Day: October 14, 2021

Chinese officials have denounced a former Uyghur internment camp detainee who was forcibly sterilized about three years ago and has spoken publicly about her ordeal, as part of an ongoing smear campaign to discredit those who have exposed abuses against the mostly Muslim minority group.

Zumrat Dawut, who came to the U.S. with her family via Pakistan in 2019, had testified about her experience in the camps, where she was subjected to forced sterilization, providing news outlets and human rights organizations with strong evidence of the Chinese government’s alleged genocidal policies.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced her in April along with other former residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) who had testified about abuses in the region while living abroad as liars, criminals, terrorists, and persons of “bad morality.”

At a press conference Monday in Beijing, XUAR government officials defended their policies concerning Uyghur women and responded to recent reports that they had sold the assets of detained Uyghur businesspeople online.

Chinese officials hold periodic press conferences to counter condemnation of a litany of documented abuses against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, including confinement in mass internment camps, sexual assaults, forced abortions and birth control measures, and forced labor.

China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps since 2017, while dismissing widely documented evidence that it has mistreated Muslims living inside and outside the camps, including testimony from former detainees and guards describing widespread abuses in interviews with RFA and other media outlets.

Chinese officials say the camps are vocational training facilities where Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are taught skills in an effort to prevent religious extremism and terrorism in the region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live.

At the press conference, Xinjiang government spokesman Xu Guixiang discussed what he called the “protection of women’s rights and interests” in Xinjiang.

“Some anti-China forces falsely claim that Xinjiang has severely violated the rights and interests of ethnic minority women, and spread lies about the so-called forced birth control and forced labor by ethnic minority women,” he said.

“Facts have proved that with the continuous enhancement of the protection of women’s rights and interests in Xinjiang, the development environment of women of all ethnic groups has been continuously improved, the level of education has been significantly improved, the awareness of rights protection of marriage, family and property has increased significantly, and people’s livelihoods and welfare have been steadily improved,” Xu said.

‘They wanted to attack me psychologically’

When discussing policies on Uyghur women, Xu attacked Zumrat, who was forced to undergo sterilization surgery three years ago.

He rejected statements that Zumrat previously made that she had been held in a “training center,” that she and other detained Uyghur women were forced to take contraceptives, and that she had been forced to undergo sterilization surgery. He also denied that her “relatives”— Han Chinese assigned to monitor the homes of Uyghurs — had forced her to eat pork.

Xu also said that Zumrat’s father had never been questioned by police and did not die in custody.

Additionally, Xu told the audience that the woman’s older brother said that her Han “relative” was actually a relative of Zumrat’s brother, Abduhelil Dawut, and that his “relative” never once spent the night in the house.

Xu went on to say that in January 2018, Zumrat’s brother’s “relative” invited Zumrat, along with her brother and sister-in-law, to come to his house, and that the relative’s mother was an ethnic Hui Muslim, which meant that that it was impossible that she would have served pork to the guests.

The Xinjiang regional government has smeared other former Uyghur female detainees, including Tursunay Ziyawudun, Qelbinur Sidiq, and Sayragul Sauytbay, who have testified about the abuse they endured or witnessed.

Zumrat told RFA on Monday that she was surprised that Xu had discredited her at the press conference.

“They took advantage of a time when I was ill and weak,” she said. “It was as though they wanted to attack me psychologically. … On top of that, today is exactly two years since the day my father died. The time of my surgery occurred at the same time as the two-year anniversary of his death.”

Zumrat also said that she has ample evidence that she was in an internment camp, underwent forced sterilization surgery, and had Han Chinese “relatives” inside her home.

“Even now, compared to other survivors, whether we’re talking about the ‘relatives’ program or other things, I witnessed it all and have photographs I took with me when I left,” she said. “They cannot deny this.”

“There wasn’t only one [‘relative’] in my house. My daughter was five years old at the time, and even she had a Han Chinese ‘relative,’” Zumrat said. “I can’t remember their names right now, but I have photos of all of them. I even have photos when they were lying down and sleeping on the quilts in my home.”

Zumrat pointed out that Xu was correct in stating that the mother of her older brother’s “relative,” who is surnamed Zhao, was an ethnic Hui, but that the official failed to mention that Zhao’s father was Han Chinese.

