Author: Chin@Strategy

In Xinjiang, questions about disappeared family members remain unanswered and reports of dubious arrests continue to emerge despite claims by the Chinese government that a widely condemned internment campaign targeting Uyghurs has ended. The Chinese government has said the detention camps in China’s far western region were vocational training centers where the “students” voluntarily learned new skills. In 2019, the Chinese Communist Party said the attendees had graduated and most had found good jobs. But RFA Uyghur has confirmed that detentions continue, and satellite images reviewed by the service indicate…

In late July, a group of Chinese government officials and academics met in Urumqi to discuss how Xinjiang was implementing a national plan to “Sinicize” Islam.  The officials did not bring up the religious sites China has demolished, or the Islamic books it has burned, or the Uyghurs it has “re-educated” in concentration camps for any suggestion of Islamic belief, according to a Xinhua News agency summary of the event. Those actions proceeded under separate Chinese Communist Party plans.  But the plan they were responsible for, a five-year work outline…

A delegation from the U.N.’s International Labor Organization made an unannounced visit to China’s Xinjiang region last week, saying it discussed the issue of Uyghur forced labor but drawing criticism from rights groups that said it should have consulted with them beforehand. The organization engaged in “technical discussions about the implementation of China’s laws and practice of ratified international labor conventions concerning discrimination in employment and occupation, as well as forced labor,” the ILO told RFA in a statement on Tuesday. The ILO did not indicate if delegates could freely…

Western travel agencies must stop offering tours of China’s far western Xinjiang region because they are implicitly supporting Beijing’s repression of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live there, a new report by a Uyghur advocacy group says. “Travel companies have no business in running tours to sites of ongoing atrocities,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, or UHRP, in a statement issued Aug. 30, the day the report was released.  “Nobody would have dreamed of taking tourists into Rwanda, Cambodia under the Khmer…

Human rights groups criticized the United Nations for failing to take concrete action against China for its repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, saying the international body has done little since releasing a damning report a year ago stating that Chinese may have committed crimes against humanity against the mostly Muslim group. The report issued on Aug. 31, 2022, by former U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights Michelle Bachelet highlighted “serious human rights violations” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region amid what Beijing has described as steps to counter terrorism and religious…

A Uyghur design director who has worked for a Chinese locomotive manufacturer in Turkey for more than a decade was arrested by Chinese authorities in March when he returned to Xinjiang for a family visit, company employees said. Qahar Eli, 39, left Turkey on March 27 with his family on a month-long trip to visit his parents in the town of Turpan with an assurance from his company that he would be allowed to return to Turkey, said his lawyer Wadat, who gave only one name.  Although he had a…

After appearing in court in a wheelchair as their trial resumed Tuesday, one of two Uyghur men suspected in a deadly bombing in Bangkok said that his eight years of confinement had taken a toll on his health.   Adem Karadag and co-defendant Yusufu Mieraili have been incarcerated since they were arrested within two weeks of the Aug. 17, 2015, attack at a Buddhist shrine, and they returned to court on Tuesday after a nine-month hiatus in the case, which is still only in the prosecution phase.   While Mieraili walked into…

Visiting Xinjiang for the second time in just over a year, President Xi Jinping vowed to double down on China’s hardline policies toward the 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in the restive, far-western region. Maintaining “hard-won social stability” would remain the top priority, and that stability must be used to “guarantee development,” Xi said during a speech on Saturday in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur Region, state media reported. Xi said it was necessary to “combine the development of the anti-terrorism and anti-separatism struggle with the…

Seeking to promote its rosy narrative about the peace and prosperity enjoyed by majority-Muslim Uyghurs in the far-western region of Xinjiang, China earlier this month invited delegates from the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation to visit and observe. The propaganda junket – aimed at blunting international criticism of Beijing’s repression that the United States and some Western parliaments have described as genocide and crimes against humanity – seems to have worked. The delegation traveled to Urumqi, Kashgar, Changi and the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, where they saw an exhibit on…

A prominent U.S.-based Uyghur activist said he learned this week that his father died seven months ago in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, though the circumstances of his death remain unclear. Abdulhakim Idris, executive director of the Center of Uyghur Studies based in Falls Church, Virginia, and former inspector general of the World Uyghur Congress, found out on Wednesday that his father, Abdulkerim Zikrullah Idris, 81, died in January in the city of Hotan, known as Hetian in Chinese. Abdulhakim was informed of the news from a source who insisted on anonymity…