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Uighurs are not ethnically or culturally Chinese, but a Turkic people whose language is close to the Uzbek of nearby Uzbekistan and distantly related to the Turkish of Turkey.

. In 1955 the PRC created the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region as a concession to the non-Han population and in parallel with similar arrangements for Tibet and Inner Mongolia

As China emerged from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the power of the Chinese Communist Party recovered; there was no equivalent liberation for the Uighurs.

Demonstrations in 1995 in Yining, the base of the 1940s’ independent republic, provoked Beijing to issue Document No. 7 the following year. It identified the conflict in Xinjiang as the most serious threat to the Chinese state and a ‘Strike Hard’ campaign was launched against resisters. In 1997 another major Yining demonstration in the north-east of the state was violently suppressed.

The repression under the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign became permanent. Anyone suspected of sympathies for ‘separatism’ – advocating an independent Uighur state – or involvement in ‘illegal religious activities’, primarily with the Sufi brotherhoods – could be detained without trial. Attempts by family members to extract relatives from police stations or other detention facilities have led to frequent clashes with the authorities, many of which have turned violent. Sporadic attacks against the police or other symbols of Chinese rule, either by local people or armed militant groups, were followed by government reprisals. Most conflict occurred in the old Sufi strongholds in the south of Xinjiang but, in July 2009, clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the regional capital, Urumqi, cost many lives. They also resulted in the detention of thousands of Uighurs, some of whom were executed, and the eventual replacement in April 2010 of the Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary, Wang Lequan, who had held the post since 1994. The level of repression and the secrecy of judicial processes aroused widespread international concerns about human rights abuses.

In August 2016 Xi appointed Chen Quanguo, who had previously ruled Tibet, as Xinjiang Party Secretary: he rapidly introduced draconian measures of repression – ‘counter-terrorism’ in the official terminology – including the now notorious concentration camps and advanced surveillance technology. The clampdown on religious activities has intensified and satellite images indicate that many mosques and Sufi shrines have been destroyed, including the Imam Asim shrine outside Khotan, the site of an annual festival attended by thousands of pious Uighur Muslims. This intensification of repression shows no sign of ending.

It was being used to detain hundreds of thousands of – some estimates suggested over a million – members of the Muslim Uighur community suspected of involvement in, or sympathy for, demonstrations and attacks on government institutions.

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China initially denied the existence of the camps, before claiming they were a necessary measure against separatist violence in Xinjiang.

In July 2020, the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab accused China of "gross and egregious" human rights abuses against the Uighurs. The reports of forced sterilisation and wider persecution of the ethnic group were "reminiscent of something not seen for a long time", he said.

The Chinese government says the measures are necessary to combat separatist violence in the region, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uighurs. Many prominent members of the ethnic minority have been imprisoned or sought asylum abroad after being accused of terrorism

In 2017, President Xi Jinping issued a directive that "religions in China must be Chinese in orientation" and "adapt themselves to socialist society". The directive led to a fresh crackdown on religious practice that particularly affected the Uighurs.

Xinjiang is now covered by a pervasive network of surveillance, including police, checkpoints, and cameras that scan everything from number plates to individual faces.

The Uighurs are a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnicity who regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. The majority live in Xinjiang, where they number about 11 million people.

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"I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi".

citing terrorism and security risks.

China initially denied the existence of the camps, before saying the internment sites provide job training and education.

central government policies have gradually curtailed the Uighurs' religious, commercial and cultural activities, as large numbers of majority Han Chinese have been encouraged to move to the region.

Intrusive and pervasive surveillance oversees the Muslim minorities of Xinjiang.

Displays of Islamic faith are often punished. A network of concentration camps has been constructed to enslave Uighurs for purposes of “reeducation,” and in recent years the camps have swelled to accommodate a torrent of new inmates. 

 Many of the women in the camps are sterilized.

Our knowledge of the monstrous treatment of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities has recently been sharpened by drone footage out of Xinjiang taken last year showing scores of Uighurs sitting, bound and blindfolded with heads shaved, waiting to be loaded onto train cars bound for the camps—or worse.

