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Former reeducation camp detainees have told CNN they experienced political indoctrination and abuse inside the camps, such as food and sleep deprivation and forced injections.

CNN reporting has also found that some Uyghur women were forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization as part of a deliberate attempt to push down birth rates among minorities in Xinjiang.

China denies allegations of such human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It has insisted that its reeducation camps are necessary for preventing religious extremism and terrorism in the area,

Bates said -- apparently referring to a claim by former national security advisor John Bolton that Trump previously encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to continue building detainment camps in Xinjiang.

The treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang has been widely condemned by the international community. In July 2019, twenty-two countries including Japan and the UK signed a letter urging China to end its "mass arbitrary detentions and related violations" and called on Beijing to allow UN experts to access the region.

Earlier this month, the US also banned imports of cotton products and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang over forced labor concerns.

Over the same period, ByteDance has flourished. Its TikTok app has been downloaded a billion times, of which nearly 100 million came from the United States, and it has a jaw-dropping valuation of $75 billion.

ByteDance has also been working with Xinjiang authorities under a program called “Xinjiang Aid,” whereby Chinese companies open subsidiaries or factories in Xinjiang and employ locals who have been detained in the camps. Its operations are centered on Hotan, an area of Xinjiang considered backward by the Communist Party and where the repression has been among the most severe.

ByteDance has been guiding and helping Xinjiang authorities and media outlets to use its news aggregation app and Douyin to “propagate and showcase Hotan’s new image,” according to the ASPI report.

Leaked documents have previously shown how ByteDance censors content that the Chinese government disapproves of, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.

In the case of Huawei, which is locked in an existential battle with the Trump administration, there is evidence of extensive and direct work with Chinese security organs in Xinjiang, including helping authorities there with the “digitization requirements” of public security projects.

“Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society,” a Xinjiang government website quoted one Huawei director as saying last year.

When the Xinjiang Public Security Department and Huawei signed the agreement to establish an “intelligent security industry” innovation lab in the regional capital of Urumqi last year, a local official said Huawei had been supplying “reliable technical support” for the department, according to the report

Huawei has also participated in a program called “Safe Xinjiang,” which the ASPI experts said was “code for a police surveillance system.”

“The Chinese tech companies in this report enjoy a highly favorable regulatory environment and are unencumbered by privacy and human rights concerns,” it concludes. Many are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”

The four-page UN Genocide Convention was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and has a clear definition of what constitutes "genocide." China is a signatory to the convention, along with 151 other countries.

However any establishment of an International Criminal Tribunal would require the approval of the UN Security Council, of which China is a permanent member with veto power, making any hearing on the allegations of genocide in Xinjiang unlikely.

According to the report, between 1 million and 2 million people have allegedly been detained in as many as 1,400 extrajudicial internment facilities across Xinjiang by the Chinese government since 2014, when it launched a campaign ostensibly targeting Islamic extremism.Beijing has claimed the crackdown was necessary after a series of deadly attacks across Xinjiang and other parts of China, which China has categorized as terrorism.

The report also attributed a dramatic drop in the Uyghur birth rate across the region -- down about 33% between 2017 and 2018 -- to the alleged implementation of an official Chinese government program of sterilizations, abortions and birth control, which in some cases was forced upon the women without their consent.

"The genocide allegation is the lie of the century, concocted by extremely anti-China forces. It is a preposterous farce aiming to smear and vilify China," Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a news conference on February 4.

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.

"If there was no policy across the whole country, it would be difficult to enforce a separate one for poor people and Muslims."

China's birth rate has been falling rapidly since the introduction of the one-child policy more than 40 years ago, which limited couples to one baby in order to alleviate poverty and stem a population boom.

During the one-child policy, ethnic minorities, including Xinjiang's Uyghur population, were allowed to have up to three children, which authorities said was in deference of the group's cultural traditions of large families.

Faced with a demographic crisis, the Chinese government relaxed the policy in 2016 to allow for two children

n 2020, the birth rate fell by almost 15% year on year.

While the policy successfully reined in birth rates as China developed, in more recent years officials have become concerned the country won't have enough young workers to keep powering its economic growth.

Between 1991 and 2017, Xinjiang had a substantially higher birth-rate ratio when compared to the rest of the country, according to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

But when the Chinese government began its crackdown in Xinjiang in 2017, which allegedly involved sending millions of Uyghurs to a vast complex of detention centers, there was a simultaneous tightening of family planning policies.Between 2017 and 2018, birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by a third, from 15.8 per 1,000 people to 10.7 per 1,000 people.

At a time when the Chinese government was desperately trying to raise birth rates, sterilizations in the region surged to 243 per 100,000 people in 2018, according to official government documents referenced in a report by Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. That is far higher than the rate of 33 per 100,000 people for the rest of the country.

