Chinese Doublespeak

‘Human rights with Chinese characteristics’ are in fact crimes against humanity
By Omer Kanat

In 2017, three days before Human Rights Day on December 10, Beijing hosted the ‘South-South Human Rights Forum.’

The event took place as the Chinese authorities were interning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in concentration camps. 

More than 300 delegates from 70 countries attended. 

The outcome document, the ‘Beijing Declaration,’ affirmed states should “choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.” 

In sum, China sought an international clearance for the concept of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ sublimating individual and collective freedoms to the needs of the state.

The world is learning quickly about the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of human rights. 

In East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Taiwan, and China’s heartland, the Chinese government has met any opposition with repression and destabilization. 

Indeed, the application of the latest technologies to create a pervasive system of surveillance indicates the party has taken the step of preempting any resistance to its authoritarian rule. 

The recent leaks of government documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times lay bare how the party intends to commit cultural genocide against the Uyghur people through “no mercy” policies.
The label ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ is a misnomer. 

It is how the Chinese Communist Party attempts to entangle the interests of Chinese people with the logics of their continued power. 

If it was at all possible, just ask any one of the imprisoned Chinese human rights lawyers how they feel about “the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and human rights protection.” 

However, the imposition of the party’s vision of human rights does not stop at China’s borders. 

The profitable export of surveillance technology enables states to restrict the fundamental human rights of individuals on every continent.

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uighurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony and ask for the closure of “re-education center” where Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. 

Human Rights Day commemorates the day the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a foundational document outlining rights standards and translated into over 500 languages, including Uyghur. 

It’s worth revisiting the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

From Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to Article 9, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” to Article 20, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” China is in open violation of these fundamental rights in regards to the Uyghur people.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Chinese government is actively subverting the concept of universal human rights by cooking up its own version. 

Since 2017, evidence of mass arbitrary detention and torture of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples has become indisputable. 

The Chinese government has rationalized these crimes against humanity within the logics of ‘vocational training,’ as if the systemic ethnocide of their people was somehow in the interests of the Uyghurs.

File photo posted by the East Turkestan Judicial Administration to its WeChat account. 

However, the Chinese Communist Party does not limit the spread of its concept of human rights to events such as the South-South Human Rights Forum. 

More alarming, Beijing is leveraging the United Nations itself to undermine the standards set out in the UDHR. 

In recent years, China has been able to mute criticism, as well as find champions for its rights abuses among UN member states. 

This has been partly achieved through an exchange of loans and grants for silence and support, as well as threats and intimidation.
Furthermore, China has targeted individual human rights defenders. 

In 2017, China tried to prevent me from delivering my statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, and at the 2019 Forum, it attempted to do the same to the President of the World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa. 

In 2013, China detained Cao Shunli, who was on her way to attend China’s Universal Periodic Review in 2013. 

She was charged with illegal assembly, picking quarrels and provoking trouble and died in detention in 2014. 

Remember, this is a state the UN Secretary-General has called “a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism.”
Among the enablers of Xi Jinping’s repression are states with disreputable records attracted to a possible exemption from universal standards that ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ affords. 

And again, if we could freely ask the populations who reside in these states how they feel about such a concept, there would be few advocates. 

Therefore, on Human Rights Day, we have a responsibility to defend those who defend universal values and be clear ‘never again’ has meaning. 

There is injustice everywhere and we must fight it. 

Uyghurs are among them, for example, the imprisoned Ilham Tohti, and in exile Rebiya Kadeer, Rushan Abbas, and Gulchehra Hoja, whose families have been detained and disappeared in East Turkestan because of their advocacy. 

The second ‘South-South Human Rights Forum’ is opening in Shanghai for this year’s Human Rights Day. 

The dangerous fiction of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ that there are exceptions to the universality of rights should be firmly resisted.

China's Final Solution

China secretly abducted in Germany a university president and convicted him in a sham trial. He may be executed

• A prominent Chinese Uyghur may be facing imminent execution by the Chinese goverment. 
• Tashpolat Tiyip was seized in Germany while on a trip to a conference there, and has been held in unknown conditions since.
• As many as 3 million Chinese Muslims, including Uyghurs, are being held in concentration camps in China's East Turkestan colony. 
• They face interrogation, torture, and indoctrination by the Chinese Communist Party.

By Ellen Ioanes

Uyghur intellectual Tashpolat Tiyip may be facing imminent execution by the Chinese government after two years of languishing in secret detention, Amnesty International reports.
Tiyip was the president of East Turkestan University, and was visiting Germany with students for a conference in 2017 when he was forcibly detained while traveling, one of hundreds of prominent Uyghurs who have disappeared as Chinese authorities have relocated millions of these Muslim citizens to concentration camps in the country's west.
Tiyip underwent a secret and "grossly unfair" trial where he was convicted of "separatism" and sentenced to a "suspended death sentence" — where the detainee is eligible for commutation after two years provided they have committed no other crimes — two years ago this September, according to Amnesty International. 

The rights group reports that he is being held in unknown conditions, and that his execution could be imminent, as the two-year reprieve period comes to an end this month.
Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International's East Asia Regional Office, told Insider that it's not uncommon for Uighur intellectuals to be targeted by the Chinese government.
"From my research and interviews with other Uyghurs, some other Uyghur intellectuals were also accused of this [separatism] charge, not mention the famous case of Ilham Tohti," he told Insider via email.
Tohti is a Uyghur scholar who has been detained by the Chinese government for the past five years. He was given a life sentence after being convicted of separatism in a two-day trial. 

Ilham is a well-known scholar on Uyghur issues and an advocate for Uyghur rights, according to PEN America.
Frank Bencosme, Amnesty's U.S.-based Asia Pacific advocacy manager, told Radio Free Asia that no exact timeline regarding Tiyip's case has been made available, and there has been no communication from the Chinese government about their plans to execute him.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project counts 386 cases of Uyghur intellectuals currently detained, disappeared, or imprisoned as of March of this year, including scholars, students, journalists, and artists.
Darren Byler, a scholar at the University of Washington who focuses on Uyghur culture, explained the purpose of targeting Uyghur intellectuals. 

"In the past these figures served as models for younger generations of Uyghurs," he told the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
"Their criminalization sends the message throughout Uyghur society that the space for permitted difference, for Uyghur-ness, has now been drastically reduced. It makes it clear that any self-determined celebration of Uyghur values is no longer permitted."
"Ordinary Uyghurs hold great hopes for these elites," Tahir Hamut, a Uyghur poet, said. 

"Therefore, the attack on these elites will destroy the hope of Uyghur society and plunge Uyghurs into despair. Perhaps the Communist Party of China would like to see this result."
The Chinese government has been targeting ethnic Uyghur minorities in East Turkestan colony for years, particularly since 2017, keeping them in so-called "re-education camps" under brutal conditions.
The Chinese government claims the camps are "vocational education centers" aimed at stemming Islamic extremism. 

But Randall Schriver, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, said "The (Chinese) Communist Party is using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps," during a Pentagon briefing in May, Reuters reported. 

