights Council representatives criticized Beijing for refusing to act on previous recommendations to clean up its act.
In 2022, a report by then-U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who visited Xinjiang, said China’s mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the region may constitute crimes against humanity.
The following year, 51 countries, including the U.S., expressed deep concern to the U.N. over China’s human rights violations of Uyghurs in Xinjiang — a measure that came after China was elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council for the 2024-2026 term, despite its poor track record in protecting rights.
Chinese state media portrayed the rights record review as a success, with countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Vietnam praising Beijing’s efforts to protect and promote human rights.
And many Muslim-majority countries have remained silent about China’s treatment of the Uyghurs.
Bachelet’s successor, Volker Türk, this March urged China to carry out recommendations from his office to protect human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and across the country.
Chen Xu, China’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, said the recommendations rejected by Beijing were “politically motivated based on disinformation, ideologically biased or interfering in China’s traditional sovereignty,” Voice of America reported.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Habibulla Izchi for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Two earthen pillars, eroded by sand, in barren terrain are all that’s left of an ancient Buddhist temple in the far-western Chinese region of Xinjiang.
Chinese historians and archaeologists assert that a 7th century Chinese empress ordered the construction of the Mor Temple — known locally as Mora, or “chimney” in the Uyghur language — one one of the earliest Buddhist sites in the region.
The ruins show China’s influence in shaping the history and culture of the region — home today to 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs — going back centuries, state-run media said.
“They are a powerful testimony to the diversity, unity and inclusiveness of Chinese civilization,” according to a June 3 report by the China News Service.
But experts outside China dispute those claims, saying the Mor Stupa, or pagoda, and other temple structures were built in more of an Indian style.
And it’s highly unlikely that Wu Zetian, empress from 690-705 CE during the Tang Dynasty, was involved in the construction of pagodas because it was hundreds of miles away from her court in central China, they say.
Instead, the Chinese government-backed research may be driven more by Beijing’s efforts to expand its cultural influence in the region, where it is actively seeking to Sinicize Uyghur culture and Muslim practices, they said.
A view of the Qigexing Buddhist Temple ruins in Yanqi Hui Autonomous County, northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, Oct. 4, 2012. (Rolfmueller via Wikimedia Commons)
“Empress Wu, the famous female emperor of that time, was avidly promoting Buddhism but not necessarily was she promoting it out in Xinjiang,” said Johan Elverskog, a professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and author of the book A History of Uyghur Buddhism.
“There is no way that the Tang was involved in building things that far to the west,” he said.
Before Islam
Before Islam arrived in China in the 7th century, Buddhism did flourish in what China today calls Xinjiang, or “New Territories” — but which the Uyghurs refer to as East Turkistan, the name of the Uyghur nation that briefly existed in the mid-20th century.
Western archaeologists and Buddhism researchers believe that Buddhism began to spread to Xinjiang during the Kushan Empire, which controlled the western and northern Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang and ruled over parts of what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and India between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE.
Some historical documents show Buddhism spread to the region from Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, Elverskog said, while other documents indicate that the Kingdom of Khotan, in present-day Hotan, adopted Buddhism as the official state religion in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
Archaeological digs at the Mor Temple — about 30 kilometers (19 miles) northeast of Kashgar — since 2019 have determined that the original complex was built in the 3rd century, according to the China News Service report.
It said that elements of Chinese architecture appeared between the 7th and 10th centuries, indicating the prevalence of Chinese Buddhism.
Artifacts discovered around the site reflect Indian and Central Asian Buddhist traditions as well as the influence of the Central Plains, an area along the Yellow River that is believed to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, it said.
But Elverskog said that while there was a Chinese military presence in the region during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), no Buddhist temples were built.
‘United’ by Chinese culture
The idea that Uyghur culture, including its ancient Buddhist history and structures, should be supplanted by Chinese culture was summed up in a speech by Pan Yue, head of the State Council’s National Ethnic Affairs Commission, at an international forum on Xinjiang’s history and future held in June in Kashgar.
“Although Xinjiang’s culture is diverse, it exists in unity, and the most important factor that unites them is Chinese culture,” said Pan, who has been in his role since June 2022.
“Xinjiang should be studied from the perspective of the common history of the Chinese nation and the multipolar unity of the Chinese nation, and Xinjiang should be understood from the perspective of a region where many cultures and religions coexist and ethnic groups live together,” he said.
A view of the perimeter wall of the Rawak Stupa, a Buddhist stupa with modern stone protection, situated on the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China’s Xinjiang province, Nov. 17, 2008. (Vic Swift via Wikimedia Commons)
Kahar Barat, a Uyghur-American historian known for his work on Buddhism and Islam in Xinjiang, said there was “absolutely no Chinese influence” in the Buddhist culture of places like Kashgar and Kucha, another city that once had many Buddhist temples.
He said Kashgar and Kucha were part of the Hindu-Greek Gandhara Buddhist culture that existed in present-day Pakistan from the 3rd century BCE to the 12th century CE.
“They call it the Gandhara art,” he said. “It’s the Gandhara culture created by the Buddhism developed in Kashmir and Pakistan. Therefore, the Buddha paintings and temples in Hotan, Kashgar, Kucha have the influence of Gandhara culture.”
Furthermore, Buddhist temples during the Tang Dynasty were modeled after those in India, making it an exaggeration to say that the Mor Stupa and other temple structures reflected the architectural style of that era, he said.
“Pavilion-style construction is a style of India Buddhism,” he told RFA. “Hence, all the pavilions in China are inspired by these styles. The building styles in the Han Dynasty were later influenced by Buddhist vihara-style construction.”
