China's state terrorism uproots Uighur families, leaked data shows

Newly revealed database exposes methods the Chinese government employed to crack down on Muslim minorities in East Turkestan.
Al Jazeera
For decades, a Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China's far west.

On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. 

On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. 

In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.
But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer's native East Turkestan colony three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.
Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.
The database obtained by The Associated Press news agency profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and contains information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbours and friends.
Each entry includes the detainee's name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighbourhood background, the reason for the detention and a decision on whether or not to release them.
Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom.
Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials picked who was put into and who was let out of concentration camps, as part of a significant crackdown that has locked away more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims.
The database emphasises that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention -- not just political violence, as authorities claim, but everyday activities such as praying, attending a mosque, or even growing a long beard.

Religious practice targeted
It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and giving entire families like Emer's a criminal record in the process.
Similarly, family background and attitude is a bigger factor than detainee behaviour in whether they are released.
"It's very clear that religious practice is being targeted," said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in East Turkestan.
"They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and re-education."
The East Turkestan colonial government did not respond to faxes requesting comment.

Heavy-handed rule

China has struggled for decades to control East Turkestan, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing's heavy-handed rule. 

With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, officials began using the spectre of "terrorism" to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying young Uighurs were susceptible to violence "extremism".
After armed groups set off bombs at a train station in East Turkestan's capital in 2014, Xi Jinping launched a so-called "People's War on Terror", transforming East Turkestan into a digital police state.
The leak of the database from sources in the Uighur exile community follows the release in November of a classified blueprint on how the mass detention system really works.

Uighur women use carts to transport cement for home renovations at the Unity New Village in Hotan, in western China's East Turkestan colony in 2018.

The blueprint obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes the AP, showed that the centres are in fact forced ideological and behavioural re-education camps run in secret.
Another set of documents leaked to the New York Times newspaper revealed the historical lead-up to the mass detention.
The latest set of documents came from sources in the Uighur exile community, dating most recently to March 2019.
The detainees listed come from Karakax County, a traditional settlement of about 650,000 on the edge of East Turkestan's Taklamakan Desert where more than 97 percent of residents are Uighur.
The list was corroborated through interviews with former Karakax residents, Chinese identity verification tools and other lists and documents seen by the AP.

'Witch-hunt mindset'
Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. 

Households are designated as "trustworthy" or "not trustworthy" and their attitudes are graded as "ordinary" or "good." 

Families have "light" or "heavy" religious atmospheres and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a "training centre."
Officials used these categories to determine how suspicious a person was -- even if they had not committed any crimes.
"It underscores the witch-hunt mindset of the government and how the government criminalises everything," said Adrian Zenz, an expert on the detention centres and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC.
Reasons listed for internment include "minor religious infection," "disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons," "relatives abroad," "thinking is hard to grasp" and "untrustworthy person born in a certain decade." 

The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 percent of people considered "untrustworthy" were in the age bracket of 25 to 29 years, according to an analysis of the data by Zenz.
When former student Abdullah Muhammad spotted Emer's name on the list of the imprisoned, he was distraught.
"He didn't deserve this," Muhammad said. 

"Everyone liked and respected him. He was the kind of person who couldn't stay silent against injustice."

Renowned teacher
Even in Karakax county, famed for its intellectuals and scholars, Emer stood out as one of the most renowned teachers in the region.
Muhammad studied the Quran under Emer for six years as a kid, following him from house to house in an effort to dodge the authorities.
Muhammad said Emer was so respected that the police would phone him with warnings ahead of time before raiding classes at his modest, single-story home of brick and mud.

Under heavy surveillance
Though Emer gave Party-approved sermons, he refused to preach Communist propaganda, Muhammad said, eventually running into trouble with the authorities. 

He was stripped of his position as an imam and barred from teaching in 1997 amid unrest roiling the region.
When Muhammad left China for Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 2009, Emer was making his living as a doctor of traditional medicine. 

Emer was growing old and under heavy surveillance, he had stopped attending religious gatherings.
That did not stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his eighties and sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison over 2017 and 2018.
The database cites four charges in various entries: "stirring up terrorism," acting as an unauthorised "wild" imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.
Muhammad called the charges false. 

Emer had stopped his preaching, practised a moderate Central Asian sect of Islam rather than Wahhabism and had never dreamed of hurting others, let alone stirring up "terrorism," Muhammad said.
"He used to always preach against violence," Muhammad said. 

"Anyone who knew him can testify that he wasn't a religious extremist."
None of Emer's three sons had been convicted of a crime. 

But the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into the detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being "untrustworthy" or "infected with religious extremism," or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

'He never bowed down to them'
It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials they were too dangerous to let out from the concentration camps."His father taught him how to pray," notes one entry for his eldest, Ablikim Memtimin.
"His family's religious atmosphere is thick. We recommend he (Emer) continue training," says another entry for his youngest son, Emer Memtimin.
Even a neighbour was tainted by living near him with Emer's alleged crimes and prison sentence recorded in the neighbour's dossier.
The database indicates much of this information is collected by teams of cadres stationed at mosques, sent to visit homes and posted in communities. 

This information is then compiled in a dossier called the "three circles", encompassing their relatives, community, and religious background.
It was not just the religious who were detained. 

The database shows that Karakax officials also explicitly targeted people for activities that included going abroad, getting a passport or installing foreign software.
Pharmacist Tohti Himit was detained in a camp for having gone multiple times to one of 26 "key" countries, mostly Muslim, according to the database. 

Former employee Habibullah, who is now in Turkey, recalled Himit as a secular, kind and wealthy man who kept his face free of a beard.
"He wasn't very pious, he didn't go to the mosque," said Habibullah, who declined to give his first name out of fear of retribution against family still in China. 

"I was shocked by how absurd the reasons for detention were."
The database says cadres found Himit had attended his grandfather's funeral at a local mosque on March 10, 2008. 

