China's crimes against humanity

China’s assault on human rights is the one thing bringing Washington together
By Josh Rogin

Ethnic Uighur demonstrators hold portraits of their relatives said to be missing during a demonstration against China in Istanbul on Feb. 23. 

It has become accepted Washington doctrine that, when it comes to foreign policy, the splits between the parties (and within them) are too wide to bridge.
But there’s one issue bringing everyone together, even in this era of deep political and ideological discord: China’s horrific treatment of its Uighur Muslim population and other ethnic and religious minorities.
Republicans and Democrats, isolationists and internationalists, the Trump administration and Congress, even Christians and Muslims all agree: This is a catastrophe the United States can no longer ignore. 
This rare consensus, made possible only by the mind-boggling cruelty and injustice the Chinese government is perpetrating on millions of its own people, has finally materialized in words — and will hopefully soon translate to action.
When releasing the State Department’s annual human rights reports Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China “is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.” 
Ambassador Michael Kozak, who heads the bureau that drafted the reports, compared China’s internment of more than 2 million people in East Turkestan colony to Nazi concentration camps.
“You haven’t seen things like this since the 1930s,” he said.
The Chinese “are trying to basically erase [Muslim minorities’] culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. It’s just remarkably awful.”
The State Department’s report on China goes into excruciating detail.
Chinese authorities are conducting mass arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, rape, compulsory worship of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, and more. 
They especially target activists, artists, musicians, teachers, lawyers and family members of U.S. citizens, in clear and egregious violation of both Chinese and international law.
Any Uighur family not in the camps is monitored 24/7 by one of the 1.1 million “civil servants” Beijing has sent to live among them and report anything suspicious, religious or disloyal back to the party. 
Thousands of children of interned parents are being shipped off to orphanages.
The Chinese government is pressuring Uighurs around the world to give up their DNA and other private information under the threat that their families will vanish.
For those watching the issue closely, much of this was already known.
But what’s new is that the Trump administration is joining Congress, at least rhetorically, in confronting Beijing publicly on its repression, its lies and its overall campaign to snuff out religious and ethnic identity inside China. 
“The Chinese government is at war with faith. It is a war they will not win,” Sam Brownback, ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said in Hong Kong last week.
In Congress, the Uighur issue has brought together a broad and unlikely alliance of lawmakers.
Just look at the list of 39 co-sponsors of the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, which is moving through the House now.
The bill’s leader , Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), and co-sponsor Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) could not be further apart on Israel, but they are both appalled by China’s persecution of Uighurs. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) are at war over the Russia investigation, but they agree on this.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is a sponsor, which means the bill is likely to pass the House. The Senate version, led by Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has 25 co-sponsors, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
It’s a bipartisan, bicameral, and ideologically and ethnically diverse coalition forged by outrage at Beijing and the determination not to turn a blind eye.
The Chinese government is certainly feeling the pressure, illustrated by the fact that its explanation for the camps keeps evolving.
At first, the authorities denied their existence.
Then, they were described as “re-education centers” for extremists.
Now, they are “boarding schools.”
The fact that the story changes so often lays bare that Chinese officials are lying.
Beijing could be forgiven for not believing that the United States is serious.
The Trump administration hasn’t taken any of the punitive actions Congress is demanding, such as sanctioning Chinese officials under the Magnitsky Act or restricting the export of technologies used for repression. 
Officials tell me that Trump hasn’t wanted to complicate ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing or his North Korea diplomacy, which depend on Xi’s cooperation.
But the repression is only getting worse, and now China is exporting it.
Beijing is retaliating against Turkey for speaking out about the Uighurs.
Under Chinese pressure, the government of Kazakhstan this week arrested the leader of a group that has been exposing the camps.
China can bully smaller countries but not the United States. 
Despite America’s recent shortcomings, the world still looks to us to lead on human rights.
If we lead, like-minded nations will follow.
The Uighur issue is just one part of a greater awakening and consensus in Washington and other Western capitals about the threat of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi, which is more internally repressive and externally aggressive every day. 
But calling out the problem is not enough; now the world must act.

China’s human rights abuses threaten the state of our union

By Josh Rogin

President Trump delivers his first State of the Union address on Jan. 30, 2018, in Washington. 
The wife of a Taiwanese human rights activist imprisoned in China will attend President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, hoping to raise awareness of her husband’s plight and Beijing’s growing persecution of non-Chinese citizens. 

She is calling on Trump and all Americans to help confront China’s exporting of its authoritarianism around the world.
Chinese authorities arrested Taiwanese democracy activist Li Ming-che in March 2017 in the Chinese territory of Macau. 

He was put under investigation for “pursuing activities harmful to national security.” 

