I knew Ramadan would start on June 28 because someone in the cell before us had carved a calendar into the wall with their fingernail. Late at night, after the task of watching over the other prisoners was assigned, someone else in our cell was selected to scratch off the old day. Everyone would bicker among themselves for the chance to erase another day of their sentence, but since I believed that I would be in there for life, the calendar didn’t interest me much. I’d often forget to mark it when it was my turn.

On the eve of Ramadan, my shift as watchman began at 1 a.m. This time, I remembered to update the calendar and saw that someone had added a small drawing of a crescent and star just above the date. My heart pounded—I worried that I’d been spotted. I took a quick glance around the room. No one who’d already spent a year labeled “dangerous”—and tortured for it, as I had been—would have dared to draw this. Only someone rounded up after May 2014 could have been so bold. With my heart pounding in my chest and the buzzing eyes of the video cameras aimed at me, no matter where in the cell I was, I rarely had the chance to formulate any thoughts, let alone write them on the wall.

I was arrested on August 19, 2013, in Kashgar, more than two thousand miles west of Beijing. I was born in the capital of Uyghur culture, and I was shaped by it. The city taught me to love books, knowledge, and righteousness, and it was there that I stood proudly behind the lectern of a Chinese university as an instructor. But now, this city had become my prison. That August, officers from the Chinese security forces came to interrogate me. They accused me of opposing the spread of the state language by teaching Uyghur preschoolers their mother tongue. Apparently, I was indoctrinating children in the spirit of separatism. During the interrogation, I was informed that the preschool I’d founded amounted to preparation for an Uyghur state, and that the lectures I’d given on linguistics in different Uyghur cities were incitement to terrorism. According to the officers, my crime was having studied in the United States under a Ford scholarship between 2009 and 2011. I was told that I was a CIA agent sent to break up “Xinjiang.” 

In the 1980s and ’90s, it seemed as if Uyghurs—a long-oppressed, predominantly Muslim ethnic minority group—were on their way to greater freedom within the Chinese system. It had become easier to use our own language to publish books, produce movies, and practice Islam. But the fist closed again, and the protests calling for an end to our persecution were harshly punished. Our fear returned. 

I left to study linguistics in the United States so that I could learn how to keep our language and culture alive. In the past, it had been natural: young people learned from elders in mosques, during traditional communal gatherings called meshrep, and in our large, multigenerational homes. But then meshrep was banned, and in many places minors were forbidden by the Chinese Communist Party to enter religious buildings. Meanwhile, poverty in the countryside was taking its toll on families. Young adults migrated for work in bigger cities where the Han money was, and children were forcibly sent to assimilationist, Mandarin-language boarding schools.

By the time I was locked away, it had become clear that the reform and opening that had transformed Uyghur society in the ’90s would not be returning. I was lucky enough to be let out because international academic and human rights organizations demanded my release. But there are not many like me. In 2017, convinced that all Uyghurs were terror threats, China rounded up more than a million of us—including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic people native to the region—and put us into prison camps. In these camps, prisoners are “reeducated,” forced to denounce their identities and declare themselves Chinese. Torture and rape are rampant. Forced labor in factories and cotton fields is systematic. Death by deliberate neglect is common.

Since 2019, China’s claimed the camps have been closed. Many have been, but only because the Xinjiang government arranged a wave of mass sentencing to take their place. Today, Uyghurs receive sentences of five, fifteen, or twenty years—and sometimes even life—for such “crimes” as owning a Qur’an, speaking to family members living abroad, or refusing to drink alcohol. A lost generation of children has been functionally orphaned and now lives in state residential schools, where physical abuse is the norm and the Uyghur language is strictly forbidden. 

I could not have known how bad things would become when I chose to leave the United States and return home. 

My arrest was a foretaste of the crackdown of 2017, when the mass disappearances started, but I had no illusions about the risk of going back. No, I found myself staring at the scratched-out calendar in that prison cell because I had felt a calling to return to Kashgar, the city I loved. I had a calling to go back with my wife and daughter and build a language school and cultural center for Uyghur people, a place where we could practice our faith and speak our language. 

On the plane from Chicago to Beijing, my daughter hit it off with the other passengers. The trip took more than twenty hours, but for Mesude, who had been living in America for years, it was like a game. She spoke English with confidence and had the mannerisms and ease of an American. When we finally got to Beijing, a student was supposed to meet us at the airport. But I’d forgotten where we were supposed to meet. I opened up my laptop to check, but it was dead. I couldn’t find an outlet anywhere in the stately airport, and the employees at the information desk were of no use. 

Eventually, I summoned the courage to ask airport security if there was a place I could charge my laptop. Instead of answering, they demanded to see my ID. “Dad, why does this man hate you so much?” Mesude asked me in English. 

The cop could tell from looking at our faces and listening to our accents that we were Uyghur. “Since when do people from Xinjiang speak Human?” he asked, sneering. “And he’s even taught his kid English!” I took Mesude’s hand and left. I’d lived in Beijing ten years earlier, and every time I saw such ugly expressions of contempt, I wanted to reject their “glorious” civilization. I’d long since learned I couldn’t defend myself against them, and so I chose to stay quiet. 

An Uyghur like me could not get basic human respect in Beijing. Not as a student, as I’d been years before, and not now, with a family and two graduate degrees. If we had been in America, I’d have taken the cop to court for racial discrimination. But in China, it wasn’t worth the time or trouble to try to report him. The law here didn’t recognize the value of a person’s dignity. My daughter stared at me, the question still written on her face. I lowered my gaze and changed the subject. 

Mesude had spent most of her life in America, where everyone was from somewhere else. But even in China, we Uyghurs are treated like foreigners. And until recently, we were. China calls our homeland Xinjiang—“New Frontier.” Our language is a sister to Uzbek and cousin to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. For centuries, our land was located on the eastern edge of Turkestan, known today as Central Asia—not on the western end of China. We were conquered in the 1700s by the Qing, an expansionist dynasty that had seized control of Beijing. In the northern reaches of our homeland, a Mongol people called the Junghars resisted Qing expansion, so the Qing annihilated them. In their old pastures, the Qing founded a capital for the domain, naming it Dihua—“Civilization.” On the advice of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong conquered the young East Turkestan Republic in 1949 to secure access to the region’s oil reserves and created special incentives for Han settlers to move in. In the beginning, the communists decried “Han chauvinism,” and even restored Dihua’s original name: Urumqi. But Han chauvinism endured. On the “mainland,” people guard their wallets and pinch their noses when we pass by. To them, we’re pickpockets and terrorists, kebab sellers and drug dealers. If there’s anything good about us, it’s how much we love to sing and dance. 

Once we were out of the airport, we couldn’t get a hotel room. Some hotels told us there were vacancies over the phone, then changed their minds when they saw our faces. Others said yes once they’d seen us, but when they looked at our IDs, told us there was an order from the higher-ups not to let in people from Xinjiang. Our Beijing-quality clothes, our English, and our smooth Mandarin could hide what we were at first, but the 65 at the start of our ID numbers would give us away. I’d gotten used to this treatment, but I couldn’t stand to see the exhaustion on my wife’s face or the confusion in my daughter’s eyes as we carried her on our backs from hotel to hotel, answering her unending questions. I was humiliated. Relief finally came late in the afternoon, when we found a room close to the rear gate of the University where I’d once studied. 

As we lay in bed, the kids from the elementary school next door left to go home. In front of the building, women were selling freshly hatched chicks, shouting “One yuan! One yuan!” Children gathered around, waving coins in the air. As they came to pick them up, some of their parents bought them chicks. My daughter looked at the students for a moment, then asked, “Daddy, do all those kids know how to take care of them?” 

Her confusion was justified. They were children, they couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone chicks. In America, Mesude had been disappointed when we wouldn’t let her have a cat. There were so many formalities: to get a pet, you had to fill out an application with a shelter so they could make sure that you weren’t on the list of known abusers, that you knew how to take care of the animal, and that you could pay for the insurance. My daughter had been too young to look after a pet, and neither I nor my wife had had any experience with animals, so it wasn’t an option. My daughter was surprised at this “business” of irresponsibly and mercilessly selling fragile baby animals. She couldn’t stand to see kids her own age treating terrified, defenseless chicks like stones they’d picked up on the road. 

When, at last, we made it back to Urumqi and its Uyghur neighborhood, I was surprised to see a blue police booth in front of our building. Inside it sat a dark-skinned Uyghur officer ready to inspect anyone trying to enter. She hadn’t been there when I’d left. The differences between Uyghur and Han regions had grown in the two years I’d been gone. In the places where the Han live, skyscrapers had sprung up. The streets were lined with ads showing stylish Chinese women wearing Zara, Nike, Adidas, Levis, and other foreign brands. But on those streets and in the malls and markets of Han areas, any Uyghur who tried to get past the iron-barred gates was pulled aside to have their bags searched. 

The first friend I caught up with met me in a restaurant on Consulate Street. He seemed on edge, routinely glancing around as though looking for someone. There was no clear connection between any sentence he said and the next, but I understood what he was really telling me when he suggested that I return to America after the summer and stay there for my doctorate or something else, as long as I didn’t stay here. I spent the next few days catching up with other acquaintances and looking around Urumqi for the right place to open up my school. I’d already posted online about my plan, and word traveled fast, so I didn’t have to explain much. They all said it was pure fantasy, and they were certain that nothing would come of it. 

I sped through the week looking for funders, collaborators, and people to help me handle the bureaucracy. Instead of offering support, my friends reacted with shock and stern warnings. Everyone said the same thing: “There’s nowhere left in Urumqi.” The Old City, where Uyghurs had lived for hundreds of years, was now nicknamed “Gaza.” Anyone who managed to escape this prison was considered a hero. And here I was coming back. 

I had been in the United States during the worst riots of July 2009. But my wife and daughter were still in Urumqi. I watched from Kansas as two Uyghurs from my hometown were beaten to death. Han workers at a toy factory in the southeastern Chinese city of Shaoguan had accused them of raping a Han woman, and a lynch mob assembled against the factory’s Uyghur employees. Videos of the violence spread quickly online, and on July 5, protests erupted in Urumqi. Uyghur students demonstrated with Chinese flags, demanding justice from the government. When the protest was violently suppressed, it turned into a riot. Uyghurs attacked Han and destroyed the shops they’d opened in our neighborhoods. Then the army came in and stood by for days as Han attacked Uyghurs. No one knows for sure how many died—at least over a hundred—and thousands of Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. 

“Don’t go outside,” I said to my wife over the phone. “Just stay at home.” For a few days, she did. Our daughter fell asleep to the sound of gunfire. That call was the last time I’d speak to her for nine months. The government shut off the internet, and international calls couldn’t get through. After I lost contact with my wife, I began to panic. Luckily, one of the other Chinese Ford Scholars at Kansas University was a former People’s Liberation Army officer. We’d already grown close, and when I told him what had happened, he promised to help. A week later, he put me in touch with army contacts who’d been deployed to Urumqi. Each time, I was given a different number to call. The people on the other end arranged to make sure my wife was safe and have food delivered to her apartment.

For days, my wife and daughter were trapped at home. Once, Mesude heard the sound of army helicopters circling the city, then a man’s voice down by the door to the building. She jumped up and ran to look outside, thinking her father had come back from America to save her. She opened the window and waved, shouting for me. The soldier she’d heard whirled around to aim his rifle at her. 

It was worse on the streets. One day, when they finally ventured outside with Mesude’s grandmother, they were spotted by Han rioters, who chased after them. Another time, Mesude and her mother fled onto a bus, and the mob surrounded them, banging on the windows. Mesude crawled under a seat, sobbing.  The bus driver sped to the police station, but the rioters followed behind. In full view of the police, they boarded the bus and began to beat the passengers. My wife was hit on the head and lost consciousness. She woke up in a hospital. It was overcrowded with people who were gravely injured, and she received no attention. The patients were kept inside by guards, but she snuck past them and returned home. 

Because of the communications blackout, I didn’t hear of any of this as it was happening. I was wracked with fear. One afternoon, hardly knowing what I was doing, I tried to walk to Walmart for groceries, but quickly lost my way. The streets of the suburban neighborhood confused me, and after a couple wrong turns I ended up wandering around in a cul-de-sac. I think I walked back and forth several times. Finally, a man called out to me. “What’s up?” he said from behind the truck he was working on in his driveway,  “Can I do something for you?” He was strong-looking, with bright red hair and a Midwestern accent. “I’ve lost my way,” I said.

“Okay, no worries. I can help. Where are you from?”

“The northwest part of China.”

“Ah.” The man paused. “I heard about that. Isn’t something happening there? I read about it in The New York Times.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s my city.”

“He gave me a hug, introduced himself, and invited me in for coffee. His name was David. We talked for a bit more, then he asked if I was hungry. It had been a while since I’d set out for food. “Yes,” I said. He heated us up a pizza and we ate together on his porch. I told him about my family, what I knew about the riots, what Ürümchi was like.

Eventually, I mentioned that I’d been on my way to Wal-mart. He immediately offered to drive me. I remember I bought some apples. After I was done, he told me that it wasn’t good to be without a car in America – he’d let me have his bike so I could get around.

“Pain is like an infectious disease,” he told me before we parted. “If you stay sad, it’ll affect people around you. Besides, it’s not good to hold onto it. If you feel alone, you can always call me.” 

For a full year, I didn’t know what had become of my family. I wasn’t able to talk to them. It would be more than a year before I could get them safely to Kansas to join me. And then another three years before I decided to return to Urumqi.

Now that I was back in Urumqi, I heard the terrible stories of people rounded up for questioning during the riots. It was almost as if they were competing with each other to offer up the bloodiest tale. I saw such suffering in people’s eyes, felt such hopelessness in their words that it became hard to breathe. After the July riots, the feeling of tragedy stuck around and Urumqi never again felt safe. Uyghurs there understood that whatever had protected them until that day could no longer be trusted. As we took the elevator down to leave our apartment, everyone kept glancing up at the camera in the corner, standing as far away from me as they could. I realized they thought I was under watch. That was the day I decided to leave the city. 

Besides, the only people in Urumqi willing to hear me out about my school were just interested in setting up English classes or making some money and putting up ads in Uyghur. I was constantly asked how to make it to America, how to get European residency, or how to become a Turkish citizen. People had stopped bragging about where their homes were, instead boasting about the foreign countries to which their kids had fled. Anyone who said, “My son’s living abroad,” really meant, “My son’s in a place where he won’t be beaten down.” I kept thinking of a proverb I’d heard old people say: “If you’re safe in your own place, you’ll see color in your face.” Everyone around me looked sick.  

