You would oppose china too when you see han immigrants in the millions settling in your "kampung".
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Ah Tiongs dealing with Muslims. Ah tiong land Bagus
- Thread starter Hypocrite-The
- Start date
commie chink thugs in urumqi looking for trouble.
ho whack mai whack go whack uighur elderlies selling fruit in street.
ho whack mai whack go whack uighur elderlies selling fruit in street.
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China legalises its secret mass internment camps for Uighur Muslim minority
ABOUT 3 HOURS AGO
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Ethnic Uighurs sit near a statue of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong.
PHOTO China could be detaining more than 1 million minority Uighurs in the secret camps.
REUTERS: THOMAS PETER
China's western Xinjiang region has made it legal to send minority Uighur Muslims to "vocational training centres" — facilities Western nations say are actually massive internment camps.
Key points:
China allegedly detains more than 1 million Uighurs in secret internment camps
China denies the camps exist, but says it does operate "vocational training centres"
The new regulations create a legal basis for the alleged detention camps
A UN human rights committee recently said it believed China could be detaining more than 1 million Uighurs in secret camps, a claim China has repeatedly denied.
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
Since last spring, several hundred thousand and possibly more than a million ethnic minorities — mostly Uighur — in Xinjiang have been interned in mass detention facilities.
One of the new clauses added to Xinjiang's anti-extremism laws said the so-called training centres were intended to "educate and transform" detainees.
"Governments above the county level can set up … vocational training centres, to educate and transform people who have been influenced by extremism," the clause said.
The region's anti-extremism laws have been in force since April last year, and also ban Muslim men and women from growing "abnormal" beards or wearing veils in public.
Reports of mass detentions and strict surveillance of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China have sparked a growing international outcry, and prompted the United States to consider sanctions.
China denies that it is detaining Uighurs in internment camps and says such facilities do not exist — however it does admit to sending criminals to training centres.
The new regulations in Xinjiang effectively provide a legal basis for those centres.
Man passes freshly baked bread to woman who piles loaves on a market bench
PHOTO Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are also banned from growing beards or wearing veils in public.
REUTERS: REINHARD KRAUSE, FILE
Former detainees have said they were forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the Communist Party, and described the facilities as political indoctrination camps.
"It's a retrospective justification for the mass detainment of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang," said James Leibold, a scholar of Chinese ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
"It's a new form of re-education that's unprecedented and doesn't really have a legal basis, and I see them scrambling to try to create a legal basis for this policy."
China says Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists. Unrest between Uighurs and members of the ethnic Han Chinese majority has seen hundreds killed in recent years.
Party calls for 'decisive battle' against halal
Uighur security personnel patrol in Kashgar
PHOTO Officials and party members have been told to firmly believe in Marxism-Leninism, not religion.
AP: NG HAN GUAN, FILE
Separately, the capital of Xinjiang launched a campaign against halal products, in order to stop Islam penetrating secular life and fuelling "extremism".
In a meeting on Monday, the Communist Party leaders of Urumqi city led cadres to swear an oath to "fight a decisive battle against 'pan-halalisation'," according to a notice posed on the city's official WeChat account.
'You have to criticise yourself'
'You have to criticise yourself'
Omir Bekali details how he had to disavow his Islamic beliefs, criticise himself and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
The Urumqi Communist Party leaders also said they would require government officials and party members to firmly believe in Marxism-Leninism, not religion, and to speak standard Mandarin Chinese in public.
The official Global Times said that the "demand that things be halal which cannot really be halal" was fuelling hostility towards religion, and allowing Islam to penetrate secular life.
Chinese citizens are theoretically free to practise any religion, but they have been subject to increasing levels of surveillance as the government tries to bring religious worship under stricter state control.
Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.
VIDEO 0:58 Crosses have been burnt and removed from churches in China
ABC NEWS
Last month, images emerged of crosses being burned and removed at Christian churches in central Henan province, which were reportedly replaced with images of Chinese President Xi Jinping in some cases.
In August, local officials in China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region announced they would demolish a newly built mosque, sparking a rare protest that attracted hundreds of worshippers.
The Communist Party later that month issued a revised set of regulations governing its members' behaviour, threatening punishments or expulsion for anyone who clung to religious beliefs.
ABC/Wires
SHAREEmail Facebook Twitter WhatsApp
RELATED
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The struggles of reporting on China's secret Uighur 're-education camps'
China may be holding more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs in secret camps, UN says
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Breaking news
A powerful magnitude-7.3 earthquake has struck east of Papua New Guinea, the United States Geological Survey says.
NEWS HOME
China legalises its secret mass internment camps for Uighur Muslim minority
ABOUT 3 HOURS AGO
Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp
Ethnic Uighurs sit near a statue of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong.
PHOTO China could be detaining more than 1 million minority Uighurs in the secret camps.
REUTERS: THOMAS PETER
China's western Xinjiang region has made it legal to send minority Uighur Muslims to "vocational training centres" — facilities Western nations say are actually massive internment camps.
Key points:
China allegedly detains more than 1 million Uighurs in secret internment camps
China denies the camps exist, but says it does operate "vocational training centres"
The new regulations create a legal basis for the alleged detention camps
A UN human rights committee recently said it believed China could be detaining more than 1 million Uighurs in secret camps, a claim China has repeatedly denied.
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
Since last spring, several hundred thousand and possibly more than a million ethnic minorities — mostly Uighur — in Xinjiang have been interned in mass detention facilities.
One of the new clauses added to Xinjiang's anti-extremism laws said the so-called training centres were intended to "educate and transform" detainees.
"Governments above the county level can set up … vocational training centres, to educate and transform people who have been influenced by extremism," the clause said.
The region's anti-extremism laws have been in force since April last year, and also ban Muslim men and women from growing "abnormal" beards or wearing veils in public.
Reports of mass detentions and strict surveillance of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China have sparked a growing international outcry, and prompted the United States to consider sanctions.
China denies that it is detaining Uighurs in internment camps and says such facilities do not exist — however it does admit to sending criminals to training centres.
The new regulations in Xinjiang effectively provide a legal basis for those centres.
Man passes freshly baked bread to woman who piles loaves on a market bench
PHOTO Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang are also banned from growing beards or wearing veils in public.
REUTERS: REINHARD KRAUSE, FILE
Former detainees have said they were forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the Communist Party, and described the facilities as political indoctrination camps.
"It's a retrospective justification for the mass detainment of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang," said James Leibold, a scholar of Chinese ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
"It's a new form of re-education that's unprecedented and doesn't really have a legal basis, and I see them scrambling to try to create a legal basis for this policy."
China says Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists. Unrest between Uighurs and members of the ethnic Han Chinese majority has seen hundreds killed in recent years.
Party calls for 'decisive battle' against halal
Uighur security personnel patrol in Kashgar
PHOTO Officials and party members have been told to firmly believe in Marxism-Leninism, not religion.
AP: NG HAN GUAN, FILE
Separately, the capital of Xinjiang launched a campaign against halal products, in order to stop Islam penetrating secular life and fuelling "extremism".
In a meeting on Monday, the Communist Party leaders of Urumqi city led cadres to swear an oath to "fight a decisive battle against 'pan-halalisation'," according to a notice posed on the city's official WeChat account.
