At the beginning of this year, we heard stories of people starving and sleeping on the streets in quarantined Shanghai. But the lockdown in Xinjiang is even more of a cause for concern. The region, which is home to the Uyghurs and other Turkic, mostly Muslim ethnic groups, has been subject to a years-long crackdown before Covid even came on the scene. As many as a million Uyghurs have been corralled into concentration camps for so-called “re-education,” and now the implementation of Covid restrictions sees millions more imprisoned in their homes. 

There’s usually an almost complete blackout on communications coming out of Xinjiang.

“While everyone in China is afraid to criticize the government, this is particularly true for Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, because even the slightest perceived dissent could send one to a political camp or prison,” Yaqiu Wang, a Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me. 

But now, Uyghurs are breaking the silence. They’re taking to social media to describe how they’re running out of food, being denied medical care, and collapsing on the streets. At one point, 100 new posts per minute were being uploaded to a hashtag on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, about the Yili region of Xinjiang near the border with Kazakhstan, where conditions seem to be worst of all.

Censorship personnel working for the government have gone into overdrive to quell the outburst. They were directed to “flood” Weibo with unrelated content to try to drown out the dissent, according to a leaked censorship directive published by China Digital Times. “Content may include domestic life, daily parenting, cooking,” the directive read. “But do not touch on the pandemic situation, pandemic volunteers, pandemic prevention policies, etc.”

The Weibo platform has also set Xinjiang’s food and scenery as trending topics to try to drown out cries for help on the site so that anyone searching for news of the lockdown is inundated with noodle shots and tourism tips. Weibo users noticed the sudden inundation of irrelevant recipe posts on the Xinjiang hashtags. “All of today’s food posts are a political task. Everyone knows this, yet they still won’t let us comment,” one person wrote. 

And when the Queen died, eight of 10 of the top topics on Xinjiang then became about the British royal family. “The Queen has saved Weibo,” tweeted China researcher and journalist Chu Yang. 

Things are no better, it seems, in Tibet. Following Xinjiang’s lead, Tibetans have also been breaking their silence and taking to social media to air their frustrations over the zero covid policy. There are reports that the city of Lhasa has been under lockdown for over a month, and those housed in quarantine facilities have posted videos documenting spartan conditions, with rotten food and no one to check on them. A Weibo hashtag on Tibet’s Covid situation has repeatedly surged up the trending topics on Weibo — only to be deprioritized again. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

We’ve been covering in this newsletter how one Boston hospital, which offers care to transgender youth, has been targeted by vicious death threats and bomb scares from anti-LGBTQ far-right groups. Now this campaign, orchestrated by the extreme right-wing “Libs of TikTok” Twitter page, has a new target in its sights: the American healthcare company Kaiser Permanente, which has been running special Zoom workshops to help transgender kids and their families. The workshops are focused on mental health topics, and helping kids between 12-17 with gender dysphoria navigate their emotions, explore their gender identity, and “learn ways to comfortably express themselves.” A post on Libs of TikTok’s substack falsely claimed that the workshops were being held “without parental consent,” despite the workshops being designed for both parents and kids. “Libs of Tiktok is now pushing misinformation around Kaiser Permanente to stoke another campaign of terror against medical providers,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo tweeted. 

As the cost of living soars amid predictions of energy shortages this winter, there’s a panicked rumor going around in Switzerland, claiming that people will face jail time if they heat their homes higher than 66°F. It’s been published in a number of tabloids and online news sites — and though it’s not true, it’s not entirely false. Plans are being proposed in the country to cap heating temperatures, and potentially issue large fines to those that refuse to comply. Whether they’ll go to jail for three years, though — as the rumors claim — is highly unlikely. The rumors are, it seems, a side-effect of the tense geopolitical situation and the likelihood of gas shortages in the coming months. 

The ripple effects of the Roe v Wade ruling in the United States are being felt in authoritarian-minded countries all over the world. In Hungary, where abortions have been legal since the 1950s, women wanting an abortion will now be forced to listen to the fetus’s heartbeat before going through with the procedure. “The only achievement of this amendment will be that people trying to access abortions will be more traumatized and more stressed,” an Amnesty International representative told the media. Opposition MP Timea Szabo said this week that the government is “banning abortion quietly, without consulting women.” Since the overturning of Roe, we’ve noticed a significant uptick in the amount of abortion-related misinformation online. For instance this week, a tweet by the evangelical American lobby group the Family Research Council tweeted a false claim that “abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of a mother.” The tweet brought in thousands of likes and retweets, and despite numerous doctors weighing in to disprove it, has yet to be removed by Twitter. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

At an Amazon delivery hub in California, which has been struck by a crippling heatwave, nearly half the Amazon drivers vomited from heat-related illness in recent weeks. For the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Avi-Asher Schapiro writes about how drivers are under huge pressure from Amazon’s strict measures to push themselves to work beyond safe limits — because taking a break, even when your nose is bleeding from being so hot, could affect your “productivity score.”

Rebekah Robinson contributed to this edition.

The post Chinese censors working overtime to silence dissent on zero-Covid lockdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet appeared first on Coda Story.

As the China Media Project pointed out, there has been little domestic coverage or even condemnation of the report in China. The domestic press has chosen the path of blissful ignorance. Instead, China’s responses have been outward facing, its calculated “fury” intended to send a message to the world.

Aynne Kokas, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me that the “The Chinese government either ignores or denies reports on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In this case, likely due to the extremely high profile nature of the report and well-respected international source, the strategy appears to not give the report additional oxygen.” 

But if silence was the policy within China, the Chinese response to the report in English-language media was swift and voluble. In a press conference the day after the report was released, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the UN Human Rights Office “has been reduced to an enforcer and accomplice of the U.S. and some Western forces to force developing countries to fall in line with them.” 

Following Wenbin’s lead, the state-backed tabloid the Global Times called the report “a patchwork of disinformation and a political tool.” A spokesperson for China’s UN mission said the report was “a perverse product of the United States and some other Western forces’ coercive diplomacy.” 

When the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman told reporters that the U.S. and Western forces were weaponizing the UN report to “force developing countries to fall in line,” he was alluding to a battle for global opinion that has only intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is China’s response to what it calls U.S. propaganda, such as a state department report released on August 24 accusing China of attempting to “manipulate and dominate global discourse on Xinjiang and to discredit independent sources reporting ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity.” 

Researchers at MapInfluenCE observed in a recent study that Russian and Chinese disinformation “have been previously analyzed separately, leaving the question of whether Russia and China coordinate in spreading narratives largely unanswered.” The researchers found that news outlets in Central Europe, their area of focus, often uncritically reported Russian and Chinese talking points, portraying the relationship between the two countries as “mutually beneficial and as a counterweight to the Western liberal world order.”

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin has played up Russia’s growing trade and diplomatic connections to China. He was at it again in an address to the Eastern Economic Forum, held in Vladivostok between September 5 and 8, in which he lambasted sanctions as a “threat to the whole world.” Putin claimed that US-led sanctions would have little effect given “the demand” for Russian resources “is so great on the world markets that we have no problem selling them.” 

Western countries, like Canada, are increasingly beginning to recognize that their attempts to fight disinformation cannot focus on Russia and China separately but as a coordinated effort to garner sympathy for a worldview that is anti-West, that proposes a Sino-Russian counter to Western wealth and dominance. 

Part of that effort is apparent in China’s response to the UN report of its crimes against humanity in Xinjiang — don’t respond to the findings; instead, accuse the U.S. of spreading disinformation as part of a geopolitical struggle for control.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

A new study by the U.S. government-funded research and advocacy organization Freedom House examines China’s attempt to influence the public conversation across 30 democracies. “In every country,” the researchers wrote, “Chinese diplomats or state media outlets openly promoted falsehoods or misleading content to news consumers — on topics including the origins of Covid-19, the efficacy of certain vaccines, and pro democracy protests in Hong Kong — in an apparent attempt to confuse foreign audiences and deflect criticism.”

Much of the considerable budget China devotes to such matters goes towards cyberbullying journalists, paying social media influencers to push narratives, and sowing doubt and confusion about democratic processes and functions. In as many as 16 of the 30 countries examined, China was using multiple disinformation techniques to spread preferred messages and the study found that the countries in question were relatively ill-prepared to resist.

China’s determination to control the narrative includes reviving British colonial laws in Hong Kong to silence speech. These British laws in Hong Kong — ironically, intended to suppress pro-Beijing voices — are now a crucial part of the arsenal China deploys to prevent accurate reporting and dissenting opinions. Later this week, a Hong Kong court will sentence five authors of a series of children’s books who were convicted of spreading seditious, pro-democracy messages through those books.

More absurdly, a pastor in Hong Kong is currently being tried for sedition. His “crime”? Applauding while he attended, as an online journalist, the trial of a pro-democracy activist who allegedly strayed into sedition while she defended herself and criticized the magistrate.   

The irony of governments arresting and frequently jailing citizens for spreading so-called disinformation is that the worst offenders are nearly always governments. Research from Asia Center, a think tank based in Malaysia and Thailand, found that government agencies and political parties in Malaysia were the primary source for disinformation in the country. PR agencies and content providers are hired to package disinformation, often providing slick graphics and videos, which are then spread to promote particular political, often divisive storylines.

As if to pile irony upon irony, the response in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and India to disinformation spread most often by figures in positions of authority is to cut off access to the internet. Perhaps the only reasonable long term solution is to invest in media literacy courses, but that might mean citizens will be equipped to see through their politicians’ lies and distortions.

And speaking of lies and distortions, Vladimir Putin said sanctions against Russia “threaten the whole world.” Speaking at an economic conference in Vladivostok, Putin spoke about Russia’s growing closeness to Asia and how American-led sanctions could never isolate Russia. He used the conference to argue that Russia could not be isolated. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke via video in Vladivostok and emphasized India’s closeness to Russia and the need to further strategic collaboration. China was also prominently represented at the conference, with news also emerging of a likely meeting between Putin and Chinese president Xi Jingping in Uzbekistan next week. As if choreographed, Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan also weighed in over the last day or two to back Putin’s claim in Vladivostok that exports of Ukrainian grain were going to rich rather than poor countries. Ukraine says two-thirds of its exports are going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Speaking in Belgrade, Erdogan added that the West was “leading a policy based on provocation” and that “other countries should not underestimate Russia.” It appears Russian disinformation is thriving outside the West. 

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta. Rebekah Robinson contributed to this edition.

The post China and Russia join forces to combat the West’s “coercive diplomacy” appeared first on Coda Story.

Translators and interpreters like Mahmut have been indispensable for non-Uyghur journalists reporting on the Uyghur genocide. With more than one million Uyghurs imprisoned by the Chinese state, Mahmut’s ethnicity alone means that in Xinjiang she has a significant chance of being arrested and sent to a camp.

Journalists — and advocacy groups, police-makers, and academics — are forced to rely on a small number of dedicated bilingual Uyghur-English speakers. Experienced translators estimate there are 10 to 20 people in the world capable of and willing to do public Uyghur-to-English interpretation, meaning to expose themselves to working in the view of the public —and under the gaze of the Chinese state. 

In the past several years, meticulously reported journalism has sent out global shock waves, and has fueled a movement to hold China accountable. Journalists have contributed essential reporting to public understanding of the scale of abuses in Xinjiang. Their ability to work, however, is hampered by the risks facing the Uyghur language translators they must hire to conduct their interviews and research. 

Journalists reporting on Uyghurs say they confront a growing risk to their physical safety from China’s security apparatus, online trolls, and numerous other sources. Uyghur language translators face these same risks –and more because of their families living in Xinjiang. Uyghur translators almost always have close family and other relatives and friends living in China and they, as much as the translators living abroad, are vulnerable to state reprisal, which can include torture and imprisonment.