People had gotten sick of their realities and were desperate to get out. Some left so that their children would grow up Western, without the defect of Uyghurness. Some who thought Uyghurs had no future in China left to find foreign countries that might agree to take them. Some people believed that China’s supposedly high-quality and “bilingual” education was actually just a way to turn Uyghurs into obedient good-for-nothings, and so they yearned for the developed education systems of the West. They chose to become refugees rather than live without the freedom to raise their children fully in Uyghur culture. In 2011, more than twenty Uyghurs left for Kansas. Until that year, I never knew of more than four in the whole state. A wave of more than a thousand others ended up in European refugee camps and eventually were granted asylum—more than the number who’d fled there after the communists conquered East Turkestan in 1949. Others equated their journey out of China to the pilgrimage of the Prophet Muhammad, who’d left his own home in Mecca for freedom in Medina. 

If you managed to get out, people called you a winner. Once, when I was talking with a friend, I brought up a merchant we’d known whose business had failed. But when I mentioned that he’d gone on to settle in Turkey, my friend was amazed. “Wow,” he said. “He really made it in the end.”

So I decided to leave Urumqi and return to my hometown of Kashgar. I was excited to take a semester or two off to spend more time with Mesude and teach her to speak Uyghur. Going back to Kashgar was like reuniting with an old friend who I’d not seen in years. The covered, snaking streets. The neighborhoods crammed with old two-story houses. The ancient mosques—although now, they were unlocked only during prayer time. The sprawling markets in the shade of willows that teemed with men’s doppas—our traditional skullcaps—and women’s headscarves. You could see the seasons change by the front steps of the Heytgah Mosque, where people sold cold yogurt drinks or tea from a steaming samovar. 

Nearby were restaurants and pottery shops that old Kashgar families had run for generations. The sound of the city was music. The dumpling makers sang as they counted out orders: “Oh! One manta! Two manta! Three manta!” The bowl makers and blacksmiths kept the beat with their hammers as the call to prayer echoed down narrow alleys where each craft had its own market. In the coat bazaar, the instrument bazaar, or the hat bazaar, there were hundreds of the same item for sale, handmade in every color imaginable. Even after the government evicted Kashgaris from the Old City to tear down the ancient buildings and replace them with replicas for tourists, the soul of my hometown survived. In Kashgar, you never heard the gunshots or screams that kept people in Urumqi on edge. Urumqi was a gray city of security fences, where cops set up surveillance stations on your street, and you could get carried off with a black sack pulled over your head. I thought Kashgar could never become like that.

But even Kashgar had changed. Before I left, I’d barely heard the word hijrah, or sacred migration, outside Qur’an readings at the mosque. But now, back home, it was constantly coming up in conversation, and people there meant something different by it than in cosmopolitan Urumqi. During Friday prayers one week, the imam denounced a book that called for Uyghurs to live abroad. It said they should move to Muslim countries where they could practice their faith freely and raise their children in it, and that God would reward them for living in the lands of the caliphate. None of this was true, the imam said, because after the Prophet liberated Mecca, he announced the end of migration as a religious duty. In 2004, I’d heard words like these on the virtue of migration from an Uyghur who helped students find schools in Malaysia. He’d get excited and say, “Going to Malaysia to study is just like going on hijrah” He collected payments from many students and ran visa scams with Han-owned language schools. I was furious with him. 

The imam went on about those who thought that sending their children abroad to countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt was hijrah. He said that if a child hasn’t grown up in a family and society that provides him with an Islamic education, sending him to study even in Mecca won’t ensure he lives a moral life. I wondered what could drive someone to call even the most rudimentary work abroad hijrah and indebt themselves to Han smugglers to get there. 

He said that just leaving for another country wasn’t hijrah and that besides, it was wrong to recommend it either way. He spoke of the Uyghurs who’d been duped by smugglers and left to die in the forests of Vietnam and the rice paddies of Thailand. But since the imam devoted an entire sermon to this, people’s desire to leave must’ve truly been strong.

Back when it seemed that China would keep granting freedom to the Uyghurs, we began to reconnect with the rest of the Islamic world. Young Uyghurs went to study at Al-Azhar in Cairo, traders split time between Kashgar and Uzbekistan, and businessmen set up shop in Istanbul. They brought back the Turkish language, Bollywood, and a new, stricter vision of Islam. When the Chinese government began to tighten the leash, suddenly fearful of what it had allowed us, many saw piety as a way to fight back. Some women traded the traditional Uyghur headscarf for full veils, and mullahs denounced our traditional music and dance as un-Islamic. The Chinese Communist Party called this “Talibanization” and tried to stamp it out. 

Now, after the bloodshed on the streets of Urumqi, the Uyghur masses were in deep shock and terrified for their safety. Intellectuals who knew where things were headed fell into despair. Those who could leave, did. Choosing to stay meant I had more in common with those who took refuge in religion or even with the naive who told themselves things would go back to normal. 

Why would I choose to return, knowing about the surveillance, detentions, and slander that awaited me? Let my daughter push me away if it meant she’d stay Uyghur. Let my daughter shine, as I had, thriving in Uyghur misfortune. Only in this way could she become Uyghur. What worried me most was my daughter calmly analyzing our disaster from a distance. Even if my daughter spoke Uyghur, as long as she didn’t know what was happening to our people, she wouldn’t really be Uyghur. I reminded myself that as horrible as life was in Kashgar, having her grow up in America would cut her off from who she was. I chose to raise her in the same conditions that had made me Uyghur. 

But things in Kashgar didn’t go as I hoped. Within two weeks, I started to regret coming back. It wasn’t just hearing so much hopelessness, nihilism, and apathy from the people around me. On the first phone call I made, the sound began to echo. I tried buying phones from a couple other brands, but no matter whom I called, I heard my own voice played back to me. People told me that it sounded like my voice was coming from another room and that they’d also hear their own voice bounce back at them. Not only that, but all the people opening language schools who I’d been hoping to collaborate with in Kashgar believed I had been blacklisted and even that I was being followed. In the end, I couldn’t find anyone who’d agree to work with me. Meanwhile, my daughter could barely speak Uyghur and struggled having anyone to talk to in English besides my wife and me. 

Despite it all, I managed to open the school. We quickly reached full enrollment, and others started similar programs in other cities. For a short time, it seemed that the government might leave me alone—the state-run local news even began filming a profile on me. But it couldn’t last. Strangers called to deliver vague threats and warnings. I began to prepare for the worst. No one was surprised when the police showed up at my house and invited me back to the station. 

I was in prison from August 19, 2013 to November 27, 2014, though for all I knew, it would be forever. In a quick show trial, I—along with two friends who helped run the school—was convicted of “fraudulent fundraising.” There was never any doubt about the real reason we were targeted—I was forced to wear the yellow vest of a political prisoner at all times. 

In Chinese prisons, society follows its own rules. Strength keeps you safe, and violent criminals sit at the top of the hierarchy. Political prisoners, set apart by their special uniforms, lie at the bottom. But every prison was different. In some, the guards were a constant presence, always threatening a beating. Köktagh prison was run mostly by the inmates. Each cell had a boss and underlings picked out by the guards—the second-in-command in mine was a Hui named Hai Xiaoyang. He was cruel, though in ways I was used to by that point. For no reason, he made other prisoners sleep on the floor. I bided my time, waiting for a chance to change him. One day, I interpreted between him and an Uyghur prisoner. Xiayang was surprised by my Chinese proficiency and asked me who I was. When I mentioned my time in Beijing, America, and Turkey, the sneer on his face was replaced by curiosity. 

I began to teach English to Xiaoyang. Instead of spending all day, every day, sitting cross-legged in my cell, I got to move my arms and legs a bit. He’d already known a bit of the language, and since he was still young, he picked it up easily. To start, I prepared some short texts for him to memorize. Once I’d taught him sentences about daily life in the cell and the names of the objects within it, I wouldn’t let him speak to me in Chinese. Within a month or two, he could read and understand English texts up to a half a page long. Since I was such a devoted and approachable teacher, he stopped saying “no” to me in other matters. Gradually, his insults and curses toward the other Uyghur prisoners stopped too. I passed him readings on the importance of compassion, equality, respect, freedom, and justice. 

One day, he said to me, “I admit it, I was wrong. I won’t do anything to hurt Uyghurs. I’ll never be that evil.” He fell silent. “Not just us,” I said. “Anyone.” Xiaoyang was the grandson of a mullah, but his mother was Han. He’d spent his childhood feeling ashamed in front of adults and learned to keep his distance from other people.

For over a year, I grew close with people like Xiaoyang. It’s possible, I discovered, to be friends with someone who beats you. Many of the common criminals I got to know were young Uyghurs already hardened by the cruelty of life in Xinjiang. There was Memetyüsüp, the Uyghur orphan who’d killed the Han pedophile given custody of his sister. Gheyret, the heroin addict, had been brought in at eighteen for stealing a piece of jade. He’d found God, and I was tortured for teaching him how to pray during Ramadan. Yaqupjan came in clutching the amulet his mother had made for him. On his first day in prison, our cellmates tore it from his hands. 

 They let me go as abruptly as they’d arrested me. One evening, I was rushed out from prison and driven to the Urumqi municipal court. With the invisible motions I’d picked up in prison—a slight bend in my back and a flick of my hand—I prayed for the patience and health of friends who I was now leaving behind. But I also forgave our oppressors. They were victims of a broken system. Even the man who’d arrested me in Kashgar, the one who’d torn off my clothes. Even the cops who forced me to dance like a monkey and crawl on all fours like a donkey in front of dozens of people. Inside the car as we drove away, one of the officers asked the others, “If these people ever get us, won’t they do the same things?” Everything they’d subjected me to melted away. Well done, I thought. God forbid that our legacy ever be sinking to the level of you and your government. If we did what you’ve done, would we be any different from you? This is how animals behave. What human being would ever bite back at the animal who’d bitten his leg? I still remember how, in my evening prayer after I was released, I threw away my anger alongside my filthy prison slippers. 

A few weeks before I left America, I’d debated my decision on the phone with a trusted Uyghur scholar. He advised me to stay. I began to defend my choice, but the conversation was cut short. I’d been counting on his support. Without it, I felt much less sure of what I was about to do. After that, I stopped asking people I knew in America what they thought, and many of them didn’t even realize that I was going to leave. Some even offered to help me find a job. Uyghurs who’d made it to America would never think of going back. I worried that if I mentioned my plan to them, they’d talk me out of it, so I never brought it up. 

Going back was my wife’s idea. One day, when she went to see some Turkish friends of ours, the conversation turned to the parts of life in the United States they found frustrating. Mesude couldn’t take it. “Why are you saying bad things about America? I love America!” she said. Everyone was shocked. Not long after, she announced, “I’m going to marry Jason.” I laughed so hard I couldn’t speak. Jason was a Black boy from her preschool.  

Mesude was four years old and beginning to learn how people were different. In her understanding, there were parents and kids, girls and boys, men and women, small and big. There were also, she said, American and Uyghur. Within all of these, she thought of herself as a kid, a girl, small, and American. My daughter had first learned she was Uyghur when she was trapped during the riots at home, when she was chased in the streets, when the bus she boarded with her mother was surrounded by men,  armed and grinning, when she saw those Han grown-ups coming to hurt her. 

When she first arrived in America, she was still terrified of riding the bus. But life in America helped her forget she was Uyghur. Within a year, she even forgot how to pronounce the word. America was hers, and she wouldn’t have us criticizing it. I thought of her growing up in America, becoming foreign to her own people. I knew that if I returned, I could be surveilled, detained, or worse, but these were risks I took for my daughter. 

The first person I had to tell about my decision was my thesis advisor. She’d spent two years guiding me in my research and had helped me secure a stipend to support myself through the completion of a PhD. “Are you sure?” she replied over email. Afterward, I spent a long time handwriting a letter explaining myself and, to thank her for the untiring kindness she’d shown me, delivered it along with five or six books I’d brought from East Turkestan. I never got a response. 

My wife and I spent the final days of that May packing everything we wanted to bring back. But the preparations were easy compared to the conversations. My friends joked about my new life in America, and I wouldn’t correct them. Yet I couldn’t refuse when a childhood friend called me up as we were emptying our apartment and invited us to visit his new house in Nebraska. We stayed for two days. He and I spoke late into the night. He tried to talk me out of leaving, and as I listened to what he had to say, I couldn’t bear to disagree. I agreed to stay. In the morning, we woke up to perfect weather. “It’s such a beautiful day,” I said as I opened up his windows. “Yeah,” my friend replied. “Because you’re not going back.” My heart sank as I remembered what I’d told him. I kept up the lie until the day before our flight, but he must have been able to tell that I’d made up my mind. “In case you’re still thinking about leaving,” he said, “if you try, I’ll come to the airport to arrest you myself. I’ll lock you up in my basement for so long your visa will expire and you’ll have to just stay there.”

Sometimes, when I had second thoughts, it strengthened my resolve to remember that Mesude had forgotten how to pronounce the word Uyghur. For our first six months in America, we spoke in Uyghurche, but later, even if we pushed her, she’d only reply to us in English. She used to love long phone calls with her grandparents, but as her ability in the language weakened, she’d refuse to join in our conversations. Once, when we were calling people back home, she threw a fit over something small and wouldn’t talk to us. 

I bit back my anger and asked what was wrong. “Why do you keep talking about things I can’t understand?” she asked. And she was right. The world we spoke about in our long conversations with people back home was an Uyghur one, built on the Uyghur language. But what my American daughter saw, learned, and felt took shape in her mind in English. Even though we lived in the same house, Mesude was in her own English world. Our daughter loved us and wanted to share a world with us, but she knew that the one inside her head was beautiful, and she wouldn’t allow it to be conquered. Still, staying in America would mean losing her. 

I felt that an Uyghur who couldn’t stand with her father at Eid prayers in the mosque wasn’t really an Uyghur. Neither was one whose heart stood still at the service’s seven takbirs. If my daughter couldn’t go with her mother in matching black headscarves on Laylat al-Qadr and Eid al-Fitr to weep among relatives at her grandfather’s grave, if the sound of the Qur’an’s surahs and ayats couldn’t set her trembling, then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. If she didn’t stop me on my way home from the mosque and ask, “Daddy, what do they say there? What does it mean?” then I couldn’t make her Uyghur. Life in Kashgar would be harder for all of us, but I owed it to my daughter. Returning was my hope, my right, my pleasure, and my good fortune.

Translated by Avi Ackermann.

The post I risked prison to keep the Uyghur culture alive appeared first on Coda Story.

Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world's biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today's arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It's almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive "political reeducation" program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don't think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won't be easy,” he said. “It's not an unmitigated win-win.”

The post Why are climate skeptics speaking out about the Uyghur genocide? appeared first on Coda Story.

This is the command center of Smart Aqkol, a pilot study in digitized urban infrastructure for Kazakhstan. When I visited, Andrey Kirpichnikov, the deputy director of Smart Aqkol, welcomed me inside. Donning a black Fila tracksuit and sneakers, the middle-aged Aqkol native scanned his face at a console that bore the logo for Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer. A turnstyle gave a green glow of approval and opened, allowing us to walk through. 

“All of our staff can access the building using their unique face IDs,” Kirpichnikov told me.

He led me into a room with a large monitor displaying a schematic of the village. The data inputs and connected elements that make up Smart Aqkol draw on everything from solar panels and gas meters to GPS trackers on public service vehicles and surveillance cameras, he explained. Analysts at the command center report their findings to the mayor’s office, highlighting data on energy use, school attendance rates and evidence for police investigations. 

“I see a huge future in what we’re doing here,” Kirpichnikov told me, gesturing at a heat map of the village on the big screen. “Our analytics keep improving and they are only going to get better as we expand the number of sensory inputs.”

“We’re trying to make life better, more efficient and safer,” he explained. “Who would be opposed to such a project?”

Smart Aqkol presents an experimental vision of Kazakhstan’s economic prospects and its technocratic leadership’s governing ambitions. In January 2019, when then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke at the project’s launch, he waxed about a future in which public officials could use networked municipal systems to run Kazakhstan “like a company.” The smart city model is appealing for leaders of the oil-rich nation, which has struggled to modernize its economy and shed its reputation for rampant government corruption. But analysts I spoke with say it also marks a turn toward Chinese-style public surveillance systems. Amid the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan’s engagement with China has deepened as a way to hedge against dependence on Russia, its former colonial patron.

Kazakhstan’s smart city initiatives aren’t starting from a digital zero. The country has made strides in digitizing public services, and now ranks second among countries of the former Soviet Union in the United Nations’ e-governance development index. (Estonia is number one.) The capital Astana also has established itself as a regional hub for fintech innovation. 

And it’s not only government officials who want these systems. “There is a lot of domestic demand, not just from the state but also from Kazakhstan’s middle class,” said Erica Marat, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University. There’s an allure about smart city systems, which in China and other Asian cities are thought to have improved living standards and reduced crime.

They also hold some promise of increasing transparency around the work of public officials. “The government hopes that digital platforms can overcome cases of petty corruption,” said Oyuna Baldakova, a technology researcher at King’s College London. This would be a welcome shift for Kazakhstan, which currently ranks 101st out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

But the pilot in Aqkol doesn’t quite align with these grander ambitions, at least not yet. Back at the command center, Kirpichnikov described how Aqkol saw a drop in violent crime and alcohol-related offenses after the system’s debut. But in a town of this size, where crime rates rarely exceed single digits, these kinds of shifts don’t say a whole lot. 

As if to better prove the point, the team showed me videos of crime dramatizations that they recorded using the Smart Aqkol surveillance camera system. In the first video, one man lifted another off the ground in what was meant to mimic a violent assault, but looked much more like the iconic scene where Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey overhead at the end of “Dirty Dancing.” Another featured a man brandishing a Kalashnikov in one hand, while using the other to hold his cellphone to his ear. In each case, brightly colored circles and arrows appeared on the screen, highlighting “evidence” of wrongdoing that the cameras captured, like the lift and the Kalashnikov.

Kirpichnikov then led me into Smart Aqkol’s “situation room,” where 14 analysts sat facing a giant LED screen while they tracked various signals around town. Contrary to the high-stakes energy that one might expect in a smart city situation room, the atmosphere here felt more like that of a local pub, with the analysts trading gossip about neighbors as they watched them walk by on monitors for street-level cameras.

Kirpichnikov explained that residents can connect their gas meters to their bank accounts and set up automatic gas payments. This aspect of Smart Aqkol has been a boon for the village. Residents I spoke with praised the new payment system — for decades, the only option was to stand in line to pay for their bills, an exercise that could easily take half a day’s time.

And there was more. To highlight the benefits of Smart Aqkol’s analytics work, Kirpichnikov told me about recent finding: “We were able to determine that school attendance is lower among children from poorly insulated households.” He pointed to a gradation of purple squares showing variance in heating levels across the village. “We could improve school grades, health and the living standards of residents just by updating our old heating systems,” he said.

Kirpichnikov might be right, but step away from the clean digital interface and any Aqkol resident could tell you that poor insulation is a serious problem in the apartment blocks where most people live, especially in winter when temperatures dip below freezing most nights. Broken windows covered with only a thin sheet of cellophane are a common sight. 

Walking around Aqkol, I was struck by the absence of paved roads and infrastructure beyond the village’s main street. Some street lamps work, but others don’t. And the public Wi-Fi that the village prides itself on offering only appeared to function near government buildings.

The village also has two so-called warm bus shelters — enclosed spaces with heat lamps to shelter waiting passengers during the harsh Kazakh winters. The stops are supposed to have Wi-Fi, charging ports for phones and single-channel TVs. When I passed by one of the shelters, I met an elderly Aqkol resident named Vera. “All of these things are gone,” she told me, waving her hand at evidence of vandalism. “Now all that’s left is the camera at the back.”

“I don’t know why we need all this nonsense here when we barely have roads and running water,” she added with a sigh. “Technology doesn’t make better people.”

Vera isn’t alone in her critique. Smart Aqkol has brought the village an elaborate overlay of digitization, but it’s plain to see that Aqkol still lags far behind modern Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty when it comes to basic infrastructure. A local resident named Lyubov Gnativa runs a YouTube channel where she talks about Aqkol’s lack of public services and officials’ failures to address these needs. The local government has filed police reports against Gnativa over the years, accusing her of misleading the public.

And a recent documentary made by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — titled “I Love My Town, But There’s Nothing Smart About It” — corroborates many of Gnativa’s observations and includes interviews with with dozens of locals drawing attention to water issues and the lack of insulation in many of the village’s homes.

But some residents say they are grateful for how the system has contributed to public safety. Surveillance cameras now monitor the village’s main thoroughfare from lampposts, as well as inside public schools, hospitals and municipal buildings.

“These cameras change the way people behave and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kirpichnikov. He told a story about a local woman who was recently harassed on a public bench, noting that this kind of interaction would often escalate in the past. “The woman pointed at the camera and the man looked up, got scared and began to walk away.”

A middle-aged schoolteacher named Irina told me she feels much safer since the project was implemented in 2019. “I have to walk through a public park at night and it can be intimidating because a lot of young men gather there,” she said. “After the cameras were installed they never troubled me again."

The Smart Aqkol project was the result of a deal between Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s national telecommunications company; the Eurasian Resources Group, a state-backed mining company; and Tengri Lab, a tech startup based in Astana. But the hardware came through an agreement under China’s Digital Silk Road initiative, which seeks to wire the world in a way that tends to reflect China’s priorities when it comes to public infrastructure and social control. Smart Aqkol uses surveillance cameras made by Chinese firms Dahua and Hikvision, which in China have been used — and touted, even — for their ability to track “suspicious” people and groups. Both companies are sanctioned by the U.S. due to their involvement in surveilling and aiding in the repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in western China.

Critics are wary of these kinds of systems in Kazakhstan, where skepticism of China’s intentions in Central Asia has been growing. The country is home to a large Uyghur diaspora of more than 300,000 people, many of whom have deep ties to Xinjiang, where both ethnic Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs have been systematically targeted and placed in “re-education” camps. Protests across Kazakhstan in response to China’s mass internment campaign have forced the government to negotiate the release of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs from China, but state authorities have walked this line carefully, in an effort to continue expanding economic ties with Beijing.

Although Kazakhstan requires people to get state permission if they want to hold a protest — and permission is regularly denied — demonstrations nevertheless have become increasingly common in Kazakhstan since 2018. With Chinese-made surveillance tech in hand, it’s become easier than ever for Kazakh authorities to pinpoint unauthorized concentrations of people. Hikvision announced in December 2022 that its software is used by Chinese police to set up “alarms” that are triggered when cameras detect “unlawful gatherings” in public spaces. The company also has claimed that its cameras can detect ethnic minorities based on their unique facial features.

Marat of U.S. National Defense University noted the broader challenges posed by surveillance tech. “We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic how quickly such tech can be adapted to other purposes such as enforcing lockdowns and tracing people’s whereabouts.”

“Such technology could easily be used against protest leaders too,” she added.

In January 2022, instability triggered by rising energy prices resulted in the government issuing “shoot to kill” orders against protesters — more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing clashes. The human rights news and advocacy outlet Bitter Winter wrote at the time that China had sent a video analytics team to Kazakhstan to use cameras it had supplied to identify and arrest protesters. Anonymous sources in their report alleged that the facial profiles of slain protesters were later compared with the facial data of individuals who appeared in surveillance video footage of riots, in an effort to justify government killings of “terrorists.”

With security forming a central promise of the smart city model, broad public surveillance is all but guaranteed. The head of Tengri Lab, the company leading the development of Smart Aqkol, has said in past interviews that school security was a key motivation behind the company’s decision to spearhead the use of artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

“After the high-profile incident in Kerch, we added the ability to automatically detect weapons,” he said, referencing a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea that left more than 20 people dead in October 2018. In that same speech he made an additional claim: “All video cameras in the city automatically detect massive clusters of people,” a veiled reference to the potential for this technology to be used against protesters.

Soon, there will be more smart city systems across Kazakhstan. Smart Aqkol and Kazakhtelecom have signed memorandums of understanding with Almaty, home to almost 2 million people, and Karaganda, with half a million, to develop similar systems. “The mayor of Karaganda was impressed by our technology and capabilities, but he was mainly interested in the surveillance cameras,” Kirpichnikov told me.

As to the question of whether these systems share data with Chinese officials, “we simply don’t have a clear answer on who has the data and how it is used,” Marat told me. “We can’t say definitively whether China has access but we know its companies are extremely dependent on the Chinese state.”

When I reached out to Tengri Lab to ask whether there are concerns regarding the safety of private data connected to the project, the company declined to comment.

What does all this mean for Aqkol? The village is so small that the faces captured on camera are rarely those of strangers. The analysts told me they recognize most of the town’s 13,000 inhabitants between them. I asked whether this makes people uncomfortable, knowing their neighbors are watching them at all times.

Danir, a born-and-raised Aqkol analyst in the situation room, told me he doesn’t believe the platform will be abused. “All my friends and family know I am watching from this room and keeping them safe,” he said. “I don’t think anybody feels threatened — we are their friends, their neighbors.”

“People fear what they don’t understand and people complain about the cameras until they need them,” said Kirpichnikov. “There was a woman once who spoke publicly against the project but after we returned her lost handbag — after we spotted it on a camera — she started to see the benefits of what we are building here.”

After a few years with the system up and running, “it’s normal,” said Danir with a shrug. “Nobody has complained to me.”

For regular people, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. And that may be OK, at least for now. As Irina, the young school teacher whom I met on the village’s main thoroughfare, put it: “I don’t really know what a smart city is, but I like living here. They say we’re safer and my bills are lower than they used to be, and I’m happy.”

The post The smart city where everybody knows your name appeared first on Coda Story.

Hundreds of Uyghurs fled China in 2014, as the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown on the Muslim-majority ethnic group native to the northwest region of Xinjiang. The aim, the government said, was to stamp out extremism and separatist movements in the region. The authorities called it the “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” and created a program of repression to closely monitor, surveil and control the Uyghur population.

The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones. 

Back in 2014, Uyghurs seeking to flee the burgeoning crackdown were forced to take a notoriously dangerous route, known as the “smugglers’ road,” through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand into Malaysia — from there, they could reach Turkey. Though Malaysia had previously deported some Uyghur Muslims to China, in 2018, a Malaysian court released 11 Uyghurs on human rights grounds and allowed them safe passage to Turkey. By September 2020, despite Chinese anger, Malaysia declared it would not extradite Uyghurs seeking refuge in a third country. 

But before they could make it to Malaysia, many Uyghurs were detained by the immigration authorities in Thailand and returned to China. Human rights groups condemned the deportations, saying that Uyghurs returned to China “disappear into a black hole” and face persecution and torture upon their return. 

Hashim Mohammed, 26, was 16 when he left China. He spent three years in detention in Thailand before making a dramatic escape. He now lives in Turkey — but thoughts of his fellow inmates, who remain in Thai detention, are with him every day. This is his account of how he made it out of China through the smugglers’ road. 

Hashim’s Story 

On New Year’s Day, in 2019, I was released from immigration detention in Istanbul. It was late evening — around 10 p.m. It was the first time I had walked free in five years. And it was the end of my long journey from China’s Uyghur region, which I ran away from in 2014. 

It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious. 

The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.

After some time, the gym closed — like lots of similar gyms all over the Uyghur region. People around me were being arrested, seemingly for no good reason. I realized I couldn't live the way I wanted in my hometown, so I decided to leave. 

At that time, thousands of Uyghurs were doing the same thing. I had heard of a smugglers’ route out of China, through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and eventually to Malaysia. From there, I’d be able to fly to Turkey and start a new life. We called it the “illegal way.” It’s very quick once you leave China, it only takes seven days to get to Malaysia. 

At the border leaving China, we met with the smugglers who would get us out. They stuffed around 12 of us into a regular car, all of us sitting on top of each other. I was traveling alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the car. 

I remember one guy, Muhammad, who I met in the car for the first time. He was from the same area as me. He was with his wife and two kids and seemed friendly. 

The road was terrifying. There was a pit of anxiety in my stomach as the smugglers drove through the mountainous jungle at night at breakneck speed. I watched the speedometer needle always hovering above 100 kmph (about 60 mph), and I couldn’t help thinking about how many people were in the car. We heard about another group, crossing the border into Cambodia in a boat, who nearly drowned. After just seven days, we reached Thailand and the border with Malaysia. We sat in the jungle, trying to decide what to do — we could try climbing the border fence. 

But we also saw a rumor on WhatsApp that if you handed yourself in to the Thai border police, they would let you cross the border to Malaysia and fly onward to Turkey within 15 days. People on the app were saying some Uyghurs had already managed it. At this point, we’d been sleeping outside, in the jungle, for days, and we believed it. We handed ourselves in, and the police took a group of us to a local immigration detention center in the Thai jungle. 