'You have to criticise yourself'
'You have to criticise yourself'
Omir Bekali details how he had to disavow his Islamic beliefs, criticise himself and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
The Urumqi Communist Party leaders also said they would require government officials and party members to firmly believe in Marxism-Leninism, not religion, and to speak standard Mandarin Chinese in public.
The official Global Times said that the "demand that things be halal which cannot really be halal" was fuelling hostility towards religion, and allowing Islam to penetrate secular life.
Chinese citizens are theoretically free to practise any religion, but they have been subject to increasing levels of surveillance as the government tries to bring religious worship under stricter state control.
Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.
VIDEO 0:58 Crosses have been burnt and removed from churches in China
ABC NEWS
Last month, images emerged of crosses being burned and removed at Christian churches in central Henan province, which were reportedly replaced with images of Chinese President Xi Jinping in some cases.
In August, local officials in China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region announced they would demolish a newly built mosque, sparking a rare protest that attracted hundreds of worshippers.
The Communist Party later that month issued a revised set of regulations governing its members' behaviour, threatening punishments or expulsion for anyone who clung to religious beliefs.
ABC/Wires
SHAREEmail Facebook Twitter WhatsApp
RELATED
Hidden from view: Is China transferring Uighur detainees to far-flung prisons?
The struggles of reporting on China's secret Uighur 're-education camps'
China may be holding more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs in secret camps, UN says
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'Like Pulp Fiction': Missing journalist reportedly cut up with bone saw by hit squad
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Dreamworld inquest QC says lawyers planning to sue the park 'compromised' evidence
Opinion: Our obesity epidemic is fuelled by 'truth decay'
Meteorologist carries young son on her back during weather report
Wall Street plunges by 800 points in shock sell-off
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Abuse survivors in limbo as institutions grapple with National Redress Scheme
Study sheds light on weather conditions that cause gastro
Australia stares down defeat as Pakistan closes in on day four
WhaleMail from avid watchers record a whale boom thanks to timely tech
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Han chinese immigrants to xinjiang should learn to assimilate with local culture,
These were ah tiong lands way b4 these mudslimes moved in. It should be mudslimes assimilate with ah tiong commie culture
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China defends 'vocational training centres' amid international pressure over mass Uighur detentions
BY CHINA CORRESPONDENT BILL BIRTLESABOUT 2 HOURS AGO
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PHOTO
Residents walk through a security checkpoint where a screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping in western China's Xinjiang region.
AP: NG HAN GUAN, FILE
China's Government has released details of its network of 'vocational training' centres in the far west for the first time, which activists claim are political indoctrination camps for thousands of Muslims.
Key points:
- More than 1 million people estimated to be in 'vocational training camps'
- Communist Party official said centres made region "safe" from extremism
- Xinjiang home to roughly 10 million primarily Muslim Uighurs
He added that the centre's have made the province, known as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, safe and stable.
'You have to criticise yourself'
Omir Bekali details how he had to disavow his Islamic beliefs, criticise himself and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
Mr Zakir — the higher-ranking ethnic Uighur in Xinjiang — said the centres, "respect and protect the customs and habits of various ethnic groups", and claimed the centres provide "free" nutritious meals, "free education" and dorms equipped with radio, television and sports facilities.
"Various activities such as contests on speech, writing, dancing, singing and sports are organised", Mr Zakir is reported to have said.
"Many trainees have said that they were previously affected by extremist thought and had never participated in such kinds of art and sports activities, and now they have realised that life can be so colourful", Xinhua reported him saying.Human rights groups and Uighur advocacy organisations outside China claim the centres — which first appeared in 2017 — are arbitrarily detaining innocent people, mainly men, and subjecting them to political indoctrination.
Some former detainees have said conditions in the camps are poor, with inmates subjected to psychological and physical abuse, according to Reuters.
An estimated one million detained
PHOTO Students from ethnic minorities give the Young Pioneer's salute to their teacher at a primary school in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Chinese characters above the blackboard read, "Always be prepared to strive for the cause of communism".
REUTERS
Relatives living abroad have also said family members in Xinjiang have cut contact with them due to fears communicating with people abroad could incur punishment from authorities.
Just last week, Xinjiang's Government amended laws to legally permit the use of "vocational training centres" to "educate and transform" people influenced by extremism, in an apparent bid to thwart growing international scrutiny of the extra-legal detentions.
China's Government hasn't revealed how many people are detained, but it is estimated at least several hundred thousand and possibly more than 1 millionethnic minorities — mostly Uighur — in Xinjiang have been interned in mass detention facilities, according to a series of recent commissions and reports.
China's hotbed: who created the violence?
By turning the screws on the Uighurs tighter every day, is China actually creating the hotbed of discontent that it's trying to crack down on?
Hu Xijin, editor of the Communist Party-owned nationalistic tabloid Global Times and an influential voice in China's external propaganda efforts, used Twitter to claim the number of detainees is "much fewer", but said he wasn't authorised to disclose it.
Xinjiang is home to roughly 10 million primarily Muslim Uighurs, who have long had separate language, religion and culture from China's majority Han population.
Beijing has long tried to thwart separatist movements in the resource-rich area and has been increasingly concerned about Muslims travelling abroad to Syria and other countries in the Middle East.
Jailed for life for dissent
China's hardline approach in Xinjiang is exemplified by the case of Ilhan Tohti, who was jailed for life and saw his family have all their property confiscated, for daring to criticise government policy.
A series of terror attacks in Xinjiang in recent years as well as a large-scale knife attack at a southern Yunnan train station that killed 41 people in 2014, were attributed by China's Government to Islamist separatists.
In his state-media interview, Mr Zakir hinted some detainees may be released at the end of the year because they were coming close to reaching, "the completion standard agreed to in training agreements".
"Xinjiang authorities are feeling the heat — it shows that [international] condemnation is working", Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch wrote on Twitter.
"Short of releasing all detainees & closing all camps, Chinese govt's [sic] justifications won't work to blunt criticisms."
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China’s frontier of fear
By Mark Doman, Stephen Hutcheon,Dylan Welch and Kyle Taylor
Updated about an hour ago
Published about 5 hours ago
Satellite imagery captured over a remote and highly volatile region of western China lifts the lid on the size and spread of internment camps used to indoctrinate vast numbers of the region’s Muslim population.
An investigation by ABC News using new research collated by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank, identifies and documents the expansion of 28 detention camps that are part of a massive program of subjugation in the region of Xinjiang.
Analysis of the data shows that since the start of 2017, the 28 facilities have expanded their footprint by more than 2 million square metres. In the past three months alone, they’ve grown by 700,000 square metres - that’s about the size of 35 Melbourne Cricket Grounds.
The nominally autonomous province is home to about 14 million Chinese citizens belonging to mainly Muslim ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Turkic-speaking Uighur (pronounced WEE-ger) people.
Xinjiang, which means “new frontier”, has long been the epicentre of ethnic unrest. At the heart of the conflict is a separatist movement which seeks to establish an independent Uighur homeland called East Turkestan.
Xinjiang
CHINA
Beijing, which views the region as an incubator of terrorism, has responded by reinforcing local security forces, expanding the network of police stations and checkpoints, and supercharging its electronic surveillance network.