That September, he was sentenced to five years in prison for “subverting state power,” based on what his family and supporters say was a forced confession.
His wife, Li Ching-yu, has led a public campaign for his release, raising the ire of the Chinese authorities. 

On Tuesday, she will sit in the House gallery while Trump addresses the nation and the world. 

She told me she wants to serve as a reminder that human rights are universal and that the Chinese Communist Party is now exporting its repression.
“Human rights abuses in China are not only to Chinese citizens,” she said. 

“When they start persecuting Taiwanese citizens like my husband, the persecution of human rights by the Chinese Communist Party has already extended beyond China’s borders, all over the world. So the whole world should really be concerned about China.”
Li will be a guest of Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who serves as the co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

The commission has been investigating Beijing’s persecution of minority groups inside China, including the Chinese government’s forced internment of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim Uighurs.
As part of Beijing’s clampdown on criticism of its human rights policies, the Chinese authorities have imprisoned dozens of family members of American journalists and others who speak out. 

Smith told me that he invited Li to the State of the Union to draw attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless efforts to harass Taiwan, including her husband’s case.
But the larger issue is Xi Jinping’s broad campaign to round up hundreds of lawyers and activists inside China while also exporting repression, which represents a threat to the integrity and security of free and open societies, said Smith.
“If we want democratic values to survive in the 21st century, the international community cannot be passive in the face of massive human rights abuses in China or the threats to a democratic Taiwan, particularly as Xi Jinping seeks to export neo-Stalinist ideas about censorship, politics, and social control globally,” he said.
Li is in Washington as part of a delegation organized by Bob Fu, the founder and president of China Aid, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for human rights activists and Christians being persecuted in China. 

Fu and some members of the delegation will attend the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.
Li knows her public advocacy is risky. 

After visiting her husband in prison in December, she held a news conference decrying the conditions of his detention. 

In retaliation, the Chinese government banned her from seeing him again until April. 

But she believes Trump and the United States have an important role to play.
“China is a rising economic giant, but it uses its power to expand its authoritarianism globally. So this is a threat not only Taiwan is facing, but the entire world is facing, including the United States,” she said. 

“I hope and call on America, in accordance with the spirit of the founding fathers, to help.”
Last year, Trump highlighted human rights by inviting North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho to the State of the Union and talking about the “depraved character” of the Kim Jong Un regime. 

This year, with his North Korea diplomacy in full swing, his tone may be different.
Trump will likely call out the regimes in Iran and Venezuela for their repression — and rightfully so — but he may tread lightly when talking about China at a sensitive time in economic negotiations. But Vice President Pence stated the problem clearly in his October speech at the Hudson Institute.
“For a time, Beijing inched toward greater liberty and respect for human rights, but in recent years, it has taken a sharp U-turn toward control and oppression,” Pence said. 

“As history attests, a country that oppresses its own people rarely stops there. Beijing also aims to extend its reach across the wider world."
The State of the Union is a chance not just for the president but also for Congress to highlight important issues we as a country must address in the year ahead. 

Confronting the Chinese government’s atrocious human rights policies inside China and abroad must be on that list.

China's crimes against humanity

China is creating concentration camps in East Turkestan. Here’s how we hold it accountable.
The Washington Post

Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in western China's East Turkestan colony. 

CHINA CONTINUES to see the uproar over its creation of concentration camps holding as many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs and others as a public-relations problem. 

In recent days, the government issued another white paper claiming it is "protecting" religious freedom and culture in the autonomous northwestern province of East Turkestan, despite evidence that it has corralled much of the Muslim population into spartan camps for forced brainwashing. 

When Western nations repeatedly brought up the camps on Nov. 6 at China’s five-year United Nations human rights review in Geneva, a top Chinese official dismissed the claims as “seriously far from the truth.”
That is why recently introduced bipartisan legislation in Congress is vitally important. 

China’s leaders have dissembled for a year and cannot be allowed to escape accountability for the massive indoctrination and internment drive. 

Exposure of the camps — by witnesses, scholars, nongovernmental organizations and Western governments — has been extremely important. 

But China’s leaders are not shamed. 

They are old hands at repression, having built the system known as laojiao, or reeducation through labor, that existed outside the regular prison system and was widely used for punishing dissidents and petty criminals until it was closed down in 2013. 

Now it has been resurrected for use against the ethnic Uighurs, big time.
The Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2018 — introduced with bipartisan sponsors, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee; and Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) in the House — calls for creating a U.S. special coordinator for East Turkestan to respond to the crisis, as well as paving the way for applying Global Magnitsky Act sanctions on specific Chinese officials responsible for the human rights violations. 

That includes Chen Quanguo, the party secretary overseeing the imprisonment.
The legislation, if enacted, would mandate a report to Congress identifying Chinese firms contributing to the camps and ubiquitous surveillance systems in East Turkestan, perhaps leading to the sanctioning of these companies, and would empower the FBI to track down Chinese officials responsible for harassing Uighurs in the United States. 

