U.S. House Approves Uighur Bill Demanding Sanctions On Senior Chinese Officials

The bill requires the U.S. president to condemn abuses against Muslims and call for the closure of concentration camps in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan.

Reuters


WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would require the Trump administration to toughen its response to China’s crackdown on its Muslim minority, demanding sanctions on senior Chinese officials and export bans.
The Uighur Act of 2019 is a stronger version of a bill that angered Beijing when it passed the Senate in September.

It calls on President Donald Trump to impose sanctions for the first time on a member of China’s powerful politburo, even as he seeks a trade deal with Beijing.

The bill, passed 407 to 1 in the House, requires the U.S. president to condemn abuses against Muslims and call for the closure of concentration camps in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan.
It calls for sanctions against senior Chinese officials who are responsible and specifically names East Turkestan Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who, as a politburo member, is in the upper echelons of China’s leadership.

The revised bill still has to be approved by the Senate before being sent to President Trump. 

The White House has yet to say whether Trump would sign or veto the bill, which contains a provision allowing the president to waive sanctions if he determines this to be in the national interest.
The White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The bill comes days after President Trump signed into law congressional legislation supporting anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.
China responded to that on Monday by saying U.S. military ships and aircraft would not be allowed to visit Hong Kong, and announced sanctions against several U.S. non-government organizations.
Analysts say China’s reaction to passage of the Uighur bill could be stronger, though some doubted it would go so far as imposing visa bans on the likes of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has called China’s treatment of Uighurs “the stain of the century”.

“MODERN-DAY CONCENTRATION CAMPS”
Republican Congressman Chris Smith called China’s actions in “modern-day concentration camps” in East Turkestan “audaciously repressive,” involving “mass internment of millions on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.”

“We cannot be silent. We must demand an end to these barbaric practices,” Smith said, adding that Chinese officials must be held accountable for “crimes against humanity.”

Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called China’s treatment of the Uighurs “an outrage to the collective conscience of the world.”
“America is watching,” she said.
Chris Johnson, a China expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said passage of the bill could lead to a further blurring of lines between the trade issue and the broader deteriorating Sino-U.S. relationship, which China in the past has tended to keep separate.
“I think there’s a sort of piling on factor here that the Chinese are concerned about,” he said.
President Trump said on Monday the Hong Kong legislation did not make trade negotiations with China easier, but he still believed Beijing wanted a deal.
However, on Tuesday, he said an agreement might have to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in November 2020.
The House bill requires the president to submit to Congress within 120 days a list of officials responsible for the abuses and to impose sanctions on them under the Global Magnitsky Act, which provides for visa bans and asset freezes.
Democratic lawmaker Brad Sherman said it was “long past the point when this should have been done,” adding: “It should not be linked to ongoing negotiations on trade or any other issues.”
The bill also requires the secretary of state to submit a report on abuses in East Turkestan, to include assessments of the numbers held in re-education and forced labor camps. 

United Nations experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in the camps.
It also effectively bans the export to China of items that can be used for surveillance of individuals, including facial and voice-recognition technology.

China's Reinhard Heydrich -- Zhu Hailun

The man behind China's detention of one million Uighur Muslims

AP

This screenshot taken from the Xinjiang Legal News Network website shows Zhu Hailun who has played a key role in detaining a million or more Uighurs in detention camps. 

After bloody race riots rocked China's far west a decade ago, the ruling Communist Party turned to a rare figure in their ranks to restore order: a Han Chinese official fluent in Uighur, the language of the local Turkic Muslim minority.
Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into concentration camps.
Published in 2017, the documents were signed by Zhu, as then-head of the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Communist Party in the East Turkestan colony.

A Uighur linguist recognized Zhu's signature scrawled atop some of the documents from his time working as a translator in Kashgar, when Zhu was the city's top official.
"When I saw them, I knew they were important," said the linguist, Abduweli Ayup, who now lives in exile. 

"He's a guy who wants to control power in his hands. Everything."
Zhu, 61, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Long before the crackdown and despite his intimate familiarity with local culture, Zhu was more hated than loved among the Uighurs he ruled.
He was born in 1958 in rural Jiangsu on China's coast. 

In his teens, during China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Zhu was sent to Kargilik county, deep in the Uighur heartland in East Turkestan. 

He never left.
Zhu joined the Party in 1980 and moved up East Turkestan's bureaucracy, helming hotspot cities. 

By the 90s, he was so fluent in Uighur that he corrected his own translators during meetings.
"If you didn't see him, you'd never imagine he's Han Chinese. When he spoke Uighur, he really spoke just like a Uighur, since he grew up with them," said a Uighur businessman living in exile in Turkey, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

The businessman first heard of Zhu from a Uighur friend who dealt with the official while doing business. 

His friend was impressed, describing Zhu as "very capable" — a Han Chinese bureaucrat the Uighurs could work with. 

But after years of observing Zhu oversee crackdowns and arrests, the businessman soon came to a different conclusion.

