China’s Brutal ‘Boarding Schools’

Beijing’s concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs are stark violations of human rights.
The New York Times

A sign warning against "uncivilized" behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's East Turkestan colony.

The Trump administration may not be the most unimpeachable source when it comes to human rights, but the head of the State Department’s bureau for human rights, Michael Kozak, was dead on when he said China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities was “just remarkably awful.”
Mr. Kozak made the comments on Wednesday as the State Department presented its annual report on human rights around the world, an event at which his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
That’s a tough call in today’s world.
But China’s brutal campaign to strip Uighur and other Turkic minorities in the East Turkestan colony of their culture, religion and identity through a network of secretive concentration camps must rank among the more outrageous continuing violations in the world. 
What makes it all the more galling is the Beijing government’s feigned umbrage whenever the camps are mentioned, and its absurd efforts to depict them as China’s contribution to the war on "terrorism".
After initially denying the existence of the camps, China in October began a campaign to portray them as “campuses,” “vocational training centers” and “boarding schools” intended to bring Uighurs into the modern era.
China has made direct news reporting from East Turkestan all but impossible, giving access only to carefully monitored official tours. 
On one, Reuters reported that camp inmates praised their new life and sang, in English, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Reports from survivors, Uighur dissidents, the Uighur diaspora, satellite imagery and other sources depict something far more akin to the gulag than a happy boarding school, with more than a million Uighurs, out of a population of more than 10 million Muslims in East Turkestan, forced to undergo Cultural Revolution-style coercion to adopt state-sanctioned norms of political thought and behavior.
Writing in The Times, Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam at the Cato Institute, described camps at which “people are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” 
He said survivors told of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
Conquered and incorporated into China in the 18th century, East Turkestan has long been a thorn in China’s side.
The Chinese government attributes scores of violent events, including bombings and assassinations, to Uighur separatists.
Violent riots in July 2009 in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital, escalated into attacks on Han Chinese people and a vicious crackdown and several death sentences.
But trying to extinguish national identity through what amounts to mass brainwashing is an atrocity that smacks of some of the worst experiments of our time — including China’s own Cultural Revolution — with some thoroughly modern twists. 
A key part of China’s campaign to control the Uighurs has been collecting DNA from members of the minority under the guise of a free health check.
Sadly, Muslim nations have been reticent about supporting the Uighurs, because of the economic clout China wields among them and the solidarity these states have with an anti-Western authoritarian regime.
In February, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted on Chinese television after a meeting with Xi Jinping as saying, “China has the right to carry out antiterrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”
That should not dissuade other governments and organizations from continuing to focus attention on the camps, as the State Department has.
A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, would require the State Department and intelligence agencies to report on what the Chinese government is doing in East Turkestan.
The bill should be promptly passed.
The United States should also support the request of 15 Western ambassadors to Beijing — America’s was not one of them — to meet with the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan.
What is happening in East Turkestan must not be ignored.

China's crimes against humanity

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

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

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