Later that year, the cadres found, he had gone to the same mosque again, once to worship and once to celebrate a festival. 

In 2014 he had gone to Anhui province, in inner China, to get a passport and go abroad.
That, the government concluded, was enough to show that Himit was "certainly dangerous." 

They ordered Himit to stay in the centre and "continue training."
Emer is now under house arrest due to health issues, his former student, Muhammad, has heard. 

It is unclear where Emer's sons are.
It was the imam's courage and stubbornness that did him in, Muhammad said. 

Though deprived of his mosque and his right to teach, Emer quietly defied the authorities for two decades by staying true to his faith.
"Unlike some other scholars, he never cared about money or anything else the Communist Party could give him," Muhammad said. 

"He never bowed down to them -- and that's why they wanted to eliminate him."

China's Final Viral Solution

Uighurs fear spread of Chinese coronavirus in China's concentration camps
More than 50 cases reported in northeastern colony of East Turkestan, home to persecuted Muslim minority.Muslim men of the Uighur ethnic group leaving the Id Kah Mosque after Friday prayers in Kashgar, East Turkestan

Members of China's Uighur minority living in exile are sounding the alarm over the risk of the Chinese coronavirus spreading in concentration camps inside the country, where NGOs say hundreds of thousands of people have been rounded up by Beijing.
So far, official figures released by Chinese state media give no major cause for concern over the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in the northeast colony of East Turkestan, which is home to the Uighurs, a Muslim minority who speak a Turkic language.
It is far from the epicentre of the outbreak and just 55 cases have been reported in the colony so far. The first patients to fully recover in the region have already left hospital, according to official media.
More than 1,100 people have died in China due to the Chinese coronavirus epidemic although most of the deaths and infections have been in the central Hubei province, whose capital, Wuhan, is the epicentre of the outbreak.
But representatives of the Uighur diaspora warn there is a real reason to fear a rapid spread of Chinese coronavirus in the massive Chinese concentration camps.
The Chinese virus spreads from person to person through droplets disseminated by sneezing or coughing, and confining large groups of people together, possibly without adequate access to germ-killing soap and water, will increase the likelihood of an outbreak.
China has rounded up an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly-Muslim ethnic minorities in concentration camps, NGOs and experts say, and little is known about the conditions inside them.
"People are starting to panic. Our families are there, dealing with the camps and the Chinese virus, and we do not know if they have enough to eat or if they have masks," said Dilnur Reyhan, a French sociologist of Uighur origin.

Muslim ethnic Uighurs carry a woman who fainted during a protest in Urumqi in China's far west East Turkestan colony on July 7, 2009.

A petition posted on Change.org signed by more than 3,000 people urges the closure of the concentration camps in order to reduce the threat.
There have also been social media hashtag campaigns such as #VirusThreatInThecamps and #WHO2Urumqi to urge the World Health Organization (WHO) to send a delegation to the city of East Turkestan.
"We must not wait until news of hundreds of Chinese coronavirus related deaths in the camps before we react," the petition says.
"As China continues to struggle to contain the Chinese virus in Wuhan, we can easily assume the virus will rapidly spread throughout the camps and affect millions if we don't raise the alarm now."
Regional authorities in East Turkestan did not respond to a query from AFP about measures taken to prevent the spread of the Chinese virus in the camps.
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), one of several groups representing Uighurs outside China, said it was very concerned "that if measures are not taken to further limit the spread of this Chinese virus, it could rapidly infect large numbers of people" in East Turkestan.
"These people are in a vulnerable and weakened state due to the Chinese government's abuses and mistreatment," said its President Dolkun Isa.
"This has just further compounded the suffering of the Uighur people, as our friends and family are now in even greater danger."
French immunologist Norbert Gualde said it was impossible to say "precisely under what conditions the Uighurs and other detainees are living in Chinese concentration camps".
"There are good reasons to think that their detention is synonymous with imposed promiscuity, stress and fear -- all circumstances that favour the transmission of the Chinese virus between those obliged to remain incarcerated," he said.

Cultural Genocide

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared
In East Turkestan the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.

By Amy Qin

Children leaving school in Hotan, China, this month. Beijing has used schools in the city and across the colony of East Turkestan to indoctrinate Uighur children.

HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog.
“When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities.
The girl’s father had passed away, he added.
But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western East Turkestan colony.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to concentration camps and prisons in East Turkestan over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam.
Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of East Turkestan’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017.
Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in East Turkestan without putting them at risk of arrest. 
But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.

A boarding middle school in Hotan. A government document says such schools immerse children in a Chinese-speaking environment away from the influence of religion.

State media and official documents describe education as a key component of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in East Turkestan, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures.
The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.
“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.
To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in East Turkestan have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group.
At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.
Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.
The campaign echoes past policies in Canada and Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.
“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.
Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare.
References on social media are usually quickly censored.
Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.
Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in East Turkestan, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”

Abdurahman Tohti, a Uighur living in Istanbul, saw his son in a video shared by a stranger on a Chinese social media platform.

Indoctrinating Children
Abdurahman Tohti left East Turkestan and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul.
But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.
He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China.
His parents were detained too.
The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.
Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher.
The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.
Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.
“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”
Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. 
Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.
Then, after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in East Turkestan, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.
In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase.
Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in East Turkestan, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.
In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry’s website, officials from East Turkestan outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.
Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”
By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in East Turkestan — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools.
At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.

Mahmutjan Niyaz, a Uighur businessman living in Istanbul, learned last year that his 5-year-old daughter was sent to a boarding school in East Turkestan after his relatives were detained.

Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in East Turkestan.
Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38 percent three years ago.
And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.
The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree.
But the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of Uighur culture.
Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.
Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.
Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them.
Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.
“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said.
“But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”

The Kasipi Village Elementary School near Hotan was converted into a full-time boarding school last year, according to an online diary of a Chinese language teacher there.

