Chinese Doublespeak

‘Human rights with Chinese characteristics’ are in fact crimes against humanity
By Omer Kanat

In 2017, three days before Human Rights Day on December 10, Beijing hosted the ‘South-South Human Rights Forum.’

The event took place as the Chinese authorities were interning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in concentration camps. 

More than 300 delegates from 70 countries attended. 

The outcome document, the ‘Beijing Declaration,’ affirmed states should “choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.” 

In sum, China sought an international clearance for the concept of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ sublimating individual and collective freedoms to the needs of the state.

The world is learning quickly about the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of human rights. 

In East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Taiwan, and China’s heartland, the Chinese government has met any opposition with repression and destabilization. 

Indeed, the application of the latest technologies to create a pervasive system of surveillance indicates the party has taken the step of preempting any resistance to its authoritarian rule. 

The recent leaks of government documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times lay bare how the party intends to commit cultural genocide against the Uyghur people through “no mercy” policies.
The label ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ is a misnomer. 

It is how the Chinese Communist Party attempts to entangle the interests of Chinese people with the logics of their continued power. 

If it was at all possible, just ask any one of the imprisoned Chinese human rights lawyers how they feel about “the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and human rights protection.” 

However, the imposition of the party’s vision of human rights does not stop at China’s borders. 

The profitable export of surveillance technology enables states to restrict the fundamental human rights of individuals on every continent.

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uighurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony and ask for the closure of “re-education center” where Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. 

Human Rights Day commemorates the day the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a foundational document outlining rights standards and translated into over 500 languages, including Uyghur. 

It’s worth revisiting the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

From Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to Article 9, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” to Article 20, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” China is in open violation of these fundamental rights in regards to the Uyghur people.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Chinese government is actively subverting the concept of universal human rights by cooking up its own version. 

Since 2017, evidence of mass arbitrary detention and torture of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples has become indisputable. 

The Chinese government has rationalized these crimes against humanity within the logics of ‘vocational training,’ as if the systemic ethnocide of their people was somehow in the interests of the Uyghurs.

File photo posted by the East Turkestan Judicial Administration to its WeChat account. 

However, the Chinese Communist Party does not limit the spread of its concept of human rights to events such as the South-South Human Rights Forum. 

More alarming, Beijing is leveraging the United Nations itself to undermine the standards set out in the UDHR. 

In recent years, China has been able to mute criticism, as well as find champions for its rights abuses among UN member states. 

This has been partly achieved through an exchange of loans and grants for silence and support, as well as threats and intimidation.
Furthermore, China has targeted individual human rights defenders. 

In 2017, China tried to prevent me from delivering my statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, and at the 2019 Forum, it attempted to do the same to the President of the World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa. 

In 2013, China detained Cao Shunli, who was on her way to attend China’s Universal Periodic Review in 2013. 

She was charged with illegal assembly, picking quarrels and provoking trouble and died in detention in 2014. 

Remember, this is a state the UN Secretary-General has called “a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism.”
Among the enablers of Xi Jinping’s repression are states with disreputable records attracted to a possible exemption from universal standards that ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ affords. 

And again, if we could freely ask the populations who reside in these states how they feel about such a concept, there would be few advocates. 

Therefore, on Human Rights Day, we have a responsibility to defend those who defend universal values and be clear ‘never again’ has meaning. 

There is injustice everywhere and we must fight it. 

Uyghurs are among them, for example, the imprisoned Ilham Tohti, and in exile Rebiya Kadeer, Rushan Abbas, and Gulchehra Hoja, whose families have been detained and disappeared in East Turkestan because of their advocacy. 

The second ‘South-South Human Rights Forum’ is opening in Shanghai for this year’s Human Rights Day. 

The dangerous fiction of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ that there are exceptions to the universality of rights should be firmly resisted.

China's Final Solution

China is harassing journalists reporting on Uighurs. They cannot be stifled.
By Fred Hiatt

A police station is located next door to a mosque in Yining, in China’s East Turkestan colony, on Aug. 21. 

