Chinese Doublespeak

‘Human rights with Chinese characteristics’ are in fact crimes against humanity
By Omer Kanat

In 2017, three days before Human Rights Day on December 10, Beijing hosted the ‘South-South Human Rights Forum.’

The event took place as the Chinese authorities were interning vast numbers of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in concentration camps. 

More than 300 delegates from 70 countries attended. 

The outcome document, the ‘Beijing Declaration,’ affirmed states should “choose a human rights development path or guarantee model that suits its specific conditions.” 

In sum, China sought an international clearance for the concept of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ sublimating individual and collective freedoms to the needs of the state.

The world is learning quickly about the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of human rights. 

In East Turkestan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, Taiwan, and China’s heartland, the Chinese government has met any opposition with repression and destabilization. 

Indeed, the application of the latest technologies to create a pervasive system of surveillance indicates the party has taken the step of preempting any resistance to its authoritarian rule. 

The recent leaks of government documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times lay bare how the party intends to commit cultural genocide against the Uyghur people through “no mercy” policies.
The label ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ is a misnomer. 

It is how the Chinese Communist Party attempts to entangle the interests of Chinese people with the logics of their continued power. 

If it was at all possible, just ask any one of the imprisoned Chinese human rights lawyers how they feel about “the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and human rights protection.” 

However, the imposition of the party’s vision of human rights does not stop at China’s borders. 

The profitable export of surveillance technology enables states to restrict the fundamental human rights of individuals on every continent.

A boy wearing a blue mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uighurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony and ask for the closure of “re-education center” where Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. 

Human Rights Day commemorates the day the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a foundational document outlining rights standards and translated into over 500 languages, including Uyghur. 

It’s worth revisiting the 30 articles of the UDHR. 

From Article 5, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to Article 9, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” to Article 20, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” China is in open violation of these fundamental rights in regards to the Uyghur people.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Chinese government is actively subverting the concept of universal human rights by cooking up its own version. 

Since 2017, evidence of mass arbitrary detention and torture of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples has become indisputable. 

The Chinese government has rationalized these crimes against humanity within the logics of ‘vocational training,’ as if the systemic ethnocide of their people was somehow in the interests of the Uyghurs.

File photo posted by the East Turkestan Judicial Administration to its WeChat account. 

However, the Chinese Communist Party does not limit the spread of its concept of human rights to events such as the South-South Human Rights Forum. 

More alarming, Beijing is leveraging the United Nations itself to undermine the standards set out in the UDHR. 

In recent years, China has been able to mute criticism, as well as find champions for its rights abuses among UN member states. 

This has been partly achieved through an exchange of loans and grants for silence and support, as well as threats and intimidation.
Furthermore, China has targeted individual human rights defenders. 

In 2017, China tried to prevent me from delivering my statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, and at the 2019 Forum, it attempted to do the same to the President of the World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa. 

In 2013, China detained Cao Shunli, who was on her way to attend China’s Universal Periodic Review in 2013. 

She was charged with illegal assembly, picking quarrels and provoking trouble and died in detention in 2014. 

Remember, this is a state the UN Secretary-General has called “a pillar of international cooperation and multilateralism.”
Among the enablers of Xi Jinping’s repression are states with disreputable records attracted to a possible exemption from universal standards that ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ affords. 

And again, if we could freely ask the populations who reside in these states how they feel about such a concept, there would be few advocates. 

Therefore, on Human Rights Day, we have a responsibility to defend those who defend universal values and be clear ‘never again’ has meaning. 

There is injustice everywhere and we must fight it. 

Uyghurs are among them, for example, the imprisoned Ilham Tohti, and in exile Rebiya Kadeer, Rushan Abbas, and Gulchehra Hoja, whose families have been detained and disappeared in East Turkestan because of their advocacy. 

The second ‘South-South Human Rights Forum’ is opening in Shanghai for this year’s Human Rights Day. 

The dangerous fiction of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ that there are exceptions to the universality of rights should be firmly resisted.

China's Final Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

They chronicled roundups of eminent poets, clerics and intellectuals. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost no one in the region dares talk to outsiders. 

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

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

“The Uighurs have no other voice.”

State Terrorism: Inside the People’s Republic of Death

The range of victims—from hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
By Gordon G. Chang

A Chinese informant for the Central Intelligence Agency was shot in front of colleagues in the courtyard of a government building, reports The New York Times. 

China’s government, according to former American officials, executed at least a dozen supposed CIA sources from the end of 2010 through 2012.
Beijing’s Global Times, a semi-official tabloid, calls the reporting of the courtyard killing “a purely fabricated story, most likely a piece of American-style imagination based on ideology,” but the publication, controlled by the authoritative People’s Daily, did not deny the New York paper’s report of the other executions.
The People’s Republic of China has very little compunction about killing its citizens. 

There is no question about that. 

The range of victims—from supposedly hardened spies to infants barely out of the womb—is stunning and should be taken into account by Washington whenever it deals with Beijing.
We start with babies born without permits issued by population control officials.
Mao Hengfeng heard the “piercing cries of her baby” after a forced abortion. 