Schriver said at the same meeting that close to 3 million Chinese Muslims, including Uyghurs, are in the camps.
Detainees have reported being interrogated, tortured, and forced to consume Communist party propaganda at the camp, where they are guarded from watchtowers and fenced in my razor wire. Some have committed suicide, according to Reuters.

China's crimes against humanity

China Targets Uighur Intellectuals to Erase an Ethnic Identity
By Austin Ramzy

Rahile Dawut, above with camera, is an anthropologist at East Turkestan University who studied Islamic shrines, traditional songs and folklore. She was detained in December 2017 and has not been heard from since.

ISTANBUL — As a writer and magazine editor, Qurban Mamut promoted the culture and history of his people, the Uighurs, and that of other Turkic minority groups who live in far western China.

He did so within the strict confines of censorship imposed by the Chinese authorities, who are ever wary of ethnic separatism and Islamic extremism among the predominantly Muslim peoples of the region.
It was a line that Mr. Mamut navigated successfully for 26 years, eventually rising to become editor in chief of the Communist Party-controlled magazine Xinjiang Civilization before retiring in 2011.
“My father is very smart; he knows what is the red line, and if you cross it you are taken to jail,” said his son, Bahram Sintash, who now lives in Virginia. 

“You work very close to the red line to teach people the culture. You have to be smart and careful with your words.”
Then last year, the red line moved. 

Suddenly, Mr. Mamut and more than a hundred other Uighur intellectuals who had successfully navigated the worlds of academia, art and journalism became the latest targets of a sweeping crackdown in the colony of East Turkestan that has ensnared as many as one million Muslims in indoctrination camps.
The mass detention of some of China’s most accomplished Uighurs has become an alarming symbol of the Communist Party’s most intense social-engineering drive in decades, according to scholars, human rights advocates and exiled Uighurs.
As the guardians of Uighur traditions, chroniclers of their history and creators of their art, the intellectuals were building the Central Asian, Turkic-speaking society’s reservoir of collective memory within the narrow limits of authoritarian rule. 

Their detention underscores the party’s attempts to decimate Uighur identity in order to remold the group into a people who are largely secular, integrated into mainstream Chinese culture and compliant with the Communist Party.
The Chinese government has described the detentions as a job training program aimed at providing employment opportunities for some of the country’s poorest people. 

But a list of more than 100 detained Uighur scholars compiled by exiles includes many prominent poets and writers, university heads and professors of everything from anthropology to Uighur history.
“The fact that highly educated intellectuals and academics and scientists and software engineers are being held in these facilities is one of the best counterarguments to authorities’ claims that this is some kind of educational program meant to benefit Uighurs,” said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The removal of high-profile Uighur scholars familiar with the Chinese government, and the country’s education and legal systems, is aimed at erasing not only the group’s unique ethnic identity but also its ability to defend such traditions, said a Uighur professor now living in Istanbul who asked not to be identified because of possible risks to family in East Turkestan.

Qurban Mamut, a magazine editor in East Turkestan who has been detained. “My father is very smart; he knows what is the red line,” his son said.

Many scholars trace the assault on intellectuals to the imprisonment of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist, in 2014. 

Mr. Tohti, who was an outspoken critic of the discrimination Uighurs face in China, was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of separatism.
More detentions came in 2017. 

Many of those targeted worked on preserving Uighur culture.
Rahile Dawut, one of the most well known of the disappeared Uighur academics, is an anthropologist at East Turkestan University who studied Islamic shrines, traditional songs and folklore. 

Ms. Dawut was detained in December 2017 and hasn’t been heard from since.
Before the crackdown, the Uighur intellectual elite offered a bridge between the body of Uighur society, who number about 11 million and are largely poor farmers, and the much wealthier Han Chinese, who dominate economic and political power. 

The scholars also worked carefully to try to improve the lot of a group that complained of widespread discrimination and draconian restrictions on religious activity.
These scholars offered a moderate path, where Uighurs could maintain religious and cultural practices without turning to extreme and isolationist ideas, said Rune Steenberg, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.
“This is the really big tragedy about the clampdown,” Dr. Steenberg said. 

“They were actually bridge builders of integration of broader Uighur society into modern Chinese society and economy.”
Many young Uighurs have been inspired by the scholars’ accomplishments, said Erkin Sidick, a Uighur engineer who went to the United States for graduate school in 1988 and now works on telescopes for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Mr. Sidick said hundreds would attend informal talks he gave on pursuing graduate degrees and many closely studied a book he published that compiled biographies of Uighur academics.
“Uighur people value education very much,” he said.
Now, Uighurs keep a grimmer list of Uighur intellectuals — those who have disappeared in the current campaign.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet who lives in Virginia, began working with other Uighur exiles to collect the names of those detained over the past year based on news reports and information from families and classmates. 

The list has now grown to 159 Uighurs and five others from other minority groups.
“These people are all the most prestigious in East Turkestan,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“They are models who all study diligently and raise themselves up. Their arrest is a great injury, a great attack to all Uighurs.”
The Chinese authorities have accused Uighurs in official positions of being “two-faced,” or mouthing the official line in public but resisting the crackdown in private. 

Such labels have surrounded the removal of several top administrators at universities in East Turkestan.

Many scholars trace the assault on intellectuals to the imprisonment of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist, in 2014.

The East Turkestan government propaganda department and the news office for the State Council, China’s cabinet, did not respond to faxed requests for comment. 

But officials in East Turkestan have clearly stated their resolve to pursue people they see as hindering efforts to rewire Uighurs and steer them from what authorities have called religious extremism.
“Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins,” wrote Maisumujiang Maimuer, a religious affairs official, in a commentary in the state news media. “Completely shovel up the roots of ‘two-faced people,’ dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.”
The campaign has not spared scholars who expressed support for the party, such as Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, a scholar of medieval Central Asian poetry at East Turkestan Normal University who worked to preserve Uighur culture and identity.
“He was a very moderate man who always tried to give a balanced view, so much so that a lot of Uyghur nationalists accused him of selling out to the regime,” Rachel Harris, who studies Uighur music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has known Jalaleddin for more than a decade, said in an email. (Uyghur is an alternative spelling of Uighur.)
Last year, Jalaleddin joined a government-led campaign for prominent Uighurs to write open letters declaring their allegiance to the state.
Despite that declaration, he was detained in January 2018, according to overseas Uighur organizations.
“So many moderate intellectuals have been detained now,” Dr. Harris said.
“I don’t know how else to understand this, except as a deliberate policy to deprive Uyghurs of their cultural memory.”
It is a pattern that has repeated itself in the far western colony.
The authorities targeted Uighur intellectuals after the People’s Liberation Army occupied East Turkestan in 1949, and even before in the late 1930s, when East Turkestan was ruled by a Soviet-backed warlord, said Ondrej Klimes, a researcher with the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences who studies East Turkestan and the Uighurs.
“It makes the community easier to be subjugated, more cooperative, more docile,” Dr. Klimes said.
“You have this whenever an authoritarian regime comes, they first target intellectuals.”
By detaining so many influential figures, the government appears to be acknowledging that its efforts to woo Uighurs to accept the primacy of the Chinese state have failed, and that it must use more forceful methods, Dr. Steenberg said.
“The government has lost,” he said, “and now like a chess player about to lose, it swipes the board.”

