China's Final Solution

UN boss raises East Turkestan Uyghurs during his trip to China

By Julia Hollingsworth

Uyghur refugee describes horror inside Chinese concentration camps 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has reminded China that its treatment of Uyghurs is still under close watch. 

Human rights must be respected even when fighting terrorism, he told Chinese authorities during a visit to last week's billion-dollar Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, according to a UN spokesman.
China has cracked down on its population of Muslim Uyghurs, who are concentrated in the country's East Turkestan colony. 

Last year, a US State Department official estimated that at least 800,000 and possibly up to two million people may have been detained in huge "re-education centers." 

In February, Turkey's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said the people detained in the camps were subject to "torture and political brainwashing" and called the camps a "great shame for humanity."
During Guterres' trip to Beijing last week, he met with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. 

Asked by reporters on Monday whether Guterres had raised the issue of Uyghurs during that conversation, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric replied that the UN chief had "discussed all relevant issues with Chinese authorities."
"He did just that, and that includes the situation in East Turkestan," he said.
"Each community must feel that its identity is respected and that it fully belongs to the nation as a whole," Dujarric said, explaining Guterres' stance.
When asked by a reporter whether Guterres was satisfied by the China's response, Dujarric was evasive.
"It's not for me to speak on behalf of the Chinese authorities," he said. 

"This is part of a dialogue that the Secretary‑General has had with Chinese authorities in the past and that he will continue to have."
Guterres left Beijing on Saturday after speaking at the Belt and Road Forum, a meeting about Xi's signature global infrastructure policy.
In March, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet presented a report on human rights around the world to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised the issue of "enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions" in East Turkestan.

China's detention of Muslims in concentration camps country's worst human rights abuse since Mao era

Grave human rights violations being committed on vast scale in East Turkestan colony, experts say
By Chris Baynes

Why aren’t Muslim leaders standing up for Uighurs?
China’s detention of millions of Uighur Muslims in re-education camps amounts to human rights abuse on a scale not seen since in the country since Mao Zedong’s era, British MPs have been told.
The UK must not remain silent over grave violations committed during Beijing’s crackdown on the minority in East Turkestan colony, the foreign affairs committee heard.
Up to three million Uighurs have been arbitrarily detained in centres which Amnesty International has compared to “wartime concentration camps”. 

Released internees were tortured into denouncing Islam and swearing loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Steve Tsang, director of the London School of Oriental Studies said: “When you have an identifiable group of citizens in a country where something like one tenth of that identifiable group live in camps, you have an enormous human rights problem.
“Ever since the end of Mao Zedong’s era in 1976, and probably including the period of hard military crackdown in 1989, we have not seen the scale of human rights abuse that we are seeing today in East Turkestan.”
An estimated 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death under rule of Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic of China.
Hundreds surround Chinese embassy over detention of Uighur Muslims
Chinese ‘re-education camps run like concentration camps’

Speaking to MPs on the committee, Prof Tsang urged politicians to speak out over abuses against Uighur Muslims
He said: “If we believe in our values, in our system – even though there’s probably not much we can actually do to change the situation in China – it would be wrong for us to remain silent on the subject.”
China denied the existence of the camps until October last year, and since claimed it is detaining people guilty of minor crimes in what it describes as “vocational education centres”.
Eva Pils, a China human rights expert and professor of law at King’s College London, said Beijing had been careful to present the crackdown as a response to the threat of Islamist terrorism.
She said there was credible evidence human rights abuses were happening on vast scale.
Prof Pils told MPs: “The grave human rights violations that Professor Tsang was alluding to in my view almost certainly include not only arbitrary detention of people in these camps but also the use of torture to ‘transform’ them, to ‘de-extremify’ them.
“That, in my view, especially as we have credible evidence that it happens at this very vast scale, is extremely concerning.”
Beijing faces mounting international criticism over its treatment of the Uighur minority, an estimated 15 million of whom live in China.
UN human rights official Michelle Bachelet, said in December her office was seeking access to East Turkestan to verify worrying reports.
The UK government has also raised concerns and pledged to “press China to change its approach”.
“I think it’s extremely important to continue raising the issue,” said Prof Pils.
“The ability of any western country, including the UK, to influence China is limited, but I think that at least we need to ask for investigation. It would be appropriate to seek the appointment of international observers.”
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, warned China’s Muslim crackdown could put Britain at greater risk of Islamist terror attacks.
He said: “On jihadi websites today, you are starting to see very clear condemnation of the Chinese government’s actions on the Uighar population. You seeing very, very clearly the imprisonment and torture of Muslims in western China being cited as reasons for jihad.
“Indeed, there is a real issue here for countries like our own that the mass torture, imprisonment and execution of Muslims in western China is leading to a rise in jihadism that could easily have repercussions for us, not just in China.”
Prof Tsang replied: “The basic point you make is a very, very true one. China did have a very, very small terrorist problem before.
“If this policy is continued you will have a very large number of Muslim people – Uighurs or sometimes other nationalities who will turn to jihadism because they have got nothing else.”