Elverskog agreed that the Mor Temple was built in Indian style.
“It’s obviously based on precedence in northwest India,” he said. “That was the main source of the Buddhist culture in Hotan and particularly coming from India. … So the Buddhism, the iconography, the artwork, was heavily based on northwestern Indian models.”
Xia Ming, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island in New York, said China’s interpretation of historical Uyghur Buddhism as part of Chinese Buddhism shows the tendency of the Chinese Communist Party to seek its current legitimacy from Chinese dynasties dating back thousands of years.
“If you look at the thousands of years of Chinese history,” he said, “you will see that the Chinese Communist Party will pick and choose any historical node and talk about it if it is useful to them.”
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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On an important Muslim holiday last month, police and security officials in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang set up camps to keep an eye on Uyghurs, took Uyghurs to see communist-themed films, and visited Uyghur homes to make sure they weren’t practicing Muslim religious activities.
The moves around the Qurban Eid, also known as Eid al-Adha or the Feast of the Sacrifice, which fell on June 17 this year in Xinjiang — one of two official Muslim holidays in China — appeared to be attempts to undermine the observation of the Muslim holy day, outside experts said.
Chinese authorities are trying to weaken Uyghurs’ ethnic and religious identity and forge their loyalty to the Chinese state and the Communist Party, while maintaining security, the experts said.
“It looks like they are trying to Sinicize Eid,” said Erkin Ekrem, a professor at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and vice president of the World Uyghur Congress.
“The Chinese government is trying to change the Eid customs, prayers and traditions [by] making Uyghurs consume food along with Chinese people [and] adding Chinese elements to the Eid festivals, thereby removing the Muslim Eid elements,” he added.
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Before 2017, when the Chinese government started cracking down on religious activities in the predominantly Muslim region, men would observe the holiday by visiting mosques for special prayers, cooking meals, spending time with relatives and welcoming guests to their homes.
Since then, authorities have also forbidden Islamic dress for women, beards for men, and Muslim names for children. They have also prevented Uyghurs from fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and encouraged the consumption of pork and alcohol, which Islam forbids.
Chinese national consciousness
On the eve of Eid, Ma Xingrui, Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, visited communities in Urumqi, the region’s capital, and asked residents to strengthen Chinese national consciousness and insist on the Sinicization of Islam.
Public security officers celebrated the holiday with Uyghurs and other ethnicities in Xinjiang and promoted “the common consciousness of the Chinese nation,” the Xinjiang Daily reported on June 19.
A screen displays Chinese President Xi Jinping near a mosque in Kashgar, northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, June 4, 2019. (AFPTV)
The Keriye County Public Security Bureau in Hotan invited teachers at area primary schools, students and parents on June 16 to participate in social activities at a police camp to “build strong Chinese national consciousness and celebrate Eid,” the report said.
On the same day, police in Qitai county in the Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture invited Uyghur “relatives” with whom they had been paired up under a previous monitoring program to visit a museum to watch communist-themed films.
On June 17, members of the Public Security Bureau in the prefecture’s Manas county visited Uyghur homes and danced with residents, who had no choice but to join in, the news report said.
“The police showed their concern for the public by their actions and also planted the seeds of national unity deep in everyone’s hearts,” it said.
Assimilation policies
Henryk Szadziewski, director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said public security agents interfere in Muslim holidays like Eid al-Adha to push assimilationist policies in Xinjiang.
Uyghur identification with Turkic culture along with a belief in Islam and related social and political values are considered a threat because they are outside the control of the Chinese state, he told Radio Free Asia.
Attendees watch video of a Muslim praying during a government reception held for the Eid al-Fitr holiday in Beijing, China, May 13, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
“China’s policies are intended to weaken those kinds of affinities outside which are beyond the borders of China and to ensure Uyghurs allegiances are pinned to the Chinese state and, of course, the Chinese Communist Party,” Szadziewski said.
But the Chinese government separates Islam in China from Islam in the rest of the world, Erkin Ekrem of the World Uyghur Congress said.
“In China, the Sinicization of Islam is being carried out vigorously,” he told RFA. “They are trying to create a nation away from Islamic beliefs and customs.”
“Deemphasizing the religion adding in this secular Chinese national consciousness [is] meant to delink Eid al-Adha from its religious origin,” he said. “That is one of the aims here.”
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uyghar for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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No Uyghurs from China’s far-western region of Xinjiang were among the Muslims from China who went on this year’s Hajj, according to data from the Islamic Association of China and a Uyghur living abroad who went on the pilgrimage to Mecca.
All told, more than 1.8 million people participated in this year’s Hajj, which fell between June 14-19, according to Saudi Arabian officials, including 1.6 million foreign pilgrims.
Muslims in China need government permission to make the pilgrimage, which as one of the Five Pillars of Islam is required of all Muslims once in their lives, if health allows.
As of early June, 1,053 pilgrims – 769 from China’s Gansu province and 284 from Yunnan province – were registered to go on the Hajj, according to the website of the Islamic Association of China. No Uyghurs or other Muslims from Xinjiang were included in the tally.
Last year, 386 pilgrims from Ningxia province and other places in China participated, but none from Xinjiang.
The last time any pilgrim from Xinjiang was reported by the association was in 2016.
Abdusalam Teklimakan Haji, a Uyghur in Turkey who went on the Hajj this year and is a member of the board of the International Union of Eastern Turkistan Organizations, said he saw no Uyghurs from Xinjiang among the Chinese delegation, although he did see some ethnic Hui Muslims carrying Chinese flags.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Hajj and Umrah, which oversees the pilgrimage, allows about 1,000 pilgrims per million people from each country around the world, he said. With an estimated population of 11 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang – which Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan – at least 11,000 Uyghurs should be allowed to perform the Hajj.
