China's Final Solution

China is harassing journalists reporting on Uighurs. They cannot be stifled.
By Fred Hiatt

A police station is located next door to a mosque in Yining, in China’s East Turkestan colony, on Aug. 21. 

To punish Gulchehra Hoja, a Washington-based journalist for Radio Free Asia, and to stifle her reporting, China’s rulers have imprisoned her brother, harassed her parents and threatened many other relatives back home in East Turkestan, China.
The punishment is keen. 

But no stifling has taken place.
“Every time they threaten us, we are more proud of you,” Hoja’s mother, who is 72, told her daughter during one of their infrequent phone calls. 

“Keep doing your work.”
And so she has.
The greatest crime against humanity of our young century is unfolding in northwestern China. 

If it were not for Hoja and her 11 colleagues, we might not know it was taking place.
Yes, you read that right: A dozen reporters and editors working for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service, reporting on events taking place halfway around the world, have confounded the massive propaganda machine of the Communist Party of China.
They uncovered the massive but secret incarceration of innocent Uighur men, women and children in a gulag of concentration camps — camps that China at first said did not exist and then insisted were benign vocational training centers.
The RFA reporters disclosed terrible living conditions in orphanages where suddenly parentless children have been sent. 

They chronicled roundups of eminent poets, clerics and intellectuals. 

They have begun to report — always carefully, always with two sources or more, never sensationally — on mass deaths in the camps.
Their reports, greeted with some skepticism when they first appeared in 2017, over time have been confirmed by satellite photography, foreign academics, other journalists and, most recently, an extraordinary leak of documents from the Communist Party itself. 

It is now accepted that more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 3 million Uighurs have been confined, and that thousands of mosques and other sacred spaces have been destroyed.
At every step, Chinese officials have sought to stymie the RFA reporting.
When the journalists began reporting on the mass detentions, the Communist Party began threatening and then rounding up their relatives. 

A half-dozen RFA journalists, Uighurs living in unsought exile, have spoken publicly about family members back home — often dozens of them — being taken away, with explicit references to the journalists’ work.
When hostage-taking did not deter the journalists, China began screening and blocking calls from the United States to East Turkestan, where the crimes are taking place. 

And when reporters found a way around that, China began employing artificial intelligence and voice recognition. 

Now, says reporter Shohret Hoshur, he can still call police desk sergeants and other potential sources — but his calls cut off after one minute.
No matter. 

It was Hoshur’s Oct. 29 story that confirmed the deaths of 150 people over the course of six months at the No. 1 Internment Camp in the Yengisher district of Kuchar county, “marking the first confirmation of mass deaths since the camps were introduced in 2017,” as the story notes.
It was Hoja’s Oct. 30 story that disclosed a camp survivor’s account of forced sterilizations, sexual abuse and other torture in the camps.
It was RFA reporters who disclosed intrusive surveillance, cameras installed even in homes, Uighur women forced to accept male Han Chinese “guests” in their homes and in their beds, and efforts to make Uighurs eat pork and drink alcohol, in violation of their faith.
All of this, we now know from documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is in service to a campaign instigated by Xi Jinping. 

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim, ethnic Turkic people who have lived in Central Asia — in what is now the East Turkestan colony of China — for more than 1,000 years. 

On the pretext of suppressing Islamist extremism, China is trying to eradicate their culture and religion — their identity as a people.
This confirmation notwithstanding, it’s certain that what’s happening is far worse than we yet know, as China blocks communication in both directions. 

Almost no one in the region dares talk to outsiders. 

Radio Free Asia, U.S.-funded but independently run, continues to broadcast in the Uighur language, but shortwave radios are no longer permitted to be sold in the region, and China has blocked satellite transmission of RFA news.
So the RFA reporters continue their reporting, one one-minute call at a time, one call after another, day after painful day. 

Sadly, having dozens of relatives locked away no longer makes them all that unusual among Uighurs, notes Rohit Mahajan, RFA’s vice president of communications.
But even if it did, said Mamatjan Juma, deputy director of the Uyghur Service, they would persist.
“It’s an existential choice for us,” he told me. 

“The Uighurs have no other voice.”

China's crimes against humanity

A Search For Loved Ones Held In China's East Turkestan Colony
By ROB SCHMITZ

Kalida Akytkhan, pictured with her son Parkhat Rakhymbergen, has two sons and two daughter-in-laws who have been detained in re-education camps in East Turkestan. She brought photos of her family to the offices of rights organization Atazhurt in Almaty.