Rogue Nation

China’s long game on human rights

By Ted Piccone

For decades, China’s Communist Party largely kept clear of muscling its way on to the global human rights stage, preferring to bide its time while it contended with massive economic and social challenges at home. 

This began to change in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 when China faced unprecedented criticism of its brutal repression of unarmed citizens demanding more freedoms. Beijing fought hard to defend its one-party system and joined hands with like-minded autocratic states to block external criticism of its hard-line rule. 

It also engaged in the international human rights system in other ways, including by ratifying a number of relevant treaties and inviting some independent U.N. experts to visit the country and advise officials on compliance with international norms.
More recently, however, especially since the ascension of Xi Jinping in 2013, China is moving beyond playing defense and adopting a more self-confident posture in the halls of the United Nations. 

It has begun promoting its model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the preferred path for protecting human rights while chipping away at well-entrenched principles that define the international human rights system. 

These principles include external monitoring by independent experts of a state’s human rights record, active participation of civil society as both stewards and sirens for human rights, and, when merited, public condemnation of egregious human rights violators. 

Through soft terms like “win-win cooperation” and building a “community of common destiny”—newly blessed as “Xi Jinping thought” deserving of constitutional standing—China is winning some important battles that will determine the meaning of sovereignty and human rights in the 21st century.
Given China’s accelerating rise in global affairs, this development should not come as a surprise. 

This progress, in the view of China’s leaders, supports the argument that their controlled approach to state-led development should be emulated by others.
The catch, of course, is the high cost of China’s system to political, civil, cultural, and minority rights, which China dismisses as inconvenient and disruptive to their one-party control of society. 

For those on the front lines of defending such rights in China, the penalties are severe—denial of state benefits, detention, torture, and death. 

Mass internments of Muslims in concentration camps and militarized police patrols in the East Turkestan province are on the rise. 

More broadly, China’s advances in the field of internet censorship, facial recognition and artificial intelligence already are having dire consequences for even a modicum of personal liberties and civil rights enshrined in international human rights law.
The Chinese state’s growing power is felt not only at home. 

Its expanding portfolio of loans, direct investment, and trade agreements around the world, and its willingness to use them as leverage for diplomatic gains that challenge the U.S.-led international order, are changing the geopolitical game across a wide swath of issues. 

On the human rights front, China’s more confident behavior is a direct existential threat because it seeks to subvert the fundamental norms which have shaped global progress toward greater respect for liberal democracy and the rule of law. 

It is making tangible headway, for example, in Europe, where Hungary and Greece blocked consensus last year on a European Union statement criticizing China’s crackdown on lawyers and journalists. 

It is making steady progress in isolating democratic Taiwan by offering economic incentives to developing countries like El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso, which previously did not recognize Beijing. 

It is partnering with Russia to cut budgetary resources for human rights monitors integral to U.N. peacekeeping missions and to block civil society organizations from participating in U.N. forums.
In the pre-Trump world, the United States was on the forefront of challenging China’s long game on human rights. 

It regularly called out China’s repressive human rights record and more broadly built cross-regional coalitions of other democratic states to defend and strengthen the international human rights system. Now, however, the United States has walked away from the U.N.’s primary forum for promoting human rights. 