Fifteen days slipped by, and we began to realize that we’d made a terrible mistake. With every day that passed, our hope that we would get to Turkey slipped away a little further. No one came to help us. We were worried that the Thai authorities would send us back to China.  

I was put in a dark cell with 12 guys — all Uyghurs like me, all trying to escape China. Throughout our time in jail, we lived under the constant threat of being deported back to China. We were terrified of that prospect. We tried many times to escape.

I never imagined that I would stay there for three years and eight months, from the ages of 16 to 19. I used to dream about what life would be like if I was free. I thought about simply walking down the street and could hardly imagine it. 

There were no windows in the cell, just a little vent at the very top of the room. We used to take turns climbing up, using a rope made out of plastic bags, just to look through the vent. Through the grill, we could see that Thailand was very beautiful. It was so lush. We had never seen such a beautiful, green place. Day and night, we climbed up the rope to peer out through the vent. 

We knew that the detention center we were in was very close to the Thai border. One guy who I shared the cell with figured out something about the place we were in. The walls, he said, in this building built for the heat were actually very thin.

We managed to get hold of two tools. A spoon and an old nail. 

We began, painstakingly, to gouge a hole in the wall of the bathroom block. We took turns. Day and night, we had a rota and quietly scraped away at the wall, making a hole just big enough for a man to fit through. There was a camera in the cell, and the guards checked on us frequently. But they didn’t check the bathroom — and the camera couldn’t see into the bathroom area, either. 

We all got calluses and cuts on our hands from using these flimsy tools to try to dig through the wall. We each pulled 30-minute shifts. To the guards watching the cameras, it looked like we were just taking showers. 

The guys in the cell next door to ours were working on a hole of their own. We planned to coordinate our breakout at the same time, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. 

We dug through as much of the wall as we could, without breaking through to the other side until the last moment. There was just a thin layer of plaster between us and the outside world. We drew numbers to decide who would be the first to climb out. Out of 12 people, I drew the number four. A good number, all things considered. My friend Muhammad, who I met on the journey to Thailand, pulled number nine. Not so good.

That Sunday, we all pretended to go to sleep. With the guards checking on us every few hours, we lay there with our eyes shut and our minds racing, thinking about what we were about to do.

Two a.m. rolled around. Quietly, carefully, we removed the last piece of the wall, pulling it inward without a noise. The first, second and third man slipped through the hole, jumped down and ran out of the compound. Then it was my turn. I clambered through the hole, jumped over the barbed wire below me and ran.

The guys in the next cell had not prepared things as well as us. They still had a thick layer of cement to break through. They ripped the basin off the bathroom wall and used it to smash through the last layer. It made an awful sound. The guards came running. Six more guys got out after me, but two didn’t make it. One of them was Muhammad. 

The detention center we were in wasn’t very high security. The gate into the complex had been left unlocked. We sprinted out of it, barefoot, in just our shorts and t-shirts, and ran into the jungle on the other side of the road, where we all scattered. 

I hid out for eight days in the jungle as the guards and the local police tracked us through the trees. I had saved some food from my prison rations and drank the water that dripped off the leaves in the humidity.

It’s impossible to move through the undergrowth without making a lot of noise — so when the police got close, we had to just stay dead still and hope they wouldn’t find us. At one point, we were completely surrounded by the police and could hear their voices and their dogs barking and see their flashlights through the trees. It was terrifying.

Finally, after days of walking and hiding in the undergrowth, we made it to Thailand’s border with Malaysia. It’s a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. I managed to climb it and jump over — but the guy I was with couldn’t make it. He was later caught and sent back to detention.

In total, there were 20 of us who had managed to break out of the Thai jail. Eleven made it to Malaysia. The others were caught and are still in the detention center in Thailand. 

After spending another year in detention in Malaysia, I was finally able to leave for Turkey. After two months in Turkish immigration detention, I walked free. I had spent my best years — from the age of 16 until 21 — in a cell. I feel such sorrow when I think of the others who didn’t make it. It’s a helpless feeling, knowing they’re still in there, living under the threat of being sent back to China. 

Now I have a good life in Istanbul. Every morning, I go to the boxing gym. I’d like to get married and start my own family here. But half of me lives in my home region, and my dream is to one day go back to my home country.

Muhammad, my friend who I met on the smuggler’s road, is still in the Thai jail. He’s such an open and friendly person, and he was like my older brother inside. When the hope drained out of me and I broke down, he always reassured me and tried to calm me down. He would tell me stories about the history of Islam and the history of the Uyghur people. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. I think about him, and the other Uyghurs still trapped in Thailand, all the time.

The post Escaping China with a spoon and a rusty nail appeared first on Coda Story.

As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

The post In Istanbul, the last Uyghur bookshops struggle to survive appeared first on Coda Story.

Since 2017, China has arrested some 1.5 million Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking, majority-Muslim people, for “reeducation.” Under the auspices of counterterrorism, Beijing has unleashed a wave of repression and rage against the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang. Using a combination of demographic resettling and forced sterilization, concentration camps, a panopticon of 21st-century surveillance technology, and forced labor, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to eradicate Uyghur culture and identity. 

In 2020, Tursun was disappeared, reportedly sentenced to 16 years in prison. He is among the hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals interred by the state in its bid to erase an independent local identity. 

“I chose to translate ‘The Backstreets’ because it was a masterful work of modernist fiction,” Byler told me in an email exchange. “It also spoke to the issue I was researching as an ethnographer: how rural migrant Uyghurs live despite the forms of systematic discrimination they experience while navigating settler-colonial institutions in the city.”

A stranger in his own land, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the alienating effects of racial discrimination and the climate of fear choking Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi. In the modernist tradition, the novel follows a stream-of-consciousness journey of an unnamed labor migrant as he flees the poverty of the Uyghur countryside to take up a government post and find an apartment to live in. He wanders the streets shunned by those around him and horrified by the harsh urban landscape: “The murky condition of [Urumqi] in the fog, the murky mental condition of my brain, and the ambiguous position of my identity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region seemed to be totally of the same substance; sometimes they mirror each other, and sometimes they seep into each other.” 

Tursun captures this lonely atmosphere through his character’s fixation on discarded items such as used condoms, abandoned clothing, and garbage. Each of these items evokes a feeling of connection, meaning, or nostalgia for the unnamed narrator as he grasps for a sense of purpose in the face of the indifference of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The Party, embodied by his ever-smiling supervisor, has little interest in his culture or individuality, forcing him for instance to write in Mandarin despite his struggles with the language.

‘China’s Rushdie’

Perhat Tursun was born in 1969 in Xinjiang, across the border from today’s Republic of Kyrgyzstan at the height of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His father, a schoolteacher, was arrested for “counterrevolutionary activites” while Red Guards terrorized the Uyghur countryside. 

Following Mao’s death in 1976, China embarked on market and ideological reforms, offering new space for Uyghur culture to breathe. It was during these years that Tursun moved to Beijing on a government scholarship to study world literature, and quickly immersed himself in the works of Kafka, Nietzsche, and Camus. 

Tursun’s own writing echoed the existentialist themes of his heroes, earning fans and hostile critics alike. Tursun drew comparisons to the author Salman Rushdie after his 1999 novel The Art of Suicide incensed Xinjiang’s Islamic establishment and led to book burnings and death threats. The region’s publishers — which are largely state-run — refused to publish Tursun’s work for the next 16 years. 

But Tursun has never considered his work to be political. In an illuminating essay that accompanies the novel, the Uyghur author compares his writing to Communist-era Czech author Milan Kundera: “Kundera is also writing about the human experience, but because of his circumstances, his fiction gets read as somehow political. It doesn’t start from politics, it just gets pulled into it. Human relationships are the center; they just get blocked by politics. The same is true for most writers if they are really honest.”

Byler informs me that Tursun, whom he knew personally, always expressed suspicion of ideological dogma and preferred to imagine a world of diverse possibilities. “In the end,” Byler says, “state authorities came to see Uyghur freedom of thought as potentially dangerous.”

A City Torn Apart

“The Backstreets” took Tursun 15 years to write and it meticulously documents the ethnic and class tensions that led to the explosive 2009 Urumqi riots and their aftermath. Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to rent a room “the size of a grave.”

Unlike Han migrants who came to the region in search of lucrative jobs in the oil sector, Uyghurs struggled to find work. According to Byler, while some Uyghurs remained within these institutions, the hierarchies of power came to center on Han individuals and values they brought with them, rather than the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Other forms of discrimination permeated this rapidly gentrifying city. Rental and house-ownership regulations often prevented Uyghurs from becoming permanent residents in the city, while Han migrant resettlement in Xinjiang cities was encouraged and subsidized by the government. “During my fieldwork in the region,” says Byler, “settlers ranging from taxi drivers to university teachers told me over and over again that they viewed Uyghur migrants and colleagues as ‘backward’ and uncivilized.”

In one illuminating passage, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the gaze of racist contempt all-too familiar to Uyghurs: “This wasn’t the only moment when those eyes had stared ruthlessly at me. They appeared in my heart from the first time I opened my eyes to the world, like a poisonous snake. They continually stung my heart cruelly, making me writhe with pain.” 

In addition to being ostracized, Uyghurs are forced to constantly prove their worth. Tursun explores this theme through his protagonist’s Kafkaesque job writing official letters in a language imposed upon him by a state that treats him with such scorn. Despite his education and rank in the bureaucracy, the protagonist feels like a second-class citizen. This is made evident when he encounters a Han janitor whose “kingly attitude” and decisiveness of voice in Mandarin make him feel worthless. 

The narrator fixates on the injustice around him, falling into a destructive rage. “While I wandered about without finding even a place the size of a tomb in which I could fit my body, at the same time, others lived in apartments in giant buildings, cruised the streets in fast cars, and ate piles of food in restaurants; I began to hate people. Even though I was the shyest person in the world, I wanted to destroy those fancy buildings.”

This complex interplay of racial and class tensions created the powder keg that exploded in Urumqi on July 5, 2009. That evening, following a peaceful demonstration led by Uyghur students, the city erupted into ethnic violence. For three days, groups of Han and Uyghur youth prowled the streets with spiked clubs and machetes, killing one another in fierce brawls. By the end, the streets were covered in skull fragments, broken bodies, and pools of blood. 

These grim scenes are referenced when Tursun’s protagonist walks through a rain soaked alleyway. “I heard the sloshing sound of muddy footsteps as I walked. This noise made me really sad. I didn’t know why this sound made me sad. Perhaps it was because it sounded like blood splattering on the ground.”

The ‘People’s War’

The thickening fog in “The Backstreets” acts as a metaphor for the nationalist xenophobia blanketing Xi Jinping’s China. As the protagonist wades through the fog he sees a Han Chinese man approaching, muttering to himself about his desire to eradicate the entire Uyghur population by chopping them down with an ax. The word “chop” is repeated over 200 times to indicate his obsessive fixation on violence. “Every time he said the word ‘chop,’ in his mind, a man’s head was being cut off to roll on the ground, covered with blood.” 

This mindset forms the deep rot at the heart of society, corroding everyone it touches. “It wasn’t hard to see from his face that his anger was wearing down his soul. It looked like it was a straw roof being blown by the wind, or like perhaps it was being eaten out by a worm.”

Perhat references the Holocaust as the fog begins to take the shape of a “huge communal shower room.” Gruesome images are evoked, as people fantasize about carving up one another’s naked flesh to watch the blood spurt out. In his vision, it forms the crimson colors of the Chinese flag — perhaps a metaphor for ethnonationalism as social diversity is recast as one nation by threat of force. 

In another harrowing passage, Perhat reflects on the way people are more outraged by random acts of killing than they are by industrialized slaughter. “If the massacre took place in an orderly way, it seemed like an acceptable thing to people, and they stayed silent, bowing their heads.” 

For all the novel’s dark musings on identity, the nature of existence, and political violence, there are glimmers of hope that pierce through the fog. Confronted with the open hostility of his employer, our protagonist concludes that his life must be valuable otherwise it would not evoke such visceral contempt. He finds comfort in this knowledge and concludes that his greatest power and his strongest act of defiance is simply to keep on living.

“That’s right, the greatest thing in the world is living. There is nothing greater than living!” 

The post Ethnic violence, fear and alienation in Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

They told him how they “dealt” with people who went to the west on intelligence missions and then severed contact with the authorities. 

“Wherever you go, we can always take you back. You have no other way except to work for us,” they said. When they dropped him off at the airport, they said, “Little brother, if you ever start to forget what we told you, just look at the moon. Wherever you can see the moon, we can find you.”

It was early 2018. The Chinese agents sent Omer to Dubai, with the hope that he would continue on to Europe to spy on the Uyghur diaspora.

He had instructions to infiltrate Uyghur groups and send back information about activists working to draw attention to the human rights crisis in northwest China.

Omer said the Chinese agents had spent months grooming, threatening and brainwashing him, and in turn, Omer persuaded his handlers that they’d produced a loyal Chinese citizen, who would be able to do the state’s bidding. 

In Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan, more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are thought to have been locked up in concentration camps, as well as detention centers, prisons and forced labor complexes. 

Omer, 31, is one of very few Uyghurs to escape Xinjiang in recent years. He’s fled almost as far as it is possible to go: to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town at the northernmost tip of Norway, just a few miles away from the Russian border. He arrived in January.

Here in the Arctic, where the northern lights flicker overhead and every sound is muted by the snow, he feels safer than he’s felt in years.

“I sleep better here,” he said. “It almost feels like I’ve come to the edge of the world.”

There are roughly 2,500 Uyghurs in Norway. With its famously egalitarian laws and democratic values, Norway — the world’s top-ranking democracy, home to the Nobel Peace Prize — seems like it should be the safest place on earth. 

It’s not — not for the Uyghurs trying to live here. 

“Close to 100%” of Uyghurs living in Norway face surveillance, intimidation and censorship from the Chinese state, according to Uyghur activists in Norway.

They describe a collective sense of unease among Norwegian Uyghurs — a feeling of constantly being watched. 

“Uyghurs here often say we would like to live free from psychological pressure, just like the Europeans do,” said Bahtiyar Omer, director of a Norwegian Uyghur justice group in Oslo (Bahtiyar Omer and Memettursun Omer are not related). “But it’s really difficult, and we never feel secure.”

Last year, his mother in Xinjiang told him that police had been visiting her regularly. She warned him to be careful in Norway. “She told me, ‘The police know everything. They even know what’s happening inside your house.’” 

He described how police will call Uyghur Norwegians via WhatsApp from inside their relatives’ homes in Xinjiang, and begin pressuring them to hand over information and stop their activism. The calls trigger tremendous anxiety for Uyghurs in Norway, who fear their families will be taken hostage if they don’t respond. 

