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…
DetailsThe 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.…
DetailsOfficials 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…
DetailsThousands 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…
DetailsIt’s not hard to spot the ethno-racial profiling Chinese authorities use to clamp down on Uighur resistance. In recent years, Chinese authorities have established numerous checkpoints in cities and towns across Xinjiang, the vast province that abuts post-Soviet Central Asia. In some areas, one is unable to walk more than a couple of hundred meters…
DetailsAcademics in Australia might reflect on the fact that scholarly books critical of the Chinese Communist Party are now shunned by publishers. Scholars who work on China know that continued access to the country requires them to play by Beijing’s rules, which for most means self-censorship – the dirty secret of China studies in Australia.…
DetailsBefore he disappeared from his luxury apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong on Jan. 27, 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, favored female bodyguards. Why, exactly, was unclear: Perhaps he simply liked being surrounded by women; perhaps he trusted them more than men. Whatever the reason, those guards weren’t much help when…
DetailsNostalgia for the boyishly-brutal Wang Zhen flooded across Han Xinjiang in the days, weeks, and months following the intra-communal violence of early July 2009 in Urumqi. Many Han invoked Wang Zhen’s notorious approach to management of Xinjiang’s non-Han (and in particular, Uyghur) population as the solution to what they termed the ‘ethnic problem’ (minzu wenti).…
DetailsHigh school sweethearts – both originally from China’s Xinjiang Uighur region – dreamed of living together in Australia The last time Almas Nizamidin saw his wife was on Valentine’s Day last year, when he flew from Australia to China to surprise her. Now she’s in prison. A month after his visit to China, his newly pregnant wife,…
DetailsAuthorities in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region have jailed the four wealthiest ethnic Uyghurs in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) city for acts of “religious extremism,” according to an official, amid a crackdown he said is unlikely to end any time soon. A source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service that Abdujelil…
DetailsFar from the booming metropolis of Beijing, China is building a sprawling system that combines dystopian technology and human policing. “It’s a kind of frontline laboratory for surveillance. KASHGAR, China — This is a city where growing a beard can get you reported to the police. So can inviting too many people to your wedding, or naming your…
DetailsOne member of the Uyghur diaspora explains why Uyghurs abroad raise their banners outside Chinese embassies. A question I am often asked is why I participate in protests and demonstrations. What impact do our blue and white placards and hoarse voices have against a stoic Canberran building that hoists the Chinese flag? Perhaps my questioners see…
DetailsTO THE BRINK In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2017, a heavily armed gunmanstormed Reina, an exclusive Istanbul nightclub on the Bosphorus coast, murdering 39. ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre, but the Turkish deputy prime minister swiftly made an incendiary claim: the perpetrators, he said, were “probably” Uyghur—the ethnically Turkic Muslims indigenous to the region…
DetailsBEIJING: A court in China’s mainly Muslim East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region has sentenced a man to six years in prison for “provoking trouble” and growing a beard, a practise discouraged by local authorities, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The court in the desert oasis city of Kashgar sentenced the 38-year-old Uyghur to six years, while…
DetailsThe article, about a Muslim couple in the western Chinese region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang) being sentenced to prison for growing a long beard and wearing a burqa, appeared in state news media on Sunday. By Monday morning, it had vanished. Such occurrences are commonplace in China, where censors frequently purge without explanation online information…
DetailsDuring 2014, the ruling Chinese Communist Party intensified its targeting of ethnic minority groups with an “anti-terror” campaign in the troubled northwestern region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang), and ratcheted up controls on freedom of expression, Amnesty International said in its annual global human rights report. Ethnic minorities including Tibetans, mostly Muslim Uyghurs, and Mongolians faced…
DetailsLast week, a court in China’s far western East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region sentenced Ilham Tohti, a member of the Uyghur minority, to life in prison for the crime of “inciting separatism.” The conviction of this moderate scholar elicited international condemnation; the sentence was an order of magnitude longer than those given to other Chinese dissidents. But,…
DetailsBeijing should learn from the mistakes of the U.S.’s “war on terror” as it mounts its own campaign against attacks allegedly perpetrated by its predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority, analysts said Thursday. Speaking at a George Washington University conference on Uyghur affairs — what aims to be an annual dialogue to influence how Washington addresses the…
Details