It claims its membership, which regularly includes China, Vietnam, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela, renders the body hopelessly ineffective.
The reality is quite different. 

Time and again, the U.N.’s human rights system has responded to egregious violations by calling emergency sessions and dispatching independent experts and investigators to document abuses, demand accountability, and defend human rights activists in such places as Iran, Vietnam, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Cambodia. 

The United States, as in many other domains of international affairs, is now missing in action. 

The result is clear: China and its allies are filling the vacuum and, over time, will neuter if not fundamentally redefine the core precepts of universal human rights.
So far, China’s more assertive gambit on human rights has not always won the day. 

Despite the U.S. withdrawal, and China’s growing efforts to sway others, a core bloc of democratic states remain steadfastly committed to bolstering the international human rights regime. 

Leading European actors like France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, joined by Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Australia, are building coalitions with states like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Tunisia, Ghana, Georgia, and Ukraine to hold the line on key principles. 

The U.S. Congress can do its part by ensuring that the system’s building blocks are properly funded. And the new High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, can speak with moral clarity for defending the principles that China, slowly but surely, now seeks to undermine.

China’s secret camps are at last in the spotlight

As increasing evidence emerges of the arbitrary detention of Muslim minorities on a shocking scale in the north-western region, the new UN rights chief and others are speaking out
The Guardian

Police patrolling the Old Town in Kashgar, East Turkestan. ‘According to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders, official data suggests a fifth of all arrests in China last year were in East Turkestan, which has just 1.5% of its population.’ 

It is unthinkable. 

Yet week by week, the evidence mounts that in north-western China’s East Turkestan colony, as many as a million people are being held in extralegal indoctrination camps where inmates are forced to write self-criticisms, sing patriotic songs and chant slogans praising the Communist party. According to former detainees, people have been pulled in because they went abroad, because they engaged in conventional religious practices, or even because they do not speak Chinese. 

Many are held indefinitely. 

Some say they were tortured. 

Most of those held are Uighurs, who make up less than half of the 23 million population of the region, or belong to Kazakh or other Muslim minorities. 

One report, drawing upon official sources, suggests some areas have detention quotas.
The camps are the most shocking aspect of an intense and all-encompassing crackdown, described by Human Rights Watch this week as amounting to rights violations of a scope and scale not seen in China since the Cultural Revolution unleashed in 1966. 

According to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders, official data suggests a fifth of all arrests in China last year were in East Turkestan, which has just 1.5% of its population. 

The human cost is immense, as a new Guardian report reveals.
The ordeal does not end when people are released: they remain burdened by trauma and the fear they could be seized again. 

East Turkestan has become a digital police state, studded with checkpoints, security cameras and facial recognition technology. 

China has always kept an iron grip on East Turkestan, including through tight restrictions on religion and culture. 

But in 2014, after a series of more violent attacks that claimed dozens of lives, including suicide bombings and a knife attack in a train station, China launched an even harsher “Strike Hard Campaign”. 

The mass detentions, which began early last year, are a step further. 

One scholar warns that “an entire culture is being criminalised”.

China has acknowledged that "some" East Turkestan residents caught in anti-"terrorism" campaigns had been taken to “vocational education” centres (Satellite images and tendering and other official documents show vast new facilities with watchtowers and barbed wire fences.) 

Other official sources have talked of “transformation through education”, which one government document described as “like a free hospital treatment for the masses with sick thinking”.

All this has been greeted by near-silence from majority-Muslim countries. 

“They’re scared. Nobody wants to say anything,” said Anwar Ibrahim, in line to be Malaysia’s next prime minister, when he raised it this week. 

The US now says it is “deeply troubled” by the crackdown; it is considering sanctions against officials and companies. 

The new UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, used her maiden speech to urge China to grant monitors access in light of “deeply disturbing” reports. 

East Turkestan’s camps reflect the much more repressive turn China has taken generally in recent years, and perhaps the region’s geostrategic importance in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, much of which runs through central Asia. 

But their flourishing also reflects the secrecy shrouding them and the indifference with which reports have been greeted, giving China no incentive at all to moderate its course. 

This should be the start of international pressure, not the end.