Cultural Genocide

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

By Amy Qin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's crimes against humanity

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

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

The Moral Hazard of Dealing With China

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

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

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

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

Arbeit macht frei

China adds a sickening new dimension to its treatment of Uighurs

The Washington Post

An ethnic Uighur demonstrator attends a protest against China in front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 1. 

AT A news conference in Beijing recently, the head of China’s East Turkestan colony in the far northwest, Shohrat Zakir, said that “trainees” in a notorious archipelago of reeducation camps had all “graduated,” and “with the help of the government, stable employment has been achieved and their quality of life has been improved.”
In reality, China has corralled more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims into concentration camps in East Turkestan in order to wipe out their language, religion and culture. 
So what did they graduate to?
Many are being sent to factories no freer than the camps, in some cases located on the camp grounds or adjacent to them. 
If true, the creation of a chain gang of Uighur workers is yet another sickening dimension to one of the world’s most serious human rights crises. 
It should be the subject of a credible international investigation, with consequences.
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who has published pioneering work on the East Turkestan concentration camps, has now unearthed evidence that points to forced labor.
Writing in the Journal of Political Risk, he says, “Since the second half of 2018, limited but apparently growing numbers of detainees have been released into different forms of forced labor.” 
Mr. Zenz argues that the involuntary labor is one part of a “grand scheme that penetrates every corner of ethnic minority society with unprecedented pervasiveness,” sending a whole population into a state-controlled environment of political indoctrination, social control, extrajudicial internment and massive surveillance with the effect of breaking up traditional, religious and family life. 
It amounts to “targeted cultural genocide.”
Mr. Zenz bases his conclusions in part on Chinese government documents that point toward factories and workshops staffed by the internees from the concentration camps.
In the Xinhe County Industrial Park, he found, a garment company set up a work base to provide employment for 500 internees from the Xinhe County camp, and “the government provides police forces and special instructors so that the factory is run in a ‘semi-military style management’ fashion.”
What factory needs police, except to keep people from escaping?
In Yarkand County, Mr. Zenz found spreadsheets produced by local government authorities listing the employment situation of thousands of Uighur residents, and he noticed that 148 stood out as specially designated people who had been in detention, including in the camps.
Mr. Zenz points out in an essay in Foreign Policy the irony of placing the interned Uighurs into sweatshops: Many were once skilled businessmen, intellectuals and scientists. 
Mr. Zenz’s information is powerful but fragmentary; more needs to be uncovered about the patterns of forced labor he has begun to expose.
China is to host the Winter Olympics in February 2022.
Should such an event of global significance be held in a country that maintains concentration camps and coerced labor? 
It is not too early to begin raising the question.

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

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.

535
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.”

Chinazism

In China, every day is Kristallnacht
By Fred Hiatt

In China, every day is Kristallnacht.
Eighty-one years ago this week, in what is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” hundreds of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany were damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of Jewish-owned businesses.
It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.
Before                                                                      After: Dome removed
The dome of a Uighur mosque in Artush, East Turkestan, was removed in 2018.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

In a cultural genocide with few parallels since World War II, thousands of Muslim religious sites have been destroyed. 

At least 1 million Muslims have been confined to concentration camps, where aging imams are shackled and young men are forced to renounce their faith. 

Muslims not locked away are forced to eat during the fasting month of Ramadan, forced to drink and smoke in violation of their faith, barred from praying or studying the Koran or making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
And — in the most astonishing feature of this crime against humanity — China has managed to stifle, through 21st century repression and age-old thuggery, virtually any reporting from the crime scene.
Which makes all the more significant the publication last week of a heartrending compendium of evidence: “Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines,” by Bahram K. Sintash.

Before                                                                      After: Cemetery demolished
The site of Sultanim cemetery in Hotan, East Turkestan, in December, 2018 and March 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

Sintash, 37, lives in the United States but grew up in what is now, he says, “a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known.” 

Sintash knows: Chinese police took his father into custody in February 2018, and Sintash has not heard from him since.
Unable to help his father — who, if he is still alive, turned 69 last month — Barham has channeled his anguish into documenting the destruction of the Uighur heritage.
Uighurs — Barham, his father and millions of other Chinese citizens — are an ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim people. 

For decades, they found a place in Communist China. 

