China's state terrorism uproots Uighur families, leaked data shows

Newly revealed database exposes methods the Chinese government employed to crack down on Muslim minorities in East Turkestan.
Al Jazeera
For decades, a Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China's far west.

On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. 

On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. 

In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.
But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer's native East Turkestan colony three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.
Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.
The database obtained by The Associated Press news agency profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and contains information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbours and friends.
Each entry includes the detainee's name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighbourhood background, the reason for the detention and a decision on whether or not to release them.
Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom.
Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials picked who was put into and who was let out of concentration camps, as part of a significant crackdown that has locked away more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims.
The database emphasises that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention -- not just political violence, as authorities claim, but everyday activities such as praying, attending a mosque, or even growing a long beard.

Religious practice targeted
It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and giving entire families like Emer's a criminal record in the process.
Similarly, family background and attitude is a bigger factor than detainee behaviour in whether they are released.
"It's very clear that religious practice is being targeted," said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in East Turkestan.
"They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and re-education."
The East Turkestan colonial government did not respond to faxes requesting comment.

Heavy-handed rule

China has struggled for decades to control East Turkestan, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing's heavy-handed rule. 

With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, officials began using the spectre of "terrorism" to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying young Uighurs were susceptible to violence "extremism".
After armed groups set off bombs at a train station in East Turkestan's capital in 2014, Xi Jinping launched a so-called "People's War on Terror", transforming East Turkestan into a digital police state.
The leak of the database from sources in the Uighur exile community follows the release in November of a classified blueprint on how the mass detention system really works.

Uighur women use carts to transport cement for home renovations at the Unity New Village in Hotan, in western China's East Turkestan colony in 2018.

The blueprint obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes the AP, showed that the centres are in fact forced ideological and behavioural re-education camps run in secret.
Another set of documents leaked to the New York Times newspaper revealed the historical lead-up to the mass detention.
The latest set of documents came from sources in the Uighur exile community, dating most recently to March 2019.
The detainees listed come from Karakax County, a traditional settlement of about 650,000 on the edge of East Turkestan's Taklamakan Desert where more than 97 percent of residents are Uighur.
The list was corroborated through interviews with former Karakax residents, Chinese identity verification tools and other lists and documents seen by the AP.

'Witch-hunt mindset'
Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. 

Households are designated as "trustworthy" or "not trustworthy" and their attitudes are graded as "ordinary" or "good." 

Families have "light" or "heavy" religious atmospheres and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a "training centre."
Officials used these categories to determine how suspicious a person was -- even if they had not committed any crimes.
"It underscores the witch-hunt mindset of the government and how the government criminalises everything," said Adrian Zenz, an expert on the detention centres and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC.
Reasons listed for internment include "minor religious infection," "disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons," "relatives abroad," "thinking is hard to grasp" and "untrustworthy person born in a certain decade." 

The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 percent of people considered "untrustworthy" were in the age bracket of 25 to 29 years, according to an analysis of the data by Zenz.
When former student Abdullah Muhammad spotted Emer's name on the list of the imprisoned, he was distraught.
"He didn't deserve this," Muhammad said. 

"Everyone liked and respected him. He was the kind of person who couldn't stay silent against injustice."

Renowned teacher
Even in Karakax county, famed for its intellectuals and scholars, Emer stood out as one of the most renowned teachers in the region.
Muhammad studied the Quran under Emer for six years as a kid, following him from house to house in an effort to dodge the authorities.
Muhammad said Emer was so respected that the police would phone him with warnings ahead of time before raiding classes at his modest, single-story home of brick and mud.

Under heavy surveillance
Though Emer gave Party-approved sermons, he refused to preach Communist propaganda, Muhammad said, eventually running into trouble with the authorities. 

He was stripped of his position as an imam and barred from teaching in 1997 amid unrest roiling the region.
When Muhammad left China for Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 2009, Emer was making his living as a doctor of traditional medicine. 

Emer was growing old and under heavy surveillance, he had stopped attending religious gatherings.
That did not stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his eighties and sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison over 2017 and 2018.
The database cites four charges in various entries: "stirring up terrorism," acting as an unauthorised "wild" imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.
Muhammad called the charges false. 

Emer had stopped his preaching, practised a moderate Central Asian sect of Islam rather than Wahhabism and had never dreamed of hurting others, let alone stirring up "terrorism," Muhammad said.
"He used to always preach against violence," Muhammad said. 

"Anyone who knew him can testify that he wasn't a religious extremist."
None of Emer's three sons had been convicted of a crime. 

But the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into the detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being "untrustworthy" or "infected with religious extremism," or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

'He never bowed down to them'
It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials they were too dangerous to let out from the concentration camps."His father taught him how to pray," notes one entry for his eldest, Ablikim Memtimin.
"His family's religious atmosphere is thick. We recommend he (Emer) continue training," says another entry for his youngest son, Emer Memtimin.
Even a neighbour was tainted by living near him with Emer's alleged crimes and prison sentence recorded in the neighbour's dossier.
The database indicates much of this information is collected by teams of cadres stationed at mosques, sent to visit homes and posted in communities. 

This information is then compiled in a dossier called the "three circles", encompassing their relatives, community, and religious background.
It was not just the religious who were detained. 

The database shows that Karakax officials also explicitly targeted people for activities that included going abroad, getting a passport or installing foreign software.
Pharmacist Tohti Himit was detained in a camp for having gone multiple times to one of 26 "key" countries, mostly Muslim, according to the database. 

Former employee Habibullah, who is now in Turkey, recalled Himit as a secular, kind and wealthy man who kept his face free of a beard.
"He wasn't very pious, he didn't go to the mosque," said Habibullah, who declined to give his first name out of fear of retribution against family still in China. 

"I was shocked by how absurd the reasons for detention were."
The database says cadres found Himit had attended his grandfather's funeral at a local mosque on March 10, 2008. 

Later that year, the cadres found, he had gone to the same mosque again, once to worship and once to celebrate a festival. 