To punish Gulchehra Hoja, a Washington-based journalist for Radio Free Asia, and to stifle her reporting, China’s rulers have imprisoned her brother, harassed her parents and threatened many other relatives back home in East Turkestan, China.
The punishment is keen. 

But no stifling has taken place.
“Every time they threaten us, we are more proud of you,” Hoja’s mother, who is 72, told her daughter during one of their infrequent phone calls. 

“Keep doing your work.”
And so she has.
The greatest crime against humanity of our young century is unfolding in northwestern China. 

If it were not for Hoja and her 11 colleagues, we might not know it was taking place.
Yes, you read that right: A dozen reporters and editors working for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service, reporting on events taking place halfway around the world, have confounded the massive propaganda machine of the Communist Party of China.
They uncovered the massive but secret incarceration of innocent Uighur men, women and children in a gulag of concentration camps — camps that China at first said did not exist and then insisted were benign vocational training centers.
The RFA reporters disclosed terrible living conditions in orphanages where suddenly parentless children have been sent. 

They chronicled roundups of eminent poets, clerics and intellectuals. 

They have begun to report — always carefully, always with two sources or more, never sensationally — on mass deaths in the camps.
Their reports, greeted with some skepticism when they first appeared in 2017, over time have been confirmed by satellite photography, foreign academics, other journalists and, most recently, an extraordinary leak of documents from the Communist Party itself. 

It is now accepted that more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 3 million Uighurs have been confined, and that thousands of mosques and other sacred spaces have been destroyed.
At every step, Chinese officials have sought to stymie the RFA reporting.
When the journalists began reporting on the mass detentions, the Communist Party began threatening and then rounding up their relatives. 

A half-dozen RFA journalists, Uighurs living in unsought exile, have spoken publicly about family members back home — often dozens of them — being taken away, with explicit references to the journalists’ work.
When hostage-taking did not deter the journalists, China began screening and blocking calls from the United States to East Turkestan, where the crimes are taking place. 

And when reporters found a way around that, China began employing artificial intelligence and voice recognition. 

Now, says reporter Shohret Hoshur, he can still call police desk sergeants and other potential sources — but his calls cut off after one minute.
No matter. 

It was Hoshur’s Oct. 29 story that confirmed the deaths of 150 people over the course of six months at the No. 1 Internment Camp in the Yengisher district of Kuchar county, “marking the first confirmation of mass deaths since the camps were introduced in 2017,” as the story notes.
It was Hoja’s Oct. 30 story that disclosed a camp survivor’s account of forced sterilizations, sexual abuse and other torture in the camps.
It was RFA reporters who disclosed intrusive surveillance, cameras installed even in homes, Uighur women forced to accept male Han Chinese “guests” in their homes and in their beds, and efforts to make Uighurs eat pork and drink alcohol, in violation of their faith.
All of this, we now know from documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is in service to a campaign instigated by Xi Jinping. 

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim, ethnic Turkic people who have lived in Central Asia — in what is now the East Turkestan colony of China — for more than 1,000 years. 

On the pretext of suppressing Islamist extremism, China is trying to eradicate their culture and religion — their identity as a people.
This confirmation notwithstanding, it’s certain that what’s happening is far worse than we yet know, as China blocks communication in both directions. 

Almost no one in the region dares talk to outsiders. 

Radio Free Asia, U.S.-funded but independently run, continues to broadcast in the Uighur language, but shortwave radios are no longer permitted to be sold in the region, and China has blocked satellite transmission of RFA news.
So the RFA reporters continue their reporting, one one-minute call at a time, one call after another, day after painful day. 

Sadly, having dozens of relatives locked away no longer makes them all that unusual among Uighurs, notes Rohit Mahajan, RFA’s vice president of communications.
But even if it did, said Mamatjan Juma, deputy director of the Uyghur Service, they would persist.
“It’s an existential choice for us,” he told me. 

“The Uighurs have no other voice.”