China's human rights record to be examined in UN review

Treatment of minorities, detentions and suppression of freedoms to be scrutinised
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

A protest against the Chinese government’s detention of Muslim minorities in September in India. 

China’s human rights record will be examined on Tuesday at a UN event expected to focus on Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities, detention of activists and suppression of religious and civil freedoms.
The process, known as a universal periodic review (UPR), takes place every five years for each UN member state. 

The country under review is meant to demonstrate how it has followed previous recommendations as well as answer questions from states, NGOs and others.
Advance questions from member states have focused on China’s treatment of ethnic minorities in East Turkestan, where an estimated 1 million ethnic Uighurs and others are detained in a network of internment camps.
Others raised questions about press freedoms in Hong Kong, where a journalist with the Financial Times was in effect expelled; the detention of Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai; and the detention of human rights defenders such as the lawyer Wang Quanzhang, the Uighur activist Ilham Tohti, and the dissident Huang Qi, who is believed to be suffering from chronic kidney disease, an accumulation of fluid in the brain, and heart disease.
On Monday, a group of 14 NGOs called on China to release Huang on the basis that there was an immediate threat to his life. 

According to the statement, authorities have repeatedly rejected applications for release on medical bail, allowing his health to deteriorate.
Critics say this year’s review highlights how China’s human rights record has deteriorated under the leadership of Xi Jinping. 

“What is most telling is that we are asking the same questions as we head into China’s third review. That some of the same issues are still coming up is a powerful statement of how little progress China has made,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.
Rights activists say China has sought to suppress the voices of dissidents at events on the global stage such as this. 

Fewer Chinese activists and NGOs are participating in the review process than in years past, in what some call the “Cao Shunli effect”, after the activist who was detained for participating in China’s UPR in 2009 and 2013. 

Cao died in a military hospital in 2014 after being denied treatment.
“All UN member states have an equal opportunity to press China on its egregious human rights record, and they shouldn’t waste it,” said John Fisher, the Geneva director at Human Rights Watch.
“Chinese activists have been imprisoned, tortured, and fatally mistreated for the chance to challenge Beijing over its human rights record.”

China's Final Solution

China's paranoia and oppression in East Turkestan has a long history

By James Griffiths

Hong Kong -- China finally admitted this week what had been widely reported: that it is interning thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people in "re-education camps" in the far-western colony of East Turkestan.
Human rights groups previously estimated that as many as one million people have been held in the camps, which satellite photos show have sprung up across the region in recent months.
Along with restrictions on halal food, Islamic dress, and general religiosity, the ongoing crackdown has primarily affected the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group who historically were the majority in the region.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang defended recent measures at a press briefing Thursday, saying "taking measures to prevent and crack down on terrorism and extremism have helped preserve stability, as well as the life and livelihood of people of all ethnicities in East Turkestan."
While the strategies Beijing is taking are new -- and include a state-of-the-art surveillance regime -- they echo a longtime paranoia about East Turkestan and a deep suspicion of its non-Han population among China's rulers which have historically resulted in oppression and rebellion.
East Turkestan is vast. 

Stretching 1.6 million square kilometers (640,000 sq miles) from the Tibetan plateau in the southeast to Kazakhstan on its north-western border, it is by far China's largest colony, but one of its least densely populated. 

Around 22 million people reside in the region, most of whom live around the major cities of Urumqi, Kashgar and Yining.
While Chinese armies rampaged through East Turkestan and controlled parts of it for centuries, the modern administrative unit only dates to the mid-nineteenth century, a fact hinted at by its Chinese name, which translates as "new frontier" in Chinese.
Despite the Communist Party's claims that "East Turkestan has since ancient times been an inseparable part of the motherland," the relatively recent imperial conquest of East Turkestan has always been accompanied by an ever present paranoia that it could break away from Chinese rule, becoming another "Outer Mongolia."
During the Sino-Soviet split, there was a deep fear in Beijing that Moscow would seek to annex East Turkestan, which bordered the then Soviet Union, or encourage ethnic minority groups to rebel.
This was a very real possibility: during the 1930s and 40s, as the short-lived Nationalist government fought a civil war with the Communists and faced a growing threat of Japanese invasion, two breakaway East Turkestan Republics were declared and swiftly put down.
While the East Turkestan independence movements (and their successors today) were largely based on ethno-nationalist arguments about a homeland for Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, since the turn of the millennium Beijing's chief concern has been the potential spread of radical Islam in the region, and the alleged influence of international terrorist organizations.
Particularly in the wake of September 11, 2001, as Washington sought Beijing's support in its "war on terror," the Chinese government linked unrest in East Turkestan with Islamist groups overseas, succeeding in getting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) listed as a terrorist organization by the US.
This was despite there being such little information available on ETIM at the time or evidence supporting Beijing's claims that some openly questioned whether it existed as a coherent group at all.

A woman stands in front of police and riot vehicles on July 7, 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan.

Ethnic unrest
Even as the authorities were focused on Islamic terrorism, the biggest unrest in East Turkestan in recent years appeared to have nothing to do with religion.
A mass protest which broke out after a police crackdown on a smaller demonstration spiraled out of control in July 2009, and saw rioters rampage through Urumqi armed with clubs, knives and stones.
They randomly attacked and in many cases beat to death any Han Chinese they found in the streets, including women and elderly people, and set cars, houses and shops on fire.
It took around 20,000 paramilitary police and People's Liberation Army soldiers to quell the unrest, which left at least 197 Han and Uygur people dead, according to Chinese state media.
Internet access to all of East Turkestan, along with international phone and text messaging services, was cut off for almost a year in the wake of the violence.
Since the 2009 violence -- which came shortly after unrest in Tibet -- restrictions on the lives of ordinary Uyghurs in East Turkestan have increased, even as the space to criticize and push for alternative policies has narrowed.
The region has a multitude of problems deserving of discussion beyond security and ethnic unrest. East Turkestan is one of China's poorest areas, and development has lagged other parts of the country. Uyghurs and other minorities complain of discrimination in employment and education, and corruption is rife within state-controlled industries that continue to dominate the local economy.
Increasingly however, any criticism of these issues -- particularly anything which touches on ethnic or religious matters -- is cast as advocating for independence or seeking to undermine the government.
In 2014, Ilham Tohti, a Beijing-based economics professor who was considered one of the leading moderate Chinese voices on East Turkestan, was jailed for life for "separatism" and spreading "ethnic hatred."
His arrest and the severity of his sentence shocked many supporters, who warned that by stamping out voices such as Ilham's, "the Chinese Government is in fact laying the groundwork for the very extremism it says it wants to prevent."
This prediction has largely been borne out, especially as Chinese authorities have ramped up restrictions on Islam in the name of fighting terrorism, including banning veils and bears, cracking down on Quran study groups, and preventing Muslim officials from fasting for Ramadan.
Both Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have featured East Turkestan in their propaganda in recent years, and Uyghur fighters have been spotted in Syria and Iraq.
Uyghurs have also been linked to numerous violent attacks in East Turkestan and other parts of China, though it is disputed how many of these incidents are linked to or directed by overseas militant groups.