In 2014 he had gone to Anhui province, in inner China, to get a passport and go abroad.
That, the government concluded, was enough to show that Himit was "certainly dangerous." 

They ordered Himit to stay in the centre and "continue training."
Emer is now under house arrest due to health issues, his former student, Muhammad, has heard. 

It is unclear where Emer's sons are.
It was the imam's courage and stubbornness that did him in, Muhammad said. 

Though deprived of his mosque and his right to teach, Emer quietly defied the authorities for two decades by staying true to his faith.
"Unlike some other scholars, he never cared about money or anything else the Communist Party could give him," Muhammad said. 

"He never bowed down to them -- and that's why they wanted to eliminate him."

China's Final Viral Solution

Uighurs fear spread of Chinese coronavirus in China's concentration camps
More than 50 cases reported in northeastern colony of East Turkestan, home to persecuted Muslim minority.Muslim men of the Uighur ethnic group leaving the Id Kah Mosque after Friday prayers in Kashgar, East Turkestan

Members of China's Uighur minority living in exile are sounding the alarm over the risk of the Chinese coronavirus spreading in concentration camps inside the country, where NGOs say hundreds of thousands of people have been rounded up by Beijing.
So far, official figures released by Chinese state media give no major cause for concern over the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in the northeast colony of East Turkestan, which is home to the Uighurs, a Muslim minority who speak a Turkic language.
It is far from the epicentre of the outbreak and just 55 cases have been reported in the colony so far. The first patients to fully recover in the region have already left hospital, according to official media.
More than 1,100 people have died in China due to the Chinese coronavirus epidemic although most of the deaths and infections have been in the central Hubei province, whose capital, Wuhan, is the epicentre of the outbreak.
But representatives of the Uighur diaspora warn there is a real reason to fear a rapid spread of Chinese coronavirus in the massive Chinese concentration camps.
The Chinese virus spreads from person to person through droplets disseminated by sneezing or coughing, and confining large groups of people together, possibly without adequate access to germ-killing soap and water, will increase the likelihood of an outbreak.
China has rounded up an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly-Muslim ethnic minorities in concentration camps, NGOs and experts say, and little is known about the conditions inside them.
"People are starting to panic. Our families are there, dealing with the camps and the Chinese virus, and we do not know if they have enough to eat or if they have masks," said Dilnur Reyhan, a French sociologist of Uighur origin.

Muslim ethnic Uighurs carry a woman who fainted during a protest in Urumqi in China's far west East Turkestan colony on July 7, 2009.

A petition posted on Change.org signed by more than 3,000 people urges the closure of the concentration camps in order to reduce the threat.
There have also been social media hashtag campaigns such as #VirusThreatInThecamps and #WHO2Urumqi to urge the World Health Organization (WHO) to send a delegation to the city of East Turkestan.
"We must not wait until news of hundreds of Chinese coronavirus related deaths in the camps before we react," the petition says.
"As China continues to struggle to contain the Chinese virus in Wuhan, we can easily assume the virus will rapidly spread throughout the camps and affect millions if we don't raise the alarm now."
Regional authorities in East Turkestan did not respond to a query from AFP about measures taken to prevent the spread of the Chinese virus in the camps.
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), one of several groups representing Uighurs outside China, said it was very concerned "that if measures are not taken to further limit the spread of this Chinese virus, it could rapidly infect large numbers of people" in East Turkestan.
"These people are in a vulnerable and weakened state due to the Chinese government's abuses and mistreatment," said its President Dolkun Isa.
"This has just further compounded the suffering of the Uighur people, as our friends and family are now in even greater danger."
French immunologist Norbert Gualde said it was impossible to say "precisely under what conditions the Uighurs and other detainees are living in Chinese concentration camps".
"There are good reasons to think that their detention is synonymous with imposed promiscuity, stress and fear -- all circumstances that favour the transmission of the Chinese virus between those obliged to remain incarcerated," he said.

Made in China Pandemic

Beijing's behavior confirms how bad the brand truly is
By James Jay Carafano

Long before the Chinese coronavirus made international headlines, China’s Communist Party, which rules the country with unchallenged authority, had an image problem.
Image has always been a key element of Beijing’s plan to rise to global greatness. 

They’ve worked assiduously to carve a reputation as an unstoppable power wading well into the midst of world affairs.
Today, however, that carefully crafted image is badly tattered. 

It's worse than it was just one year ago when nations that eag
erly participated in China’s Belt and Road Initiative began to realize that Chinese “aid” was a two-edged sword.
No one has done more to damage China’s international reputation more than Beijing itself. 

Hopefully, the Chinese coronavirus outbreak will help more and more governments recognize the truth behind the image: The Chinese Communist Party is not to be trusted.
To be fair, the Chinese response to the coronavirus thus far has been better than its response to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Southern China in 2002. 

Still, that’s not saying much.
The SARS response was abysmal. 

China moved slowly, concealing the seriousness of the disease for months. 

As a result, the illness spread to more than 8,000 people in more than two dozen countries. 

Nearly 800 died.
While China has been at least somewhat more forthcoming and preemptive in its efforts to corral the coronavirus, its performance leaves much to be desired.

Let’s start with how the virus began.
The outbreak has been traced back to the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan China. 

It is a "wet market,” a labyrinth of ramshackle stalls hawking live fish, meat and wild animals.
For years, public health authorities have warned Beijing that such markets can be incubators for transmitting new deadly viruses. 

Many of the species in the Chinese omnivore diet are zoonotic; they carry diseases that easily transmit from animals to humans. 

SARS was an animal virus. 

Yet even after the SARS outbreak, Beijing failed to systematically address these risks.
Chinese officials also proved incredibly inept at quickly and transparently sharing critical information and recruiting international support.
As the Chinese coronavirus spreads, the people of Taiwan people stand in close proximity — and deadly peril. 

Yet China is blocking Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Organization. 

Clearly, Beijing prioritizes denying Taiwan international legitimacy over saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease. 

That’s not a smart look for China.

If the outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus had just been another bad day in global health, the Chinese Communist Party might have gotten a pass. 

It is not. 