And while the use of IUD birth control devices dropped in China between 2016 and 2018, Zenz quoted documents showing in Xinjiang it rose to 963 per 100,000 people.

"If you lifted the birth restrictions universally, they'd lose their justification for tightening birth control policies against specific sectors of Chinese society that they dislike," said Carl Minzner, professor of law at Fordham University.

Experts said Beijing would be reluctant to find new roles for the tens of thousands of people employed by the government to oversee the country's massive family planning policy.

At the same time, removing the limits would abolish one of the many ways in the Chinese government can monitor its population, Byler said, forcing Beijing to find another reason to carry out intimate domestic surveillance.

In 2019 exports from the province totalled $17.6bn, about the same as in 2017 ($17.5bn), including more than $300m in goods that went to the American market in each of those years.

Until last year, governments and industry leaders around the world said little to directly challenge China over allegations of forced labour.

In March a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which would establish a presumption that all goods from Xinjiang are made with forced labour, blocking them at the border unless companies can prove otherwise.

American customs officials have issued a series of orders blocking certain shipments from Xinjiang,

On December 23rd the Fair Labour Association, a consortium that counts Nike and Adidas among its affiliate members, declared that it was “prohibiting sourcing and production” from Xinjiang, including raw materials like cotton that might end up in finished goods elsewhere.

In December a bill similar to America’s was introduced in Australia’s parliament.

subject of intense lobbying from industry, including representatives of big clothing-makers, who have sought, among other changes, a delay of up to one year in enforcement.

it will take time for all of them to shift supply chains, and to encourage more cotton-growing elsewhere.

they expect the incoming Biden administration to continue the Trump administration’s enforcement actions against Xinjiang imports

they argue that it is difficult to penetrate deep into their supply chains to verify the origin of raw materials

Experts (as well as industry groups) argue that the efforts of Congress and the Trump administration will have a limited impact unless other governments follow suit.

In the European Union the issue of Uyghur forced labour hangs over an investment deal that has been negotiated with China

Not all businesses appear ready to decouple from Xinjiang entirely, or at least quickly

88% of China’s textiles and clothing are produced for domestic consumption. Large non-Chinese firms are among those who profit.

American laws, aided by forensic science, will help to combat forced labour in Xinjiang. But more countries and multinational companies will also have to forgo their immediate self-interest and take on China directly

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

productive work.

e is evidence

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.

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.

European Parliament members Reinhard Butikofer, Michael Gahler, Raphaël Glucksmann, Ilhan Kyuchyuk and Miriam Lexmann were included in China's sanctions.

The U.S. joined the EU and other allies.

The EU and U.S., along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada released a joint statement saying, "We will continue to stand together to shine a spotlight on China's human rights violations. We stand united and call for justice for those suffering in Xinjiang."

The State and Treasury Departments released statements announcing financial terms that send "a strong signal to those who violate or abuse international human rights, and we will take further actions in coordination with likeminded partners."

“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.”

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.

ong time

of the show’s stars have disappeared into a vast new gulag in which more than 1m people, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up.

Officials say the camps offer “vocational education” to help Uyghurs find better jobs and to curb their “extremist” tendencies.

shown no more sign of extremism than simply being devout Muslims.

their crime has been to show too much enthusiasm for Uyghur culture, not necessarily just Islam.

Uyghur groups in the West reckon the four are among nearly 400 intellectuals and cultural figures who have been detained in the new camps, sent to regular prisons or who have otherwise disappeared since the clampdown began.

Others associated with Uyghur culture have been paraded on state television praising the virtues of the Communist Party or singing patriotic songs.

In September 2014 Ilham Tohti, a revered academic with moderate political views, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism.

Mr Tohti had maintained a website that hosted writing by Uyghur intellectuals on social and cultural issues.

conforming to a stereotype endorsed by the party such as smiling Uyghurs wearing brightly coloured traditional costume, dancing in public squares and singing, often in Mandarin

Uyghurs in exile have been waging a parallel campaign to keep their culture alive

There are still underground artists in Xinjiang, she says. As repression has tightened, their works have become increasingly suffused with lament and despair.

Mr Tursun’s writings and links with other cultural personalities in Xinjiang may have led to his detention in 2018 and his reported jail term of 16 years.

But displays of loyalty to the party are no longer enough to keep people safe.

It includes fawning lyrics such as: “You put light into the hearts of the people.” Uyghurs in exile were dismayed to hear a much-loved performer crooning for the regime.

It returned last year, with changes. Introducing the new series, the host made approving remarks about building socialism in Xinjiang and loving the party.

In the show’s early days, this would have been “unimaginable”, says Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, an American ethnomusicologist who competed in the inaugural series of “The Voice of the Silk Road” in 2014.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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

saying th

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.