A person wearing a white mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uyghurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights East Turkestan in April 2018.

No way out
Beijing's paranoia about separatism in East Turkestan is real.
But despite numerous warnings about this resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy, the authorities' reaction has only been to crack down harder and restrict Muslim life further.
Chinese officials argue that without a firm hand, the country's far west risks turning into another Syria, where rebel groups and Islamist militants backed by foreign powers, including the US, have plunged the country into a years-long civil war.
This narrative has been used to justify not only restrictions on Islam, but the massive securitization of East Turkestan, with armed police manning checkpoints across cities, surveillance cameras everywhere, and citizens unable to leave the region.
That approach reached its zenith in the past year with the expanding network of "re-education camps," where predominantly Uyghur internees are forced to attend "anti-extremist ideological" classes and their behavior -- particularly religious behavior -- is tightly controlled.
"Detentions are extra-legal, with no legal representation allowed throughout the process of arrest and incarceration," according to the World Uyghur Congress, a Germany-based umbrella group for the Uyghur diaspora, which recently submitted evidence to the United Nations about the camps.
While the Chinese government initially pushed back against these claims -- saying "East Turkestan citizens including the Uyghurs enjoy equal freedoms and rights" -- the apparent acknowledgment and legalization of the camps this week, as well as increasing discussion of the issue in state media, indicates Beijing may be doubling down on its policies in East Turkestan in the face of growing international condemnation.
Washington has recently found its voice on East Turkestan, where it long overlooked abuses by Beijing. 

This week, US lawmakers announced their intention to nominate Ilham Tohti for the Nobel Peace Prize, the award of which in 2010 to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo infuriated Beijing. 

Liu died of cancer last year while still in Chinese government custody.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu rejected US criticism at a regular press briefing Thursday, saying people had "been creating lies and launching baseless accusations at the appropriate counter-terrorism measures taken by the East Turkestan authorities."
Nor is it obvious how Beijing would reverse its policies at this point. 

Few moderate Chinese voices are left who can speak authoritatively on East Turkestan, and those officials running the province -- like Chen Quanguo, former Tibet party secretary and a key ally of Xi Jinping -- are hardliners with a reputation for ruthless crackdowns and brutal repression.
Just as in Hong Kong, where China's heavy-handed approach arguably inspired support for independence, Beijing is left with a problem that it created, but one that perversely justifies its earlier approach.
Charting an alternative path of reconciliation and respect for human rights would require a subtlety in dealing with dissent that Xi's administration has so far not shown evidence of.

Muslim Solidarity

A Critic of China’s Concentration Camps Says His Family Faces Deportation From Turkey

By DAKE KANG

In this Aug. 25, 2018, photo, Omir Bekali, right, an outspoken critic of China's internment camps for Muslims, poses for a picture with his children Aisha, left, and Ibrahim in a cafe in Istanbul. 

An outspoken critic of China’s concentration camps who now lives in Istanbul says his wife and son face deportation to China because Turkish authorities might bar them from entering the country.
Omir Bekali, a Kazakh national, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Turkish authorities are holding his wife and 2-year-old son at the airport in Istanbul and are accusing them of using fake passports.
“My family has been split in two,” he said by phone from the airport. 

“They didn’t let me see her. I’ve been waiting here. My heart is hurting.”
Bekali was among the first to speak publicly about the ordeal he endured in new indoctrination camps in China’s East Turkestan colony — camps that China denies exist.
Bekali told The AP in a report in May that he and dozens of other Muslim minority Kazakh as well as Uighur detainees were held in camps for months and forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
The camps are estimated to hold upward of 1 million people and reports about them have drawn growing criticism of China from the U.N. and the U.S. 

The U.S. is considering sanctioning Chinese officials responsible for the stifling security crackdown in the region.
Bekali returned to Kazakhstan after being released from detention but moved to Turkey earlier this year, fearing for his safety. 

His wife, Ruxianguli Taximaimaiti, 45, a Chinese ethnic minority Uighur, and their youngest son Mukhamad Bekali were to join him in Istanbul this week.
They arrived in Istanbul on a plane from Almaty on Sunday night. 

Bekali, who had been waiting for them at the airport, got a call from his wife telling him that border police weren’t letting them into the country.
Turkish airport authorities accused his wife and son of holding fake passports, Bekali said, and had earlier booked them on a flight back to Kazakhstan, where she no longer has a valid visa that would allow her to stay.
“I’d rather die here in Turkey then go back,” she had told Bekali at the time.
It was not immediately clear if they boarded any flights. 

Attempts to reach Turkish airport police for comment on Monday were unsuccessful.
If they are sent back to Kazakhstan, Bekali said, authorities in that country would likely deport his wife back to China where she could be punished for his criticism of the indoctrination camps, leaving nobody to take care of his son.
East Turkestan, the tense colony where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism.
Critics of China’s policies in the region and the harsh restrictions imposed on Uighurs and Kazakhs have been punished severely. 

Zhang Haitao, a Han Chinese electronics salesman who complained online about the treatment of Uighurs, was sentenced to 19 years in prison in 2016.
Prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, a moderate critic of the government’s policies in the region, was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred.
Bekali said the uncertainty over his wife and son’s fate had reignited a persistent anxiety he had about China and the detention he had left behind.
“I feel like I’m a thief, hiding and sneaking around. The pressure is enormous,” Bekali said. 

“I can’t live like an ordinary person. We have no way to live safely in the 21st century.”

China vs. Islam

Star Scholar Disappears as Crackdown Engulfs East Turkestan
By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy

Rahile Dawut, third from left, an academic from the Uighur ethnic minority, working in the Chinese region of Xinjiang in 2005. She has been missing for eight months.

URUMQI, East Turkestan — She was one of the most revered academics from the Uighur ethnic minority in far western China. 

She had written extensively and lectured across China and the world to explain and celebrate Uighurs’ varied traditions. 

Her research was funded by Chinese government ministries and praised by other scholars.
Then she disappeared.
The academic, Rahile Dawut, 52, told a relative last December that she planned to travel to Beijing from Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan where she taught. 

Professor Dawut was in a rush when she left, according to the relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of punishment from the Chinese authorities.
She has not been heard from since, and her family and close friends are sure she was secretly detained as part of a severe clampdown on Uighurs, the largely Muslim group who call East Turkestan their homeland.
Professor Dawut’s trajectory — from celebrated ethnographer at East Turkestan University in Urumqi to clandestine detainee — illustrates a wider crackdown that has drastically constricted Uighur life and culture.

A police officer standing guard as Muslims arrive for morning prayers during Eid al-Fitr at the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, China, last year.

The family member and Professor Dawut’s friends said they decided to speak out now, eight months after she vanished, because it had become clear that staying silent would not bring her release from a re-education facility, detention cell or perhaps prison.
“Virtually all expressions of Uighurs’ unique culture are dangerous now, and there’s no better evidence of that than the disappearance of Rahile Dawut,” said Rian Thum, an associate professor at Loyola University New Orleans whose historical research on Uighur pilgrimages and manuscripts drew on Professor Dawut’s pioneering studies. 

