China’s 21stCentury Internment Camps in the Uyghur Region
The Report was commisioned by Rebiya Kadder ,leader of Uyghur movement in exile and the president of International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation
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Table of Contents
BEIJING — THE Chinese government, as part of a long-running dispute over islands in the East China Sea, recently declared an “air defense identification zone” in the area, raising tensions with Japan and the United States. In my view, the significance of this step is not the warning to Japan, but the patriotic stance it represents. For a long time a strain of popular opinion in China had criticized the government for being weak on the issue. The new stance can be seen as a response to these sentiments. In this connection I am reminded of a pair of incidents last summer. On July 17, in the town of Linwu in Hunan Province, in central China, a melon farmer, Deng Zhengjia, and his wife had a dispute with municipal officials by their roadside watermelon stall. Several officers beat Mr. Deng, and he fell to the ground and died. According to witnesses, he had been struck on the head with a steelyard weight before he fell.
Last week, a pleased Shanghai doctor who performed a successful cataract operation gingerly led his patient to the window for him to see the city's skyline for the first time, but instead of a delightful cry, the patient batted his eyelids several times and began to shout at the doctor for botching the job. That is one of the dozens of jokes flying around the country's social media as Shanghai and more than 100 other major mainland cities were enveloped in the choking and hazardous smog last week. Visibility in some eastern cities was reduced to less than 50 metres and to less than five metres in the worst hit places, where PM2.5 concentrations hit 500 micrograms per cubic metre. The World Health Organisation's recommended level for the pollutant is 25mcg per cubic metre.
A top ethnic minority Uyghur scholar and activist has hit out at moves to ban college students in China's troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang from graduating unless they pass a test of political views, saying that the policy is "dangerous" and "ridiculous." "The Xinjiang authorities are in the process of doing something very dangerous," Uyghur university professor Ilham Tohti, a vocal critic of China’s policies toward ethnic minority Uyghurs, said in response to official media reports from a regional education conference.
The second most-wanted student leader from the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was turned back from Hong Kong on Monday in his latest attempt to surrender to Chinese authorities and return home. It was the fourth such attempt by Wu'er Kaixi, who said his lack of success so far was the result of "absurd" actions by the Chinese government. Wu'er, who has lived in exile for more than two decades, is stuck in a situation in which he's both wanted for arrest and, like many other dissidents who have fled, prevented from returning to China.
