Tibet human rights bill

US House Passes Bill on Sanctions Against Chinese Officials for Meddling in Dalai Lama's Succession.

The bill will also prohibit China from opening any new consulate in the US until Beijing allows Washington to open its diplomatic station in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

PTI

Washington/Beijing -- The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that authorises financial and travel sanctions against Chinese officials who interfere in the process of selecting the successor to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader based in India.
Introduced by Congressman James P McGovern, Chairman of the House Rules Committee and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the bill was passed by a overwhelming vote of 392 to 22 on Tuesday.
The bill, if passed by the Senate and signed into law by the president, will also prohibit China from opening any new consulate in the US until Beijing allows Washington to open its diplomatic station in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
According to the bill, the succession or reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama, is an exclusively religious matter that should be decided solely by the Tibetan Buddhist community.
Under the draft legislation, Washington would freeze any American asset and ban US travel of Chinese officials if they are found to be involved in "identifying or installing" a Dalai Lama approved by Beijing.
The Dalai Lama fled to India in early 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese rule.
While Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a separatist who seeks to split Tibet from China, the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate says he only seeks greater rights for Tibetans, including religious freedom and autonomy.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill sends Beijing a clear signal that it will be held accountable for interfering in Tibet's religious and cultural affairs.
The proposed legislation, she said, makes it clear that "Chinese officials who meddle in the process of recognising a new Dalai Lama will be subject to targeted sanctions, including those in the Global Magnitsky Act".
The Global Magnitsky Act allows the US to sanction foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the world.
Pelosi said the bill deploys America's diplomatic weight to encourage a genuine dialogue between Tibetan leaders and Beijing.
"It is unacceptable that the Chinese government still refuses to enter into a dialogue with Tibetan leaders... We are supporting the Tibetan people's right to religious freedom and genuine autonomy by formally establishing as US policy that the Tibetan Buddhist community has the exclusive right to choose its religious leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama," she said.
Though introduced as a stand-alone piece of legislation, the bill serves as an amendment to the Tibet Policy Act of 2002, which codified the US position of support for the Tibetan people.
"Our bill updates and strengthens the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 to address the challenges facing the Tibetan people. But perhaps as importantly, it reaffirms America's commitment to the idea that human rights matter. That we care about those who are oppressed, and we stand with those who are struggling for freedom," Congressman McGovern said on the House floor.
"It should be clear that we support a positive and productive US-China relationship, but it is essential that the human rights of all the people of China are respected by their government," he asserted.
Last year, the US Congress passed the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, demanding that American journalists, diplomats and tourists be given the same freedom to travel to Tibet that Chinese officials have to travel freely in the US.
"The Dalai Lama should be commended for his decision to devolve political authority to elected leaders. The Tibetan exile community is also to be commended for adopting a system of self-governance with democratic institutions to choose their own leaders, including holding multiple 'free and fair' elections to select its Parliament and chief executive," McGovern said.
The bill also mandates the US State Department to begin collaborative and multinational efforts to protect the environment and water resources of the Tibetan Plateau.
"We are protecting Tibet's environmental and cultural rights: working with international governments and the business community to ensure the self-sufficiency of the Tibetan people and protect the environment and water resources on the Tibetan Plateau. It is really important to sustainability of our planet," Pelosi, a longtime advocate for Tibet, said.

China is showing its true nature in Hong Kong. The U.S. must not watch from the sidelines.

By choosing violence and intimidation to silence Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party is once again showing its true nature. 
By Marco Rubio

Demonstrators at Tamar Park in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Beijing recently reinforced its People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong with thousands of troops and authorized a new wave of arrests to intimidate peaceful demonstrators. 

In parallel, it blocked the Hong Kong government’s proposal to work out a compromise with the city’s massive and grassroots pro-democracy movement.
What began as a protest against an unjust extradition bill backed by China has now become a fight for Hong Kong’s autonomy and future. 

Yet what’s happening in Hong Kong is not simply China’s internal affair. 

The United States and other responsible nations are not watching from the sidelines.
The extradition bill is only the latest example of China’s many broken promises to the Hong Kong people and the world. 

Most obviously, the Chinese Communist Party is preventing the city’s government from acting with the autonomy that Beijing had promised it in a legally binding 1984 international treaty with Britain, under Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and in China’s diplomatic outreach to the United States and other nations.
In 2014, Beijing also backed off its commitment to allow Hong Kong citizens to choose their city’s chief executive through universal suffrage, a provocation that sparked the city’s massive Umbrella Movement protests. 

