Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag

Turning the desert into concentration camps

China is incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Muslims in concentration camps that are rising from the desert sands in East Turkestan. A forensic analysis of satellite images of 39 of these facilities shows they are expanding at a rapid rate.
By Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov

A United Nations panel has accused China of turning its far-flung western colony of East Turkestan “into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights zone’.” It estimates that there could be as many as one million Muslims who have been detained there.
Former detainees describe being tortured during interrogation, living in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of Communist Party indoctrination that drove some people to suicide. 

Most of those who have been rounded up by the security forces are Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that numbers some 10 million. 

Muslims from other ethnic groups, including Kazakhs, have also been detained.
China rejects the allegations that it has locked up large numbers of Muslims in re-education camps. The facilities, it says, are vocational training centers that emphasize “rehabilitation and redemption” and are part of its efforts to combat "terrorism" and religious extremism.
The crackdown includes tight control over information and access to the region. 

East Turkestan is now the most heavily policed area in the world.

This follows the launching of a “people’s war on terror” in 2014 after a series of violent attacks in East Turkestan and other parts of China that authorities blamed on religious extremists.

While China says the Uighur camps are "vocational training" centers, they are heavily guarded. Researchers have resorted to using satellite imagery to view and track the expansion of these facilities.
Reuters worked with Earthrise Media, a non-profit group that analyzes satellite imagery, to plot the construction and expansion of 39 of these camps, which were initially identified using publicly available documents such as construction tenders. 

The building-by-building review of these facilities revealed that the footprint of the built-up area almost tripled in size in the 17 months between April 2017 and August 2018. 

Collectively, the built-up parts in these 39 facilities now cover an area roughly the size of 140 soccer fields.
The facility at Turpan can be seen at the foot of the Tianshan mountains in East Turkestan. 

A tender notice revealed that officials there wanted to be able to listen in to telephone calls made by "trainees" at the camp.
Construction notices published on local government websites, including tenders and procurement requests, have provided clues about the location and features of many of the camps. 

The technical specifications in these documents include references to guardhouses, surveillance systems that leave “no blind spots,” automatic weapons and their safe storage.
A tender issued for the center at Turpan, for instance, canvassed bids for a telecommunications “control system,” saying the facility was in “urgent need to know in real time” the content of trainees’ telephone conversations so that they could be forcibly interrupted.
Having identified 80 detention facilities using construction notices, Reuters focused its analysis on 39 that were clearly identifiable from satellite imagery. 

Earthrise then scrutinized hundreds of satellite images spanning a two-year period.
“I was immediately struck by how many camps there were, how large, and how quickly they are growing. In a matter of months they are throwing up five-story buildings, longer than football fields, lined up in rows in the desert,” said Edward Boyda, co-founder of Earthrise. 

“The construction and arrangement of buildings is very similar from site to site, in the new sites especially, which means there is a method behind it.”
China’s State Council Information Office, foreign ministry and the East Turkestan government did not respond to questions from Reuters.

Uighurs have bristled at what they say are harsh restrictions on their culture and religion. 

They have faced periodic crackdowns, which intensified after riots in the regional capital in Urumqi in 2009 killed nearly 200 people.
Bombings in East Turkestan and attacks allegedly carried out by Uighur separatists, including a mass stabbing in the city of Kunming in China’s southwest in 2014 that killed 31 people, led to further restrictions. 

In recent years, under Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan and a loyalist of Xi Jinping, measures against Uighurs have included a ban on “abnormal” beards for men and restrictions on religious pilgrimages to Mecca.
Chen has also overseen the installation of a pervasive, technology-enhanced surveillance apparatus across East Turkestan. 

Tens of thousands of security personnel have been recruited to staff police stations and checkpoints. Security screening, including scanners equipped with facial recognition cameras, has been installed in public places such as mosques, hotels and transportation hubs.
Reuters did not receive a response to questions sent to Chen via the East Turkestan government.
Reuters visited the locations of seven of the facilities identified as detention camps from construction documents and satellite photos. 

All had imposing perimeter walls, guard watchtowers and armed guards at the entrances. 

Signs at two of the facilities identified them as "vocational training" centers. 

