China's Final Solution

The stunning new evidence of China's crimes against humanity, 

By Ishaan Tharoor

We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in East Turkestan. 

The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. 

We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of concentration camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. 

There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. 

A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. 

They insist that the camps are actually "job-training centers" where amenable East Turkestan residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. 

They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. 

We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. 

The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including Xi Jinping. 

The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. 

And what we see is chilling.



Elizabeth Warren
✔@ewarren
The Chinese government’s cruel, bigoted treatment of Muslims and ethnic minorities is a horrifying human rights violation.
We must stand up to hatred and extremism at home—and around the world. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html …
‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims
More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the  East Turkestan colony.nytimes.com
11.2K
9:44 PM - Nov 16, 2019

It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. 

This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. 

As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in East Turkestan vwarned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. 

The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern East Turkestan city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. 

“Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. 

It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. 

“Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the "school" if they meet course completion standards.”The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. 

China makes independent reporting in East Turkestan virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. 

Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in East Turkestan in recent years. 

The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
A Washington Post report looked at the plight of one Uighur woman, Zumrat Dawut, who spent more than two months in a cell that was so cramped that the women there had to lie down in shifts. During the day, they recited propaganda slogans that included praise for Xi.
“When she was let go, she was forced to sign documents agreeing not to practice her religion and not to tell anyone what had happened in the camps,” my colleagues Emily Rauhala and Anna Fifield wrote. 

“After her detention, she was forced to pay a fine of more than $2,500 for breaking China’s family planning rules by having three, not two, children.”
Terrified by what would happen if she resisted, she complied with a suggestion to submit herself for a sterilization. 

Dawut, unlike countless of her brethren, managed to escape the country alongside her children and Pakistani husband and made her way to the United States, where she’s hoping to receive asylum. 

Her troubles captured the attention of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who cited her as a victim of religious persecution.


isabella steger
✔@stegersaurus
This is the language now being used by Chinese officials and @hkpoliceforce to describe HK protesters. So i don’t think it’s a stretch for ppl here to keep East Turkestan in their minds when they’re putting up resistance. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1195729621519613953 …The New York Times
✔@nytimes
Replying to @nytimes
Publicly, Chinese officials say the East Turkestan camps provide job training. But privately, the documents show, they used words like "virus," "infected" and "eradicate" to justify mass detentions and plotted how they would manage and intimidate families that were torn apart.

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5:12 PM - Nov 16, 2019

But Washington’s focus on the horrors in East Turkestan also comes at a time when the Trump administration has made it dramatically harder for refugees and asylum seekers to find sanctuary in the United States. 

Locked in a trade war with Beijing, Trump has remained conspicuously silent on pressing matters of human rights, both in East Turkestan and Hong Kong. 

And, indeed, the protesters in Hong Kong, where clashes with police are turning all the more violent, see China’s unrelenting, unflinching approach taken in East Turkestan as an omen of darker days to come under Beijing rule.
The New York Times report does point to small acts of resistance. 

In 2017, Wang Yongzhi, a local official in a prefecture in southern East Turkestan, quietly released 7,000 camp inmates of his own volition. 

As a result, he was stripped of his position, prosecuted and later pilloried as a “corrupt” official. 

“I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” 

Wang wrote in a signed confession he may have given under duress. 

“Without approval and on my own initiative, I broke the rules.”

The Han Supremacists Of China

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui

‘Sinicization’ is defined as bringing people who are not of Chinese descent under the influence of Chinese culture. 

Truly speaking, it is a process where societies that are traditionally non-Chinese are put under the influence of the Han Chinese communities, by adapting to their culture, customs, and way of life.
Along with Dr. Imtyaz (an area specialist on ethnic and minority studies) I have been calling the process of Sinicization, as practiced by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as Hanification (a term which has become more common these days compared to more than half a decade ago when we first used it). 

It is essentially a supremacist policy. 

It aims to cement the supremacy of the Han Chinese majority through the PRC’s government policies of imposed acculturation, forced assimilation, or cultural imperialism on non-Han citizens of the state.
The spoken language of the Han Chinese is Mandarin. 

There are 292 non-Mandarin languages spoken by other non-Han (and yet native) nationalities in today’s China.
Although mainland China today is a people’s republic – or more properly, a communist-ruled state with managed capitalism – that is run by Han Chinese, it had a long history as a multi-ethnic empire when Sinicization accommodated and respected diversity, thus, allowing others – the non-Han communities – to strengthen the cultural influence of imperial China.
Consider, e.g., the case of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a Muslim (of Bukhara), who was the governor of Yunnan (located in south-west part of today’s China) under the (non-Han) Mongol-founded Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 CE).
After conquering the Bai Kingdom of Dali, Sayyid Ajjall promoted Sinicization of the non-Han Chinese peoples in Yunnan during his reign. 

He founded a “Chinese style” city where modern Kunming is today, called Zhongjing Cheng.
Both Confucianism and Islam were promoted by Sayyid Ajall in his “civilizing mission” during his time in Yunnan. 