That has meant that Uyghur translators are in a “dire shortage,” said Elise Anderson, an American scholar and Uyghur translator. Anderson is among an even smaller number of non-Uyghurs fluent in the language who are willing and able to work as translators. 

In fact, there are many fluent Uyghur-English speakers outside China. There is a growing diaspora of native speakers in both languages who have interpretation-level fluency, such as Uyghur university students studying in the West. There are an estimated 12,000 Uyghurs in Europe. Many are young, however, and Uyghur students say they are especially vulnerable. Many young Uyghurs study and work at universities and institutions where China has significant influence.

Mahmut is a well-known singer — a member of a group of London-based musicians from across Central Asia. She also runs the U.K. office for the World Uyghur Congress, an international advocacy organization founded in 2004. But she spends a lot of her time traveling internationally to interpret for journalists, academics and NGOs wanting to speak to former detainees about China’s sprawling network of detainment camps.

My eyes are weary from looking out for you.
My hands are sore from praying for your return
My heart bleeds from being torn apart,
My dear son, when will you return?
Everyday I wait on the road,
Yearning for your appearance all day long
the nights are sleepless until dawn breaks
My dear son, when will you return?
Without you by my side I am alone
No food can pass my lips as my throat is too dry
I worry if you have eaten or not
My dear son, when will you return.

Born in a town called Ghulja in Xinjiang, near the Kazakhstan border, Mahmut last returned home more than 20 years ago. Six years ago, the Chinese state prohibited her family from visiting her in the U.K. Five years ago, China launched the rapid construction of an enormous web of detainment camps under the Chinese Communist Party official Chen Quanguo. Four years ago, Mahmut heard from her brother for the last time. He said, "Leave us in God's hands. We leave you in God's hands too." Often dressed in stylish Uyghur-patterned clothing, Mahmut is a target of the Chinese state.

“When I had cancer in 2013, I sent a letter from the oncologist who stated the seriousness of the disease and said that I need family to look after me,” she said over the phone. “Even with that letter, they wouldn't allow any of my nine siblings to have a passport and travel.”

In late 2016, Mahmut’s family stopped answering her phone calls. Her brother informed her that any association was too dangerous. She says that some people she knows who traveled back to Xinjiang were stopped by state security police and enquired about her work in the U.K.

“The families of people who are active, they are considered to be significant people, and are surveilled more heavily compared to others, and so in order to avoid really severe punishment, the only thing they can do is to completely cut off or declare that she is not my sister anymore,” Mahmut said.

The Chinese state has a long history of oppressing its Uyghur minority, including a crackdown on Uyghur culture and religion during Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution, when longstanding Han prejudices against minority beliefs were reinforced. Repression of Uyghurs has accelerated in the 21st century, first as part of the United States’ post-9/11 War on Terror and then following 2009 riots in the city of Urumqi.

These events combined with some high-profile terrorist attacks, committed by Uyghurs, led to President Xi Jinping announcing a “People’s War on Terror” against Muslim minorities. A rapid build-up of surveillance in the region followed. By 2021, the independent Uyghur Tribunal had declared that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

As pressure increases on Uyghurs within China, so too has transnational repression. The lawyer Rodney Dixon, representing two Uyghur advocacy groups, has repeatedly sought to bring a case to the International Criminal Court alleging that Chinese agents have been operating in Tajikistan to deport Uyghurs and convert others into being informants.

Deportations of Uyghurs to China have been occurring in multiple countries. In December 2021, a Moroccan court approved the extradition of Idris Hasan, who had worked at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Turkey and also worked as a translator. 

Among the few younger Uyghurs willing to take the risk of working as a translator is Arslan Hidayat, a 34-year-old Uyghur-Australian activist and YouTuber who speaks fluent English and Uyghur.

Pro-Beijing online influencers have tried to discredit Hidayat, who says that when he is not being accused of working for the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy, he is accused of supporting ISIS or Turkestan Islamic Party, the loose successor to the obscure East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an organization that the U.S. had labeled a terrorist organization. “We are labeled as sell-outs and puppets of the West,” said Hidayat.

Hidayat says if he tries to respond to his online attackers, trolls will unleash a torrent of new allegations. The only successful tactic is silence. Still, he frequently posts videos on his channel Talk East Turkestan.

Hidayat believes public translation work forces translators into the role of activists, opening up translators to new risks. Hidayat has never received direct threats, but when he recently returned to Australia after living in Turkey, his mother received phone calls from several of her friends warning that her son was linked to terror groups around the world. She believes these friends had been contacted by the Chinese embassy in Australia.

Of greater concern for Hidayat, like all the ethnic Uyghur interpreters and translators I spoke to, is that he still has family in China who have been interviewed by police and have been forced to distance themselves from him. “I must be doing something impactful for them to approach my family in this manner,” he said.

Zubayra Shamseden has similar experiences, receiving messages that discredit her translation work, and since 2015 she has not spoken to her family back home. One of her brothers is a political prisoner and her entire family is under constant surveillance. “Because of my work my family is paying a heavy price, but they are willing to sacrifice for what I do.”

Other translators work behind the scenes. I spoke to two translators who anonymously work on testimonies.The targeting of translators working with journalists is a facet of China’s larger project to erode or even extinguish the Uyghur language, say scholars. The Uyghur language has been banned from schools, Uyghur language newspapers have closed, and Uyghur language books are largely missing in Xinjiang while intellectuals are being targeted for punishment.

“Many Uyghurs have found safe havens abroad, but they're still dealing with educational systems that do not have a space to accommodate the Uyghur language. Language is one means of intergenerational transmission of knowledge and ways of life,” said Elise Anderson, the Uyghur-speaking researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “People have been forced into a situation where no matter where they are in the world and no matter what they're doing, it's very difficult for them to pass on their native language to their children in the way they would most prefer.”

China’s repression of journalists: no more borders, no more constraints

China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic

Isobel Cockerell

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story appeared first on Coda Story.

She is now writing a memoir about her experiences, titled “You’re So Brave.” In October, she and her colleagues at ASPI published a new report detailing the complex network of repression in Xinjiang. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been researching surveillance in Xinjiang for years. Was there anything that shocked you while you were working on this project?

I think what's really striking to me is the extent of the Communist Party of China’s penetration into people's daily lives. We did a case study on one family, and their son was 19 when he was caught using a file-sharing app called Zapya, which people just use to share music. For this, he was sentenced to three years in prison — and not even by a real court. Somebody in the neighborhood committee informed him about his sentence, outside of legal procedures. Then this neighborhood committee would visit the family six times in a single week, supposedly to “calm their thoughts”  after the verdict. This is a very personalized system. 

You quoted the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil in the report. I thought his insight was so striking. He said, “People eventually felt as though they were part of the police, with a taste for watching and reporting on one another. They remained constantly ready to confront enemies and, at the same time, often felt that they themselves were the enemy.”

In a normal society, the police are the police and the people are the people. The uniform separates them. But, in this situation, the whole dynamic is different at a local level. In the same community, some civilians have policing and spying powers, and some civilians are just subject to all this unlawful treatment. They do not have any legal resources to just say no. All they can do is put their hands up and go to flag-raising ceremonies and show their allegiance to the party. I think it's a lot more than the word “surveillance” can describe. 

What word do you think should be used instead?

I think some people call it “tech authoritarianism.” That works. You know, we hear about surveillance in Xinjiang day in, day out. And I don't feel anything when I hear that word now. Working on the ASPI report, we got access to thousands of pages of police records that no one had closely studied before. When we put those together, we realized we had the vantage point of Xinjiang police officers, which is something most researchers can only dream of. When we looked at communities and neighborhoods from this point of view, it was shocking.

How do you stop yourself becoming numb to all of this stuff?

I very much turn off the emotional side of my brain when I work on these things, because if you keep getting emotional over statistics and case studies, it stops you from actually working objectively. But, sometimes, a year later or something, I often read back, put myself in the reader's shoes, with my whole range of emotions, and think, “This is outrageous.” 

What do the people around you think of the work you do?

Everyone who has a vague idea of what I do is afraid for me. Before I published this report, a lot of my friends were trying to persuade me not to use my real name. I decided I just couldn't do that. It’s not a normal thing for a journalist or researcher to pour your life into a project for six months, a year, and then pretend you have nothing to do with it. Professionally, that's extremely painful and, morally, it's the wrong thing to do, because you're giving in to whoever is trying to silence you. I can't let that happen, so I just published this report under my own name and I didn't give in to fear. As for what's going to happen now, we'll see. 

Can you tell us a bit more about why your friends are afraid for you?

Last year, I was the lead author of the report Uyghurs for Sale which dealt with the issue of Uyghur forced labor. The report named dozens of companies that were directly or indirectly connected to Uyghur forced labor, including Nike and Apple. It had a lot of reach and impact and was even featured on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” According to Chinese media, tens of billions of dollars evaporated from China’s textile industry as a result. In April 2021, the Chinese media referred to me as a traitor and “demon,” a drug addict and a sexual pervert, as well as an ungrateful daughter, who had also fabricated the issue of forced labor and caused Uyghur workers to lose their jobs. A lot was published about me, all of it extremely negative. There was also fake porn of me circulating. That national fame — or, rather, notoriety — in China was absolutely horrifying.

 What's your relationship with social media like now? 

Twitter is my preferred social media platform, but my relationship with it is kind of traumatizing. For a few months this year, when I was tweeting out my ideas and trying to engage with my followers, I frequently came across screenshots of a particular porn clip in my comments. It was supposed to be of me, but it’s not. After months of exposure, I became extremely familiar with the clip. It was engraved on my mind, against my will. On Twitter, I’ve also had Chinese diplomats posting articles about me that call me “bewitched.” 

Do you feel safe in Australia? 

You know, the thing is that I do not feel very safe right now. The first time I went to an Australian police station, I was told that someone threatening to rape me online was not the same as receiving such a threat in real life. That advice was maybe given in good faith back then, because it was more than two years ago, and I think our public institutions didn’t have enough understanding about Chinese clandestine operations.

Now, I receive some support from the Australian authorities, though not enough to make me feel fully protected. Strange things, including hacking attempts, happen frequently, but I try not to be paranoid. I’m wary of these investigations taking up too much of my time that can be used towards research or writing. It’s the same for many Xinjiang researchers. It’s pretty tough to work in such a high-risk environment with minimal security, training or resources.  

You talk in the report about how you were competing against the Chinese authorities’ efforts to scrub evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang from the internet. Did it feel like a race against time?

Yeah, absolutely. At the beginning of our work, when we were probably three months in, we read this article in The Washington Post, which said that there were systematic efforts by the Chinese government to delete records of the Xinjiang clampdown. And, then, we started to notice it ourselves. It was not just news articles or government notices that got deleted, but also things like web pages that researchers, including ourselves, had saved in archives like the Wayback Machine, but even some of those caches had gone. This meant that sources we were citing suddenly disappeared when we were mid-project. 

What was it like to discover that pieces of evidence you thought you'd saved had disappeared? 

Well, I mostly blamed myself and I’ll never make the same mistake again. But, sometimes, we forget that, for atrocities on the scale of what’s happening in Xinjiang, it’s impossible for everything to be carried out entirely in secrecy. It is impossible to lock up a million people and place tens of thousands or more in forced labor assignments without some kind of record of it. You need a lot of bureaucratic machinery to achieve the results that they have. It’s impossible to completely hide that. And the good news is that they cannot censor something that hasn't been reported. The censors are always stuck behind you. You have to write about something for the authorities to take note of it. If your research is new, you're always one step ahead. 

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The post ‘Surveillance’ doesn’t begin to describe what Beijing is doing to Uyghurs appeared first on Coda Story.

One week later, Moroccan authorities confirmed that Aishan had been arrested after a terrorism alert was issued by Beijing through Interpol. He now faces possible extradition to Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim communities have been held in concentration camps in a crackdown described as “genocide” by the U.S. State Department in July.