And in 2016 and 2017 , the High Court disqualified a total of six democratic lawmakers from their Legislative Council seats using a controversial interpretation of Hong Kong’s constitution.
Thirty years after People’s Liberation Army troops massacred reform activists and ordinary Chinese citizens on the way to Tiananmen Square, Beijing now appears poised to intervene overtly and aggressively in Hong Kong.
The paramilitary People’s Armed Police — built up in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre — has thousands of personnel and vehicles in Shenzhen, just across the boundary between mainland China and Hong Kong.
Chinese officials and state media have steadily escalated their warning rhetoric and outlined what they describe as the legal case for intervention based on “signs of terrorism.”
An unsigned editorial in Xinhua, a state-run news agency reflecting the institutional voice of the party center, claimed that Hong Kong is engaged in a “color revolution.”
The world ignores these warning signals at the peril of the Hong Kong people and the hundreds of thousands of foreigners — including roughly 85,000 U.S. citizens — living in the city.
China’s communists today are using the same messaging playbook that they have followed since they intervened in North Korea in 1950. 
We were surprised then; we should be prepared now.
The United States and the international community must make clear to Chinese leaders and power brokers that their aggression toward Hong Kong risks swift, severe and lasting consequences.
In particular, the administration should make clear that the United States can respond flexibly and robustly in Hong Kong.
Our options are much more than just a “nuclear option” of ending Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law.
The Hong Kong Policy Act, authored by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and enacted in 1992, allows the president to apply to Hong Kong those laws that address the People’s Republic of China.
The law’s power is selective and flexible, however, and not necessarily all-or-nothing for Hong Kong’s special status.
For example, the Tiananmen sanctions could be applied to target the city’s police force, which has collaborated with organized crime, instigated violence and now is torturing detained demonstrators.
Hong Kong’s special status — and therefore Beijing’s ability to exploit and benefit from it — depends on the city being treated as a separate customs area, on open international financial connections and on the Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the U.S. dollar.
The United States both administratively and diplomatically can constrain these conditions.
The administration also can impose sanctions against individual officials who have committed serious human rights abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables sanctions against foreign individuals or entities.
In addition, Congress should pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, a bill that I co-authored with Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
The bill, among other things, would mandate that officials in China and Hong Kong who have undermined the city’s autonomy are vulnerable to such sanctions.
The United States and other nations have options precisely because Beijing benefits from Hong Kong’s special status. 
Indeed, the city has proved irreplaceable as a gateway for international finance, even as China attempts to build up a mainland alternative.
China’s leaders must either respect Hong Kong’s autonomy and rule of law or know that their escalating aggression will inexorably lead them to face swift, severe and lasting consequences from the United States and the world.
Today, that choice is theirs.

Global Magnitsky Act

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

Vice President Mike Pence at the UN. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

East Turkestan Executioner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's crimes against humanity

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

By Edward Wong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s no discrepancy.”

Mass detention of Uighurs has been superseded by trade talks

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing China Sanctions
BY AMY MACKINNON

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood participates in a protest march demanding the European Union take action against China in support of the Uighurs, in Brussels, on April 27, 2018.

Two human rights advocates who focus on China issues say they were told by U.S. officials last year that the Trump administration was preparing to impose sanctions on Beijing in December over its treatment of Uighur Muslims in the country’s western region of East Turkestan.
The advocates were given to understand that the sanctions would fall under the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. government to place travel bans and asset freezes on human rights abusers.
But when International Human Rights Day came and went on Dec. 10—the day the United States customarily unveils a tranche of such sanctions each year—no announcement was made. 

The administration squelched the plan in order to avoid harming trade talks with China.
“Discussions with government officials indicated that there would be sanctions forthcoming in December,” said Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

A second human rights advocate, who did not want to be named, heard similar things in briefings with government officials.
Richardson said she has since heard from officials who expressed frustration that the sanctions issue was off the table due to the trade talks. 

She declined to identify the officials who had briefed her.
Rob Berschinski, the senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First, said his organization had also been “cautiously optimistic” that the sanctions on Chinese officials would be announced in December under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The U.S. failure to impose sanctions over China’s actions in East Turkestan—where it has forced up to a million Uighurs into internment camps—has been a big disappointment for the human rights community.
“While the U.S. is negotiating trade agreements, I think it’s important to remember that history is not going to remember the details of the negotiations but where the United States was on this massive human rights issue,” said Francisco Bencosme, the Asia-Pacific advocacy manager at Amnesty International USA.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was considering imposing Magnitsky sanctions in many places, including China.
A spokesperson for the State Department said: “The United States is developing a whole-of-government strategy to address the unprecedented campaign of repression in East Turkestan.”
“In regards to specific actions by the United States, the State Department does not forecast potential sanctions.”
At the Treasury, a spokesperson said officials would not “telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.”
A United Nations human rights panel has said China has turned East Turkestan, home to some 11 million people, mostly Uighurs, into a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

The Daily Beast has reported that China is also seeking to build a worldwide register of Uighurs who live abroad and has threatened to detain their relatives if they do not comply with requests for information from the Chinese police.
Many Uighurs living in the United States have family in the camps and face the dilemma to speak out—at the risk of more harm to their relatives—or keep silent.
“Every Uighur in the USA has family members in the concentration camps,” said Murat Ataman, whose brother, Dilshat Perhat Ataman, was taken to a camp in June 2018. 

