China Is Buying African Media’s Silence

I wrote about Chinese oppression in a South African paper. Hours later, they cancelled my column.
BY AZAD ESSA 

The managing editor of China Central Television Africa, Pang Xinhua, shows a local journalist in Nairobi how the organization has expanded in different parts of Africa on June 12, 2012. 

It is official. 

After more than a decade of planning, setting up, and bankrolling African media, the Chinese are finally ready to cash in on their investment.
Last week, I decided to dedicate my weekly column in a South African newspaper to discussing the persecution of more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in China’s East Turkestan colony.
The column looked at the discrimination suffered by the Turkic-Muslim community and the inability of the more than 40 African leaders in Beijing for a historic China-Africa forum to seek clarity from their host. 

No more than a few hours after the piece was published by newspapers belonging to Independent Media, South Africa’s second-largest media company, I was told that the column would not be uploaded online.
A day later, my weekly column on neglected people and places around the globe, which I have been writing since September 2016, was immediately canceled. 

I was told the “new design of the papers” meant that there was no longer space for my weekly venting.
Given the ownership structure of Independent Media, with Chinese state-linked firms holding a 20 percent stake, I understood when I wrote the column that it might rattle the higher-ups. 

I didn’t expect the exorcism to be so immediate and so obvious. 

I had, it would appear, veered into a nonnegotiable arena that struck at the very heart of China’s propaganda efforts in Africa.
In 1999, China embarked on an economic and social outreach program to the continent, known as its “Going Out” policy, in which it injected millions of dollars of investment into the African media. 

To counter the rampant negative perceptions of China in Western media, the project looked to take back control of the country’s image in a continent where its interests were only set to grow.
This meant investing heavily in China’s own state media presence, including expanding bureaus; supporting privately owned Chinese media that set up offices on the continent; purchasing stakes in private African media; and conjuring up partnerships or organizing sponsored trips to China for cash-strapped African newsrooms.
As the checkbook diplomacy of China’s agenda has been propelled by the state-owned Xinhua press agency, China Global Television Network, the African edition of China Daily, and the monthly magazine ChinAfrica, based in Johannesburg, it is yet unclear whether African audiences have been accepting Chinese versions of their own reality.
It is private media companies that have most effectively become vehicles for forwarding the interests of the Chinese state, in cahoots with local elites.
So, in Kenya, press junkets at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation or special Beijing-sponsored seminars for Kenyan journalists have turned the Nation Media Group into a spectacle of press release rewrites promising an injection of Chinese collaboration into the continent.
In South Africa, Independent Media—partly owned by the China International Television Corporation and China-Africa Development Fund—is replete with sycophantic praise for Chinese investment, lacks critical engagement with the much-ballyhooed BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) project, and fails to ask basic questions on Chinese motives in Africa. Instead of holding power to account, it has become its most ardent cheerleader.
Meanwhile, the Chinese-owned StarTimes Group is now operational in 30 countries across the continent and describes itself as the “fastest growing and the most influential digital TV operator in Africa.” 

Though privately owned, StarTimes has benefited from a close relationship with the Chinese state, as Emmanuel Dubois notes, especially as a tool for exporting Chinese culture and services.
It’s true that the China-Africa story is one that has long been marred by false dichotomies. 

But what’s needed is clear-eyed coverage, not different distortions. 

In the Western press, the Chinese are either portrayed as aggressors or neocolonizers, while the Africans are described as weak or corrupt. 

In China-friendly media, the pattern is reversed; the Chinese are benevolent benefactors or partners, while the Africans are eager recipients.
And where the Western press has done its utmost to reveal African corruption and fiscal recklessness, Chinese media does its best to conceal them.
As it stands, there’s little coverage outside of either the Western portrayal of Africa as being overrun by resource-hungry and ruthless Chinese companies or the Chinese-sponsored media efforts that extol the Chinese development model or offer a projection of Africa in outlandishly positive terms.
A lack of nuance in reporting on China has allowed selfish business leaders to use the often unfair media portrayals of China and BRICS nations, or the global south, as an excuse to promote a more authoritarian, unaccountable business ethic on the continent under the guise of economic development.
This is precisely how former South African President Jacob Zuma justified his corruption, which culminated in the widespread use of the phrase “white monopoly capital” to dismiss all criticism of his business activities.
Some African governments have recognized the value of a media that toes the state line in lieu of a national agenda. 