“He's in frustration, he's really afraid. If he's deported to China, it's a death sentence for him,” said Abduweli Ayup, a prominent Uyghur activist. Ayup, who is based in Norway, where he runs an organization dedicated to assisting Uyghurs in exile in Turkey.

Ayup, who worked with Aishan at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Istanbul in 2016, told me that he speaks with his friend every week and that he is helping his family financially. 

“It’s devastating. He has three kids in Turkey,” Ayup said. 

Aishan’s case highlights how Interpol, the largest law enforcement organization in the world, with 194 member countries, can be used by authoritarian leaders and human rights violators to track down critics across international borders.

A red notice is an international electronic wanted persons notice issued and circulated by Interpol. The alert functions as a request to other countries to find and provisionally arrest criminal suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions. Countries submit a red notice request to Interpol’s General Secretariat, which, after review, decides whether or not to release it to the police databases of member countries. Member countries can also issue a different alert called a diffusion, which notifies law enforcement authorities that they seek the arrest of a specific person. Diffusions are not published by Interpol but are circulated through the organization’s channels by the country itself.

While Interpol can serve as an effective vehicle for fighting crime, rights groups, lawyers and politicians have repeatedly voiced concerns that the issuing of red notices has been repeatedly abused by repressive governments — including China, Russia and Belarus — to target dissidents, journalists or political opponents seeking refuge in other countries.

“Democratic countries become aiders and abettors to oppressive regimes because of how Interpol works,” said Yuriy Nemets, a Washington D.C.-based attorney working on Interpol and extradition cases. He also runs the website Red Notice Abuse, which investigates how governments use Interpol’s mechanisms to persecute their opponents. “We talk about human rights and then don't really do much to stop being duped into helping these violators of human rights.”

Aishan’s wife Buzainuer Wubuli told me that she worries about her husband. She says that she can only talk to him once or twice a week for a couple minutes. 

“The Moroccan police didn’t say anything, so my husband doesn’t know anything,” Wubuli said. “‘Is there any news?’ He asks me every time he calls me.” 

Aishan is just the latest example of how red notices can be abused by authoritarian states. Last month, Makary Malakhouski, a Belarusian activist was detained near Warsaw after a red notice request from Minsk. Malakhouski was released the following day with the help of Polish politicians, lawyers and media. In July, Yevgeny Khasoyev, a Russian human rights campaigner was also detained in Poland after the Kremlin issued a red notice request. He has since been released. 

According to Interpol’s constitution, the organization, headquartered in Lyon, France, is forbidden from “intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character." However, criminal justice experts say that the system is vulnerable to abuse, including countries fabricating or misrepresenting charges against political dissidents.

“It's very rare that there's information in the red notice request that screams out abuse,” said Bruno Min, who leads a campaign for reform at Interpol at the U.K.-based NGO Fair Trials. “They're usually described as being, for example, terrorist offenses or fraud offenses.”

Min believes the problem rests with Interpol’s universal membership, which grants every country equal opportunity to send out thousands of alerts annually, some of which can be vaguely worded or prone to political abuse. “If Interpol were able to, for example, figure out that this is a Uyghur man, living in exile in a country outside China, given what we know about the human rights situation in Xinjiang, you would hope that Interpol would take that into consideration when deciding whether that red notice should be allowed,” Min said. “That's one thing that the case highlights — really questioning how good those mechanisms are.”

Attorneys, human rights activists and politicians have long pushed for reforms at Interpol, which currently has a backlog of over 66,000 active red notices. In 2019, U.S. politicians introduced the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act in the House of Representatives, which would aim to counter politically motivated Interpol abuse in the U.S., while encouraging reforms within Interpol. The bill has yet to pass the House. 

Amid growing criticism, Interpol has introduced a number of reforms in recent years. In 2015, it announced a refugee policy that would allow the removal of a red notice if an individual is classified as a refugee under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In 2016, it reformed guidelines for reviewing red notice requests by its General Secretariat, before they are circulated among other member countries. 

Other problems persist, however. Even though red notices can be removed, the risk of extradition persists and those under red notices face a broad range of difficulties, including being denied visas, bank services, jobs and political asylum.

“Interpol is an incredibly effective tool for governments not just to track down people, but to make their lives very difficult, even if they understand that the individual will never get extradited,” said Nemets. “Imagine, if it's a political opponent who cannot go to the bank, cannot travel, get a job, cannot obtain legal immigration status. How much more hellish can you make somebody's life?”

While Aishan’s red notice was canceled on August 25, based on as-yet-undisclosed new information received by Interpol, he remains in jail and could still be sent back to China after Beijing sent an official extradition request to Moroccan authorities to keep Aishan detained on the charges of inciting terrorism. 

Morocco ratified an extradition treaty with China in 2017. 

“If a previously issued red notice is found not to be in compliance with the Constitution and rules, it is deleted from INTERPOL’s databases,” said the organization’s General Secretariat in a written statement to Coda Story. “All member countries are also informed about the non-compliance of a notice or diffusion, and are asked to update their national databases accordingly, in addition to being reminded that INTERPOL’s channels may not be used for any communication regarding the case.”

On September 22, Morocco’s highest court of appeal set a new extradition hearing for October 27, adding at least another month to Aishan's detainment. 

His wife Buzainuer hopes the court will make a decision soon. She worries that her husband, who lives with long-term respiratory problems, might be vulnerable to harsh conditions in detention. “And now winter is coming," she said. "Every time the season changes or the weather gets cold, my husband coughs a lot, sometimes he can't sleep because of coughing. I'm worried that he can’t stand it and will become seriously ill.”

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Otarbay, 47, secured a visa from the British Embassy in Kazakhstan, and prepared to go to London in September. He told only a few close friends. But, before long, the phone calls started.

Two or three times a day, a man calling himself “Bakhyt” from Kazakhstan’s state security service began calling him, warning him not to go to attend. “If you go, it might affect your family, your future,” the man told him. “You should think of your family members in Kazakhstan, and in China.” He continually asked Otarbay if he would come and meet him in a coffee shop or a restaurant to “talk, face to face.” 

When the day came to fly to London, Otarbay went to Almaty airport. There was a very long pause as the border official looked at his documents, before refusing to let him board his flight. “I was shaking. I was so scared that they would arrest me,” Otarbay said. 

Along with two friends, who were also set to give evidence at the tribunal, he left the airport and took a taxi back to the city, as if going home. The three men then got into another car, turned their phones off, and drove at high speed across the border to neighboring Kyrgyzstan, completing the four-hour journey in three. From Bishkek, they managed to fly to Istanbul, Dubai, and finally, London. The relief was immense. But Otarbay, who has two children in Kazakhstan and two more in Xinjiang, felt anxious about leaving his family behind, and afraid of any punishment that might be meted out to them by the authorities once he told the truth about his experiences to the tribunal.  

In Altay, Xinjiang, where Otarbay’s parents and two of his children live, the Chinese authorities were visiting his parents at their house and threatening them about the consequences if their son gave evidence. His sister, who lives in Shanghai, called Otarbay and begged him not to testify. 

On the day of the tribunal, Otarbay told the panel of judges how he was starved, beaten, brainwashed and forced to work in Xinjiang’s network of camps and prisons. “Since there were cameras in other places, they would take us to a separate washroom where a camera wasn’t installed, and they would beat us with electric batons,” he said, via an interpreter.

The pressure exerted on Otarbay to stop him from testifying is part of a wide-ranging campaign by the Chinese and — by proxy — the Kazakh governments to undermine the Uyghur Tribunal in London, and denounce any international attempt to establish the truth about the crushing system of detention and surveillance inflicted on Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities. To date, as many as one million Uyghurs have been held in so-called “re-education” camps. 

The Uyghur Tribunal’s second hearing took place between 10 and 13 September, at Church House in Westminster, moments away from the Houses of Parliament. It was held to investigate allegations of genocide by the Chinese state against Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations in Xinjiang. The trial was formally requested by the World Uyghur Congress, but acts as an independent people’s tribunal, chaired by QC Sir Geoffrey Nice, who previously led the prosecution of the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. It has no powers of sanction or enforcement, but has, nonetheless, been targeted by the Chinese government throughout its first hearings in June and again this month. 

The People’s Republic of China did not respond to the tribunal’s requests to take part in the proceedings. Instead, it imposed sanctions against the tribunal and its organizers. 

During a press conference this week, Zheng Zeguang, China’s ambassador to the U.K. said: “The so-called witnesses the organizers have put together are merely actors who have been making up the so-called persecution that never happened at all.” 

Zheng added that he asked the U.K. government “to stop the organizers from continuing such malicious behaviour.” The U.K. Foreign Office did not respond to requests for comment about whether it had sought to reassure the ambassador over the tribunal. Zheng was told he was banned from visiting the U.K. parliament on September 15, while sanctions remain against several MPs and peers. 

Organizers of the tribunal have said the hearings were marked by condemnation from China and other covert attempts to undermine the proceedings. 

“China continued its attack to harass the witnesses who agreed to give evidence,” said Hamid Sabi, the tribunal’s counsel, during closing remarks on Monday. He described how, following pressure by the Chinese government, two witnesses withdrew their statements.

Organizers of the tribunal also told me that the host venue, Church House, had been put under pressure not to hold the event. “I think there was some effort to actually try to hire out another part of the building by people who were connected to the Chinese Embassy, so it gives you an idea of how deep this thing went,” said Luke de Pulford, an advisor for the tribunal and co-founder of rights group the Coalition for Genocide Response. 

Church House declined to comment on the matter. 

Tribunal staff also experienced a number of suspicious attempts to hack into their digital security. “We did receive a high number of fake bookings in the build-up to the hearings,” said Frankie Vetch, a project assistant at the tribunal. He described how the organizers received several suspicious emails and login attempts. This led them to take measures to safeguard the data of their witnesses, including ensuring that there was no public Wi-Fi connection within the venue, in order to prevent outsiders from hacking into the system. 

The Embassy of the People's Republic of China in London did not respond to requests for comment. 

Muetter Iliqud, a project researcher at the Uyghur Transitional Justice database, which registers disappeared and imprisoned Uyghurs in Xinjiang, presented her report at both the tribunal’s June and September sessions. In the days leading up to both hearings, her Telegram app notified her of numerous login attempts on her account. The same thing happened on Facebook and WhatsApp. Her colleagues also experienced similar activity. She showed me her phone and scrolled back through dozens of login alerts. Iliqud and her mother, both based in Norway, also received phone calls from unknown numbers in the lead up to the hearing. “I’m not just risking myself, but also everyone I’m working with, and I’m very worried about it,” she said. 

Another expert witness, Julie Millsap, director of public affairs and advocacy at the Campaign for Uyghurs, was harassed by anonymous accounts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, which posted old photographs of her pole dancing, along with out-of-focus, fake images of a woman kissing a man in a dance studio. “The messages said, “We’ll show this to your husband,” she said. He then received similar messages. During her testimony, trolls spammed the Uyghur Congress YouTube page with comments denouncing her. 

During the June hearings, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a press conference featuring family members disputing evidence given by witnesses. “They tried to undermine my testimony,” said Qelbinur Sidik, a witness who, in June, recounted being forcibly sterilized in Xinjiang. The day before her testimony, she watched a video of her husband on the official foreign ministry’s Twitter page, who described her story as “nonsense.” 

“They were clearly forced to denounce their own family members as liars,” said de Pulford. “The cruelty of this government knows no bounds. They'll stoop to any low in order to support their narrative, which is to deny there's any problem to make out like it's all being made up.” 

Erbakit Otarbay has now decided it’s too dangerous to return to his home country and will try to seek asylum in the U.K. “I feel very safe here,” he said. “Bakhyt” last called him on September 9, when Otarbay was already in London. Since then, he has changed his phone number, and the calls have stopped. 

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The post Hacks, threats and propaganda: how China tried to discredit the Uyghur Tribunal appeared first on Coda Story.