A tiny office in the heart of the Kazakh city of Almaty is filled with weary-eyed visitors clutching photos of their missing mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Each morning they arrive, lining up behind two desks staffed with workers who enter their information into a database of the disappeared.
Kalida Akytkhan, 64, clad in a white sweater and matching headscarf, has traveled 300 miles in the hopes that people here can find her two sons.
"My daughter-in-law called me," Akytkhan says in Kazakh. 

"She said my son had been taken. The next day, my other daughter-in-law called and said my other son was taken."
Akytkhan grew up in China and later moved to Kazakhstan, gaining citizenship there. 

Her sons remained in China as Chinese citizens. 

Now they had been detained and ordered "re-educated" by Chinese authorities for visiting their parents in Kazakhstan, a foreign country.
"I called the village head, and he told me to mind my own business," says Akytkhan. 

"After that, my daughters-in-law disappeared."
The two sets of parents left behind 14 children between the ages of 3 and 15.
Akytkhan has no idea where her grandchildren are or who's taking care of them. 

She says the stress of not knowing the whereabouts of her family led to her husband falling sick. 

Just days before she visited this office, he succumbed to his illness.
"He died not knowing where his own children and grandchildren are," she says through sobs. 

"He stopped eating and drinking. He got weaker and weaker, and he kept asking where they were."
In the past year, the office, run by a Kazakh rights organization called Atazhurt, has collected more than 1,000 testimonies from ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs whose families have disappeared into a network of internment camps across the border, a few hundred miles away in the Chinese colony of East Turkestan. 

They're among an estimated million people belonging to mostly Muslim ethnic minorities who have been detained.

A group of ethnic Kazkhs stand together at the offices of Atazhurt in Almaty, displaying photos of their missing loved ones in the East Turkestan colony of China, where government officials have rounded up the mostly Muslim ethnic minorities of the region and placed them inside so-called "re-education" camps.

International rights groups have blamed China's government for conducting a campaign of cultural genocide.
"We help them write complaints to the U.N., to the Kazakh president's office, to the Kazakh foreign ministry," says Serikjan Bilash, Atazhurt's co-founder. 

"We've given up writing to the Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan, because writing to them is like throwing a stone in the sea."
Bilash sent China's embassy boxes filled with complaints from the families of those detained in the camps in East Turkestan, but says staff refused to accept them.
Kazakhstan's government hasn't treated him much better. 

"I've received four warnings from them [to stop my work]," complains Bilash.
Kazakhstan and its neighbors in the mostly Muslim region of Central Asia that have benefited from Chinese investment aren't speaking up for the Muslims inside interment camps in China, he says.
"They're silent about this because they need Chinese money. They've sold their religion. They don't want heaven. They want Renminbi," he says, referring to China's currency.

"It just came out of the blue"
Uighurs and Kazakhs, the overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minorities in East Turkestan, constitute more than half the region's population, but they make up less than 1 percent of China's entire population. 

In 2016, after China suffered several violent attacks blamed on Uighur separatists, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping appointed a new party secretary of East Turkestan, who transformed the region into one of the world's most tightly controlled police states.
Chen Quanguo, who oversaw a proliferation of police stations in China's colony of Tibet while serving as party secretary there, has used the same playbook in East Turkestan. 

Security cameras were suddenly installed, capturing all corners of the region's cities, and police stations were built every few blocks, with officers routinely demanding IDs from passersby.
Around the same time, a number of prominent Uighur officials in East Turkestan began writing "loyalty letters" to the Chinese Communist Party, published in state-run newspapers, stating their unflinching support for Chinese rule and policies in East Turkestan.
"It just came out of the blue," recalls Alim Seytoff, director of the Uighur language service at Radio Free Asia in Washington, D.C. 

The organization is funded by the U.S. Government and is broadcast globally over shortwave radio.
Thanks to a wide rage of local connections in East Turkestan, Seytoff's team of ethnic Uighur reporters often breaks news developments in the region. 

Seytoff says he and his colleagues first learned of the concentration camps in April of 2017, soon after the loyalty letter campaign.
"It was shocking," he recalls. 

"A large number of people in different towns were being detained not for committing any crimes, but simply because someone had a beard, or had a beard a couple of years ago, or someone's wife wore a long dress a few years back, or some people were just gathering to talk about a religious teaching."
Seytoff says his team interviewed Uighurs who said they were asked to fill out a government form to assess their security threat to the Chinese state. 

Uighurs told Seytoff's team that applicants were graded on a 100-point scale.
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. 

"If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."