Radio Free Asia tried contacting the Islamic Association of China and other departments in Xinjiang administrating the relevant affairs for comment, but received no response.
Repressing religion
The apparent lack of Uyghur participation suggests Chinese authorities are not permitting any Muslims from Xinjiang from going on the pilgrimage, and reflects Beijing’s wider repression of Uyghur culture and religious practice, activists and experts say.
Since 2017, China has severely restricted most religious practices among Uyghurs, including praying in mosques, reciting the Quran and fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, in the name of squelching religious extremism and terrorism.
“The Chinese government’s targeted restrictions and repression on Uyghur people’s religious activities, such as pilgrimage, prayer and fasting, are part of its genocidal policies against Uyghurs.” said Ma Ju, an analyst of Islam based in New York City.
“Although China is giving opportunities to a small number of Hui Muslims to perform Hajj so that they can attract the attention of the world, especially the Muslim world, we know that their religious freedom is also restricted,” he said.
“There is no religious freedom for any citizen in China,” Ma said.
Just before the start of this year’s Hajj season, the Chinese government boosted its propaganda campaign for the Muslim world, experts said.
At the beginning of June, the Chinese Consulate General in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and the Xinjiang Overseas Friendship Association jointly organized a music night in Dubai called “Xinjiang is a Good Place.”
China has held similar events in Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt and other Muslim-dominated countries, emphasizing that they respect the freedom of cultural and religious belief in Xinjiang.
Although the events featured Uyghur dancers and singers, no Uyghurs were a part of the Chinese delegation to Mecca.
Translated by Martin Shawn, edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gülchëhre.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Decision could result in retailers being prosecuted if they import goods made through forced labour, campaigners say
The UK National Crime Agency’s decision not to launch an investigation into the importation of cotton products manufactured by forced labour in China’s Xinjiang province was unlawful, the court of appeal has found.
Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which brought the action, said Thursday’s decision was a landmark win that could lead to high street retailers being prosecuted under the Proceeds of Crime Act (Poca) if they import goods made through forced labour.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Decision could result in retailers being prosecuted if they import goods made through forced labour, campaigners say
The UK National Crime Agency’s decision not to launch an investigation into the importation of cotton products manufactured by forced labour in China’s Xinjiang province was unlawful, the court of appeal has found.
Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which brought the action, said Thursday’s decision was a landmark win that could lead to high street retailers being prosecuted under the Proceeds of Crime Act (Poca) if they import goods made through forced labour.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Canada’s ambassador to China expressed concern over documented human rights violations against Uyghurs with top officials during a visit to Xinjiang, sparking criticism from the Chinese Embassy in Canada that said her concerns were based on “fabricated rumors and reports with ulterior motives.”
Ambassador Jennifer May visited the far-western region on June 19-22 and met with Xinjiang Party Secretary Ma Xingrui and other senior regional government officials, according to a statement issued by Global Affairs Canada, the government department that manages diplomatic relations.
Very few Western diplomats have visited Xinjiang in recent years. It was the first visit to the region by a Canadian diplomat in 10 years. Last August, a group of diplomats from Mexico, Pakistan, Iran and other countries visited the region as part of a government-sponsored tour.
May went to Xinjiang as part of Canada’s diplomatic engagement with China and to raise concerns “over credible reports of systematic violations of human rights occurring in Xinjiang” affecting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, the statement said.
Specific concerns included restrictions on Uyghur-language education and the forced placement of Uyghur children in boarding schools, it said, but did not provide detail about the places May visited or what she saw.
In February 2021, Canada’s House of Commons passed a motion declaring the Chinese government’s mistreatment of Uyghurs — including the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored camps, the use of Uyghur forced labor, the suppression of Uyghur religious practices, and the forced sterilization of women — a genocide.
May also repeated Canada’s calls for China to allow U.N. independent experts unfettered access to all regions of the country, including Xinjiang, the statement said.
“Until an independent investigation team can visit, assess the situation, and release an unbiased report, Canada is signaling that China’s propaganda and staged displays showing Uyghurs as content are ineffective and disregarded,” said Memet Tohti, executive director of the Ottawa-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.
Jennifer May, Canada’s ambassador to China, appears on CTVNews, June 18, 2024. (CTVNews screenshot)
A 2022 report by the then-U.N. Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet, who visited Xinjiang, found that China’s mass detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the region may constitute crimes against humanity. Uyghur rights groups criticized the tightly organized trip as a staged tour.
Beijing has denied accusations of severe rights violations.
May’s visit coincided a call by international human rights organizations and Uyghur advocacy groups on June 20 for the U.N.’s current human rights chief, Volker Türk, to provide a public update of measures taken by the Chinese government and his office to address the situation in Xinjiang.
‘Same old rhetoric’
On Monday, the Chinese Embassy in Canada issued a statement saying that Canada “repeated the same old rhetoric, expressing so-called concerns based on fabricated rumors and reports with ulterior motives, without mentioning what Ambassador May really saw and heard in Xinjiang.”
The embassy urged Canada to be objective and unbiased and to show Canadians what May saw during her visit. It also said that Xinjiang enjoys social stability, economic prosperity, ethnic unity and religious harmony.
“Human rights of people of all ethnic groups, including their right to use and advance their own ethnic languages, are fully protected,” the embassy said.