The positive spin about the continent keeps African leaders happy (in a self-satiating bubble), and China establishes itself as a “true friend” of the continent.
Companies that take on Chinese ownership are likely to experience the Chinese model of censorship; red lines are thick and non-negotiable.
Given the economic dependence on the Chinese and crisis in newsrooms, this is rarely confronted. And this is precisely the type of media environment that China wants their African allies to replicate.
In 2015, Faith Muthambi, then South Africa’s former communication minister, went to Beijing to understand how the country’s state-owned broadcast media works. 

Media freedom in China is among the worst in the world. 

So it beggars belief that the minister traveled to learn anything other than how to control the news.
On the U.S. government side, though, the focus on the situation in East Turkestan comes after a spate of criticism of what is being described as China’s “debt-trap diplomacy.” 

As valid as these concerns may be, there’s a strong element of Western self-interest here. 

Many of the recent attacks have come off the back of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China.

For the Chinese, meanwhile, silence about a million people imprisoned without trial is golden. 

As non-Western powers such as Malaysia begin to raise the Uighur issue for the first time, potentially endangering Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road project, the battle for African public opinion is becoming particularly heated. 

The culling of my column came just as Xi pledged $60 billion to the continent, in the form of projects, assistance, investment, and loans, in an event described as the “largest and most high-profile diplomatic event” ever held in Beijing.
The timing to raise the plight of the Uighurs, it turns out, was wrong. 

And, evidently, just right.

Rogue Nation

China’s Oppression Reaches Beyond Its Borders
By Lauren Hilgers
The first threatening phone call that Zhuang Liehong got in New York was in the fall of 2016, on a gloriously warm September morning. 

The call came from a jail where his father was being held following a protest in Mr. Zhuang’s home village in Southern China. 

“Is this Zhuang Liehong?” asked an unfamiliar voice. 

When Mr. Zhuang said yes, there was a pause and his father’s voice came on the line. 

“Son,” he said, “stop doing what you’re doing. It will be bad for your family.”
What Mr. Zhuang had been doing, for the most part, was posting on Facebook. 

He was putting up photos that had been sent by friends and family, which recorded a police crackdown that had swept his home village, Wukan. 

Five years earlier, during the fall of 2011, Mr. Zhuang had been a ringleader in a series of protests that overtook the little seaside village. 

He had helped alert his fellow villagers to land grabs that were chipping away at village boundaries and filling the pockets of local officials. 

When those protests ended, it seemed the villagers had emerged victorious. 

Villagers had been granted the right to hold local elections, and Mr. Zhuang was one of seven new village committee members tasked with administrating the village and returning stolen land.
Back then, Wukan was held up among democracy activists as a symbol of liberalization, a hopeful sign that China was open to political change. 

But the elections were misleading, the hope misplaced. 

Mr. Zhuang fled to New York in 2014. 

Two years later, he found himself answering that phone call in New York City, swept up in new political currents. 

The Communist Party of China was taking a recent crackdown on dissent and moving it over borders. Mr. Zhuang had moved to the United States to speak freely about his village. 

In his father’s voice he heard the ventriloquism of the corrupt officials who had sold off his village land. 

Mr. Zhuang guessed that his father was surrounded by security personnel. 

He felt the phone call suggested a trade — his father’s freedom for Mr. Zhuang’s silence.
Since 2015, a sweeping crackdown on internal dissent has ensnared hundreds of human rights lawyers, feminists, journalists and democracy activists. 

China now spends more on internal security than it does on its military. 

And as the crackdown continues at home, the Chinese Communist Party has started to expand its reach, looking to enforce censorship, increase surveillance and silence dissent across borders. 

Their targets have included academics, exiled business elites, former judges and activists like Mr. Zhuang.
In a twist, as states across the globe retrench and solidify their hold, the quest for centralized rule and the quashing of dissent have caused borders to become porous. 