A sample of classified Chinese government documents leaked to a consortium of news organisations, is displayed for a picture in New York on Friday. 

"He's a crafty fox. The really cunning sort, the kind that plays with your brain," he said. 

"He was a key character for the Communist Party's policies to control Southern East Turkestan."
Ayup, the linguist, met Zhu in 1998, when he came to inspect his township. 

He was notorious for ordering 3 a.m. raids of Uighur homes, and farmers would sing a popular folk song called 'Zhu Hailun is coming' to poke fun at his hard and unyielding nature.
"He gave orders like farmers were soldiers. All of us were his soldiers," Ayup said. 

"Han Chinese controlled our homeland. We knew we needed to stay in our place."
Months after a July 5, 2009 riot left hundreds dead in the region's capital of Urumqi, Zhu was tapped to replace the city's chief. 

Beijing almost always flew in officials from other provinces for the job, in part as training for higher posts. 

But central officials on a fact-finding mission in Urumqi concluded that Zhu, seen as tougher than his predecessor, needed to take charge.
"They were super unhappy," said a Uighur former cadre who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. 

"It had never happened before, but because locals said he was outstanding at maintaining stability, he was snatched up and installed as Urumqi Party Secretary."
Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar. Classified documents lay out the Chinese government's deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities. 

Upon appointment, Zhu spent three days holed up in the city's police command, vowing to tighten the government's grip. 

Police swept through Uighur neighborhoods, brandishing rifles and rounding up hundreds for trial. Tens of thousands of surveillance cameras were installed.
But instead of healing ethnic divisions, the crackdown hardened them. 

Matters came to a head in April 2014, when Chinese dictator Xi Jinping came to East Turkestan on a state visit. 

Just hours after his departure, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.
Xi vowed to clamp down even harder.
In 2016, Beijing appointed a new leader for East Turkestan — Chen Quanguo. 

Chen, whose first name means "whole country", had built a reputation as a hard-hitting official who pioneered digital surveillance tactics in Tibet.

A guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around one of a growing number of concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, where by some estimates over 1 million Muslims have been detained. 

Zhu was his right-hand man. 

Appointed head of the region's security and legal apparatus, Zhu laid the groundwork for an all-seeing state surveillance system that could automatically identify targets for arrest. 

He crisscrossed the region to inspect internment centers, police stations, checkpoints and other components of an emerging surveillance and detention apparatus.
After Chen's arrival, Uighurs began disappearing by the thousands. 

The leaked documents show that Zhu directed mass arrests, signing off on notices ordering police to use digital surveillance to investigate people for having visited foreign countries, using certain mobile applications, or being related to "suspicious persons". 

State television shows that Zhu continued on his relentless tour of East Turkestan's camps, checkpoints, and police stations, personally guiding the mass detention campaign.
Zhu stepped down last year after turning 60, the traditional retirement age for cadres in the Chinese Communist Party. 

Chen remains in his post.
"Chen Quanguo came in the name of the Party," said the Uighur businessman. 

"Zhu knows how to implement, who to capture, what to do."

By Taking Aim at Chinese Tech Firms, President Trump Signals a Strategy Shift

In blacklisting surveillance companies, the United States is the first major government to punish China for its crackdown on Muslims.
By Paul Mozur and Edward Wong
Hikvision cameras in a mall in Beijing in May. The company was among those blacklisted by the Trump administration this week.

SHANGHAI — The world has largely sat by for nearly two years as China detained more than one million people, mostly Muslims and members of minority ethnic groups, in concentration camps to force them to embrace the Communist Party.
Now, the Trump administration is taking the first public steps by a major world government toward punishing Beijing. 

In doing so, it is opening up a new front in the already worsening relationship between Washington and Beijing: human rights and the dystopian world of digital surveillance.
Trump administration officials on Monday placed eight Chinese companies and a number of police departments on a blacklist that forbids them to buy American-made technology like microchips, software and other vital components. 

The companies are at the vanguard of China’s surveillance and artificial intelligence ambitions, with many of them selling increasingly sophisticated systems used by governments to track people.
The White House cited their business in East Turkestan, a colony of northwestern China that is home to a largely Muslim minority group known as the Uighurs. 

More than one million ethnic Uighurs and other minorities have been locked in concentration camps there.On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced visa restrictions on Chinese officials believed to be involved in the detention or abuse of Muslim ethnic minorities.
The announcements suggest that the Trump administration is increasingly willing to listen to the advice of American officials focused on the strategic challenges posed by China and who are concerned about its human rights abuses, even if President Trump himself never seems to pay much attention to those.
The restrictions were announced just two days before American and Chinese officials were set to begin a 13th round of trade talks, most likely putting a chill over the negotiations.
More broadly, the White House, in its blacklist announcement, signaled a willingness to take aim at China’s technological dreams. 

China has plowed billions of dollars into companies developing advanced hardware and software to catch up with the United States. 