“Canada has repeatedly made unwarranted remarks about other countries’ human rights situation, while turning a blind eye to its own racial issues,” the embassy went on to say, citing systemic racial discrimination and unfair treatment of indigenous people, homeless people whose rights are not protected, and racial discrimination against Black civil servants in the federal government.
Canada has long upheld human rights protections and has voiced its concerns about them periodically, said John Packer, a law professor and director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa.
“This has been a contentious part of the relationship because China does not share the same perspective and considers these issues a matter of internal affairs, feeling it is inappropriate for Canada to raise them,” he told Radio Free Asia.
Because Canada and China are parties to international treaties, including human rights agreements such as the U.N. Charter and the Genocide Convention, they are bound by certain multilateral standards, making it legitimate to discuss such matters in international forums and in bilateral relations, Packer said.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jewlan for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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China has changed the names of about 630 Uyghur villages to Mandarin words such as “Harmony” and “Unity” to promote ethnic harmony in Xinjiang, a report by a human rights group found,
The move is “part of Chinese government’s efforts to erase the cultural and religious expression” of the more than 11 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs living in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, New York-based Human Rights Watch, or HRW, said in its June 18 report.
“How these village names are being kind of erased and replaced shows how dystopian the whole project of the Chinese government in the Uyghur region is,” Maya Wang, acting China director at HRW.
“It’s about repressing people and … the past, and erasing the future, and erasing what they can imagine as a possibility for their own children or grandchildren,” she said.
The results came after HRW and Norway-based Uyghur Hjelp scraped names of villages in Xinjiang from the website of China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
All told, China hanged the names of 3,652 of 25,000 Uyghur villages in Xinjiang between 2009 and 2023, but most of these changes have been mundane, such as correcting numbers or the way the names were written, they found.
But 630 of the changes were more dramatic and religious, cultural or historical in nature. And most renamings occurred between 2017 and 2019, when the Chinese government’s repression escalated in the region, the report said, but they appear to be continuing.
‘Erasing symbols’
For example, Aq Meschit, or “White Mosque,” village in Akto county, Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, was renamed Unity village in 2018.
The same year, Hoja Eriq, or “Sufi Teacher’s Creek,” village in Aksu Prefecture was rechristened Willow village.
And Dutar, a village named after a Uyghur musical instrument, in Qaraqash county of Hotan prefecture, was renamed Red Flag in 2022.
The Chinese government has used the village renamings along with other tactics, including the banning of hijabs for women, beards for men, and Muslim names for children, to wipe out Uyghur culture and to humiliate the ethnic group, Wang said.
“On a very fundamental level, erasing the symbols of people, the language and culture is about erasing who they are and teaching them to fear,” she said.
The village renamings are also part of the greater set of serious rights abuses and crimes against humanity involving the detentions of an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic people in “re-education” camps, torture, forced labor, sexual violence and the forced sterilization of woman, Wang said.
Uyghur children play in a square where a propaganda poster shows Han Chinese and Uyghurs posing together in a photograph with the words ‘Hotan City Unity New Village Unity Square’ at the Unity New Village in Hotan, northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, Sept. 20, 2018. (Andy Wong/AP)
Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based Uyghur advocacy group, condemned the village renamings.
“The names, which have now been changed to empty CCP [Chinese Communist Party] slogans, once reflected our long history and rich culture and have been in our homeland for hundreds of years,” said Rushan Abbas, the group’s executive director, in a statement.
“Although the CCP appears to celebrate Uyghur culture by showcasing elements like our music and dance, these displays are nothing but hollow propaganda masking the regime’s ongoing and systematic suppression of cultural and religious expression,” Abbas said.
In response to such measures, foreign governments, especially those in Muslim-majority nations, can put pressure on the Chinese government to stop its abuses involving religious and ethnic minorities and condemn such behavior, said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcom Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Report finds that religious, historical and cultural references have been removed in crackdown by Beijing
Hundreds of Uyghur villages and towns have been renamed by Chinese authorities to remove religious or cultural references, with many replaced by names reflecting Communist party ideology, a report has found.
Research published on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and the Norway-based organisation Uyghur Hjelp documents about 630 communities that have been renamed in this way by the government, mostly during the height of a crackdown on Uyghurs that several governments and human rights bodies have called a genocide.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Anthony Albanese should seek commitments for tangible measures in his talks with Li Qiang, campaigners say
Human rights advocates have called on Anthony Albanese to place China’s human rights record ahead of economic and trade discussions in his meeting with China’s second most powerful leader on Monday.
They said it was time for Australia’s Labor government to demand concrete action from China in addressing human rights complaints against it as “statements of concern” were not achieving results.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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In a visit to the far-western region of Xinjiang, China’s security chief Chen Wenqing called for the normalization of counterterrorism policies, which experts said could signal renewed efforts to suppress the more than 11 million Uyghurs who live there.
During his May 22-26 visit, Chen — a former head of China’s Ministry of State Security espionage agency — stressed the need for persistent law-based crackdowns on violent and terrorist crimes and called for political and legal bodies to make social stability a top priority, according to Chinese media reports.
On May 27, the day after his visit ended, China’s Ministry of Public Security said in a statement that the country had not had a terrorist attack in more than seven years.
Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s party secretary, speaks during a meeting of the Xinjiang delegation at the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 12, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP)
Still, Beijing has made no major policy changes in Xinjiang and remains highly interested in stabilizing the region, said Anders Corr, principal of political risk analysis firm Corr Analytics in New York.