Bungling this global health emergency is only the latest in a long line of missteps.
In 2017, the 19th Communist Party Congress held a national “coming out” party. 

Xi Jinping declared it was a “new era” — not just for China, but for the world. 

Not only was China now in the top echelon of world powers, but China was retooling the world to march to Beijing’s tune.
Critics saw this declaration as an overt signal that China intended to be a disruptive force on the global stage, not a benign influence and not just a big checkbook as many had hoped.
The critics were right.
The checkbook was most obvious in China’s Belt and Road initiative, which encompasses a worldwide network of infrastructure and investment projects. 

But nations that gladly took the checks are waking up to the fact that there’s no such thing as free yuan. 

Belt and Road has been accused of every ill, from spreading corruption to laying debt traps.
On the human rights front, Beijing’s policies have been nothing short of a public relations disaster. 

It has harassed the Dalai Lama. 

Throughout the 2017 Rohingya refugee crisis, it displayed complete indifference to Myanmar’s reprehensible expulsion policies and offered no support or assistance to Bangladesh, a poverty-stricken neighbor struggling to provide refuge for the displaced Rohingya. 

Beijing has now graduated to imprisoning millions of its own citizens, Uighurs — a massive abuse of human rights that has garnered global condemnation.
And don’t forget its mishandling of protests in Hong Kong. 

Rather than affirm its commitment to the “One China, two systems” agreement it signed when the island was turned over from British control, the regime has done the opposite. 

Beijing’s behavior is widely viewed as reneging on its commitments to the people of Hong Kong.
None of this plays well internationally. 

Taiwan’s recent elections were seen as a strong rebuke of Beijing. 

Despite reports of Chinese meddling, some of the mainland government’s staunchest critics were swept into office.
Beijing has also been criticized for pressuring international organizations for its own ends: for example, filling United Nations posts with Chinese officials loyal to the Chinese Communist Party and interfering in organizations such as Interpol and the International Civil Aviation Organization to forward its own interests and isolate Taiwan.
The Chinese government has also conducted a heavy-handed campaign to bribe and bully countries in Latin America to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
China’s long list of aggressive behavior is wearing on the international community. 

Increasingly, other countries do not trust China. 

That lack of trust can have severe consequences for Beijing — from limiting foreign purchases of Huawei’s new 5G technology to reducing Chinese money and influence on college campuses.

Cultural Genocide

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared
In East Turkestan the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.

By Amy Qin

Children leaving school in Hotan, China, this month. Beijing has used schools in the city and across the colony of East Turkestan to indoctrinate Uighur children.

HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog.
“When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities.
The girl’s father had passed away, he added.
But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western East Turkestan colony.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to concentration camps and prisons in East Turkestan over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam.
Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of East Turkestan’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017.
Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in East Turkestan without putting them at risk of arrest. 
But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.

A boarding middle school in Hotan. A government document says such schools immerse children in a Chinese-speaking environment away from the influence of religion.

State media and official documents describe education as a key component of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in East Turkestan, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures.
The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.
“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.
To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in East Turkestan have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group.
At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.
Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.
The campaign echoes past policies in Canada and Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.
“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.
Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare.
References on social media are usually quickly censored.
Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.
Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in East Turkestan, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”

Abdurahman Tohti, a Uighur living in Istanbul, saw his son in a video shared by a stranger on a Chinese social media platform.

Indoctrinating Children
Abdurahman Tohti left East Turkestan and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul.
But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.
He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China.
His parents were detained too.
The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.
Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher.
The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.
Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.
“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”
Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. 
Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.
Then, after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in East Turkestan, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.
In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase.
Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in East Turkestan, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.
In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry’s website, officials from East Turkestan outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.
Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”
By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in East Turkestan — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools.
At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.

Mahmutjan Niyaz, a Uighur businessman living in Istanbul, learned last year that his 5-year-old daughter was sent to a boarding school in East Turkestan after his relatives were detained.

Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in East Turkestan.
Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38 percent three years ago.
And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.
The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree.
But the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of Uighur culture.
Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.
Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.
Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them.
Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.
“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said.
“But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”

The Kasipi Village Elementary School near Hotan was converted into a full-time boarding school last year, according to an online diary of a Chinese language teacher there.

‘Kindness Students’
In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern East Turkestan, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.
It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top.
Cameras were mounted on every corner.
And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.
It wasn’t always like this.
Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.
Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred.
Classrooms were rearranged.
Bunk beds were set up.
Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.
Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.
The government says children in East Turkestan’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.
“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report.
He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”
But Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children.
Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left.
And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.
“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.
“It’s not just the children,” he added.
“The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”
The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders.
Before the conversion of the school, Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.
“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl.
“Daddy, why don’t you come back?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued.
“You must study hard too.”

Students in Hotan playing soccer in a schoolyard with a dormitory in the background

Nevertheless, Kang was generally supportive of the schools.
On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”
“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students.
Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.
Learning Chinese was the priority, Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.
On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.”
At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.
Tighter security has become the norm at schools in East Turkestan.
In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records.
At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.
Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern East Turkestan.
Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed.
But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.
“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.

A Uighur child doing his Chinese homework at a bus stop. The government says minority children will have better prospects if they are fluent in Chinese, but Uighur activists worry about losing their culture.

‘Engineers of the Human Soul’
To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline.
Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.
“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.
The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for East Turkestan from across China.
Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year.
The influx amounted to about a fifth of East Turkestan’s teachers last year, according to government data.
The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line.
Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.
The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as “scum of the Chinese people” and accused them of being “bewitched by extremist religious ideology.”
Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them.
A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.
Officials in East Turkestan also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.
Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.
Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun.
Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.
“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.
There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.
Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left East Turkestan to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.
Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media.
It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.
“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them.
“I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”

Kalbinur Tursun, right, at her tailor shop in Istanbul this month.

China's crimes against humanity

China calls them ‘kindness students.’ They’re actually victims of cultural genocide.
The Washington Post
Workers walk by the perimeter fence of a concentration camp in Dabancheng in East Turkestan, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. 