Cultural genocide

How China is tearing Uyghur families apart in East Turkestan
By Ivan Watson and Ben Westcott

Hong Kong -- Every day, US-based Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja tries to call her family in the Chinese colony of East Turkestan.

Sometimes she tries up to 20 different numbers, just hoping that someone will pick up.
"I know they won't pick up the phone, but I try ... nobody picks up," she told CNN in an interview from her office in Washington.
She doesn't expect an answer because 23 of her family members -- including her aunt, her brothers, her cousins -- have disappeared, along with tens of thousands of other ethnic Uyghurs inside enormous state-controlled "re-education camps."
Hoja, who works as a journalist for US government-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA), says her brother was the first in the family to vanish in September 28, 2017.
"This is my brother and this is me," she says, holding up a picture. 

"This was taken in summer 2000, it's my birthday ... this is my last picture with him .... (Now) he is missing. We don't know where he is now."

Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja holds a picture of her brother who has been missing in East Turkestan for more than a year

Her aunt, who raised her, and then her cousins vanished into East Turkestan's vast detention system, without any explanation or trial. 
She says her parents, last she heard, were under house arrest, unable even to go to a doctor without permission.
But even they stopped taking her calls a month ago.
An estimated one million Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in western China, are being held in camps across the colony, according to a US congressional report.
The Chinese government has never explained the disappearances, which began in 2017, nor said how many people are being held in the camps, which they insist are "vocational training centers" that local "students" are happy to attend.

Defending his country's human rights record at a United Nations forum in early November, China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng said that his country had made "remarkable progress" in the past four decades.
But many other countries remain harshly critical of Beijing's record, especially in regards to the East Turkestan camps.
More than a dozen states including Australia, Germany and the United States have called on China to dismantle the camps and release those detained.
"They are transformation centers, and they really are aimed at completely altering Uyghur culture and identity. It's kind of a surreal practice, I would say, that is definitely unprecedented in the 21st century," Sean Roberts, director of the International Development Studies Program at George Washington University, told CNN.
Hoja goes even further.
She describes it as "cultural genocide."

'Brainwashed'
Beijing has had a long and fractious history with East Turkestan, a massive colony in the far west of the country that is home to a relatively small population of around 22 million in a nation of 1.4 billion people.
Although the ruling Communist Party says East Turkestan has been part of China "since ancient times,"it was only officially named and placed under central government control after being conquered by the Qing Dynasty in the 1800s.
The predominately Muslim Uyghurs, who are ethnically distinct from the country's majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, form the majority in East Turkestan, where they account for just under half of the total population.
This, however, is changing fast.
According to government data, in 1953 Han Chinese accounted for just 6% of Xinjiang's total population of 4.87 million, while Uyghurs made up 75%.
By the year 2000 the Han Chinese population had grown to 40%, while Uyghurs had fallen to 45% of the total population of 18.46 million.

Uyghur crackdown in East Turkestan doubles security spending in one year

Continued economic development has led to an increase in Han Chinese migrants.
The provincial capital Urumqi, East Turkestan's largest and most prosperous city, is today majority Han Chinese.
"They named our homeland Xinjiang ... Uyghurs prefer to call it East Turkistan because our land was called (that) before the Chinese occupied," Hoja said, looking at the map of her home province.
In the past decade, "Sinicization" across East Turkestan has led to Uyghur unrest -- and bouts of bloody ethnic violence.
The region has also been braced by acts of violence directed at authorities.
In reaction, the provincial government, which blames the attacks on independence-seeking Uyghurs, has greatly expanded its efforts to control the local Uyghur population.
Under direction of East Turkestan's Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, authorities have cracked down hard on the Muslim beliefs and practices of the Uyghur population, including face coverings and long beards, Quran study groups and preventing government employees from fasting for Ramadan.
Anyone can be sent, under the flimsiest of reasons, to "re-education camps".
"When my brother was taken ... my Mum asked like, 'Why are you taking my son? What he do?' And the officer answered back, 'His sister's (in the US), is that not enough to take him?'" she said.
But Hoja believes the real reason he was taken was simpler than that.
"They are targeted just because they are Uyghurs."