“What we’re seeing here is a breach of human rights that is of such a scale that we haven’t seen since the post Tiananmen Square crackdown in China,” said Fergus Ryan, an analyst and China expert at ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre.
An estimated two million Uighurs and other Muslims have been rounded up and detained in these camps where they are forced to undergo patriotic training and “de-extremification”, according to witnesses and human rights groups.
China at first denied the existence of the camps. But under intense international scrutiny ahead of a UN review into its human rights record next week, officials have changed tack. After retrospectively legalising the dragnet, Beijing launched a propaganda campaign portraying the camps as humane job training centres.
But the growing weight of testimony of victims, witnesses, and now the availability of high resolution satellite imagery, reveals the fast-tracked expansion of a re-education camp network that appears set to become a permanent feature of life in Xinjiang.
“By detaining such a huge amount of people for no legal reason China is really running the risk of radicalising these people and creating the perfect conditions for violent extremism to happen in the future,” warns Mr Ryan.
centresAdminRe-education centres
Imagery: Google Earth/Landsat/Copernicus
Imagery: Google Earth/Digital Globe
It’s from here, high above China, the task of locating the camps begins.
Pulling together testimonies, the work of international researchers and government documents — the network of camps in Xinjiang is pieced together.
One of the largest clusters of camps is in the western reaches of Xinjiang.
Across the mountain range from the traditional oasis town of Kashgar, lies one heavily fortified camp — the Atushi City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center.
At the start of 2016, the facility is one block with little to no fencing, in what’s listed as an industrial park.
As China began ramping up its campaign of mass detention, the size of this camp began expanding.
New buildings are added on a monthly basis and razor wire fences can be seen going up.
Parkland is taken over for staff car parking — a common occurrence at many of the facilities.
By December 2017, more than 20 new buildings had gone up. But some of the most intensive building work was still to come.
This image posted on Twitter in mid-2018 shows a number of cranes to the south of the facility.
An official document detailing plans for works at this address dated March 2018 outlined plans for a 95,000 square metre development which included an 8,500m² armed police area, a 1,300 metre wall and about 7,600m² for the “students”.
Then in the latest imagery, we can see the construction of three massive detention centres to the south. They are barricaded by at least three levels of fencing and are surrounded by watchtowers.
This “re-education” centre complex is now almost 150,000m² — a 420 per cent increase since 2016.
It’s just one example of the rapidly expanding network of camps in Xinjiang.
And you don’t have to look far to find more examples. Just 20 kilometres south of the Atushi City complex, another camp has been identified.
The Kashgar City Transformation Through Education School.
It’s been built around what appears to be an existing detention facility.
A government document detailing plans for the expansion at this site describes the project as one that will “care for special groups and promote the harmonious development of society”.
The new buildings that went up to the north of the detention centre were flanked by watchtowers and razor wire fencing.
This is one of eight internment camps the research identified in Kashgar prefecture.
But the rapid growth of detention facilities has by no means been confined to the western reaches of Xinjiang. A much larger network has been growing across the province.
All up ASPI analysts have identified 28 centres it believes are being used as internment camps.
Seventeen of these facilities, ASPI lists as highly likely to be camps. The remaining 11 are likely to be camps, according to its analysis.
“What we’re looking at is a system that has been rolled out at an incredible pace, the scope and scale of which is absolutely massive,” ASPI analyst Mr Ryan said.
Despite the massive scale of the camps examined in this project, it’s likely they make up just a fraction of the detention network in Xinjiang. Estimates of camp numbers range anywhere between 181 to upwards of 1,200.
Tap the satellite images to swap between 2016 and 2018
2016
2018
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 8,750m2
Size in 2018 56,750m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 18,000m2
Size in 2018 106,200m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 12,200m2
Size in 2018 129,600m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 27,000m2
Size in 2018 75,000m2
Prefecture Hotan
Size in 2016 7,000m2
Size in 2018 172,850m2
Prefecture Hotan
Size in 2016 0m2
Size in 2018 120,700m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 3,700m2
Size in 2018 122,000m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 54,600m2
Size in 2018 101,900m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 9,200m2
Size in 2018 14,050m2
Prefecture Hotan
Size in 2016 12,900m2
Size in 2018 20,200m2
Prefecture Kizilsu
Size in 2016 34,900m2
Size in 2018 148,300m2
Prefecture Ili
Size in 2016 20,150m2
Size in 2018 32,450m2
Prefecture Turpan
Size in 2016 17,750m2
Size in 2018 36,100m2
Prefecture Kashgar
Size in 2016 0m2
Size in 2018 195,400m2
Prefecture Hotan
Size in 2016 49,050m2
Size in 2018 137,650m2
Prefecture Hotan
Size in 2016 37,900m2
Size in 2018 102,000m2
Prefecture Urumqi
Size in 2016 0m2
Size in 2018 526,500m2
Adelaide student Adam Turan’s 80-year-old father, Abdulkerim Turan, lived in a village near Kashgar and spent a year in one of those camps. He passed away a few weeks ago, shortly after being released from detention.
Mr Turan, who is also general secretary of the East Turkestan Australian Association, said he believes his father was rounded up because he was a Muslim who had a beard and a relative who lived overseas.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/10451584
Supplied
He has chosen to speak out because his mother is also missing and presumed to be incarcerated. “They killed my dad, so it’s no point to be quiet,” he told ABC News.
Mr Turan showed two photographs of his father, taken a year apart. The second one was taken after his release from detention and show his father with his long beard trimmed, dressed in pyjamas and looking frail.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/10451640
Mr Turan's father before (L) and after being forced into an internment camp. Supplied
“He was deprived from food, deprived from sleeping... he was so weak,” he said. “I can’t imagine how he spent over a year under that condition.”
That bleak picture of camp life is also shared by Dr Erkin Emet, the secretary of the World Uighur Congress. He says life in the camps has become unbearable.
“It’s actually a genocide, a hidden genocide,” he said from his home in the Turkish capital where he is a language professor at Ankara University.
“China’s way of assimilating [the Uighurs] is to make them forget their original culture and then replace it with Chinese culture... [so it becomes] one culture, one nation,” said Dr Emet, who says 13 members of his family are among those interned.
Under constant watch
The Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has a population of about 24 million and covers an area that is about one-fifth the size of Australia - one that is dominated by rugged mountain ranges, vast plains and desert basins.
Its ancient oasis towns like Kashgar, Turpan and Aksu gave respite to the merchants and their camel trains that once crisscrossed this territory along the old central Asian trading routes known as the Silk Road.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/10249906
Kashgar is the country's Uighur heartland.ABC News: Matthew Carney
Today, Xinjiang is once more poised to play a key logistical role in international trade. The region, which shares its border with seven countries, has been designated as a key gateway in President Xi Jinping’s ambitious “Belt and Road” initiative.
But there is a cost in bringing stability and what China calls “civilisation” to Xinjiang.
Many accounts of life in the province describe a repressive environment that appears to be designed to eradicate Islamic and local cultural practices deemed to challenge the Communist Party’s orthodoxy.
According to a published list of “75 behavioural indicators of religious extremism”, even acts such as refusing to play volleyball, owning a tent and suddenly giving up drinking and smoking have been identified as signs of radicalisation.