Some of the companies added to the list on Monday are among the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-ups.

A showroom video promoting Megvii’s facial recognition abilities.

Much of that technology — including facial recognition and computer vision — can be used to track people. 

That includes smartphone tracking, voice-pattern identification and systems that track individuals across cities through powerful cameras. 

Washington officials have grown increasingly worried about China’s ambitions to export its systems elsewhere, including places known for human rights abuses.

“This is an important first step in making some of the companies that have benefited the most from the concentration camps system in East Turkestan feel the consequences of their actions,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs.
He said the move signaled that abuse of minority groups in East Turkestan“is real and justifies a political and economic response.”
It is also a potentially groundbreaking use of a powerful tool that the American government typically uses against terrorists. 

The Chinese companies and police departments were placed on what is called an entity list, which forbids them to buy sensitive American exports unless Washington grants American companies specific permission to sell to them.
Use of the entity list over a human rights issue may be a first, said Julian Ku, a professor of constitutional and international law at Hofstra University.
“As far as I know, it was the first time Commerce explicitly cited human rights as a foreign policy interest of the U.S. for purposes of export controls,” he said, referring to the Department of Commerce, which manages the entity lists. 

“This is not an implausible reading of the regulations, but it is new and has potentially very broad applicability.”

The immediate effect on the Chinese companies is likely to be minimal, because many have stockpiled essential supplies, but they could feel increasing pain if they stay on the blacklist for months or years.
Perhaps more important, it can put a cloud over the companies’ reputations, limiting their sales in the United States or elsewhere and keeping them from hiring the world’s best technology talent.
“The U.S. move today puts up a big roadblock on the road to internationalization,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute.
“Most global technology companies are setting up labs abroad, partnering with the best universities around the world and looking to recruit top talent from everywhere,” he said. 

“That all just got a lot harder now that they’re marked with the scarlet letter of the entity list.”
The move followed more than a year of internal debate over how to punish China for its persecution of Muslims in  East Turkestan.
Senior officials on the National Security Council and in the State Department have pushed for the use of the entity list to target Chinese companies supplying surveillance technology to the security forces in  East Turkestan. 

They have also urged President Trump to approve sanctions that would penalize Chinese officials and companies involved in the abuses.
But top American trade negotiators, including the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have cautioned against policies that would upset trade talks. 

Mr. Trump has said he wants to reach a trade deal with China.
Until now, other top officials, most notably Mr. Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, have denounced China’s policies in East Turkestan but not enacted punitive measures. 

This month, American customs officials blocked products from a Chinese garment maker in East Turkestan, but they had held off on stronger action.
The Chinese companies on the list include Hikvision, a major maker of surveillance cameras, and the well-funded artificial intelligence start-ups SenseTime and Megvii.

A Hikvision camera in downtown Beijing. American officials worry that China will export its surveillance systems.

SenseTime said it set “high ethical standards for A.I. technologies,” while Megvii said it required “clients not to weaponize our technology or solutions or use them for illegal purposes.” 

It added that it had generated no revenue from within East Turkestan in the first half of 2019.

New York Times reporting showed that four of the companies on the list — Yitu, Hikvision, Megvii and SenseTime — helped build systems across China that sought to use facial recognition to automate the detection of Uighurs.

Government procurement documents, company marketing materials and official government releases tied all eight companies to various business operations and sales in East Turkestan. 

The many local East Turkestan police bureaus on the list buy commercial American technology like Intel microchips and Microsoft Windows software, according to procurement documents.
President Trump’s next step could be imposing sanctions on specific Chinese officials working in East Turkestan. 

Among the officials discussed is Chen Quanguo, a Politburo member who is the party chief in East Turkestan and an architect of the system of internment camps and surveillance.
The blacklist action is a sign that strategic advisors have become even more influential in the administration in recent weeks.
Matthew Pottinger, the senior director for Asia and an architect of policies aimed at countering China, was promoted to deputy national security adviser last month. 

Earlier, Robert O’Brien, the administration’s top hostage negotiator, replaced John R. Bolton as national security adviser. 

Mr. O’Brien has written that China poses an enormous challenge to the United States.
“This East Turkestan package has been in the works now for months,” said Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America, a think tank. 

“So the fact that it comes out now just ahead of the next round of trade talks sends a signal from those in the administration who want no deal.”

China's crimes against humanity

US Senate presses sanctions on China's treatment of Uighurs

AFP

More than one million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have been rounded up into concentration camps in the tightly-controlled northwest colony, home to China's Uighur population.