When reporters approached the compounds, police pulled them over and told them to leave.


Rapid expansion
The full scale of the camp network is likely vast. 

Many smaller buildings like schools, hospitals and police stations were repurposed to hold Muslims, according to residents in East Turkestan and construction and procurement documents. 

Two of the smaller camps visited by Reuters were previously a factory and a Communist Party school.
Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist who has tracked the expansion of the camps, estimates there could be as many as 1,200 – at least one for every county and township in East Turkestan. 

There is limited information on the costs of construction, but tenders for one facility outside the city of Kashgar list a combined budget of $45.6 million.
The vast majority of facilities have been built since early 2017, says Shawn Zhang, a law student based in Canada who has used government documents and open-source satellite imagery to identify dozens of camps. 

Recently, Zhang said, the Chinese government has stopped publishing tender notices and has been deleting old ones from the internet.
The construction of new facilities and expansion of existing ones largely began around April 2017. That was the month Beijing enforced new anti-extremism regulations in East Turkestan, including prohibitions on the wearing of veils in public places and the stopping of children from attending “patriotic education classes.”

Foreign reporters who arrive in East Turkestan are closely followed by Chinese security forces. Reuters reporters who visited 10 different cities in the region this year were under surveillance from the moment they got off the plane. 

They were followed in their car, on foot and on trains.
On several occasions, police threw up temporary roadblocks to block the reporters from reaching the camps.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions from Reuters about these restrictions.

A Chinese police officer stops reporters at a roadblock near what is officially called a "vocational training center" in Ghulja, a city in the northwest of East Turkestan.
A remote place with snow-capped mountains and sprawling wind farms, the district of Dabancheng is home to one of the largest camps.
It is one of many that have been built from scratch. 

It is surrounded by a barbed wire fence and high perimeter wall. 

A sign at the main entrance reads: “Urumqi Vocational Education Training Center.”

A guard watchtower can be seen above the perimeter fence at Dabancheng.
Satellite images reveal that before April last year, the site was a brown expanse of desert without a single building. 

Since then, a sprawling complex has risen from the sand.
A close-up look at the construction


Workers walk along the perimeter fence at Dabancheng (left). Signs at the entrance to the camp remind workers about building safety requirements.

In September, a narrow road running along the facility was filled with construction vehicles and workers, indicating that building was still underway at Dabancheng. 

Satellite photos from August reveal the scale of the construction at the camp.


Intense indoctrination
Interviews with eight former detainees, all of whom are now outside China, reveal a picture of harsh extrajudicial detention that is at odds with Beijing’s claim that it is providing vocational skills at training centers to help the local population.
The former detainees said they were shackled to chairs for days during interrogation and deprived of sleep. 

They described living in prison-like conditions. 

Their every move, including visits to the toilet, was monitored by cameras and microphones.

One female detainee said her cell was so crowded that inmates took turns to sit and rest while others stood.
From early morning to night, the detainees said they were subjected to mind-numbing political indoctrination. 

This included reciting Chinese laws and Communist Party policies, as well as singing the national anthem and other traditional Red songs. 

Those who failed to correctly memorize the lines of Communist Party dictums were denied food.

Detainees were forced to renounce their religion, engage in self-criticism sessions and report on fellow inmates, relatives and neighbors.
Of the eight former detainees interviewed by Reuters, four were Uighurs and four were ethnic Kazakhs. 

Some requested anonymity, in most cases because they said they feared repercussions for family members who remained in China.

Kairat Samarkan said he was detained late last year when he returned to his hometown of Altay, in the north of East Turkestan, to sell his home. 

Samarkan, a 30-year-old ethnic Kazakh who was born in China, had moved to Kazakhstan in 2009.
After about three months of intense indoctrination sessions at the camp where he was held, Samarkan said he became “obsessed with suicide. I had thought for a long time about how to do it,” he said. One day, he tried: He ran into a wall head first. 

When he regained consciousness, he was in the camp hospital. 

He was released in February this year and returned to Kazakhstan the next month.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions about the accounts given by former detainees.


China's explanation
Many of the construction tenders issued last year refer to “re-education” facilities. 