China’s westernmost region has suffered a years-long crackdown on the basic human rights of its mostly Muslim population. Over 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim groups have been held in concentration camps that are described by Beijing as vocational training centers. The U.S., the EU and dozens of international law experts around the world have described China’s actions as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”.

Despite the long-standing ties with non-native Kazakhs who have settled in the country in large numbers over the past three decades, Kazakhstan’s authorities have adopted a series of harsh measures to quell the protests.

Kunbolat came to Kazakhstan in 2002. He lives in Almaty, with his wife and three children and has worked a number of jobs, including a stint as a taxi driver. His younger brother Baimurat, however, remains in Xinjiang. 

Kunbolat has not heard from Baimurat since 2018. Over a year later, he found out his brother had been arrested by police in Ghulja City for alleged hate-speech in a 2012 social media post. He learned, by text messages from family in China, that his brother is serving a 10-year prison sentence. 

In January 2020, Kunbolat decided to stage a one-man demonstration outside the Chinese Consulate in Almaty. “I had been silent for a year-and-a-half,” he said. “But when I heard he’d been convicted, all I could do was protest.”

In February, Kunbolat went back to the consulate with other Kazakhs from Xinjiang. Kunbolat, members of his family and other protesters, have been regularly fined, threatened and arrested by Kazakh police. At the time of our interview, he had been detained seven times during protests. “During my detentions, policemen would say, ‘Baibolat, your actions are dangerous for you, your family, your children’s future,’” he said.

Kazakhstan has become a nerve center of activism against the oppression of Muslims in Xinjiang. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Kazakhstan declared sovereignty in 1990, it launched a program to bring back ethnic Kazakhs living in neighboring countries. Kazakhs not native to the country are referred to as “qanda,” meaning “compatriots.” About a million have returned from Uzbekistan, Mongolia and China in the past 30 years. Many have left behind friends and relatives in China and a significant number of them have become targets of Beijing’s ethno-religious crackdown.

The human rights group Nargis Atajurt, founded by a Kazakh, born in Xinjiang, named Serikzhan Bilash, has documented and shared thousands of testimonies of those interned in Xinjiang camps and their relatives since 2017. 

Kazakhstan’s government has repeatedly refused to allow Nargis Atajurt, which is financed by supporter donations, to register as an NGO, cutting it off from foreign funding. Bilash fled Kazakhstan, via Turkey, and relocated to the U.S. after repeated harassment, intimidation and an arrest and a 2019 ban from political activism, handed down by the authorities. 

Speaking by telephone from his new home in Texas, Bilash told me the human rights group has been trying to highlight the plight of protestors like Kunbolat and those detained in Xinjiang, only to be harassed online and have their efforts blocked by the Kazakh government. Bilash believes that Kazakhstan’s strong economic ties with China are behind the official silence on the treatment of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang. 

Bilash said the authorities’ actions ignored the rights of non-native Kazakhs, in favor of economic concerns. “They think human rights or this injustice and unfairness is less important than Chinese yuan. They love Chinese yuan more than their people, more than their nation,” he said. “They don’t want to solve the problem from the root. They want people to shut their mouths and eyes and keep silent and don’t poke China.”

Kazakhstan's foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the treatment of Kazakhs in China.

China is one of the biggest partners and investors in Kazakhstan’s energy-driven economy. Kazakhstan is also an integral part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a political, economic and security alliance between China, Russia and four Central Asian countries. The Chinese government organizes regular educational exchanges for Kazakh citizens. 

“This is how economic dominance turns into political influence,” said Temur Umarov, China and Central Asia expert at Carnegie Moscow. According to him, although Kazakhstan is trying to diversify its economy and is pursuing projects with other countries, its immediate future is tied to economic cooperation with China. Therefore, the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang poses serious problems for Sino-Kazakh relations. 

“What the government is doing is to try to find a way of resolving those kinds of situations that would not be unacceptable, either for China or for Kazakh society,” Umarov said. “For the government, it's a very sensitive topic and it's becoming more and more politicized.”

Niva Yau Tsz Yan is a researcher at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, who monitors China’s role in Central Asia. She believes that, in its pursuit of new economic strategies, Kazakhstan is trying to gain more bargaining power against China. “They're not China's puppet, at least not yet. There is a lot of resistance that they are very willing to do,” Yau explained.

However, she adds that “Kazakhstan will always have to deal with China in some capacity, Which is why in this Xinjiang problem, they are very reluctant to be so opposed to China.”

Since the protests began, participants have told numerous stories of Kazakh relatives being arrested in Xinjiang, simply for performing Muslim prayers or holding religious services.

Demonstrators outside the consulate believe that international pressure is essential to bring an end to the persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. “We think only the West can save us,” said Aqiqat Qalliola. Speaking by a video call, he told me that his father died in prison in 2020 in Dorbiljin County, Xinjiang, after being detained for about two years. He added that he hasn't been able to talk to his mother and brother in Xinjiang since last August. He has heard that they have also been detained as well.

“If America and Europe don’t take any action, China won't even bother to take us seriously,” he said. 

In May, the official Twitter account of the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan featured a post about the issue. “We condemn China's mass imprisonment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities. The U.S. Mission stands with those who are seeking information about their family members in #Xinjiang. People should not be detained for assembling and expressing themselves peacefully.”

The statement had no effect on Kazakh police, who have continued to disperse, fine and arrest demonstrators. Kunbolat has been arrested four times since.

In May, on their 100th consecutive day outside the consulate, he decided to film the protesters. “I knew I would be arrested if I carried a sign or a photograph and if I chanted,” he says. “Spreading information is not against the law. I decided to act in a way that the Kazakhstan government couldn't detain me.” 

He was taken to jail anyway. 

Still, Kunbolat has vowed to continue protesting until his brother is freed. “We've got a proverb, ‘Homeland begins with family,’” he said. “If I can’t save my brother today, how will I save my homeland tomorrow? That’s why I don’t want to stop.”

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The post Kazakhstan is arresting protesters seeking information about missing relatives in Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

Wang Leizhan — who spoke under a pseudonym via a video link, with his face covered and voice distorted — said he was one of up to 150,000 police recruits who were sent to the territory to “deal with” the Uyghurs. 

Wang spent several months in the region in 2018, tasked with investigating political and religious suspects, including Islamist groups. He recalled that on arrival he was immediately dispatched on arrest rounds. He added that during his short time in Xinjiang 300,000 Uyghurs were detained, including entire villages. 

He stated that he did not know about the existence of so-called “re-education” or “ideology transformation” camps until he arrived. Later, he learned of a special committee that ruled which Uyghurs would be forcibly detained. According to Wang, arrests were made because people “were showing their cultural identity, or they were somehow considered to have a different ideology” to that of the Communist Party of China.

Wang outlined how all Uyghur residents of Xinjiang had to provide DNA samples and that officers ordered schools and neighborhood committees to give up the names of people believed to have “problems with their thoughts.” 

After an individual’s name was provided to the authorities, Wang explained that “all their activities, including using the telephone and using the internet” were monitored, and that ID cards were used to flag Uyghurs trying to leave the region at train stations and airports. “If you’re a suspect, someone who has this tendency — that you’re against the government — that will be shown on the system,” he said via an interpreter. “Every movement is all completely under surveillance control.”

Among police ranks, Uyghurs were seen and described as “enemies of the people,” “terrorists” and “separatists,” and “were not considered as human beings,” he said.

The tribunal heard allegations that guards tortured prisoners, suffocating them with plastic bags, forcing water into their lungs and electrocuting them. 

“They were forced to sign confessions to admit that they are terrorists and also to denounce and provide a list of their relatives and friends as being terrorists,” Wang said in his witness statement. 

“I realized it was a kind of unwritten rule that the police have the power to torture prisoners,” he told the panel, explaining that while officers were required to video interrogations of Han Chinese inmates, there was no such obligation for Uyghur prisoners.

Officers themselves were sworn to silence. “Everything conducted was secretive. We were not supposed to disclose any information,” he said. “Many Uyghur police were arrested when they spoke about these facilities over the phone.” 

Wang left China in 2020 and is now living in Germany. “My dream was to serve my country and protect people,” he said. “Gradually, from my own experiences with how the system works, I   realized that I wasn't serving the people, I was serving the empire, to protect their power.”

On the tribunal’s final day, the panel heard eight statements from witnesses including Mehmut Tevekkül, 51, a Uyghur who was imprisoned and tortured in Xinjiang before being released in 2010, and Nursiman Abdureshid, 33, a Uyghur woman whose family is detained in Xinjiang’s prisons. Proceedings concluded with new research from Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies of the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He told the panel about his peer-reviewed analysis of birth rates in Xinjiang, looking at how China is “optimizing” its ethnic population structure in the region. Ethnic minority birth quotas have been strictly imposed in Xinjiang since 2017. China has been accused of enforcing birth control and sterilization procedures, separating couples and detaining those who exceed their quota.

Zenz set out how birth control policies could stop between 2.6 and 4.5 million births of minorities in southern Xinjiang alone over the next two decades. He went on to state his belief that a shrinking population “is easier to assimilate and indoctrinate.”

The tribunal has no state backing and any judgement it reaches will not be binding. Beijing has also roundly attacked the proceedings. At a press conference in May, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian described it as “a special machine producing lies.”

Chaired by human rights barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal was held at the request of the World Uyghur Congress — an international organization of exiled Uyghurs — amid increasing pressure for western countries to investigate whether China’s policies in Xinjiang amount to genocide. The panel and its witnesses will reconvene in September. 

Watch: the story of another police officer in Xinjiang, as recounted by his sister.

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The post Former Xinjiang police officer describes torture in Uyghur detention centers appeared first on Coda Story.

Beijing recently ratified an extradition treaty with Turkey. Human rights groups say that the document could have devastating consequences for members of the country’s 50,000-strong Uyghur community. 

While the treaty has not yet been signed off by the Turkish government, critics worry it could lead to the forced return of Uyghurs to China. “If adopted by Turkey, the extradition treaty is likely to become another instrument of persecution for China, aiding the Chinese government in its coordinated efforts to forcibly return Uyghurs living abroad,” the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress said in a statement made in late December.

Originally promised in December, the delivery of the CoronaVac vaccine to Turkish authorities was delayed by two weeks, reportedly owing to customs issues. 

However, there has been speculation that China was withholding it to force the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to finalize the agreement. Now, as the first shipments are arriving, mistrust — both in the vaccine and Turkey’s ability to keep Uyghurs safe — is increasing. 

Turkey’s deal with Beijing promises the purchase of 50 million doses of CoronaVac, with Turkish authorities preparing to roll out the shot by Friday. Chinese officials have described the agreement as a sign of closer bilateral ties between the two countries.

According to reports, Turkish opposition politician Lutfu Turkkan of the secular centrist Iyi Party, has accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of allowing China to use coronavirus immunization as a bargaining tool. “They will return Uyghur Turks to China to get the vaccine,” he said.   

Erdogan, leader of Turkey’s conservative Islamist AK Parti, has performed a diplomatic balancing act in his dealings with China, a key economic partner, over the Uyghur issue. Turkey continues to give sanctuary to Uyghurs fleeing persecution in Xinjiang, but has also been accused of cooperating in their deportation to China via third countries. Ankara has also remained relatively tight-lipped over Xinjiang’s arbitrary detention system, in which an estimated one million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim groups are held.

“Turkey buying the vaccine from China means it will now be really hard for Turkey to stand up for the Uyghurs,” said Nursiman Abdureshid, 32, a Uyghur activist who came to Istanbul as a student in 2015. 

The outlook for exiled Uyghurs certainly appears bleak. In December, China’s state-backed Global Times reported that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had pledged that Turkish authorities will not allow anyone in the country to “undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” 

"China has worked for years to strong-arm governments into returning Uyghurs from abroad, often using economic or other incentives to force their partners to capitulate,” explained Peter Irwin of the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project.