WASHINGTON -- The US Senate has approved a Bill to press China on its treatment of Uighurs, requiring the US government to closely monitor the mass incarceration of the community and consider punishment of those responsible.
The Senate unanimously approved the so-called Uighur Human Rights Policy Act late Wednesday. It still needs passage by the House of Representatives, which is highly likely as the Bill enjoys wide bipartisan support.
The act would require US intelligence to produce a report within six months on the crackdown in East Turkestan, the western colony where as many as one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities are being held in concentration camps.
It would also establish a State Department special coordinator on East Turkestan and ask the FBI to assess reports of harassment by China of US citizens and residents of Uighur heritage.
The Bill also asks Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to consider sanctions on Chinese officials behind the policy, notably Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party chief for East Turkestan.
"It's long overdue for the United States to hold the Chinese government and Communist Party officials accountable for the systemic and egregious human rights abuses and crimes against humanity in East Turkestan," said Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican ally of Trump who co-sponsored the resolution.
The Trump administration has repeatedly criticised China, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently calling Beijing's treatment of Uighurs one of the "worst stains on the world."
But activists say that US actions have gone little beyond statements at a time that Trump is embroiled in multiple feuds with China, most notably on trade.
Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who co-sponsored the Bill with Rubio, said the measure showed that the United States was not turning a blind eye even though the Trump administration "has not seen fit to make the tragic situation in East Turkestan a priority."
Rights groups and witnesses accuse China of forcibly trying to draw Uighurs away from their Islamic customs and integrate them into the majority Han culture.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing now defends the camps, which it calls "vocational education centers."

Global Magnitsky Act

Vice President Mike Pence signals openness to sanctions over China's human rights abuses
By Erica Pandey, Jonathan Swan

Vice President Mike Pence at the UN. 

Vice President Mike Pence has signaled that the Trump administration is open to using the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction top officials in East Turkestan, China, where more than 1 million Uighur Muslims are being held in concentration camps, according to a Chinese religious freedom advocate who met with Pence at the White House Monday.

Driving the news: Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, said that Pence also told him that he planned to give a second speech about China in the fall to address religious freedom issues.

Beijing has been paying close attention to Pence's plans for a second speech, as the vice president has been at the forefront of the administration's confrontation with China. 

Behind the scenes: Fu told Axios he sat next to Pence at the meeting and handed him a list of 9 officials, including Chen Quanguo — the Chinese Communist Party's secretary of East Turkestan who has been dubbed the brains behind the detention camps. 

Fu said Pence made no commitments but told him he would personally follow up about the recommendation to sanction the individuals. 

Pence's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Why it matters: As we've reported, much of the world has shrugged as the Chinese Communist Party has detained over a million Uighur Muslims in East Turkestan in "political re-education" camps. 

The Communist Party has posted 100,000 jobs for security personnel in East Turkestan in just the last year, reports Quartz. 

The province has turned into a police state, with officials surveilling Muslim residents, collecting their DNA and seizing their passports.
Only a handful of countries have come out against Beijing on the East Turkestan issue. 

Meanwhile, all authoritarian regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Russia and North Korea, have signed a letter expressing support for China.

Between the lines: While the Trump administration has condemned the concentration camps, it has taken no specific action against Beijing for the human rights abuses. 

Magnitsky sanctions — if imposed — would be a significant step.
Since the passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 100 individuals for human rights abuses in Russia, Myanmar and South Sudan, among other places.
But the U.S. has only sanctioned one Chinese national under Magnitsky. 

In December 2017, President Trump sanctioned Gao Yan, a former Chinese police officer, for his role in the death of a Chinese human rights lawyer who lost her life in custody, per the South China Morning Post.
Magnitsky sanctions have never been used against an official of the Chinese Communist Party.

The big picture: Pence's meeting with the Chinese human rights advocates on Monday came on the same day President Trump took another step to escalate his economic conflict with China. 

Just hours after the meeting, the Treasury Department labeled China a currency manipulator.
President Trump's tweet accusing China of currency manipulation came during the meeting, and Pence pointed it out to the table as an example of the president's constant focus on China, said Fu.
On the table, Pence had printed copies of his and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent speeches on China to demonstrate that the administration has been clear about its views on  East Turkestan, Fu said.
Fu's list of Chinese officials:

East Turkestan Executioner

President Trump Could Blacklist China’s Hikvision, a Surveillance Firm
By Ana Swanson and Edward Wong

A worker installing Hikvision surveillance cameras in a park in Beijing in February.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering limits to a Chinese video surveillance giant’s ability to buy American technology, people familiar with the matter said, the latest attempt to counter Beijing’s global economic ambitions.
The move would effectively place the company, Hikvision, on a United States blacklist.

It also would mark the first time the Trump administration punished a Chinese company for its role in the surveillance and mass detention of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority.
The move is also likely to inflame the tensions that have escalated in President Trump’s renewed trade war with Chinese leaders. 

The president, in the span of two weeks, has raised tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, threatened to tax all imports and taken steps to cripple the Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei. China has promised to retaliate against American industries.
Hikvision is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance products and is central to China’s ambitions to be the top global exporter of surveillance systems. 