“This is just the way the Chinese government tests out different methods and sees who can easily be controlled,” Omer said. 

The aim is to silence the Uyghurs in Norway.

In the past, Uyghurs in Europe have pleaded with their families back in Xinjiang to be careful, to watch out for the authorities and to not speak out against the Chinese line. Now, the same thing is also happening in reverse. Uyghurs inside China are warning their families abroad to keep silent, to stop their activism, and to watch out for themselves — in Istanbul and London, on the snowy streets of Oslo, and in small Norwegian towns far above the Arctic circle.

I was afraid when I came to Norway. That’s why I changed my name,” said Merdan, 34. Officially, he goes by the Norwegian name “Martin Gunnar.” But everyone knows him by his original Uyghur first name, Merdan. 

Merdan left his homeland in 2010 after being brutally tortured in Chinese prisons. 

He was living in an asylum camp in southern Norway when he got a phone call from a Chinese official who told him to keep silent about what he witnessed in Xinjiang’s prisons.

“He said if I told anybody what I experienced it would be dangerous for my family in East Turkestan,” he said.

During his early years in Norway, Merdan lived in fear of the officer’s words.

But in 2018, as the crisis in Xinjiang deepened, he decided he could no longer remain silent — even if it meant his family would be harmed. 

“No matter what we do, our parents will suffer under the Chinese government,” he said. 

Merdan began to speak out. He organized Uyghur youth activist groups in Oslo, began running an Islamic Uyghur cultural center, took media training, and built a home studio where he filmed news videos about the Uyghur crisis on YouTube. He also re-adopted his Uyghur first name.

Merdan said he has gone past the point of caring what information the Chinese authorities gathered about him. An ebullient figure with an easy laugh, he’s often seen wearing a Uyghur doppa — a traditional hat. 

He drives around Oslo in an Audi, with a Red Bull in the cupholder, his doppa on the dashboard, and an unmistakable license plate that defiantly says “UYGHUR”. He paid just over $1,000 to have rights to the vanity plate for a decade. 

“When I first got the license plate I drove five or six times past the Chinese Embassy. Because I’m not a terrorist, I’m doing nothing wrong.”

In addition to his work as an activist and filmmaker, Merdan spends his nights doing nursing training, visiting care homes and retirement residences to take care of the local elderly.

He does this work to feel a connection with his parents back in Xinjiang. “I cannot get back to my own country, and take care of my own parents. So I just think, if I can take care of other people’s parents, then I hope somebody can take care of my parents,” he said. 

In 2019, he got a video call. His father was sobbing while filming his mother, whose knees were broken and bandaged. 

“If you don’t stop what you’re doing, maybe we will come to further harm,” Merdan’s father said. “Look at your mother’s situation — it’s all because of you.” Merdan believes that his father meant the Chinese authorities would punish his mother if he carried on with his activism. 

In 2019 and 2020, his phone rang twice more. A man’s voice introduced himself as an officer with China’s security services. He asked, “Don’t you care about your parents? Don’t you care about your children?” The officer listed the names of Merdan’s children and their Oslo schools.

“They threatened me, suggesting ‘maybe I would get into a car accident’ or that ‘thieves might come into my house while I was on night shift,’” he said. 

The agent told Merdan that he knew about his loans from Norwegian banks, and proceeded to list the amounts. 

He offered to send Merdan money, indicating that in return, Merdan would spy on other Uyghurs, and stop his activism. Merdan refused. Instead, he installed multiple surveillance cameras around his house in Oslo.

“I told him, are you stupid? You don’t need to send money to Uyghurs to spy on me and collect my information. You might as well just give all the money to me! I’m making videos about what we are doing!” Merdan said. “Everything is open, we have nothing to hide!”

Merdan believes the Chinese authorities are setting up spies with the aim of creating rifts within the Uyghur community.

Uyghurs spy on each other, he explained, “not because of the money. They do it because they’re scared that their parents will get tortured or arrested, sent to the concentration camp or the jails.” 

“Nobody can trust anybody,” he added. 

The Chinese embassy in Oslo has been a source of anxiety for Uyghur Norwegians, who report regularly receiving automated calls from embassy phone numbers, informing them they need to come in and retrieve “emergency documents” or face being blocked at the border. One Uyghur man described getting as many as 20 calls in a matter of weeks while he was a student in high school.

The Chinese Embassy in Oslo denied all claims Uyghurs made of being tortured in prisons, coerced to spy, hacked, threatened, or contacted by the embassy or the Chinese authorities. “What you mentioned are totally groundless rumors and lies fabricated by anti-China forces,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “There is no evidence so far to support any of those accusations. In front of indisputable facts, a lie repeated a thousand times will remain a lie.”

In 2019, Oslo-based researcher and law student Muetter Iliqud, 24, began writing anonymous articles about Uyghur human rights issues for a Norwegian website run by Uyghurs. 

But her efforts to keep her writing secret were in vain. Several months after she began writing, her grandmother, living just outside Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, got a knock on the door. The Chinese National Security Bureau officers had arrived with printed versions of Iliqud’s work.

“I have no idea how they figured it out,” Iliqud said. Her grandmother received a warning from the police, who also asked her for Iliqud's contact details in Norway. “She ended up in trouble because of my anonymous articles.” 

When Iliqud heard about these visits, she felt a wave of guilt. “I felt like it was my fault that my family was threatened. But then I kept telling myself that I did nothing wrong.”

Iliqud stopped using a pseudonym, and instead became more vocal. “I realized there was no sense in being anonymous, because they can just find out anyway,” she said.

Iliqud works for the Uyghur Transitional Justice Institute, a project that gathers data about Uyghur disappearances in Xinjiang. Harassment, surveillance and hacks are an occupational hazard for the Institute. 

In 2021, when Iliqud gave expert evidence at London’s Uyghur Tribunal, which was investigating whether China’s actions in Xinjiang constitute genocide, her phone bleated out alerts that she was being hit with brute-force hacking attempts to her social media and email accounts.

“China, Iran and other authoritarian states use their intelligence services to identify and spy on dissidents and refugees in Norway, and will continue to do so in 2022,” said Martin Bernsen, senior advisor at the Norwegian Police Security Service. He added that their aim was to “eliminate” political opponents. 

He described how regimes like China's often will infiltrate exile communities’ events and activist groups, while foreign intelligence officers try to gain access to Norwegian immigration databases.

Last autumn, 101 Uyghurs arrived in Norway from Turkey. As life under Recep Erdogan’s regime has become more difficult, with the looming prospect of an extradition treaty between Ankara and Beijing, there has been an exodus of Uyghurs from Turkey.

They bought a ticket from the Turkish city of Antalya to Belgrade, Serbia, with a stop-off in Oslo. Chinese citizens don’t need a visa to Serbia, so they were allowed to board the plane, and disembarked during the Oslo stopover. 

Memettursun Omer was one of the people on board.

When he was a child in Guma, a county in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert, Omer’s parents told him stories about places in the far north, where there was no darkness in summer, and no light in winter, and where during Ramadan, people sometimes had to fast for 20 hours a day. 

Omer thought it was a fantasy — something the adults had just dreamed up.

In January, he was posted to the Arctic border town of Kirkenes, where the Norwegian immigration authority has just opened up an asylum reception center, alongside around 60 other Uyghurs.

During his first few days there, the sun did not rise at all. “I never dreamed I would end up this far north,” he said.

He spent days walking around the icy border town in the blue twilight of the polar winter, gazing out at the desolate wilderness.

“I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by people. But here, there’s hardly anyone around. It’s all so different,” he said. 

“I thought to myself, will this be my life forever?” He posted videos of the northern lights on Instagram.

As a young man, Omer loved China. His WeChat pages were frequently peppered with Chinese flags, and as a chef training in Beijing, he had a lot of Han Chinese friends and colleagues.  

“I was always against Uyghur people who were standing up to the Chinese,” he said. “I believed the Chinese government wouldn’t do anything to innocent people. And I never thought they would do anything to me — because in order for that to happen, I’d have to do something bad.”

Omer was arrested in Xinjiang in 2017 after traveling abroad. Uyghurs in Xinjiang are invariably targeted by police following foreign trips, which Chinese authorities claim is grounds for arrest on suspicion of terrorist activities. He spent more than ten months in detention centers and high-security prisons.

He was tied to a tiger chair, interrogated and electrocuted. At night, as he slept, 360-degree cameras watched him from all sides. If he turned over in bed, the camera would whirr to follow his movement. If he moved again, a guard would yell through the speaker system to keep still.

His interrogators told him “we are going to be best friends.” He was forced to meet regularly with them, and field their questions about his relatives living in Europe.

He managed to convince the agents that his father was a prominent activist in Germany, with influence within the World Uyghur Congress, a leading Uyghur human rights organization. 

The Xinjiang agents hatched a plan that he would infiltrate the group and send intelligence back to his handlers.

“They wanted me to go to Germany, and get in with their group, collect phone numbers and addresses, find out which flights they were taking, which restaurants they ate at,” he said. He was instructed to pass back information via regular WeChat video calls. 

Over and over again, Omer said he was threatened about what would happen if he dropped his handlers. 

“You need to remember, your older brothers are still here in Xinjiang,” the agent told him. “If you just disappear, we can make them suffer.” They forced him to sign a deposition admitting he was a terrorist. “Wherever you go, we can use this to show you’re a criminal, and bring you back to China.” 

Despite their threats, Omer had no intention of becoming a spy. He planned to escape the agents' control as soon as he left China.

He flew to Dubai, where he immediately called his father in Turkey and told him what was going on. From there, he went to Istanbul, where he attempted to start a new life. 

As spring arrived in Istanbul in 2018, Omer reunited with his father, found a job as a chef, and got engaged. He tried to forget what the Chinese agents had told him. But it proved difficult: he was continually dogged by desperate calls and messages from his handlers. He keeps the voice notes on his phone to this day. 

Sitting in his living room in Kirkenes, he played them one by one, as snow floated down outside. The tinny voice of the official rang out into the room. 

"We didn’t send you out there so you could behave like this,” the official drawled in one recording. “You’re forgetting who you are.”

During phone calls, the threats began. “You don’t need us to tell you how we do things. We’ll kill you — even if you’re in Germany. We’ll deal with this problem according to our own rules.”

The messages “had a psychological way of crushing your mind,” Omer said. “I felt like I was still in prison. I was scared and paranoid every day. Even thinking about it now, I’m afraid.”

In the summer of 2018, Omer gave the voice notes to Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service, which serves the Uyghur diaspora. RFA published the messages, and promptly the calls from China stopped. 

Omer’s handler attempted to contact him again just once more, with the message “don’t be like this, little brother.” 

Omer responded with a "winky tongue face" emoji. 

Although the messages went quiet, Omer lived in fear that Turkey wasn’t really safe — that he might be spirited back to China at any time, trapped once again in Xinjiang. 

In September 2021, Omer flew to Norway. 

“We don’t have a choice in coming here. There's no other way. We cannot go back,” Omer said. 

Two weeks into his time in Kirkenes, Omer saw his first sunrise. Now, as the spring equinox approaches, the days are getting longer. Kirkenes lies at such an extreme latitude that for six days each month, the moon can’t be seen.

The Chinese agent’s words — that the state would be able to find Omer wherever the moon shines — are beginning to fade.

China's repression of journalists

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

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

Erica Hellerstein

The post China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic appeared first on Coda Story.

“It is this feeling that we Uyghurs cannot escape China wherever we go,” said Buzainuer Wubuli (Zeynure Obul). “Uyghurs in our homeland are being disappeared in prisons and camps. Outside the country, Uyghurs are not allowed to live in peace anywhere.”

For the past 10 years Wubuli’’s husband has faced constant harassment and detention by Turkish authorities — further evidence of China’s reach in Turkey, according to Wubuli — pushing him to finally leave the country with a plan for his family to follow. He was unaware that China had issued a red notice for him and was arrested in July 2021 while in transit in Casablanca. Today Idris Hasan is being held in a Moroccan prison.

Following international outcry, Interpol canceled the red notice for Hasan. However, Moroccan authorities decided to follow through with Hasan’s deportation in light of a recently signed extradition treaty with China. Hasan would be the first Chinese national extradited under the treaty that was signed in early 2021. The UN Committee Against Torture has pressured Moroccan authorities to pause the extradition while it reviews Hasan’s case, a process that could take weeks, months, even years.

This has left Hasan’s wife and children living in limbo. However, Wubuli has launched her own campaign of resistance for her husband’s release.

This is her story.

The post China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

China's repression of journalists

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Katia Patin

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

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

Erica Hellerstein

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide 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.

When the journalist arrived, he was greeted by a person who didn’t look familiar. He wasn’t a childhood friend. Instead, the man told the reporter, he worked with one of China’s state security agencies. He explained that before their meeting, he had paid a visit to some of the reporter’s family members back in Tibet — who were fine, he assured him — and then waved over two men sitting at a nearby table. The trio then besieged the journalist with questions — “Who are your sources in Tibet? How do you get your information?” — but the reporter refused to answer and hurried out of the hotel.

A few weeks later, he was ambushed on his walk home from work. According to one of the reporter’s former colleagues, two men sprung out of a vehicle, thrust a black hood over his head, and pushed him into the car. The van drove around for hours as the men interrogated the reporter about his contacts in Tibet and searched through his phone. Again, he refused to answer. After several hours, the kidnappers dropped the reporter off near his house, warned him not to turn around for five minutes, and sped away. 

According to a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist who had worked with the kidnapped man, this was the end of his colleague’s career in media. He was terrified that his journalism work could put him and his relatives back in Tibet in harm’s way. “He was so worried about his family he quit reporting right away,” he explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to risk my life and my family’s lives.’”

The U.S.-based Tibetan journalist, who was privy to the events leading up to and including the kidnapping, asked for anonymity and to withhold the location of the kidnapping to protect his colleague’s identity.

Fear of retaliation against family members back home, which forced the Tibetan reporter out of his media job, is a key feature of China’s pressure campaign against diaspora journalists and writers, particularly for members of religious and ethnic minority groups like Uyghurs and Tibetans. 

They are among the 55 ethnic minorities in the country outside of the Han Chinese majority, who make up more than 90% of the population. Under China’s President Xi Jinping, Beijing has pursued a sweeping policy of "Sinicization” aimed at assimilating the country’s ethnic minorities into the dominant Han culture. This approach includes a crackdown on local languages and religions and has been accompanied by wide-ranging and ambitious initiatives by the Chinese government to silence its critics. Both efforts can be seen as separate expressions of the same larger goal: to create a homogenous national identity defined by the state, with no room for alternative points of view. People who challenge the government’s sanctioned identity narratives can be subject to pressure, even when they live far away from China.