IMAGINE THIS: a facility in southern East Turkestan colony in China, in a dusty village nestled among fields of barren walnut trees.
It is surrounded by a tall brick wall, two layers of barbed wire, cameras on every corner, and a guard wearing a black helmet and protective vest with a metal detector at the entrance.
This is a school?
The building, recently described in a New York Times article, is a clue to the eradication of a people’s culture and language taking place every day in concentration camps in western China. 
The building is in fact a boarding school and part of China’s attempt to wipe out the mind-set of the ethnic Uighur population and others, including Kazakhs.
They are Turkic Muslims, and about 1.8 million of them are now incarcerated in camps that China calls “vocational education” facilities but look more like prisons.
As the Times article and other recently published research has revealed, China’s attempts to suppress Uighur traditions start with the youngest.
Children are separated from their parents — who are hauled off to faraway camps — and the kids are then subjected to intensive indoctrination at places such as the boarding school. 
The goal is to erase from their minds the Uighur language and cultural ways and replace them with coerced respect for China’s ruling Communist Party and the traditions of its Han-majority population.
In the village with the barbed wire, government officials call the children “kindness students,” referring to the party’s supposed "generosity" in making special arrangements.
But the glove bearing this generosity has a fist inside.
As Adrian Zenz at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has documented, in some Uighur-majority regions in southern East Turkestan, preschool enrollment more than quadrupled in recent years, exceeding the average national enrollment growth rate by more than 12 times.
Why? 
Because parents, and in some cases both parents, have disappeared into the camps. 
China is carrying out cultural genocide and social reengineering on young minds when they are most impressionable.
China has claimed the campaign is a response to extremism and violence in East Turkestan a decade ago, but these methods far exceed what would be needed for counterterrorism.
The punishment of the Uighur Muslims appears to fit the definition of crimes against humanity. 
The annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, released Wednesday, says: “Security personnel at the camps subjected detainees to torture, including beatings; electric shocks; waterboarding; medical neglect; forced ingestion of medication; sleep deprivation; extended solitary confinement; and handcuffing or shackling for prolonged periods, as well as restricted access to toilet facilities; punishment for behavior deemed religious; forced labor; overcrowding; deprivation of food; and political indoctrination.”
That is some “kindness.”
Congress should promptly finish with legislation that would pave the way for sanctions on those responsible for the repression.
If this horror is not ended soon, the entire world must ask: Should China be allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in one city while running concentration camps in another?

The Moral Hazard of Dealing With China

Stephen Schwarzman: A Loyal Xi Jinping's Fellow Traveller
By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