“There was a lot of hope that they would see that she was a nonthreat and release her, but that hope gradually dwindled.”
The East Turkestan region, more than anywhere else in China, has demonstrated how Xi Jinping, the country’s dictator, is determined to redraw the boundaries of what is permitted in religion, academic research, civil society and ethnic expression.
Under him, the government has redoubled a years long clampdown on Uighurs who are marked as potential supporters of independence or Islamist extremism. 

For many of East Turkestan’s 11 million Uighurs, their homeland has become a surveillance state swarming with checkpoints, security cameras and armed patrols.
Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been kept in secretive re-education centers for weeks, months and even years, scholars and international human rights groups estimate. 

Uighurs have also experienced increasing restrictions on movement, prayer and communications.

The Old City of Kashgar in 2016. For many of East Turkestan’s 11 million Uighurs, their homeland has become a surveillance state swarming with checkpoints, security cameras and armed patrols.

Chinese officials have mostly avoided acknowledging the mass internments. 

But not even moderate academics like Professor Dawut appear secure. 

The government has purged what it calls “two-faced” Uighur teachers and officials suspected of secretly resisting the hard-line policies.
“Since Uighurs are now collectively under suspicion, any Uighur academic with foreign ties is branded a ‘two-faced intellectual’ — disloyal to the state and in need of re-education,” said Rachel Harris, who studies Uighur music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and knows Professor Dawut as a friend and academic partner.
“The accounts of the ‘re-education’ regime that people are undergoing in those camps are harrowing,” Professor Harris said by email. 

“I imagine my lovely, principled, dedicated colleague there, and I feel incredibly angry.”
Other prominent Uighurs who have vanished in the past two years, apparently into detention, include writers and website operators, a soccer star and a popular musician, according to Radio Free Asia and overseas Uighur groups with extensive contacts in East Turkestan.
At least one of Professor Dawut’s graduate students in China has also disappeared, according to John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundationin San Francisco, which lobbies the Chinese government on human rights cases. 

He said his attempts to get information about Professor Dawut from Chinese officials had been unsuccessful.

A poster showing the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, near the East Turkestan town of Hotan in 2017. Under Xi, the government has redoubled a clampdown on Uighurs who are marked as potential supporters of independence or Islamic extremism.

“Everyone who has known her is under suspicion,” Mr. Kamm said. 

“Rahile Dawut is the human face of this unspeakable tragedy.”
A month before Professor Dawut left her last message, her life had a semblance of normality. 

She gave a talk on Uighur women in November at Peking University, speaking to a forum of scholars who have backed Xi’s assimilationist ethnic policies in Xinjiang.
Uighurs are a Turkic people, much closer in appearance, language and customs to peoples across Central Asia than the Han who make up the vast majority of China’s population. 

The Chinese government had long been wary of defiance from them, given Uighurs’ heritage and history of independence. 

Official alarm skyrocketed after deadly riots in East Turkestan in 2009 and a series of primitive but bloody assaults on Han people, police officers and officials.
But until recently, Professor Dawut’s work was welcomed by Chinese bureaucrats, as evidenced by grants and support she received from the Ministry of Culture. 

She had earned an international reputation as an expert on Uighur shrines, folklore, music and crafts that had been neglected by previous generations of scholars.
“I was deeply drawn to this vivid, lively folk culture and customs, so different from the accounts in textbooks,” she said in an interview with a Chinese art newspaper in 2011. 

“Above all, we’re preserving and documenting this folk cultural heritage not so that it can lie in archives or serve as museum exhibits, but so it can be returned to the people.”

Men dancing in front of the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar after morning prayers during Eid al-Fitr last year.

While Chinese policymakers worried that Uighurs were increasingly drawn to radical forms of Islam from the Middle East, Professor Dawut’s work portrayed Uighur heritage as more diverse and tolerant, shaped by Sufi spiritual traditions anathema to modern-day extremists. 

In 2014, she told The New York Times that she worried about Uighur women drawn to conservative Islam.
After finishing her doctorate in Beijing, Professor Dawut began teaching at East Turkestan University, the colony’s premier school. 

She founded a folklore institute and shared her work in Europe and the United States, becoming a guide to many foreign scholars.
“Most Western scholars doing research on East Turkestan knew to bring her coffee,” said Elise Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University who worked with Professor Dawut. 

“I remember a lot of the time she would say, ‘Let’s take a break from work. Let’s drink some coffee.’”
Professor Dawut stayed away from political disputes about the future of East Turkestan. 

If she needed any warning about the risks, there was Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist at Minzu University in Beijing and measured critic of Chinese policy in East Turkestan. 

He was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 on charges of separatism. 

Seven of his students were also charged.
But Professor Dawut’s international prominence and pride in Uighur traditions may help explain her downfall.
Professor Dawut working in East Turkestan in an undated photo. She was known as an expert on Uighur shrines, folklore, music and crafts that had been neglected by previous generations of scholars.

After Xi came to power in 2012 and installed a hard-line party functionary to run East Turkestan, the drive to root out dissent here accelerated. 

East Turkestan University and other schools became a particular focus.
In March of last year, the university leaders were replaced, and soon afterward a team of party inspectors reported that the university had been politically lax. 

The new administrators vowed to unmask “two-faced” Uighur academics who resisted the new orthodoxies. 

Research and foreign ties that were once tolerated became increasingly suspect.
East Turkestan University held a rally of 4,300 teachers and students who were warned that separatist sympathizers would be driven out like “rats crossing the road.”
“The Chinese government, after arresting Uighur government officials, Uighur rich people, they’ve begun to arrest Uighur intellectuals,” Tahir Imin, a former student of Professor Dawut, said from Washington, where he lives. 

“Right now I can tell you more than 20 names, all prominent Uighur intellectuals.”
As her friends abroad expressed growing worry, Professor Dawut continued her teaching and research as far as new restrictions allowed. 

She was also reluctant to leave her mother alone in Urumqi, Professor Harris said.
“I always tried to bring some freshly ground coffee with me when I visited her,” she said of Professor Dawut. 

“That’s a painful memory when I think of her life now in the detention camp.”

Evil Empire

China's crimes against humanity you've never heard of
By Michael Caster

Soldiers and paramilitary police patrol during a pep rally for an anti-terrorism and maintaining stability rally in East Turkestan in March 2017.

I first visited East Turkestan in July 2009, returning to Beijing only days before demonstrations in the region's capital, Urumqi, turned deadly.
Police responded to the violence with a massive crackdown, and detentions or disappearances ranged into the thousands.

To control the spread of information, internet access to all of East Turkestan was cut off for around 10 months.
Since then, China's persecution of Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority who form a bare majority in East Turkestan, has intensified, accelerating in particular since 2016 with a change in Party leadership in the region.
While violent resistance has been episodic, and should be denounced, the Chinese authorities have suppressed even peaceful expression of Uyghur rights, most notably the 2014 life sentence handed down to Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti on the absurd charge of separatism.
Despite the increasingly dire human rights situation in East Turkestan, few around the world are aware of it, and even fewer have spoken out. 