Dilshat, an editor of a popular Uighur website, served a four-year sentence in prison between 2010 and 2014 on charges of endangering state security.
It took four months for Murat to learn that his brother had been taken to a camp. 

Uighurs in East Turkestan are forced to install monitoring apps on their cellphones, limiting their ability to communicate freely with the outside world and making it hard for their families abroad to track their whereabouts.
On March 27, Pompeo met with members of the Uighur diaspora. 

Among the group was Ferkat Jawdat, who came to the United States as a refugee in 2011. 

His mother and four of his father’s relatives are currently being detained in East Turkestan.
Five days after the meeting, Jawdat received a message from contacts in China that his aunt and uncle had been sent to the camps. 

Jawdat said that members of his family have previously been questioned about his activism in the United States.
“I decided to go public because I don’t know if I can save my mom or not, but I want to save the other people,” he said.
“China’s plan is to wipe out the whole nation. This will be written in the history books as a genocide... My children, your kids, they’re going to learn about this. I don’t want my daughter to one day ask me, ‘What did you do to stop this?’” Jawdat said.
Commenting on the suggestion that trade talks had been given priority over the mass incarceration of Muslims in China, he said: “The U.S. should give up some economic development to save our next generations.”
Members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeatedly called on the Trump administration to place sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in East Turkestan and have introduced sanctions bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“For nearly a year I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in demanding the Trump Administration impose sanctions on Chinese officials directly involved in putting roughly a million Uighurs into internment camps,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, said in a statement to Foreign Policy.
At a rally in support of the Uighurs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, successive speakers called for the United States to place sanctions on Chinese officials.
“Each time the world swears never again. When will we actually mean it?” said Dolkun Isa, the president of the World Uyghur Congress.
Given China’s influential economic clout, many members of the Uighur community see the United States as their only hope.
Among Muslim countries, only Turkey has sharply condemned China for its treatment of the Uighurs and other Muslims. 

Muslim-majority states have even supported it. 

In 2017, Egypt detained and deported dozens of Uighur students back to China. 

On a visit to China this year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom supported China’s right to undertake anti-terrorism measures. 

Last month, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose 57 member states have substantial Muslim populations—passed a resolution that commended China’s efforts to care for its Muslim citizens.
China has invested heavily in countries across Central Asia and the Middle East as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Berschinski of Human Rights First, who previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said 2018 was the first year that no sanctions were announced under the Magnitsky Act or the Global Magnitsky Act on International Human Rights Day.
No official explanation was given, although Berschinski suggested that perhaps a work overload at the Treasury Department may have been a contributing factor.
The Magnitsky Act takes its name from a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison after exposing widespread corruption. 

Passed in 2012, the law enabled the U.S. government to place sanctions on human rights abusers. 

The Global Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2016, extended that ability to the rest of the world.
“People are starting to get concerned that the administration is giving up on Global Magnitsky sanctions,” Berschinski said.

‘The Chinese Government is at War With Faith.’

U.S. Official Denounces Religious Crackdown in China
BY AMY GUNIA

Former US Senator Samuel Dale Brownback (R-KS) testifies during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing to be ambassador at large for international religious freedom, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Oct. 4, 2017.

U.S. diplomat Samuel Brownback denounced China’s treatment of the Uighur minority during a teleconference call Tuesday.

Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, make up roughly 40% of the population of the northwestern colony of East Turkestan.

According to the U.N., an estimated 1 million Uighurs are being held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.
“We have been putting out very clearly that this is a horrific situation that’s taking place in East Turkestan,” said Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom.
Brownback was speaking Tuesday from Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, where he is leading a regional conference on religious freedom to raise awareness of the issue.
In response to a question submitted by TIME, Brownback said that international pressure on China over their treatment of Uighurs is causing Beijing to change their approach.
“Initially they didn’t respond. Then they denied that it was taking place and then finally more recently settled on this idea that this is "vocational training". They haven’t said that it’s involuntary vocational training,” he said. 