The Commerce Department may require that American companies obtain government approval to supply components to Hikvision, limiting the company’s access to technology that helps power its equipment.
Administration officials could make a final decision in the coming weeks.
The combination of more traditional surveillance equipment with new technologies, like artificial intelligence, speech monitoring and genetic testing, is helping make monitoring networks increasingly effective — and intrusive. 

Hikvision says its products enable their clients to track people around the country by their facial features, body characteristics or gait, or to monitor activity considered unusual by officials, such as people suddenly running or crowds gathering.
China poses an economic, technological and geopolitical threat that cannot be left unchecked. 

The United States has targeted Chinese technology companies like Huawei that poses a national security threat given deep ties between the Chinese government and industry and laws that could require Chinese firms to hand over information if asked.
Adding to those concerns are the global human rights implications of China’s extensive surveillance industry, which it increasingly uses to keep tabs on its own citizens. 

The Chinese have used surveillance technology, including facial recognition systems and closed-circuit television cameras, to target the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have accused the Chinese government of discriminating against their culture and religion.
China has constructed a police state in the country’s northwest colony of East Turkestan, which is Uighurs' homeland. 

That includes extensive surveillance powered by companies like Hikvision and barbed wire-ringed internment compounds that hold 800,000 to as many as three million Muslims.
China has begun exporting this technology to nations that seek closer surveillance of their citizens, including Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Since last year, administration officials have debated what to do about China’s attempts to clamp down on the cultural and religious practices of the Uighurs. 

But they have refrained from taking action, in part because some American officials worried a move would derail attempts to win a trade deal with China.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News on May 2 that the administration was concerned “that the Chinese are working to put their systems in networks all across the world so they can steal your information and my information.” 

He mentioned the Muslim internment camps, adding, “This is stuff that is reminiscent of the 1930s that present a real challenge to the United States, and this administration is prepared to take this on.”
Since trade talks with Beijing nearly crumbled early this month, the administration has quickly ramped up economic pressure on China. 

It is moving ahead with plans to tax an additional $300 billion in products, and announced a sweeping executive order cutting off Huawei from purchasing the American software and semiconductors it needs to make its products. 

While American companies can try to obtain a license to continue doing business with Huawei, firms like Google are making plans to curtail the products and services that they supply.
The administration is also attempting to prosecute a top Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, who faces criminal charges in the United States and is under house arrest in Canada, where she awaits a court decision on extradition.

The Trump administration is considering adding Hikvision to an “entity list” that could limit its ability to buy American technology.

The measure against Hikvision would operate similarly to Huawei’s license requirement.
The Commerce Department would place it on an “entity list,” which requires designated foreign companies and American companies to get United States government approval before they do business with one another.
“Taking this step would be a tangible signal to both U.S. and foreign companies that the U.S. government is looking carefully at what is happening in East Turkestan and is willing to take action in response,” said Jessica Batke, a former State Department official who has done research in Xinjiang and testified before Congress on the issue.
“At the same time, however, the ongoing trade war perhaps undercuts the perception that this is coming from a place of purely human rights concerns.”
The Commerce Department and the White House declined to comment.
Hikvision is little known in the United States, but the company supplies large parts of China’s extensive surveillance system. 
The company’s products include traffic cameras, thermal cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles, and they now allow Chinese security agencies to monitor railway stations, roads and other sites.
It is not immediately clear what effect a United States ban would have on Hikvision’s business.
The company appears to source just a small portion of its components from the United States, and any such ban could speed its efforts to switch to Chinese suppliers.
But Hikvision does have a growing international presence, and its executives have warned in the past about the potential for rising anti-China sentiment in the United States to affect its operations.
The company says it has more than 34,000 global employees and dozens of divisions worldwide, and it has supplied products to the Beijing Olympics, the Brazilian World Cup and the Linate Airport in Milan.
It has tried to expand into North America in recent years, employing hundreds of workers in the United States and Canada, setting up offices in California and building a North American research and development team headquartered in Montreal.
Members of Congress from both parties have called on the administration to impose sanctions on companies involved in aiding China’s persecution of Muslims, including Hikvision. 
In an August 2018 letter, legislators also urged the Commerce Department to strengthen its controls over technology exported to these companies, and called on the government to increase disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies that might be complicit in human rights abuses.
Hikvision and Dahua, another company cited by lawmakers, are both listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
MSCI, one of the largest index providers in the United States, added Hikvision to its benchmark emerging markets index last year.
UBS and J. P. Morgan are among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to Hikvision.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said in an interview that the House Intelligence Committee, which he leads, could scrutinize more closely American companies that are investing in or partnering with Chinese firms that are building up the Chinese surveillance state.
Congress and the administration have responded with other measures that may clamp down on Hikvision’s business.
Congress included a provision in its 2019 military spending authorization bill that banned federal agencies from using Chinese video surveillance products made by Hikvision or Dahua.
The Trump administration is also considering imposing sanctions on specific Chinese officials known to play critical roles in the surveillance and detention system in East Turkestan.
These sanctions would be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The highest-ranking official being considered for this type of targeted sanction is Chen Quanguo, a member of the party’s Politburo and party chief of East Turkestan since August 2016.
The State Department and White House National Security Council support imposing the sanctions, but officials at the Treasury Department have pushed back, citing a desire not to upset the trade talks, even though those have bogged down.
Pro-China Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has advocated maintaining strong business ties with China.
The Commerce Department is also working on new restrictions on the types of potentially sensitive American technology that can be exported to foreign businesses, which are likely to touch on artificial intelligence and 5G abilities.