The US-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says authorities in Xinjiang have forced the locals to submit to the collection of biometric data, including voice, blood, DNA samples and iris scans.
In what appears to be an even more intrusive version of its “social credit” system rolling out across the whole of China, the data collection and electronic eavesdropping allows authorities to identify, monitor and restrict the activities of potential troublemakers among the populace.
Under a new, hardline provincial party boss Chen Quanguo, who took over in 2016, the security crackdown was augmented with a program to ramp up indoctrination efforts.
Loyal party cadres were despatched to live in smaller towns and villages and later even embedded in the homes of Muslim Chinese under a compulsory homestay program called the “becoming family” campaign.
Then authorities began converting schools and other public buildings into makeshift facilities before this latest phase that saw the expansion of a purpose-built network of so-called “transformation through education” camps.
“They’ve slipped from talking about a few bad apples spoiling things for everyone else to this mass approach to re-education and indoctrination,” said Dr David Brophy, a senior lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney, and a frequent visitor to Xinjiang. “Now it’s turned into this really vicious campaign.”
From secrecy to media blitz
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/9676022
A show of military force in front of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Reuters
The Chinese government last month launched what it calls a “vocational education and training program” to assist residents with a poor command of the national language and limited educational opportunities.
“Its purpose is to get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and religious extremism and stop violent terrorist activities from happening,” said Shohrat Zakir, chairman of the Xinjiang government, in an interview with China’s official news agency Xinhua.
The program, he said, targeted petty criminals who were given free food and board over the duration of their training.
The Chinese government’s publicity blitz also included a 15-minute report on state television which showed Uighur detainees in the Hotan City Vocational Skills Education and Training Centre attending legal classes, participating in games and social activities and undertaking training in garment manufacturing and woodwork.
“It’s a crass propaganda video that anyone who knows Xinjiang would not find credible,” said Dr James Leibold, an associate professor in politics and Asian studies at La Trobe University.
After years of frustration in winning the hearts and minds of disaffected ethnic groups, Dr Leibold believes Beijing has ditched its multicultural approach in favour of cultural “mingling”, or assimilation.
The prevailing party ideology dictates that social harmony can only be achieved with the “standardisation of human behaviour”.
“This [the camp network] is the latest example of the party’s belief that it can really kind of re-engineer people through these coercive techniques of brainwashing,” he said.
Ablet Tusuntohti, 29, was a car dealer living and working in the Hotan area of Xinjiang. He has first hand experience of life inside one of the camps, having been incarcerated in one in October 2015.
Speaking from Turkey where he has been living since he left China in 2016, Mr Tusuntohti said he was locked up for a month in a village school that had been transformed into a “concentration camp”.
He described the conditions as harsh and regimented with inmates forced to do manual labour as well as attend re-education classes where they were forced to praise the government’s policies and express their gratitude for the re-training.
Mr Tusuntohti said the facility included a punishment room where guards “abused us badly, randomly”. “They took everyone there to beat them.”
Muhammad Attawulla, comes from Hotan county in southern Xinjiang and has been studying in Turkey since 2016.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/10452062
Despite the risks, Mr Attawulla says he can't stay silent about what's happening in Xinjiang.ABC News: Niall Lenihan
He told ABC News that he has five relatives in detention in Xinjiang, including his mother, two brothers and a brother-in-law.
“The detentions have destroyed my family,” he said. “We can say it [has also] destroyed Uighur society.”
Mr Attawulla said his mother has been held in custody since March. She was accused of attending a funeral at a private home in 2013 with “20 or 30 old women” who said prayers and recited verses from the Koran.
“I cannot bear keeping silent [any more] because I think there’s a genocide taking place in East Turkestan,” he said, using the name many Uighurs use to refer to their homeland.
Echoing the view of many of his fellow Uighurs, Mr Attawulla believes Beijing is eradicating their traditional way of life. “They want to erase, erase, erase your identity and our culture and to melt them into Han Chinese.”
Asked to comment, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Canberra referred ABC News to a recent article published in the state-owned English-language publication The Global Times. The story was titled: “Xinjiang’s education programs improve life chances for trainees, families”.
Methodology: ASPI has amalgamated work done by other researchers in this field including German academic Adrian Zenz, ANU student Nathan Ruser and Shawn Zhang, a law student studying in Canada. The investigation has also cross-referenced the discoveries with hundreds of contracts sourced from government websites for the building and outfitting of these facilities. Further corroboration about these camps was found in photographs and videos taken by activists and the media. This project zeroed in on just 28 facilities where there were strong signals indicating they were part of this network of camps.
Credits
- Reporting: Mark Doman, Stephen Hutcheon Dylan Welch and Kyle Taylor
- Design: Alex Palmer
- Development: Ri Liu and Nathanael Scott
- Translations: Mehmet Celepci
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Its about time countries in south east asia build re-education camps to make sure chinese assimilate with local cultures. Including in singapura.
And Malaysia and Indonesia.
Came across so many jiuhukia. Cant even speak colloquial Malay. Spoke Mandarin all the way. Should be sent to re-education camp. If not happy ship them out to Middle shit or sinkieland!
Their men will be sent back to hainan island. The women to be sex slaves as subscribed in IS ideology.
The chunks r just doing wat the mudslimes will do to them.
Why Muslim nations remain silent as China sends ethnic minorities to re-education camps
BY TASHA WIBAWAUPDATED 18 MINUTES AGO
Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp
PHOTO
Re-education was often used by Chinese leaders in the past to force cooperation.
REUTERS: THOMAS PETER
Beijing's crackdown on its ethnic Muslim-minority Uyghurs has been met with international condemnation, however some very significant voices have remained silent — those of Muslim nations.
Key points:
Experts say Muslims nations are keeping quiet due to China's economic and political clout as well as foreign policy considerations.
China's war on religion
Banned bibles, burnt crosses, and re-education camps — denomination aside, religion is a dangerous pursuit in Xi Jinping's China in 2018.
China policy expert Michael Clarke, from the Australian National University, told the ABC that China's economic power and the fear of retaliation was a big factor in Muslim politics.
In contrast, countries including Australia and the United States have publicly denounced Beijing's actions in the region.
The Turkic-speaking ethnic minorities have been detained in 're-education' camps and subjected to political indoctrination, including being forced to learn a different language and give up their faith.
Recent research reveals that the 28 detention facilities have expanded by more than 2 million square metres since the beginning of last year and detainees have been forced to sew clothes for export to a US sportswear company.
A deafening silence
PHOTO Satellite imagery captured over a remote and highly volatile region of western China lifts the lid on the size and spread of internment camps.
ABC NEWS/GOOGLE EARTH/DIGITAL GLOBE
Governments of Muslim-majority nations including Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have avoided raising the matter publicly.
Pakistan has gone even further by defending China, saying the reporting on the Uyghurs' situation has been "sensationalised" by Western media.
China's frontier of fear
Satellite imagery lifts the lid on the size and spread of China's internment camps, used to indoctrinate vast numbers of the Xinjiang region's Muslim population.
While the Indonesian Government has remained largely quiet on the topic, it finally raised the issue of the camps this week after growing internal pressure from Islamic groups and amid increased media coverage.