But China, which for months denied their existence, now calls them "vocational training centers".
“Through vocational training, most trainees have been able to reflect on their mistakes and see clearly the essence and harm of terrorism and religious extremism,” Shohrat Zakir, the East Turkestan governor, said in remarks to the state-run Xinhua news agency in October. 

“They have also been able to better tell right from wrong and resist the infiltration of extremist thought.”
In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of "vocational training". 

“If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.

The criminals who run East Turkestan
Criticism of China’s policies in East Turkestan has been growing. 

In late August, a bipartisan group of 17 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin urging them to impose sanctions on seven senior Chinese officials for their role in the “ongoing human rights crisis” in East Turkestan. 

At the top of the list was Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan, who made his name in Tibet. 

There, Chen implemented a sustained crackdown on the local population.


Chen Quanguo


Shohrat Zakir


Hu Lianhe


Sun Jinlong


Peng Jiarui


Shewket Imin


Zhu Hailun

Earlier this year, one of the U.S. lawmakers who signed the letter urging sanctions, Senator Marco Rubio, described what was happening to Muslims in East Turkestan as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
In August, a United Nations human rights panel said that Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”


Empty mosques
In Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis town in East Turkestan’s southern Uighur heartland, locals say they live in fear. 

As security forces have blanketed the region and high-tech surveillance has become pervasive, there have been waves of mass detentions of Muslims in places like Kashgar.
The arrests peaked last year as police convoys with sirens blaring took people away, their heads covered in black hoods. 

In Kashgar, the locals say that many of those detained have not yet returned. 

On the streets, there are few young men to be seen.
“You can go to a Uighur and slap him in the face and he won’t dare retaliate,” said one Han Chinese local, who grew up with Uighurs in Kashgar and saw many of his friends taken away. 

“It’s going to be quiet for another one or two years, but then what? The greater the pressure, the fiercer the backlash.”


An elderly man (left) sits in the Old Town of Kashgar. A Chinese flag (right) flutters next to the Id Kah Mosque in the Old Town.

Mosques across East Turkestan are now adorned with Chinese flags and banners exhorting people to “Love the Party, Love the Country.” 

During Friday prayers, the mosques are almost empty.
The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. 

That policy is reflected in other ways on the ground – such as the dramatic transformation of the Old Town section of Kashgar, once considered one of the best-preserved sites of traditional Islamic and Central Asian architecture in the region.
The local authorities have long espoused the need to bulldoze and modernize large swathes of the mud-brick maze of courtyard homes in the Old Town, citing building-safety concerns. 

Now, large sections of the quarter have been vacated and shut for reconstruction. 

Already, there are bars and restaurants springing up that offer food designed to appeal to Han tourists visiting from other parts of the country.
One mosque has been transformed into a trendy hookah lounge and bar serving shisha tobacco and alcohol. 

The interior of the “Dream of Kashgar 2018” has been renovated and freshly painted, except for the ceiling, where the original wood carvings and tapestries have been preserved.

A waitress carries drinks at a bar located in what was once a mosque in the Old Town of Kashgar.

A food market in Kashgar’s Old Town is now filled with Han Chinese tourists and adorned with Chinese flags.

A Uighur woman walks past a giant screen broadcasting Communist Party messages and images of Xi Jinping in the main square in Kashgar.

When Kairat Samarkan returned to his village in Altay prefecture in February, he noticed many changes. 

“Men were missing from almost every household in my village,” he said.
Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. 

They were “burned,” the locals told him.
“These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”

Methodology
For each of the 39 facilities, cloud-free, high-resolution satellite images of the scene were gathered from multiple sources. The dates of the satellite images from which data was derived vary for each camp. The first image of each camp that was analyzed was captured somewhere between Jan. 7, 2016 and April 9, 2017. The most recent image of each camp was captured between May 29, 2017 and Sep. 23, 2018, with the majority of these images being captured in August and September this year. The resolution of the satellite images makes wire fences and guard towers visible; perimeter walls and other features can also be traced.

Internet Sleuths Are Hunting for China’s Secret Concentration Camps for Muslims

The country is using high-tech methods of repression, but even the simplest tech may be enough to expose them.

By SIGAL SAMUEL
The site of a concentration camp in Shufu County, East Turkestan, as seen in satellite imagery in May 2017.