President Trump reportedly gave his blessing to China’s treatment of the Uighurs.

 According to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, at the G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi explained to Trump the rationale behind the concentration camps. According to the American interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump considered eminently justified. Bolton also declared that the National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, had confirmed that Trump endorsed the Chinese gulag during his November 2017 trip to China.

“For Biden’s policies toward China, the part about making China play by the international rules, I think, is very hollow,” said Wang Dan, who helped lead the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a university student. “As we know, the Chinese Communist Party hardly abides by international rules.”

“The Trump Administration by far has done more to raise our issue than all other countries combined,” said Salih Hudayar, who was born in Xinjiang and moved to the United States as a child. “I’m very skeptical of a Biden administration because I am worried he will allow China to go back to normal, which is a 21st-century genocide of the Uighurs.”

“These guys are utilitarian, and they believe that if Trump is waging war against the C.C.P. then he’s right for them,” Mr. Badiucao said. “That mentality fits the whole ‘America First’ ideology, where it’s OK for other people to suffer if your goal is met, and their goal is overthrowing the C.C.P.”

In June, Mr. Trump signed legislation that led to sanctions being placed on Chinese officials who have overseen the construction of mass detention camps in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where more than a million people, mostly members of the Uighur Muslim minority, have been imprisoned.

“The United States must realize that there will be no improvements on human rights issues in China if there is no regime change,” Mr. Wang added. He has continued to question Mr. Trump’s electoral loss, baseless claims shared by other prominent Chinese-born dissidents.

uring the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden released a statement calling the situation in Xinjiang a “genocide.” The Trump Administration has not used such a designation, and a book by his former national security adviser said that Mr. Trump told Mr. Xi that he should continue building the detention camps in Xinjiang.

Foreign policy advisers to Mr. Biden say that it is unfair to presume that he will continue the Obama administration’s moderate stance. It is, they say, a different era. The recent human rights legislation championed by the Trump administration has received broad bipartisan support.

And some Asian dissidents acknowledge that the antipathy toward Mr. Biden is driven in part by a deluge of online misinformation that paints the president-elect as a secret socialist or contends, without any proof, that foreign “communist money” turned the election against Mr. Trump. Such unsubstantiated claims have been repeated by niche online publications in Vietnamese, Chinese and other languages.

“The crisis of democracy in the world makes people, especially activists, confused and susceptible to the influence of conspiracy theories and information manipulation,” said Nguyen Quang A, a Vietnamese dissident

“The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. “China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”

The effective barring of Roth from entering Hong Kong is not an isolated incident, happening days after a U.S. photographer covering the pro-democracy protests was also banned from entering the financial hub.

“I think it’s worth stressing that what happened to me pales in comparison to what is happening to the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong. They’re the ones who are facing tear gas, beatings and arrest, and I just had another 16 hour flight [back to New York],” Roth says. “But what it does reflect is a real worsening of the human rights situation in Hong Kong.”

At a press briefing on Monday after the incident involving Roth, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “allowing or not allowing someone’s entry is China’s sovereign right,” adding that foreign NGOs were supporting “Hong Kong independence separatist activities.”

“The justification they put forward was laughable, and insulting to the people of Hong Kong,” says Roth. “They don’t need me to tell them to take to the streets — they are looking to defend their own human rights, their own political freedoms and their own rule of law.”

Roth says Beijing’s explanation for barring him shows how fearful the authorities are of demonstrations in the city, and is an attempt to persuade those in the mainland not to emulate the pro-democracy protests. “They simply cannot admit to people on the mainland that hundreds of thousands Chinese citizens would take to the street in opposition to the increasingly dictatorial rule that is coming from Beijing.”

The Chinese government has attempted to deter, track and deport journalists and foreign investigators from reporting on forced indoctrination and detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in China’s western province of Xinjiang, highlighted in Roth’s lead essay in the HRW report.

On Monday, Chinese state media reported that the semi-autonomous region of Tibet would introduce forthcoming regulations to “strengthen ethnic unity;” echoing language used in regulations introduced in Xinjiang four years ago.