Confidence in CoronaVac is already low in Turkey, with just 11% of citizens saying they would take it. Jevlan Shirmehmet, a 29-year-old Uyghur activist based in Istanbul, explained his Turkish friends have asked him whether they should trust the vaccine. “Our answer is always the same: we don’t believe China,” he said.

In recent weeks, Uyghur activists have kept a daily vigil outside the Chinese consulate in Istanbul, protesting against Beijing’s influence over Turkey and demanding details of missing family members in Xinjiang. 

Abdureshid said the resolve of the wider community is being tested by these new developments. “When people saw that Turkey is relying on China to get through the pandemic, because they need the vaccine, they kind of lost hope.”

The post Uyghurs in Turkey fear China is leveraging its Covid-19 vaccine to have them deported to Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

Published by Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute, the report describes how China’s official line on the humanitarian crisis has been promoted to TikTok users around the world. Of the top 20 videos on TikTok’s Xinjiang hashtag, only one is critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

The report, which also looked at how the video-sharing platform’s LGBTQ hashtags in the Middle East and Russia are being shadow banned, studied how the app treated the program of oppression, surveillance and control currently underway in China’s northwest region.  It described TikTok as “a powerful political actor with a global reach,” with the ability to covertly control flows of information on its platform. 

While the subject of Xinjiang and China’s oppression of Muslim minorities is widely discussed across other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the Xinjiang hashtag on TikTok, owned by tech giant Bytedance, is noticeably free of criticism. A scroll through TikTok’s #Xinjiang videos shows users glossy propaganda videos and happy vlogs made by state media-linked accounts, Chinese influencers and production companies, while content that’s critical of the regime is relegated to the bottom of the feed. 

When researchers at the Australian institute analyzed all 444 videos on the Xinjiang hashtag, they found that only 5.6% of videos were critical of the crackdown on the Uyghurs. Almost half of the top 100 videos were either propaganda, presenting Xinjiang in a highly idealized light, or outwardly pro-CCP. 

“Do not rely on the view of the world that TikTok provides you, because it is very distorted,” said Fergus Ryan, an analyst at ASPI and the report’s lead researcher. “The CCP has enormous leverage over this company, and their temptation to then use that leverage to subtly tweak the algorithms is going to be irresistible.”

Bytedance is subject to China’s security, intelligence, counter-espionage and cyber security laws. “Bytedance itself works hand in hand with public security bureaus in China to produce and disseminate propaganda,” said Ryan, describing how ASPI’s research showed TikTok’s feeds being flooded with content from its Bytedance-owned, firewalled-off Chinese counterpart, Douyin. TikTok denied cross-posting content from Douyin, but said that its users may be doing so.

Last year, TikTok was criticized for censoring discussions of Uyghur oppression after the company banned an Afghan-American political activist who posted a video discussing Xinjiang. 

“TikTok remains committed to creating a fun, authentic, and safe place for our users,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an emailed statement. TikTok did not answer questions about being used as a platform for Chinese state propaganda. 

As reporting from Coda Story pointed out in August, the Xinjiang hashtag feed is flooded with videos, hailing Xinjiang as a tourist destination, and featuring happy Uyghurs living an idyllic rural lifestyle. 

Following up on Coda’s coverage, the ASPI report identified several characters within the Xinjiang hashtag. One particularly prominent user, Jessica Zang, has more than 16,000 TikTok fans and is an employee of state owned China Global Television Network and a member of China’s ruling Community Party (CCP). “Have no idea that my video were on top under #Xinjiang… that’s new to me,” said Zang in a Facebook message, adding that she wanted to use her English skills to post on the international version of the app. “I just wanted to share the beauty and fun things in China.” Her videos proliferate on the #Xinjiang hashtag, showing snippets from a recent trip to the region during the pandemic. 

Another account on the hashtag is @guanvideo, a Chinese production company that also produces videos for Beijing-owned Global Times.

The Xinjiang hashtag also features videos from Uyghurs within China, such as a young woman called @aygul_uyghur, whose account describes her as “just a simple girl from Xinjiang.” Her most popular video has racked up more than 100,000 views. In the past, Uyghurs living in exile have pointed to social media accounts like these as clearly propaganda-oriented, for the simple fact that they are allowed to post to western audiences. 

For many Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang, using a virtual private network in Xinjiang (a necessity to post on TikTok) is a shortcut to arrest and detainment, though there appear to be exceptions for users who use the video-sharing platform to promote the Chinese party line. 

“The result, even for TikTok users perusing the topic, is a depiction of Xinjiang that glosses over the human rights tragedy unfolding there and instead provides a more politically convenient version for the CCP,” the report said.

President Trump has given Bytedance a deadline of September 20 to sell its U.S. TikTok business and destroy all its copies of U.S. user data, or be banned in the U.S. In India, the app – which dominated the social media space in the country – was banned in June as part of an ongoing standoff between Delhi and Beijing, losing Bytedance 120 million monthly users.

An analysis by ASPI of Bytedance’s career page suggests that the company is continuing to hire workers in China to monitor international TikTok content. 

“Even if hypothetically they were able to completely sever the content moderation from China, that doesn't get to the core problem: What is happening in the algorithm,” said Ryan. “The algorithm is a total black box.”

The post Welcome to TikTok’s sanitized version of Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

Investor Alliance of Human Rights, a non-profit initiative focusing on responsible business conduct, published a report where it urged investors to assess companies’ human rights impact on minorities in Xinjiang. 

Last week, The Walt Disney Company came under fire from human rights activists who called for a boycott of the studio’s latest release, “Mulan”, after it emerged that the $200 million live-action film, which was partly shot in Xinjiang, ends with thanks to several government institutions, including the Xinjiang government's publicity department. 

Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong was among those who promoted the hashtags #BoycottMulan and #BanMulan on Twitter.

In Xinjiang, authorities are believed to have detained as many as one million Uyghurs and members of other minority groups in internment camps, officially described as vocational education and training centers. In June, Coda Story analyzed videos on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, which showed Uyghurs being forcibly transported in large numbers to factories around the country as part of what Beijing describes as a “poverty alleviation” initiative. 

Louisa Greve, director of global advocacy at Uyghur Human Rights Project, said investors should pressure Disney to make a bold move to salvage its reputation. “Investors should press Disney to make reparations for its complicity. Tens of thousands of separated Uyghur families in the diaspora are stranded in nearby countries without legal status to work, to access medical cases, to enroll their children to attend school. Thousands are being made stateless as their Chinese passports expire, while China refuses to renew their passports unless they return to China, where they would face horrific human rights abuses.”

In the wake of the overseas controversy, Chinese state publication Global Times, citing analysts, described the calls to boycott “Mulan” as “narrow-minded attacks on Xinjiang.” According to Reuters, major media companies in China have received a notice from Cyberspace Administration of China to not cover the movie.

"Disney's Mulan disaster will surely be a universal case study for reputational-risk experts for years to come,” added Greve. “Every brand must already be scrambling to be sure they are not the next Disney.”

Photo by Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The post Disney faces backlash after thanking Xinjiang authorities in ‘Mulan’ credits appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, a nonprofit that encourages responsible business practices, published a report advising investors to make sure they have no companies in their portfolios with links to Xinjiang. As many as a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities are thought to be held in detention camps in the region, and a large-scale forced labor program is also being enforced. 

“Investors will need to determine whether identified potential or actual harms can be ceased, prevented, or mitigated. Otherwise, steps need to be taken to end business relationships responsibly,” said the Investor Alliance in a recent statement. 

During the pandemic, China has used forced labor to manufacture personal protective equipment, shipping Uyghur workers in “batches” of hundreds to factories across Xinjiang and eastern China. 

In June, a Coda Story investigation examined dozens of videos emerging on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, showing large numbers of Uyghurs being transported as part of a labor scheme that Beijing refers to as a “poverty alleviation” initiative. 

The investigation followed a March report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, titled Uyghurs for Sale, which found that the initiative amounted to forced labor and formed an extension of Xinjiang’s detention program. The ASPI report established links between the labor programs and more than 80 international brands.

In July, a group of 190 human rights organizations around the world formed the Coalition to End Uyghur Forced Labor, calling upon more than 30 companies, including Adidas, Ikea and Ralph Lauren, to cut all business ties with Xinjiang and the labor transfer program. 

“Now is the time for real action from brands, governments and international bodies – not empty declarations,” said Jasmine O’Connor, CEO of Anti-Slavery International, in a statement. 

The textile industry is being called upon to examine supply chains for any links with Xinjiang, which produces more than a fifth of the world’s cotton. The Better Cotton Initiative, a nonprofit promoting better farming practices, represents more than 1,800 members, including major brands such as H&M, Levi Strauss & Co and Gap. Operating in 21 countries, it accounts for 22% of global cotton production. Following the ASPI report examining forced labor practices in Xinjiang, the body withdrew its assurances for cotton sourced from the region.  

“Companies are now finally on the record saying they have zero tolerance for forced labor as their response to the Uyghur crisis, but are still saying how difficult it is to disentangle their supply chains from the horrors in the Uyghur region,” said Louisa Greve, director of global advocacy for the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. 

She said that businesses have a responsibility to examine all aspects of their supply chains for links to Xinjiang, right down to raw materials.

“All have to be off limits, if you care at all about freedom and your own ethical supplier codes, and your core identity as a brand.”

Photo by Chien-min Chung/Getty Images, Turpan, Xinjiang, 2005

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Grey, 62, who visited Xinjiang as a tourist, said he couldn’t find any traces of the sprawling concentration camps he had read about in the press. “I never saw one,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It’s a huge place, but we did cycle down some very, very long stretches of open road.”

Grey, who is a former London Metropolitan police officer, admitted that he found Xinjiang’s surveillance network and continual police checks oppressive. “It was a pain in the butt,” he said. “But at no stage were they ever abusive.”

I asked him if he would willingly live under a draconian regime of surveillance and arbitrary detention like the one that operates in Xinjiang, controlling the region’s Muslim population under the guise of combating terrorism.

“Would I like it? Course not. I wouldn't like it at all,” he said. “But would I move? Probably not. If they said to me, ‘You can't use a VPN and you can't use your Twitter account,’ and things like that, then I might consider it. Because my lifeline to the outside world is through the internet.”

Despite Grey’s acknowledgement of heavy surveillance in Xinjiang, he has devoted the past five months denying the existence of detention camps in the region, citing his bike ride as evidence. 

In March, he was in quarantine after returning home from a trip to Thailand. It was six months on from his visit to Xinijiang. “I was bored silly, so I opened up my Twitter account and thought, ‘I know what I'll do. One of the things I can do is I can start tweeting about the bike ride.’”

Grey began with two followers and now has more than 4,000. Many of them are Chinese users, living both within the country and abroad. His Twitter page is a relentless rehashing of his camp-free cycling tour. “We didn't see any concentration camps, but the days and nights in Xinjiang require a lot of concentration to get through,” he quipped in one July 15 post. 

Grey has, inevitably, attracted the attention of Chinese media. On the day we spoke, he was scheduled to speak with the state TV channel CGTN directly after. 

“Their propaganda department absolutely sucks. And I think – maybe I'm being used, but I'm being used to deliver a message that I believe in,” he said. “They’re not telling me what to say.”

Other Beijing-based news outlets have already featured interviews with Grey: “Australian offers candid observation of Xinjiang distinct from Western characterizations,” ran one headline on the website of the Global Times newspaper in June. 

Though Grey’s individual reach is modest, he is part of a network of users that all share a similar message. He calls them his “comrades in arms.” 

