Chinazism

It has been a bad week for Beijing, with new support for pro-democracy protesters and detailed evidence of the repression in the north-western colony

The Guardian

Beijing was never going to welcome the news that the US had passed a law backing pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. 

But its anger today at Donald Trump’s signing of a bill it condemns as “full of prejudice and arrogance” perhaps had extra bite. 

This was its third blow in a week. 

On Monday, leaders woke up to a pro-democracy landslide in Hong Kong’s local elections, and the publication of leaked documents exposing the workings of concentration camps in East Turkestan, where at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims are detained.
China’s bullishness has already been challenged by the trade war and slowing economic growth, now at a 27-year low. 

President Trump has previously made it clear that he regards Hong Kong’s protesters as leverage, and has shown he does not want this law to hinder a trade deal that both sides need and appear to be close to agreeing. 

China is hoping he will not implement the law, which enables sanctions on individuals and the revocation of the region’s special trade status if annual reviews find that it has not retained sufficient autonomy.
The passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act may prove to be most important in embodying the striking shift in US attitudes towards China. 

The shift has taken place across the political spectrum and it is not primarily about what has changed in America, but what has changed in China: its ever-increasing authoritarianism under Xi Jinping.

Western engagement with China rested largely on a blithe and now utterly discredited assumption that economic liberalisation would bring political freedoms. 

The bilateral relationship is responding to the change in China’s relationship with its own people. 

The tightened grip has been seen most clearly on its periphery, in East Turkestan and Hong Kong, albeit by very different means and to very different degrees.
The erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy has been clearer precisely because it still enjoys freedoms and rights denied to people on the mainland, who do not get to deliver a verdict on their leaders. 

Though the district council elections are usually low stakes affairs, they had effectively become a referendum on the city’s political future. 

Communist authorities have believed that a “silent majority” would come out to reject the protests by voting for pro-Beijing candidates. 

The silent majority duly showed up – with turnout soaring in the biggest electoral exercise the city has seen – but overwhelmingly backed the other side. 

Pro-democracy candidates took 392 seats (to 60) and seized control of 17 out of 18 district councils. 

The message was clear. 

Hong Kong people embrace peaceful democratic means when they are available. 

And they are on the side of the protesters.Extraordinary levels of control and surveillance make it far harder to determine what is happening in East Turkestan, despite dogged researchers and horrifying accounts of abuse and torture from former camp inmates and their families. 

Now documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the Guardian and other media partners have laid bare their workings.

Authorities initally denied the camps and now portray them as "vocational training centres". 

The internal papers tell another story: “Never allow escapes.”
These two stories are connected by more than the wrath they have roused in Beijing. 

Despite the gulf between the cultures and experiences of the regions, people in Hong Kong increasingly cite the north-western colony as a kind of warning, seeing East Turkestan as at the far end of a slope down which they will slide unless they take a stand now.
In recent years, China’s economic might has silenced many critics and muted others. 

Though the new US law and renewed protests over the treatment of Muslim minorities in the wake of the leaked files suggest things may be evolving, many will decide it is too costly to care. 

After this week, however, they can no longer say they did not know.

Leaked Documents Expose the Machinery of China’s Prison Camps

The new materials reveal how Beijing’s internment of Uighur Muslims actually works—and who is complicit.
BY JAMES PALMER

A screen shows an image of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Kashgar, East Turkestan, on June 4. 

A major set of leaked documents revealing new information about China’s increasingly well-documented oppression of Muslims in East Turkestan has been translated and published, thanks to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in a project led by frequent Foreign Policy contributor Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian. 

These came after an earlier leak published by the New York Times.
Experts say more than 1 million Uighurs and members of other, mostly Muslim minority groups are detained in East Turkestan.
The leaks appear to stem from different sources: The New York Times documents mostly include materials about internal Chinese Communist Party speeches and rhetoric, whereas the ICIJ one concentrates on the practicalities of the crackdown. 

One of the most important among them is a manual that lays out the conditions for the so-called “students” in the camps, including security and the prevention of any escape.

Grim revelations. 

The papers confirm the size and scope of the detentions. 

One passage describes more than 15,000 Uighurs being swept into the camps in a single week in one region. 

Another document reveals that even routine Muslim worship is now enough to result in imprisonment. 

Algorithmic policing and surveillance through the Integrated Joint Operations Platform system, now routinely deployed throughout China, appears to play an important role.

Whereas Beijing has claimed that foreigners are misinterpreting the New York Times leaks, its denial of the ICIJ documents, which more directly detail oppression on the ground, has been strong. 

Chinese government officials and proxies have become highly aggressive in interviews, denying claims as “fake news.”
The publication of two separate leaks—both likely delivered at great personal risk to the individuals involved, who could face execution if caught—suggests serious discontent. 

They could be cases of a change in conscience or could indicate growing dissatisfaction with the hard-line turn under Chinese dictator Xi Jinping as a whole. 

Either way, they have already begun to reinforce Beijing’s paranoia about the foreign press.

International reactions. 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the camps once again, while many Muslim-majority nations—some of which previously signed a letter supporting Chinese policies in East Turkestan—remained silent. 

International outrage, however, is not confined to official responses. 