American Quisling: Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong shakes hands with Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman before a ceremony to officially open the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Shortly before its first-ever applications period was due to close, the Schwarzman Scholars program held an admissions seminar at the Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The China-based graduate program, funded by American businessman Stephen Schwarzman’s personal wealth and fundraising efforts and modeled after Oxford University’s Rhodes Scholarship, had recruited heavily from the world’s top academic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge.
It would kick off its inaugural academic year in fall 2016, and was aiming for a cohort comprising the best students from China and around the world.
To guarantee a “scientific and fair” admissions process, the program invited a group of experts to participate in the seminar.
The meeting, held on September 20, 2015, was attended not just by academics and administrators, but also by top Chinese Communist Party luminaries, including officials from the CCP’s Youth League, Central Party School, and the State Council, as well as a high-ranking member of the United Front Work Department—the party’s political-influence arm.
These participants “conducted an in-depth discussion on how to select China’s future leaders,” according to an article posted to the Tsinghua University website.
The fact that such officials helped guide the Schwarzman Scholars admissions process reflects both the importance China’s leaders ascribe to the program and the party’s desire to leave nothing to chance.
But the program’s relationship with the CCP, while offering non-Chinese participants a rare inside look at the future elite of a one-party state, highlights a growing moral hazard confronting Western universities: As Xi Jinping’s China descends deeper into repression, curtailing personal as well as academic freedoms, at what point do the restrictions placed on American, British, and other institutions seeking to establish campuses and joint programs in China—a lucrative market and crucial subject of study—become too much to bear?
Dozens of Sino-foreign institutes and hundreds of joint educational programs exist in China.
Among them, the Schwarzman Scholars program is particularly vulnerable to pressure from the CCP. That’s because, unlike other U.S.-China education initiatives, it has no American academic institution as a partner.
Its primary institutional tie to the United States is the private education foundation of Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire with extensive business dealings in China.
In 2007, a year before his private-equity firm, Blackstone, opened an office in Beijing, Schwarzman’s firm announced that China Investment Corporation, China’s state-investment vehicle, would acquire a $3 billion stake in the company. (China sold the stake in 2018.)
Schwarzman Scholars’ institutional home, Tsinghua University, is subject to Chinese laws and owes its continued existence and funding to the Chinese government’s largesse.
Though the program is staffed with highly respected individuals, it isn’t affiliated with any Western-based academic institution that could serve as a moral counterweight, or draw a line in the sand, should the situation in China deteriorate.
The program has particularly close ties to the United Front, which is key to understanding the CCP’s influence both at home and abroad.
The party exercises tight discipline over its 90 million members, and the United Front is responsible for establishing ideological sway over everyone else, including foreigners and Chinese nationals who live overseas. 
Under Xi, the United Front has undergone a restructuring that has amplified its power and strengthened its clout both inside and outside of China.
One of its bureaus focuses specifically on students and professors, and sent a top representative to participate in Schwarzman Scholars’ 2015 admissions seminar.
A United Front magazine, Exchange Student, has also featured the Schwarzman program.
The program and the United Front share personnel ties too. 
The United Front views David Daokui Li, who was the Schwarzman Scholars’ founding dean and is now a finance professor at Tsinghua, as an especially reliable ally.
Beijing Education, a magazine published by the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, dedicated an entire April 2017 article to praising Li as an “outstanding nonparty representative”—a term used by the United Front for people who are not official members of the CCP but who promote its goals and mission, and who “have the willingness and ability to participate in political affairs.” 
Li’s résumé is filled with recent United Front affiliations: He has served as a national representative to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a party organization of more than 2,000 delegates that is an important domestic arm of the United Front; has attended numerous conferences hosted by the State Council and the United Front, according to the Beijing Education article; and has “received a high degree of recognition from the Central United Front Work Department and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.” (Li did not respond to a request for comment.)
Julian Chang, the former Schwarzman Scholars associate dean of student life who joined the program in its inaugural year from the Harvard Kennedy School, also in 2015 became a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank that was founded by the Western Returned Scholars Association—itself officially directed by the United Front. CCG’s founder, Wang Huiyao, describes himself in an online biography as a “member of the expert advisory group of the United Front Work Department.”
Schwarzman himself met with Sun Chunlan, the former national head of the United Front, in April 2018 at Zhongnanhai, the party and government headquarters in Beijing.
In July 2018, Schwarzman Scholars co-hosted a conference on Chinese philanthropy with Tsinghua University and the CCG.
One of the highlighted speakers was Tan Tianxing, deputy minister of the United Front.
Of course, when operating inside China, engaging with the CCP and its many departments is to some extent inevitable—these are the mechanisms by which institutions are created and sustained.
It’s also neither surprising nor nefarious that a party ally like Li was offered a founding position at Schwarzman and appears to have been recognized by the party for his overtures.
In a China that is more and more authoritarian, major initiatives such as Schwarzman Scholars are only possible with the assistance of those whom the party trusts—and to create a new program, especially a high-profile one dedicated to a higher calling than profit, its founders must secure the support of the party.
But these kinds of compromises were far easier to accept a decade ago, when a kinder, gentler version of the party ruled.
As Beijing has become more heavy-handed in its approach to academia and civil society, universities have begun applying the brakes to partnerships there. 
In April 2016, the University of Notre Dame canceled plans for a partnership with Zhejiang University amid concerns about academic and religious freedom. 
In October 2018, Cornell University announced that it was severing ties with Renmin University after the Chinese institution punished Chinese students for labor-related activism.
This year, a Cornell faculty member argued for further distancing from China, citing the country’s detention of more than 1 million Muslim ethnic minorities in mass internment camps in the northwest coloy of East Turkestan.
And Wesleyan University, a private liberal-arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, said in October that it would no longer pursue a joint campus in China.
“It became clear that they were less interested in a liberal-arts approach than we initially thought,” a university spokesperson, Lauren Rubenstein, told Wesleyan’s student newspaper.
Several former participants in the Schwarzman Scholars program told me that the academic environment did appear, on the whole, to be free—or as free as one could expect, given that Chinese professors and students at times faced constraints on what they could and could not say.
And party sway over admissions seems to extend only to Chinese participants.
But such a process gives the lie to China’s assurances that it enters into such partnerships based on open exchange, and out of a desire to deepen mutual understanding.
The involvement of party officials in the selection of Chinese students is “part of the program design,” a Schwarzman Scholars spokesperson told me.
“The intention was always for China to identify its future leaders for participation in the program.” The spokesperson said the program’s U.S. office has “had no engagement” with the United Front, but added that Schwarzman Scholars is “about maintaining dialogue through periods of adversity” and that the program had “appropriate dialogue around academic ethics and freedom.”
To be sure, there is great value in observing authoritarianism from the inside.
I once spoke with a young American who told me that she had specifically chosen to pursue a master’s degree in political science from a university in China to get hands-on experience navigating an obstructed information system.
She learned how Chinese academics and researchers operate, what remains possible, and what kind of knowledge is successfully stymied.
That is invaluable for understanding how the party governs, and how Chinese society responds to that governance.
It benefits outsiders to have an intimate understanding of that reality.
But at what point does engagement become complicity? 
Take this year’s commencement ceremony.
The program invited Tang Xiao’ou, the founder of the Chinese artificial-intelligence company SenseTime, to speak.
The New York Times reported in April that SenseTime helped develop facial-recognition technology that can pick ethnic minorities out of a crowd, a capability the Chinese government is deploying against Muslim minorities in East Turkestan.
During his speech, according to a published account by Schwarzman alum Noah Lachs, Tang called reports of SenseTime’s involvement in human-rights violations “fake news.”
While the Chinese students in the audience laughed at this, wrote Lachs, the Western students reacted with “muted fury.”
Upon learning that Schwarzman Scholars had chosen as its commencement speaker one of the architects of East Turkestan’s minority-targeting mass surveillance, dozens of program participants had sent a joint letter to the administration, asking them to choose a different speaker. 
Program staff declined, and after the speech went badly, as Schwarzman participants had feared, they sent another more strongly worded letter to the administration.
“In this instance, we chose as a speaker a recognized global leader in AI, given the relevance and importance of the topic. When a subset of students raised objections, we listened and carefully considered their viewpoints,” the Schwarzman Scholars spokesperson told me.
“We ultimately decided that since the invitation had already been made and accepted, it was inappropriate and rude to disinvite the speaker.”
Four months after the ceremony, the United States placed SenseTime and 27 other Chinese entities deemed complicit in East Turkestan human-rights abuses on the U.S. “entity list,” which prohibits American companies from selling products to them without special approval.
As China becomes more and more locked down, as it carries out cultural genocide against ethnic minorities while trumpeting its governance model to the world, it requires what is approaching a stark choice: to operate fully within the party’s machinery, or to stay away entirely.
At what point does the price of continued ties become too high?
This is the existential question that those who wish to engage with China must now ask themselves.

Turkey: A Muslim Kapo Nation

They Built a Homeland Far From China’s Grip. Now They’re Afraid.
By Carlotta Gall
Ablet Abdugani with his daughter Serife, 15, and his sons Abdussalam, 11, and Abdullah, age 5, at their home in Istanbul, Turkey.