When Uighurs outside China have protested what is happening, their relatives in East Turkestan have been hauled off to camps and other locations, as happened to relatives of six U.S.-based journalists for Radio Free Asia.
Congress needs to act to fill a vacuum left by the Trump administration, which has said and done little about the East Turkestan repression. 

In Beijing, in an initiative led by Canada, 15 Western ambassadors have sought a meeting with Chen Quanguo to express concern, but the United States did not join. 

It should. 

Most of the world’s majority-Muslim nations have been unconscionably mute about the repression; the United States should stand with other liberal democracies.
China has justified its actions as "counterterrorism" and “preventing extremism,” but it hardly makes sense to imprison 11.5 percent of the Muslim population of East Turkestan between the ages of 20 and 79.

Forcing tens of thousands of people into jails and then trying to wipe away their language and culture are crimes against an entire people. 

No amount of spin can conceal it.

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.”

Subversion: China is infiltrating U.S. colleges

Penn State is among those that have closed their Confucius Institutes
By JOSH ROGIN

China’s massive foreign influence campaign in the United States takes a long view, sowing seeds in American institutions meant to blossom over years or even decades. 

That’s why the problem of Chinese financial infusions into U.S. higher education is so difficult to grasp and so crucial to combat.
But at last, the community of U.S. officials, lawmakers and academics focused on resisting Chinese efforts to subvert free societies is beginning to respond to Beijing’s presence on America’s campuses. 

One part of that is compelling public and private universities to reconsider hosting Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-sponsored outposts of culture and language training.
With more than 100 universities in the United States now in direct partnership with the Chinese government through Confucius Institutes, the U.S. intelligence community is warning about their potential as spying outposts. 

But the more important challenge is the threat the institutes pose to the ability of the next generation of American leaders to learn, think and speak about realities in China and the true nature of the Communist Party regime.
“Their goal is to exploit America’s academic freedom to instill in the minds of future leaders a pro-China viewpoint,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

“It’s smart. It’s a long-term, patient approach.”
This month, Mr. Rubio asked all Florida educational institutions that host Confucius Institutes to reconsider doing so in light of a growing body of evidence that China seeks to constrain criticism on American campuses, exert influence over curriculum related to China and monitor Chinese students in the United States.
One of the schools Mr. Rubio contacted, the University of West Florida, had already decided not to renew its contract with Hanban, the Chinese government entity that manages the institutes. 

Western Florida joins a growing list of universities that are rejecting the Faustian bargain that comes with accepting Chinese government funding and management for programs meant to expose students to China, including the University of Chicago, Penn State University and Ontario’s McMaster University. 

West Florida President Martha Saunders told me the decision was primarily due to a lack of student interest, but the rising concerns also contributed.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray articulated those concerns in testimony last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

He said the FBI is “watching warily” and investigating Confucius Institutes. 

He said academic sector naivete was exacerbating the problem and called out the Chinese government for planting spies in U.S. schools.
“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere. But they’re taking advantage of it,” Mr. Wray said.
For Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., that’s a long-awaited acknowledgment. 

The majority of the institutes’ activity may be benign, and it’s difficult to determine how much self-censorship participating institutions engage in, Mr. Smith said. 

He has commissioned a study of the institutes by the Government Accountability Office to collect data to support his call for their closure.
“They are nests of influence, reconnaissance,” he said. 

“They keep tabs on Chinese students, and those who attend their classes are getting a Pollyannaish take on what China is about today.”
To understand what Confucius Institutes are really about, it’s necessary to understand their connections to the Communist Party and its history. 

Peter Mattis, a former U.S. intelligence analyst now with the Jamestown Foundation, said Confucius Institutes can be directly linked to the Communist Party’s “united front” efforts, still described in Maoist terms: to mobilize the party’s friends to strike at the party’s enemies.
For example, Liu Yandong, the Communist Party official who launched the Confucius Institutes, was head of the United Front Work Department when the program began. 

“They are an instrument of the party’s power, not a support for independent scholarship,” Mr. Mattis said. 

“They can be used to groom academics and administrators to provide a voice for the party in university decision-making.”
At a minimum, Confucius Institutes must be required to provide more transparency, yield full control over curriculum to their American hosts and pledge not to involve themselves in issues of academic freedom for American or Chinese students. 

If they don’t do this voluntarily, Congress will likely act to compel them. 

Mr. Rubio and Mr. Smith are working on new legislation to do just that.
More broadly, if we as a country don’t want Confucius Institutes to control discussion of China on campus, we must provide better funding for the study of China and Chinese languages. 

If we are headed into a long-term strategic competition with China, there is no excuse for not investing in educating our young people about it — or for letting the Chinese government do it for us.