Carl Zha, a Chinese-American Twitter user with 43,000 followers, spends his mornings surfing in the turquoise waters of Bali, Indonesia, before returning to his fiancee, three puppies, and his job as an influencer posting and broadcasting about China. Zha, 43, was born in China a month after Mao Zedong’s death and left for the U.S when he was 13. Over the past two years, he has become known for his content about Xinjiang. His posts are devoted to attacking Western reports of human rights abuses in the region and painting coverage of Uyghur oppression as an influence operation designed to incite tension between the U.S. and China. 

“The US government is pushing Cold War propaganda to get us involved in another war,” he told me in a Skype interview. Despite the content of his Twitter account, he said he doesn’t deny that China has inflicted human rights abuses on its Uyghur population.

“I feel very conflicted about what the Chinese government is doing, because it is very heavy-handed, it is a massive social engineering project,” he said. I asked him whether he had spoken to any Uyghurs about the issue. He said that he has been a member of a WeChat group of Uyghur and Han people from Xinjiang in 2015. “It’s pretty much defunct now,” he said, explaining that it went quiet when Xinjiang authorities cracked down on communication two years later. 

Since then, despite extensively posting about Xinjiang, Zha told me he had not had a conversation with any other Uyghurs, either living in Xinjiang or abroad. “Nobody has reached out to me,” he said. “The Uyghurs living in exile – there are actually plenty of outlets for them right now. I mean there's many – all the news channels, all the mainstream news. I'm a small shop. I'm a one-person channel.”

Zha’s podcast about China, titled “Silk and Steel,” hosts mostly like-minded guests, including Jerry Grey. Zha said he wasn’t opposed to speaking with Uyghurs and told me that he had featured a Hong Kong protester on the show. 

“I'm not just a shitposter that posts a lot – my podcast is my income stream. That’s what’s supporting me to live in Bali,” he said. 

Zha and Grey are part of a group of bloggers, YouTubers and social media personalities – backed by legions of automated accounts – who seek to play down Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang. They see reports of Uyghur human rights abuses as attempts to attack Beijing, and believe that Western coverage of the Xinjiang crisis forms part of a state-funded offensive against China. 

Though the accounts of Zha and Grey are run by real people, there are hundreds of accounts within their network which appear to be inauthentic. These coordinated accounts, seen by Coda Story, all spout Chinese propaganda content claiming Xinjiang is happy and thriving. Some claim to be run by Uyghurs. If they were authentic Xinjiang Twitter accounts, their users would require a VPN to access them – a practice that can mean instant arrest in the region. 

Over on TikTok, the top-ranking videos on the “Xinjiang” hashtag bring up beautiful images of the region, interlaced with videos claiming the camps in Xinjiang are a conspiracy theory. A top result comes from an American user called @vagdentata. “I keep seeing people post about the Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, claiming there are concentration camps there – that is not true, it’s fabricated by the CIA.” On Friday, President Trump banned dealings with Chinese tech giants TikTok and WeChat and announced he would bar both apps from operating in the U.S, unless they were sold to a U.S. buyer within 45 days. 

Mamutjan Abdurehim, 42, is a Uyghur father living alone in Sydney. He has spent a great deal of time on social media, trying to find out more about the situation in Xinjiang. He is troubled by the presence of the denialists he encounters on the internet.

“That's the most painful part of being online,” he said. “Seeing somebody denying — openly denying — what's going on there and trying to portray activists as agents of the West or agents of Western propaganda. That's very, very painful.” 

Abdurehim believes his wife, Muherrem Ablet, is currently imprisoned in Xinjiang. She and their two children were separated from him after they had to return to China to replace her passport. In April 2017, Abdurehim’s wife was rounded up and sent to a camp. The family was told she would be entering a brief period of “study.” Except for a short message when she was allowed out on day release in late May 2017, Abdurehim has not heard from his wife since.

Abdurehim said he is often kept awake at night after reading conspiracy theories denying Uyghur oppression. “I get tempted to respond to them and fight them over Twitter,” he said. “But I calm myself down. No, no, no, no need for that.”

Alongside Abdurehim, there are thousands of Uyghurs around the world who have testified about their missing family members in Xinjiang. Since 2016, the region has been subjected to a brutal crackdown, corralling Uyghurs into a sprawling network of detention centers, camps and prisons.  

Researchers and journalists have unearthed overwhelming evidence of Xinjiang’s surveillance and detention programs. As a result, they are often targeted by bots, trolls, and pro-Beijing influencers. Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who published a report exposing Xinjiang’s forced labor system in March, is one of them. 

“There have been a lot of attacks against me and my family on the internet,” she said, explaining that her critics are not interested in seeing evidence of oppression in Xinjiang. 

“They have decided that if we publish material that appears to be criticizing the Chinese government, then we must have been paid by a foreign government; we must have secret agendas. But, no matter how strong the research is, no matter how much evidence we have, they’re not going to be persuaded otherwise.” 

One Twitter account that frequently targets Xu is run under the name Xi Fan. Its owner says she is a young Chinese woman living in Victoria, Australia, who grew up in Xinjiang. Her tweets are typical of pro-Beijing channels: TikTok videos showing China’s tourist attractions, mixed with political content often justifying the Chinese government’s crackdowns on Tibetans, Hong Kongers, the Falun Gong religious movement and Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities. 

On the day that the new Hong Kong security law was passed, giving Beijing sweeping powers to clamp down on dissent, she tweeted: “I've been looking forward to this day for a long time. I was in the street when I heard the good news, and jumped for joy. Hong Kong is finally stable.” 

When I contacted Xi for an interview, she would only answer my questions publicly on the platform. Our back and forth lasted a whole day. “When I joined Twitter, I saw articles here about Xinjiang, I was shocked and angry,” she said. “These articles are complete distortions of reporting, which is why I am speaking out.”

I asked her what her response was to the thousands of Uyghurs around the world who have spoken out about abuses in Xinjiang. “They are liars. They are trying to subvert China, incite ethnic hatred and split China. Paid by CIA, to attack China. And u stupid idiot believe that,” she said. She added: “U believe what u want to believe. And Uyghur are still living a stable and happy life in China.” Soon after, she stopped responding to my questions. 

Illustration by Sofiya Voznaya

The post Pro-Beijing influencers and their rose-tinted view of life in Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

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Chinese authorities are reporting a new Covid-19 outbreak in the capital of the far northwestern Xinjiang region. The province entered “wartime mode” after its health commission reported 25 cases in Urumqi and a further case in the city of Kashgar. Authorities immediately locked down communities in the capital, banning public gatherings and implementing mass screenings. Xinjiang, home to Uyghurs and other Chinese Muslim minorities, has so far seen low coronavirus numbers. Until last week, it had reported just 76 cases and six deaths. Uyghurs living abroad worried that the figures were in fact much higher. Read our investigation into how Uyghurs have been transported across China during the pandemic to work in forced labor programs.

Vaccine disinformation is on the rise in Serbia, where Covid-19 case numbers continue to grow after the lifting of a nationwide lockdown in May. President Aleksandar Vucic says that his government is in talks with an unnamed country about acquiring a “completed” vaccine by the end of the year. He refused to identify the nation to journalists, but none of the 23 vaccines currently in clinical trials are close to that stage, according to the World Health Organization. Adding to the confusion, Serbian media outlets are reporting that Russia has completed clinical trials of a coronavirus vaccine, with mass production expected to start in August. However, the vaccine in question — developed by the Russian Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow — has only been safely tested on 38 volunteers, just passing the first very first stage of clinical trials.

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FOLLOW UP:  GLOBAL PEDOPHILIA MYTHS 

In May, we wrote about a strange Facebook post by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in which he accused the WHO of encouraging children to masturbate — a myth that originated on Russian fake news sites. Last week, we reported that it had resurfaced in Mexico.

And now: In Brazil, Bolsonaro continues to harp on this theme, tweeting without evidence last week that “the left is looking for ways to decriminalize pedophilia, transforming it into a mere disease or sexual option.” An analysis from the investigative news site Agencia Publica explains why this subject is a favorite of Bolsonaro: it tracks well with the evangelical right, a central component of his political base. The claim that the left is increasingly supportive of pedophilia was recently spread widely by far-right Christian sites, such as Gospel Prime, which was cited in a recent Brazilian congressional inquiry into fake news.

Historical context: The Brazilian right was obsessed with pedophilia long before Bolsonaro’s election. The former astrologer and far-right philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, a prominent supporter and guru of the president, published a blog post in 2002 titled “One Hundred Years of Pedophilia.” The piece described the reintroduction of the practice into modern life by Freud, and accused feminism, birth control and gay rights of helping to normalize it. The essay also defended the Catholic Church against accusations of child abuse that were then just beginning to emerge.

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SPOTLIGHT: TURMENISTAN ᛫ MARIAM KIPAROIDZE

Denial, secrecy and disinformation — these three words perfectly describe Turkmenistan’s approach to the coronavirus crisis. 

Across the country, mosques are closed, transportation is restricted and people are forced to wear masks. State-controlled television is broadcasting music videos that explain (link in Russian) how to wear them. But officially Covid-19 still doesn’t exist. According to the government, the reason for wearing face masks is an increase of dust particles in the air. 

“People are dying because of Covid-19, but our country doesn’t say it officially,” said Hanum Rasulova, an Turkey-based activist for the SES Turkmenia Unite movement.

Last month Rasulova, along with other Turkmen nationals living in Istanbul, began to stage street protests against their government’s pandemic response. She told me that the crisis has been compounded by the worsening economic situation and that people have reached out to her, saying, “Please help us because we are dying, we have nothing to eat, nothing to drink. We don't have money.” 

Verifying these reports is incredibly difficult. Turkmenistan is one of the most isolated places on the planet. Its government, headed by the dictator and former dentist Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, has no tolerance for dissent. 

For months after the pandemic began, Berdymukhammedov effectively banned any mention of the coronavirus and attempts to enter the country by the WHO were delayed. The organization finally negotiated access and sent a group of experts on July 6. 

Ten days later, they issued a largely positive report, recommending enhanced testing and monitoring, but saying that the Turkmen health system was prepared to deal with the pandemic. 

But the few inside the country who dare to speak out say that a growing number of people are displaying Covid-19 symptoms. 

Some also allege that when the WHO entered Turkmenistan, hospitals stopped admitting patients reporting symptoms of pneumonia. 

“It’s really a situation where hospitals and medical staff are not admitting people,” said said Chemen Ore, a Turkmen activist in Istanbul. They were, he said, “trying to isolate them from the WHO team.” 

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It takes a village, or in our case a team to put this newsletter together. Coda Story’s Katia Patin, Gautama Mehta and Isobel Cockerell all contributed to this one. 

Thanks for reading. And see you on Friday,
Natalia 

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The post Infodemic: a new outbreak in Xinjiang, pedophilia myths in Brazil and trouble in Turkmenistan appeared first on Coda Story.

The Uyghurs are a largely Muslim Turkic ethnic group, with their own language and culture. Roughly 11 million are in China, and 1.5 million more live around the world. For centuries, Uyghurs have lived in a vast region of deserts, mountains and lakes in the far northwest of China, known today as Xinjiang. For thousands of years, leaders, tribes and China's imperial dynasties have fought for control of this resource-rich territory. Around the 10th century, Arab influence arrived in the region and Islam became a part of Uyghur life. 

During the Qing dynasty, the region was brought once again under Chinese control. In the late 19th century it was given its current name, Xinjiang, which means “new frontier” in Mandarin. 

Today, Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are subject to a comprehensive, targeted campaign of surveillance and control. According to leading researchers and human rights groups, as many as 1.5 million have been placed in concentration camps. This ongoing program of repression follows decades of tension between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government. So, how did we get here?

1949: Declaration of the People’s Republic of China

As civil war raged in China in the 1940s, Xinjiang experienced a brief period of independence and became known as East Turkestan. On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China and brought Xinjiang under its control. 

In 1954, the People’s Republic designated the Uyghurs as one of China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities. The classification of these groups went hand-in-hand with the state’s aim of fostering “a great family founded in principle on ethnic equality” and bringing minorities together under the common vision of a communist China. 