‘Kindness Students’
In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern East Turkestan, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.
It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top.
Cameras were mounted on every corner.
And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.
It wasn’t always like this.
Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.
Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred.
Classrooms were rearranged.
Bunk beds were set up.
Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.
Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.
The government says children in East Turkestan’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.
“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report.
He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”
But Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children.
Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left.
And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.
“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.
“It’s not just the children,” he added.
“The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”
The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders.
Before the conversion of the school, Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.
“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl.
“Daddy, why don’t you come back?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued.
“You must study hard too.”

Students in Hotan playing soccer in a schoolyard with a dormitory in the background

Nevertheless, Kang was generally supportive of the schools.
On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”
“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students.
Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.
Learning Chinese was the priority, Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.
On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.”
At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.
Tighter security has become the norm at schools in East Turkestan.
In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records.
At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.
Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern East Turkestan.
Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed.
But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.
“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.

A Uighur child doing his Chinese homework at a bus stop. The government says minority children will have better prospects if they are fluent in Chinese, but Uighur activists worry about losing their culture.

‘Engineers of the Human Soul’
To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline.
Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.
“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.
The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for East Turkestan from across China.
Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year.
The influx amounted to about a fifth of East Turkestan’s teachers last year, according to government data.
The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line.
Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.
The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as “scum of the Chinese people” and accused them of being “bewitched by extremist religious ideology.”
Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them.
A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.
Officials in East Turkestan also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.
Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.
Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun.
Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.
“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.
There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.
Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left East Turkestan to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.
Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media.
It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.
“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them.
“I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”

Kalbinur Tursun, right, at her tailor shop in Istanbul this month.

Mankind's Enemy No. 1

China is a global threat to human rights, report finds
By Amy Woodyatt

The Chinese government increasingly poses a "global threat to human rights," according to NGO Human Rights Watch.
In its annual report reviewing human rights standards in nearly 100 countries, the NGO warned that China is carrying out an intensive attack on the global system for enforcing human rights.
The report's release comes after HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said he was denied entry to Hong Kong -- with no reason given by immigration authorities.
Roth had planned to launch the report in the city, which has been rocked by anti-government protests for over seven months.
HRW echoed longstanding concerns about China's use of an "Orwellian high-tech surveillance state" and sophisticated internet censorship system to catch and stamp out public criticism.
The report also pointed to the detainment and intense surveillance of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in the far western colony of East Turkestan.
Beijing has faced increasing international pressure over its tactics in East Turkestan, with multiple, unprecedented leaks shining a light on a massive network of concentration camps targeting Muslims. Former detainees have also spoken out, with a former teacher in the camps telling CNN they witnessed abuse and attempts at brainwashing of detainees.
Beijing has previously denied accusations of ethnic or religious discrimination in East Turkestan, which is home to 10 million Muslims.

Beyond East Turkestan, HRW warned of "mass intrusions" on personal privacy including the forced collection of DNA and use of artificial intelligence and big data analysis "to refine its means of control."
High-tech surveillance and censorship tactics pioneered in East Turkestan have previously been rolled out to other parts of the country, and there have been concerns that other religious minorities -- including Hui Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists -- are facing similar restrictions to those placed on Islam in East Turkestan.
"Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics," Roth said in a news release after he was prevented from entering Hong Kong.
"Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone's future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing's assault on the international human rights system."

Mesut Ozil vs. China: Arsenal star makes human rights stand

'Lukewarm and selective support'
As well as criticizing China for undermining international human rights protections, HRW also took aim at democratic governments and world leaders for their "lukewarm and selective support" for existing standards.
The organization criticized Donald Trump, who was deemed to be "more interested in embracing friendly autocrats than defending the human rights standards that they flout."
It also singled out the European Union for a failure to adopt a "strong common voice" on human rights, both in China and around the world, and noted that it was instead distracted by Brexit, nationalism and migration.
In the report, the NGO calls for governments and financial institutions to offer alternatives to Chinese loans and development aid, and for universities and companies to promote codes and common standards for dealing with China.
Beijing has emerged as the primary donor for much of the developing world, as well as extending major trade and infrastructure investment through Xi Jinping's Belt and Road project.
The report also urges leaders to force a discussion about East Turkestan -- where massive concentration camps are located -- at the UN Security Council.
Such international condemnation has been hard to come by, however, particularly among Muslim countries, which might be expected to speak out against China's hardline tactics.
At the UN General Assembly in late October, 23 mostly Western countries came forward to make a strong, official statement criticizing Beijing's East Turkestan concentration camps.
In response, Belarus issued a statement claiming 54 countries were in support of the East Turkestan camps system. 
Not all signatories were revealed, but a similar statement in July included several Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.
"An inhospitable terrain for human rights is aiding the Chinese government's attack," the organization said in a statement.
"A growing number of governments that previously could be relied on at least some of the time to promote human rights in their foreign policy now have leaders, such as Donald Trump, who are unwilling to do so."

China's crimes against humanity

China calls them ‘kindness students.’ They’re actually victims of cultural genocide.
The Washington Post
Workers walk by the perimeter fence of a concentration camp in Dabancheng in East Turkestan, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. 