Russia stands accused of poisoning a former spy living in Britain. 

Turkish thugs attacked a crowd of protesters in Washington, D.C., during a visit by Turkey’s authoritarian-leaning president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

Some of these tactics are old. 

Autocratic regimes have long sought to eliminate former spies living abroad. 

Detaining family members as a proxy for a high-profile dissident in exile is an old practice. Technology, however, has decreased the price of harassment. 

The same tools that enabled the uprisings in the Arab Spring, the same ones that help Mr. Zhuang promote his cause, make surveillance and intimidation easier. 

Now anonymous teenagers can harass on Twitter and so can agents of state.
The warning call that Mr. Zhuang got from his father would not be the last. 

Over the next few months, they kept coming. 

Mr. Zhuang had several phones, and if he stopped answering one, the calls would appear on another. Security officers tracked the phones of his friends and interrogated them if they accepted calls from Mr. Zhuang. 

A CCTV camera mysteriously appeared outside the door of the home that Mr. Zhuang’s mother shared with his handicapped older brother. 

Friends and family no longer visited. 

His father was sentenced to three years in prison and kept sending warnings. 

His mother called him from her ramshackle home in Wukan. 

When she called, she warned her son that, even in the United States, he was not safe.
The extended reach of the Chinese government has affected exiles and immigrants across the world. In Canada, a former Supreme People’s Court judge, Xie Wendong, reported that his sister and son had both been detained by security forces. 

Chinese government agents sent a lawyer to Canada to try to persuade him to return to China. Authorities also ordered Xie’s ex-wife to bring him back to China, threatening her with detention if she failed. 

In France, Zheng Ning, a former businessman, was successfully pursued by Chinese agents and ended up returning to China. 

In a report released in January, the Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto, recorded a phishing operation that ran for 19 months, targeting Tibetans, the Falun Gong-related publication The Epoch Times and groups of ethnic Uyghurs.
In the United States, scholars studying China have also reported that phishing scams and targeted malware have become a matter of routine — with repeated attempts to access research and identify sources. 

An outspoken Chinese student at the University of Georgia recently told Radio Free Asia that he had received a call from a Chinese security officer, asking him to inform on other Chinese students and activists. 

Ethnic Uyghur journalists now living in the United States have reported the disappearance of multiple family members still in China.
Chen Xiaoping, a journalist at the Long Island-based, Mandarin-language media company Mirror Media Group, issued an open letter on Twitter in January asking the Chinese government to release his wife, who had been missing in China for 90 days. 

She had disappeared shortly after Mr. Chen began interviewing the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. 

Soon after Mr. Chen released the letter, a video was anonymously posted on YouTube — a tape of his wife denouncing his work in the United States.
The threats that Mr. Zhuang has received have not dissuaded him from continuing to protest China’s government. 

They have, however, stolen his peace of mind. 

The political problems that Mr. Zhuang had were, he felt, with the local government in Guangdong Province. 

He assumed those officials would not be able to reach him in New York. 

And then, when the phone calls started coming, he began to doubt himself.
Mr. Zhuang, like so many other exiled Chinese citizens, is finding that he is still subject to Beijing’s demands. 

Worldwide, China’s government is sending a chilling message: no matter where you are, speaking freely comes at a steep price.

East Turkestan: Digital police state shackles Chinese minority

Thousands disappear as China polices thought

By Gerry Shih

In this Nov. 3, 2017 photo, paramilitary policemen in an armored vehicle are on duty at the airport in Hotan in western China's Xinjiang region. Authorities are using detentions in political indoctrination centers and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority Beijing fears could be influenced by extremism. 

Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police.
Not his village neighbors in China's far west, who haven't seen him in months. 

Not his former classmates, who fear Chinese authorities beat him to death.
Not his mother, who lives in a two-story house at the far end of a country road, alone behind walls bleached by the desert sun. 

She opened the door one afternoon for an unexpected visit by Associated Press reporters, who showed her a picture of a handsome young man posing in a park, one arm in the wind.
"Yes, that's him," she said as tears began streaming down her face. 