Uyghur journalist Gulchehra Hoja's brother and parents in an undated family photo

Up to 40% of the province's Uyghur population, as many as four million people, could currently be held in the "re-education camps."
"They are ill-treated there. They are tortured there. Even you cannot speak your own language in there, you are brainwashed," Hoja alleged.
"Every day before your meal you have to sing a 'red' (communist) song, and say thank you to (Chinese dictator) Xi Jinping or the Communist Party."
In defense of the government's policy, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV aired footage inside what they term "vocational training camps," showing smiling Uyghurs learning Chinese and skills such as sewing.
But Hoja challenged the idea that her family was in such desperate need of vocational training that they should be taken to the camps.
"My aunt knows more than three languages, she is also retired from the East Turkestan Museum, so what kind of education does she need to take?" she said.

'The worst feeling in the world'
Mamatjan Juma, another Uyghur journalist working for RFA, said not knowing where your family was, or being able to help them, was "the worst feeling in the world."
"Every day I think of them, the pain is there. Because it's just like a kind of virus, it's in your mind, the pain is there every night. They were in my dreams sometimes ... You cannot do anything," he told CNN.
A former teacher from a big family in the East Turkestan city of Kashgar, Juma, said Chinese authorities took away two of his brothers in May 2017.
"My last brother, the third one, the youngest brother was taken away this year, in February. And since then I've lost contact with my Mom and two of my younger sisters," he said.

Ahmatjan Juma, a teacher and brother of Uyghur journalist Mamatjan Juma, who disappeared in East Turkestan in 2017

Like Hoja, Juma feels that working as a journalist in the US has led to negative consequences for his family.
From 2010, he began to receive calls from his brother trying to convince him to come home.
They only stopped when his brother vanished.
Juma said he is most concerned about his mother, who is severely unwell after suffering multiple heart attacks and being sent to hospital three times.
"I don't know what happened to her, if she's been taken away, or something has happened to her," he said.
He worries for those detained.
"One Uyghur businessman told me that they were left like animals. They don't have any facilities ... They don't have enough food," he said.
The Chinese government claims its actions in East Turkestan, including the mass detentions and forced home stays by Communist Party officials, are designed to make the colony more secure and prosperous.
East Turkestan Governor Shohrat Zakir, himself a Uyghur, told the state-run Xinhua news agency in October that since the crackdown "East Turkestan is not only beautiful but also safe and stable."
But Juma told CNN Beijing is simply trying to "Sinicize" East Turkestan, remove the Uyghurs' culture and identity and make them more like the Han Chinese majority.
"They call it educate and civilize, but that's not the case," he said.

'Critical location'
While a large part of the Chinese government's crackdown in East Turkestan has centered on efforts to "transform" Uyghurs into model Chinese citizens, Roberts, the associate professor, said there may be ulterior motives for Beijing.
"If you look at the plans for (Chinese dictator) Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, East Turkestan is a critical location that will serve as the jumping off point for all economic expansion into Central Asia and South West Asia and really into Europe," he told CNN.
The Belt and Road Initiative, a signature policy of Xi's, plans to create trade corridors between Beijing and the rest of the world, through international infrastructure spending and diplomatic agreements.
The name references the Maritime Silk Road, which will run to Africa through South East Asia, and the Silk Road Economic Belt, which will connect East Turkestan to important partners such as Pakistan, Turkey and Russia.
"The Belt and Road is part of the reason that there's such an urgency to clean up the Uyghur population in East Turkestan at the present moment," Roberts said.


China's paranoia and oppression in East Turkestan has a long history

"What really concerns me is that, if it's really the last chance to try to transform Uyghurs, what's the next step if they decide that the Uyghurs can't be transformed into a passive benign minority that's loyal to the state?" he said.
Despite the threat of violence or abduction for her and her family, Hoja says she feels obligated to keep speaking out and working to raise awareness for the "voiceless" Uyghur.
Even with everything that's happened, Hoja says, her dearest wish would be to return home, one day, to East Turkestan.
"It's my biggest dream ... everybody wants to go back home right?"