We are now reaching a crisis point, when speaking out is not enough.
The persecution must be called by its true name, and measures taken accordingly.
Chinese officials in East Turkestan have previously said they protect the "legitimate rights and interests of all ethnicities and prohibit the discrimination and oppression against any ethnic groups." Beijing also denies arbitrarily arresting or detaining citizens based on ethnicity or religion, saying its actions in East Turkestan are related to counter terrorism and anti-extremism.

China's crimes against humanity
The concept of crimes against humanity originated in the 18th century, denouncing the atrocities of slavery and colonialism, and entered international law after World War II. 

Today, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides the most thorough definition.
The statute lists 11 acts, which when widespread or systematic, may rise to the level of crimes against humanity. 

These include: the forcible transfer of populations; arbitrary imprisonment; torture, the persecution of ethnic, cultural or religious groups; enforced disappearances; and apartheid, the institutionalized systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over others.
Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during peace time, but the idea that victims live in peace is only a callous technicality.
The situation that is unfolding in East Turkestan, I would argue, fits the textbook definition of crimes against humanity.

Police patrol in a night food market near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in East Turkestan.

Beijing's final solution to the East Turkestan problem
Uyghurs in East Turkestan and elsewhere in China face systematic persecution.
With Islam a fundamental part of the Uyghur identity, so-called counter-terrorism campaigns which have cracked down hard on Muslim practices and increasingly criminalized Islam, are tantamount to the criminalization of being Uyghur.
This has reportedly included the banning dozens of Uyghur names, with violators at risk of not having their children's births registered; to forcing Uyghurs to denounce core tenets of their religion. Parents caught teaching their children about Islam risk detention or having their offspring taken away.
According to new research by New York-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders, in 2017 criminal arrests in East Turkestan accounted for a shocking 21% of all national arrests, even though the region's population is only 1.5% of China's total. 

In prison, according to state media, so-called "religious extremists" euphemistically undergo thought rectification.
As in apartheid South Africa, checkpoints and restrictions on movement are a fact of daily life for Uyghurs.
Armed police scan IDs, checking biometric and personal data. 

Religiosity, having relatives abroad, or simply being Uyghur increase the chances of being detained, as do the contents of a person's phone or computer.
Since 2015, as I have reported for the London-based Minority Rights Group, Uyghurs have had to obtain permission to visit relatives or seek medical treatment outside their hometowns, and passports started being recalled. 

Increasingly, the threat of detention and concerns over surveillance make contact between distant family members impossible.

Police patrol as Muslims leave the Id Kah Mosque after the morning prayer on Eid al-Fitr in 2017 in the old town of Kashgar in East Turkestan.

Nowhere are the signs of crimes against humanity more alarming than in the expanding system of concentration camps which are springing up across East Turkestan.
While the government officially denies the camps exist, in July state media reported authorities admitted to having transferred some 460,000 Uyghurs for "vocational training," as part of a bid to "to improve social stability and alleviate poverty."
Evidence suggests as many as one million Uyghurs and other Muslims are interned across East Turkestan in "re-education centers," around 10% of the population.
What little is known about what happens inside points to systematic physical and psychological torture, and indoctrination. 

One former detainee said she was not allowed to wear underwear and her head was shaved, while another described having tried to commit suicide by bashing his skull against a wall. 

Many simply disappear.
Meanwhile, so-called "becoming family" and "home stay" policies force Uyghur families to accept Communist Party officials into their homes to observe and report on their behavior. 

Imagine a family member has been taken away and now you are forced to host their abductor, quite possibly in the same room left empty by their disappearance.
Children whose parents have been detained are transferred to state custody, where, by some accounts, "they are locked up like farm animals" in so-called orphanages.

A proper response
Awareness of crimes against Uyghurs is only barely beginning to attract the level of attention demanded by their severity.
Journalists, diplomats and others who speak out about East Turkestan should at least acknowledge the appearance of ongoing crimes against humanity.
The international community must demand an independent and effective commission of inquiry into the crimes against humanity in East Turkestan.
This week, US lawmakers are holding hearings on the "arbitrary detention, torture, (and) egregious restrictions on religious practice and culture" in East Turkestan.
Under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, according to Human Rights Watch, Washington can "impose visa bans and targeted sanctions on individuals anywhere in the world responsible for committing human rights violations or acts of significant corruption."
Those who bear responsibility for the dire situation in East Turkestan must be held responsible.

Rogue Nation

China's crackdown on Uighurs spreads to even mild critics
By GERRY SHIH
In this photo taken early Dec 27, 2017 and released by China Aid, Li Aijie poses for a photo with one of two photos she has of her husband Zhang Haitao after authorities confiscate her electronic devices after arriving in the U.S. in Midland, Texas. Li is seeking political asylum in the U.S. Zhang who was sentenced to 19 years in prison had been a rare voice in China, a member of the Han ethnic majority and salesman by day who complained on social media about government policies he said were unfair to Muslim minority Uighurs. 

Zhang Haitao was a rare voice in China, a member of the ethnic Han majority who for years had criticized the government on social media for its treatment of the minority Muslim Uighurs.
Zhang's wife had long feared some sort of backlash despite her husband's relative obscurity. 

He was a working-class electronics salesman, unknown even to most Uighur activists. 

So she worried that authorities might block his social media accounts, or maybe detain him. 

Instead he was arrested and prosecuted for subversion and espionage. 

His punishment: 19 years in prison.
"They wanted to make an example of him, to scare anyone who might question what they do in the name of security," Zhang's wife, Li Aijie, told The Associated Press earlier this week, one day after she arrived in the United States and asked for political asylum. 

"Even someone who knows nothing about law would know that his punishment made no sense."
Elsewhere in China, Zhang would have been sentenced to no more than three years, said his lawyer, Li Dunyong, and may not have been prosecuted at all.
But East Turkestan, the tense northwestern region where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance, which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism. 

Zhang, who moved to East Turkestan from central Henan province more than a decade ago in search of work, wondered in his social media posts whether these policies were stoking resentment among Uighurs. 

He warned that China's restrictions on the Uighurs' religious practices risked sparking an insurgency.
But questioning government policies in Xinjiang has become an untouchable third rail in today's China.
Court records say Zhang was convicted of sending 274 posts from 2010 to 2015 on Twitter and the Chinese social media service WeChat that "resisted, attacked and smeared" the Communist Party and its policies, earning him 15 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power. 

He was given another five years for talking to foreign reporters and providing photos of the intense police presence in the streets of Xinjiang. 

That, the court said, amounted to providing intelligence about China's anti-terror efforts to foreign organizations.
The court said it would combine the two punishments and sentence him to 19 years in prison.
He was convicted in January 2016. 

An appeals court in December 2016 refused to hear his petition, noting he had never expressed regret or admitted guilt.

Hoping to draw attention to Zhang's plight, Li provided her husband's court documents and letters from jail to the AP, as well as her own account.

The daughter of a farming family in Henan's hardscrabble hill country, Li met Zhang in 2011 after stumbling across a personal ad he had arranged to have placed in a local park where singles sought partners. 