“They continue to prioritize so-called terrorism when there is no terrorism, and there never really were actual terrorists at all in Xinjiang,” he said. “And so, that’s the unfortunate issue when they say that they’re normalizing counterterrorism.”
The Washington-based advocacy group Campaign for Uyghurs said Chen’s call to further normalize counterterrorism efforts suggested continued and possibly increased surveillance, restrictions and arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs.
“Chen Wenqing’s statement is a blatant admission that the Chinese Communist Party intends to perpetuate a permanent campaign of genocide against the Uyghurs,” said Rushan Abbas, the group’s executive director in a statement.
“Instead of addressing international scrutiny, they are doubling down on their efforts,” she said. “The international community must see through the CCP’s propaganda and euphemisms, which justify their horrific crimes as ‘counterterrorism measures.’”
A Uyghur woman passes an old disused mosque in Artush, capital of Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, July 19, 2023. (Pedro Pardo/AFP)
The Chinese government ramped up its suppression of Uyghur and other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang beginning in 2017 with mass detentions of an estimated 1.8 million in “re-reeducation” camps that China claimed were vocational training schools to prevent “terrorism” and “religious extremism.”
Because of the mass detentions and other severe human rights violations, including the forced sterilization of Uyghur women and forced Uyghur labor, the U.S. government, European Parliament and the legislatures of the and some Western countries have declared that the measures constitute genocide and crimes against humanity — accusations denied by Beijing.
Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s party secretary from August 2016 to December 2021, oversaw the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs. But under Ma Xingrui, China’s current Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, the goal is the “legalization and normalization of counter-terrorism stability maintenance work,” said Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director in China studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
“Normalization and institutionalization are very much what the CCP pursues in Xinjiang,” Zenz told Radio Free Asia, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “Long-term counterterrorism is part of that. This also fits with the continued waves of detentions that we hear about.”
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uyghar and Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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China’s far-western region of Xinjiang — called East Turkestan by Uyghurs — is a essentially a colony that China has occupied for the past 70 years, but before that there has not been any continuous Chinese rule there going back 2,000 years – despite Chinese claims, according to Michael van Walt, an international lawyer who has studied the region extensively.
Van Walt, who has specialized in inner Asia and East Asian relations for the past 15 years and works to resolve conflicts in different parts of the world, presented his findings at 20th anniversary commemoration of the World Uyghur Congress in Munich, Germany, on May 3-6.
In an interview with RFA Uyghur Director Alim Seytoff, van Walt discussed his research. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RFA: In your presentation, you said that East Turkestan is a colony of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese government claims that Xinjiang has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times. How do you interpret this latter claim, based on your research?
Michael van Walt: It’s very clear that there has not been any continuous Chinese rule or authority in Eastern Turkestan over the last 2,000 years. Only during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907) was there some presence. Before the Republic of China was established, Eastern Turkestan was ruled by various khanates, mainly from neighboring parts of Asia, but definitely not Han.
RFA: When we refer to China, it’s understood that China has existed for thousands of years, and that there has been one country called China, dynasty after dynasty. Is this understanding correct?
Michael van Walt: No, it isn’t, and this is what is causing a lot of confusion. What the People’s Republic of China has done, and the Republic of China before it, was to create this idea. There was this national history of China that was projected back into history for thousands of years, as if China had existed as a political entity, as a state, for thousands of years, which it definitely has not.
There have been a number of Han states, empires and dynasties, but the Han people have been ruled not just by Han states, but by many Inner Asian empires as well.
What we call China today was just part of the Manchu empire of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) and the same with numerous others much earlier. So, the present way in which so-called Chinese history is presented — but also, presented sometimes by Western and other scholars — is misleading in that way. It makes it confusing.
And particularly because we use the words “China” and “Chinese,” which can mean many different things.
Today, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] uses the word “China” in Chinese to actually mean all the people that are within what it claims to be the borders of the PRC, whether they are Han Chinese, Tibetan or Uyghur.
But other people use the word “Chinese” essentially to mean Han Chinese and the Chinese language, and the Chinese script to mean the Mandarin script. So, we’re using that word without being precise about what we mean.
Michael van Walt presents his findings at 20th anniversary commemoration of the World Uyghur Congress in Munich, Germany, May 4, 2024. (Bahram Sintash/RFA)
If we are being precise, then really the concept of China as a state was imagined in 1911, discussed in 1911, and created in the beginning of 1912 with the Republic of China.
Before that, there were other states with different names, different structures and different principles of governance, which had very little in common with the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China.
From a legal perspective, those two things are completely different. You cannot talk about the continuity of a state for 2,000 years. It just doesn’t exist. I’m not denying that there was Chinese culture for 2,000 years or 5,000, whatever it may be. I’m not denying there weren’t any Han people. All of this is possible. But not continuous or a continuous stream of Han states.
RFA: Why does the Chinese government make this claim, that Manchuria, southern Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan were part of China since ancient times?
Van Walt: I can’t think for them, but it would seem that the idea was first developed by the Republic of China precisely because it wanted to claim those Inner Asian territories as part of the Republic of China. It needed to develop a rationale for that, needed to develop an excuse for that that would be acceptable. So, they invented this history.
Today, I think the PRC insists on that history and that historical narrative precisely because it does not want to be seen as a colonial power in Eastern Turkestan, Tibet and in Inner Mongolia.
RFA: So, was the first state called “China” established only in 1912, and before that there were different dynasties and empires under different names that had nothing to do with China as a political entity?
Van Walt: No, and the words zhongguo and zhonghua that are used for the name “China” or for “Chinese” existed before for a long time, but they had a different meaning. They had a meaning of “central state” — the central high culture people radiating wisdom and culture out into civilization.
