Tag: Uyghurs

Acclaimed Uyghur Folklorist Rahile Dawut’s Life Sentence Confirmed

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WASHINGTON —  About six years after acclaimed Uyghur folklorist Rahile Dawut first disappeared, it has been confirmed that a Chinese court sentenced her to life in prison, a human rights group announced Thursday, marking yet another Uyghur academic whose life has been caught up in Beijing’s ongoing crackdown in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Citing a Chinese government source, the Dui Hua Foundation in California announced Thursday that the acclaimed Uyghur scholar Dawut had been sentenced to life in prison for allegedly endangering state security. The news was devastating for…

Blocked Roads, Crumbling Camps as China Moves Xinjiang Detentions Out of Sight

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Artux, China —  A policeman waves reporters away from a desert prison in Xinjiang, part of a network of detention facilities transformed by China’s shifting policies in the northwestern region. Since 2017, more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims have been swept into internment camps where human rights abuses are commonplace, researchers, campaigners and members of the diaspora say. Beijing says the facilities were voluntary centers for teaching vocational skills, closed years ago after their inhabitants “graduated” into stable employment and better lives. Analysts counter that some camps have…

State-Backed Tourism Booms in China’s Troubled Xinjiang

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Kashgar, China —  Chinese travelers throng the bazaars of old Kashgar, munching mutton kebabs and soaking up heavily commodified Uyghur culture — part of a government push to remold troubled Xinjiang into a tourism paradise. Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis, was more recently on the front lines of Beijing’s sweeping anti-terrorism campaign in the northwestern region. The city’s outskirts are still pockmarked with facilities that the ruling Communist Party once called vocational schools but Western researchers describe as extralegal detention camps for Muslims — with the United States linking…

UK solar could be ‘dumping ground’ for products of Chinese forced labour, ministers warned

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The UK risks becoming a dumping ground for the products of forced labour from Xinjiang province in China if it rejects reforms by members of the foreign affairs select committee with cross-party support, ministers have been warned. An amendment to the energy bill, due to be debated on Tuesday, would require solar energy companies to prove their supply chains are free of slave labour. The Xinjiang region is the source of 35-40% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, the key raw material in the solar photovoltaic supply chain. The amendment to…

‘Talk About Something Else’: Chinese AI Chatbot Toes Party Line

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Chinese tech giant Baidu rolled out its ChatGPT-like ERNIE Bot to the public Thursday. But the app is highly censored, offering state-approved answers to taboo questions and sometimes refusing to process them altogether when AFP tested the service. Here are some of ERNIE’s answers to questions about sensitive topics in China: Taiwan Asked about the status of Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own, ERNIE told AFP that it is “not a country.” “Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China. China’s…

Britain has done more than ignore the Uyghur genocide – from politics to business, it is complicit | Rahima Mahmut

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This week, yet another foreign secretary has justified engaging with the perpetrators of genocide, on the basis that going to Beijing would allow them to raise concerns in private. According to an official statement, James Cleverly made clear the UK’s “strength of feeling about the mass incarceration of the Uyghur people” in his bilateral meetings with senior Chinese government figures. Once again, this has shown China that when it comes to the mass contravention of human rights, the UK government has nothing but words in response and fails to stand…

Travel firms urged to halt trips to Uyghur region over China rights abuses

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Uyghur advocates have called on western tourism companies to stop selling package holidays that take visitors through Xinjiang, where human rights abuses by authorities have been called a genocide by some governments. The request comes as China reopens to foreign visitors after the pandemic, and as its leader, Xi Jinping, calls for more tourism to the region. A report by the US-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), released on Wednesday, said western tourism to the region risked supporting the normalisation of Chinese government policies that were “intended to destroy the…

Xi urges more work to ‘control illegal religious activities’ in Xinjiang on surprise visit

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The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has made a surprise visit to Xinjiang, urging officials in the region to conserve “hard won social stability” and deepen efforts in controlling “illegal religious activities”. It was only his second visit since launching an extreme crackdown on the area’s Uyghur and Turkic Muslim population almost a decade ago. Xi arrived in the city of Urumqi on Saturday, according to Chinese state media, where he heard a government work report and made a speech to Communist party and government officials. During his visit, Xi urged…