The statement is in stark contrast to the stance of Indonesia on other Muslim issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict and the plight of the ethnic minority Rohingya in Myanmar.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Malaysia and others have also repeatedly condemned the persecution of Rohingya Muslimsand Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
An economy 180 times bigger
PHOTO An estimated 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination in Xinjiang.
AP: NG HAN GUAN
Dr Clarke said China's economy is 180 times bigger than that of a country such as Myanmar, making the latter a far safer target for criticism.
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
Since last spring, several hundred thousand and possibly more than a million ethnic minorities — mostly Uyghur — in Xinjiang have been interned in mass detention facilities.
"In Myanmar, you're dealing with a much weaker regional state which is much more open to pressure and international criticism," he said.
Chinese investments and contracts in the Middle East and North Africa from 2005 until this year amount to $144.8 billion.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, it is $121.6 billion over the same period, according to think tank American Enterprise Institute.
Beijing has heavily invested in state-owned oil and gas industries in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and promises continued investments across Asia, Africa and the Middle East with its Belt and Road initiative.
PHOTO The treatment of Uyghurs is seen as a response to terrorism threats following deadly attacks in the region.
REUTERS: PETAR KUJUNDZIC
Beijing's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim groups has not deterred Muslim tourists from travelling to China.
Muslim travellers spent more than $US8 billion ($11.3 billion) in China this year, a figure that is expected to increase by $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) annually, according to a recent report from market research company Salam Standard.
China's non-intervention stance pays off
PHOTO Chinese characters above the blackboard read, "Always be prepared to strive for the cause of communism".
REUTERS
Beijing's policy of "non-intervention", whereby it avoids becoming involved in the domestic affairs of other nations, has long been a key part of its foreign policy agenda.
But analysts say it is now paying off with Muslim countries reciprocating the favour.
WorldUyghurCongress
✔@UyghurCongress
https://twitter.com/UyghurCongress/status/1075476537191882752
.@AP reported on Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz detainees arbitrarily detained in internment camps in China are being forced to work sewing sportswear and other products, some of which are being sold by US companies.
39
3:42 AM - Dec 20, 2018
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China has gone as so far as to repeatedly abstain from votes or use its veto power in UN security council meetings on many international interventions, such as proposed sanctions in Syria and in Myanmar.
"Many [Muslim nations] have their own internal issues whether its religious or ethnic minorities … so they are very loathe to criticise Beijing for its handling of its own problems given they have their own problems to deal with," Dr Clarke said.
This case can be made for Turkey, which has spoken out against China on Xinjiang — a move Beijing has not forgotten.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the events in the restive province as "a kind of genocide" while Turkey also provided asylum for Uyghurs fleeing the region.
Beijing had extended an offer of support during this year's economic crisis in Turkey, on the provision that Ankara didn't release any "irresponsible remarks" related to Uyghurs or ethnic policy in Xinjiang — and no comments on the matter have been publicly made since.
PHOTO Bordered by eight countries including the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Xinjiang is China's largest province.
SUPPLIED: GOOGLE MAPS
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Top Stories
BY TASHA WIBAWAUPDATED 18 MINUTES AGO
Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp
PHOTO
Re-education was often used by Chinese leaders in the past to force cooperation.
REUTERS: THOMAS PETER
Beijing's crackdown on its ethnic Muslim-minority Uyghurs has been met with international condemnation, however some very significant voices have remained silent — those of Muslim nations.
Key points:
- Muslim nations fear diplomatic and economic retaliation from China, experts say
- Beijing has refrained from intervening in other countries' domestic issues
- Crackdown on Uyghurs and others have not deterred Muslim tourists visiting China
Experts say Muslims nations are keeping quiet due to China's economic and political clout as well as foreign policy considerations.
China's war on religion
Banned bibles, burnt crosses, and re-education camps — denomination aside, religion is a dangerous pursuit in Xi Jinping's China in 2018.
China policy expert Michael Clarke, from the Australian National University, told the ABC that China's economic power and the fear of retaliation was a big factor in Muslim politics.
"You're dealing with one of the most powerful states in the world," Dr Clarke said.
"It's ultimately a very unfortunate situation the Uyghur people find themselves in."In contrast, countries including Australia and the United States have publicly denounced Beijing's actions in the region.
The Turkic-speaking ethnic minorities have been detained in 're-education' camps and subjected to political indoctrination, including being forced to learn a different language and give up their faith.
Recent research reveals that the 28 detention facilities have expanded by more than 2 million square metres since the beginning of last year and detainees have been forced to sew clothes for export to a US sportswear company.
A deafening silence
PHOTO Satellite imagery captured over a remote and highly volatile region of western China lifts the lid on the size and spread of internment camps.
ABC NEWS/GOOGLE EARTH/DIGITAL GLOBE
Governments of Muslim-majority nations including Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have avoided raising the matter publicly.
Pakistan has gone even further by defending China, saying the reporting on the Uyghurs' situation has been "sensationalised" by Western media.
China's frontier of fear
Satellite imagery lifts the lid on the size and spread of China's internment camps, used to indoctrinate vast numbers of the Xinjiang region's Muslim population.
While the Indonesian Government has remained largely quiet on the topic, it finally raised the issue of the camps this week after growing internal pressure from Islamic groups and amid increased media coverage.
"Of course, we reject or [want to] prevent any human rights violations," Jusuf Kalla, Vice-President of Indonesia, told local journalists on Monday.
"However, we don't want to intervene in the domestic affairs of another country," he said.The statement is in stark contrast to the stance of Indonesia on other Muslim issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict and the plight of the ethnic minority Rohingya in Myanmar.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Malaysia and others have also repeatedly condemned the persecution of Rohingya Muslimsand Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
An economy 180 times bigger
PHOTO An estimated 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination in Xinjiang.
AP: NG HAN GUAN
Dr Clarke said China's economy is 180 times bigger than that of a country such as Myanmar, making the latter a far safer target for criticism.
'Like lambs waiting to be killed'
Since last spring, several hundred thousand and possibly more than a million ethnic minorities — mostly Uyghur — in Xinjiang have been interned in mass detention facilities.
"In Myanmar, you're dealing with a much weaker regional state which is much more open to pressure and international criticism," he said.
Chinese investments and contracts in the Middle East and North Africa from 2005 until this year amount to $144.8 billion.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, it is $121.6 billion over the same period, according to think tank American Enterprise Institute.
Beijing has heavily invested in state-owned oil and gas industries in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and promises continued investments across Asia, Africa and the Middle East with its Belt and Road initiative.
"It [seems] to act as a break on any of those states from openly criticising Beijing," Dr Clarke said.
PHOTO The treatment of Uyghurs is seen as a response to terrorism threats following deadly attacks in the region.
REUTERS: PETAR KUJUNDZIC
Beijing's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim groups has not deterred Muslim tourists from travelling to China.
Muslim travellers spent more than $US8 billion ($11.3 billion) in China this year, a figure that is expected to increase by $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) annually, according to a recent report from market research company Salam Standard.
China's non-intervention stance pays off
PHOTO Chinese characters above the blackboard read, "Always be prepared to strive for the cause of communism".
REUTERS
Beijing's policy of "non-intervention", whereby it avoids becoming involved in the domestic affairs of other nations, has long been a key part of its foreign policy agenda.