He ordered that a Buddhist temple, a Confucian temple, and two mosques be built in the city. 

The Confucian temple that Sayyid Ajjall built in 1274, which also doubled as a school, was the first Confucian temple ever to be built in Yunnan. 

After his death, his son Nasir al-Din became the Governor of Yunnan in 1279.
Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435), a great-great-great-grandson of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing (the capital was later moved to Beijing by the Yongle Emperor). 

He commanded expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433 and built mosques on his traveled lands.
Six of Ming dynasty (1368-1644) founder Hongwu Emperor’s most trusted generals are said to have been Muslim, including Lan Yu who, in 1388, led a strong imperial Ming army out of the Great Wall and won a decisive victory over the Mongols in Mongolia, effectively ending the Mongol dream to re-conquer China.
During the war fighting the Mongols, among the Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang’s armies was the Hui Muslim Feng Sheng. 

When the Qing dynasty invaded the Ming dynasty in 1644, Muslim Ming loyalists led by Muslim leaders Milayin, Ding Guodong, and Ma Shouying led a revolt in 1646 against the Qing during the Milayin rebellion in order to drive the Qing out and restore the Ming Prince of Yanchang Zhu Shichuan to the throne as the emperor.
The Muslim Ming loyalists were crushed by the Qing with 100,000 of them, including Milayin and Ding Guodong killed. 

The Muslim Ming loyalists were joined by Tibetans and Han Chinese in the revolt.
The rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) were ethnic Manchus, who were a minority. 

They developed a sense of Manchu identity and used Central Asian models of rule as much as Confucian ones. 

Nevertheless, there is also evidence of Sinicization. 

For example, Manchus originally had their own separate style of naming from the Han Chinese, but eventually adopted Han Chinese naming practices.
The Qing dynasty witnessed multiple revolts. 

In 1759 Manchu Qing emperor Qianlong defeated the Jungar Mongols and completed the conquest of Dzungaria. 

It committed genocide by liquidating the entire Dzungar nation, almost to the last baby; those who survived were killed by the following epidemic of smallpox; total loss of the population in Dzungaria reached 1,000,000, transforming it eventually into the Land without people.
Concurrently, the Qing Dynasty occupied the Altishahr region of Eastern Turkestan, which had been settled by the followers of the Muslim political and religious leader Afaq Khoja. 

After the Qing conquest, the Chinese began to incorporate Altishahr and the Tarim Basin into their empire. 

The territory came to be known as Xinjiang. 

This resulted in a substantial resistance movement against the Qing rule, led by the Khojijan princes of Kashgar (officially named Kashi), which continued for decades until the Manchus were overthrown by the Kuomintang revolution of 1912. 

Between 1759 and 1862 the Uyghurs – the natives of East Turkestan who are Muslim by faith and are ethnically Turkic – revolted 42 times against the rulers of the Qing Dynasty.
The Ush rebellion in 1765 by Uyghurs against the Manchus occurred after some Uyghur women were gang raped by the servants and son of Manchu official Su-cheng. 

The Manchu Emperor ordered that all the Uyghurs in the rebel town be massacred. 

Accordingly, the Qing forces enslaved all the Uyghur children and women and slaughtered the Uyghur men. 

The heinous crimes against Muslim Uyghurs, including raping Uyghur women, caused massive hatred and anger by Uyghur Muslims to the criminal Manchu rule. 

The anti-Muslim attitudes of the Qing officials resulted in attempted uprisings by Hui and Salar Chinese Muslims in 1781-84, who had hitherto tried to remain neutral.
The liberation of Kashgar (1818-28) by Jahangir Khoja was preceded by the rape of a Muslim girl by another Manchu official, Binjing. 

Such rape of Muslim women by Manchu officials became quite common enraging many Muslims. The Qing dynasty sought to cover up the rape of Uyghur women by Manchus to prevent anger against their rule from spreading among the Uyghurs.
The Manchu official Shuxing’a started an anti-Muslim massacre which led to the Panthay Rebellion, which occurred in Yunnan province from 1855 to 1873, and the Dungan revolt, which occurred mostly in East Turkestan, Shensi and Gansu, from 1862 to 1877. 

He ordered several Muslim rebels to be sliced to death in a slow and painful way. 

The Manchu government ordered the execution of all rebels, killing a million people in the Panthay rebellion, and several million in the Dungan revolt.
During the waning years of Quing dynasty, some Muslim generals like Ma Qianling and Ma Fuxiang, played important roles to strengthen Sinicization of the conquered territories. 

The Hui Muslim 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) governed southern East Turkestan in 1934–37. 

A Muslim army called the Kansu Braves led by General Dong Fuxiang fought for the Qing dynasty against the foreigners during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). 

They included well known generals like Ma Anliang, Ma Fulu, and Ma Fuxiang.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Sun Yat-sen, who established the Republic of China on Jan. 1, 1912, immediately proclaimed that the country belonged equally to the Han, Man (Manchu), Meng (Mongol), Hui (Muslim), Tsang (Tibetan), and Miao peoples. 