In fact, the Chinese Communist Party vetted imams, approved their sermons and authorized the study of Uighur culture.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque destroyed
A mosque in Aksu was replaced by a parking lot in 2017.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

But in the increasingly intolerant rule of Xi Jinping, nothing that competes with party loyalty can be tolerated. 

Previously vetted clerics, even octogenarians, receive 20-year sentences. 

Anything that looks too “Islamic” — even a dome atop a department store — is flattened.
Based on satellite imagery and interviews with recent exiles — escapees might be an apter term — Sintash estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites have been destroyed, he told a conference at the National Endowment for Democracy last week.
Many of these are village mosques, too small to stand out in Google satellite imagery, and no one on the ground will send pictures, because to do so would guarantee confinement in the camps. 

But Sintash has documented the destruction of more than 150 larger mosques in before-and-after, shrine-to-parking-lot photographs. 

In big cities, one mosque may be spared, for tourism or propaganda purposes, but even that one will have its dome and minarets removed, its religious inscriptions displaced by party banners.
Even starker are the images of cemeteries, such as the centuries-old Sultanim burial ground in Hotan, replaced by what look like giant fields of mud.
“My father and my grandfather were also buried in this cemetery,” one exiled Uighur scholar told Sintash. 

“The cemetery was the most important holy place for millions of people to go and visit in Hotan every year.”
Workers in the world of human rights tend to be highly reticent when it comes to Nazi analogies. 

The Holocaust was a unique event.
Yet at the unveiling of the report last week, the Holocaust kept pushing itself into the conversation as the only adequate point of comparison. 

Omer Kanat, director and co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, noted the Kristallnacht anniversary.
Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, likened the brave reporters of Radio Free Asia to Jan Karski, the Pole who tried to alert the West to Nazi atrocities. 

Those RFA reporters are living in exile, since China does not let them in, but dozens of their family members in western China have been imprisoned in retribution for RFA’s groundbreaking journalism on this cultural genocide.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque demolished
The site of the Grand Mosque in Wusu,  East Turkestan, in 2017 and 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

And what is the impact of such destruction of sacred spaces?
Rahile Dawut is a respected scholar who in 2017 was preparing to travel to Beijing from her home in Urumqi when she was taken away. 

Years before she disappeared, she said, “If one were to remove these . . . shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”
Sintash himself says he fears this is China’s “final solution” to destroy the Uighur people.
“I don’t know if my father died or is alive right now,” he says. 

“But I can see the mosque where we prayed is gone.”

U.S. Moral Bankruptcy

Dealing With China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost

We thought economic growth and technology would liberate China. Instead, it corrupted us.

By Farhad Manjoo

The N.B.A. store in Beijing.

The People’s Republic of China is the largest, most powerful and most brutal totalitarian state in the world. 

It denies basic human rights to all of its 1.4 billion citizens. 

There is no freedom of speech, thought, assembly, religion, movement or any semblance of political liberty in China. 

Under Xi Jinping, “president for life,” the Communist Party of China has built the most technologically sophisticated repression machine the world has ever seen. 

In East Turkestan, in Western China, the government is using technology to mount a cultural genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority that is even more total than the one it carried out in Tibet. 

More than a million people are being held in concentration camps in East Turkestan, two million more are in forced “re-education,” and everyone else is invasively surveilled via ubiquitous cameras, artificial intelligence and other high-tech means.
None of this is a secret. 

Under Xi, China has grown markedly more Orwellian; not only is it stamping its heel more firmly on its own citizens, but it is also exporting its digital shackles to authoritarians the world over. 

Yet unlike the way we once talked about pariah nations — say East Germany or North Korea or apartheid South Africa — American and European lawmakers, Western media and the world’s largest corporations rarely treat China as what it plainly is: a growing and existential threat to human freedom across the world.
Why do we give China a pass? 

In a word: capitalism. 

Because for 40 years, the West’s relationship with China has been governed by a strategic error the dimensions of which are only now coming into horrific view.
A parade of American presidents on the left and the right argued that by cultivating China as a market — hastening its economic growth and technological sophistication while bringing our own companies a billion new workers and customers — we would inevitably loosen the regime’s hold on its people. 

Even Donald Trump, who made bashing China a theme of his campaign, sees the country mainly through the lens of markets. 

He’ll eagerly prosecute a pointless trade war against China, but when it comes to the millions in Hong Kong who are protesting China’s creeping despotism over their territory, Trump prefers to stay mum.
Well, funny thing: It turns out the West’s entire political theory about China has been spectacularly wrong. 