Public reactions included, most notably, an Afghan American teenager’s successful subversion of the Chinese-owned app TikTok to talk about the atrocities. (TikTok subsequently banned her account.)

Towards the International Criminal Court for Xi Jinping's Crimes in East Turkestan?

UK calls for UN access to Chinese concentration camps in East Turkestan

Foreign Office responds after leaked China cables appear to confirm brainwashing centres
By Juliette Garside and Emma Graham-Harrison

A facility in Artux, one of a growing number of internment camps in East Turkestan where an estimated 1 million Muslims are detained. 

The UK has urged China to give United Nations observers “immediate and unfettered access” to concentration camps in East Turkestan, where more than a million people from the Uighur community and other Muslim minorities are being held without trial.
The call from the Foreign Office was in response to the China cables, a leak of classified documents from within the Communist party which provide the first official confirmation that the camps were designed by Beijing as brainwashing internment centres.
The documents describe how inmates are to be cut off from their families for at least a year and held behind multiple layers of security to undergo ideological transformation.

The International Criminal Court building is seen in The Hague, Netherlands, in this January 16, 2019, photograph. 

The leak prompted the Foreign Office to demand “an end to the indiscriminate and disproportionate restrictions on the cultural and religious freedoms of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan.”
A spokesperson added: “The UK continues to call on China to allow UN observers immediate and unfettered access to the region.”
In Brussels, the European commission condemned the use of “political re-education camps”. 

In a statement the commission said it would not comment on the details of the leak, but insisted it would continue to raise the issue of human rights abuses in East Turkestan with Chinese government officials.
“We have consistently spoken out against the existence of political re-education camps, widespread surveillance and restrictions of freedom of religion or belief against Uighurs and other minorities in East Turkestan,” a spokeswoman said.
“We as the European Union continue to expect China to uphold its international obligations and to respect human rights, including when it comes to the rights of persons belonging to minorities, especially in East Turkestan but also in Tibet, and we will continue to affirm those positions in this context in particular.”
In July, 22 countries at the UNs’ top human rights body took the unusual step of issuing an joint statement calling for China to end its arbitrary detentions and other violations against the rights of Muslims in the north-west border colony of East Turkestan.
Signatories included the UK, Australia, Canada and a number of European countries. 

The statement urged China to allow “meaningful access” to the region independent international observers, including Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
Chinese authorities deny they run detention camps and say the “vocational education and training centres” are part of a focused crackdown on extremism and terrorists.
However, the China cables point to the ruling party setting out a blueprint for human rights violations.
Reports of a crackdown first emerged two years ago, as hundreds of thousands of muslims in East Turkestan were rounded up into secretive, newly built and heavily guarded compounds.
Xi Jinping’s government took action following a rise in terrorist attacks. 

In 2009, nearly 200 people died during riots in the East Turkestan capital, Urumqi. 

Dozens more were then killed and hundreds injured over the following years.
The China cables contain dozens of pages of orders covering the setting up of the camps and the establishment of a vast digital surveillance operation being used to identify new detainees.
In a single week in June 2017, the digital platform flagged up 24,412 “suspicious” individuals in one part of southern East Turkestan alone. 

Of these, more than 15,000 were sent to re-education camps, and a further 706 were jailed.The cables reveal camps must adhere to a strict system of total physical and mental control, with multiple layers of locks on dormitories, corridors, floors and buildings.
Inmates could be held indefinitely – but must serve at least a year in the camps before they can even be considered for “completion”, or release. 

Weekly phone calls and a monthly video call with relatives are their only contact with the outside world, and they can be suspended as punishment.
Control of every aspect of their lives is so comprehensive that they have to be assigned a specific place not only in dormitories and classrooms, but even in the lunchtime queue.
Obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with the Guardian and 16 other media partners, the documents have been independently assessed by experts who have concluded they are authentic.

China's crimes against humanity

More Secrets of China's East Turkestan Camps Leaked to Foreign Media

By Reuters


SHANGHAI — Classified Chinese government documents made public by an international group of journalists describe the repressive inner workings of concentration camps in East Turkestan, in a second rare leak in days of secret files concerning the troubled western region.
The publication on Sunday of the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) follows a New York Times report on Nov. 16 based on a cache of secret papers revealing details of China's clamp-down on ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in the region.
United Nations experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in camps in East Turkestan.
The ICIJ https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-cables/exposed-chinas-operating-manuals-for-mass-internment-and-arrest-by-algorithm says it obtained a 2017 list of guidelines "that effectively serves as a manual for operating the camps", with instructions on how to prevent escapes, maintain secrecy about the camps' existence, indoctrinate internees and "when to let detainees see relatives or even use the toilet".
Other documents it obtained include "intelligence briefings" showing how police have been "guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of East Turkestan residents for detention".
Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a news conference on Monday that East Turkestan affairs were an internal matter of China's.
The leaks come amid a rising international outcry over China's broader human rights record in East Turkestan.

The United States has led more than 30 countries in condemning what it called a "horrific campaign of repression".
Beijing denies any mistreatment of Uighurs or others in East Turkestan, saying it is providing "vocational training" to help stamp out Islamist extremism and separatism and to teach new skills.