Citizen journalists and scholars are in a race against time, scouring the internet for evidence before the Chinese government can erase it. 

Since last year, the country has been sending vast numbers of Muslims to concentration camps, where it tries to force them to renounce Islam and embrace the Communist Party, as The New York Times and other media outlets have reported based on interviews with former inmates. 

At this point, as many as1 million Muslims are being held in the camps, according to an estimate widely cited by the United Nations and U.S. officials.
China has denied that it aims to indoctrinate Muslims in the camps, telling a UN panel last month that “there is no such thing as reeducation centers,” even though the Chinese government’s own documents have referred to them as such. 

The country now claims the camps are just "vocational schools" for criminals, and journalists have described attempts to keep them away from the heavily guarded sites. 

Yet as China went about building its massive internment system, it left behind electronic traces, such as government web pages and social-media posts containing images and details of the camps.
As Beijing faces intensifying international scrutiny—the Trump administration is weighing sanctions against officials involved with the camps—it has begun to delete these documents, according to scholars and journalists monitoring the websites where they appear. 

That’s left a handful of people around the world rushing to capture and archive them before they can be scrubbed. 

Compared with China’s high-tech surveillance state, their tools are simple: Google. Twitter. The Wayback Machine.
“All you need is Mandarin skills, a computer, and an internet connection,” said Timothy Grose, one of the China scholars involved in this effort, which he characterized as virtual detective work. 

“The situation is becoming urgent because the government is becoming more aware that there is this paper trail, and they’ve been erasing a lot of documents. So anyone who wants to get involved should, and they should do so quickly. The more time we wait, the fewer pieces of evidence are going to be left on the Chinese internet.”

Grose started hunting down evidence in the spring. 

Step one was running a search for “reeducation center” using Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google. 

He said that led him to news reports that described how local officials, under a policy known as qu jiduanhua gongzuo (“de-extremification work”) were “reeducating” Muslim ethnic minorities—notably Uighurs and Kazakhs—in the East Turkestan colony, which Beijing has long viewed as a breeding ground for extremism and separatism. 

Step two was using that policy’s name as a search term in Baidu, which he said led him to government websites. 

Step three was seeing what those websites said about the centers’ activities and locations.
Using this simple process, Grose said he found photos of a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a recently built facility in East Turkestan, along with a local-government press release. 

“They have officials standing in front of a gate, and the gate quite clearly says in Chinese and Uighur ‘reeducation center,’” he said. 

“So there we have physical proof.” 

After finding photos like this or other documentation, Grose would save the material as PDFs or upload them to the digital archive known as the Wayback Machine, and post the contents on Twitter.
Another important type of evidence has come in the form of construction bids and tender notices that Chinese government officials posted online as they sought companies to build the camps. 

Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany, has found and listed more than 70 of them. 

Many bids specify that the compounds must include high walls, watchtowers, barbed wire, surveillance systems, facilities for armed police forces, and other security features.
He has also cataloged official recruitment notices for camp administrators, which he told me have “suspiciously low educational requirements, such as a middle-school education.” 

If the camps were really vocational schools, as the government now claims, they would be recruiting staff with college degrees, Zenz said, adding that that’s the level of education typically required to work in such schools in China.
Along with scholars, citizen activists are joining the search for online traces of China’s camps. 

Shawn Zhang, a 29-year-old Chinese law student in Canada, has been playing an important role alongside scholars such as Zenz and Grose. 

Like them, he began hunting for information on what was happening in East Turkestan by searching the internet for “reeducation center” using Baidu and Google. 

He, too, noticed the construction bids, many of which specified where the camps were to be built. Then he took an additional step: He plugged the location information into Google Earth—and found satellite imagery of what appeared to be concentration camps.

Zhang told me he started doing this in May after reading news reports saying hundreds of thousands of Muslims were being sent to Chinese camps: “When I saw the news, I was skeptical. I thought, how is it possible to detain so many Uighurs? … How is it possible for this kind of thing to happen in 2018? So I decided to check out this information myself.”
Seeing the satellite imagery convinced him that it really was possible that Muslims were being detained en masse in his native country—and that some of the camps kept growing, month after month. 

