“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” Omar Bekali, a resident of China’s Xinjiang province told a reporter from the Associated Press, breaking down in tears as he described the conditions he lived in. “I still think about it every night, until the…
Will the Repression in Xinjiang Influence Beijing’s Social Credit System? In recent months, troubling details have emerged about a sprawling network of secretive political reeducation camps in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. Both official and leaked evidence indicates that up to one million Muslims, chiefly from the Uighur minority, have been interned without legal proceedings.…
One of the worst human rights abuses in recent times is occurring in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang. The Chinese Communist Party has rounded up possibly one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in purpose-built concentration camps where they are subjected to mental and physical abuse without legal recourse. Despite the scale and intensity of this…
China’s concerns with terrorism are almost entirely focused on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Xinjiang’s geopolitical position at the eastern edge of the Islamic and Turkic-speaking world and the ethno-cultural distinctiveness of its largely Turkic-Muslim ethnic groups have constituted a challenge to the centralising imperatives of successive Chinese governments. Domestically, this has resulted in the extreme securitisation…
Satellite imageries suggest China is expanding detention camps in Xinjiang at an unprecedented pace. The time of detention camp booming coincides with the escalation of China’s war against “terrorism, separatism, extremism”, which is reported to be targeting Uyghur and Kazakh minorities. It’s unclear whether these detention camps serve as “re-education camps”. Most detention camps in…
An Australian national security agency head was shown a secret list of about 100 Chinese fugitives that Beijing believes live in Australia, evidence the communist nation’s hunt for former officials and business people is much wider than publicly known. The Weekend Australian can reveal a Chinese minister produced the list during a private lunch in Beijing…
The firms profiting from China’s rights abuses are often backed by Western investors. BY CHARLES ROLLET ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MAGEE FOR FOREIGN POLICY In the far western region of Xinjiang, China has created one of the world’s most sophisticated and intrusive state surveillance systems to target the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority. Part of what Beijing…
Anthropologist Darren Byler chronicles artistic culture in Northwest China amid a massive security crackdown. By Jonathan Hiskes In the last three months, University of Washington anthropology student Darren Byler has spoken about his research to AI developers at Google, business leaders at the Washington State China Relations Council, and journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Beijing.…
Four hundred thousand to one million people in concentration camps. If these estimates are true, that means that at least one—and perhaps far more—of every ten Uyghur men lives in a re-education camp right now. Those numbers come from an article published by the Associated Press two weeks ago. [1] This week’s Economist lists a similar tally. It goes on to…
International attention on the question of Xinjiang, the autonomous province in the northwestern corner of China, and the oppression of its native Uyghur population by the Chinese state still lags behind the well-publicized case of Tibet. Yet in the mind of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs call East Turkistan, now outweighs Tibet as a…