Borders do not necessarily constrain the government’s reach.

Writers and journalists from the country’s ethnic minorities, therefore, find themselves at the hostile intersection of China’s multi-pronged war against independent speech and identity. 

In Tibet, which has been under Beijing’s control for decades, the Chinese government’s long-simmering campaign of cultural erasure can be seen as a progenitor of the oppression it later unleashed on Xinjiang, which has been described as a genocide by U.S. officials. There, more than one million Uyghurs have been sent to concentration camps and the relatives of exiled reporters face relentless persecution, intimidation, and harassment. Many people I interviewed pointed out that the former party secretary in Tibet subsequently became the Chinese party secretary of Xinjiang. In Tibet, he expanded policing and cultural assimilation, and developed a widespread surveillance system. Experts say he continued to implement those same policies in Xinjiang. While the repression and government justification for it is distinct in each respective region, some see Tibet as a testing ground for the campaign later deployed in Xinjiang.

Beijing’s pathology around minorities’ distinct cultural identities is rooted in an understanding that they can act as a counterweight to the government’s desire to control the narrative. “They recognize the power of words and culture as an animating force,” said James Tager, the director of research at PEN America. “And they have these policies of culture diminution or cultural erasure, particularly in Xinjiang, and similarly, somewhat less intense but somewhat more sustained, is the effort to diminish Tibetan culture. Peaceful cultural advocacy is potentially criminal in China.”

According to the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world” — referring to the suite of tactics from surveillance technology to physical violence, intimidation, and harassment that governments use to persecute citizens of their own countries who live overseas. In China, the targets of this campaign include ethnic minorities like Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians, as well as Han Chinese reporters and writers covering China critically. Their experiences are a case study of what a well-resourced regime can do when it weaponizes technology, repression, and fear to create a sweeping information suppression apparatus that reaches around the globe. 

“The full scope of censorship needs to be understood as not only what is explicitly being banned but by the message that the targets of the censorship internalize. It’s called the chilling effect,” explained Tager. “And many writers across cultural and social spheres will feel chilled because they know that people who are seen as too critical of (Chinese Communist Party) governance may put their family members within China at risk.”

For Tibetan diaspora journalists, threats of retaliation against family members remain a powerful tool in the transnational repression playbook. The region has been under China’s control since the 1950s, when it was invaded by the newly formed People’s Republic of China. After an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India and set up the Tibetan government in exile, where some 90,000 Tibetans currently live, and which remains a focal point for the exile media community as it seeks to cover one of the world’s most restrictive media environments from outside. 

Tibet is ranked as the worst place globally for civil liberties and political rights according to Freedom House — tied with Syria and above South Sudan, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. Media outlets within Tibet are controlled by China, international broadcasts are routinely jammed, foreign journalists must apply for — and are often denied — permission from the Chinese government to go to the region, and Tibetans who pass information to foreign media risk arrest. Today, human rights groups and exile journalists say it has effectively become walled off from the foreign press. 

“Nowadays people tend to think that because Tibet is not coming up too much in the news, it’s because nothing is happening in Tibet. That’s not true,” Kalden Lodoe, the Tibetan service director at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C., told me. “The information flow is totally blocked there.” 

For journalists covering it from afar, like Lodoe’s team, “we feel like we are digging into a very strict police state where people are watched constantly,” he added. “It’s escalated and it’s only going to get worse. They have created this fearful society where if you have any contacts outside you will be in trouble.”

Authorities impose harsh penalties on Tibetans who communicate with journalists or family members living overseas who send information to exile media. According to data provided to Coda by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, over the last decade, 98 Tibetans have been detained for contacting journalists and source intermediaries outside the region. Sixteen are currently imprisoned and serving their sentences. Prominent cases include Kunchok Jinpa, a Tibetan tour guide who was detained in 2013 and later sentenced to 21 years in prison for “leaking state secrets” by providing information to foreign reporters about protests in Tibet. Jinpa died last February while serving his sentence due to reported paralysis and brain hemorrhage. Another well-publicized case is the imprisonment of Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan language advocate who was released from prison in China last year after spending five years behind bars over a charge of “inciting separatism" based on an interview he gave to The New York Times.

Some diaspora writers and journalists fear their work could expose relatives and sources in Tibet to detention or arrest, and sources in exile can be wary of communicating with the press for the same reason. They say that exiled journalists’ and writers’ family members still living in Tibet come under pressure from Chinese authorities. 

Sonam Tobgyal, a researcher with the U.K.-based human rights nonprofit Tibet Watch, said families living in exile with relatives still in Tibet have received threatening calls from unknown numbers after news leaks from the region that officials suspect they are connected to. “They will say, ‘If you do this again, your family is in your hands,’” he said.

“This is how they threaten, saying, ‘You are responsible for the safety of your family.’”

In Xinjiang, the relatives of diaspora reporters are also under siege. As of March 2021, more than 50 family members of journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service have been arrested by Chinese officials, according to the broadcaster, including relatives who have gone missing.

“The tactical maneuver is to make everyone think twice before they think or write or publish and to think about whether there could be negative consequences for their family members, their friends, and their communities,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.

In Tibet, the relative of one Radio Free Asia reporter was severely beaten and detained for a week after speaking to the news service, according to Lodoe. Two additional relatives of the same reporter were arrested and imprisoned for sharing information with the agency, and the family members of other Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan journalists have gotten visits from local officials. “People are very scared,” he said. “For example, our reporters in Washington, D.C., their families have told them, in coded language, ‘we are fine, please don’t call us.’ It’s not just one or two. Many reporters will not even talk to their parents nowadays.”

The lingering possibility of family and source retaliation carries a heavy psychological toll for exiled Tibetans working in the public eye. A Tibetan writer based out of India, who asked to be anonymous to protect his family’s safety, told me authorities have stopped by the home of his family members still in Tibet and interrogated them about his work and his whereabouts. “I recently got a message from my sister saying, ‘don’t come back to Tibet,’ the police were searching for me,” he said. Because of the risks, he added, “I hardly communicate with my parents. If I talk with them, we talk about sensitive issues in a code way.”

In the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Tibet was gripped by anti-government protests marking the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Eager to avoid bad international press in the lead-up to the games, Beijing moved swiftly to stamp out coverage of the protests, barring foreign reporters from entering Tibet and censoring and blocking international news reports and broadcasts. Tibetans who passed information to foreign media faced stiff penalties, including detention and imprisonment. Later, China responded to the unrest by ratcheting up control of the media and expanding surveillance and policing, according to human rights groups. 

Experts and journalists I spoke to said the situation in Tibet has worsened in the fourteen years since the protests, aided by a sophisticated surveillance dragnet in which police, cameras, facial recognition, online surveillance, and self-censorship are ubiquitous. “China is more effective now because they’re employing their whole state and human resources to spy, monitor, and surveil everything,” said Tibet Watch’s Tobgyal.

“It’s very difficult and it’s not getting better, but more disastrous.”

The Chinese messaging app WeChat has complicated the communication landscape for people within and beyond Tibet. The platform, which is China’s most popular messaging app, has given a place for diaspora Tibetans and their loved ones at home to stay in touch, while simultaneously exposing them to government surveillance. A 2020 report by the Canada-based cybersecurity research organization Citizen Lab found that the platform surveils accounts from outside of China and uses that content to train censorship algorithms deployed on accounts registered in China. Tibetan WeChat users have reportedly been detained for sharing photos of the Dalai Lama, spreading “rumors” about coronavirus on the app, and setting up a chat group without registering it with local authorities as required.

Despite the privacy and security risks, the app became widely adopted by Tibetans overseas, with an estimated 70% of the diaspora population using the platform as of 2019. In 2020, however, India banned the platform — a move Tenzin Dalha, who researches Chinese cybersecurity with the Tibet Policy Institute, said has presented communication barriers between exile reporters and Tibetans and their contacts back at home. Some use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the ban, but others do not have the technological know-how to figure it out. For the latter group, Dalha explained, “their communications completely broke down since the Indian government banned WeChat. There’s become more like a communication vacuum between inside and outside Tibet.”

Now, as all eyes are on Beijing for the Olympics, sources I talked to describe a complete information blackout from Tibet. Updates from the ground have halted, leaving family members living overseas in complete darkness about what’s happening at home. 

“We don’t know what’s happening inside Tibet,” Tobgyal told me. “If you have family in Tibet, it’s scary. You aren’t able to talk to them and you don’t know what’s going on. So you have to anxiously wait.”

Beijing’s clampdown on press freedom in Tibet has broadened over the last several years. It now sweeps up writing that’s not politically inflected. Even a year ago, there were a handful of websites in Tibet that published content about Tibetan culture, language, and the environment, according to Tseten Wangchuk, a senior editor with the Tibetan Service for the U.S.-funded international news outlet Voice of America. Now, Wangchuk said, “They all shut down. I think there used to be a borderline, a gray area where you could talk about the environment, Tibetan language, and things like that. Now it seems like nobody can write about anything — any topic — that’s outside of government control.”

There are clear links between China’s hostility toward Tibetan cultural writing and its Sinicization campaign, which has sought to eradicate the distinct religious and cultural identities of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. PEN’s James Tager said that Beijing sees cultural promotion as a threat. “Beijing tends to view expressions of culture through the lens of potential criminality. Particularly in ethnic minority communities, they treat cultural promotion, cultural engagement, cultural activism, as a substitute for political activism that they see as threatening and illegal.”

The assimilation project has taken aim at mother tongue education for ethnic minority groups. Under China’s “bilingual education” policy, schools in Tibet have shifted to teaching in Mandarin over Tibetan, according to human rights groups. A recent report by the U.S.-based Tibet Action Institute found that roughly 800,000 Tibetan school children are enrolled in boarding schools where they are taught primarily in Chinese. “Wait another 10 years and almost no one will speak Tibetan anymore,” said Human Rights Watch’s Richardson.

In Xinjiang, China’s campaign of repression, surveillance, and cultural erasure has been described as a genocide by the Biden administration. Chinese officials have sent more than one million Uyghurs to concentration camps, demolished mosques, and banned Uyghur language education in schools. Uyghurs living overseas, including prominent journalists, are subject to intimidation and threats. According to Alim Seytoff, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service director, eight U.S.-based reporters for the news division have family members in Xinjiang who are in detention or have disappeared. Seytoff said some of those reporters had relatives approached by Chinese authorities. “They basically said, ‘Tell your relatives in America working at Radio Free Asia to stop telling the world what’s happening,’” Seytoff said.

And in Inner Mongolia, the Chinese government in 2020 rolled out a new policy phasing out language instruction in schools from Mongolian to Mandarin, setting off massive protests. Enghebatu Togochog, director of the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, said the policy generated such fierce blowback because language is seen as the final symbol left of Mongolian’s distinct cultural identity. Already, Togochog said schools have implemented the language change and said the organization has heard of instances in which officials have taken down Mongolian language signs. 

“Right now what we are facing is wholesale cultural genocide,” he said. “First our political rights were taken away. Then our way of life was completely changed. Language is pretty much the last defense of Mongolian identity, so just get rid of that and these people will become Chinese.”

China’s crusade against free expression has turned the country into the most aggressive jailer of journalists in the world. The regime has placed at least 127 reporters behind bars — more than half of whom are Uyghur — according to the global press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which ranks China 177th out of 180 in its World Press Freedom Index. Beijing’s clampdown on the press has escalated dramatically under Xi Jinping’s leadership, who, Reporters Without Borders argues, has “restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which freely accessing information has become a crime and to provide information an even greater crime.”

Crucially, this campaign is not just limited to China. Over the last decade, China has invested heavily in its global media footprint, acquiring shares in foreign media outlets and vastly expanding the reach of international TV broadcasting. The state-owned China Global Television now airs in more than 160 countries while independent Chinese media overseas has shrunk.

Cedric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders’ Taipei Bureau Director, who has written extensively about press freedom in China, characterized Beijing’s approach to the press as: “If you can’t kill it, buy it.” The outcome, he added, “is that now, in 2022, there’s very few Chinese language overseas media that are critical of the Chinese regime.”

Adversarial reporters or journalists who cover Beijing's policies in an unflattering light outside the country have come under diplomatic pressure from Chinese embassies overseas, including foreign reporters like a Swedish journalist who received a threatening email from the Chinese Embassy in Sweden in 2021, accusing him of spreading anti-Chinese misinformation and demanding he cease his coverage or “face the consequences of your actions.” 

For journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service in Washington, D.C., the risks of the work are well understood.

“Our reporters understand the difficult situation we are in,” Seytoff told me. “But in spite of the detention and the disappearances of our loved ones, in spite of the fact that China is committing genocide against our people, and in spite of all of this tremendous psychological pressure on us, I think we have kept our cool. We are deeply devoted to journalism.”

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

Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide

Emin Ozmen / Magnum Photos

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

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The post Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press 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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Born in Suizhou, Hubei in 1976, he trained in a police academy before working as an officer in a prison and then as a manager in factories in Guangdong. There, he began advocating on behalf of workers and ran several blogs reporting on human rights violations in China, all of which were deleted by the authorities. He now runs a blog called “Free in China” from Germany. Later, he helped organize protests in Beijing on behalf of people whose homes were razed in massive state development projects. 

Liu’s work attracted the attention of the artist Ai Weiwei, who made a 2010 documentary featuring Liu called Hua Hao Yue Yuan (Blissful Harmony) about how the Chinese authorities treat activists. After the documentary’s release, he was among those calling for a “Jasmine Revolution”, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings calling for democracy. He was arrested and tortured in Chinese detention. Upon his release he fled to Europe in 2013.  

I met him in Berlin, where we discussed his work as an overseas activist and his ongoing fight against intensifying censorship from Beijing. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: What is it like to be a Chinese dissident living in exile in 2021? 

Liu Dejun: It’s very difficult for me. When Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and democracy activist, died in 2017 after nine years in prison, I was very upset. I called for non-violent revolution in China, to overturn the Communist Party. I wrote letters to the United Nations and to the European Union and other international organizations. And, I’m not 100% sure, but I think the Communist Party was very angry with it and wanted me to stop. 

You currently live in Nuremberg, do you feel surveilled?