ISTANBUL — Six years ago, he fled China’s crackdown on Muslim Uighurs and sought refuge in Turkey, joining a community of fellow exiles.
He started a business with his brother, translating and publishing self-help books into their language. His wife got a job as a teacher in a Uighur school where his children began to take classes.
Now, Ablet Abdugani worries the life he built will disappear.
The Turkish government told him he had to leave the country.
That could mean being sent back to China and likely straight into detention in a sprawling network of internment camps where about one million Muslims are held.
“I am scared whenever the door opens,” Mr. Abdugani said in his apartment on the far outskirts of Istanbul.
“I feel very sad about my six years here.”
Uighurs have left China in droves as the government intensified a campaign of assimilation in the western colony of East Turkestan.
In the last three years, at least 11,000 have landed in Turkey, long a favored haven.
Now, they worry they could become pawns in a geopolitical game.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who a decade ago called Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs a genocide, has tried to reduce his country’s reliance on the West by turning to nations such as China.
In recent years, he has secured billions of dollars in loans and investments from the Asian giant to help prop up the faltering Turkish economy.

Renaay Muhammed, center, who teaches the Uighur language to children, with her students in an empty construction lot next to the school in Istanbul, Turkey.

Earlier this year, Turkey deported at least four Uighurs to Tajikistan. 
From there, they were sent back to China, alarming the Uighur community and drawing protests on social media.
Turkish authorities later said they would not send any Uighurs back to China.
But Mr. Abdugani, who was not deported, and many others like him remain anxious.
“We are caught in the middle of Chinese-Turkish relations and we don’t even know how much we are worth,” Mr. Abdugani said.
For those who have fled China, Turkey has offered them a place to reimagine their homeland.
Their people share a common heritage and similar languages.
Turkey’s government recognizes Turkic people as their own, making it a rare Muslim-majority nation that has spoken up for the Uighurs despite China’s objections.
They can practice Islam without fear and celebrate the culture of their 12 million people.
They teach classes on religion and the Uighur language and hold a yearly rally for their rights, activities that would be risky, or even banned, in China.
But many Uighurs in Turkey find themselves in a state of impermanence.
They are denied work permits and business licenses, and in some cases permanent residence and citizenship.
Once their Chinese passports expire, they are left effectively stateless.

‘Our people are being tortured’
The Uighurs speak a Turkic language and write in an Arabic script.
Their mosques feature turquoise tiled domes, their homes are decorated with Afghan-style rugs and their kitchens serve up cumin-spiced lamb pilaf and naan.
In their new home in Turkey, the Uighurs found something rare: a chance to restore their way of life and the reservoir of collective memory that China’s ruling Communist Party has sought to erode.
China intensified restrictions on the Uighurs after a spate of attacks in 2014 that the authorities blamed on "extremists".
Arrests and criminal convictions soared.
The authorities have confiscated Uighur books, restricted the use of the language in schools and detained scholars, artists and intellectuals, among others, in indoctrination camps.
Omer Hemdulla was studying in the Middle East in 2017 when his family in China warned him against going home.
The authorities had arrested his brothers and confiscated their businesses, they told him.
He went to Turkey and took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January, joining a burgeoning trade of printing books in the Uighur language.

Omer Hemdulla took over a bookstore in Istanbul in January and prints books in the Uighur language.

“The entire Uighur nation is in danger. Our people are being tortured,” said Mr. Hemdulla, 30, a law graduate.
He and his business partner, Nur Ahmet Mahmut, 32, publish anything they can find, from Uighur history and literature to children’s stories and cookery books.
They sell symbols of their hoped-for republic, East Turkestan — such as its sky blue flag with white crescent and star — items that are outlawed in China.
Mr. Hemdulla stocks books that were banned in East Turkestan.
Among the most popular, he said, are the novel “Awakened Land,” by Abdurehim Otkur, a well-known Uighur author, and “East Turkestan History” by Muhamet Emin Bugra, an exiled Turkic Muslim leader.
“I only read them when I came to Turkey and I realized China oppressed and occupied us a long time ago,” he said.
His shop is among half a dozen bookstores in the outlying districts of Sefakoy and Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, where many of the estimated 50,000 Uighurs in Turkey live.
Another publisher, Abduljalil Turan, 61, started his business in the 1990s, focusing on Islamic books and Uighur history and literature.
He asked friends to bring books to Turkey and then began publishing works of Uighur exiles, including his own writings.
He steadily expanded his stock to 1,000 titles and exports them to Uighur communities around the world.
“It is part of the cause,” he said, “to keep awareness alive about our condition.”

‘Will our culture disappear?’
For many Uighurs brought up under Communism, Turkey provides them a chance to raise a generation unbound by party orthodoxy, children who are free to embrace religion and their ethnic roots.
In China, Niaz Abdulla Bostani was imprisoned for three years for teaching the Quran to Uighur children.
Now, at 87, he holds religious classes for Uighur children on weekends at a local hall in Istanbul.

Niaz Abdulla Bostani, right, a religious teacher who moved to Turkey in 2016, and his wife, Hebibihan Merup.

“Young people come to me and ask questions,” he explained.
“Education is the answer. It will not solve things in a few days, but it will affect you all your life.”
Abdurashid Niaz, 55, was imprisoned for a year in China in 2005 for translating a book by the Egyptian Islamist Muhammad Qutb from Mandarin to Uighur.
He now runs a Uighur school in Istanbul with his wife, and says the internment drive in East Turkestan has made the Uighurs worried about their people’s survival.
“Everyone is discussing whether in 50 years, will our culture disappear,” Mr. Abdurashid said.
Four children were studying geography with his wife, Anifa Abdurashid, on a recent morning, and they leapt to answer questions about their homeland.
“I know the population is 32 million,” the youngest in the class, Abdulla, piped up.
The true population of the region of East Turkestan, of which Uighurs make up half, is closer to 24 million, but Mrs. Abdurashid let it go.
The Uighurs have preserved their identity through five millenniums, said Ferhat Kurban Tanridagli, a musician and scholar of Turkic languages.

Uighur children drew a map of their homeland during a class at a Uighur school in Istanbul.