IMAGINE THIS: a facility in southern East Turkestan colony in China, in a dusty village nestled among fields of barren walnut trees.
It is surrounded by a tall brick wall, two layers of barbed wire, cameras on every corner, and a guard wearing a black helmet and protective vest with a metal detector at the entrance.
This is a school?
The building, recently described in a New York Times article, is a clue to the eradication of a people’s culture and language taking place every day in concentration camps in western China. 
The building is in fact a boarding school and part of China’s attempt to wipe out the mind-set of the ethnic Uighur population and others, including Kazakhs.
They are Turkic Muslims, and about 1.8 million of them are now incarcerated in camps that China calls “vocational education” facilities but look more like prisons.
As the Times article and other recently published research has revealed, China’s attempts to suppress Uighur traditions start with the youngest.
Children are separated from their parents — who are hauled off to faraway camps — and the kids are then subjected to intensive indoctrination at places such as the boarding school. 
The goal is to erase from their minds the Uighur language and cultural ways and replace them with coerced respect for China’s ruling Communist Party and the traditions of its Han-majority population.
In the village with the barbed wire, government officials call the children “kindness students,” referring to the party’s supposed "generosity" in making special arrangements.
But the glove bearing this generosity has a fist inside.
As Adrian Zenz at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has documented, in some Uighur-majority regions in southern East Turkestan, preschool enrollment more than quadrupled in recent years, exceeding the average national enrollment growth rate by more than 12 times.
Why? 
Because parents, and in some cases both parents, have disappeared into the camps. 
China is carrying out cultural genocide and social reengineering on young minds when they are most impressionable.
China has claimed the campaign is a response to extremism and violence in East Turkestan a decade ago, but these methods far exceed what would be needed for counterterrorism.
The punishment of the Uighur Muslims appears to fit the definition of crimes against humanity. 
The annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, released Wednesday, says: “Security personnel at the camps subjected detainees to torture, including beatings; electric shocks; waterboarding; medical neglect; forced ingestion of medication; sleep deprivation; extended solitary confinement; and handcuffing or shackling for prolonged periods, as well as restricted access to toilet facilities; punishment for behavior deemed religious; forced labor; overcrowding; deprivation of food; and political indoctrination.”
That is some “kindness.”
Congress should promptly finish with legislation that would pave the way for sanctions on those responsible for the repression.
If this horror is not ended soon, the entire world must ask: Should China be allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in one city while running concentration camps in another?

Colleges Should All Stand Up to China

American universities need to show Beijing—again and again—that they reserve the right to unfettered debate.
By Rory Truex
About five times a year, the U.S. military conducts freedom-of-navigation operations, or FONOPs, in the South China Sea to challenge China’s territorial claims in the area.
American Navy vessels traverse through waters claimed by the Chinese government.
This is how the U.S. government registers its view that those waters are international territory, and that China’s assertion of sovereignty over them is inconsistent with international law.
Americans are witnessing a similar encroachment on territory equally central to our national interest: our own social and political discourse. 
Through a combination of market coercion and intimidation, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain how people in the United States and other Western democracies talk about China.

Freedom-of-speech operations (FOSOPs) 
This encroachment needs a measured response—what we might call freedom-of-speech operations, or FOSOPs for short. 
American universities can take the lead.
They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in East Turkestan, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government.
These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers.
They need not originate from a university’s administration.
If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grass roots.
Last month’s NBA-China spat crystallized the basic problem.
After the Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protesters, Rockets games and gear were effectively banned in China, costing the team an estimated $10 million to $25 million.
It has become common for the Chinese government to force Western firms and institutions to toe the party line.
Gap, Cambridge University Press, the three largest U.S. airlines, Marriott, and Mercedes-Benz have all had China access threatened over freedom-of-speech issues. 
This list will continue to grow.
Recently, the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV canceled the showing of an Arsenal soccer game because the club’s star, Mesut Özil, had criticized the ongoing crackdown in East Turkestan.
The Chinese government regularly uses coercive tactics to affect discourse on American campuses, including putting pressure on universities that invite politically sensitive speakers.
This is precisely what happened at the University of California at San Diego, which hosted the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker in 2017.
The Chinese government, which considers the Tibetan religious leader a threat, responded by barring Chinese scholars from visiting UCSD using government funding.
There is also disturbing evidence that the Chinese government is mobilizing overseas Chinese students to protest or disrupt events, primarily through campus chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. 
These groups exist at more than 150 universities and receive financial support from the Chinese embassy in the United States. 
As Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian reported last year in Foreign Policy, the embassy can exert influence over the chapters’ leadership and activities.
The goal of freedom-of-speech operations is safety in numbers.
Other universities remained largely mum after the Chinese government moved to punish UCSD, effectively inviting Beijing to deploy similar tactics against other schools in the future. 
But imagine if instead there had been an outpouring of events on Tibet or invitations for the Dalai Lama. 
Coordination is key.
An affront to one American university should be taken as an affront to all.
At Princeton, where I teach, we held three FOSOPs in recent weeks: the first on East Turkestan, sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions; the second on Hong Kong, sponsored by a student group that promotes U.S.-China relations; and a third on East Turkestan, also sponsored by students. 
These events were not labeled as FOSOPs, of course; I, not the organizers, am applying the term.
The panels occurred independently, organically, and with no real interference or involvement from university administration, other than to ensure the safety and security of our students.
I played a small role in the Hong Kong event, at which I moderated a panel that featured three Hong Kong citizens discussing the ongoing protest movement.
Our China talks usually get about 30 attendees, most of whom are retirees who live nearby.
The Hong Kong panel last month was the biggest China-related event I have attended on our campus.
Our room was at maximum capacity, as was the overflow room we created for the simulcast.
It was clear that mainland-Chinese students and Hong Kong students—two groups whose views on the protests generally diverge—had both mobilized in some way or another.
The event was emotionally charged at the outset.
One Chinese student, apparently sympathetic to the Chinese government’s position, flipped the panel the middle finger after a panelist made a comment about police brutality against Hong Kong protesters.
Several of the audience members from mainland China pressed the panelists on some of the basic realities of the events on the ground.
One student asked if there was actually any evidence of police brutality.
It felt like Chinese students had come to the event just to push the Communist Party line. 
But it was healthy and helpful to have pro-Beijing views expressed and debated publicly, and juxtaposed with the lived experiences of the Hong Kong protesters.
As the panelist Wilfred Chan noted, it is especially important right now to have dialogue between the Hong Kongers and mainland-Chinese communists.
Western university campuses are among the only spaces where this can occur.
Firms, local governments, civic associations, and individuals can create their own freedom-of-speech operations.
Imagine if every NBA player signed a pledge to mention China’s mass detention of Muslims in East Turkestan at press conferences, just for one day. 
Or if American churches reached out to Chinese pastors to give sermons about the repression of China’s Christian community.
There will be pushback from the Chinese government, and some events might be labeled as an affront to “Chinese sovereignty” or “the feelings of the Chinese people”—standard rhetorical devices of the Chinese Communist Party.
University administrators may receive warnings or veiled threats in the short term.
But if this sort of interference is met with more campus events, at more universities and institutions, China’s coercion will be rendered ineffective, and its government would have no choice but to back down.
It is important that while we push to preserve freedom of speech on China at Western institutions, we also push to preserve the rights and freedoms of our students from mainland China.
Anti-China sentiment in the U.S. is at historic highs.
Freedom-of-speech operations should be constructed to encourage dialogue and foster norms of critical citizenship.
Done right, these events can protect Americans’ intellectual territory, and demonstrate the value of our open society. 