In 1955, the People’s Republic established the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In practice, the Uyghurs were not given any significant political power. This focus on ethnic identity and autonomy was seen as a way of quelling independence movements while maintaining Beijing’s power over China’s regions.

1966: The Cultural Revolution arrives in Xinjiang 

In 1966, an ageing Mao was keen to quash his opponents once and for all. He wanted to reinvigorate the Communist revolution and purge China of any lingering remnants of capitalism and traditional life. To achieve this, he called on the Communist Red Guards to attack the “four olds” – old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs.

 In Xinjiang, Uyghur life was upended. Mosques were destroyed or converted into Communist Party buildings. Religious texts and Uyghur-language books were deemed anti-revolutionary, and were confiscated and burned. During this period, Mao ordered millions of China’s educated, urban youth to the countryside to do hard labor on the land. Many were sent to rural Xinjiang. Mao called the program “re-education” – a phrase that would come to haunt the region more than 50 years later. 

Developing Xinjiang

Xinjiang is rich in natural resources like coal and gas, and shares borders with eight countries. From 1950 on, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to develop Xinjiang’s economy and infrastructure, and shore up support for the People’s Republic of China along its outer borders. The state began to encourage Han Chinese people – China’s dominant ethnic group – to migrate to Xinjiang. They were often lured with the promise of employment, housing and a better life.

Skilled Han migrants were strategically relocated and placed in jobs to develop the region’s oil, gas and cotton industries, and frequently given priority over Uyghurs and other local minorities. Over time, inequality and segregation between Han Chinese and Uyghurs began to grow. Uyghurs earned less and had a lower standard of living than their Han counterparts, a trend which continues to this day. 

Reform and opening

After Mao’s death in 1976, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, led a policy of “reform and opening” that gave Uyghurs space to explore their cultural history and revive their traditions and religion.

By the early 1990s, Xinjiang had witnessed a resurgence of Islamic devotion and ideology, and the Uyghurs had built thousands of new mosques. 

Political activism also increased in the region, and protests became more common, with some protesters calling for Uyghur independence, prompting authorities to once more tighten control of the region and clamp down on religious expression. During this period, several riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police and open resistance to the Communist Party became more common.

Demonstrations, civil unrest, bombings and other attacks increased during the 90s, with violence reported on both sides. Amnesty International described the 1997 protests in the city of Gulja, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting the exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. “I have never seen such viciousness in my life." “Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.” The Chinese government ascribed any violence in Xinjiang during that time to “inhuman, antisocial and barbaric acts,” and made it clear that the state saw Uyghur separatism and Islamic ideology as at the root of the unrest.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, China began a renewed crackdown on the Uyghurs, warning its people that Uyghur separatism and religious extremism posed a terrorist threat.

2009: Riots in Urumqi

In late June 2009, a fight broke out between Uyghur and Han workers at a toy factory in the city of Shaoguan in Guangdong Province, southeast China. Two Uyghurs were killed and 120 people, mostly Uyghurs, were injured. The news was met with shock by Uyghurs thousands of miles away in Xinjiang. On July 5, a group of Uyghur students took to the streets of Urumqi, the region’s capital, to protest.

Clashes between the protesters, police and Urumqi’s Han residents quickly escalated. Protesters threw rocks and burned cars; troops and paramilitary police responded with bullets. Around 200 people were killed – according to the authorities, most were Han. In the following days, armed mobs of Han vigilantes ran through the city, seeking revenge on the Uyghurs. During the protests, the authorities cut off the internet in Urumqi. It was one of the first times in history that a government implemented this measure, now a favored tactic of authoritarian regimes across the world.

2012: The ascent of Xi Jinping

The 2009 riots marked a turning point for government policy in Xinjiang. In 2012, Xi Jinping was named leader of the Chinese Communist Party. During the first 18 months of his presidency, several high-profile outrages – including a suicide car attack in Tiananmen Square, a train station stabbing in southern China and the bombing of a market in Urumqi – were attributed to Uyghur militants. Xi made his first and only trip to Xinjiang in 2014. On the last day of his visit, two Uyghur militants attacked passengers at a station in Urumqi with knives and explosives. Three people were killed in the suicide attack, including the two assailants, and dozens injured. Xi launched what he referred to as a “People’s War on Terror” in 2014. For ordinary Uyghurs in Xinjiang, life began to change dramatically. 

By 2015, the state began to roll out a massive surveillance network across the region, placing extensive restrictions on freedom of expression and religion in the name of counter-terrorism. Police checkpoints were introduced everywhere and Xinjiang residents were required to submit biometric information including iris scans, blood samples, DNA and voice samples and facial scans to the authorities. Millions of cameras and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology were deployed to track residents’ every move.

Xinjiang became a testing ground for the latest developments in surveillance technology. It was also given a new regional boss: Chen Quanguo, whose previous job had been to enforce a security crackdown in Tibet. Shortly after his appointment in August 2016, Chen issued an order to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

2017 - 2020: Camps

As the crackdown intensified in Xinjiang, authorities arrested Uyghurs for any behaviour deemed potentially “extremist” –  making trips or phone calls abroad, wearing a hijab, growing a long beard, or keeping Islamic books in the house. When the authorities began to confiscate passports for “safekeeping” in some parts of Xinjiang, it became nearly impossible for many Uyghurs to leave China. Police stations sprang up every few hundred yards in Xinjiang’s cities.

Most troublesome of all, vast, mysterious facilities were built in the region’s deserts. Human rights organizations, journalists and activists raised the alarm: they appeared to be camps. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs began to disappear into them. Initially, the Chinese authorities denied the existence of the camps. In August 2018, a report put together by the UN estimated that a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang had been imprisoned within them. 

After the UN report, the Communist Party referred to the camps as “vocational training centers” intended to “re-educate” Xinjiang’s Muslim population. That word brought back grim memories of the Cultural Revolution. The camps are guarded with great secrecy, though the state has allowed propaganda images to circulate of Uyghurs in classrooms, being cleansed of their religious ideology, taking lessons in communist history and Mandarin.

Uyghurs were also held in prisons and detention centers, for crimes such as having WhatsApp (a banned app in China) on their phone or messaging people abroad. Uyghurs who have been released from these centers described cramped, inhumane conditions and constant surveillance. In the fall of 2019, drone footage emerged of hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men, being marched off a train in Xinjiang. All had their heads shaved; all appeared to be Uyghur or other minority prisoners.

2020: Rebranding Xinjiang

Today, Xinjiang is promoted heavily by the Chinese state as a tourist destination. Images coming out of the region are tightly controlled, and video footage often shows Uyghurs happily dancing for visitors. Last summer, the Chinese government claimed “most people” had been released from Xinjiang’s camps and returned to society. However, according to human rights groups, as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs remain in detention, while arrests, detentions and prison sentences have surged in Xinjiang.

Uyghurs outside China who have spoken to Coda Story say they are still waiting for their relatives to be released from the camps. A leaked cache of documents published in November 2019 showed how the camps – which China maintains are for education and training – are run like high-security prisons. In March 2020, a report was published that showed Uyghurs were being transferred to factories used by global brands, including Nike and Apple, and made to work “under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor.”

Illustrations for this article were done by "Lutpulla," a Uyghur artist who wished to remain anonymous. The map is by Sofiya Voznaya.

The post China’s oppression of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs: a visual history appeared first on Coda Story.

In the months that have passed, TikTok has come under fire for shutting down a video of a young woman who discussed the Xinjiang concentration camps while curling her eyelashes. The platform later apologized for a "human moderation error."

“TikTok does not moderate content due to political sensitivities," a TikTok spokesman told me at the time.

Since then, Xinjiang’s Douyin space has become an all-singing, all-dancing propaganda platform.  

When I first spoke to him, Sydney-based Uyghur activist Alip Erkin, 41, was trawling Douyin every day for evidence of China’s persecution in Xinjiang. In recent months, he believes the app has been wiped of the most compromising information about Xinjiang. 

“I feel that nowadays the videos that I would hope to see on Douyin have decreased in number,” said Erkin. “I think Douyin has gathered experience of how they can best censor people.”

Now when Erkin logs on, he’s greeted by a wall of videos showing a sunny, smiling Xinjiang. “The visuals are very reflective of the facade of the situation and the fake acts of being happy and dancing and singing in public,” Erkin said.

Erkin has noticed how the Uyghur language – which is Turkic in origin and uses Arabic script – is being wiped away from Douyin. “Most Uyghurs are using Mandarin now for their captions and in their videos,” he said. 

Erkin tried an experiment: “The other day I used a Uyghur language name to set up an account. About a minute later a notification came in saying: “the information you put in is not accepted by our rules.””

When Erkin changed it to Latin letters, the account name was approved. 

In November, a Douyin video of a young girl complaining about being censored for using Uyghur language went viral on social media. “I would like to ask Douyin, why are my videos suspended every time I do them in Uyghur?”

Aliye Yasin, whose name has been changed to protect her family, used to spend hours every day trying to trick the app’s algorithm into showing her content the Chinese government didn’t want her to see. For a while, it worked. But spending so much time on the app can take its toll. “I stopped digging,” she told me. Now, she says, whenever she logs on, “the algorithm just gives me propaganda again.”

Last week, state-owned media outlet Global Times published an article about how a hashtag, #charmofthexinjiangpeople, had gone viral on Xinjiang Douyin.

The article described how the hashtag featured “beautiful Xinjiang people in gorgeous ethnic costumes, and, of course, their brightest smiles.”

The footage was in stark contrast to some of the video content that has previously leaked out of Xinjiang via Douyin, including images of religious buildings being destroyed, or long lines of people waiting to be scanned at one of many security checkpoints. 

"Bytedance collaborates with public security bureaus across China, including in Xinjiang where it plays an active role in disseminating the party-state’s propaganda," observed a November report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“It wasn't that long ago that Uyghurs were using Douyin (TikTok) to shine a light on the brutal surveillance state in Xinjiang,” tweeted Fergus Ryan, an analyst at ASPI. “Looks like ByteDance has got that under control. Only "positive energy" now.”

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The post Xinjiang’s TikTok wipes away evidence of Uyghur persecution — Coda Follows Up appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, a cache of documents leaked from deep within the Chinese government was published by the New York Times, exposing the architecture of China’s brutal repression of its Uyghur population in Xinjiang, where more than a million have been imprisoned in concentration camps. 

My thoughts turned to what the documents meant for Uyghurs living in exile around the world, many of whom still have relatives trapped in Xinjiang. I called Uyghur poet and scholar Abduweli Ayup, who I first met in Istanbul. Ayup now lives in Norway, which has granted asylum to a small group of Uyghur refugees. 

Ayup told me he was shocked by the documents. What disturbed him particularly, he said, was the revelation that President Xi Jinping was the driving force behind the policy in Xinjiang. He explained he had nursed the hope that the Uyghur crisis was the brainchild of the region’s top official, Chen Quanguo – who’s been described as the architect of the camps – and would be discontinued when Chen left office. Ayup had envisioned going home “as soon as possible” once the policy ended. “I read that the designer of this policy is Xi Jinping. I realized things will not change, even if they replace the governor. It made me very very disappointed,” he said. 

Miyesser Mijit, 29, the young Uyghur woman whose brother was recruited into the Xinjiang police force, had a similar reaction. Especially revealing for Mijit, who studied outside Xinjiang, were the directives advising local officials on how to deal with Uyghur students returning to the region for the summer vacation. The documents advised the officials to say the students’ missing relatives were “in a training school set up by the government,” and to tell students that their behavior could affect how long their families were kept in the camps. 

“I didn't think that they had such a big plan for this situation,” Mijit said. “I can't imagine how it came to this level.” Mijit vividly remembers returning herself to Xinjiang in summer 2015, as the crackdown on Uyghurs was gaining momentum. “The weather was very good,” she said, “but something was very dark. You just felt very bad. All around you was just darkness.” After that summer, Mijit would not return home again. 