"Intensive indoctrination" for Uighurs
Thanks to available satellite data and access to Chinese government procurement and construction bids, researcher Adrian Zenz has been able to gather evidence of rapid construction of the camps starting in March 2017. 

What's less clear, though, is the government's motivation in building them.
In interviews with dozens of ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs who have family members inside the camps, several former residents of East Turkestan told NPR they believed the goal of China's government was to eradicate ethnic minorities from the region altogether.
Zenz has a different take. 

He believes the Communist Party leadership in Beijing is reacting strongly to a string of attacks carried out by Uighurs in several cities throughout China.
"They were really looking for a definitive solution to the problem by believing that you need to change the people. You can't just put a police officer next to every Uighur," says Zenz. 

"You can't just have a camera in every Uighur home, although they're getting close to that. Trying to literally change the population through intensive indoctrination is the next level up."
After months of denying the camps existed, China's government suddenly justified them over state-run media last month. 

In an interview with Xinhua, the Uighur governor of East Turkestan said the camps were built to provide "vocational" training to Uighurs, "and now they have realized that life can be so colorful."
He said the campaign to "re-educate minorities" in China would take many years. 

In a report on the camps from Communist broadcaster CCTV, a Uighur inmate said, "Before coming here, my brain was simple, my ideas impoverished. Now my brain has been enlightened with knowledge."
Rights groups have roundly dismissed these reports as propagandistic nonsense. 

Zenz says China's Communist Party, increasingly under pressure about the camps from foreign governments and the United Nations, is in an ideological bind.
"Communism has always tried to create a new person that's no longer affected by the opium of religion," says Zenz. 

"On some level, therefore, they have to believe that re-education and changing people works, because if they don't, they basically have to admit the possibility that something like religious belief could be stronger than Communist belief."

"I will destroy your family"
At Radio Free Asia, Shohret Hoshur is in between broadcasts at the Uighur language service. 

His team's work has come at a price: He and five colleagues have family members who have been detained.
When some of his relatives were taken, he called the police chief in his home village back in East Turkestan. 

"As soon as he picked up the phone, he recognized my voice," recalls Hoshur. 

"He said, 'Don't ever call this number again. If you do, I will destroy your family.' Four months later, two of my brothers were arrested."

Shohret Hoshur, a journalist at Radio Free Asia who reports on news in China's East Turkestan colony. Eight of Hoshur's family members are detained in the camps or in prison in retaliation for his work, he says, including his 78-year-old mother.

Eight of Hoshur's family members are detained in the camps or in prison in retaliation for his work, he says, including his 78-year-old mother. 

Police told her she had an "ideological problem" before she was taken in April, he says.
Hoshur says he feels an obligation to keep reporting. 

"So many people who have dared to tell the truth to let the world know what's happening are now in prison," he says. 

"So I feel like I have a responsibility to them to uphold. For Westerners, it's almost unbelievable that something like this is happening in this day and age. On the other hand, the power of China's government is rising, and it can exert an enormous amount of pressure on the rest of the world."
That power hasn't stopped the families of the disappeared from searching for their loved ones. 

In Atazhurt's tiny office in Almaty, a 15-year-old Uighur girl reports that her mother was detained in March, after authorities discovered she and her father had left China for Kazakhstan.
The girl, who doesn't give her name for fear of retaliation against her mother, says she has repeatedly called the police back in her hometown in China.
"They only tell me that she's studying and learning Mandarin," she says. 

"It's horrible. I've heard people in the camps are forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in order to denigrate their religion. They're also forced to give thanks to the Communist Party before every meal. I don't think a humane country would ever force people to do such things."
She says her Han Chinese friends back home are sickened by what's happening to their Uighur and Kazakh friends and neighbors.
I ask her if she'll ever go back to China.
"I want to go back to yesterday's China, not today's China," she says. 

"I love China. It's where I was born and raised. I never expected it would turn into what it has today. I used to be proud of being born in China. I told everyone I was Chinese. Now I don't know what to say."

China detains relatives of U.S. reporters in punishment for East Turkestan coverage

By Simon Denyer

A policeman is seen through a car window at a security checkpoint at Khom village of Altay, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, on Jan. 28. 