The flier said he sold wireless routers and listed his modest height: 168 centimeters (5-foot-6). 

On their first date, when Zhang was back home in Henan, he wore a jacket with threadbare cuffs but showed Li his identity card in an awkward attempt to prove he was genuine.
That simple directness was something she grew to love, Li said, but it was also Zhang's downfall. 

He had been repeatedly warned by police about his social media activity, but he always ignored them.
When the authorities finally arrested him in 2015, they told Li he was suspected of inciting ethnic hatred. 

The charges were raised to subversion and espionage, Li suspects, after he refused to confess. 

In a letter he wrote to Li and his sister earlier this year, Zhang described how Nelson Mandela, who spent nearly three decades in prison, had become an inspiration.
"Life must have greater meaning beyond the material. Our mouths are not just for eating, but also for speaking out," Zhang wrote.
While the severity of Zhang's sentence stands out, others in the region have been punished for mild criticism.
Ma Like, a Muslim hostel owner in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, was accused in April of "propagating extremism" because he had retweeted two Weibo posts — one about how Chinese policies were alienating Uighurs, the other a veiled reference to restrictions on the Islamic headdress — according to two of Ma's friends, who provided copies of Ma's indictment and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation.
The prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred, advocating violence and instigating terror on a website he ran. 

He, too, was known as a moderate who argued against Uighur separatism and stressed the need for dialogue.
But when it comes to East Turkestan, calling for public debate amounts to an intolerable act of defiance, said Wang Lixiong, a Han Chinese writer and dissident.
"The government removes the middle road so it leaves two extremes," Wang said. 

"You're either their mortal enemy or their slave."
Zhang was arrested when Li was three months pregnant. 

She gave birth to their son two years ago, while he was being held in a desert prison. 

She returned home to Henan to raise him and began blogging and speaking to the overseas media.
The authorities tried to silence Li, pounding on her front door as she did a phone interview, for example, and threatening to derail the careers of her two brothers, low-level government workers.
Li's family begged her to divorce Zhang, even give up their child.
When words didn't sway her, in October her siblings and parents beat her, leaving her bruised on the family home's floor.
"I cannot hate them," Li said. 

"They were trying to resist enormous pressure. But after that, I had nowhere to go."
A month ago, she sneaked away and made her way to Bangkok. 

With the help of the U.S.-based organization China Aid, she flew to Texas, where a host family had been found for her, and where she hopes to start a new life with her son.
When she files her asylum paperwork, she lists the boy's legal name.
But in quiet moments, she calls him by his nickname: Xiao Man De La.

"Little Mandela."

In China's far west the perfect police state is emerging

During a trip through China’s violence-plagued Xinjiang, the Guardian witnesses dramatic security surge as Communist party fights to ‘pacify’ region

By Tom Phillips in southern Xinjiang

Shopkeepers perform daily "anti-terror" drill outside the bazaar in Kashgar, in March. 

It was Friday, the Islamic day of assembly, but outside Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque on Liberation Avenue it was the growl of diesel engines that filled the air not a muezzin’s wistful cry.
One by one armoured personnel carriers, some with machine guns poking from their turrets, rolled towards People’s Square where a 12-metre statue of Mao Zedong was preparing to preside over the latest in a series of tub-thumping “anti-terror” rallies to be held here in the heartlands of China’s Muslim Uighur minority this year.
Open-backed lorries packed with heavily-armed troops joined the procession, red and yellow propaganda banners draped from their sides.
“Unity and stability are blessings! Separatism and unrest are a curse!” read one.
A second warned: “Let all those terrorists who dare to be enemies of the people be smashed to pieces!”
To ensure the march went off without a glitch, police had placed this entire city of about half a million inhabitants on lock down. 

“All the roads are blocked,” said a black-clad officer who was posted outside the mosque with a 12 gauge shotgun slung across his chest.
The mass rally, witnessed by the Guardian at the end of April, came as a long-running crackdown in China’s violence-stricken far west hit draconian new heights.
Three days earlier thousands of armed troops had swept onto the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where, according to one local newspaper, they vowed to “sacrifice everything for the party and the people” in their fight against the Islamic "extremists" Beijing blames for a series of attacks on government officials and civilians.
“Please rest assured, my fellow countrymen, that I will ... crack down on the arrogance of those violent gangs and terrorists so they are left with no road to go down and no place to hide,” one participant told reporters.
A week before, more than 1,000 troops flooded Aksu, a city in Xinjiang’s south, for a three-day show of strength. 

“Suddenly a siren rang out and vehicles shot out onto the streets like swords being drawn from their sheaths,” read an account of the event by one local propaganda writer.

‘The perfect police state’
The parades are part of a wider security escalation that has gripped China’s western frontier since Chen Quanguo, a Communist party hardliner who Beijing credits with quelling a wave of unrest in Tibet, was drafted into Xinjiang last summer.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher who has studied the securitisation of both politically sensitive regions, said China’s leaders believed Chen had managed to contain a surge in self-immolations in the Tibet Autonomous Region, using a series of innovative and repressive policies such as high-tech surveillance and the introduction of tight social controls. 

Police patrolling the Old Town in Kashgar, a 2,000-year-old oasis city in China’s far west. 

Now, they hoped he could do the same in Xinjiang, a vast and resource-rich borderland that has endured decades of bloodshed including anti-government uprisings, ethnic rioting and, more recently, terrorist attacks targeting civilians. 

“I’m sure he has been sent there … to pacify Xinjiang,” said Zenz, from Germany’s European School of Culture and Theology.
Chen has wasted no time in putting his controversial ideas into practice. 

Since he became Xinjiang’s party chief last August thousands of security operatives, ranging from elite special forces to poorly trained rookies, have been deployed onto the streets of villages, towns and cities. 

Many are low-level surveillance officers tasked with keeping tabs on the region’s 23m inhabitants and – above all – members of the 10m-strong Uighur minority.
Zenz said the recruitment of security staff in Xinjiang had gone “absolutely through the roof” under Chen’s rule. 

In the first five months of this year, 31,000 such jobs were advertised -- more than the entire total between 2008 and 2012. 

Last year a record 32,000 security agents were hired.
“[It is] almost like in the old East Germany,” Zenz said. “The perfect police state.”

“What are they going to do? Start a war?”

A shopkeeper comes into the street brandishing a metal pole during a regular anti-terror drill in Tashkurga, Xinjiang. 

During a week-long road trip through southern Xinjiang, the Guardian saw first-hand how the unfolding security surge was affecting life across the region.
In a village near Upal, a Uighur market town 50km south of Kashgar, members of one local militia lined up in the main square, wielding 5ft metal rods, for what are now daily security drills. 

Nearby, the white and green armoured personnel carriers of China’s paramilitary People’s Armed Police raced past, along a corridor of white poplars. 

“I haven’t seen so many roadblocks since the last time I was in Hebron,” said a European traveller who had come to the region in search of the ancient Silk Road but had instead stumbled across scenes from a conflict zone.
Further south in Tashkurgan, a town on the border with Pakistan, an alarm sounded and shopkeepers rushed into the street brandishing poles and clubs. 