“All of these are completely unsatisfactory answers,” he added.
“It is past time in the year 2019 for the Chinese government to answer what it’s doing to its own people,” he continued. 

The ambassador said families of hundreds of people who have gone missing in the detainment camps have contacted him.
Brownback called for China to allow international observers to visit East Turkestan and for the release of individuals being held there. 

He mentioned that if China does not comply, the U.S. could invoke sanctions or enact the Global Magnitsky Act, legislation that allows the U.S. (as well as other countries, including Canada and E.U. member states) to put sanctions on individuals or organizations who are complicit in human rights abuses.
“The administration is serious about religious freedom matters and deeply concerned about what is taking place in China,” he said. 

U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly called for the Trump Administration to take firm action against China over its treatment of Muslims.
The conference in Taipei came after Brownback visited Hong Kong, where he gave a speech addressing wider religious repression by the Chinese government.
“Over the last few years, we have seen increasing Chinese government persecution of religious believers from many faiths and from all parts of the mainland,” he said at Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents Club on Friday, referring to growing religious repression against not just Muslims, but also Buddhists, Christians and the Falun Gong.
Referring to China’s claims that the East Turkestan camps help prevent terrorism, he said the “magnitude of these detentions is completely out of proportion to any real threat China faces from extremism.”
“Based on testimonies of survivors, it is clear that China’s misguided and cruel policies in East Turkestan are creating resentment, hatred, division, poverty and anger,” he added.
Concerning Buddhists in Tibet, Brownback said in the same speech that China is “likely to interfere with the selection of the next Dalai Lama” but that Tibetans “should be able to select, educate, and venerate their religious leaders without government interference”
He also addressed persecution of Christians in China, denouncing the government’s 2018 ban on online sales of the Bible. 

He also discussed the crackdown on underground churches and the detention of Christian religious leaders.
China is officially atheist but its constitution guarantees its citizens “freedom of religious belief” and protection or “normal religious activities.” 

The Chinese government officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism.
Since 1999, the U.S. government has designated China a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.

The world must stand against China’s war on religion

By Chris Smith

Muslim protesters outside China's embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Dec. 21. 

Mihrigul Tursun said she pleaded with God to end her life as her Chinese jailers increased the electrical currents coursing through her body. 

Tursun, a Muslim Uighur whose escape led her to the United States in September, broke down weeping at a Nov. 28 congressional hearing as she recounted her experience in one of China’s infamous political “ re-education centers. ”
It is an appalling story but one that is all too familiar as existential threats to religious freedom rise in Xi Jinping’s China. 

The world can’t ignore what’s happening there. 

We must all stand up and oppose these human rights violations.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party has undertaken the most comprehensive attempt to manipulate and control — or destroy — religious communities since Mao Zedong made the eradication of religion a goal of his disastrous Cultural Revolution half a century ago. 

Now Xi, apparently fearing the power of independent religious belief as a challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy, is trying to radically transform religion into the party’s servant, employing a draconian policy known as sinicization.
Under sinicization, all religions and believers must comport with and aggressively promote communist ideology — or else.
To drive home the point, religious believers of every persuasion are harassed, arrested, jailed or tortured. 

Only the compliant are left relatively unscathed.
Bibles are burned, churches destroyed, crosses set ablaze atop church steeples and now, under Xi, religious leaders are required to install facial-recognition cameras in their places of worship. 

New regulations expand restrictions on religious expression online and prohibit those under age 18 from attending services.
Government officials are also rewriting religious texts — including the Bible — that remove content unwanted by the atheist Communist Party, and have launched a five-year sinicization plan for Chinese Protestant Christians.
These efforts have taken a staggering human toll. 

In recent months, more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony have been detained, tortured and forced to renounce their faith. 

The U.S. government is investigating recent reports that ethnic minorities in internment camps are being forced to produce goods bound for the United States.
Yet, despite this anti-religion campaign, the Vatican has shown a disturbing lack of alarm concerning these threats and, instead, appears to be seeking a form of accommodation. 

In September, Vatican officials signed a “provisional agreement” that essentially ceded to the Chinese government the power to choose — subject to papal review — every candidate for bishop in China, which has an estimated 10 million to 12 million Catholics.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a retired bishop of Hong Kong, in September called the deal “a complete surrender” by the Vatican and an “incredible betrayal” of the faith.
At a congressional hearing I chaired in September, Tom Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, testified that the government-controlled body charged with carrying out the policy, the Catholic Patriotic Association, had drafted an implementation document containing the following passage: “The Church will regard promotion and education on core values of socialism as a basic requirement for adhering to the Sinicization of Catholicism. It will guide clerics and Catholics to foster and maintain correct views on history and the nation.”
One can hope that Beijing has made concessions to the church that have yet to be revealed. 