China's Final Solution

Uighur Americans Speak Against China’s Concentration Camps. Their Relatives Disappear.

By Edward Wong

Rushan Abbas, a Uighur American whose family members have been detained in China.
ROSSLYN, Va. — Speaking last month at a Washington think tank, Rushan Abbas relayed tales of suffering she had heard about China’s repression of ethnic Uighur Muslims — including the detention of members of her husband’s family in a widespread system of mass internment camps.
Within six days, Ms. Abbas’s ailing sister and 64-year-old aunt disappeared from their homes in northwest China. 

No family members or neighbors have heard from them in more than a month.
Ms. Abbas is an American citizen and Virginia resident; her sister has two daughters, and both live in the United States. 

They all assume the women are being detained in the camps, which Western analysts estimate hold up to one million people.
Ms. Abbas said they had fallen victim to the persecution against which she had been campaigning — and because of her.
“I’m exercising my rights under the U.S. Constitution as an American citizen,” Ms. Abbas, a business consultant, said from her 12th-floor office in Rosslyn, Va., overlooking the Key Bridge and Potomac River. 

“They shouldn’t punish my family members for this.”
“I hope the Chinese ambassador here reads this,” she added, wiping away tears. 

“I will not stop. I will be everywhere and speak on this at every event from now on.”
Ms. Abbas, 50, is among a growing number of Uighur Americans who have had family members detained by the Chinese police and placed in the anti-Islam camp system that is spread across the northwest colony of East Turkestan. 

Chinese officials describe the internment as “transformation through education” and “vocational education.”
The Washington area has the largest population of Uighurs in the United States, so stories like that of Ms. Abbas are now common here. 

Chinese officers aim to silence Uighurs abroad by detaining their family members.

A growing number of Uighur Americans have had family members detained by Chinese police and placed in the anti-Islam camp system spread across the northwest colony of East Turkestan.
But that tactic is backfiring. 

Although some Uighurs abroad are afraid to speak out for fear that relatives in East Turkestan will be detained, Ms. Abbas said, there are ones like her who are more willing to voice their outrage.
Those in Washington could sway United States policy toward China, at a time when officials are debating a much tougher stand on defending Uighurs. 

Some like Ms. Abbas have acquaintances at think tanks, including at the conservative Hudson Institute, where she spoke on Sept. 5, and in Congress and the White House. 

Ms. Abbas has also spoken to staff members at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which is led by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey.
“Harassing the relatives of U.S. citizens is what Mao Zedong used to call dropping a rock on your own feet,” said Michael Pillsbury, director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, noting that repression of Uighurs would also erode relations between China and Muslim nations.
This month, a daughter of Ms. Abbas’s detained sister wrote to Mr. Rubio about her mother’s plight. The daughter, an American citizen, lives in Florida, Mr. Rubio’s home state. 

The other daughter, a legal permanent resident, lives in Maryland. 

Their mother, Gulshan Abbas, 56, has severe health problems.
Asked for comment about issues facing Uighur Americans, Mr. Rubio said, “The long arm of the Chinese government’s domestic repression directly impacts the broader Uighur diaspora community, including in the United States.”
“This is unacceptable, and it takes tremendous courage for these individuals to even come forward given the growing number of reports of Chinese government harassment, intimidation and threats aimed at the Chinese, Uighur and Tibetan diaspora communities living in the United States,” Mr. Rubio added.
Mr. Rubio is pushing legislation to compel the United States to take action on behalf of Uighurs. 

It says the F.B.I. and other government agencies “should track and take steps to hold accountable” Chinese officials who harass or threaten people from China who are American citizens or living or studying here, including Uighurs.
Separately, officials at the White House and the State and Treasury Departments are discussing imposing economic sanctions on Chinese officials, under the Global Magnitsky Act, who are involved in repression of Uighurs.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has spoken about the plight of the Uighurs and the harassment of Uighur Americans. 