Kalbinur Tursun, 36, also has no plans to return. As the authorities closed in on her family, Tursun was forced to leave her husband and five of her children in Xinjiang, escaping with one child and pregnant with another. Shortly after she left, Tursun’s husband was arrested. She hasn’t heard news of him since. Via footage she came across by chance on Chinese video-sharing app TikTok, she discovered her elder daughter, Aisha, had been taken to an “orphanage” for Uyghur children. “For me it’s important to believe that my other children are alive,” she said. 

When I visited last year, Tursun’s youngest child Marziya had just turned two, and had never met her father. She is talking now, Kalbinur told me.  “Every day she asks, “Where is my father?” As far as Tursun knows, Marziya’s father is still in Xi Jinping’s concentration camps, along with an estimated one million other Chinese Muslims.

Read more about Mijit, Tursun, and Ayup in my multimedia feature on the Uyghurs, published in May. I’ll keep reporting on the Xinjiang crisis as it continues to unfold. @isocockerell

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The post Coda Follows Up: documents reveal how China orchestrated mass detentions in Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

Naturally, I spend much of my time thinking about that silk road region in China’s far west. I think about the mostly-destroyed old city in Kashgar. I think about how the clocks in Urumqi are set to Beijing time, even though it’s several time zones to the west. I think about the yawning silence – how the air feels when at least a million Uyghurs have been disappeared into concentration camps. I think about the apricots: one Uyghur source told me those in Xinjiang are the sweetest she’d ever had. She believes she’ll never taste one again. I wonder, perhaps selfishly, if I will one day — because of my reporting, it also seems unlikely. 

This week, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia — where Coda has a newsroom — exploring the eastern edge of the city, where a vast multi-million dollar Chinese development lies, part of the Belt and Road project. It’s a strange, at times eerie place. A huge, gleaming five-star hotel, echoing with emptiness. Deserted strip malls; blank shop windows. And like everywhere in Tbilisi, the odd stray dog. As the wind picked up and the sun began to set, the smell of charcoal and cumin caught the air — suddenly, a clattery Uyghur restaurant emerged from the lengthening shadows. It’s run by one Uyghur woman, who’d been living in Tbilisi for two years. I was desperate to know her story, but for that afternoon I was content to eat her food, drink her tea, and look at the pictures on the walls: Uyghurs playing the dutar; camels running through the Gobi desert; traditional undemolished Uyghur homes.

Xinjiang has been dominating my thoughts this week after having several long phone calls with Olsi Jazexhi, an Albanian-Canadian journalist and academic who went to the region in August on a North Korea-style propaganda tour. For months, Jazexhi had been reading the reports about the Uyghur humanitarian crisis, and decided to investigate for himself. “I approached the Chinese embassy in Albania and presented myself to them as an Albanian journalist. I told them I’d seen so many stories and I don’t believe them to be true,” Jazexhi told me.

“I never imagined what the media were saying was true and that things were even worse – even more tragic.”

Jazexhi arrived at Urumqi airport on a hot day in mid-August, alongside a group of foreign journalists, mostly representing state broadcasters from countries along the silk road economic belt. He was greeted by his guides for the trip: a group of Chinese Communist Party officials. “We were given first class treatment,” Jazexhi said. “Wherever we went, state police were at our service. The traffic was stopped and the police opened the way for us. We were treated like presidents.”

The journalists stayed in five-star hotels while they toured the cities of Xinjiang and were lectured on China’s so-called “de-extremification” program to stamp out terrorism and separatism in the region. “They presented us with their own version of the history of Xinjiang,” Jazexhi said. Almost every night, the journalists were given a show. “A group of boys and girls were selected to sing and dance for us everywhere we went. They were using Uyghurs like monkeys in the zoo.”

“They wanted us to see these people singing and dancing so that when we came out of China we could tell people, ‘there are no concentration camps. There are kids who sing and dance, and they’re very happy.’”

The journalists toured the mosques, many of which Jazexhi described as simply a front for Chinese party propaganda. “They wanted to show to the outside world that there were mosques in Xinjiang,” Jazexhi said. He ventured into one of the mosques near Urumqi’s grand bazaar. “But when I went in I found there was just a store.” 

Many of the other mosques were simply shuttered or had been turned into museums. In Kashgar, the famous Id Kah mosque was open only on Fridays. “We saw only elders – people 55 years and above — praying. The youth were afraid to pray,” Jazexhi said. “In the sermons the imams praised Xi Jinping and the Communist Party.”

The centrepiece of the Xinjiang press trip was a visit to one of the region’s so-called “vocational training centers” — the vast concentration camps where a million Uyghurs are currently held. In a convoy of minibuses, the group drove out of the city of Aksu into the bare, open desert. The camp, which Jazexhi’s Chinese minders referred to as a “school”, was surrounded by rocky nothingness.

“It was in the middle of nowhere,” Jazexhi said. “It was a kind of Alcatraz – even if they could climb the walls and jump, they would be dead in the desert.”

Jazexhi tried to interview some of the camp’s inmates — to the consternation of the guards, who preferred that he watch another dance performance. “I told them, ‘I’m sorry, I did not come from Europe to watch a show,’” Jazexhi said.

When he did manage to talk to some Uyghurs, Jazexhi was deeply disturbed. “We understood that they were under total control of their Chinese guards and totally terrified to talk to us.” 

Jazexhi asked the inmates why they had been detained. “They started responding that a year ago they read the Quran, or posted on the internet that Muslims should pray five times a day. Things that are basic human rights we have in the West. Their only crime was that they are Muslims.”

The Aksu camp was a turning point for Jazexhi. “When I was there I understood the Chinese were playing with us,” he said. As the group was ferried back to the comfort of their five-star hotel, Jazexhi faced a discomfort familiar to any journalist who’s been on a state-funded press junket (I was reminded of a recent, lavish press lunch laid on by the Moscow Center for Innovations while I was reporting for a dispatch on their surveillance program).

“It’s a kind of irony, after all they paid for my trip and they were expecting me to behave myself,” Jazexhi said. “I questioned myself: should I reveal the truth, or should I — for the sake of the treatment the Chinese gave to us — lie. But by doing this I would ignore these poor people who are suffering in these concentration camps.”

Jazexhi made a series of YouTube videos about his experience in Xinjiang, and also posted footage of his time in the Aksu camp. You can watch it all here. He made the only real choice available to him: to tell the truth. “I know that now I am an enemy of China,” he said. “But at least I told the world what I saw.”

My favorite Coda Story this week: 

Continuing on the China theme, have a read of this dispatch by reporter Rui Zhong on the social credit scheme’s growing influence in the country. One of the most chilling elements Zhong picks out is the reality that citizens who don’t pay their debts live in fear of being outed as a “debt-dodger.” How? By having their face plastered onto advertisements on Chinese TikTok. 

And elsewhere...

Think your pets are safe from authoritarian tech? Think again. Last week, a Russian security researcher accidentally found a way to hack and take over all FurryTail automatic pet feeders across the globe. Anna Prosteva of St Petersburg, Russia, told business tech website ZDnet that the feeders’ vulnerability would allow a hacker to hijack the feeding schedules of more than 10,000 furry friends living around the world. Surveillance? More like purr-veillance.

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The post Inside Xinjiang’s five-star propaganda tour appeared first on Coda Story.

As revealed by Coda Story last month, Anil K. Jain, the head of Michigan State University’s Biometrics Research Group, traveled to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi in August 2018 and gave a speech about facial recognition at the Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (CCBR). Jain was also on the CCBR’s advisory board and was pictured receiving an honorary certificate. 

Jain is regarded as one of the world’s most influential computer scientists and a pioneer in areas of pattern recognition and biometric recognition systems. He has won countless awards and honors and is often quoted on U.S. facial recognition issues in publications like Wired and Slate. In the same month as Jain presented a paper titled “From the Edge of Biometrics: What’s Next?” at the CCBR conference in Urumqi, a United Nations human rights panel described Xinjiang as resembling a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

Biometrics played a prominent role in the government-led “anti-terror” crackdown which saw hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs detained in re-education camps. Facial recognition, DNA collection, iris scans, and other methods of surveillance became ubiquitous. 

“I would certainly turn down such an invitation,” said Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “The Chinese government is very closely aligned with the tech sector and has very troubling uses of face recognition in particular and surveillance in general. It’s really using behaviors that challenge human rights, especially those of ethnic minorities. I wouldn’t need to be seen facilitating or supporting that.”

“By the time Professor Jain attended the conference in 2018 nearly all major news outlets had reported on the camp system and the forcible collection of biometric data across the region,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington, and an expert on Xinjiang. “As a leading expert on technology and racial bias, he should have known how the research produced by his colleagues at the conference was being used.”

Byler added that he found Jain’s attendance at the CCBR “even more appalling” given that the conference was held at and sponsored by Xinjiang University, whose ethnically Uyghur president Tashpolat Tiyip, a respected geographer, was arrested in 2017 as part of “a clear demonstration of the government’s broad-scale attack on Uyghur intellectual life,” according to PEN America. A few weeks after the CCBR, Tiyip was sentenced to death; Amnesty International announced this week that he faces imminent execution.

Whether Jain was aware of this context is difficult to confirm. Michigan State University’s media relations department directed requests for comments to Jain, who did not answer questions sent by email or reply by phone.

Jain has strong ties to China’s biometrics community. At the CCBR in Urumqi, he was pictured with two former students, Jianjiang Feng and Qijun Zhao, who both now teach at Chinese universities and specialize in facial recognition and other intelligent video applications. 

Another attendee, Hu Han, also worked with Jain at MSU, where he specialized in computer vision applications for “biometrics, forensics, law enforcement, and security systems”. Hu is now employed at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government research institute. 

During the same trip, Jain also traveled to Sichuan to meet a former colleague from the 1980s who has now started his own surveillance firm, Wisesoft, which uses Jain’s research to develop 3D face recognition systems.

The involvement of academic institutions with tech firms linked with the Chinese government’s crackdown in Xinjiang has come under increased scrutiny. Imperial College London recently hosted an open facial recognition competition where one of the sponsors was a Chinese AI startup called DeepGlint, which services several security projects in Xinjiang. When asked for comment, the competition’s organizer said he was not aware of DeepGlint’s role in tracking Uyghurs. Imperial College organizers subsequently removed DeepGlint’s sponsorship.

David Tobin, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow who studies security in China, said researchers in technical fields often ignore the real-world applications of their research. “It is imperative that natural scientists be trained in social sciences to understand these effects and the world they make things for and in ethics to be able to ask these questions when they construct, conduct, and disseminate their research,” he said. “However, such training and knowledge is sadly lacking in these fields and public debates rely on false dichotomies between natural and social worlds and between facts and values.”

Jain is not alone in facing criticism - a university in Australia is investigating one of its professors for co-writing several studies seeking to improve methods to distinguish Uyghurs’ faces from others. A senior Microsoft AI researcher, Gang Hua, who has since left the company, and Qiang Ji, a computer science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, also attended the CCBR in Xinjiang and gave a speech.

Jain’s attendance at CCBR has also prompted criticism by Uyghur activists. “Michigan State and all universities need to urgently review their faculty's research activities in China for compliance with basic academic ethics,” said Louisa Greve, external affairs director for the DC-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. “At a minimum, if they are conducting research or otherwise cooperating with Chinese institutions that collect data without consent, they should be sanctioned”.

Whether the controversy over the Xinjiang conference will have any long-term impact is unclear. Jain is listed on the organizing committee for the next CCBR, which will not be held in Xinjiang but in the interior city of Zhuzhou next month. The CCBR 2018 website is no longer active.

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The post Influential US scientist under fire for Xinjiang links appeared first on Coda Story.