These were civilizational and spatial concepts, not names of states or of a country. Those words were used, and they were transformed to become a label, as a name. Then they were paired to be equivalent to the word “China” in English or “Chine” in French — the Western concept of China, which Europeans had already for a long time mistakenly imagined to be this continuous China, this imaginary country. By pairing the two, it’s made it very difficult, especially for Westerners and Europeans to conceive of the notion that there was not this continuous China because it already existed in our imagination.
RFA: Are Beijing’s claims akin to, hypothetically speaking, Italy claiming that territories occupied by the Roman Empire were part of the country today? Is China’s rationale similar to this?
Michael van Walt: It is a similar rationale, but there’s a distinction. If they really were to do that, they would claim what the Romans had conquered and what they themselves had conquered in the past. What the PRC claims is what the Mongols and Manchus conquered, not what the Han conquered. So, an illogical thing to do.
It’s quite aside from the fact that today in the modern world you cannot claim territory on the basis of some historical claim from 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago or even 100 years ago, which China does. But you certainly can’t claim it on the basis of what another empire did that happened to conquer you.
Michael van Walt presents his findings at 20th anniversary commemoration of the World Uyghur Congress in Munich, Germany, May 4, 2024. (Bahram Sintash/RFA)
But the PRC has been able to convince many that whoever ruled what I call the Han homeland — the Han people and their territory — somehow became Chinese or Han. This notion that the Mongols and Manchus were actually Chinese is absurd.
The fact that today the PRC calls Genghis Khan a great son of China is absurd. Genghis Khan is the one who ordered the conquest of China, not as a son of China, but as a son of the Mongols.
RFA: Is China technically exercising colonial rule in the Uyghur homeland by plundering natural resources and by settling Han Chinese into the territories? Is this part of the reason why China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs?
Van Walt: Yes, it is. It is afraid of losing control over Eastern Turkestan and is trying to suppress Uyghurs and others in Eastern Turkestan. It’s a way of trying to maintain control. Xi Jinping and his government in particular are bent on absolute control. That is the most important policy objective, so everything is driven by that. And if it means putting millions of people in internment camps, eradicating the cultures of the Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians, and to have absolute control over these territories, then so be it. That is their objective.
As for wanting to control all the territories of the former Qing Empire, they have not finished their objective yet. They still need to achieve that. They will want to control Taiwan, the South China Sea, northern India, and probably parts of today’s Russia, including Tuva and Boryatia, because at some point some Mongol or Manchu ruler ruled some of those areas.
And if we were to go into the absurd, let’s remember that the Mongols ruled most of the Eurasian continent all the way to Hungary, the Middle East and India. We wouldn’t really want to see China claim everything that the great son of China, Genghis Khan, achieved.
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A Uyghur official who spied on fellow Uyghurs in Xinjiang is serving a seven-year prison sentence on the charge of religious extremism after he was moved by Muslim sermons and gave up smoking and drinking alcohol, area authorities said.
The change of heart in Yasin Tursun, a Chinese Communist Party member and secretary of Terim village in southern Xinjiang’s Peyziwat county, pleased his family but upset authorities, the sources said, insisting they not be identified for security reasons.
After struggling to find a reason to arrest and convict him, authorities accused him of being “two-faced” and sentenced him to prison in October 2019, two policemen and a county official told Radio Free Asia. He is estimated to be about 55 now.
Tursun’s case highlights how Beijing has clamped down harshly on the mostly Muslim Uyghurs, and their religious practices — including prayer and abstaining from alcohol and fasting during the month of Ramadan — in the far-western region of Xinjiang in the name of suppressing religious extremism and terrorism.
It also shows how Chinese authorities have enlisted Uyghurs to spy on their own people.
‘Two-faced’
When Tursun ended up embracing Muslim practices, authorities in 2017 fell back on the common accusation of being “two-faced” — used by the Chinese Communist Party to describe officials or party members who are either corrupt or ideologically disloyal to the party.
Among Uyghurs, it is applied to those who show an interest in carrying on their cultural and religious traditions. In Tursun’s case, authorities were upset that he gave up alcohol and tobacco, promoted their abstinence and listened to Muslim sermons, the sources said.
Tursun was handed over to the authorities, and following an investigation was sentenced to seven years in prison, they said.
Some village cadres — including Tursun — who worked as spies had unexpectedly inspiring experiences at secret and public religious events, said an official from Peyziwat county, called Jiashi in Chinese.
They were moved by the orderliness and kindness at these gatherings, as well as by the eloquent speeches of religious leaders and their insightful interpretations of the world, humanity and life, said the official, asking not to be identified.
This caused some of the Uyghur cadres to disengage from their work activities, and even resign, he said.
‘Swayed’ by religion
One police officer from Terim village said all former Uyghur cadres from the the second sub-village had been arrested.
“We had 10-16 cadres, but now there are none left,” he told RFA.
The security director of Terim’s fifth sub-village said two “two-faced” Uyghur cadres, including Tursun, had been influenced by “religious extremism.”
Tursun was arrested for his association with religious individuals, while the other cadre, Rahman Ghopur, about 33 years old, was arrested for promoting the idea of not crying at funerals, he said.
Tursun was removed from his role because of “bad habits” such as abstaining from alcohol, the security director said.
“Yasin Tursun was removed from his position because he made his wife wear modest clothes and he himself grew a beard,” he told RFA. “The investigation indicated that he had been influenced by religious individuals. I heard he was swayed while working at religious events.”
