Category Archives: Xinjiang

It’s time to boycott any company doing business in Xinjiang | Michael Caster

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Forced labour in China’s internment camps taints the supply chains of many western companies. We need to take action

Any western company doing business in Xinjiang should consider their supply chains tainted by forced labour drawn from internment camps. Hardly a drop in the ocean of the vast global economy, this involves companies such as Ikea, H&M, Volkswagen and Siemens.

This month, the United States banned the import of products made by a firm in Xinjiang over its use of forced labour. It also blacklisted 28 Chinese entities for their role in the repression of Uighurs and issued visa restrictions on key Chinese officials. Following suit, two major Australian companies have now also announced they are ending partnership with their cotton supplier in Xinjiang.

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Joe Hockey offered to assist in Barr inquiry without official request – politics live

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There is a transcript of his conversation with US attorney, but officials say they do not intend to share it with estimates. All the day’s events, live

Mark Butler to Angus Taylor:

“I refer to the minister’s previous answer – where did the minister get the forged document?”

I absolutely reject the premise of the question and the bizarre assertions being peddled by those opposite.

Mark Butler to Angus Taylor:

My question is to the minister of emissions reduction. Section 253 of the New South Wales crimes act creates a serious offence for making a false document to influence the exercise of a public duty. I refer to his provision of a forged City of Sydney document in the Daily Telegraph in an attempt to influence the Lord Mayor of Sydney in exercise of her public duty. Will he administer to this house that this forgery was not made by him or his office?

Yes.

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‘Think of your family’: China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests

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Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. But the call from Xinjiang, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in internment camps.

Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.

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Hong Kong protests are at ‘life-threatening level’, say police

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Warning follows another night of violent skirmishes between police and protesters in city

Violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have escalated to a “life-threatening level”, police have said, after a small bomb exploded and a police officer was stabbed in clashes overnight.

Peaceful rallies descended into chaos in the Chinese-ruled city on Sunday with running skirmishes between protesters and police in shopping malls and on streets. Black-clad activists threw 20 petrol bombs at one police station, while others trashed shops and metro stations.

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Uighur children are being separated from their families. Guterres must denounce China | Tahir Imin Uighurian

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Eleven children from my family have been taken from their parents in Xinjiang – the UN chief must not remain silent

It has already been a year since the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination said it had credible evidence that more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and minorities in China were being held in internment camps and forced into “political camps for indoctrination”, turning the Uighur autonomous region into a “no rights zone”.

As the United Nations General Assembly meets this week, UN chief António Guterres should denounce China’s crimes against Uighurs. On Tuesday, the US led more than 30 countries in condemning what it called China’s “horrific campaign of repression” against Muslims in Xinjiang. Assistant secretary of state John Sullivan said the UN and its member states had “a singular responsibility to speak up when survivor after survivor recounts the horrors of state repression”.

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Footage shows hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners in China – video

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Drone footage has emerged showing police leading hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men from a train in what is believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang. The video, posted anonymously on YouTube last week, shows what appear to be Uighur Muslims or people from other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police. Prisoners in China are often transferred with handcuffs and masks covering their faces

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Uighurs in China were target of two-year iOS malware attack – reports

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Android and Windows devices also targeted in campaign believed to be state-backed

Chinese Uighurs were the target of an iOS malware attack lasting more than two years that was revealed last week, according to multiple reports.

Android and Windows devices were also targeted in the campaign, which took the form of “watering hole attacks”: taking over commonly visited websites or redirecting their visitors to clones in order to indiscriminately attack each member of a community.

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China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship?

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This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s hardline rule

The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. “It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”

We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”

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Families of missing Uighurs use Tiktok video app to publicise China detentions

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Short messages campaign for information on loved ones held in Xinjiang camps

Uighurs are sending out messages on social media video app Tiktok showing family members who have gone missing, in their latest attempt to raise awareness about the estimated 1 million Uighurs who have been detained in camps that have sprung up across China’s Xinjiang region.

The videos, many of which are over eery music, show images of missing people, with a photograph or video of the person posting the clip superimposed over the top. Many of those posting the videos are crying.

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Uighur man held after leaking letters from Xinjiang camp inmates, says family

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Abdurahman Memet believed notes from his parents and brother were proof they had been imprisoned in Chinese ‘re-education’ centres

A Uighur man who leaked letters from inmates at China’s secretive internment camps in Xinjiang has been detained, according to activists and relatives.

Abdurahman Memet, 30, a tour guide in Turpan, last year received letters from his parents and brother, written from inside detention centres in the far western region where as many as 1.5 million Muslims are believed to be detained in political “re-education” and other camps.

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Activists scramble to prevent Uighur man’s deportation to China

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Ablikim Yusuf, who had been living in Pakistan, faces detention and torture if he is sent to China, say supporters

Human rights activists are scrambling to prevent the imminent deportation of a Uighur man to China, where they say he faces torture.