He started posting the images on his blog and his Twitter account, along with the coordinates of the facilities, so that anybody could examine them. 

This project, to which he said he devoted an hour of free time each day on average, soon attracted the attention of professional journalists and scholars. 

They began to collaborate.
Zhang said journalists on the ground in East Turkestan have asked him for help identifying potential concentration camps: “They sometimes ask me if I can give them some camps that are more accessible, easier to visit, so they can visit them onsite.” 

An important Wall Street Journal investigation, which involved a visit to a camp in the city of Turpan, made use of Zhang’s work. 

The Journal reporter Josh Chin confirmed to me that he’d asked Zhang to help analyze photos and satellite images of the Turpan site to see if its characteristics resembled the characteristics of other sites Zhang had cataloged as camps. 

The features did match, and in fact, Zhang said, he had already found the Turpan site via Google Earth and surmised that it was a camp.
Explaining why he hadn’t posted the details of that camp online, Zhang told me that he sometimes finds a structure that he thinks looks like it is a concentration camp, but he avoids publicly identifying it as such unless he can verify it. 

In the Turpan case, he said, “I didn’t post it on my blog, because I didn’t have corroborating evidence. I need to find at least one [piece of] corroborating evidence, like a tender notice or some local news, before posting it.”
Zhang said concentration camps have telltale visual hallmarks that help distinguish them from other facilities he can identify from government tender notices and construction bids as regular prisons, detention centers, or schools. 

For instance, he said, detention centers are typically one or two stories high and have very little yard space, unlike the concentration camps, which tend to have at least three or four stories and occupy sprawling grounds. 

Nevertheless, it can be difficult to say with certainty that a facility viewed only through satellite imagery is a camp, which is why scholars, journalists, and Zhang himself try to supplement that approach with other methods of verification.
“Satellite-image analysis is a time-honored method. It’s been used for a lot of extremely helpful human-rights documentation in the past,” said Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, who cited examples of successful use in Zimbabwe, Darfur, and Nigeria. 

“My skepticism would be, you’d need to know a lot about the document chain to know that you’re looking in the right place—to know that you’re looking at a camp and not a tractor factory.” 

He said that in order to be sure he wasn’t misreading an image, he’d want to see solid documentation, such as government construction bids that have been authenticated, or some form of “ground truthing,” such as an eyewitness report from a journalist in East Turkestan.
In addition to these forms of cross-referencing, Grose said it’s important to talk to Uighurs themselves. 

“Government documents and even physical representations can only give us a superficial representation of what’s going on. It doesn’t explain what’s going on inside... We don’t know how local officials are interpreting the policies,” he said, adding that the accounts of former inmates and their relatives have yielded vital information about the locations of camps and the treatment of inmates, which can vary from camp to camp.
Among the most active gatherers and archivists of information pertaining to the camps are Uighurs themselves—both the journalists in the region, such as those with Radio Free Asia, as well as citizens who have left China and remain concerned about relatives back home. 

According to Grose, a Uighur woman who goes by the pseudonym Nur was the first to dig up a now–widely circulated image showing inmates in what appears to be an internment camp in Lop County, Hotan, East Turkestan. 

He said the woman, who frequently tweets her findings, found this and other photos by sifting through months’ worth of posts published by the government’s official account on WeChat, a Chinese social-media platform.
When I contacted her through Twitter, Nur declined to disclose her real name or current whereabouts, because she fears her family in East Turkestan will be further punished, she told me. 

“I use VPN every time I hit the internet for some digging,” she wrote to me. 

“My fear is that [the] Chinese government is capable of anything and they might be able to track my IP and eventually me. You can tell the extreme paranoid state that I am in. Since I started digging for information, some nights I can’t sleep because of anxiety and fear.”
She started searching for evidence in June, she said, after coming to the conclusion that “no matter where you live, you can’t escape the constant, indirect mental torture of what is happening in East Turkestan. Finally, I came to a point where I realized I need to do something, otherwise I might mentally break down.”
Since June, Nur has amassed a Google Drive full of PDFs, Word documents, and screenshots bearing photos and details related to the camps, some posted by the government’s official WeChat account. She shared it with Grose, who shared it with me with her permission. 