The security director said he was in the courtroom when Tursun was sentenced for “religious extremism,” and that others who were listed among his mobile phone contacts faced similar circumstances.
A second officer from the police station in Terim said Tursun’s previous lifestyle of spying had nearly destroyed his family, but after he embraced religion, his relationships with his wife and children improved.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A delegation of Palestinian and other Arab politicians praised China’s policies in Xinjiang during a visit to the northwestern region, sparking criticism from experts and Uyghur rights advocates for not highlighting the plight of fellow Muslims living in the region.
The delegation was led by Bassam Zakarneh, a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council of Palestine and made up of politicians from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan and Tunisia, according to a report by the Global Times.
On March 27, Xinjiang’s Communist Party chief Ma Xingrui welcomed them to Urumqi, the regional capital.
The goal of the visit, according to a Xinjiang Daily report, was to present a comprehensive understanding of the situation in Xinjiang and convey a narrative of a peaceful and vibrant region to the international community.
That’s in sharp contrast with the United States and some Western parliaments, which have accused China of carrying out a genocide against the 11-million-strong Uyghurs who live in Xinjiang – a region taken over by Chinese Communists in 1949 – by imprisoning, torturing and sterilizing those who do not fall into line.
Beijing has denied the claims and said that alleged concentration camps are in fact vocational training centers that have since been closed.
To the visiting delegates, Ma touted the region’s development, stability and guarantee of human rights for all ethnic groups, and accused the United States and the West of spreading lies, according to Chinese media reports.
“Their objective is to restrict and control China through Xinjiang,” Ma was quoted as saying.
‘See it for yourself’
During their meeting with Ma, the delegation praised China’s creative governance measures and “unprecedented progress in economic development,” the Xinjiang Daily said.
The delegation head said that “people of all ethnic groups live a good life, enjoy full freedom of religious belief, and have smiles on their faces,” according to the report, which didn’t provide the names of who spoke or any direct quotes.
Women walk past a propaganda slogan promoting ethnic unity in “the new era”, in both Chinese and Uyghur languages, in Yarkant, Xinjiang region, July 18, 2023. (Pedro Pardo/AFP) The paper went on to say that the delegation said the United States and other Western nations are “smearing” China’s Xinjiang policy and fabricating rumors.
“Why not come and see it for yourself?” the delegates said, according to the Xinjiang Daily. “We will tell more people what we saw and heard in Xinjiang, China, so that Arab countries can better understand the real Xinjiang, China.”
But experts on the region said China orchestrated what the delegates would and wouldn’t see during their visit so as to conceal the persecution of the Uyghurs.
The visitors should have been allowed to speak directly and freely with Uyghur Muslims living in the region, said Robert McCaw, director of the Government Affairs Department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Apparently, China wants to reach out to these leftist movements in the Arab world, and China wants to use them as its own propaganda,” said Mustafa Akyol, senior fellow at the Cato’s Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. “The Arab world should not be influenced by China.”
Political dynamics at play
China has used such visits to Xinjiang to win over other Muslim groups – and push them away from the United States and other Western powers, experts say. It has also supported the Palestinians, as it seeks to expand its influence in the Middle East.
Ten 10 months ago, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to Beijing that he believed the Xinjiang issue, often framed as a human rights concern, was in fact a battle against terrorism, extremism and separatism.
And last August, China invited delegates from the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to visit Xinjiang, in a bid to promote its rosy narrative about the peace and prosperity enjoyed by Uyghurs and blunt international criticism.
“China seeks to build consensus and strengthen its global influence,” said Ma Ju, an ethnic Muslim Hui scholar based in the United States.
Meanwhile, Muslim nations may be unwilling to criticize China because they need its political support and investment, experts said.
Although some Muslim countries have endured a painful history under Western colonialism, they may be willing to overlook that China has effectively colonized the Uyghur homeland, Ma said.
“For them, the primary concern seems to be finding a method to counter the influence of the U.S. and the West,” he said.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uyghar for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, General Motors and BYD could do more to ensure their strict standards are applied in China, Human Rights Watch says
Car manufacturers Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, General Motors and BYD may be using aluminium made by Uyghur forced labour in their supply chains and could do more to minimise that risk, Human Rights Watch says.
An investigation conducted by HRW has alleged that while most automotive companies have strict human rights standards to audit their global supply chains, they may not be applying the same rigorous sourcing rules for their operations inside China.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Since 2014, millions of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other minorities have been locked up in China and subjected to torture and forced labour. Some of those freed talk about trying to rebuild their lives in neighbouring Kazakhstan
- Photography by Robin Tutenges
This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Beijing says labour transfers are poverty alleviation tool, but research raises concerns schemes are not voluntary
Xinjiang, a region of north-west China that is about three times the size of France, is an area that has become associated around the world with detention camps. The facilities are referred to by Beijing as vocational education and training centres. But critics say they are used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other minority ethnic groups with the goal of transforming them into devotees of the Chinese Communist party.
After unrest in the region and a series of riots and violent attacks by Uyghur separatists between 2014 to 2017, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, launched his Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism, leading to the establishment of the camps. The UN has estimated that since then about 1 million people have been detained in these extrajudicial centres.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Fiji has withdrawn from an international statement that called on China to end its persecution of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, underlining the superpower’s leverage over Pacific island countries.
A total of 51 nations had backed the statement that was issued in mid-October at a U.N. committee on human rights violations in the region in China’s northwest. It cited an assessment by the office of the U.N. human rights commissioner that relied extensively on China’s own records and found evidence of large-scale arbitrary detention and other abuses such as torture, forced abortions, family separations and forced labor.