BEIJING — China’s security services have detained several close relatives of four U.S.-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia, in an attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage of the Muslim-majority East Turkestan region, the news organization said Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of Muslim ethnic Uighurs have been detained in “political education centers” by Chinese authorities in East Turkestan in recent months, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The campaign is portrayed as a “strike hard” campaign against "terrorists and separatists", but effectively means anyone who expresses their religious or cultural identity is targeted, Human Rights Watch said.
“We’re very concerned about the well-being and safety of our journalists’ family members, especially those in need of medical treatment,” said Rohit Mahajan, director of public affairs at Radio Free Asia in Washington.
“We’re also particularly concerned about the use of detentions as a tactic by Chinese authorities to silence and intimidate independent media, as well as to inhibit RFA’s mission of bringing free press to closed societies.”
Among those who have been detained or disappeared are several close relatives of Shohret Hoshur, Gulchehra Hoja, Mamatjan Juma and Kurban Niyaz, four ethnic Uighur journalists working for Radio Free Asia in Washington. 

The first three are U.S. citizens while Niyaz is a green-card holder.
Their reporting for the U.S. government-funded news organization has offered one of the only independent sources of information about the crackdown in the province.
All three of Hoshur’s brothers were jailed in East Turkestan in 2014, but two were released in December of the following year after protests from the U.S. government. 

The third, Tudaxun, was sentenced to a five-year jail term in 2015 for endangering state security and remains in prison.
Now, Hoshur said, the other two brothers were detained again in September and taken to the “Loving Kindness School,” a political re-education center in the city of Horgos. 

Hoshur said a source told him that around 3,000 people have been detained there.
Hoshur said Chinese authorities have contacted family members living in East Turkestan, urging them to ask him to stop calling and reporting on events in the region.
In a separate statement posted online last week, Hoja said her brother, 43-year-old Kaisar Keyum, was taken away by police in October and his whereabouts are unknown. 

Since late January, she has also lost all contact with her parents, who are both in their seventies and suffer from poor health.
“My father is paralyzed on one side and needs a constant care. My mother has recently had a surgery on her feet and is very weak,” she said in the statement. 

“I need to know where they are and that they are OK. I need to be able to speak to them. They have not committed any crime.”
Shortly after calling her aunt earlier this month, Hoja said she received a call from a friend in West Virginia whose mother lives in Urumqi, East Turkestan’s capital. 

Her friend said that around 20 of Hoja’s relatives had been arrested by the Chinese police because of her reporting.
When her brother was detained, police told Hoja’s mother that her employment with RFA was the reason for his detention, while Hoja has heard that her relatives may have been detained for being in communication with her through a WeChat messaging group, RFA said.
Juma, deputy director of RFA’s Uyghur Service, reported that his brothers Ahmetjan Juma and Abduqadir Juma were detained in May 2017. 

Ahmetan’s whereabouts are unknown, while Abduqadir has been taken to a prison in Urumqi. 

He suffers from heart and health issues that require medical care, but his sister has been denied access to him.
“The family is deeply concerned about his health and well-being while being held in a prison known for its inhumane conditions,” RFA said.
RFA Uyghur broadcaster Niyaz’s youngest brother Hasanjan was arrested last May and soon afterward sentenced to six years in jail for “holding ethnic hatred.”
Human rights groups say China represses the rights, culture and freedom of worship for Uighur Muslims. 

East Turkestan has been home to long-running separatist unrest, and there have been several violent attacks there in recent years, blamed by the authorities on Islamist extremism.
In a report issued Tuesday, Human Rights Watch described how a system of predictive policing, involving constant mass surveillance and big data analysis, was being deployed to bolster the crackdown in East Turkestan.
The policing program called “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” gathers data from all-pervasive security cameras, some of which have facial recognition or infrared capabilities, “WiFi sniffers” monitoring smartphones and computers, and car license plate and identity card numbers gathered at the region’s countless security checkpoints, all cross-checked against health, banking and legal records, the report said.
Police officers, Communist Party cadres and government workers also visit homes to gather data on families, their “ideological situation” and their relationships with neighbors. 

One interviewee said even owning a large number of books could arouse suspicion, unless one worked as a teacher, while data is also gathered on frequency of prayer and visits abroad.
Constant surveillance and harassment have made it extremely difficult for foreign reporters based in China to cover the crackdown in East Turkestan effectively, with locals too scared to talk to reporters and security officials obstructing or detaining several journalists who have ventured there. 

That has made RFA’s coverage even more important in understanding the situation there.
RFA said it had been in contact with the State Department over the detentions, but China’s foreign ministry declined to say whether it had received any communications from the U.S. government.
RFA was set up by Congress in 1994 to broadcast news that would otherwise not be reported in Asian countries where governments do not allow a free press and it continues to be funded by an annual grant from the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Hoshur said China might be using voice recognition technology to intercept his phone calls to gather information from East Turkestan, with almost all of them cut off in under a minute.