Uyghur nationalism become a grave challenge to the post Qing warlords controlling East Turkestan. 

Twice, in 1933-34 and 1944-49, the Uyghurs successfully regained their independence for East Turkestan Republic.
During the rule of the Kuomintang party, the Kuomintang appointed the Muslim chiefs of the family known as the Ma clique (in Northwestern China) as the Military Governors of the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia for 10 years from 1919 until 1928. 

Bai Chongxi was a Muslim General (1926-49) and Defence Minister (1946-48) of China during this time. 

He rejoined the Central Government at the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek in 1937 and took a leading role as a strategist and Chief of the General Staff (1937-49) in liberating China from Japanese invaders.

Many Hui, Turkic Salar, Dongxiang, and Bonan Muslims fought in the war against Japan. 

Besides Bai, Ma Bufang and Ma Bufang served as Muslim generals against the Japanese occupation forces. 

Ethnic Turkic Salar Muslims made up the majority of the first cavalry division which was sent by Ma Bufang.
The Chinese communist party during the civil war (against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek) promised that ethnic groups in regions such as Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan would be free to choose their own future.
However, as soon as they came to power, Mao Zedong repudiated self-determination as an option and rejected any prospect of dividing China into federated republics. 

Instead, he created the concept of “autonomous regions, provinces and districts” within which the various ethnic groups were promised “equality” with the Chinese Han majority. 

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region was proclaimed in 1955. 

In fact, as the most westerly outpost of the Chinese empire, Xinjiang has always been treated in a typical colonial fashion by whichever faction ruled in Beijing-Feudalists, Nationalists and Communists-since the Manchu dynasty. 

In 1949, East Turkestan’s (Uighur) rulers did not agree to form a confederate relation within Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China.
After the communists came to power, Muslim Kuomintang National Revolutionary Army forces in Northwest China, in Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, East Turkestan, as well as Yunnan, continued an unsuccessful insurgency against the communists from 1950 to 1958, after the general civil war was over.
During Mao’s communist rule, the slow process of Sinicization was changed to an aggressive and a violent one. 

In the last 70 years, the Muslim population, which once numbered more than 10% before the communist revolution, has been brought down to less than 20-50 million today (less than pre-1949 figures) within an overall population of 1.4 billion, thus, accounting for anywhere between 1.5 to 3.5 percent only. 

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-75), mosques along with other religious buildings were defaced, destroyed or closed and copies of the Qur’an were destroyed along with temples and churches. 

Muslims were forced to renounce Islam, raise pigs and eat haram (religiously forbidden) food. 

In 1975, in what would be known as the Shadian incident, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) massacred 1,600 Hui Muslims.
After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the communist party-state began to relax its policies towards Muslims in 1978. 

However, the PRC has become a state of, for and by the Han Chinese via the all-too-obvious supremacist Hanification process that has seemingly reached its climax under its new dictator Xi Jinping! 

Thus, the disappearance and detention of a million Uighurs in East Turkestan who face a socio-cultural genocide today with their rights robbed is a footnote – albeit a big one – in Chinese history in that calculus of Hanification.

Chinazism: State Terrorism

'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over East Turkestan protests
Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing
By Benjamin Haas in Munich

Demonstrators holding Uighur flags in Berlin before a meeting between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Li Keqiang. 

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. 

But the call from East Turkestan, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. 

It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in concentration camps.
Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. 

But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. 

Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. 

Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.
By the end of the conversation, the façade constructed by the Chinese security agent was broken and Emet’s sister wept as she begged him to stop his activism. 

Then the Chinese official took the phone again with a final warning.
“You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. 

“You need to think of their safety.”
In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. 

Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in East Turkestan, and some were asked to spy for China.
More than a million Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and other minorities are being held in concentration camps, according to the UN, with some estimates saying the number is “closer to 3 million”.
Emet, originally from Aksu in East Turkestan, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. 

He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.
“I will not keep my silence and the Chinese government should not use my family to threaten me,” Emet said. 

“I was clear with them on the phone: if they harm my family, I will speak out louder and become a bigger problem for the government.”

‘China threatening people in Germany should never become normalised’
Most Uighurs remain silent, and have found little help from European authorities. 

But Margarete Bause, a member of the German parliament representing Munich, said Chinese interference was unacceptable and urged Uighurs to contact their MPs.
“We need to protect visitors to the Bundestag. Observing parliament is a fundamental right in any democracy,” she said. 

“It’s also important for the German public to know how China is trying to exert influence here. The Chinese government threatening people in Germany should never become normalised.”
Bause has been interested in Uighur issues for over a decade, after she was admonished by Chinese diplomats in 2006 for attending an event hosted by the World Uyghur Congress. 

In August she was denied a visa as part of a parliamentary visit to China and the trip was eventually cancelled in response.
Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. 

Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. 

Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way, he said, with his number well known in the Uighur community in Munich.
Chinese agents offer cash, the promise of visas to visit East Turkestan or better treatment for family members as a reward, but also dangle the threat of harsh consequences for those same family members if their offers are refused. 

Uighurs described having crucial documents withheld from Chinese embassies and consulates unless they agreed.
One Uighur living in Germany who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said a Chinese agent asked for photos of Eid and other celebrations, and specifically asked for information on Uighurs who had recently arrived in Europe.

A group of people stage a protest against China’s human rights violations against members of the Turkic Uighur minority.

The recent surge in activism among Uighurs overseas is mostly a direct response to the increasingly repressive policies in East Turkestan, and as more people speak out China has doubled efforts to silence them and control the narrative over what it calls “re-education camps”.
There are some signs China’s campaign to silence Uighurs in Europe is working. 

Gulhumar Haitiwaji became an outspoken critic of policies after her mother disappeared into one of the camps in East Turkestan, appearing on French television and starting a petition addressed to French president Emmanuel Macron that garnered nearly half a million signatures. 

But after threats from Chinese officials targeting her mother, Haitiwaji cancelled a planned appearance in March at a human rights summit in Geneva, according to two sources familiar with her plans. 

Haitiwaji and the organisers of the meeting did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who focuses on East Turkestan, said European governments needed to do more to protect their citizens from Chinese intimidation.
“The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. 

“China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”
The Chinese embassy in Berlin did not respond to requests for comment.

American greed: Beijing's ass kissers

How the NBA censored me on American soil

The NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime

By Jon Schweppe


I’ve been an NBA fanatic as long as I can remember. 

Growing up, I rooted for the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

I was there for the ups — who can forget that almost magical 2004 season? — and all of the downs, of which there have been far too many. I still follow the team closely today.
So as a fan of the league, I was shocked when I found myself being censored at an NBA exhibition game Wednesday night in Washington between the Washington Wizards and the Guangzhou Loong Lions. 

Now, I’m rethinking my allegiance to the league and wondering whether I should stop attending or even watching games altogether.
I decided to attend last night’s game after reading about an incident that took place at a Philadelphia 76ers game this week. 

In Philly, security guards ejected two spectators for displaying small signs with messages of support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy dissidents.
It was an unsettling sight: One of America’s premier sports leagues, which constantly virtue-signals about its “values,” groveling to a totalitarian regime and censoring its own fans in the United States of America — in Philly, home of the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell.
I knew I had to do something. 

I wanted to test for myself whether the NBA would be so brazen as to censor fans again — this time in our nation’s capital, no less.
My friends and I entered Capital One Arena donning “Free Hong Kong” T-shirts given to us by an activist outside the arena and with homemade signs concealed in our clothes. 

We took our seats shortly before the Chinese national anthem began to play.
At that point, we stood up and unfurled a long “Free Hong Kong” banner. 

That immediately attracted the attention of several security guards, who came over to confiscate our sign. 

We asked why we were having our sign taken away. 

We were told: “We respect your freedom of speech, but … we don’t have any stance on [Hong Kong]. So we’re just asking not to have any signage related to that in here tonight.”
Later, we unveiled a second message, a homemade sign that simply said “Google Uyghurs,” referring to China’s oppressed Muslims, more than a million of whom are detained in Chinese concentration camps.
This sign, too, was deemed to be a problem. 

Within minutes, we were approached by security supervisors, who told us that we were not allowed to make political statements about China at the game. 

My friend pleaded that we were simply seeking to educate some of the NBA officials, coaches and players, many of whom had expressed ignorance about the issue. 

It was in vain: The supervisor still confiscated the sign and told us that if we continued to disrupt the game, we would be ejected.
By then, we felt we had seen enough and left of our own accord.
At this point, it’s fair to wonder: 

What values does the NBA really stand for? 

In recent years, the league has taken pains to exhibit a concern for “social justice,” with prominent players speaking out in favor of almost exclusively progressive political causes and executives encouraging such activism.
Most notably, in 2016 the NBA used its influence to push a gender ideology and lobby against a “bathroom bill” law in North Carolina that would have protected women in private spaces — going so far as to move the NBA All-Star game out of Charlotte to New Orleans. 

Far from avoiding political controversy, the league seemed to embrace it when the targets were American conservatives.
But the NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime. 

When Xi Jinping yanks the NBA’s corporate chain, the league tells its fans: “Shut up and watch us dribble.”
This should be very worrying for all Americans, not just sports fans. 

If the price of US companies doing business in China involves self-censorship, there should be no sale. 

Free speech is a bedrock American principle, not some cheap slogan that can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. 

When Beijing can force the country’s wokest sports league to practice Chinese-style censorship and authoritarianism on American soil, free trade has gone too far.
Our country and the freedoms we enjoy are too important to ignore the league’s craven conduct. 

Until the NBA apologizes to fans for how it has handled this incident and unequivocally commits to bedrock American values, I will be forgoing my NBA viewership for a pastime which better upholds American values. 

I encourage my fellow fans to do the same.