Turkey: A Muslim Kapo Nation

They Built a Homeland Far From China’s Grip. Now They’re Afraid.
By Carlotta Gall
Ablet Abdugani with his daughter Serife, 15, and his sons Abdussalam, 11, and Abdullah, age 5, at their home in Istanbul, Turkey.

ISTANBUL — Six years ago, he fled China’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs and sought refuge in Turkey, joining a community of fellow exiles.
He started a business with his brother, translating and publishing self-help books into their language. His wife got a job as a teacher in a Uighur school where his children began to take classes.
Now, Ablet Abdugani worries the life he built will disappear.
The Turkish government told him he had to leave the country.
That could mean being sent back to China and likely straight into detention in a sprawling network of internment camps where about one million Muslims are held.
“I am scared whenever the door opens,” Mr. Abdugani said in his apartment on the far outskirts of Istanbul.
“I feel very sad about my six years here.”
Uighurs have left China in droves as the government intensified a campaign of assimilation in the western colony of East Turkestan.
In the last three years, at least 11,000 have landed in Turkey, long a favored haven.
Now, they worry they could become pawns in a geopolitical game.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who a decade ago called Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs a genocide, has tried to reduce his country’s reliance on the West by turning to nations such as China.
In recent years, he has secured billions of dollars in loans and investments from the Asian giant to help prop up the faltering Turkish economy.

Renaay Muhammed, center, who teaches the Uighur language to children, with her students in an empty construction lot next to the school in Istanbul, Turkey.

Earlier this year, Turkey deported at least four Uighurs to Tajikistan. 
From there, they were sent back to China, alarming the Uighur community and drawing protests on social media.
Turkish authorities later said they would not send any Uighurs back to China.
But Mr. Abdugani, who was not deported, and many others like him remain anxious.
“We are caught in the middle of Chinese-Turkish relations and we don’t even know how much we are worth,” Mr. Abdugani said.
For those who have fled China, Turkey has offered them a place to reimagine their homeland.
Their people share a common heritage and similar languages.
Turkey’s government recognizes Turkic people as their own, making it a rare Muslim-majority nation that has spoken up for the Uighurs despite China’s objections.
They can practice Islam without fear and celebrate the culture of their 12 million people.
They teach classes on religion and the Uighur language and hold a yearly rally for their rights, activities that would be risky, or even banned, in China.
But many Uighurs in Turkey find themselves in a state of impermanence.
They are denied work permits and business licenses, and in some cases permanent residence and citizenship.
Once their Chinese passports expire, they are left effectively stateless.

‘Our people are being tortured’
The Uighurs speak a Turkic language and write in an Arabic script.
Their mosques feature turquoise tiled domes, their homes are decorated with Afghan-style rugs and their kitchens serve up cumin-spiced lamb pilaf and naan.
In their new home in Turkey, the Uighurs found something rare: a chance to restore their way of life and the reservoir of collective memory that China’s ruling Communist Party has sought to erode.
China intensified restrictions on the Uighurs after a spate of attacks in 2014 that the authorities blamed on "extremists".
Arrests and criminal convictions soared.
The authorities have confiscated Uighur books, restricted the use of the language in schools and detained scholars, artists and intellectuals, among others, in indoctrination camps.
Omer Hemdulla was studying in the Middle East in 2017 when his family in China warned him against going home.
The authorities had arrested his brothers and confiscated their businesses, they told him.
He went to Turkey and took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January, joining a burgeoning trade of printing books in the Uighur language.

Omer Hemdulla took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January and prints books in the Uighur language.

“The entire Uighur nation is in danger. Our people are being tortured,” said Mr. Hemdulla, 30, a law graduate.
He and his business partner, Nur Ahmet Mahmut, 32, publish anything they can find, from Uighur history and literature to children’s stories and cookery books.
They sell symbols of their hoped-for republic, East Turkestan — such as its sky blue flag with white crescent and star — items that are outlawed in China.
Mr. Hemdulla stocks books that were banned in East Turkestan.
Among the most popular, he said, are the novel “Awakened Land,” by Abdurehim Otkur, a well-known Uighur author, and “East Turkestan History” by Muhamet Emin Bugra, an exiled Turkic Muslim leader.
“I only read them when I came to Turkey and I realized China oppressed and occupied us a long time ago,” he said.
His shop is among half a dozen bookstores in the outlying districts of Sefakoy and Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, where many of the estimated 50,000 Uighurs in Turkey live.
Another publisher, Abduljalil Turan, 61, started his business in the 1990s, focusing on Islamic books and Uighur history and literature.
He asked friends to bring books to Turkey and then began publishing works of Uighur exiles, including his own writings.
He steadily expanded his stock to 1,000 titles and exports them to Uighur communities around the world.
“It is part of the cause,” he said, “to keep awareness alive about our condition.”

‘Will our culture disappear?’
For many Uighurs brought up under Communism, Turkey provides them a chance to raise a generation unbound by party orthodoxy, children who are free to embrace religion and their ethnic roots.
In China, Niaz Abdulla Bostani was imprisoned for three years for teaching the Quran to Uighur children.
Now, at 87, he holds religious classes for Uighur children on weekends at a local hall in Istanbul.