It contains 174 documents—and counting.
The digital methods being used to retrieve, archive, and circulate information about the camps are low-tech and open-source, favoring immediacy, transparency, and collaboration. 

For a scholar like Grose, it’s a reflection of the urgency of the situation. 

“The platforms that we have for academic writing take so long. To get an article published, you have to count on at least a year,” he said. 

“We don’t have the luxury to wait a year with what’s going on in East Turkestan right now … This is a race against time, so we have to use the tools that are going to give us the most immediate and effective results.”

Axis of Evil

South Korea seizes Han ship transferring oil to North Korea
By Jake Kwon and James Griffiths
The Lighthouse Winmore filled up with oil to take to Taiwan but never went there.

Seoul -- South Korea has seized a Hong Kong-registered ship that transferred oil to a North Korean vessel in violation of United Nations sanctions.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry said the Lighthouse Winmore left the port of Yeosu in South Korea carrying refined oil which was then transferred to a North Korean ship in international waters on October 19.
The US Treasury Department released satellite imagery in November of two ships performing an illegal ship-to-ship transfer in international waters on the same day.

Satellite imagery the US says shows a ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, between two vessels in an effort to evade sanctions on North Korea.
It identified one of the ships as a sanctioned North Korean vessel, the Rye Song Gang 1, but did not name the other. 

South Korean officials could not confirm Friday if the second ship was the Lighthouse Winmore.
"UN Security Council sanctions prohibit the transfer of anything to a North Korean ship," a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told CNN, adding the Lighthouse Winmore was seized when it re-entered Yeosu on November 24.
President Trump said Beijing had been "caught red-handed," after the satellite images were republished in South Korean media earlier this week.
South Korea said the Lighthouse Winmore and its crew were still in South Korean custody and under investigation. 

There were 23 Chinese nationals and two Burmese nationals on board the ship, officials said, adding they would be permitted to leave only when the investigation was concluded.
China has denied breaching UN sanctions on North Korea.
The Lighthouse Winmore was one of 10 ships the US asked the UN to ban from international ports this month over its dealings with North Korea, according to Reuters.
That move came after the UN blacklisted four ships in October, including one that was caught smuggling 30,000 North Korean-made rocket-propelled grenades in 2016.
According to South Korea, the Lighthouse Winmore was being leased by a Taiwanese company, the Billions Bunker Group, and was en route to Taiwan when it made a ship-to-ship transfer of its oil cargo to four ships, including one North Korean ship.
"This is one of the main ways in which North Korea uses an illegal network to circumvent UN Security Council sanctions," the South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said. 

It is customary in South Korea that officials do not give their names.
The Hong Kong government said in a statement Friday it had noted media reports that the Lighthouse Winmore had been seized. 

"We are liaising with the Korean parties concerned to obtain further information about the incident, and will take appropriate actions as necessary," the statement said.

'Very disappointed' in China
In an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, Trump claimed "oil is going into North Korea" and appeared to blame China, saying if Beijing fails to put pressure on Pyongyang then the US may take punitive economic actions against Beijing.

"China on trade has ripped off this country more than any other element of the world in history has ripped off anything," Trump said.
"If they don't help us with North Korea, then I do what I've always said I want to do. China can help us much more, and they have to help us much more."
He added: "China's hurting us very badly on trade, but I have been soft on China because the only thing more important to me than trade is war."

Trump: 'disappointed' China allowing oil into North Korea

A senior US State Department official told CNN Thursday the US is "aware that certain vessels have engaged in UN-prohibited activities, including ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum and the transport of coal from North Korea."
"We have evidence that some of the vessels engaged in these activities are owned by companies in several countries, including China," the official said. 

"We condemn these acts and hope that any UNSC members, including China, work more closely together to shut down smuggling activities."
Pyongyang has for years used deceptive shipping practices to help bring in revenue for the country's regime, analysts say, and the US has called for more to be done to crackdown on ships transporting goods to and from North Korea.
UN Security Council resolutions passed this year stipulate "all Member States shall prohibit the entry into their ports of such designated vessels," save for some circumstances, including in emergencies or if they are granted humanitarian exceptions by the UN.