China's crimes against humanity

US Senate presses sanctions on China's treatment of Uighurs

AFP

More than one million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have been rounded up into concentration camps in the tightly-controlled northwest colony, home to China's Uighur population.

WASHINGTON -- The US Senate has approved a Bill to press China on its treatment of Uighurs, requiring the US government to closely monitor the mass incarceration of the community and consider punishment of those responsible.
The Senate unanimously approved the so-called Uighur Human Rights Policy Act late Wednesday. It still needs passage by the House of Representatives, which is highly likely as the Bill enjoys wide bipartisan support.
The act would require US intelligence to produce a report within six months on the crackdown in East Turkestan, the western colony where as many as one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities are being held in concentration camps.
It would also establish a State Department special coordinator on East Turkestan and ask the FBI to assess reports of harassment by China of US citizens and residents of Uighur heritage.
The Bill also asks Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to consider sanctions on Chinese officials behind the policy, notably Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party chief for East Turkestan.
"It's long overdue for the United States to hold the Chinese government and Communist Party officials accountable for the systemic and egregious human rights abuses and crimes against humanity in East Turkestan," said Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican ally of Trump who co-sponsored the resolution.
The Trump administration has repeatedly criticised China, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently calling Beijing's treatment of Uighurs one of the "worst stains on the world."
But activists say that US actions have gone little beyond statements at a time that Trump is embroiled in multiple feuds with China, most notably on trade.
Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who co-sponsored the Bill with Rubio, said the measure showed that the United States was not turning a blind eye even though the Trump administration "has not seen fit to make the tragic situation in East Turkestan a priority."
Rights groups and witnesses accuse China of forcibly trying to draw Uighurs away from their Islamic customs and integrate them into the majority Han culture.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing now defends the camps, which it calls "vocational education centers."

China’s Brutality Can’t Destroy Uighur Culture

The Turkic people has an ancient language and traditions. Even Mao didn’t expect to erase it.
By S. Frederick Starr

A police vehicle patrols in Kashgar, East Turkestan, June 25, 2017. 

Daily headlines tell the story of China’s mass internment of Uighurs in its East Turkestan colony, along with the closing and destruction of Uighur mosques and the demolition of their neighborhoods. But the press largely ignores other aspects of their identity, notably their significant cultural and intellectual achievements. 

These details matter, because Uighurs’ resilient culture may ultimately frustrate China’s efforts to stamp them out.
Uighurs are one of the oldest Turkic peoples and were the first to become urbanized. 

When the ancestors of modern Turks were still nomadic, Uighurs were settling into sophisticated cities. 

One of their branches, known today as the Karakhanids, had a capital at Kashgar, near China’s modern border with Kyrgyzstan. 

When Karakhanids conquered the great Silk Road city of Samarkand, they established a major hospital and endowed not only the doctors’ salaries but the cost of heating, lighting and food. 

That was 1,000 years ago, before the Normans conquered England.
Uighurs were active experimenters in religion. 

Besides their traditional animism, they embraced Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity and finally Islam. 

They were also among the first Turkic peoples to develop a written language. 

And with writing came literature and science.
Yusuf of Balasagun (c. 1020-70) was chancellor of the Karakhanid state. 

His “Wisdom of Royal Glory” celebrates the active and civic life. 

Rejecting mystic Sufism, Yusuf embraced the here and now, proclaiming that “the next world is won through this world.” 

The widely read text helped popularize a literary version of the Turkic language, the equivalent of the works of Chaucer in English or Dante in Italian. 

His rhymed couplets bemoaning the disenchantments that come with the passage of time reach across the centuries.
A contemporary of Yusuf was Mahmud of Kashgar, a pioneer linguist, ethnographer and geographer. 

Mahmud spent much of his career in Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. 

He knew that the Arab Caliph was totally dependent on Turkic soldiers and civil servants, but saw how the Arab rulers scorned and segregated them as second-class citizens. 

Mahmud’s mission was to promote Turkic peoples and to encourage Arabic and Persian speakers to learn Turkic languages.
Both Yusuf and Mahmud have been considered saints in Uighur culture, and they remain part of the public consciousness. 

The Chinese government doesn’t dare touch their grand mausoleums near Kashgar, so instead it seeks to strip the two Uighur heroes of their religion and ethnicity, regarding their monuments as undifferentiated landmarks in a Chinese world.
Meanwhile, Kashgar itself, which was 99% Turkic when Mao Zedong conquered it in 1949, is rapidly being transformed into a Han Chinese city. 

The government has bulldozed much of the old city and entire districts of traditional Uighur homes, replacing them with generic Chinese high rises. 

In Ürümqi, the capital of East Turkestan, the Han are now an overwhelming majority, and Kashgar is fast following suit.
Beijing hopes its ruthless “Strike Hard” campaign will stamp out the Uighurs as a distinct group. 

But sheer numbers will make that effort near impossible. 

Official data put the Turkic population of East Turkestan at 8.6 million, but it is likely well over 10 million. 