China has engineered ferocious economic growth in the past half century, lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. 

But China’s growth did not come at any cost to the regime’s political chokehold.
A darker truth is now dawning on the world: China’s economic miracle hasn’t just failed to liberate Chinese people. 

It is also now routinely corrupting the rest of us outside of China.
This was the theme of the N.B.A.’s hasty and embarrassing apology this week after Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets’ general manager, tweeted — and quickly deleted — a message in support of Hong Kong’s protesters. 

After an outcry from American lawmakers, Adam Silver, the N.B.A.’s commissioner, later seemed to backtrack on his genuflection.
But I wasn’t comforted. 

The N.B.A. is far from the first American institution to accede to China’s limits on liberty. 

Hollywood, large tech companies and a variety of consumer brands — from Delta to Zara — have been more than willing to play ball. 

The submission is spreading: This week the American video game company Blizzard suspended a player for calling for the liberation of Hong Kong in a live-stream. 

And ESPN — a network owned by Disney, which has worked closely with the Chinese government on some big deals in China — warned anchors against discussing Chinese politics in talking about the Rockets controversy.
This sort of corporate capitulation is hardly surprising. 

For Western companies, China is simply too big and too rich a market to ignore, let alone to pressure or to police. 

If the first and most important cost of doing business in China is the surgical extraction of a C.E.O.’s spine, many businesses are only too happy to provide the stretcher and the scalpel.
But it will only get worse from here, and we are fools to play this game. 

There is a school of thought that says America should not think of China as an enemy. 

With its far larger population, China’s economy will inevitably come to eclipse ours, but that is hardly a mortal threat. 

In climate change, the world faces a huge collective-action problem that will require global cooperation. 

According to this view, treating China like an adversary will only frustrate our own long-term goals.
But this perspective leaves out the threat that greater economic and technological integration with China poses to everyone outside of China. 

It ignores the ever-steeper capitulation that China requires of its vassals. 

And it overlooks the most important new factor in the Chinese regime’s longevity: the seductive efficiency that technology offers to effect a breathtaking new level of control over its population.
There was a time when Westerners believed that the internet would be the Communist regime’s ruin. In a speech in 2000 urging Congress to normalize trade relations with China, Bill Clinton famously quipped: “There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” 

The crowd of foreign policy experts erupted in knowing laughter.

China proved them wrong. 

It didn’t just find a way to nail Jell-O; it became a Jell-O master carpenter. 

Through online surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and the propagandistic gold mine of social media, China has mobilized a set of tools that allow it to invisibly, routinely repress its citizens and shape political opinion by manipulating their feelings and grievances on just about any controversy.
This set of skills horrifies me. 

China may not be exporting its political ideology, but through lavish spending and trade, it is expanding its influence across the planet. 

There is a risk that China’s success becomes a kind of template for the world. 

In the coming decades, instead of democracy — which you may have noticed is not having such a hot run on either side of the Atlantic — Chinese-style tech-abetted surveillance authoritarianism could become a template for how much of the world works.
I should say there were a couple of small reasons for optimism regarding the spread of Chinese tyranny. 

The Last Hope

The bipartisan outrage over the N.B.A.’s initial apology to China did suggest American lawmakers aren’t willing to give China a completely free pass. 

The Trump administration also did something clever, placing eight Chinese surveillance technology companies and several police departments on a blacklist forbidding them from trading with American companies.
But if we are to have any hope of countering China’s dictatorial apparatus, we’ll need a smarter and more sustained effort from our leaders. 

I’m not holding my breath.

Hong Kong Geheime Staatspolizei

Unidentified flinching object: In Hong Kong protests, police wage assault on facts
By David Crawshaw and Timothy McLaughlin

Riot police move to disperse protesters outside a police station in Hong Kong early Monday. 

HONG KONG — The “yellow object” lying on the ground had a distinct shape, evident in the video footage that surfaced later. 

Certainly, a good portion of it was bright yellow. 

It appeared to have arms. 

And two protrusions that resembled legs. 

Someone had dressed the object in dark-colored shorts.
As Hong Kong police officers swarmed over the object and roughed it up in a dark alley, it appeared to squirm.
In a city grown accustomed to clashes between demonstrators and police as the government responds to months of protests with tear gas and mass arrests, the incident on Saturday and the official response to it illustrated a breakdown in the relationship between the police force and the public.