Initial reports are less than promising. 

Since the agreement was reached, underground priests have been detained, Marian shrines destroyed, pilgrimage sites closed, youth programs shuttered, and priests required to attend reeducation sessions in at least one province.
The Vatican should reconsider its arrangement with the Chinese government. 

But what can be done more generally in response to Xi’s war on religion? 

The United States and several European countries have condemned it, but any nation that values freedom of religion should unite in denouncing China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners. 

In particular, Muslim-majority countries, strangely muted regarding the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, must protest these abuses even at the risk of endangering the benefits from China’s “Belt and Road”infrastructure projects.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and I have urged the Trump administration to use Global Magnitsky Act sanctions to target Chinese officials responsible for egregious human rights abuses. 

We have sought expanded export controls for police surveillance products and sanctions against businesses profiting from the forced labor or detention of Uighurs. 

We have also introduced the bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2018 to provide the administration with new tools to comprehensively address the abuse.
The United States must lead the way in letting the Chinese Communist Party know that taking a hammer and sickle to the cross and enslaving more than 1 million Uighurs in an effort to erase their religion and culture are destructive, shameful acts that will not be tolerated by the community of nations.

The West begins to stir over China’s massive abuse of Muslims

Foreign governments’ worries about East Turkestan reflect a deeper angst about China

The Economist

Few governments send ambassadors to China to be brave about human rights. 

Envoys to Beijing are scholars of realism, their fine minds applied to a delicate task: managing profitable relations with a deep-pocketed, unapologetic dictatorship.
It is, therefore, a big deal that at least 14 ambassadors from Western countries, led by Canada, have come together to confront China over its mass detentions of Muslims in the far-western colony of East Turkestan, most of them ethnic Uighurs. 

Officials say the purpose is to stamp out extremism. 

In a letter leaked to Reuters, a news agency, the ambassadors have asked to meet Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party’s boss in East Turkestan. 

A hardliner transferred from Tibet, Mr Chen oversees a gulag into which a million Uighurs have been sent for “transformation-through-education”, many for indefinite periods without trial.
Millions more endure surveillance by facial-recognition cameras, smartphone scanners and police patrols at every turn. 

Some must host officials as houseguests, sent to assess their loyalties. 

China calls these measures vital after violent attacks carried out in recent years by Uighur patriots.
It is revealing that China seems startled to find itself under ambassadorial scrutiny. 

It has some reason to be. 

Chinese officials cynically believe that Western leaders and envoys raise human rights out of a sense of reluctant obligation, in order to placate activists and public opinion back home. 

This time, however, the charge is being led by ambassadors, not the public. 

Envoys in Beijing admit that most people in their countries have never heard of East Turkestan or the Uighurs. 

They also concede that some folk back home might have mixed feelings were they to learn that the Uighurs stand accused of "terrorist" leanings.

Protesting Muslim bans, wherever they are found
East Turkestan’s agonies are hardly a vital national interest for the first countries to sign the draft letter—Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, joined by the European Union. 

Instead, a Western diplomat sees a stark test of principle, asking: if we do not protest when a million people are detained without trial, when will we speak out?
That points to another reason for China to be startled. 

It is years since human rights seriously disrupted Chinese foreign policy. 

China won a big victory in 1994 when America’s then president, Bill Clinton, abandoned his previous commitment to make China’s access to American markets conditional on its human-rights record. 

“We have reached the end of the usefulness of that policy,” Clinton mumbled, before expressing "hopes" that China would be changed by engagement with the world. 

For selfish reasons, other governments fell in line behind that same plan: a bet that a prosperous China would surely converge with an international order crafted by Western powers after the second world war, based on global trade, universal rights and the rule of law.
China has not converged. 

In the meantime, the post-war rules-based order has rarely felt so fragile.

That fragility explains why once-meek governments are finding their voices. 

It is why East Turkestan crashed onto the agenda of the Stockholm China Forum, a twice-yearly gathering of American, Chinese and European ambassadors, diplomats, scholars, politicians and business leaders, hosted recently by Sweden’s foreign ministry and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think-tank. 

A speaker predicted that East Turkestan’s woes would “explode in public opinion”.
Normally dispassionate, the forum saw sharp exchanges about East Turkestan. 

Speakers described hearings in Washington at which farm-state senators, who once cheered trade with China, used phrases like “Orwellian” and “concentration camps”. 

It was noted that China’s high-tech police state appals Europeans, who dread government surveillance, especially in Germany. 