Niaz Abdulla Bostani, right, a religious teacher who moved to Turkey in 2016, and his wife, Hebibihan Merup.

“Young people come to me and ask questions,” he explained.
“Education is the answer. It will not solve things in a few days, but it will affect you all your life.”
Abdurashid Niaz, 55, was imprisoned for a year in China in 2005 for translating a book by the Egyptian Islamist Muhammad Qutb from Mandarin to Uighur.
He now runs a Uighur school in Istanbul with his wife, and says the internment drive in East Turkestan has made the Uighurs worried about their people’s survival.
“Everyone is discussing whether in 50 years, will our culture disappear,” Mr. Abdurashid said.
Four children were studying geography with his wife, Anifa Abdurashid, on a recent morning, and they leapt to answer questions about their homeland.
“I know the population is 32 million,” the youngest in the class, Abdulla, piped up.
The true population of the region of East Turkestan, of which Uighurs make up half, is closer to 24 million, but Mrs. Abdurashid let it go.
The Uighurs have preserved their identity through five millenniums, said Ferhat Kurban Tanridagli, a musician and scholar of Turkic languages.

Uighur children drew a map of their homeland during a class at a Uighur school in Istanbul.

He runs an arts school with his wife, a singer, and teaches music and dance to Uighur children.
He plays the dutar, a long-necked, two-string lute that has been played for 4,000 years in Central Asia.
“Made in Kashgar, in 1993,” he said proudly, turning the instrument of gleaming peanut wood, inlaid with bone, in his hands, referring to the fabled Silk Road trading town which now lives under tight police surveillance.
He warned that the Uighurs would not be able to withstand China’s onslaught on their own.
“If they destroy us, they will not stop. They will do it to others,” he said. 
“All the world needs to say to China to stop. We have no other choice.”

‘Still, there is danger’
This summer, the threat of deportation cast a new shadow of uncertainty over the Uighurs.
Mr. Abdugani, the businessman who had been told in July by the government to leave, said 40 others had received similar orders.
The Uighurs were deeply troubled when the authorities, as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants, deported a Uighur woman and her two children to Tajikistan, which sent them back to China.
A fourth Uighur, also a woman, was deported as well.
The children were handed to their grandmother, but relatives have no news of the two women and fear they have been detained.
An estimated 2,500 Uighurs do not have legal residency.
Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said in August that the government was trying to manage migration with “mercy and conscience,” and would not deport Uighurs.
Those without residence papers like Mr. Abdugani could seek humanitarian protection, he said.
That would grant them refugee status and access to health care services but not allow them to work.
Mr. Abdugani applied for humanitarian protection, but several months later was still waiting for a response and risks arrest for his illegal status.
The family was surviving on his wife’s salary and they could not pay for school books or the bus fare, so his children were walking to class most days.
Even as Turkey allows them to stay, many Uighurs said that immigration rules and the state bureaucracy make survival difficult.
Mr. Abdugani said he wanted long-term residence, which would allow him to work and support his family, and after seven years, apply for citizenship.
Businessmen complain they are restricted from developing their businesses, political activists say the authorities limit their demonstrations, and students are only offered free college education if they study religion.
And there is always a lingering fear of China’s reach.

Uighurs with flags of East Turkestan protested outside the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul.

Abdulla Turkestanli, 49, a book publisher, said he was detained without charge by the Turkish authorities for a year in 2017.
He suspected that Beijing had complained about him when he opened a second bookstore in the district of Sefakoy.
The Turkish authorities never explained why he was detained.
“A lot of writers are in prison or dead” he said.
“They are accused of terrorism in China, and so they say we are helping them.”
“I am fine, thanks be to God,” he said, “but still, there is danger.”

Hong Kong protesters rally in support of minority Uighurs

Largely peaceful rally descended into chaos after protesters grabbed a Chinese flag and tried to burn it.
hwww.aljazeera.com
Hong Kong protesters held a rally in support of the Uighurs on Sunday.

Riot police in Hong Kong broke up a rally in support of China's Uighurs on Sunday -- with one officer drawing a pistol -- after the initially peaceful protest descended into chaos when protesters removed a Chinese flag from a nearby government building and tried to burn it.
Organisers stopped the flag being burned, but riot police swooped in with pepper spray, sparking anger from the crowd who threw water bottles.
One officer drew his gun and pointed it at the crowd, but did not fire.
At least two protesters were arrested.
Several hundred people joined the rally, with some holding signs emblazoned with the blue and white flag of the independence movement in China's northwestern colony of East Turkestan.
China has faced international condemnation for detaining an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in massive concentration camps.
The emergence of a huge surveillance and prison system that now blankets much of East Turkestan has been watched closely in Hong Kong, which has been convulsed by six months of huge and sometimes violent protests against Beijing's rule.
Pro-Uighur chants and flags have become commonplace in Hong Kong's marches, but Sunday's rally was the first to be specifically dedicated to Uighurs.
The crowd gathered in a square close to the city's harbourfront listening to speeches warning that the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown in East Turkestan could one day be replicated in Hong Kong.
"We shall not forget those who share a common goal with us, our struggle for freedom and democracy and the rage against the Chinese Communist Party," one speaker shouted through a loudspeaker to cheers.

'Control Freaks'
Many of those attending were waving the flag of East Turkestan, which has a white crescent moon on a blue background.

A man holds a flag during a rally to show support for Uighurs and their fight for human rights in Hong Kong. The characters read "Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our times." 

Others wore blue face masks displaying the East Turkestan flag.
People also carried flags for Tibet -- another restless region of China - and the self-ruled island of Taiwan that China claims as its own.
China runs Hong Kong on a "one country, two systems" model which allows the city key freedoms that are denied people on the authoritarian mainland.
The framework will end in 2047, 50 years after the handover.
Many people in Hong Kong fear an increasingly assertive China is already eroding those freedoms.
Many at Sunday's rally said they felt a mainland-style government was around the corner.
"The Chinese government are control freaks, they can't stand any opinions they disagree with," Katherine, a protester in her late twenties and a civil servant, told AFP before police moved in.
"In East Turkestan they are doing what they are doing because they have the power to do so. When they take over Hong Kong they will do the same," she added.
China cracked down on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities after a series of deadly attacks in the area.
It bristles at any criticism of its policies in East Turkestan.