In April, the State Department’s chief spokeswoman met with Gulchehra Hoja, a Uighur American journalist for Radio Free Asia who said two dozen of her family members had been detained in East Turkestan. 

Ms. Hoja testified in July at the congressional commission.

Ms. Abbas showed a photo of her family members, including her sister, second from right, who recently went missing.

In a China policy speech this month, Vice President Mike Pence denounced China’s attempts to shape public opinion in the United States through coercion and other means.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said, “Beijing’s harassment now factors into whether citizens of countries like Australia and the United States feel safe enough to attend public discussions about East Turkestan at events ranging from congressional hearings in Washington or think tank talks in Sydney.”
“Ending abuses in East Turkestan now depends in part on ensuring that these communities are safe to exercise their rights around the world, and on governments following Germany’s and Sweden’s lead and committing to not sending Uighur asylum seekers back to China,” she said.
Ferkat Jawdat, a Uighur and American citizen who lives in Chantilly, Va., last spoke to his mother in February. 

She was forced to stay in East Turkestan when he and his siblings came to the United States in 2011 because the Chinese authorities would not give her a passport. 

She told him in February that she feared she was going to be put in a camp; Mr. Jawdat has not been able to reach her since.
Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia, pressed Mr. Jawdat’s case in an Oct. 3 letter to China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai. 

It asked why Mr. Jawdat’s missing mother, Minaiwaier Tuersun, “has been imprisoned, why the Chinese government refused to issue her a passport in 2011, and when she will be released.”
There has been no response from the Chinese embassy, Mr. Jawdat said.
The youngest of four children of a prominent biologist and a doctor, Ms. Abbas grew up in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, and attended a university there. 

She has lived in the United States since May 1989, when she came as a visiting scholar to Washington State University. 

She got a master’s degree in plant pathology there and became an American citizen in 1995.
Ms. Abbas has been active in Uighur issues for decades. 

She joined Radio Free Asia in Washington in 1998 as its first Uighur reporter before moving to California. 

She worked as an interpreter for the Defense Department when it detained 22 Uighurs in Guantánamo Bay, then helped with their relocations to other countries. 

She moved back to Washington in 2009 to be an advocate for Uighurs.
She said she waited one month before speaking to a journalist about the simultaneous disappearances of her sister and her aunt, Mayinur Abliz, in the hopes that officials would release them. 

Now she sees a dark future for them unless she speaks out.
She plans to mention them at a talk she is scheduled to give on Friday at Indiana University.
“China needs to respect international laws,” Ms. Abbas said. 

“This is so childish, what they’re doing — taking hostage the family members of someone who left when she was 21.”

China's crimes against humanity

Ethnic cleansing makes a comeback in China

By Josh Rogin

If ethnic cleansing takes place in China and nobody is able to hear it, does it make a sound? 

That’s what millions of Muslims inside the People’s Republic are asking as they watch the Chinese government expand a network of internment camps and systematic human rights abuses designed to stamp out their peoples’ religion and culture.
Since last year, hundreds of thousands — and perhaps millions — of innocent Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan have been unjustly arrested and imprisoned in what the Chinese government calls “political re-education camps.” 

Thousands have disappeared. 

There are reports of torture and death among the prisoners. 

The government says it is fighting “terrorism” and “religious extremism.” 

Uighurs say they are resisting a campaign to crush religious and cultural freedom in China. 

The international community has largely reacted with silence.
Horrific as they are, the camps constitute just one part of Beijing’s effort. 

The government has destroyed thousands of religious buildings. 

It has banned long beards and many Muslim names. 

People are forced to eat pork against their beliefs. 

The Chinese government’s persecution of innocents continues even after their death. 

Crematoria are being built to literally extinguish the Uighur funeral tradition, which insists on burials.
Add to that the unprecedented security and surveillance state in East Turkestan, which includes all-encompassing monitoring based on identity cards, checkpoints, facial recognition and the collection of DNA from millions of individuals. 