To exterminate them would require a double Holocaust.
Beijing’s alternative to genocide is to destroy the language and culture, but a culture’s identity cannot be so easily destroyed.

 Memories of Yusuf, Mahmud, scores of other poets and saints, the language, folklore, cuisine and way of life are simply too deeply rooted. 

The Uighurs also have developed coping mechanisms.

 While the government demands that boys be sent to Chinese schools, girls are continuing the study of their native language. 

Efforts to suppress the Uighurs’ culture will further radicalize them and drive their lives deeper underground.
The Uighur tragedy now holds the world’s attention. 

Beijing has managed to bribe Saudi Arabia, Turkey and all other Muslim countries into silence, but the gag order cannot be sustained for long. 

Meanwhile, multiple countries near and far now host large, well-educated and active communities of Uighur expatriates.

 They report on developments in East Turkestan that might otherwise pass unnoticed and provide Uighurs at home a channel to communicate with the world. 

They also translate books and articles into Uighur, which helps their co-nationals in East Turkestan overcome their isolation.
Even Mao recognized the distinctness and resilience of the Uighur people. 

Faced with the vast territory of East Turkestan that was overwhelmingly Turkic and Muslim, he named it the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. 

He thus acknowledged the Uighurs’ identity and proposed to grant them a degree of self-government.
Three-quarters of a century later, the only workable solution is still for Beijing to give Uighurs and the other Turkic peoples of East Turkestan more political and cultural autonomy. 

If China’s other provinces demand the same treatment, Xi Jinping can remind them that he is simply following Mao’s lead on the issue and not advancing a new model for Chinese governance as a whole. 

It might seem unlikely that Beijing would back down in such a way.

 But its alternative is to continue a costly conflict that brings shame at home and abroad and is unlikely ever to subdue the proud and ancient Uighur people.

China's crimes against humanity

China’s Worsening Human Rights Abuses Evoke Memories of Mao
By Shane McCrum and Olivia Enos

A Uighur woman passes the Communist Party of China flag on a wall in Urumqi, East Turkestan.
When the State Department recently released its “2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” China figured prominently in its findings—but not in a good way.
The annual report, issued March 13, shines a harsh spotlight on China and its various human rights abuses, including religious persecution, internment of Uighurs in concentration camps, and increased surveillance of its citizens.
Many assumed that China’s rapid economic transformation would have led automatically to improvements in civil liberties and human rights. 

Instead, China has become more oppressive.
What is taking place today in East Turkestan looks a lot like Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. 

And in modern China, the state is equipped with far more advanced and invasive technology to achieve its totalitarian aims.
The State Department report highlighted a number of China’s draconian practices. 

The report describes China’s crackdown on “extremism,” which resulted in the “detention since 2017 of 800,000 to possibly more than [2 million] Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in ‘transformation through education’ centers.”
These “re-education centers” are designed to instill patriotism and fidelity to the state above ethnic and religious loyalty. 

These practices were labeled among the worst abuses “since the 1930s.”
In its 2018 regulations on religious affairs, China conflates all religion with extremism and sees religious fasting, praying, and abstaining from alcohol in the same light.
To monitor for those behaviors, China uses various forms of surveillance, including internet monitoring, video surveillance, and a “double-linked” household system, in which citizens are encouraged to spy on one another.
Beyond the repression of minority and religious groups, draconian surveillance efforts affect all Chinese citizens.
The State Department report notes the continued application and development of a “social credit system,” which monitors “academic records, traffic violations, social media presence, quality of friendships, adherence to birth-control regulations, employment performance, consumption habits, and other topics.”
As the system becomes more advanced, the government has become more aggressive in implementing repercussions. 

Chinese state media claims that 11 million air-travel trips have now been “blocked” due to citizens’ low “social credit” scores.
The report also examines China’s newest efforts at internet suppression, including the creation of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which shut down an estimated 128,000 websites in 2017. Additionally, platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as any information on topics on Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre are all banned from the internet.
It’s now estimated the government employs tens of thousands of individuals to restrict and monitor internet content, as well as to promote state propaganda.
China’s internet influence extends beyond its borders and has far-reaching ramifications for its relations with other nations.
Recently, Mercedes-Benz was forced to apologize to Chinese consumers after quoting the Dalai Lama in an Instagram post. 

Instead of Western companies exerting influence over China to liberalize its totalitarian system, we see the very opposite occurring as Delta Air Lines and Spanish fashion retailer Zara were compelled to apologize to China after listing Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as countries independent from China.
This influence likewise extends to Hollywood, where the influence of Chinese censors has led to script changes in multiple blockbuster movies, so as to steer clear of topics politically sensitive in China.
Conversely, China has no problem producing movies that seek to promote Chinese foreign policy and anti-American sentiment. 