I used to live in an apartment in Nuremberg, but it was broken into by someone. They left something on the sofa that didn’t belong to me: a ladies’ jacket. I asked all my friends about it but none of them said it was theirs. I think it might have been someone from the Communist party, because it was right before an event where I was to make a speech. I’ve had my bicycle tires slashed and the wheel unscrewed, so that if I cycled too fast and a car came, or I braked too hard, the wheel would come off. I think it’s just to threaten me. Sometimes, my laptops and phones tell me my WhatsApp had a suspicious login. But I think Germany is safe. They can’t kidnap me or torture me. Maybe they could kill me, but everybody will die eventually. I’m not afraid of that. 

You spend quite a lot of your time organizing resistance within China. Does technology like virtual private networks help you navigate censorship?

Technology helps us because now people in China can find out the truth about what's happening in their country on the internet — not only about Tibet and the Uyghurs, but also Hong Kong and human rights violations in mainland China. But the firewall and the internet censorship is getting harder and harder to break through, so it’s getting more difficult. We used to be able to make VPNs that would last six months, but now a private VPN is blocked after just one or two days. I’m looking for support and experts from different corners of the world to create services that are difficult for the Chinese government to discover. 

The authorities often crack down on certain populations for using VPNs. For example, for Uyghurs having a VPN on your phone is enough to get you arrested. Do you worry that might become the norm?

VPNs are not very safe anymore and, because Chinese internet censorship technology is improving all the time, it makes them harder and harder to use. People who develop them are always at risk. The government spent many years tracking down the creator of Shadowsocks, a free encryption project that was used to breach the firewall. He was discovered by the security services and arrested, and now he doesn’t maintain it anymore.

Is there any way around this kind of surveillance?

I gave up creating VPNs, because the security services would take down anything I created very quickly. Now I’m looking for support to find other ways to help people cross the firewall. If we use a peer-to-peer network with people using different servers from around the world, it’s much harder for the Chinese government to discover.

It sounds like you are racing against the government to help people access an uncensored internet. 

I just want people to access information. I’m planning a mobile phone app that just directs people immediately to a website containing real news and articles about democracy, human rights, and nonviolent social movements. 

Is it difficult to talk to your family?

Signal is blocked and Telegram is blocked in China. I think my sister was threatened by the security services, so she doesn’t use a VPN. I have to use a separate mobile phone, only with WeChat, to talk to them. I keep it turned off, and just turn it on to talk to my family. 

The artist Ai Weiwei made a documentary about you. How did that happen?

In China, I used to write about human rights, and women’s rights, and was always protesting against the Chinese government. After I helped organize some anti-government protests in 2010 the police kidnapped me, beat me and blindfolded me before taking me out to the mountains outside Beijing. They left me there and told me “if you come back to Beijing, we will kill you.” I told a friend, who wrote on Twitter that I had been kidnapped. Ai Weiwei saw it and came to pick me up in the early morning with a camera and some other friends. He made this film about how China cracks down on activists. 

Are you still trying to organize protests within China?

I publish blogs on my website about how to organize and people in China spread this themselves. But it’s difficult for people because of censorship - they don’t have any information about Xinjiang, for example. With the pandemic, there is now a new level of surveillance. Some people are not aware that they’re being controlled. 

The post For a dissident living in Germany, China’s digital policing is winning 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.”

The post Authoritarian regimes are using Interpol to hunt down their critics appeared first on Coda Story.

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. 

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.”

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

But on a stop in Shanghai to present the University of Tokyo’s findings, scientific authorities revised the age of the mummies. They changed the date so it would be consistent with Han Chinese historical presence in the region. The mummies couldn’t be “older than Chinese history,” remembers the archeologist’s daughter, Gulchehra Hoja. Her father, she recalls, came home to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, shaking with rage. 

Eight years later, the museum where Abduqeyum worked was demolished, ostensibly to house its priceless collections in a more modern structure. But Abduqeyum believed the government ordered the building’s destruction in 2000 to help erase the Uyghur cultural record, and his anger flowed again. “So many things in that building went missing, just went away,” Gulchehra said.

And then so did Gulchehra. In July 2001, she had packed a single suitcase to embark on an exciting solo vacation, an itinerary that flew her from Urumqi to Vienna. She could afford a European vacation. Like her father, she had become a well-known figure in Xinjiang. Gulchehra was the host of a popular provincial children’s show, a role she enjoyed, although she had been under pressure to speak more Mandarin, instead of the channel’s primary Uyghur language, and to feature more Han Chinese children. 

Vacationing in Austria, she accessed the internet for the first time, connected with Uyghur activists, discovered CNN and Western newspapers. She was astonished at her own lack of awareness of acts of repression against Uyghurs at home. “I felt shame,” she recalls, and abruptly concluded that she would not return home, despite her closeness with an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and a grandfather famous in Xinjiang for his traditional Uyghur musical compositions. 

In choosing to suddenly emigrate, Gulchehra, who had studied literature at Xinjiang Normal University, abandoned her television career and her father, with whom she had an especially close relationship. He had cultivated a bond with her, ever since she was a girl who obsessed over dreams of becoming a dancer and he obsessed over his dream that she should not. “My father taught me to love books. His knowledge is insane,” she says. 

Gulchehra had experienced the dawning of China’s decades-long crackdown on its Uyghur population, which after 2016 saw more than a million people sent to concentration camps and was labeled a genocide on the final day of the Trump administration. But human rights abuses at that scale were still in the future when in 2000, as the host of a children’s television show, the government sent Gulchehra on a tour of big Chinese cities — Shanbong, Beijing, Shanghai — to interview Uyghur children who had been sent to live in boarding schools. 

She describes what she witnessed as a “brainwashing:” children forced to eat non-halal food, speak Mandarin, and shed Uyghur cultural habits. Parents were allowed to visit once a month. 

By October 2001, Gulchehra had obtained a working visa and could move to the U.S. She spoke almost no English but, with a background in broadcasting, had found a job as a journalist at the Uyghur-language service of Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C.. 

Gulchehra rose in prominence as a Uyghur-language journalist and developed a large following. She has closely chronicled events in Xinjiang from Washington, conducting important interviews with camp survivors. China’s government has watched as she has been honored for her work, receiving the Magnitsky Human Rights Award and the Courage in Journalism Award

At first, China’s reprisals were aimed at her father. The regional government in Xinjiang severed Abduqeyum’s ties to the museum and any access to scholarship, and his books on the Taklamakan desert’s Buddhist-era societies were banned. 

A gregarious man who enjoyed public speaking and live music, Abduqeyum began to spend more and more time on his balcony, where he grew hundreds of blooming flowers in pots. Gulchehra said that her brother often visited their mother and father, and so did old classmates, who would help Gulchehra’s parents remember their long-absent daughter. “They would come to celebrate my birthday together, before the camps started of course, before most of them had been arrested,” she said.

For two decades, Gulchehra kept in touch with her family by phone. Although, said Dana, Gulchehra’s 16-year-old daughter, “If you say certain trigger words, the phone automatically hangs up. China controls that. So, it’s always stressful.”

In September 2017, when evidence of mass internment camps began streaming out of Xinjiang, Gulchehra learned that her brother had been picked up by the police. Less than a year later, 24 of her relatives were also arrested. Her father was, by then, partially paralyzed from a stroke and could no longer speak on the phone.

Then, in April, the Chinese government released a video about Gulchehra, a U.S. citizen living in Northern Virginia, and her 81-year-old father. It purports that they pose a violent threat to Chinese sovereignty and have been put on a roster called the Shanghai List.

According to the Chinese government, they are now terrorists.

“I was expecting a more serious reaction from the American government, for the State Department to give a statement, to condemn China and say, stop harassing a U.S. journalist,” she told me. “I’m using my voice but it’s not enough. This is mentally torture, separation from my parents for 20 years.”

The Chinese government has taken aggressive measures against citizens and former citizens living in foreign countries who it perceives to be a threat. A new report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs includes the first case-by-case map of China’s transnational repression against Uyghurs. It also reveals that, between 1997 and December 2016, China was involved in the detention or deportation back to China of over 851 Uyghurs across 23 countries. 

Since 2017, China’s actions against overseas Uyghurs have “expanded dramatically as part of the broader security sweep.” Since 2017, the report finds, at least 695 Uyghurs have been detained or deported to China from 15 separate countries. 

It also documents that since 1997, when the first cases of rendition of Uyghurs to China were recorded in Pakistan, China’s “transnational repression has expanded to include a full gamut of activities from espionage, cyberattacks, and physical assaults, to the issuance of Red Notices via Interpol.” 

The threat of retaliation looms constantly over Gulchehra. “My children are worried when I go to the supermarket, what might happen to me,” she said.

Surveillance and control

The modern crackdown in Xinjiang began when China seized on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 call for a globe-spanning assault on terrorism, in order to first erode and then to strip away the civil rights of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. 

China’s totalitarian apparatus of surveillance and control was installed under the cover of anti-terrorism measures. In the 2000s, punitive curfews were imposed after frequent police raids rounded up hundreds of Uyghurs in search of explosives and firearms. Communal violence — sparked by an influx of Han Chinese from outside Xinjiang — and riots in the streets were also cited to justify further crackdowns in the name of anti-terrorism. Uyghurs demonstrating against government policies were characterized by Chinese media as violent separatists. 

I traveled throughout Xinjiang on a reporting trip in the fall of 2008, at a time when large numbers of Han Chinese were being induced to relocate to the underdeveloped region, even as state media stoked fear of Uyghurs targeting them for muggings and robberies. Government goons dressed in black carrying a steampunk-looking camera trailed me in a black sedan, filming while I ate in restaurants. It felt like everybody was being watched. I emailed an editor that Xinjiang had “a patina of creepiness.”

Mosques had become avatars of religion, controlled by government minders. Mandarin-language posters peered over the walls of Uyghur bookstores. I interviewed Uyghurs who spoke of pressure to “become Chinese.” The attempt at erasure of their cultural identity I saw in 2008 foreshadowed the “re-education” camps a decade later. “They are trying to eliminate us by making us Chinese,” said Abdul, a 25-year-old English-speaking Uyghur man, who I met in Hotan, a city in southerwestern Xinjiang. 

Back in Northern Virginia, Gulchehra said she has been warned not to travel abroad. “My freedom of movement is controlled by the Chinese government. It’s ridiculous.”

Nightmares rule her sleep. 

“I feel like I don’t have much time, my father is 81 years old. The Chinese government wants to silence me. I want the American government to protect me. If I cannot go there, please use tools to bring my parents here.”

The investigation is supported by the JFJ Investigative Grant Program.

The post How China threatens prominent Uyghurs — in the US, in China and everywhere 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.

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.

“We wish it were the case that talk of the internment camps was a myth, fabricated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. But it is not,” read the letter, addressed to the Monthly Review, alluding to a denialist conspiracy theory that the humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang is fabricated by American spy agencies. The letter condemned the Monthly Review’s article displaying “agnosticism, let alone denialism, towards what is clearly a shocking infringement of the rights of Uyghur people.” 

Since 2017, the Chinese government has implemented a vast system of prisons, camps and surveillance apparatus in Xinjiang to control its Muslim minorities, in the name of combating terrorism. Beijing’s crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslims has been criticized by world leaders and been the subject of significant international media attention. 

But more recently, a backlash has built up momentum, largely pushed by ultra-left defenders of the Chinese government and Beijing’s state media. It seeks to downplay the atrocities gripping Xinjiang, and paint Western coverage of Uyghur oppression as a plot designed to spark a new cold war. 

The Monthly Review article, “Sinophobia Inc: Understanding the anti-China Industrial complex”,  was originally published by Qiao Collective, a diaspora Chinese media platform aimed at “challenging U.S. aggression towards China.” The open letter in opposition to the article was signed by an international group of 35 academics. They criticized the report’s claim that China’s activities in Xinjiang are a part of a legitimate anti-terrorism campaign, and rejected the argument that the Chinese Communist Party has been subjected to “double standards” because the same criticism is not leveled at the Western war on terror. 

The letter condemned both U.S. anti-terrorism campaigns and China’s activities in Xinjiang. “China’s deradicalization discourse represents a deliberate appropriation of Western counterterror practices,” the letter read. It also criticized brutal Islamophobic policies in the West as well as in China. “Uncritically invoking China’s “terrorism problem,” and downplaying the severity of Beijing’s response to it, paints a left-wing façade on a global discourse of counterterrorism that poses a threat to Muslim communities everywhere,” the letter said. 

The scholars also drew attention to some of the most extreme aspects of the Xinjiang regime, including arbitrary incarceration on a massive scale, combined with the building of a network of camps, “workhouse style” training and factory programs and the mass separation of families. “The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognize and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness.” 

The publication of the letter marks a significant moment in which scholars on the left have come together to dispute some of the most potent narratives that seek to distort the reality of the Xinjiang humanitarian crisis. “The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognise and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness,” the letter said. 

International coverage of the brutal crackdown on Xinjiang’s Uyghurs has often been dismissed by Chinese state pundits and leftist international voices as an unfair display of hypocrisy and western imperialism. The letter published by the Uyghur academics addressed and rebuked these arguments. 

The lead author of the letter, David Brophy, a historian of China and Inner Asia at the University of Sydney, declined to comment.

Academics and journalists alike have frequently been accused of American collusion when they draw attention to the Xinjiang crisis. “The Chinese state media organization, the Global Times, has accused me of forming part of the "backbone" of a group of scholars who were secretly working for the U.S. intelligence agency,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Xinjiang at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a signatory to the open letter. “I am deeply critical of American militarism and I have never worked for the U.S. government.”

Byler, who said he was speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the group, added that he hoped the letter would make it more difficult for leftist “scholar-activists” to continue to promote Xinjiang-related disinformation. “I do not know how leftist activists will respond, they may continue along the path they have already begun. I think inside the academy this letter will become a touchstone for principled leftists.” 

The Monthly Review has not yet acknowledged the letter, and did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly named Darren Byler’s institution. It is the University of Colorado, Boulder, not the University of Boulder, Colorado.

The post Leftist defense of persecution of Uyghurs triggers a fierce response from professors appeared first on Coda Story.

In the early months of the coronavirus outbreak, the government locked down more than 50 million people in Hubei province and imposed strict stay-at-home measures in cities across the country. However, footage shared on social media suggests that, at the same time, a state-mandated mass migration of Uyghurs was taking place in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.  

In January, dozens of videos began to surface on Douyin — a version of TikTok, made by the same company, only available to Chinese users — showing crowds of people being packed onto trains, buses and airplanes.

The footage shows Uyghurs being transported as part of what Beijing refers to as a "poverty alleviation" initiative. Sent far from home, they are put to work in tightly surveilled factory labor programs and often housed in dedicated labor compounds.