“Yet instead of being able to hold her newborn child,” veteran journalist Verna Yu reports, “she watched helplessly while her baby was drowned in a bucket.”
“The baby was alive, I could hear the baby cry,” Mao said. 

“They killed my baby.” 

Mao was also forced by family planning officials to undergo a hysterectomy. 

She had been seven-and-a-half months pregnant at the time.
Her baby was killed a quarter century ago, but the practice continues today. 

“In today’s China, under the Communist rule,” says blind activist Chen Guangcheng, “the government can put their hand into your body, grab your baby out of your womb, and kill your baby in your face.” 

Chen talks of a “war zone” created by family planning officials.
Forced abortions occur as late as the ninth month, according to Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, in 2009 testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress (PDF). 

Chinese “methods of infanticide” include “puncturing the skulls and injecting alcohol into the brains of full-term fetuses to kill them during labor,” she testified.
Littlejohn appended a translation of a Chinese document labeled “Best Practices, Infanticide,” issued to handle the question, “What if the infant is still alive after induced labor?”
“This is the hallmark of communistic governments: the peacetime mass killings of their own citizens,” Littlejohn told The Daily Beast.
China, since the beginning of 2016, has generally permitted couples to have two children, a relaxation of the notorious One-Child Policy, in place since 1979. 

Yet the requirement that couples obtain birth permits and the other coercive rules remain in place.
And that, unfortunately, means “gendercide.” 

As Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research at the Center for Family and Human Rights, pointed out in comments to me, “brutal Chinese family planning policy has led to the direct and indirect killing of tens of millions of innocent Chinese baby girls just because they are girls.”
Almost as grisly is organ harvesting. Dr. Jacob Lavee, president of the Israel Society of Transplantation, told PBS NewsHour that in 2005 one of his patients was promised a heart transplant in China “two weeks ahead of time.”
“If a patient was promised to undergo a heart transplant on a specific date,” Lavee said, “this could only mean that the—those who promised that they knew ahead of time when his potential donor would be dead.”
China said in 2014 that, beginning the following year, it would no longer take organs from executed prisoners. 

But forced donations are continuing according to Ethan Gutmann, author of The Slaughter.
Gutmann, along with David Kilgour and David Matas, is co-author of an exhaustive June 2016 report. 

They maintain there are somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants a year, a number far in excess of donations available from voluntary sources.
Prisoners corroborate conclusions of the report. 

Wang Chunying and Yin Liping, Falun Gong practitioners, told PBS they were forced to take tests needed for matching organs with recipients. 

Gutmann says he has heard similar accounts from other prisoners.
“China is not the only country with organ-transplant abuse,” David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. 

“What’s different about China is it’s institutionalized, it’s state-run, it’s party-directed. It’s not a few criminals in back alleys trying to make a fast buck.” 

Kilgour, a former Canadian MP and now a human rights activist, implored the Chinese government to stop what he labeled “an industrial-scale crime against humanity.”
In China, you can get livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens, hands, breasts, arms, corneas, intestines, pancreases, thyroids, stem cells, hair, and bone marrow, and it looks like they come from more than just common criminals. 

China has used Falun Gong practitioners, Uighurs, Tibetans, and Christians as forced donors, the three authors charge.
Beijing called the charges “groundless accusations” after the U.S. House of Representatives last year passed a resolution on the practice.
Despite noticeable improvement in Chinese donor practices, the Chinese state looks like it is searching for a new source of organs. 

“Forced organ harvesting of political dissidents began in the ’90s, in Xinjiang,” Gutmann told The Daily Beast. 

“With the recent revelation from Human Rights Watch—that the Chinese authorities are comprehensively mapping Uighur DNA—it is difficult to suppress the thought that Beijing has entered a new stage: not simply the murder of individual political dissidents but a slow-motion version of racial genocide.”
But, in fact, China is still murdering political dissidents, even if the killings often are out of sight. 

In 2009, police said a 24-year-old prisoner, Li Qiaoming, died while “playing hide-and-seek.” 

Li, however, had been beaten to death, and this term suddenly became a common euphemism for official brutality.
Last year, Lei Yang, 29 years old and an environmental activist, died an hour after being taken into custody in the Chinese capital. 

Police blamed a heart attack. 

An autopsy revealed Lei choked on his own vomit.
These days, activists also “disappear.” 

Take 2015’s “709” crackdown, so named because it began on July 9. 

Some 300 rights lawyers, legal assistants, and dissidents were swept up. 

A few of them—Zhao Wei and Wang Quanzhang—are still missing. 

The 709 campaign, primarily directed at the legal profession, has been called the “war on law” and “is widely seen as a sign of a growing intolerance of dissent under Xi Jinping.
“In China, there are countless allegations of police torture, abuse, and suspicious deaths,” widely followed freelance journalist Paul Mooney tells The Daily Beast. 

The police are killing citizens “with impunity.” 

And as he points out, “police power is growing and we can expect the situation to get worse and worse.”
Many people call the country “China.” 

But we would understand it better if we thought of it as the People’s Republic of Death.