An example of this is the Chinese box office record-breaker “Wolf Warrior II,” which contains highly anti-American content and is essentially China’s version of Sylvester Stallone’s anti-Soviet Russia “Rambo” series in the 1980s.
Due to China’s large and dynamic global economy, technological advances, and influence over foreign investors, Beijing has been able to take its level of state control of citizens to the next level.
Additionally, because of the success of its pseudo-communist economy on the world stage, other nations have been forced to submit to its strict censorship laws.
The U.S. should consider carefully steps it can take to hold China accountable for the severe human rights violations taking place—not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because if left unchecked, Beijing’s draconian policies will continue to impede freedom far beyond its borders.

East Turkestan

China's persecuted Uyghurs live freely in Turkey
By Jomana Karadsheh and Isil Sariyuce

Istanbul -- The call to prayer at Emine Inanc mosque brings together immigrants who have found sanctuary in Istanbul's working-class Zeytinburnu neighborhood.
With no room inside the overcrowded mosque, dozens of worshippers spill onto the street.

For some, like Ishqiyar Abudureyimu, praying openly would have been unimaginable just a few years ago when he was living in China.
The 27-year-old is among thousands of Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from East Turkestan colony in western China, who have sought refuge in Turkey after escaping Beijing's brutal crackdown against the group.
Ethnic and religious ties between Turkey and the Uyghurs, the immigrants say, have made building new lives in Istanbul easier for them.
China 'at war with faith' says US ambassador at large

Uyghurs speak a dialect of Turkish and, like the Turks, are considered ethnically Turkic.
Dozens of Uyghur shops and restaurants line the streets of Zeytinburnu, a small neighborhood near Istanbul's international airport. 

Most shop signs are in the group's native script and language which was banned in East Turkestan province.
In a rundown building, children attend after-school classes to learn their mother tongue. 

Boys and girls crammed into small classrooms recite the Uyghur alphabet which most are learning for the first time.
"We are more comfortable than we were in our home country," says Abudureyimu, who has lived in Turkey since 2014. 

"I can practice my religion freely, speak my language freely," he adds. 

"In Turkey I saw that a man can live freely, in peace. We are free here."

Missing relatives
However, Abudureyimu is all too aware that back at home, oppression against Uyghurs continues. Seated in an Istanbul Uyghur restaurant, he lays out more than two dozen photographs of loved ones who he says have disappeared in China. 

He arranges the images along a straight line, then holds them up and introduces each of his family members.
"My father ... my mother ... my sister," he tells CNN, his voice fraught with emotion as he identifies them.
Abudureyimu does not know the whereabouts of his family or even if they are alive, but he believes Chinese authorities detained them. 

He adds that the crackdown against Uyghurs targeted his family for years but that it worsened after he fled. 

Many other families whose relatives left China have also come under increased pressure from authorities, he said.
Chinese authorities did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

After fleeing persecution, Uyghur children are learning their native language for the first time in Turkey.

An estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps across eastern China as part of the crackdown, according to a 2018 US congressional report.
The Chinese government has never explained the disappearances, which began in 2017, nor said how many people are being held in the camps, which they insist are "vocational training centers" that local "students" willingly attend.
Uyghur refugee tells of death and fear inside China's East Turkestan camps

In early January, Chinese authorities took some foreign diplomats and journalists on a carefully supervised tour of some of the "vocational education centers."
Detainees were seen taking language courses in standard Mandarin Chinese, painting, performing ethnic dances and even singing the song, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands," according to a Reuters report.
"All of us found that we have something wrong with ourselves and luckily enough the Communist Party and the government offer this kind of school to us for free," one Uyghur inmate told journalists during the tour.

Ishqiyar Abudureyimu holds up a picture of his mother outside Istanbul's Hagia Sophia mosque. He says this is the last time he saw her and that she has disappeared since she returned to China.

But China's claims don't answer the Uyghur community's questions about their disappeared loved ones.
Diaspora members see solidarity protests as their main chance to support their families back home. Dozens of Uyghurs gather in central Istanbul, waving Uyghur nationalist flags and carrying photographs of missing parents, siblings and spouses. 

Some hold whole family portraits.
'"Those photos are of my relatives and Uyghur celebrities," said one protester, philosophy student Fazilet Gurec. 

"We lost contact three years ago."
"Our expectation is to know what happened to them and what is their situation now," she added.
One of the last photographs in Abudureyimu's collection back at the Uyghur restaurant is of his mother sitting outside Istanbul's Hagia Sophia mosque. 

He claims she was detained after she returned from a 2015 visit to Turkey.
He also shows a picture of his family home, which he hasn't seen since he fled East Turkestan. Recently, he discovered the photograph on social media -- it was blanketed with snow and appeared abandoned.

Solidarity in Turkey
A sense of solidarity with the Uyghurs is evident in Turkey, but trade ties with China have tempered Ankara's response to their plight. 

For the most part, Turkey has opened its doors to Uyghurs escaping persecution, but remained largely silent about the brutal crackdown.
However, Turkey's foreign affairs ministry issued an explosive statement in February slamming the Chinese government for undertaking a deliberate campaign to eradicate "the ethnic, religious and cultural identities of the Uyghur Turks and other communities in the region."
It condemned the camps where China holds Uyghurs as a "great shame for humanity," adding that hundreds of thousands of members of the group were subject to "torture and political brainwashing" in the camps.