Beyond the worrying crackdown within China’s own borders, HRW’s report highlights Beijing’s efforts to deter the international community from scrutinizing its human rights abuses, taking “full advantage of the corporate quest for profit to extend its censorship to critics abroad.”

And at the individual level, the export of censorship is reaching dissidents and even universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.; the report notes that students from China who wanted to join campus debates felt unable to do so for fear of being monitored or reported to Chinese authorities.

The export of the Chinese censorship system also permeates governments and international institutions, and has “transformed into an active assault on the international human rights system,”

China has also consistently worked with Russia at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to investigate human rights abuses in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. “China worries that even enforcement of human rights standards someplace else will have a boomerang effect that will come back to haunt it,” says Roth.

Aside from China, the report also looks at several other concerning situations around around the world, including civilians at risk from indiscriminate bombing in Idlib province in Syria, the desperate humanitarian crisis resulting from Saudi-led coalition’s actions in Yemen, the refugee crisis emerging from Maduro’s grip on power in Venezuela, and Myanmar’s denial of the genocide of the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice. And while Roth is encouraged by a growing international response to China’s actions in Xinjiang, particularly from Muslim majority nations, there remains much more to be done. From a U.S. perspective, the report notes that strong rhetoric from officials condemning human rights violations in China is “often undercut by Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping and other friendly autocrats,” as well as the Trump-administration’s own policies in violation of human rights, including forced separation at the U.S.-Mexican border.

Kashmir has been mired in crisis for decades and this past year the Indian government upended decades of delicate, albeit flawed policies by unilaterally revoking the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir, the part of the region it controls. It sent in thousands of additional troops, arrested practically the entire intellectual class there, including elected representatives, business people and students, and shut down the internet.

Mr. Modi’s party has been pushing a religious nationalist ideology that critics say favors India’s Hindu majority and deeply alienates its Muslim minority. Just last month, Mr. Modi’s government passed a highly divisive law that creates a special path for migrants to get Indian citizenship — if they are not Muslim. Outrage at the law set off weeks of nationwide antigovernment protests, which are continuing.

Kashmir was India’s only predominantly Muslim state until August, when Mr. Modi’s government summarily erased its statehood. Since then, it has been suspended in tension, with most internet service still shut off and schools deserted.

General Rawat made the suggestion about sending Kashmiris to deradicalization camps at an international affairs conference in New Delhi attended by government officials, foreign diplomats, business executives and scholars.

Saket Gokhale, a civil rights activist in Mumbai, said this was the first he had ever heard of deradicalization camps inside India.He said that in some areas where the security forces were battling armed groups, such as the Maoist belt in central India, the military ran deradicalization programs including community visits and vocational training. But those were voluntary and did not involve confinement.

Many Kashmiri intellectuals denied that Kashmir had a radicalization problem, at least not a religious radicalization problem. The militancy is minuscule — fewer than 300 armed fighters by most estimates — and much of the combatants’ ideology turns on political differences with the Indian government, not religious ones.

Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantánamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism. Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison. “We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general.

When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantánamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down. That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantánamo, the same administration official said. “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy,” he said. “That’s not what happened. It’s like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guy’s eye.”

Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

“The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.

“He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”

Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan. Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead.

“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.

he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”

Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency

“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel. Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny. “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,”

His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.

Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies. Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

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The Chinese authorities often blame Islamic extremists for the bloodshed,

The episode on Monday occurred in Kashgar Prefecture, an impoverished stretch of southern Xinjiang whose population is nearly 90 percent Uighur and less than 10 percent Han Chinese, the nation’s predominant ethnic group

saying that some have been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But human

Government censorship of the Chinese news media and restrictions on foreign reporters who travel to Xinjiang make it difficult to learn more about such episodes, but reports of them have surged despite an increasingly heavy police presence.

the time has passed when tech companies can simply build tools, write algorithms and amass data without regard to who uses the technology and for what purpose.