"This is the first time I've heard anything of him in seven months. What happened?"
"Is he dead or alive?"
The student's friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having "extremist" thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad. 

The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of East Turkestan and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.
Along with the detention camps, unprecedented levels of police blanket East Turkestan's streets. 

Cutting-edge digital surveillance systems track where Uighurs go, what they read, who they talk to and what they say. 

And under an opaque system that treats practically all Uighurs as potential terror suspects, Uighurs who contact family abroad risk questioning or detention.
The campaign has been led by Chen Quanguo, a Chinese Communist Party official, who was promoted in 2016 to head East Turkestan after subduing another restive region — Tibet. 

Chen vowed to hunt down Uighur separatists blamed for attacks that have left hundreds dead, saying authorities would "bury terrorists in the ocean of the people's war and make them tremble."
Through rare interviews with Uighurs who recently left China, a review of government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip through southern East Turkestan, the AP pieced together a picture of Chen's war that's ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead instilling fear.
Most of the more than a dozen Uighurs interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that Chinese authorities would punish them or their family members. 

The AP is withholding the student's name and other personal information to protect people who fear government retribution.
Chen and the East Turkestan regional government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

But China's government describes its East Turkestan security policy as a "strike hard" campaign that's necessary following a series of attacks in 2013 and 2014, including a mass knifing in a train station that killed 33. 

A Hotan city propaganda official, Bao Changhui, told the AP: "If we don't do this, it will be like several years ago — hundreds will die."
China also says the crackdown is only half the picture. 

It points to decades of heavy economic investment and cultural assimilation programs and measures like preferential college admissions for Uighurs.
Officials say the security is needed now more than ever because Uighur militants have been fighting alongside Islamic extremists in Syria. 

But Uighur activists and international human rights groups argue that repressive measures are playing into the hands of the likes of al-Qaida, which has put out Uighur-language recruiting videos condemning Chinese oppression.
"So much hate and desire for revenge are building up," said Rukiye Turdush, a Uighur activist in Canada. 

"How does terrorism spread? When people have nowhere to run."

In this Nov. 4, 2017, photo, children play in the old city district where Chinese national flags are prominently hung in Kashgar in East Turkestan. 

'Thought police'
The government has referred to its detention program as "vocational training," but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination. 

A memo published online by the East Turkestan human resources office described cities, including Korla, beginning "free, completely closed-off, militarized" training sessions in March that last anywhere from 3 months to 2 years.
Uighurs study "Mandarin, law, ethnic unity, de-radicalization, patriotism" and abide by the "five togethers" — live, do drills, study, eat and sleep together.
In a rare state media report about the centers, a provincial newspaper quoted a farmer who said after weeks of studying inside he could spot the telltale signs of religious extremism by how a person dressed or behaved and also profess the Communist Party's good deeds. 

An instructor touted their "gentle, attentive" teaching methods and likened the centers to a boarding school dorm.
But in Korla, the institutions appeared more daunting, at least from the outside. 

The city had three or four well-known centers with several thousand students combined, said a 48-year-old local resident from the Han ethnic majority. 

One center the AP visited was, in fact, labeled a jail. 

Another was downtown on a street sealed off by rifle-toting police. 

A third center, the local Han resident said, was situated on a nearby military base.
While forced indoctrination has been reported throughout East Turkestan, its reach has been felt far beyond China's borders.
In April, calls began trickling into a Uighur teacher's academy in Egypt, vague but insistent. 

Uighur parents from a few towns were pleading with their sons and daughters to return to China, but they wouldn't say why.
"The parents kept calling, crying on the phone," the teacher said.
Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students abroad. 

And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began deporting scores of Uighurs to China.
Sitting in a restaurant outside Istanbul where many students had fled, four recounted days of panic as they hid from Egyptian and Chinese authorities. 

One jumped out a window running from police. 

Another slept in a car for a week. 

Many hid with Egyptian friends.
"We were mice, and the police were cats," said a student from Urumqi, East Turkestan capital.
All who returned were intensely grilled about what they did in Egypt and viewed as potential terror suspects, the students said. 