He runs an arts school with his wife, a singer, and teaches music and dance to Uighur children.
He plays the dutar, a long-necked, two-string lute that has been played for 4,000 years in Central Asia.
“Made in Kashgar, in 1993,” he said proudly, turning the instrument of gleaming peanut wood, inlaid with bone, in his hands, referring to the fabled Silk Road trading town which now lives under tight police surveillance.
He warned that the Uighurs would not be able to withstand China’s onslaught on their own.
“If they destroy us, they will not stop. They will do it to others,” he said. 
“All the world needs to say to China to stop. We have no other choice.”

‘Still, there is danger’
This summer, the threat of deportation cast a new shadow of uncertainty over the Uighurs.
Mr. Abdugani, the businessman who had been told in July by the government to leave, said 40 others had received similar orders.
The Uighurs were deeply troubled when the authorities, as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants, deported a Uighur woman and her two children to Tajikistan, which sent them back to China.
A fourth Uighur, also a woman, was deported as well.
The children were handed to their grandmother, but relatives have no news of the two women and fear they have been detained.
An estimated 2,500 Uighurs do not have legal residency.
Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said in August that the government was trying to manage migration with “mercy and conscience,” and would not deport Uighurs.
Those without residence papers like Mr. Abdugani could seek humanitarian protection, he said.
That would grant them refugee status and access to health care services but not allow them to work.
Mr. Abdugani applied for humanitarian protection, but several months later was still waiting for a response and risks arrest for his illegal status.
The family was surviving on his wife’s salary and they could not pay for school books or the bus fare, so his children were walking to class most days.
Even as Turkey allows them to stay, many Uighurs said that immigration rules and the state bureaucracy make survival difficult.
Mr. Abdugani said he wanted long-term residence, which would allow him to work and support his family, and after seven years, apply for citizenship.
Businessmen complain they are restricted from developing their businesses, political activists say the authorities limit their demonstrations, and students are only offered free college education if they study religion.
And there is always a lingering fear of China’s reach.

Uighurs with flags of East Turkestan protested outside the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul.

Abdulla Turkestanli, 49, a book publisher, said he was detained without charge by the Turkish authorities for a year in 2017.
He suspected that Beijing had complained about him when he opened a second bookstore in the district of Sefakoy.
The Turkish authorities never explained why he was detained.
“A lot of writers are in prison or dead” he said.
“They are accused of terrorism in China, and so they say we are helping them.”
“I am fine, thanks be to God,” he said, “but still, there is danger.”

Hong Kong protesters rally in support of minority Uighurs

Largely peaceful rally descended into chaos after protesters grabbed a Chinese flag and tried to burn it.
hwww.aljazeera.com
Hong Kong protesters held a rally in support of the Uighurs on Sunday.

Riot police in Hong Kong broke up a rally in support of China's Uighurs on Sunday -- with one officer drawing a pistol -- after the initially peaceful protest descended into chaos when protesters removed a Chinese flag from a nearby government building and tried to burn it.
Organisers stopped the flag being burned, but riot police swooped in with pepper spray, sparking anger from the crowd who threw water bottles.
One officer drew his gun and pointed it at the crowd, but did not fire.
At least two protesters were arrested.
Several hundred people joined the rally, with some holding signs emblazoned with the blue and white flag of the independence movement in China's northwestern colony of East Turkestan.
China has faced international condemnation for detaining an estimated one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in massive concentration camps.
The emergence of a huge surveillance and prison system that now blankets much of East Turkestan has been watched closely in Hong Kong, which has been convulsed by six months of huge and sometimes violent protests against Beijing's rule.
Pro-Uighur chants and flags have become commonplace in Hong Kong's marches, but Sunday's rally was the first to be specifically dedicated to Uighurs.
The crowd gathered in a square close to the city's harbourfront listening to speeches warning that the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown in East Turkestan could one day be replicated in Hong Kong.
"We shall not forget those who share a common goal with us, our struggle for freedom and democracy and the rage against the Chinese Communist Party," one speaker shouted through a loudspeaker to cheers.

'Control Freaks'
Many of those attending were waving the flag of East Turkestan, which has a white crescent moon on a blue background.

A man holds a flag during a rally to show support for Uighurs and their fight for human rights in Hong Kong. The characters read "Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our times." 

Others wore blue face masks displaying the East Turkestan flag.
People also carried flags for Tibet -- another restless region of China - and the self-ruled island of Taiwan that China claims as its own.
China runs Hong Kong on a "one country, two systems" model which allows the city key freedoms that are denied people on the authoritarian mainland.
The framework will end in 2047, 50 years after the handover.
Many people in Hong Kong fear an increasingly assertive China is already eroding those freedoms.
Many at Sunday's rally said they felt a mainland-style government was around the corner.
"The Chinese government are control freaks, they can't stand any opinions they disagree with," Katherine, a protester in her late twenties and a civil servant, told AFP before police moved in.
"In East Turkestan they are doing what they are doing because they have the power to do so. When they take over Hong Kong they will do the same," she added.
China cracked down on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities after a series of deadly attacks in the area.
It bristles at any criticism of its policies in East Turkestan.

Sonny Bill Williams follows Mesut Özil in support of Uighur ethnic group

‘Sad time when we choose cupidity over humanity’
Australian Associated Press

This is the first time Sonny Bill Williams has publicly voiced his opposition to China’s treatment of the Uyghur people.

Sonny Bill Williams has tweeted his support of the minority Uighur ethnic group, mirroring the stance of football star Mesut Özil.
Cross-code star Williams may further provoke Chinese officialdom with his social media post, which denounces the treatment of Uighurs.
In his tweet on Monday, Williams echoed the belief of Arsenal playmaker Özil, who is also a practising Muslim, that more countries should speak out against China’s reported actions of detaining Uighur people in concentration camps.

Former Germany midfielder Mesut Özil has criticized Muslim countries for not speaking up for minorities subjected to abuse in China. More than 1 million people have been sent to concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony.

“It’s a sad time when we choose economic benefits over humanity #Uyghurs,” Williams wrote, accompanied by an image illustrating oppression against the Muslim minority group.