The age of football moral pygmies

China's Arsenal blackout highlights Premier League's ethics problem

Amnesty International praise Arsenal midfielder Mesut Özil for speaking out against Chinese crimes but the world’s most famous league has remained tight-lipped so far

By Lily Kuo in Beijing and Paul MacInnes in London

A supporter of China’s Muslim Uighur minority holds a placard Mesut Ozil during a demonstration at Beyazid square in Istanbul.

Across the street from the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, the venue of Arsenal’s first ever match in China in 1995, shoppers at an Adidas store ignore a rack of puffer jackets, football shirts and backpacks bearing the football club’s name.
One, inspecting a range of Adidas clothing released for Chinese New Year, says he had once been a fan of Arsenal’s Mesut Özil, but since the star midfielder had condemned China’s treatment of the country’s Uighur people, he has changed his mind.
The man then goes on to admit that he is, in fact, a Manchester United supporter.
Controversy over Özil’s remarks this week has shone a light on the challenges – and compromises – foreign organisations face in trying to do business in China.
But it also draws attention to the unique role played by sport, both in contemporary China and in exerting soft power for western countries abroad.
Eight days ago, Özil, a practising Muslim of Turkish descent, posted a message on Instagram urging support for the Uighur Muslim population in the north-western Chinese colony of East Turkestan, more than a million of whom are interned in concentration camps. 
In response, Arsenal distanced themselves from their own player.
Hastily issuing a statement via Chinese social network Weibo, the club said: “The content published is Özil’s personal opinion. As a football club, Arsenal has always adhered to the principle of not involving itself in politics.”
A week of controversy followed, with the debate reaching diplomatic circles.
Arsenal were widely criticised in British media for washing their hands of Özil, and accused of only having eyes for their bottom line. 
The German found one unlikely ally, meanwhile, in the shape of the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who tweeted: “China’s Communist party propaganda outlets can censor Mesut Özil … but the truth will prevail.”
In China, there was an immediate response too, with Arsenal’s fixture against Manchester City pulled from the TV schedules by state broadcaster CCTV.
Özil was also the subject of individual sanctions when his social media accounts were blocked on the Chinese internet and his likeness removed from the Chinese version of the video game Pro Evolution Soccer.
In this way, the Özil affair echoed actions taken earlier in the year by the Chinese against NBA team the Houston Rockets, who found themselves persona non grata after their general manager, Daryl Morey, expressed support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
Two months after Morey’s post, Rockets games are still not being shown on CCTV or the service provided by digital rights holder Tencent.
Back in England and, a week after the incident, the Premier League has yet to make any public comment on the affair.
For Simon Chadwick, professor of sport enterprise at Salford Business School, this is not surprising. “I cannot imagine any scenario in which the Premier League would publicly speak out in support of Özil,” he says.
“One suspects that financially it would likely be disastrous for the Premier League to make any explicit statement questioning, criticising or undermining Chinese state policy.“
Of the 20 clubs in English football’s top flight, one, Wolverhampton Wanderers, is fully Chinese owned while another, champions Manchester City, have Chinese investors who hold a 12% stake in the club. 
Other teams, such as Bournemouth and Crystal Palace, have sponsorship deals with Chinese companies.
Perhaps most important of all to the Premier League’s financial success, however, is the TV deal struck with the company PP Sports for rights to broadcast live matches in China.
The three-year agreement that runs until 2022 is believed to be worth £500m.
The Premier League has seen the value of its TV rights fall domestically of late and in several other markets, while China remains one source of real growth.
The growth reflects increased demand for top-flight English football among Chinese fans and the government.
“This is really the horns of the dilemma for the PRC (Communist party)”, says Dr J Simon Rofe, a reader in diplomatic and international studies at SOAS.
“They’ve actively encouraged the engagement with sport, particularly the NBA through [Chinese basketball player] Yao Ming in the noughties and then the Premier League, through Xi Jinping himself. Think back to the image Sergio Agüero tweeted of Xi and David Cameron. The Premier League does have an influence and it has been cultivated by the PRC.”
In 2016, Xi is believed to have had personal involvement in the drafting of a national blueprint for the game aimed at transforming China into a “soccer powerhouse” capable of winning the World Cup by 2050.
Part of that plan involved gaining access to and learning from elite football in Europe.
As a result, a number of English clubs, including Manchester City, have opened football academies in China.
The ability for football and the Premier League specifically to open doors has not been missed by the UK government.
Alongside the Queen and the BBC, the competition is seen as one of the most effective mechanisms for exercising soft power on the international stage.
“Soft power is about getting people elsewhere in the world to see things the way that you do,” says Chadwick.
“Football is part of Brand Britain, it is part of Britain’s soft-power strategy, and it helps sell who we are and what we do.”

Moral Pygmies
Attempting to balance the interests of its stakeholders, the clubs, its sponsors and media partners, alongside its quasi-diplomatic responsibilities, means that the Premier League is unlikely to ever speak about politically matters.
There will be disappointment among many who feel the organisation could use its clout to serve a greater good.
Chinese authorities have not reacted as strongly to Özil’s remarks as they did to Morey’s.
There is an expectation that any uproar may soon disappear.
In a country with an increasing appetite for televised sport, to damage one competition might seem unfortunate, to damage a second could seem like carelessness.

Arbeit macht frei

China adds a sickening new dimension to its treatment of Uighurs

The Washington Post

An ethnic Uighur demonstrator attends a protest against China in front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 1. 