Many were believed held in the new indoctrination camps, while some were sentenced to longer prison sentences.
The young man from Korla rarely went out in the two years he spent studying Islam in Egypt. 

He played some soccer — a beloved sport among Uighurs — but wasn't particularly athletic or popular.
Instead, he kept to himself in an apartment that he kept fastidiously clean, steeped in his studies at the revered Al Azhar University, the 1,000-year-old seat of learning in Sunni Islam. 

He freely discussed Quranic verses with his Uighur friends but mostly avoided politics, one friend said. 

He spoke of one day pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative religion.
"He had big dreams," said the friend who is now hiding in Turkey to avoid being sent to China. 

"He wanted to be a religious scholar, which he knew was impossible in China, but he also wanted to stay close to his mother in Korla."
He was fluent in Arabic but also in Chinese. 

When they huddled around a smartphone to watch a Taiwanese tear-jerker about a boy separated from his mother, he would be the one weeping first.
When homesickness got to him, he would tell his friends about how his mother doted on him, and about Korla and the big house he grew up in. 

And when he gets married, God willing, he would say, he'd start a family in that house, too.
"If my wife doesn't agree, then we don't marry," he declared.
He returned to China when he was called back in 2016 and taken away in February, according to three students and a teacher from Cairo. 

They say they heard from reliable sources in China that he died in detention.

In this Nov. 4, 2017, photo, residents walk past a statue showing Mao Zedong near billboards with the words for "Welcome 19th Congress," "Patriotism" and "Democracy" near a square in Kashgar in East Turkestan.

Show of force
Southern East Turkestan, the vast desert basin from where many of the students came, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.
Deep in the desert's southern rim, the oasis town of Hotan is a microcosm of how Chen, the East Turkestan party boss, has combined fearsome optics with invisible policing.
He has ordered police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols be built every 500 yards— a total of 1,130, according to the Hotan government. 

The AP saw cavalcades of more than 40 armored vehicles including full personnel carriers rumble down city boulevards. 

Police checkpoints on every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for religious content.
Shopkeepers in the thronging bazaar don mandatory armored vests and helmets to sell hand-pulled noodles, tailored suits and baby clothes.
East Turkestan's published budget data from January to August shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 percent a year ago. 

It's quadrupled since 2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out in East Turkestan, leaving nearly 200 members of China's Han ethnic majority dead, and security began to ratchet up.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology who tracks Chinese public security staffing levels based on its recruiting ads, says East Turkestan is now hiring 40 times more police per capita than populous Guangdong Province.
"East Turkestan has very likely exceeded the level of police density seen in East Germany just before its collapse," Zenz said. 

"What we've seen in the last 12 to 14 months is unprecedented."
But much of the policing goes unseen.
To enter the Hotan bazaar, shoppers first pass through metal detectors and then place their national identification cards on a reader while having their face scanned.
The facial scanner is made by China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a state-owned defense contractor that has spearheaded China's fast-growing field of predictive policing with East Turkestan as its test bed. 

The AP found 27 CETC bids for East Turkestan government contracts, including one soliciting a facial recognition system for facilities and centers in Hotan Prefecture.
Hours after visiting the Hotan bazaar, AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters' movements.
"There are tens of thousands of cameras here," said the officer, who gave his name as Tushan. 

"The moment you took your first step in this city, we knew."
The government's tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes, and even voices. 

In February, authorities in East Turkestan's Bayingol prefecture, which includes Korla, required every car to install GPS trackers for real-time monitoring. 

And since late last year, East Turkestan authorities have required health checks to collect the population's DNA samples. 

In May, a regional police official told the AP that East Turkestan had purchased $8.7 million in DNA scanners — enough to analyze several million samples a year.
In one year, Kashgar Prefecture, which has a population of 4 million, has carried out mandatory checks for practically its entire population, said Yang Yanfeng, deputy director of Kashgar's propaganda department. 

She characterized the checkups as a public health success story, not a security measure.
"We take comprehensive blood tests for the 'good' of the people, not just record somebody's height and weight," Yang said. 