Galileo Cheng@galileocheng
A high definition, in focus video showing the malpractice by the police, shot by Yuen Long resident Ben, obtained for @HKFrontline - Acting Senior SP (Ops)(NTN HQ) Vasco Williams, that is not an ‘yellow object’ #antiELAB #ExtraditionLaw #HongKongProtests


The episode underlined a harsh reality in this global financial hub, once admired for its legal system and official transparency. 

With Beijing asserting increasing control over the city’s institutions and Hong Kong’s leader refusing to allow an independent inquiry into police behavior, authorities here appear not to fear the consequences of violating protocols intended to uphold the rule of law.
Instead, their approach this week was to obfuscate.
Asked Monday about the incident in Yuen Long, an outlying area of Hong Kong, acting senior superintendent Vasco Williams said footage showed an “officer kicking a yellow object,” not a man lying on the ground.
“We don’t know what that object is, but there are other videos that are more clear that show the entire incident,” he said. 

“And there’s no malpractice by the police whatsoever.” 

There was no assault, he added during a heated news conference.
The man shown in the video being kicked by police was a member of a group that deploys volunteers to negotiate between police and protesters at rallies, the group said. 

He was later arrested, local media reported.

Riot police stand guard behind a burning barricade after a protest march in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, on Saturday. 

Williams conceded that the case warranted investigation but suggested that the video could have been “doctored” — an idea that was quickly debunked.
“Knowing you are being videoed, do you think any officer would be that stupid to assault someone under detention? I don’t think so,” Williams said. 

Hong Kong’s daily police briefings are carried by numerous news outlets and watched by thousands. Nearly as soon as Williams spoke, netizens pointed out that more than a month ago, two officers were arrested after being captured on security footage beating a 62-year-old man restrained in a hospital bed.
Shortly after the news conference, posts that appeared to be from Williams’s account on the job networking site LinkedIn were revealed, drawing even more negative attention to the police from those supporting the pro-democracy movement.
The account, which used the name Vasco W. and listed “Superintendent at the Hong Kong Police Force” as the job description, included derogatory comments about protesters, pro-democracy lawmakers and Hong Kong residents in recent months. 

Images of the posts were taken by The Washington Post before the account appeared to be deactivated.

Throughout the protests that have rocked the city, triggered by a now-shelved plan to allow extraditions to mainland China, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has refused to countenance an independent investigation into police tactics — one of protesters’ five demands.
Those tactics have become more forceful over recent weeks, with police making more than 1,550 arrests and deploying water cannons and stinging blue dye along with tear gas.
A report last week by Amnesty International accused the force of “reckless and indiscriminate” tactics, including torture, beatings and other mistreatment of detained protesters. 

The report followed criticism of the police by the United Nations.
Asked Tuesday how her government could rebuild trust in the police without a fully independent investigation, Lam said her backing of the force does not mean she “condones irregularities.” 

Lam has said the existing police watchdog has her “full support” to conduct fact-finding studies, but critics note that the body is headed by an official she handpicked, is packed with her associates and loyalists and is not authorized to call witnesses.
Pressed about the video of the “yellow object,” Lam said it would be difficult to opine on “what is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is fake, because there have been . . . different versions [of] the same incident.”
The police have been under extreme pressure, she said, adding it was “quite remarkable” that there have been no fatalities.

The protests represent a challenge to the authority of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who warned in 2017 that any effort to contest China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong was a “red line.” 

Although not an independence movement, the protests have come as Xi faces pressure on numerous fronts, including China’s trade dispute with the United States, a slowing economy, rising food prices, a recalcitrant Taiwanese administration and accusations of cultural genocide against the Uighur people and other Muslim minorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.
Chinese authorities appear particularly anxious for calm ahead of Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China. 

Protesters are planning to disrupt official events in Hong Kong, where the government has already canceled a fireworks show.
On Tuesday in Hong Kong, a pro-democracy lawmaker, Roy Kwong, was attacked by three masked men as he tried to get into his car. 

The trio kicked and punched Kwong and recorded the assault on video, according to other lawmakers from the democracy camp.
“The fact the attackers recorded the ambush leads me to believe that the attackers were paid to do this and the video would be needed as proof in order to get paid,” said James To, a pro-democracy lawmaker. 

“By beating him, it is sending quite an alarming signal that Hong Kong is a place without regard for rule of law.”