AT A news conference in Beijing recently, the head of China’s East Turkestan colony in the far northwest, Shohrat Zakir, said that “trainees” in a notorious archipelago of reeducation camps had all “graduated,” and “with the help of the government, stable employment has been achieved and their quality of life has been improved.”
In reality, China has corralled more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims into concentration camps in East Turkestan in order to wipe out their language, religion and culture. 
So what did they graduate to?
Many are being sent to factories no freer than the camps, in some cases located on the camp grounds or adjacent to them. 
If true, the creation of a chain gang of Uighur workers is yet another sickening dimension to one of the world’s most serious human rights crises. 
It should be the subject of a credible international investigation, with consequences.
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who has published pioneering work on the East Turkestan concentration camps, has now unearthed evidence that points to forced labor.
Writing in the Journal of Political Risk, he says, “Since the second half of 2018, limited but apparently growing numbers of detainees have been released into different forms of forced labor.” 
Mr. Zenz argues that the involuntary labor is one part of a “grand scheme that penetrates every corner of ethnic minority society with unprecedented pervasiveness,” sending a whole population into a state-controlled environment of political indoctrination, social control, extrajudicial internment and massive surveillance with the effect of breaking up traditional, religious and family life. 
It amounts to “targeted cultural genocide.”
Mr. Zenz bases his conclusions in part on Chinese government documents that point toward factories and workshops staffed by the internees from the concentration camps.
In the Xinhe County Industrial Park, he found, a garment company set up a work base to provide employment for 500 internees from the Xinhe County camp, and “the government provides police forces and special instructors so that the factory is run in a ‘semi-military style management’ fashion.”
What factory needs police, except to keep people from escaping?
In Yarkand County, Mr. Zenz found spreadsheets produced by local government authorities listing the employment situation of thousands of Uighur residents, and he noticed that 148 stood out as specially designated people who had been in detention, including in the camps.
Mr. Zenz points out in an essay in Foreign Policy the irony of placing the interned Uighurs into sweatshops: Many were once skilled businessmen, intellectuals and scientists. 
Mr. Zenz’s information is powerful but fragmentary; more needs to be uncovered about the patterns of forced labor he has begun to expose.
China is to host the Winter Olympics in February 2022.
Should such an event of global significance be held in a country that maintains concentration camps and coerced labor? 
It is not too early to begin raising the question.

China's Final Solution

US Secretary of State backs Mesut Özil in criticism of China’s Uighur persecution

• Mike Pompeo says Beijing can stop broadcasts of team’s soccer games but cannot hide rights violations
• Star midfielder slammed Chinese crackdown on social media last week, urging fellow Muslims around the world to speak up about plight of Uighurs

By Lee Jeong-ho in Hong Kong

Star midfielder Mesut Özil has criticized Muslim countries for not speaking up for minorities subjected to abuse in China. More than 1 million people have been sent to concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo renewed his condemnations of China over human rights issues on Tuesday, tweeting out support for Mesut Ozil, a star midfielder for Arsenal of the English Premier League, and the criticisms Ozil had made of China's treatment of ethnic Uygur Muslims.
"China's Communist Party propaganda outlets can censor Mesut Ozil and Arsenal's games all season long, but the truth will prevail," Pompeo said in his post on Twitter. 

"The CCP can't hide its gross #human rights violations perpetrated against Uighurs and other religious faiths from the world."
Last week, Ozil, a German Muslim of Turkish origin, in social media posts called Uygurs "warriors who resist persecution" and criticised both China's crackdown and the silence of Muslims in response.
Arsenal on Saturday tried to distance itself from Ozil's comments after he posted the messages on Twitter and Instagram. 

"The content he expressed is entirely Ozil's personal opinion," the team's official account said in a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform.
But China's state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday removed Arsenal's game against Manchester City from its broadcast schedule. 

The following day, Beijing responded by saying Ozil was "blinded by fake news".
Pompeo's criticism came just a few days after a "phase one" trade deal was reached between the world's two biggest economies, illustrating that the US-China rivalry continues on other fronts.
Moreover, human rights are rising as a potentially explosive topic between the two countries.
In October, the US State Department said it would stop issuing visas to Chinese government and Communist Party officials responsible for or complicit in the detention and surveillance of Uygurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western East Turkestan colony.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that between 1 million and 2 million people, mostly ethnic Uygur Muslims, have been detained and interned in concentration camps in East Turkestan. 

Beijing doublespeak calls the camps "training centres", and says they are part of its "anti-terrorism" campaign.
The measures were hailed by human rights advocates as the first concrete actions taken by any country since the plight of the Uygurs became public knowledge two years ago.
Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives passed legislation requiring a stronger response to Beijing's treatment of its Uygur Muslim minority. 

The Senate passed a similar bill in September, and the two versions must be reconciled before being sent to US President Donald Trump to sign into law.
A similar sports controversy erupted in October over human rights in Hong Kong when the general manager of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association posted on Twitter a slogan used by pro-democracy demonstrators there. 

The tweet, which was quickly deleted, so angered Beijing and mainlanders online that the league's estimated US$4 billion market in China was put at risk.
Experts say that, as dust from the trade war settles, human rights are likely to become a constant flashpoint in US-China relations.
"Individual rights and religious freedom have long been points of contention between the United States and mainland China," said Sean King, a senior vice-president at the political consulting firm Park Strategies, suggesting that the two countries are less likely to make many concessions.
At a demonstration Saturday in Istanbul, Turkey, a supporter of China's Muslim Uygur Muslims holds a placard of Mesut Ozil reading.

To Kristine Lee, an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security, "it's deeply ironic that China has touted its 'remarkable achievements in the field of human rights', including at the United Nations.
"East Turkestan is one of the most pernicious examples in the 21st century of the CCP wielding its influence to curb progress on human rights and freedom of expression within its borders and beyond," Lee said.
"The United States must boldly call out these incongruities in China's actions, lest the CCP chip away at consensus around universal human rights, on everything from religious freedom to Hong Kong citizens' right to protest."