China's crimes against humanity

INSIDE WECHAT MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
By Isobel Cockerell

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in East Turkestan, in northwest China. 

The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. 

In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. 

Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. 

At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. 

Her husband was regularly called to the police station. 

The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. 

Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in East Turkestan and waited for the children’s passports.
“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. 

When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. 

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.
She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in East Turkestan was over. 

Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. 

“Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.
Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. 

It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to East Turkestan, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. 

She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. 

“I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. 

“I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
For Uyghurs in East Turkestan, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. 

Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. 

And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. 

It’s just one of the ways Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.
Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. 

The Uyghur separatist flag—a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. 

It’s a banned image in China, representing free East Turkestan.
East Turkestan was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. 

During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. 

The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to East Turkestan.
During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. 

In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. 

Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, East Turkestan, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. 

“I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said. 

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital. 

Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. 

It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown
In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. 

In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. 

It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.
The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.
By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. 

Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” 

Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. 

Most Uyghurs didn’t understand the authorities were watching.
This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. 

But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” 

WeChat was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.
Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left East Turkestan in 2014, just before the crackdown. 

During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. 

They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.
Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the East Turkestan police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. 

“He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,” Mijit said. 

She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. 

If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to East Turkestan for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born
The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. 

Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. 

Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. 

He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. 

The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. 

Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across East Turkestan. 

“All your life will be in the record,” he told her.
In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.” 

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. 

Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in East Turkestan.
After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave East Turkestan for Turkey. 

When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. 

Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. 

“I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. 

She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.
Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.

“It was like a monkey show,” she said. 

“They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”
Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. 

This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of East Turkestan’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. 

“The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. 

“All of them were there to give blood samples.”
Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. 

“They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”
The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. 

In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in East Turkestan province. 

The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. 

The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.
Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. 

“Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.
Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. 

“You feel like you are under water,” he says. 

“You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”
He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. 

“My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”
To transform East Turkestan into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. 

Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.
In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. 

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. 

In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”
For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in East Turkestan is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. 

A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. 

Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags
The government’s efforts to control the people of East Turkestan were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. 

In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”
At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. 

But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”
In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in East Turkestan to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming East Turkestan in its own image.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. 

She now lives in Istanbul. 

According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” 

Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.
Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the East Turkestan capital. 

Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. 

She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.
Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. 

She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp—a blocked app in China—storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.
She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. 

“The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. 

Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. 

“If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,” Jalilova said. 

“You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to East Turkestan.

Escape to Turkey
Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. 

It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.
It follows that the majority of people who have escaped East Turkestan for Turkey in recent years are women. 

Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.
Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from East Turkestan by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. 

In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.
The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in East Turkestan, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.
Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left East Turkestan in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. 

She left her other children and husband in East Turkestan. 

She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.
When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. 

Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. 

She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. 

“I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. 

Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. 

They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.
Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in East Turkestan as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)
On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. 

For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. 

“Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. 

Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.
Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. 

In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. 

Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.
In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in East Turkestan became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. 

“When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”
A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. 

A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. 

A sun emoji—“I am alive.” 

A flower—“I have been released.”
Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. 

Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. 

Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”
On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” 

A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” 

By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve
In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled East Turkestan after police took her DNA. 

They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. 

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”
Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. 

She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.
Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.
Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. 

The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. 

“I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. 

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.
Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.
Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in East Turkestan.
Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. 

This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. 

“There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.
He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. 

“It’s a strong sign the East Turkestan authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.
China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in East Turkestan, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. 

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. 

That followed a statement by East Turkestan governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”
Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.
Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.
On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in East Turkestan—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. 

She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in East Turkestan.
She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. 

An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. 

Tursun was astonished.
On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. 

“Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. 

“I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” 

It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.
The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. 

Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”
Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. 

She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. 

In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in East Turkestan. 

She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. 

The woman agreed. 

Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.
“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. 

She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.
A month later, she got a reply. 

The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.
Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. 

Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. 

She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.
It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. 

She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. 

In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister,
How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.

China’s high-tech repression threatens human freedom everywhere

The Washington Post

Chinese police patrol a street in the Peyzawat, a city in East Turkestan colony, last August. 

IN RECENT months, the world has slowly awakened to the extraordinary campaign of cultural genocide China is conducting against Muslims in its East Turkestan colony.

As many as 1 million people have been confined to concentration camps where they are forced to renounce their religious practices and memorize the Beijing regime’s propaganda. 

That gross offense against human rights must be fully investigated and sanctioned. 