At a local hotel, the receptionist greeted guests in a black stab jacket; a medieval-style cudgel, spikes soldered into its tip, was propped up against the entrance near a metal detector.
Down the road another drill was underway with police training local men and women to bludgeon imaginary assailants with an arsenal of improvised hand-held weapons. 

“One, two, three,” the group shouted in unison, pummeling their invisible targets on the final count.

Weapons at the entrance to a hotel in Tashkurgan. 

The effects of Chen’s surge are also impossible to miss in Kasghar itself, a 2,000-year-old Silk Road oasis town where petrol stations, considered possible targets, now resemble prisons, with vehicles only allowed through their razor-wire perimeters one at a time.
By night the city lights up like a flickering disco ball as hundreds of newly built police strongholds, positioned at almost every intersection, illuminate the darkness with their red and blue glow.
As the sun rises, guards with clubs that resemble giant rolling pins and halberd-style spears assemble outside schools, shops and government buildings. 

Surveillance vehicles cruise the streets and troops with assault rifles man checkpoints on the outskirts of town, searching boots and demanding documents from commuters who are ordered off yellow city buses. 

It is almost impossible to walk without running into a security agent of some description.
“It’s extreme now,” sighed one local, who said they were shocked by the scale of the recent parades. “What are they going to do? Start a war?”
The crackdown has been accompanied by a ratcheting up of controls on religion in a place where it was already forbidden for under-18s to enter mosques, to broadcast calls to prayer or make unauthorised pilgrimages to Mecca.
This year there have been reports of authorities forbidding ‘Islamic’ names such as Islam, Muhammad or Mecca, outlawing face veils and “abnormal” beards and even ordering imams to praise Xi Jinping during religious services.
At Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque -- where the pro-Beijing imam was stabbed to death in the summer of 2014 -- worshippers file out through an arch fitted with at least six CCTV cameras. 

A nearby sign in English for tourists reads: “All ethnic groups warmly welcome the party’s religious policy ... All ethnic groups live friendly together here.”
Social controls have also been stepped since Chen took office with some citizens have reportedly being told to surrender their passports to police while others have been instructed to install GPS tracking devices in their vehicles. 

There are plans for the mass collection of DNA samples a move human rights campaigners lamented as a sign Beijing was taking “its Orwellian system to the genetic level”.

CCTV cameras at Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque. Worshippers are filmed by at least six CCTV cameras as they enter and leave.

‘I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee’
Daily life in Xinjiang goes on in spite of the crackdown. 

“It’s like this every day. It’s normal,” shrugged one Kashgar resident as a convoy of armoured vehicles sped by. 

But the tightening has pushed others to breaking point. 

Fighting back the tears, one young Uighur clutched this reporter’s arm as they described their growing despair at the repression and hope -- one day -- of fleeing overseas.
“I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee than Chinese,” they said, their hands trembling. 

“This is hell for me.”
Another resident captured the almost universal fear of discussing, let alone questioning, the changes sweeping the region. 

“The system is very tight, so we must be careful.” 

In 2014, Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual known for his moderate public criticism of Beijing’s policies in the region, was jailed for life for separatism.
Nick Holdstock, a British author who has written two books on Xinjiang, cautioned against lumping all Uighurs together as members of an “entirely down-trodden, oppressed minority”. 

“On some level things are getting better in Xinjiang. The infrastructure is improving. Its economy is quite healthy.”

But Holdstock said the outlook for Uighurs had grown increasingly bleak over the last three decades, with cultural and religious controls ramping up after a succession of now-notorious outbreaks of ethnic violence in 1990, 1997 and 2009.
“There is no sense in [the government’s] minds that anything that they are doing is necessarily part of the problem. It is the sense that the more troops you can have, the more security checkpoints, then that is the way to keep going.”

Wang Hongwei, a national security expert at Beijing’s Renmin University, said the “high-pressure crackdown” was designed to intimidate Islamist militants who threatened China’s national and political systems. 

“They are like millipedes whose bodies keep wriggling even when they are being cut into pieces,” Wang said, claiming there was nothing “excessive at all” about the recent mass parades.

On Liberation Avenue, outside Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque, Uighur men watch security forces file past for the city’s latest mass “anti-terror” rally.

Authorities defend the tightening as a necessary offensive against extremists they blame for a series of attacks, such as a machete attack on a train station in Kunming and a bombing in Urumqi.
But many experts -- who believe the violence is fuelled not by religious extremism but economic exclusion, government meddling and the erosion of Uighur culture and traditions -- fear clamping down further will only breed more resentment and bloodshed.
“I think they are going at the flies with a sledgehammer,” said one western Xinjiang scholar who asked not to be named for fear of not being allowed back into the country.
Zenz meanwhile warns the current policy by Beijing could inflame rather than extinguish anti-government anger.
“Xinjiang is a powder-keg … much more so than Tibet,” he said. 

“The combination of securitisation and crackdown on normal religious practise is an absolute recipe for disaster ... This is absolutely a ticking time-bomb.”

China's War on Law: Five Names to Listen for at the EU-China Summit

EU Should Call for Release of Activists Unjustly Imprisoned
By Lotte Leicht

Federica Mogherini (L), High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, and China's State Councilor Yang Jiechi attend a joint news conference at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China April 19, 2017. 

Torture, wrongful imprisonment, restrictions on everything from peaceful expression, to religious practice, to the number of children you can have: these are some of the most persistent human rights abuses in China today. 

Under the dictator Xi Jinping, whose senior officials arrive in Brussels this week for the European Union-China Summit, courageous human rights defenders, lawyers and academics in China have sustained an extraordinary body blow.
The Chinese government’s treatment of five people is emblematic of all that is wrong in China today:
Scholar and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion” in response to his calls for democratic reform.
Ethnic Uighur economist Ilham Tohti is serving a life sentence for having urged dialogue between different ethnic groups, particularly in the predominantly Muslim area of Xinjiang.
Tibetan language rights advocate Tashi Wangchuk awaits trial for telling his story to the New York Times.
Lawyer Wang Quanzhang, detained since July 2015, is facing subversion charges for his work defending in court members of religious minorities.
Women’s rights activist Su Changlan was convicted on subversion charges in retaliation for her work defending victims of domestic violence.
The EU has pledged to “throw its full weight behind advocates of liberty, democracy and human rights” and to “raise human rights issues” including “at the highest level.” 

If that’s the case, the summit is an ideal opportunity for the EU’s highest officials to explicitly call for these people’s release. 

After all, the EU’s human rights pledges will only be meaningful if applied in real situations, with determination and conviction.
The EU has acknowledged that human rights improvements in China are key to the future of their bilateral relationship, and calling for the freedom of those unjustly imprisoned is an obvious place to start. 

That the summit falls just ahead of the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre – an event that galvanized China’s contemporary human rights community – places a responsibility on EU leaders to call for accountability from Beijing. 

The EU should demonstrate the strength and solidarity that won it the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize by insisting on the release of the 2010 winner – and all others unjustly imprisoned by Beijing.