"We find out health issues in citizens even they didn't know about."
A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last year under "Document No. 44," a regional public security directive to "comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints." 

The document's full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.
Meiya Pico, a security and surveillance company, has won 11 bids in the last six months alone from local East Turkestan jurisdictions. 

It won a joint bid with a DNA analysis company for 4 million yuan ($600,000) in Kargilik and has sold software that automatically scans smartphones for "terror-related pictures and videos" to Yarkent.
Meiya and CETC declined comment.

Prying eyes
To monitor East Turkestan's population, China has also turned to a familiar low-tech tactic: recruiting the masses.
When a Uighur businessman from Kashgar completed a six-month journey to flee China and landed in the United States with his family in January, he was initially ecstatic. 

He tried calling home, something he hadn't done in months to spare his family unwanted police questioning.
His mother told him his four brothers and his father were in prison because he fled China. 

She was spared only because she was frail.
Since 2016, local authorities had assigned ten families including theirs to spy on one another in a new system of collective monitoring, and those families had also been punished because he escaped. Members from each were sent to re-education centers for three months, he told the AP.
"It's worse than prison," he said. 

"At least in prison you know what's happening to you. But there you never know when you get accused. It could be anytime."
A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and reviewed by the AP show Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighborhood in Urumqi, the regional capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are automatically docked 10 points. 

Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily, or having a religious education, all result in 10 point deductions.
In the final columns, each Uighur resident's score is tabulated and checked "trusted," ''ordinary," or "not trusted." 

Activists say they anecdotally hear about Uighurs with low scores being sent to indoctrination.
At the neighborhood police office, a woman who gave her surname as Tao confirmed that every community committee in Urumqi, not just Hebei Road West, needed to conduct similar assessments. She said there were no statistics on how many residents had been deemed "not trusted," nor were there official procedures to deal with them.
"What is happening is every single Uighur is being considered a suspect of not just terrorism but also political disloyalty," said Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who is studying how Chinese police are using technology to track political dissidents as well as Uighurs.
This month, East Turkestan announced it would require every government employee in the region to move into a Uighur home for a week to teach families about ideology and avoiding extremism.
What pains most, Uighurs abroad say, is the self-imposed barrier of silence that separates them from loved ones, making efforts to say happy birthday or find out whether a relative is detained risky.
When Salih Hudayar, an American Uighur graduate student, last called his 70-something grandfather this summer, he spoke in cryptic but reassuring tones.
"Our phones will not work anymore," his grandfather said. 

"So, don't try calling and don't worry about us. We'll be fine as long as you're all fine."
He later heard from a cousin in Kyrgyzstan that his grandfather had been sent to re-education.
A Uighur student who moved to Washington following the crackdown this summer said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi, messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. 

She had to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her contacts list.
A month later he received calls on WhatsApp from a man who introduced himself as Ekber, a Uighur official from the international cooperation office of the East Turkestan regional public security bureau, who wanted him to work for them in the U.S. — and warned him against saying no.
"If you're not working for us then you're working for someone else. That's not a road you want to take," he snapped.
A week after that, he couldn't help himself placing one last call home. 

His daughter picked up.
"Mom is sick but she doesn't want me to speak to you. Goodbye," she said.

Unanswered question
For the past year, Chen's war has meant mass detentions, splintered families, lives consumed by uncertainty. 

It has meant that a mother sometimes can't get an answer a simple question about her son: is he dead or alive?
A short drive from Korla, beyond peach plantations that stretch for miles, the al-Azhar student's mother still lives in the big house that he loved. 

When the AP arrived unannounced, she said she had not received any court notices or reasons about why her son and his father were suddenly taken months earlier. 

She declined an interview.
"I want to talk, I want to know," she said through a translator. 

"But I'm too afraid."
AP reporters were later detained by police, interrogated for 11 hours, and accused of "illegal reporting" in the area without seeking prior permission from the Korla government.
"The subjects you're writing about do not promote positive energy," a local propaganda official explained.
Five villagers said they knew authorities had taken away the young student; one said he was definitely alive, the others weren't sure.
When asked, local police denied he existed at all.