But of equal concern are some of the means China is using to carry out the repression. 

East Turkestan has become a laboratory for the development of a comprehensive, high-tech system for monitoring people and their behaviors, which poses an unprecedented threat to freedom — not just in western China, but potentially throughout the world.
A report by Human Rights Watch expands on what is known about the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), the system for conducting mass surveillance in East Turkestan. 

By reverse engineering a mobile app connected to the system, the group was able to learn more about what data authorities are collecting about every East Turkestan resident, and what information triggers the system to order an investigation — or transport to a camp.
The results are chilling. 

“The system is tracking the movement of people by monitoring the ‘trajectory’ and location data of their phones, ID cards and vehicles; it is also monitoring the use of electricity and gas stations by everybody in the region,” the report says, adding: “When the IJOP system detects irregularities or deviations from what it considers normal, such as when people are using a phone that is not registered to them, when they use more electricity than ‘normal,’ or when they leave the area where they are registered to live without police permission, the system flags these ‘micro-clues’ to the authorities as suspicious and prompts an investigation.”
The police who follow up collect more data on people, from their blood type to the color of their cars. They examine their phones to see whether they contain one of 51 network tools deemed suspicious, such as virtual private networks and communications programs such as WhatsApp. 

They judge whether an individual fits one of 36 “person types” meriting special attention, including people who have traveled abroad, have more children than allowed or preach Islam without permission. 

All the data is sent back to the IJOP central system via the app, where it is stored in a database that also contains facial images and much other data.
Human Rights Watch points out that similar surveillance systems are being put into place all over China. 

“These mass surveillance systems have woven an ever-tightening net around people across the country,” the report says. 

“The depth, breadth and intrusiveness of the Chinese government’s mass surveillance on its citizens are unprecedented in modern history.”
Far from hiding this totalitarianism of the 21st century, Beijing is seeking to export it to other countries. 

That’s one reason what is happening in East Turkestan ought to be disturbing to anyone concerned about preserving basic freedoms as technology rapidly evolves. 

There are concrete steps that can be taken, from banning the sale to China of equipment that can be used in this repression, to sanctioning its architects — including East Turkestan party boss Chen Quanguo. 

Legislation pending in Congress, including the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, is a start; it should be taken up and passed.

China's crimes against humanity

Will China’s Uighur Detentions Spur U.S. Sanctions? Pompeo Won’t Say

By Edward Wong

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had raised the issue of human rights “in multiple conversations” with his Chinese counterpart.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo avoided saying on Sunday whether the Trump administration would impose targeted sanctions on China over mass detentions of Muslims, in another sign of the administration’s paralysis on the issue.
Mr. Pompeo was asked on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” about whether the administration might punish Chinese officials for the detention of hundreds of thousands to millions of ethnic minority Muslims in camps in East Turkestan, a vast region in northwest China.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that after months of debate, American officials had shelved proposed targeted sanctions for fear of jeopardizing continuing trade talks, and are unwilling to raise the issue in the talks.
When pressed on CBS on the matter, Mr. Pompeo said he had raised the issue of human rights “in multiple conversations” with Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and other officials. 

But he did not answer a question about any potential move on sanctions.
Mr. Pompeo has criticized the camps and said last week on Fox News that their use was “reminiscent of the 1930s.” 

But the State Department has been unsuccessful in pushing through proposed sanctions. 

Last fall, American officials drew up a policy to impose sanctions on specific Chinese officials and companies over the camps, with a legal basis in the Global Magnitsky Act, but the policy failed to get through an interagency review process.
While the State Department and the White House National Security Council approved the action, the Treasury Department voiced concerns about the effect on trade talks, according to American officials. 

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has generally been a proponent of reinforcing strong business ties with China.
Trade negotiators for the two sides are meeting this week in Washington and could conclude the talks. On Sunday, President Trump threatened to ramp up tariffs, a move that appeared to be aimed at forcing China to agree quickly to a deal.
In defending the administration’s approach to China, Mr. Pompeo said on Sunday that Trump had pushed back against China’s “enormous trade abuses” and was working to end intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer by Chinese companies and the government.
However, as the trade talks continue, it has become clear that the end result will not address critical issues like China’s cybertheft, state subsidies and regulations on trade in data. 

Economists say the trade deficit, which Trump is focused on, is not nearly as important as those other issues.
On the issue of China’s detention of Muslims, who are mostly Turkic-speaking ethnic Uighurs, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have expressed frustration at the lack of sanctions from the Trump administration. 

They have been pushing since last year for economic penalties on senior officials, including Chen Quanguo, a Politburo member who is party chief of East Turkestan. 

On Friday, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, told The Times that “words alone are not enough.”
The host of “Face the Nation,” Margaret Brennan, also pressed Mr. Pompeo on Sunday on why the State Department and the Pentagon had different estimates of the number of detainees and used different labels for the camps. 