In February, more videos were posted by a local media center in the Xinjiang city of Hotan. In one, a crowd of people stand in formation, dressed in matching red anoraks, their faces obscured by surgical masks. Each also wears a blue lanyard and has a suitcase beside them. A caption explained that the men and women are migrant workers, ready to board a plane to the heavily industrialized coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangxi.

Chinese national state media also covered the transportation, which took place in late February – just as China’s coronavirus numbers had reached a peak. 

One report stated that the workers were being sent “on a free charter flight.” Another featured images of men and women about to fly to Hunan province, where they were to work on the production line at a technology company. “Although the mask covered most of her face, she could still feel her excitement,” it said of one Uyghur woman. The article then quoted her as saying, “As long as your hands and feet are quick, the more you do, the more you earn.” 

Chinese authorities maintained they were helping pull Uyghur people out of deprivation. “We will do our utmost to help laborers who are willing to go out to work as soon as possible, to ensure that the prevention and control of the epidemic and the struggle against poverty are both addressed,” a spokesperson for Hotan’s Human Resources and Social Security Bureau told state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Another video posted on Douyin in March shows, according to the caption, a group of 850 people being moved to Korla, Xinjiang's second-largest city, to work in the textile industry. Masked Uyghurs are seen walking in single file and lining up to have their temperature checked, before boarding buses and trains.

The government-run relocation of Uyghurs has been described by experts and human rights groups as an extension of China’s mass surveillance and indoctrination system. Since 2016, as many as a one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been held in concentration camps, referred to by the Chinese Communist Party as “vocational training centers” or “re-education” facilities.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, who specializes in Uyghur studies. Referring to the labor program, he said, “There’s very likely a re-education aspect to it or some really tight form of control in the factory environment.” 

While information from Xinjiang has been scarce during the pandemic, reports have emerged that in some areas placed under lockdown, Uyghurs were not allowed to leave their homes and were dependent on state deliveries of essential supplies. The Washington D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project has drawn attention to footage circulated on Chinese social media, in which people say that their households were starving. 

Xinjiang has reported just 76 coronavirus cases and six deaths since January. Uyghurs living abroad consider these figures to be suspiciously low, given the province’s population of almost 22 million people. 

While Beijing maintains that “most people” have been released from government camps and “returned to society,” many observers believe that they have been shuttled into labor programs or other forms of detention.

The Chinese government seeks to portray the forced labor program as a benevolent initiative, providing economic opportunities to the people of a historically deprived region. In recent months, state media in Xinjiang has reported that these work placements will “emancipate the mind and eliminate old habits.” 

Zumret Dawut, 38, spent two months in a detention camp in Xinjiang’s capital city of Urumqi. While there, she underwent hours of indoctrination, during which she was beaten and made to recite Chinese Communist Party propaganda. A report by the Associated Press in June revealed that China has been forcing birth control and sterilization on Uyghur women. In the course of her confinement, Dawut was given regular injections and pills that tranquilized her and stopped her periods. 

After her release in June 2018, Dawut left Xinjiang. The following year, she flew to the U.S., where she now lives. Using a cellphone that she brought with her from China, she is still able to access Douyin, which is usually firewalled outside of the country. 

“I first started seeing videos of Uyghurs being transferred back in January,” she said. 

Dawut engaged with the content via likes and comments, so the app’s algorithm showed her more. Though some of the footage sent her way originated from state media agencies, dozens of videos were posted by Uyghurs themselves. She noticed that clips in the latter category all featured the same haunting, Chinese-language rendition of the Italian protest song “Bella Ciao.” 

“I have to be very quick to download these videos,” she said, explaining that the app usually swiftly deletes them.

Asked whether Douyin censors Uyghur-related content, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company “treats all users on our platform the same, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation.”

One video found by Dawut, posted to Douyin by a Xinjiang news outlet in March, shows a group of more than 500 Uyghurs arriving for a work placement in Korla. The footage includes their new accommodation: austere rooms fitted with bunk beds, shared kitchenettes and a common living area. 

Such dormitories are often part of larger compounds, complete with watchtowers and onsite indoctrination centers. These facilities feature prominently in Uyghurs for Sale, a report published in March by Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute. 

Its authors state that the forced labor program amounts to “re-education 2.0,” in which Uyghurs undergo mandatory indoctrination after working long hours in factory jobs, and fear detention if they attempt to quit. 

The report also details Uyghur workers being offered to factories in “batches” of 100, via online forums, then sent to work in supply chains linked to international companies, including Apple, Nike and Gap. It also explains that Uyghur labor is a lucrative industry: companies that hire Uyghurs on a long-term basis receive payments of up to $720 per person from the Xinjiang government. 

A series of advertisements on Baidu — China’s answer to Google — suggest that this incentivized market for cheap Uyghur labor has thrived throughout the pandemic. One advert, from April, offered “Xinjiang Uyghur workers, all female, 18-35 years old, proficient in Chinese, obey arrangements.” Another, from late March, stated that “the government assures security,” an apparent reference to the widespread perception of Uyghurs as dangerous extremists. The posts said workers could be paid as little as 13 yuan ($1.86) per hour.

Baidu did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Forced labor also forms part of Xinjiang’s prison system. Nursimangul Abdurashid, 32, left the province in 2013. She now lives with her husband and six-year-old daughter in Turkey, where she works as a marketing executive. In the years since she left the city of Kashgar, her parents and two brothers have been detained, and the family home now stands empty. 

In 2017, Abdurashid learned that her older brother had been put to work in an electronics factory, while being held in a detention camp in the city of Artux for the alleged non-payment of a debt. The same year, her younger brother was arrested and charged with “preparing to commit terrorist activities,” after applying for a passport to study in Turkey. 

Abdurashid recalled how he had been desperate to go to university. “He wanted to be a teacher. He gave up his dream,” she said.

Abdurashid now fears that both of her brothers – aged 30 and 34 – have been pushed deeper into Xinjiang’s forced labor system. Now, she scours the faces of Uyghur workers in Douyin videos, trying to find out what has happened to them. 

“I want to see them alive, at least,” she said. “Seeing so many young boys and girls heading into the unknown makes me so sad.”

China experts believe that detentions and forced labor are part of a deliberate strategy to destroy Uyghur life in Xinjiang. While language, architecture, religion and culture have all been attacked and suppressed during the government crackdown, the forced migration of thousands of Uyghurs can be viewed as an attempt to tear apart a whole community.

“The main goal is to move people away from their hometowns, to isolate them from their family, from their roots, and to make it harder for them to escape or move around,” said Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, the Australian report’s lead author, during a Zoom call. “They become more dependent on these work arrangements that are assigned to them. This is part of the efforts of the re-education campaign.” 

In mid-June, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill to sanction China for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The new legislation was introduced shortly after leaked extracts from a new book by former National Security Adviser John Bolton alleged that Trump told President Xi that he should “go ahead” with the construction of prison camps in the province. 

Meanwhile, Zumret Dawut continues to monitor Douyin, searching for more evidence of China’s oppression of her people. She thinks a lot about the Chinese version of “Bella Ciao” heard in so many of the videos. Once an anthem for agricultural workers protesting against harsh conditions in the rice fields of 19th-century Italy, the song’s lyrics include a line that translates as, “The day will come when we will all work in freedom.” 

“This is a message to our people,” said Dawut. “Don’t forget about us.”

Rachel Sherman and Joseph Gordon contributed research. 

With the support from the Russian Language News Exchange

The post Revealed: New videos expose China’s forced migration of Uyghurs during the pandemic 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.

All Nur needed to do, the man continued, was to attend meetings of other Uyghurs in Istanbul, make inquiries about certain people and then pass the information back to him.

Nur protested that he was too busy, that he was already loyal, that he might get caught by the Turkish police. Then he closed his WhatsApp. The messages frightened him and so did the man, who was now the only link to his parents in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, home to the majority of China’s 11.3 million Uyghurs.

The messages kept coming every few days, and soon their tone changed. “You are a smart man,” one said. “You need to think about your family. You are there, but they are here, and if you refuse to do this, you could put them in a very dangerous situation.”

Nur was trapped. One of 10,000 or so Uyghurs now living in Turkey, he had thought himself free of the Chinese state. Back in Xinjiang, authorities were intensifying a crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities that held more than a million in vast internment camps, destroyed mosques and tarmacked graveyards. China’s communist leadership describes the camps as “vocational training centers”, but they are places of indoctrination and suffering designed to eradicate religious belief. 

As this repression spread, so too has intimidation and monitoring of anyone able to escape it. A number of Uyghurs now living in Turkey recounted their experiences for this article. Others confirmed they had been approached by the state but declined to meet with a journalist for fear of reprisals. All of the individuals quoted spoke on condition of anonymity and their names have been changed accordingly.

Uyghur exiles also found refuge in Kazakhstan, Europe and North America and Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon told Coda Story that he has heard similar stories from around the world. Many, he said, were told that if they did not return to China, their family members would be detained.

When Nur came to Istanbul to study in 2011, he spoke with his family every three or four days, either via phone or the Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat  — WhatsApp and Facebook are banned in China. WeChat is monitored by the state, but Nur’s family were secular and supported the party, so they talked freely for hours. If he went much longer than a week without calling, his parents would chide him for being distant.

Their conversations continued over years, even while authorities in Xinjiang began targeting residents who showed any outward signs of religiosity, like visiting mosques, wearing a headscarf or growing a beard. But towards the end of 2016, as a newly appointed Communist Party head in the province led still harsher policies, Nur's mother ordered him to delete innocuous pictures of his life in Turkey that he had posted on WeChat. 

Around the same time, a former classmate who had gone on to join the police messaged Nur with a warning: just contacting someone from abroad put them at risk of being sent to the expanding network of camps. Friends and family began to disappear from his WeChat contact list, likely aware of the danger.

In early 2017, Nur's parents told him they could only speak once a month, for no more than half an hour, and that he should not contact his siblings. They also advised him to shave and to cut his hair short. “I realized that there might be someone beside them or someone listening in,” Nur said, recalling the conversation while sitting in an Istanbul cafe. “So I told them okay.”

Then they told Nur not to call them at all. They added that a Chinese man would sometimes help connect them from now on, so he should accept the man’s request on WeChat. 

The request came and the messages began. The man went only by a common first name and said he was in charge of security in the district Nur’s parents lived in. He wrote in impeccable Chinese and finally got around to asking a series of simple questions: When did Nur arrive in Turkey, what was his address, how many children did he have, where did he study, and would he come back to China? Nur answered, mostly truthfully.

A week later, the man, unhindered by the ban, WhatsApped him from a Hong Kong number. Nur suspected that the man had obtained his contact details from his parents. “He said ‘I am the son of your mother and now I am going to my mother’s home,’” Nur recalled. He knew that probably meant the man was one of the million of mostly Han government workers ordered to spend time in Muslim households as "family" for the purposes of surveillance and indoctrination. Nur soon received a WhatsApp video call. The Chinese man’s face was hidden but Nur heard his voice, smooth and quiet and he saw his parents. They looked happy to see him, but they told him that the man wanted him to go to the Chinese consulate in Istanbul and affirm himself as a citizen. Nur nodded, scared for them and for himself.

During this growing estrangement from his parents, other Uyghurs in Turkey were being alienated from their own relatives and friends. Abdulla, a small business owner living in Istanbul, said that his brothers, sisters and friends had also begun to delete him from WeChat. Eventually, only his parents were left and their messages went from every day to once a week and became unusually terse and unemotional.

Mehmet, who has been in the city since 2010 and has a number of close relatives in Xinjiang who have been taken to internment camps, said that even his immediate family stopped replying to messages. His WeChat history with his sister is now just a series of unanswered pictures of his newborn daughter. Again, a government-operated WhatsApp number and intermediary became the only way to contact his family, and information about his life in Turkey—his job, his children, his address—was required in return.

As well as gathering information for the state, Amnesty’s Poon added, these requests also damage the cohesion of exiled Uyghur communities, making everyone seem like a potential informer. “[Students] told me they are concerned about how some of their classmates might have answered,” he said. “It sews distrust in the community.”

There was a time when Nur did not hear from his parents for more than two months. He began calling their mobile number every day in contravention of their instructions, but could never get through. Finally, they answered. When he asked what was wrong, they told him that everything was fine, that they had just taken a trip to Ürümqi, Xinjiang's capital city, and forgot to take their phone with them. He could not ask, and they could not tell him, but Nur suspected that during this absence, they had been held in a camp then released.

It was then that Nur started to receive demands to spy on other exiled Uyghurs. His excuses appeared to put the man off and the messages stopped for a month.

Then they began again, this time from a Russian number.

Nur’s monthly conversations with his parents always went the same way. They said his brother was rich now, his sister was doing well in her job. They told him how happy they were, and how happy everyone else in the district was. They had long before stopped saying “Allahka amanat” (“God bless you”) and always hung up with a simple goodbye.

Once Nur answered a WhatsApp video call facilitated by the Chinese man and saw only his mother. He asked where his father was.

“He’s here,” she said.

“Show me,” he replied, but she stayed where she was.

Then Nur heard another voice, a man he did not recognize, speaking Uighur.

“You can move,” the voice said.

Only then did his father appear on screen.

On another occasion, Nur received a photograph of his parents via the Chinese man’s WhatsApp account. The image was strange, he thought. There were multiple people in the room but only his father and his mother’s faces were visible; the others were cropped out.

Each time the man facilitated a call, Nur would thank him afterwards. “You’re welcome,” the man would reply, “I know you’re very busy. Enjoy your time in Turkey and take care.”

Requests for information began again, this time the details of Uyghurs Nur knew in Istanbul. He did not feel he could refuse, so sent a short list of names both real and fictional.

In July 2019, the Chinese police contacted Abdulla on WeChat and asked — politely — about his family and his job. Then they asked for his WhatsApp number and if he knew the Uyghurs around him. In an attempt to protect himself, he deleted WeChat entirely. Soon after, his parents called his wife’s account. The police had visited their home with a message. It warned that Abdulla had been uncooperative, that he should think about his family members and that he was now on a terror list.

Mehmet, meanwhile, was contacted by numerous security operatives. One sometimes spoke in Turkish and sent him pictures of the Bosphorus and Taksim Square, which he said he had taken during a trip to Istanbul. Once, when Mehmet ignored the man for a few days, he opened the chat and found an innocuous voice message from his mother sending her greetings.

All three men said that simply by carrying a phone, they felt that they were still in the grip of the Chinese state — that the government was always watching them, able to listen in, demand that they become informers or threaten their loved ones.

"The police can contact me whenever they want and ask me whatever they want," Nur said. "And the one thing that makes me very uncomfortable is that I always need to listen to them."

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