Chinese accused the West of hypocrisy, saying: “This is not Guantánamo.” (True: there are only 40 inmates in Guantánamo.)
To be sure, the West is not united over how to defend the rules-based order. 

EU signatories to the ambassadors’ letter are mostly from northern Europe. 

From the China-led “16 plus one” grouping of former communist countries in Europe, the only signatory at the time of publication was Estonia. 

Australia, a big exporter to China, signed. 

New Zealand, another big exporter, did not.
America’s position is hard to predict. 

In a recent China-pounding speech, Vice-President Mike Pence was stern about East Turkestan. 

A bipartisan group of members of Congress wants Chinese officials to face sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, a law targeting human-rights abusers. 

But America’s envoy in Beijing did not sign the Canadian-drafted letter. 

Nobody can guarantee that Trump will uphold his government’s line when he sees his counterpart, Xi Jinping, later this month at a G20 meeting in Argentina, rather than beam that China is smart to be tough on Muslim "terrorists".
The wider world is not united. 

Turkey, which feels bonds of kinship with Uighurs, a Turkic people, was the only Muslim country to rebuke China at a recent meeting of the un Human Rights Council in Geneva. 

Other Muslim countries, many of them recipients of Chinese loans, praised China’s human rights.
Global argument over East Turkestan is likely to get fiercer. 

Horrible things are happening. 

International investors are growing jumpy about stakes in firms selling security kit used there. 

It matters that China’s talking points are outrageously cynical. 

Chinese lines tested in Stockholm include the claim that the camps "protect" the rights of Uighurs raised in remote, mainly Muslim areas. 

The camps offer modern employment skills, it was explained, and the right—guaranteed in China’s constitution—to choose your own religion or to believe in none. 

More propaganda like that, and ambassadors will not be the only ones asking hard questions.

China surveillance firms face backlash amid East Turkestan crackdown

By Michael Standaert
Visitors experience facial recognition technology at the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen last month

Shenzhen, China -- The video screen shows a constant procession of Chinese citizens moving past a camera at what appears to be a public festival, park or central city plaza.
Their faces are bracketed by yellow squares with various numbers hovering below, including each person's estimated age and gender. 

If the person is known to the system, their name appears too.
The facial recognition technology was just one of dozens of such systems at the China Hi-Tech Fair in the southern city of Shenzhen this month.
But while other companies tried to bring some levity to the dystopian feel by making cute dog heads appear on the faces of passers-by, others had no qualms about showcasing the Orwellian nature of their products.
Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi, which stresses the benefits of "civil-military integration" of its technologies, claims its "super-intelligent tracking system" leaves "nowhere to hide" for those it targets.
"It can find a person in a crowd of up to 8,000 people," a Kuang-Chi representative explains at the firm's prominent display at the entrance to the fair. 

"It is being used already by police in Chongqing and Shanghai and is 95 to 98 percent accurate."
For now, many Chinese appear to accept these new surveillance technologies as a way to make communities safer by tracking and identifying criminals, child abductors, and "terrorists".

'Techno-dystopian'
But outside the country questions are being asked about the more nefarious uses of such technologies, and the authorities' deployment of such systems to tighten control over their citizens and crack down on dissent, most notably in the far-western region of East Turkestan.
Last week, US legislators introduced bills that, if passed, would call on the commerce secretary to look into restrictions on technology sales to companies that are involved in providing surveillance technology in East Turkestan.
Chinese companies too might find themselves at risk of sanctions and restrictions.
"That risk is certainly appearing to be on the rise as the US government seems very determined to act against this repression, and to hold related companies responsible," said Adrian Zenz, a lecturer in social research methods at the European School of Culture & Theology, who has been following the East Turkestan situation closely.
"During conversations with State Department officials in September, I certainly got that very same impression, and I am not surprised that the government is moving towards specific actions and possible sanctions," Zenz told Al Jazeera.
The action proposed by Congress would authorise annual release reports on surveillance, detection, and control methods in East Turkestan, and create a list of leaders involved in hi-tech policing in the region including Party Secretary Chen Quanguo who could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, according to a draft.
"I believe we're at the very early stages of the matter, and will likely see this gain further prominence in the months ahead," said Adrian Shahbaz, research director of technology and democracy at Freedom House.
"Taking swift action to condemn the draconian surveillance state rapidly developing in East Turkestan is fundamental not only to protecting the human rights of millions of persecuted inhabitants there, but also to ensure the Chinese government is not given carte blanche to expand its techno-dystopian model to other parts of the country," Shahbaz added.