Mr. Pompeo has said the detention centers are “re-education camps” that hold up to one million people. 

On Friday, Randall G. Schriver, an assistant secretary of defense, told reporters that he considered the centers to be “concentration camps” that held “at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens.”
It was by far the largest estimate from any official on the number of detainees. 

Human rights groups have generally said the number is hundreds of thousands to more than one million.
Despite the obvious difference in estimates, Mr. Pompeo said there was no gap between the State and Defense Departments on their assessments.
“Don’t play ticky-tack,” he said. 

“There’s no discrepancy.”

Xiism and China's crimes against humanity

Global silence on China’s gulag
By Brahma Chellaney

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the East Turkestan colony at one point or another. 

Yet, with the exception of a recent tweet from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on China to ‘end its repression’, the international community has remained largely mute.
In its reliance on mass detention, the Chinese Communist Party has followed the Soviet Union’s example. 

But China’s concentration camps are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors, and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.
Although independent researchers and human-rights groups have raised awareness of practices such as force-feeding Muslims alcohol and pork, the Chinese authorities have been able to continue their assault on Islam with impunity. 

Even as China’s security agencies pursue Uyghurs and other Muslims as far afield as Turkey, Chinese leaders and companies involved in the persecution have not faced international sanctions or incurred any other costs.
Chief among the culprits, of course, is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who in 2014 ordered the policy change that set the stage for today’s repression of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and members of other Muslim groups. 

The forcible assimilation of Muslims into the country’s dominant Han culture is apparently a cornerstone of Xiism—or ‘Xi Jinping Thought’—the grand ‘ism’ that Xi has introduced to overshadow the influence of Marxism and Maoism in China.
To oversee this large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities, Xi, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reassigned the notorious CCP enforcer Chen Quanguo from Tibet to East Turkestan and elevated him to the all-powerful Central Politburo. 

Though Chen’s record of overseeing human-rights abuses is well known, the Trump administration has yet to act on a bipartisan commission’s 2018 recommendation that he and other Chinese officials managing the gulag policy be sanctioned. 

In general, financial and trade interests, not to mention the threat of Chinese retribution, have deterred most countries from condemning China’s anti-Muslim policies.
With the exception of Turkey, even predominantly Muslim countries that were quick to condemn Myanmar for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims have remained conspicuously silent on China. 

Pakistan’s military-backed prime minister, Imran Khan, has feigned ignorance about the East Turkestan crackdown, and Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has gone so far as to defend China’s right to police ‘terrorism’.
Emboldened by the muted international response, China has stepped up its drive to Sinicise East Turkestan by demolishing Muslim neighbourhoods. 

In Urumqi and other cities, once-bustling Uyghur districts have been replaced with heavily policed zones purged of Islamic culture.
The irony is that while China justifies its ‘re-education camps’ as necessary to cleanse Muslim minds at home of extremist thoughts, it is effectively supporting Islamist terrorism abroad. 

For example, China has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against Masood Azhar, the head of the Pakistan-based, UN-designated terrorist group responsible for carrying out serial attacks in India, including on parliament and, most recently, on a paramilitary police convoy. 

As Pompeo tweeted, ‘The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. 

On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.’
An added irony is that while China still harps on about its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of foreign imperial powers, it has for decades presided over the mass humiliation of minorities in East Turkestan and Tibet. 

Ominously, by systematically degrading Muslim populations, it could be inspiring white supremacists and other Islamaphobes around the world. 

For example, Brenton Tarrant, the Australian extremist arrested for the recent twin mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared an affinity for China’s political and social values.

There has been a good deal of reporting about how China has turned East Turkestan into a laboratory for Xi’s Orwellian surveillance ambitions. 

Less known is how Xi’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is being used as a catalyst for the crackdown. 

According to Chinese authorities, the establishment of a surveillance state is necessary to prevent unrest in the province at the heart of the BRI’s overland route.
Like Marxism–Leninism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, which left millions of people dead, Xiism promises to impose significant long-term costs on untold numbers of innocent people. 

It is the impetus behind China’s ruthless targeting of minority cultures and communities, as well as its aggressive expansion into international waters and introduction of digital totalitarianism.
Thanks to Xiism, the world’s largest, strongest and oldest autocracy finds itself at a crossroads. 

As the People’s Republic of China approaches its 70th birthday, its economy is slowing amid escalating capital flight, trade disruptions and the emigration of wealthy Chinese. 

The Chinese technology champion Huawei’s international travails augur difficult times ahead.
The last thing China needs right now is more enemies. 

Yet Xi has used his unbridled power to expand China’s global footprint and lay bare his imperial ambitions. 

His repression of Muslim minorities may or may not lead to international action against China. 

But it will almost certainly spawn a new generation of Islamist terrorists, compounding China’s internal security challenges. 

China’s domestic security budget is already larger than its bloated defence budget, which makes it second only to the United States in terms of military spending. 

The Soviet Union once held the same position—until it collapsed.