Sonny Bill Williams
✔@SonnyBWilliams

It’s a sad time when we choose economic benefits over humanity#Uyghurs

17K
9:02 PM - Dec 22, 2019


Greedy Arsenal distance themselves from Mesut Özil comments on Uighurs’ plight

Williams’ tweet comes a month after he signed a lucrative deal with Canada-based Super League club, Toronto Wolfpack, having ended a lengthy and successful career with the All Blacks.
It remains to be seen if there is a backlash from China against the 34-year-old New Zealander, who hasn’t previously voiced his opinion on such a sensitive international topic.
China’s state broadcaster removed the English Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester City from its programming in response to Özil’s actions.
The German midfielder was also removed from a Chinese-produced football computer game.
Rugby league doesn’t have the same presence in China as football or basketball’s NBA, which paid a heavy financial price when an official criticised the Chinese government in October.
Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support of protesters in Hong Kong, sparking Chinese demands that he be fired, which were rejected by the NBA.

The age of football moral pygmies

China's Arsenal blackout highlights Premier League's ethics problem

Amnesty International praise Arsenal midfielder Mesut Özil for speaking out against Chinese crimes but the world’s most famous league has remained tight-lipped so far

By Lily Kuo in Beijing and Paul MacInnes in London

A supporter of China’s Muslim Uighur minority holds a placard Mesut Ozil during a demonstration at Beyazid square in Istanbul.

Across the street from the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, the venue of Arsenal’s first ever match in China in 1995, shoppers at an Adidas store ignore a rack of puffer jackets, football shirts and backpacks bearing the football club’s name.
One, inspecting a range of Adidas clothing released for Chinese New Year, says he had once been a fan of Arsenal’s Mesut Özil, but since the star midfielder had condemned China’s treatment of the country’s Uighur people, he has changed his mind.
The man then goes on to admit that he is, in fact, a Manchester United supporter.
Controversy over Özil’s remarks this week has shone a light on the challenges – and compromises – foreign organisations face in trying to do business in China.
But it also draws attention to the unique role played by sport, both in contemporary China and in exerting soft power for western countries abroad.
Eight days ago, Özil, a practising Muslim of Turkish descent, posted a message on Instagram urging support for the Uighur Muslim population in the north-western Chinese colony of East Turkestan, more than a million of whom are interned in concentration camps. 
In response, Arsenal distanced themselves from their own player.
Hastily issuing a statement via Chinese social network Weibo, the club said: “The content published is Özil’s personal opinion. As a football club, Arsenal has always adhered to the principle of not involving itself in politics.”
A week of controversy followed, with the debate reaching diplomatic circles.
Arsenal were widely criticised in British media for washing their hands of Özil, and accused of only having eyes for their bottom line. 
The German found one unlikely ally, meanwhile, in the shape of the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who tweeted: “China’s Communist party propaganda outlets can censor Mesut Özil … but the truth will prevail.”
In China, there was an immediate response too, with Arsenal’s fixture against Manchester City pulled from the TV schedules by state broadcaster CCTV.
Özil was also the subject of individual sanctions when his social media accounts were blocked on the Chinese internet and his likeness removed from the Chinese version of the video game Pro Evolution Soccer.
In this way, the Özil affair echoed actions taken earlier in the year by the Chinese against NBA team the Houston Rockets, who found themselves persona non grata after their general manager, Daryl Morey, expressed support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
Two months after Morey’s post, Rockets games are still not being shown on CCTV or the service provided by digital rights holder Tencent.
Back in England and, a week after the incident, the Premier League has yet to make any public comment on the affair.
For Simon Chadwick, professor of sport enterprise at Salford Business School, this is not surprising. “I cannot imagine any scenario in which the Premier League would publicly speak out in support of Özil,” he says.
“One suspects that financially it would likely be disastrous for the Premier League to make any explicit statement questioning, criticising or undermining Chinese state policy.“
Of the 20 clubs in English football’s top flight, one, Wolverhampton Wanderers, is fully Chinese owned while another, champions Manchester City, have Chinese investors who hold a 12% stake in the club. 
Other teams, such as Bournemouth and Crystal Palace, have sponsorship deals with Chinese companies.
Perhaps most important of all to the Premier League’s financial success, however, is the TV deal struck with the company PP Sports for rights to broadcast live matches in China.
The three-year agreement that runs until 2022 is believed to be worth £500m.
The Premier League has seen the value of its TV rights fall domestically of late and in several other markets, while China remains one source of real growth.
The growth reflects increased demand for top-flight English football among Chinese fans and the government.
“This is really the horns of the dilemma for the PRC (Communist party)”, says Dr J Simon Rofe, a reader in diplomatic and international studies at SOAS.
“They’ve actively encouraged the engagement with sport, particularly the NBA through [Chinese basketball player] Yao Ming in the noughties and then the Premier League, through Xi Jinping himself. Think back to the image Sergio Agüero tweeted of Xi and David Cameron. The Premier League does have an influence and it has been cultivated by the PRC.”
In 2016, Xi is believed to have had personal involvement in the drafting of a national blueprint for the game aimed at transforming China into a “soccer powerhouse” capable of winning the World Cup by 2050.
Part of that plan involved gaining access to and learning from elite football in Europe.
As a result, a number of English clubs, including Manchester City, have opened football academies in China.
The ability for football and the Premier League specifically to open doors has not been missed by the UK government.
Alongside the Queen and the BBC, the competition is seen as one of the most effective mechanisms for exercising soft power on the international stage.
“Soft power is about getting people elsewhere in the world to see things the way that you do,” says Chadwick.
“Football is part of Brand Britain, it is part of Britain’s soft-power strategy, and it helps sell who we are and what we do.”

Moral Pygmies
Attempting to balance the interests of its stakeholders, the clubs, its sponsors and media partners, alongside its quasi-diplomatic responsibilities, means that the Premier League is unlikely to ever speak about politically matters.
There will be disappointment among many who feel the organisation could use its clout to serve a greater good.
Chinese authorities have not reacted as strongly to Özil’s remarks as they did to Morey’s.
There is an expectation that any uproar may soon disappear.
In a country with an increasing appetite for televised sport, to damage one competition might seem unfortunate, to damage a second could seem like carelessness.