A Uyghur restaurant displays the group's native script, which is banned in China.

Turkey's statement came after reports claimed the popular Uyghur folk musician Abdurehim Heyit had died in jail in China. 

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said it learned that he had died. 

Beijing denied the reports, broadcasting what it claimed was video footage proving Heyit was still alive.
In response, Uyghurs in Turkey joined a #MeTooUyghur social media campaign, with hundreds taking to the streets demanding China release proof-of-life videos of their disappeared relatives.

A Uyghur stand in Istanbul pays tribute to disappeared people, detained in Chinese concentration camps in western China.

"Every morning I wake up and hope not to receive a sad news," says Abudureyimu. 

"My dad, mom, brothers, grandfathers ... I live in fear of receiving news of their death."
The Uyghurs want China to be held to account for the disappearance of their missing relations. 

Abdul Melik, a member of Istanbul's Uyghur community told CNN: "There are some individual voices, some individual countries (speaking out), but the whole world is in deep sleep now."

China's crimes against humanity

INSIDE WECHAT MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
By Isobel Cockerell

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in East Turkestan, in northwest China. 

The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. 

In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. 

Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. 

At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. 

Her husband was regularly called to the police station. 

The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. 

Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in East Turkestan and waited for the children’s passports.
“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. 

When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. 

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.
She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in East Turkestan was over. 

Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. 

“Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.
Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. 

It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to East Turkestan, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. 

She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. 

“I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. 

“I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
For Uyghurs in East Turkestan, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. 

Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. 

And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. 

It’s just one of the ways Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.
Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. 

The Uyghur separatist flag—a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. 

It’s a banned image in China, representing free East Turkestan.
East Turkestan was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. 

During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. 

The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to East Turkestan.
During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. 

In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. 

Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, East Turkestan, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. 

“I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said. 

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital. 

Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. 

It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown
In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. 

In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. 

It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.
The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.
By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. 

Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” 

Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. 

Most Uyghurs didn’t understand the authorities were watching.
This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. 

But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” 

WeChat was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.
Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left East Turkestan in 2014, just before the crackdown. 

During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. 

They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.
Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the East Turkestan police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. 

“He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,” Mijit said. 

She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. 

If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to East Turkestan for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born
The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. 

Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. 

Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. 

He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. 

The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. 

Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across East Turkestan. 

“All your life will be in the record,” he told her.
In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.” 

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. 

Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in East Turkestan.
After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave East Turkestan for Turkey. 

When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. 

Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. 

“I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. 

She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.
Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.

“It was like a monkey show,” she said. 

“They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”
Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. 

This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of East Turkestan’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. 

“The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. 

“All of them were there to give blood samples.”
Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. 

“They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”
The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. 

In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in East Turkestan province. 

The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. 

The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.
Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. 

“Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.
Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. 

“You feel like you are under water,” he says. 

“You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”
He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. 

“My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”
To transform East Turkestan into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. 

Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.
In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. 

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. 

In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”
For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in East Turkestan is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. 

A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. 

Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags
The government’s efforts to control the people of East Turkestan were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. 

In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”
At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. 

But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”
In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in East Turkestan to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming East Turkestan in its own image.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. 

She now lives in Istanbul. 

According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” 

Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.
Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the East Turkestan capital. 

Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. 

She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.
Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. 

She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp—a blocked app in China—storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.
She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. 

“The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. 

Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. 

“If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,” Jalilova said. 

“You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to East Turkestan.

Escape to Turkey
Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. 

It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.
It follows that the majority of people who have escaped East Turkestan for Turkey in recent years are women. 

Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.
Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from East Turkestan by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. 

In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.
The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in East Turkestan, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.
Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left East Turkestan in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. 

She left her other children and husband in East Turkestan. 

She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.
When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. 

Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. 

She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. 

“I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. 

Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. 

They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.
Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in East Turkestan as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)
On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. 

For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. 

“Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. 

Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.
Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. 

In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. 

Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.
In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in East Turkestan became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. 

“When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”
A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. 

A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. 

A sun emoji—“I am alive.” 

A flower—“I have been released.”
Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. 

Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. 

Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”
On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” 

A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” 

By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve
In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled East Turkestan after police took her DNA. 

They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. 

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”
Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. 

She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.
Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.
Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. 

The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. 

“I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. 

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.
Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.
Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in East Turkestan.
Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. 

This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. 

“There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.
He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. 

“It’s a strong sign the East Turkestan authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.
China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in East Turkestan, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. 

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. 

That followed a statement by East Turkestan governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”
Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.
Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.
On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in East Turkestan—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. 

She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in East Turkestan.
She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. 

An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. 

Tursun was astonished.
On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. 

“Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. 

“I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” 

It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.
The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. 

Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”
Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. 

She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. 

In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in East Turkestan. 

She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. 

The woman agreed. 

Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.
“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. 

She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.
A month later, she got a reply. 

The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.
Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. 

Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. 

She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.
It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. 

She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. 

In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister,
How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.