Customer and funder
Whether companies in China involved in developing surveillance systems that the government is using for policing in places such as East Turkestan are concerned depends on whether they are targeting the domestic market or harbour ambitions of expanding beyond China, analysts say.
"I think a lot of the companies that support surveillance tech are domestic companies and don't have a lot of international trade links," said Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch who has been studying the use of technology in the East Turkestan crackdown.
"Even trying to figure out the funding and where they are selling is just coming to the surface, and a lot of these smaller companies exist beneath the surface," Wang said.
Facial recognition, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technology that can be utilised for surveillance is a huge and growing business in China.
SenseTime, which describes itself as the world's "most valuable artificial intelligence unicorn" and is worth more than $4.5bn, is a major player in facial recognition systems.
But it is also China's biggest provider of AI algorithms and is involved in projects from the development of "intelligent cities" to autonomous cars and education.

Technology monitoring streets and people is a growing business in China

In September, China's ministry of science and technology signed a deal with SenseTime to establish a fifth national open innovation platform for "next-generation" AI, joining Tencent and Baidu.
At the Shenzhen fair, SenseTime was playing up the more benign applications of its technology from fixing blemishes to adding heart-shaped cat noses and whiskers to photos.
For these firms, it is China and its government that is their biggest market, and the latter is often their biggest source of funds too.

US legislators to urge China sanctions over East Turkestan crackdown

Proposed bill will urge President Trump to condemn crackdown on Uighurs, press for ban on sale of surveillance technology.
AL JAZEERA
People mingle in the old town of Kashgar in East Turkestan in March last year.

US legislators will introduce legislation on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to respond more strongly to China's crackdown on Uighur Muslims, including possible sanctions.
Te bill will also ask President Donald Trump to condemn China's actions in the East Turkestan colony, call for the appointment of a new "special coordinator" for US policy on the issue, and press for a ban on the export of technology that Beijing could use in surveillance and mass detention of the minority Uighurs, according to a copy seen by Reuters news agency.
The legislators want the government to consider human rights-related sanctions against East Turkestan Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who is also a member of the powerful politburo, and other officials "credibly alleged to be responsible" for the security crackdown.
"Chinese government officials should be held accountable for their complicity in this evil, and US businesses should be barred from helping China create a hi-tech police state in East Turkestan," said Chris Smith, a Republican representative and one of the sponsors of the bipartisan legislation that will be presented in both the upper and lower houses of Congress.
Trump's senior aides have become more vocal recently in their criticism of China's treatment of its minority Muslims in East Turkestan.
Any decision to impose sanctions, however, would be a rare move on human rights grounds against China, with which the Trump administration is engaged in a bitter trade war.
The White House and the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the legislative proposal, which is also being supported by Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez.

Global Magnitsky Act
Beijing has dismissed accusations of human rights abuses in East Turkestan and urged the United States and other countries to stay out of its internal affairs.
China's top diplomat said earlier on Tuesday the world should ignore "gossip" about developments in East Turkestan and trust the local authorities when asked if Beijing would allow international observers to inspect camps where Muslims are believed to be held.
Western countries -- including Canada, France, Germany, and the US -- have urged China to shut down the camps in East Turkestan, where as many as one million members of the Uighur minority and other Muslims are being held.
The Trump administration for several months has been considering targeted sanctions against Chinese senior officials and companies linked to the crackdown, US officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The measures could be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, a law that allows the US government to target human rights violators around the world by freezing any US assets, imposing bans on US travel, and prohibiting Americans from doing business with them.
Uighur activists in the US, meanwhile, marked their community's "independence day" with a protest march in Washington, DC on Tuesday.
American-Uighur Aydin Anwar told Al Jazeera that China was attempting to "wipe out" the Uighur identity.
November 12 is the 74th and 85th anniversary of two short-lived Uighur republics which were established in territory that is now part of China.

China's crimes against humanity

China Must End Its Campaign of Religious Persecution

By SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY Concentration Camps Construction is Booming in East Turkestan

The United States was founded on the premise that all individuals are created equal, with certain unalienable rights. 

Throughout our history, Americans have fought and died for these rights. 

They are ingrained in the fabric of our society and regularly debated, whether in coffee shops on Main Street or the halls of Congress.
Those fundamental rights and freedoms are part of our national identity, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. 

That’s why for more than a century, the United States has been a vocal supporter, not just rhetorically but financially, as well, of global humanitarian efforts.
Over the past two decades, religious persecution in China has become a larger and more pressing issue. 

The Department of State’s annual International Religious Freedom report has included the People’s Republic of China as a particularly concerning offender since 1999.
Disturbing reports have surfaced out of China of late detailing the imprisonment of Christian pastors, Bible burning, and demolishing of Christian churches. 

The Chinese government has rounded up more than one million Uighur and Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps. 