The authorities feed all this data into an artificial-intelligence machine that rates people’s loyalty to the Communist Party in order to control every aspect of their lives.
If that doesn’t bother you, consider that this draconian expansion of Chinese repression is being exported to the United States and around the world. 

Families of U.S. citizens who speak out against Beijing are targeted as part of Beijing’s effort to snuff out all international criticism.
U.S. citizen Gulchehra Hoja, a journalist for Radio Free Asia’s Uighur service, has had more than two dozen family members in China detained in the camps, including her elderly parents and her brother, who has not been heard from since his arrest last September. 

Many of her RFA colleagues have similar stories.
“I hope and pray for my family to be let go and released, but I know if that happens they will still live under a constant threat,” she testified last week before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

“I came to the United States to realize a dream, a dream of being able to tell the truth without fear.”
Despite Beijing’s efforts, mounting evidence of the camps has managed to make its way to the outside world. 

Massive camp construction can be seen from satellites, and advertisements for new construction contracts are publicly available. 

Witnesses have told their stories. 

Yet the world has failed to respond.
Inside the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill, that may finally be changing. 

At last week’s congressional hearing, Ambassador Kelley Currie, a top official at the U.S. United Nations mission, called on the Chinese government to end its repressive policies in East Turkestan and to free all those arbitrarily detained.
The Chinese government is attempting to “Sinocise religion” and “transform religion and ethnicity in Chinese society” in a scheme more ambitious than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she testified. 

“The scope of this campaign is breathtaking.”
The U.S. government has tools to raise the pressure and costs on China, should it decide to act. Commission Chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called for U.S. corporations to stop selling China items that can be used for repression, including DNA technologies and video surveillance tools. 

The administration can also impose sanctions on senior Chinese officials for human rights abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act. 

East Turkestan Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who honed his repression skills in Tibet and has now expanded them against Muslim minorities, is one obvious target.
“We clearly know horrible things are happening here to the Uighurs. And wherever there are abuses, there are abusers,” Rubio said. 

“It’s working. That’s the saddest part of all.”
The Chinese government’s obsession with its international reputation is its main vulnerability. 

Calling out these atrocities in public and to Beijing directly is key.
The horror in East Turkestan is not a China issue, it’s a global issue. 

China uses its position on the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. Security Council not only to stifle discussion of its actions but also to attempt to rewrite international human rights norms to allow expansion of these practices by any dictatorship with the means.
“The United States advances religious freedom in our foreign policy because it is not exclusively an American right,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week. 

“It is a God-given universal right bestowed on all of mankind.”
Those words mean little if the United States continues to stand by while the situation in East Turkestan worsens. 

We may choose to look away, but we can never say again we didn’t know.

China detains relatives of U.S. reporters in punishment for East Turkestan coverage

By Simon Denyer

A policeman is seen through a car window at a security checkpoint at Khom village of Altay, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, on Jan. 28. 

BEIJING — China’s security services have detained several close relatives of four U.S.-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia, in an attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage of the Muslim-majority East Turkestan region, the news organization said Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of Muslim ethnic Uighurs have been detained in “political education centers” by Chinese authorities in East Turkestan in recent months, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The campaign is portrayed as a “strike hard” campaign against "terrorists and separatists", but effectively means anyone who expresses their religious or cultural identity is targeted, Human Rights Watch said.
“We’re very concerned about the well-being and safety of our journalists’ family members, especially those in need of medical treatment,” said Rohit Mahajan, director of public affairs at Radio Free Asia in Washington.
“We’re also particularly concerned about the use of detentions as a tactic by Chinese authorities to silence and intimidate independent media, as well as to inhibit RFA’s mission of bringing free press to closed societies.”
Among those who have been detained or disappeared are several close relatives of Shohret Hoshur, Gulchehra Hoja, Mamatjan Juma and Kurban Niyaz, four ethnic Uighur journalists working for Radio Free Asia in Washington. 