Nearly a decade ago, Cisco Systems was sued in federal court on behalf of 11 members of the Falun Gong organization, who claimed that the company built a nationwide video surveillance and “forced conversion” profiling system for the Chinese government that was tailored to help Beijing crack down on the group

According to Cisco’s own marketing materials, the video analyzer — which would now be marketed as artificial intelligence — was the “only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

The failure to punish Cisco set a precedent for American companies to build artificial intelligence for foreign governments to use for political oppression

Thermo Fisher, sold DNA analyzers to aid in the current large-scale domestic surveillance and internment of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the region of Xinjiang.

Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year.

Tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees’ legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistle-blower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union

Ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses — via international human rights law — to uphold human rights.

Another, named Wang Yongzhi in charge of Yarkand county, was made an example of after he defied orders and quietly released more than 7,000 detainees. “He refused,” an internal document said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

The Cold War was fought and won pretty much exclusively on military and cultural terms. The economic side was relevant only because the Soviets' doomed model inhibited any real competition. We were neither competitors nor partners in the economic space. A new Cold War between the United States and China would be something else entirely. It is difficult to see how it could be fought effectively, not to mention successfully.

This is by no means to question the need to respond to increasingly aggressive behavior by China. But the U.S. response must be coherent, disciplined and sophisticated. It must balance capabilities and objectives

Reverting to a Cold War mentality will drive us toward belligerent posturing that has little or no chance of changing Chinese behavior and could, on the contrary, provoke overreactions and dangerous miscalculations on both sides.

China has recognized, far earlier and far more clearly than any of the rest of us, that technology is the determining factor in the decisive battle of this moment in history. Beijing is working hard to create an overwhelming Chinese advantage in this battle.

This is very hard work, requiring patience, conviction and broad political support. It also requires the full participation of our allies, both in the region and elsewhere. We must undertake these efforts with the imperative of preventing a downward spiral toward armed conflict.

the Chinese are clearly pursuing their foreign policy goals according to a carefully calculated long-term strategy.

China’s strategy also aims to encircle the West technologically, dominating all the advanced systems of data collection and manipulation, including artificial intelligence, robotics, aerospace and quantum computing, always taking into account potential military applications

Above all, we must create a deliberate strategy that is aimed at managing this great-power conflict rather than vanquishing a foe.

Nearly spontaneous and seemingly unconnected irritations such as closing a consulate, imposing sanctions on a few officials, tweaking tariffs or sanctioning individual companies merely provoke countermeasures that will inhibit real management of this immense and complicated problem.

His latest Twitter post, though, set a new bar for China’s long-running flouting of diplomatic niceties, foreign policy experts said

“It was a deranged move by the standards of modern diplomacy,” said James Laurenceson, the director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

After the document was released, Chinese officials said they also planned to draw attention to Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people and of older residents in nursing homes — an answer to Australia’s criticism of China’s treatment of Uighurs, a Muslim minority, and its crackdown on Hong Kong.

The dating system is based on measuring the length of chromosome segments of a particular ancestry that occur in a population. When people of two different populations intermarry, their children’s genomes carry large chunks of DNA of one parent’s ancestry interspersed with large chunks from the other’s.

Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers

Though all humans have the same set of genes, their genomes are studded with mutations, which are differences in the sequence of DNA units in the genome. These mutations occur in patterns because whole sets of mutations are passed down from parent to child and hence will be common in a particular population

The lowest amount of African admixture occurs in the Druse, a religious group of the Middle East that prohibited slavery and has been closed to converts since A.D. 1043.

from the average size of the chunks in a person’s genome, the geneticists can calculate the number of generations since the mixing event.

One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia.

the European colonization of America is recorded in the genomes of the Maya and Pima Indians. And Cambodian genomes mark the fall of the Khmer empire in the form of ancestral DNA from the invading Tai people.

They find among Northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776 B.C. and A.D. 550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey.

his method cannot yet detect genetic mixing between very similar populations, as was the case with the English and their invaders from Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

“In some sense we don’t want to talk to historians,” Dr. Falush said. “There’s a great virtue in being objective: You put the data in and get the history out. We do think this is a way of reconstructing history by just using DNA.”

A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.

Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.

While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.

In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.

Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.