WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressmen Randy Hultgren (R-IL) and James P. McGovern (D-MA), Co-Chairs of the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, addressed the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights on the human rights situation in China’s Xinjiang province. The Co-Chairs’ remarks were broadcast via video at the start of the subcommittee’s “Exchange of Views on the Human Rights Situation…
BEIJING — Kayrat Samarkand says his only “crime” was being a Muslim who had visited neighboring Kazakhstan. On that basis alone, he was detained by police, aggressively interrogated for three days, then dispatched in November to a “reeducation camp” in China’s western province of Xinjiang for three months. There, he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, he…
Mr. Thum, a historian, has been conducting research in Xinjiang, China, for nearly two decades. What does it take to intern half a million members of one ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate organization, but the Chinese authorities aren’t stingy. Vast swathes of the Uighur population in China’s western region of…
Islamic domes and signs in Arabic are being pulled down and no new ‘Arab style’ mosques can be built under campaign that has Hui communities worried Every Friday, the Nanguan Grand Mosque springs to life as local Hui Muslims from Yinchuan, capital of their official heartland, gather for the most important prayer of the week.…
Beijing, China (CNN)More than a million Chinese Communist officials are being dispatched to live with local families in the western region of Xinjiang, a move seen as a sign of the government’s increasingly tightened grip over the area’s predominantly Uyghur Muslim population. The so-called “home stays,” announced by the government, target farmer households in southern…
‘Becoming Family’ Campaign Intensifies Repression in Xinjiang Chinese officials, since early 2018, have imposed regular “home stays” on families in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang. These visits are part of the government’s increasingly invasive “Strike Hard” campaign in the region, home to 11 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities. Chinese officials, since early…
Jessica Batke Jessica Batke is a ChinaFile Senior Editor. She is an expert on China’s domestic political and social affairs, and served as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Analyst for… More A version of this piece was written for and will appear in Issue 56 of China Leadership Monitor. After the 19th Party…
The mass incarceration of a minority people In the April 30 issue of this magazine, we published a piece about Jerome A. Cohen, a veteran American scholar of China. He told me that he was consumed, at present, by one thing above all: the mass incarceration of the Uyghur people, with no due process whatsoever.…
Officials in China’s northwestern Xinjiang recently fired all ethnic minority teachers as part of a racial-profiling crackdown in the region. As local government departments continue an initiative to shut down schools dedicated to educating Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian children or merge them with schools for China’s Han majority, authorities forced all minority teachers older than…
Thousands of Uyghur people rallied outside the European Commission in Brussels on April 27, calling on foreign governments to take a stand against the hundreds of thousands of their people being detained in re-education camps by the Chinese government. Up to one million Uyghurs are or have been detained in “political education centres” in the central Asian…