But analysts say it is now paying off with Muslim countries reciprocating the favour.
WorldUyghurCongress
✔@UyghurCongress
https://twitter.com/UyghurCongress/status/1075476537191882752
.@AP reported on Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz detainees arbitrarily detained in internment camps in China are being forced to work sewing sportswear and other products, some of which are being sold by US companies.
39
3:42 AM - Dec 20, 2018
56 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
China has gone as so far as to repeatedly abstain from votes or use its veto power in UN security council meetings on many international interventions, such as proposed sanctions in Syria and in Myanmar.
"Many [Muslim nations] have their own internal issues whether its religious or ethnic minorities … so they are very loathe to criticise Beijing for its handling of its own problems given they have their own problems to deal with," Dr Clarke said.
This case can be made for Turkey, which has spoken out against China on Xinjiang — a move Beijing has not forgotten.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the events in the restive province as "a kind of genocide" while Turkey also provided asylum for Uyghurs fleeing the region.
Beijing had extended an offer of support during this year's economic crisis in Turkey, on the provision that Ankara didn't release any "irresponsible remarks" related to Uyghurs or ethnic policy in Xinjiang — and no comments on the matter have been publicly made since.
"Unfortunately, it all comes down to the calculation of [whether] it's of any benefit to us and our relationships with others more broadly," Dr Clarke said
The Indonesian Government did not respond to requests for comment.
PHOTO Bordered by eight countries including the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Xinjiang is China's largest province.
SUPPLIED: GOOGLE MAPS
POSTED ABOUT 4 HOURS AGO
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US company selling clothes made in Chinese 'concentration camps'
US and Australia call on China to close Uighur re-education camps
'Absolutely massive': China's secret detention camps seen from space
Inside China's 'vocational training centres'
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East Turkestan: Chinese Separation Policy is Ripping Apart Uyghur Children and Parents
An advanced system is set in place to weaken cultural and family ties and even forcibly separate Uyghur children from their parents. Recent reports have shown that as many as one million Uyghurs are held in “re-educations” camps. A new report reveals that the children of the incarcerated are placed in de facto orphanages – even when grandparents plead to take care of them. In these institutions, children undergo brainwashing, are taught to hate their parents and love the Chinese Communist Party. Other activities include disallowing children to visit family members abroad, as well as making children spy on their parents by incitement from their school teachers.
Tahir Imin is the type of father who likes to take a video of his daughter each and every week. His phone is full of clips and photos of her: in a tutu, holding up a drawing, on a merry-go-round. Even at age six, she would ride piggyback on him as they made-believe she was a princess and he, a king. She’s seven years old now, and he’d probably still carry her aloft on his back if he could. But she’s in China. He’s in the U.S. And the last time they talked, about six months ago, she told him he’s a bad person.
Imin and his family are Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. The country has long suppressed Uighur religious identity, claiming it fuels separatism and extremism, and in the past year its crackdown has grown increasingly harsh. China has sent approximately one million Uighurs to internment camps for what the government calls “re-education,” according to estimates cited by the UN andU.S. officials. The Independent and other media outlets have reported, based on interviews with former inmates, that camp administrators try to force Uighurs to renounce Islam—which the Communist Party has characterized in one official recording as an “ideological illness” and a “virus [in] their brain”—and get them to identify with the Chinese government rather than with the Uighur people.
The mass internment system doesn’t only affect the Uighurs incarcerated in it. It also involves family separation, which impacts thousands of children. When Uighur parents are sent to the camps, their children are often taken away to state-run orphanages, which are proliferating to accommodate the growing demand, Emily Feng of the Financial Times has reported. Under state care, isolated from their relatives, the children are cut off from Uighur culture and language. Ultimately, some Uighurs and experts told me, such assimilationist policies may enable China to reshape the identity of an entire generation of Uighurs.
“I really think this is achieving the sinicization of children better than previous attempts,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islam in China. “There was an attempt in the early 1900s to force all of what we would now call Uighur children to go to Chinese school. And it just failed miserably. Rich people would pay poor people to send their kids in their own kids’ place. All the education just got undone back in the home. But now, when you take the parents out of the picture, suddenly that sinicizing education can actually take root.”
Imin worries about what might happen to his daughter in such an environment. As an academic who promotes Uighur culture and a vocal critic of China’s policies toward his people, he remains in the U.S. because he fears he will be sent to an internment camp if he goes home. He said he first left China to go to graduate school, and that his wife and child can’t join him because the Chinese government took their passports. He added that several of his family members are already in the camps, including his brother and sister. His other relatives have deleted him as a social-media contact and refuse to be in touch, he said, because communicating with a Uighur abroad could make them look suspicious to authorities. Since arriving in the U.S. last year, he has had to content himself with weekly phone calls to his daughter. But during a call in February, she asked him to stop contacting her and her mother.
“You are a bad person. The Chinese police are good people,” he recalled his seven-year-old saying—under psychological duress, he believes. He said he hasn’t been able to reach her since.
Now, Imin has nearly no way of knowing where she is or whether she’s safe. His wife divorced him last year because staying married to him put a target on her back, he said, and since then they haven’t exchanged so much as a hello. The lack of contact has left him prone to panic. The day he and I were slated to talk, he sent me an apologetic email around 5:00 a.m., asking to reschedule: “I could not sleep the whole night wondering about my family back home and trying to contact them to know whether my wife and daughter are safe or not. Today is Eid [al-Adha] for Uighurs at home, when every family joins together to celebrate.” In the small hours of the night, he’d resorted to posting on Chinese social media, asking strangers if anyone had seen his wife or daughter in the street, but to no avail. Had his wife been rounded up and sent to a camp? If so, had his daughter been placed in an orphanage?
When parents are interned, younger children are sent to de facto orphanages known as “child welfare guidance centers” and older children are sometimes sent to state-run vocational schools, Feng reported. One former teacher told her: “The child is forbidden to go to school with the normal children because the parents have a political problem.” Children have been taken by the state even when grandparents pleaded to be able to keep them, according to Feng. She cited local media reports that Xinjiang has been building dozens of new, typically massive orphanages, with 18 popping up in a single county in the city of Kashgar last year. A worker at one Xinjiang orphanage described serious overcrowding and “terrible” conditions there, telling Radio Free Asia that children aged six months to 12 years are “locked up like farm animals in a shed.”
China’s crackdown has some Uighurs in Xinjiang worried that their own children will incriminate them, whether accidentally or because teachers urge kids to spy on their parents, according to Thum. “Everybody’s just scared to death of their children,” he told me. “They’re scared that their children will tell their teachers in school something about their religious habits that will get them singled out for punishment or internment in the camps.”
Imin recalled a phone call with his daughter last December, when they were joking about what he’ll be like when he gets old. His daughter said, “Maybe you will do the namaz practice just like my grandmother!” Namaz refers to Islamic prayer—a risky thing to mention, since Chinese authorities are known to surveil calls. “At that time,” Imin recounted, “her mother took away the phone and stopped the conversation. Maybe she scolded her after: ‘Why do you say about namaz, why do you say the name of the religious practice?’ Any kind of religious name, even salaam aleikum, everything was being considered very sensitive and could lead to us being sent to camps.”
