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).…
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