Ablikim Yusuf, 53, who has been living in Pakistan, posted a desperate video on Facebook asking for help from the overseas Uighur community. He says in the video, translated and circulated by activists on Saturday: “I am currently being held in Doha airport, about to be deported to Beijing, China. I need the world’s help. I am originally from Hotan.”

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‘This isn’t true’: Uighur families angered by China claim relatives freed

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China’s claim it has freed 90% of people in Xinjiang detention camps has been met with anger and scepticism

When news broke that senior officials in China were saying 90% of Uighurs detained in Xinjiang’s notorious detention centres had been released, Nurgul Sawut’s phone started going crazy.

“My Whatsapp, my Signal, my Facebook, everyone was tagging me in their posts,” said Sawut, a Uighur community leader based in Canberra. “Everyone started reacting. They were saying: ‘If 90%, where are my relatives, where are my family and friends?’ We’re not seeing any of those people in the community, who are you releasing?”

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Uighurs challenge China to prove missing relatives are free

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Diaspora sceptical over claim most inmates released from Xinjiang detainment centres

China’s claim that most inmates have been released from mass detention centres in Xinjiang region has been met with scepticism by the Uighur diaspora, which has launched a social media campaign challenging Beijing to prove it.

Rights groups and experts say more than 1 million mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have been detained in internment camps in the tightly controlled north-west region, home to China’s ethnic Uighur population.

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China accused of rapid campaign to take Muslim children from their families

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Relatives tell of more than 100 missing children amid Xinjiang boarding school building drive

China is reportedly separating Muslim children from their families, religion and language, and is engaged in a rapid, large-scale campaign to build boarding schools for them.

The attempts to “remove children from their roots” exists in parallel to Beijing’s ongoing detention of an estimated 1 million Uighur adults from the western Xinjiang region in camps and sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group, the BBC reported.

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Chinese border guards put secret surveillance app on tourists’ phones

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Software extracts emails, texts and contacts and could be used to track movements

Chinese border police are secretly installing surveillance apps on the phones of visitors and downloading personal information as part of the government’s intensive scrutiny of the remote Xinjiang region, the Guardian can reveal.

The Chinese government has curbed freedoms in the province for the local Muslim population, installing facial recognition cameras on streets and in mosques and reportedly forcing residents to download software that searches their phones.

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‘Deep concerns’: US objects to UN counterterrorism chief’s visit to Xinjiang

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Other countries joined the US in objecting to the trip in a region where China detains 1 million Uighurs and muslims

The United States and other western countries have objected to a visit by the United Nations counterterrorism chief to China’s remote Xinjiang, where UN experts say some 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims are held in detention centres.

Vladimir Voronkov, a veteran Russian diplomat who heads the UN Counterterrorism Office, is in China at the invitation of Beijing and is due to visit Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, according to an email sent by his office to countries that raised concerns.

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UN counter-terror tsar visits Xinjiang where Uighurs held in huge numbers

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Activists say official visit risks affirming China’s narrative that camps thought to hold a million people are not an abuse of human rights

The UN’s counter-terrorism tsar is on a visit this week to China’s Xinjiang region, where Beijing insists the estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims it is detaining constitute a potential terrorist threat.

Vladimir Voronkov, the under-secretary general for counter-terrorism, is the highest level UN official to visit Xinjiang, which activists have described as an open-air prison where people are deprived of religious freedom.

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Revealed: new evidence of China’s mission to raze the mosques of Xinjiang

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Guardian and Bellingcat investigation finds more than two dozen Islamic religious sites partly or completely demolished since 2016

Around this time of the year, the edge of the Taklamakan desert in far western China should be overflowing with people. For decades, every spring thousands of Uighur Muslims would converge on the Imam Asim shrine, a group of buildings and fences surrounding a small mud tomb believed to contain the remains of a holy warrior from the eighth century.

Pilgrims from across the Hotan oasis would come seeking healing, fertility, and absolution, trekking through the sand in the footsteps of those ahead of them. It was one of the largest shrine festivals in the region. People left offerings and tied pieces of cloth to branches, markers of their prayers.

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US accuses China of using ‘concentration camps’ against Muslim minority

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In a highly charged attack, the Pentagon says up to 3m people could be imprisoned in detention centres

The United States has accused China on Friday of imprisoning more than a million Muslims in “concentration camps” in some of Washington’s strongest condemnation of Beijing’s treatment of minorities.

The comments by Randall Schriver, who leads Asia policy at the US defense department, are likely to increase tension with Beijing, which is sensitive to international criticism and describes the sites as vocational education training centres aimed at stemming the threat of Islamic extremism.

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‘Seldom uses front door’: report reveals how China spies on Muslim minority

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Authorities use an app to collect personal data on Uighurs as part of a vast surveillance network, Human Rights Watch says

Using too much electricity or having acquaintances abroad are among a list of reasons that prompt authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region to investigate Uighurs and other Muslims who might be deemed “untrustworthy” and sent to internment camps, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

The report, released on Thursday, analyses a mobile app used by authorities in Xinjiang to collect personal data from ethnic minorities, file reports about people and objects they find suspicious, and carry out investigations.

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