A 24-year-old Uighur student in the U.S. told me a similar atmosphere of fear permeated his childhood in Xinjiang. He asked to remain anonymous for fear that his father, who he said is in an internment camp, would be tortured. “When I was in elementary school, I remember that people came to our classroom and tried to question us: ‘Do you guys have a Quran at home? Do your parents do some religious activities?’” the student said. “I lied to them. I said my parents don’t do any religious activities.” He also recalls his parents fearfully pleading with him not to go to mosque. “If I commit any ‘crime,’ I’m not the only one who could go to jail,” he explained. “Almost my entire bloodline will be in trouble.”
The climate of fear has only grown more intense in recent years—and it’s reminiscent of a time in the country’s more distant past. “It’s like the Cultural Revolution in terms of the particular effects on people: turning neighbors and family members against each other, making people think that a small slip-up in what they say can ruin their life forever,” said Thum. “It’s going to leave a massive social trauma for people to deal with for decades.”
That comparison resonates deeply with Murat Harri Uyghur, a 33-year-old doctor from Xinjiang who now lives in Finland, and who said both his parents were recently taken to internment camps. “During the Cultural Revolution, they took my father from my grandfather’s house,” he said. “They sent my grandfather to a labor camp because he was an educated person with a different ideology. And they took my father from his house to a Han Chinese couple’s house. He was six or seven. He stayed with them for years, until the Cultural Revolution ended. This is why my father speaks better Chinese than Uighur.”
He paused, then added, “I guess a similar thing is going on now. They forcefully took my father from his own home to put him somewhere where he doesn’t belong.”
China’s attempt to assimilate Uighur parents through internment camps and Uighur children through orphanages fits into what human-rights groups see as a broader campaign to reshape the Uighur family unit, all in the name of promoting social stability. In 2016, the government launched the Becoming Family Campaign, which has since expanded into a huge system of “home stays,” whereby officials temporarily move in with families in Xinjiang to surveil and report on them. A Human Rights Watch report explains it this way:
In December 2017, Xinjiang authorities mobilized more than a million cadres to spend a week living in homes primarily in the countryside. … In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.
The visiting cadres observe and report on any “problems” or “unusual situations”—which can range from uncleanliness to alcoholism to the extent of religious beliefs—and act to “rectify” the situation. … They teach the families Mandarin, the Han majority language; make them sing the Chinese national anthem and other songs praising the Chinese Communist Party; and ensure families participate in the weekly national flag-raising ceremony. … [Photos] show scenes of cadres living with minority families, including in the most intimate aspects of domestic life, such as cadres and family members making beds and sleeping together, sharing meals, and feeding and tutoring their children.
The Chinese government, Thum said, encourages Uighurs and the Han officials who stay with them to refer to each other as siblings, to foster a sense of kinship and project a benign image for the program. He saw this cross-ethnic assignment of fictive relatives on display last December when he visited the city of Turpan in Xinjiang. A kilometer-long outdoor walkway, the “Ethnic Unity Corridor,” was plastered with photos of Uighurs engaged in activities with their “relatives,” like playing sports and exchanging gifts. As recently as two weeks ago, the Xinjiang Justice Administration was still publicly promoting the meetings between “relatives” as a great success.
Taken together, the evidence suggests China is aiming to weaken Uighur identity through a series of interlocking policies. These policies have the calculated feel of mathematical operations: addition (of fictive relatives), subtraction (of parents from their children), and translation (of children from the home space to the state space).
A father like Imin can only hope that, in the end, all this will total something he can still recognize, something not all that different from the family he once knew.
For now, he’s holding onto a shred of hope: Someone has replied to his social-media post, assuring him that his ex-wife and daughter were recently seen walking in the streets. Knowing they were still together and relatively safe filled Imin with relief, he told me. “I said ‘oh my god!’ and deleted those posts very quickly. I got the news, I got the news they are safe,” he said, his voice breaking.
Asked how he thinks his seven-year-old girl understands her own identity now, he said, “I taught her that we are Uighur and we have a very special culture. Our food, language, clothes, history—everything is different. I taught her to be proud of that. Now she is being taught the Chinese culture … so maybe she lost a lot of things, or forgot everything I taught her. But she has a sense in her heart that she is different: She is Uighur. I believe that.”
Bloody chinks communist!
https://unpo.org/article/21061?id=21061
An advanced system is set in place to weaken cultural and family ties and even forcibly separate Uyghur children from their parents. Recent reports have shown that as many as one million Uyghurs are held in “re-educations” camps. A new report reveals that the children of the incarcerated are placed in de facto orphanages – even when grandparents plead to take care of them. In these institutions, children undergo brainwashing, are taught to hate their parents and love the Chinese Communist Party. Other activities include disallowing children to visit family members abroad, as well as making children spy on their parents by incitement from their school teachers.
Tahir Imin is the type of father who likes to take a video of his daughter each and every week. His phone is full of clips and photos of her: in a tutu, holding up a drawing, on a merry-go-round. Even at age six, she would ride piggyback on him as they made-believe she was a princess and he, a king. She’s seven years old now, and he’d probably still carry her aloft on his back if he could. But she’s in China. He’s in the U.S. And the last time they talked, about six months ago, she told him he’s a bad person.
Imin and his family are Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. The country has long suppressed Uighur religious identity, claiming it fuels separatism and extremism, and in the past year its crackdown has grown increasingly harsh. China has sent approximately one million Uighurs to internment camps for what the government calls “re-education,” according to estimates cited by the UN andU.S. officials. The Independent and other media outlets have reported, based on interviews with former inmates, that camp administrators try to force Uighurs to renounce Islam—which the Communist Party has characterized in one official recording as an “ideological illness” and a “virus [in] their brain”—and get them to identify with the Chinese government rather than with the Uighur people.
The mass internment system doesn’t only affect the Uighurs incarcerated in it. It also involves family separation, which impacts thousands of children. When Uighur parents are sent to the camps, their children are often taken away to state-run orphanages, which are proliferating to accommodate the growing demand, Emily Feng of the Financial Times has reported. Under state care, isolated from their relatives, the children are cut off from Uighur culture and language. Ultimately, some Uighurs and experts told me, such assimilationist policies may enable China to reshape the identity of an entire generation of Uighurs.
“I really think this is achieving the sinicization of children better than previous attempts,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islam in China. “There was an attempt in the early 1900s to force all of what we would now call Uighur children to go to Chinese school. And it just failed miserably. Rich people would pay poor people to send their kids in their own kids’ place. All the education just got undone back in the home. But now, when you take the parents out of the picture, suddenly that sinicizing education can actually take root.”
Imin worries about what might happen to his daughter in such an environment. As an academic who promotes Uighur culture and a vocal critic of China’s policies toward his people, he remains in the U.S. because he fears he will be sent to an internment camp if he goes home. He said he first left China to go to graduate school, and that his wife and child can’t join him because the Chinese government took their passports. He added that several of his family members are already in the camps, including his brother and sister. His other relatives have deleted him as a social-media contact and refuse to be in touch, he said, because communicating with a Uighur abroad could make them look suspicious to authorities. Since arriving in the U.S. last year, he has had to content himself with weekly phone calls to his daughter. But during a call in February, she asked him to stop contacting her and her mother.