The first three are U.S. citizens while Niyaz is a green-card holder.
Their reporting for the U.S. government-funded news organization has offered one of the only independent sources of information about the crackdown in the province.
All three of Hoshur’s brothers were jailed in East Turkestan in 2014, but two were released in December of the following year after protests from the U.S. government. 

The third, Tudaxun, was sentenced to a five-year jail term in 2015 for endangering state security and remains in prison.
Now, Hoshur said, the other two brothers were detained again in September and taken to the “Loving Kindness School,” a political re-education center in the city of Horgos. 

Hoshur said a source told him that around 3,000 people have been detained there.
Hoshur said Chinese authorities have contacted family members living in East Turkestan, urging them to ask him to stop calling and reporting on events in the region.
In a separate statement posted online last week, Hoja said her brother, 43-year-old Kaisar Keyum, was taken away by police in October and his whereabouts are unknown. 

Since late January, she has also lost all contact with her parents, who are both in their seventies and suffer from poor health.
“My father is paralyzed on one side and needs a constant care. My mother has recently had a surgery on her feet and is very weak,” she said in the statement. 

“I need to know where they are and that they are OK. I need to be able to speak to them. They have not committed any crime.”
Shortly after calling her aunt earlier this month, Hoja said she received a call from a friend in West Virginia whose mother lives in Urumqi, East Turkestan’s capital. 

Her friend said that around 20 of Hoja’s relatives had been arrested by the Chinese police because of her reporting.
When her brother was detained, police told Hoja’s mother that her employment with RFA was the reason for his detention, while Hoja has heard that her relatives may have been detained for being in communication with her through a WeChat messaging group, RFA said.
Juma, deputy director of RFA’s Uyghur Service, reported that his brothers Ahmetjan Juma and Abduqadir Juma were detained in May 2017. 

Ahmetan’s whereabouts are unknown, while Abduqadir has been taken to a prison in Urumqi. 

He suffers from heart and health issues that require medical care, but his sister has been denied access to him.
“The family is deeply concerned about his health and well-being while being held in a prison known for its inhumane conditions,” RFA said.
RFA Uyghur broadcaster Niyaz’s youngest brother Hasanjan was arrested last May and soon afterward sentenced to six years in jail for “holding ethnic hatred.”
Human rights groups say China represses the rights, culture and freedom of worship for Uighur Muslims. 

East Turkestan has been home to long-running separatist unrest, and there have been several violent attacks there in recent years, blamed by the authorities on Islamist extremism.
In a report issued Tuesday, Human Rights Watch described how a system of predictive policing, involving constant mass surveillance and big data analysis, was being deployed to bolster the crackdown in East Turkestan.
The policing program called “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” gathers data from all-pervasive security cameras, some of which have facial recognition or infrared capabilities, “WiFi sniffers” monitoring smartphones and computers, and car license plate and identity card numbers gathered at the region’s countless security checkpoints, all cross-checked against health, banking and legal records, the report said.
Police officers, Communist Party cadres and government workers also visit homes to gather data on families, their “ideological situation” and their relationships with neighbors. 

One interviewee said even owning a large number of books could arouse suspicion, unless one worked as a teacher, while data is also gathered on frequency of prayer and visits abroad.
Constant surveillance and harassment have made it extremely difficult for foreign reporters based in China to cover the crackdown in East Turkestan effectively, with locals too scared to talk to reporters and security officials obstructing or detaining several journalists who have ventured there. 

That has made RFA’s coverage even more important in understanding the situation there.
RFA said it had been in contact with the State Department over the detentions, but China’s foreign ministry declined to say whether it had received any communications from the U.S. government.
RFA was set up by Congress in 1994 to broadcast news that would otherwise not be reported in Asian countries where governments do not allow a free press and it continues to be funded by an annual grant from the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Hoshur said China might be using voice recognition technology to intercept his phone calls to gather information from East Turkestan, with almost all of them cut off in under a minute.