The state has long suppressed the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, as well as those who practice Falun Gong.
The Chinese government has removed crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 Christian churches as of a 2016 New York Times report, and has instructed police officers to stop citizens from entering their places of worship. 

There have been violent confrontations between government authorities and worshipers, and communist leaders have implemented restrictions prohibiting children 18 years old and younger from participating in religiously-focused education.
A piece published in Forbes earlier this year describes how Chinese authorities have bulldozed homes belonging to Uighur Muslims, collected passports to restrict travel and collected Uighur DNA and fingerprints in order to track its own citizens.
Communist leaders in China try to explain away these abuses by reiterating their commitment to preserving the Chinese culture, a practice known as sinicization. 

Approximately 100 million people in China belong to religious groups that are outside what the Chinese government deems acceptable. 

That’s approximately 100 million people who are subject to persecution by communist leaders in China, and even those that practice an officially sanctioned religion have not been spared harassment. That persecution stems from religious differences and has spread to other areas of daily life, including the restriction of social media.
The United States doesn’t have the singular authority to stop the religious persecution occurring in China, but it can apply significant pressure to Chinese leaders by linking the need for religious freedom to the economic and political aspects of our bilateral relationship that are important to China. As China’s largest trading partner, the United States is in a powerful position to influence Chinese leaders and stand up for human rights. 

Fighting for religious liberty should be a central part of the United States’ relationship with China. Senator David Perdue and I, with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a resolution condemning violence against religious minorities in China and reaffirming America’s commitment to promote religious freedom and tolerance around the world. 

It also calls on China to uphold its Constitution and urges the President and his administration to take actions to promote religious freedom through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1988, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, and the Global Magnitsky Act.
No matter where they live, everyone should be able to freely express their religious beliefs. 

The United States has been a beacon of freedom since before its founding. 

We must continue that tradition by doing what we can to promote human rights and freedoms both here and around the globe.

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.”

Evil Nation

China finally admits it is building a new archipelago of concentration camps. Will the world respond?
The Washington Post

A child and woman in Peyzawat in China’s East Turkestan colony on Aug. 31. 

WHEN REPORTS began filtering out of China last year about a massive indoctrination and internment drive against ethnic Muslim Uighurs in the colony of East Turkestan, the government in Beijing denied that anything was going on. 

Later, China acknowledged that criminals and people who committed minor offenses might be sent to “vocational education” centers there. 

Now, the regime has gone a step further, revising a regional law to admit the dark reality: An archipelago of concentration camps has been built.
China has long used harsh penal systems for dissidents and political prisoners. 

One branch, known as “laojiao,” or “reeducation through labor,” existed outside the regular prison system. 

People were sent to reeducation by public security agencies without trial or legal procedure; it was widely used for dissidents and petty criminals, according to Adrian Zenz, a lecturer in social research methods at the European School of Culture and Theology, in Korntal, Germany. 

In 2013, China’s government closed down this system, seeing it as a relic of the past. 

At the time, Mr. Zenz estimates, it had 350 facilities with about 160,000 people.
Then, in 2017, China began rapidly erecting a “reeducation” system aimed at the restive Uighur population and other Muslim minorities, including Kazakhs. 

Like the earlier version, the new incarceration system was to be extrajudicial: no due process, no rule of law. 

According to Mr. Zenz, who has studied it, the scale is huge; there are now more than 1 million Uighurs and others incarcerated, or 11.5 percent of the Uighur population of East Turkestan between ages 20 and 79. 

There may be as many as 1,200 facilities. 

In a recent talk at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Mr. Zenz described them as bleak, with hardened floors, watchtowers, no trees, high fences and endless hours of “reeducation” to make the Uighurs think like the majority Han Chinese. 

He pointed out that the intent is not to kill people but to kill the memory of who they are, to wipe out their separate identity, language and history. 

Even the slightest perceived infraction, such as having a copy of the Koran on a phone or making a contact abroad, can result in incarceration.
A regional law on “de-extremification” was issued in 2017 at the outset of the East Turkestan roundup. 

But now, Chinese authorities have revised it, and acknowledged the existence of the new gulag, though in opaque language. 

The goal, the revised law says, is to “carry out de-extremification ideological education, psychological rehabilitation, and behavioral corrections, to promote ideological conversion of those receiving education and training, returning them to society and to their families.” 

In other words, to brainwash them.
The U.S.-China agenda is admittedly tense over trade, North Korea and the South China Sea. 

But something as brazen and dangerous as this calls for action. 

A good start would be for Congress and the administration to demand unfettered international inspections in East Turkestan, and to consider selected sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against officials who commit gross human rights abuses — such as wiping out an entire people’s identity.