“You are a bad person. The Chinese police are good people,” he recalled his seven-year-old saying—under psychological duress, he believes. He said he hasn’t been able to reach her since.
Now, Imin has nearly no way of knowing where she is or whether she’s safe. His wife divorced him last year because staying married to him put a target on her back, he said, and since then they haven’t exchanged so much as a hello. The lack of contact has left him prone to panic. The day he and I were slated to talk, he sent me an apologetic email around 5:00 a.m., asking to reschedule: “I could not sleep the whole night wondering about my family back home and trying to contact them to know whether my wife and daughter are safe or not. Today is Eid [al-Adha] for Uighurs at home, when every family joins together to celebrate.” In the small hours of the night, he’d resorted to posting on Chinese social media, asking strangers if anyone had seen his wife or daughter in the street, but to no avail. Had his wife been rounded up and sent to a camp? If so, had his daughter been placed in an orphanage?
When parents are interned, younger children are sent to de facto orphanages known as “child welfare guidance centers” and older children are sometimes sent to state-run vocational schools, Feng reported. One former teacher told her: “The child is forbidden to go to school with the normal children because the parents have a political problem.” Children have been taken by the state even when grandparents pleaded to be able to keep them, according to Feng. She cited local media reports that Xinjiang has been building dozens of new, typically massive orphanages, with 18 popping up in a single county in the city of Kashgar last year. A worker at one Xinjiang orphanage described serious overcrowding and “terrible” conditions there, telling Radio Free Asia that children aged six months to 12 years are “locked up like farm animals in a shed.”
China’s crackdown has some Uighurs in Xinjiang worried that their own children will incriminate them, whether accidentally or because teachers urge kids to spy on their parents, according to Thum. “Everybody’s just scared to death of their children,” he told me. “They’re scared that their children will tell their teachers in school something about their religious habits that will get them singled out for punishment or internment in the camps.”
Imin recalled a phone call with his daughter last December, when they were joking about what he’ll be like when he gets old. His daughter said, “Maybe you will do the namaz practice just like my grandmother!” Namaz refers to Islamic prayer—a risky thing to mention, since Chinese authorities are known to surveil calls. “At that time,” Imin recounted, “her mother took away the phone and stopped the conversation. Maybe she scolded her after: ‘Why do you say about namaz, why do you say the name of the religious practice?’ Any kind of religious name, even salaam aleikum, everything was being considered very sensitive and could lead to us being sent to camps.”
A 24-year-old Uighur student in the U.S. told me a similar atmosphere of fear permeated his childhood in Xinjiang. He asked to remain anonymous for fear that his father, who he said is in an internment camp, would be tortured. “When I was in elementary school, I remember that people came to our classroom and tried to question us: ‘Do you guys have a Quran at home? Do your parents do some religious activities?’” the student said. “I lied to them. I said my parents don’t do any religious activities.” He also recalls his parents fearfully pleading with him not to go to mosque. “If I commit any ‘crime,’ I’m not the only one who could go to jail,” he explained. “Almost my entire bloodline will be in trouble.”
The climate of fear has only grown more intense in recent years—and it’s reminiscent of a time in the country’s more distant past. “It’s like the Cultural Revolution in terms of the particular effects on people: turning neighbors and family members against each other, making people think that a small slip-up in what they say can ruin their life forever,” said Thum. “It’s going to leave a massive social trauma for people to deal with for decades.”
That comparison resonates deeply with Murat Harri Uyghur, a 33-year-old doctor from Xinjiang who now lives in Finland, and who said both his parents were recently taken to internment camps. “During the Cultural Revolution, they took my father from my grandfather’s house,” he said. “They sent my grandfather to a labor camp because he was an educated person with a different ideology. And they took my father from his house to a Han Chinese couple’s house. He was six or seven. He stayed with them for years, until the Cultural Revolution ended. This is why my father speaks better Chinese than Uighur.”
He paused, then added, “I guess a similar thing is going on now. They forcefully took my father from his own home to put him somewhere where he doesn’t belong.”
China’s attempt to assimilate Uighur parents through internment camps and Uighur children through orphanages fits into what human-rights groups see as a broader campaign to reshape the Uighur family unit, all in the name of promoting social stability. In 2016, the government launched the Becoming Family Campaign, which has since expanded into a huge system of “home stays,” whereby officials temporarily move in with families in Xinjiang to surveil and report on them. A Human Rights Watch report explains it this way:
In December 2017, Xinjiang authorities mobilized more than a million cadres to spend a week living in homes primarily in the countryside. … In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.
The visiting cadres observe and report on any “problems” or “unusual situations”—which can range from uncleanliness to alcoholism to the extent of religious beliefs—and act to “rectify” the situation. … They teach the families Mandarin, the Han majority language; make them sing the Chinese national anthem and other songs praising the Chinese Communist Party; and ensure families participate in the weekly national flag-raising ceremony. … [Photos] show scenes of cadres living with minority families, including in the most intimate aspects of domestic life, such as cadres and family members making beds and sleeping together, sharing meals, and feeding and tutoring their children.
The Chinese government, Thum said, encourages Uighurs and the Han officials who stay with them to refer to each other as siblings, to foster a sense of kinship and project a benign image for the program. He saw this cross-ethnic assignment of fictive relatives on display last December when he visited the city of Turpan in Xinjiang. A kilometer-long outdoor walkway, the “Ethnic Unity Corridor,” was plastered with photos of Uighurs engaged in activities with their “relatives,” like playing sports and exchanging gifts. As recently as two weeks ago, the Xinjiang Justice Administration was still publicly promoting the meetings between “relatives” as a great success.
Taken together, the evidence suggests China is aiming to weaken Uighur identity through a series of interlocking policies. These policies have the calculated feel of mathematical operations: addition (of fictive relatives), subtraction (of parents from their children), and translation (of children from the home space to the state space).
A father like Imin can only hope that, in the end, all this will total something he can still recognize, something not all that different from the family he once knew.
For now, he’s holding onto a shred of hope: Someone has replied to his social-media post, assuring him that his ex-wife and daughter were recently seen walking in the streets. Knowing they were still together and relatively safe filled Imin with relief, he told me. “I said ‘oh my god!’ and deleted those posts very quickly. I got the news, I got the news they are safe,” he said, his voice breaking.
Asked how he thinks his seven-year-old girl understands her own identity now, he said, “I taught her that we are Uighur and we have a very special culture. Our food, language, clothes, history—everything is different. I taught her to be proud of that. Now she is being taught the Chinese culture … so maybe she lost a lot of things, or forgot everything I taught her. But she has a sense in her heart that she is different: She is Uighur. I believe that.”
Bloody chinks communist!
https://unpo.org/article/21061?id=21061
Very well done. That is the best way to eliminate terrorism. Even mudslimes countries do not dare criticise ah tiong land. Soon ah tiong Lang will overtake ang mor lands bcos ang mor lands is getting ripped apart internally by a these mudslimes.
Seems u r enjoying every bit of it. No wonder ur kind all cabut. Tats ur motherland. Even killing their own kind. N u still tink commis chinks r angel. Tsk tsk.
As for angmo land u go chk history. Look at hw they invaded n destroyed those countries esp ME. Millions n millions of innocent muslims young n old were massacred by US Uk USSR
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