“Fiji attaches great value to its bilateral relations with the People’s Republic of China and based on its policy of non-interference has withdrawn Fiji’s vote,” the Fijian government said in a statement Monday.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, elected in December after 16 years of rule by strongman leader Frank Bainimarama and his Fiji First party, is attempting to balance reassertion of longstanding security relationships with countries such as Australia and the United States with his country’s economic ties to China.
Rabuka said in June he had put a police cooperation agreement with China under review because he favored relations with democracies. However, Fiji’s decision to elevate the status of Taiwan’s office in the country was reversed the same month under pressure from Beijing, according to Taiwan’s foreign ministry.
Fiji’s statement said it was reaffirming its “unwavering commitment” to relations with other countries based on mutual respect for sovereignty and “non-interference” in domestic affairs – echoing Beijing’s foreign policy mantras, particularly in response to criticism of its human rights record.
Fiji’s withdrawal from the Xinjiang statement is a “crystal-clear example of how China uses its economic leverage over Pacific countries for political gain,” said Mihai Sora, a Pacific analyst at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.
“One of the strings attached to China’s economic interest in the region is an expectation that Pacific countries support Chinese positions on a range of issues in the U.N., particularly human rights,” he said.
The retraction puts Fiji back in line with its past practice of not taking stances that China sees as interference in its domestic affairs, Sora said.
China has become a substantial source of trade, infrastructure and aid for developing Pacific island countries as part of its global effort to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and gain supporters in international institutions.
Fiji’s relations with China particularly burgeoned after countries such as Australia and New Zealand sought to punish its government for Bainimarama’s 2006 coup – the Pacific island country’s fourth since the late 1980s.
Some Pacific island countries also have faced criticism for last week siding with the U.S. in voting against a U.N. General Assembly resolution for a humanitarian truce in Gaza. The territory is being bombed by Israel in the wake of a wave of deadly surprise attacks carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Fiji, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Tonga and Papua New Guinea sided with the U.S., Israel and a handful of other countries in opposing the resolution. Several Pacific island countries abstained from the vote.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Three ailing Uyghur women recently released from the same prison in China’s Xinjiang region have died within days of one another, according to sources with knowledge of the situation, who said inmates at the facility are only given access to medical treatment in extreme cases.
Two sisters in their 30s and a 75-year-old grandmother died in early October from different ailments they developed while in detention at the Baykol Women’s Prison in Ghulja, a city located in the upper Ili River valley near Kazakhstan that is also known as Yining in Chinese.
The three women were jailed on charges of “religious extremism,” prison sources said. Such offenses deemed by Chinese authorities include Uyghurs who pray, possess a Quran or study Islam.
The sisters — Melike, 33, and Merziye, nearly 40 — hailed from Ghulja’s Araosteng village, a source with knowledge of the prison and an officer at the village police station told RFA Uyghur, although they were unable to provide details about their deaths.
They were each sentenced to 12 years in prison, jail officials said.
Baykol Women’s Prison was built after authorities in Xinjiang began mass arrests of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in 2017, said the source who knows about the issue and, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal.
The prison houses at least 10,000 inmates from different areas of the far-western region — an exceptionally high number, the source said.
In a separate interview, a police officer confirmed that there are at least 10,000 inmates in Baykol Women’s Prison and said the health of many detainees has deteriorated as a result of mandatory “educational programs” at the facility, particularly those who are older or have existing health issues. The officer did not elaborate on what the “educational programs” entailed.
Uyghurs and other Muslims detained by the Chinese government in “re-education” camps in 2017 and 2018 have reported that they were forced to sing political songs, learn Mandarin Chinese, and study speeches of Chinese Communist Party leaders. Some of the nearly 2 million who were held against their will were subjected to torture, rape, forced sterilization and forced labor.
China has said that the camps were vocational training centers and that they are now closed, though many Uyghurs are still being held in prisons.
Since the establishment of the Bakyol Women’s Prison about six years ago, and particularly over the last year, there has been a significant decline in the health of the detainees and an increase in deaths in custody, the sources said.
When contacted by RFA, an official in charge of medical affairs at the prison confirmed that the sisters had died following their release and referred further questions about the cause of their deaths to a superior.
The higher-level official said that a elderly woman named Ayshemgul, who was serving a nine-year sentence, died “of high blood pressure and cancer” the same week as the sisters.
“She passed away shortly after her release from prison,” the official said.
The medical affairs official, who has worked at the prison for eight years, said ailing detainees are only referred to medical staff in severe cases.
About 20-30 detainees require medical attention inside or outside the prison each week, she said.
“Every day I see three to five ailing inmates,” she told Radio Free Asia. “I receive reports, and they inform me of their pain. … I primarily treat severely ill individuals.”
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Joshua Lipes.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The US government has taken some steps to block Chinese imports made with forced labor. Britain and the EU have done shamefully little
Last month, Chinese diplomats sent letters – really threats – to discourage attendance at an event on the sidelines of the UN general assembly spotlighting Beijing’s persecution of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. The childish tactic backfired, heightening media interest, but it highlighted the lengths to which Beijing will go to cover up its repression. A recent exposé on the persecution of Uyghurs should reinforce our determination to address these crimes against humanity.
A four-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project pulls back the curtain on the massive use of forced labor in the Chinese government-backed fishing industry. Much of the study focused on people coercively kept on China’s distant-water fishing fleet, which holds workers at sea for months at a time in appalling conditions, often with lethal neglect. But the study also showed that seafood-processing facilities inside China are deploying Uyghur forced labor on a large scale.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