Zhao renounced her own family and married a Han Chinese man, saying that she had become Han herself and started eating pork, Zumrat said.

“She gave us [pork],” she said. “She told us that it was necessary to slowly, gradually change Muslim [halal] rules. She said things like that, like it was nothing. And she was actually a police officer, this woman, Zhao.”

Hospital recovery

The press conference coincided with Zumrat’s recovery from a hysterectomy at a hospital in northern Virginia on Oct. 7. She had to undergo the operation because the forced sterilization surgery had damaged her uterus and endangered her life.

A written statement Zumrat submitted to her gynecologist said she had become infertile approximately three years ago after undergoing forced surgery in China.

Her physician, Dr. Devin Miller, said in a letter obtained by RFA that the forced sterilization left Zumrat unable to have children.

Uyghur human rights activist Rahima Mahmut said Uyghur women have been the greatest source of firsthand information about the internment camps in Xinjiang and that China is attacking those who have been released because they have exposed the government’s wrongdoings.

“It is primarily these brave women of ours who have spoken about the terrifying things inside [the camps],” she told RFA. “They have spurred discussion in the world by speaking in detail about intensely private things, things that people are normally too afraid to speak about. There has been a great power in this. This is why China is attacking them.”

Mahmut also said that China is using all means to cover up its crimes, including denouncing all former camp detainees as liars.

“Why are they attacking Uyghur women to this degree nonstop?” she asked “It’s because they have exposed China’s real motives. These women have done the best job in raising awareness of China’s crimes against humanity.”

The U.S. and other Western states have determined that the treatment of Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity. They also have imposed unilateral sanctions on relevant individuals and entities in Xinjiang.

XUAR government officials at the press conference also defended the seizure and online auction of property confiscated from detained Uyghur businesspeople.

The government has sold assets totaling more than U.S. $80 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report based on information compiled by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) and published in September.

XUAR government spokesman Elijan Inayet defended the sales of the assets, telling attendees at the press conference that the individuals who owned them had been arrested and imprisoned on charges such as terrorism, extremism, inciting ethnic hatred, and disturbing the social order.

But the UHRP report said that the individuals detained for such charges had been jailed “in a highly secretive process of arrest and trial that appears to fall outside judicial due process, in violation of China’s own laws.”

Reported by Jilil Kashgary for RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Chinese policies aimed at mitigating climate change on the Tibetan plateau are destroying traditional Tibetan approaches to managing the land, and serve only to further government efforts to move nomads from their grazing grounds, according to a report released this week.

“China has explicit and elaborate plans to empty Tibet of Tibetans, concentrating them in towns and cities, with few ways forward into the urban economy, and no way back to their lands,” says the report “Unsustainable Futures” by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

“Nomadic families all over Tibet have, over decades, been gradually squeezed into poverty by ever-tightening restrictions on the size of land allocations,” says the TCHRD report, which comes ahead of a UN climate change conference to be held at the end of October and in November in Glasgow.

Other Chinese policies impacting traditional nomad lifestyles include the compulsory fencing of allocated lands and construction of houses on winter pasture, limits on herd size, and pressure to sell more animals at younger ages, TCHRD said.

Tibetan nomads have been blamed for decades for state failures in rangeland management, the rights group said, adding that official rationales for their forced relocation include poverty alleviation, wildlife protection, and carbon capture.

 “But Tibetan customary modes of production generate very little of the emissions that cause climate change,” the rights group said in its report.

China now declares huge watersheds on the Tibetan Plateau to be national parks in an effort to mitigate climate change and offset its reputation as a major world polluter, TCHRD said.

“[But] as the world’s biggest maker and user of coal, cement, steel, aluminium, copper, and much else, China is the primary cause of climate change emissions.”

China’s exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources has at the same time done serious damage to the region’s environment, said Lobsang Yangtso, a campaign and research assistant at the International Tibet Network, a global coalition of groups working on Tibetan issues.

“And this is certain to increase in the near future,” Yangtso said, speaking to RFA.

“Where mining has taken place, the landscape has been destroyed and land has been ruined for any kind of agriculture. Tibetans have been forced to relocate, and waste from the mining pollutes most water sources,” Yangtso said, adding that heavy vehicles and equipment used in mining also pollute the air.

Tibetans living in areas being mined have no say in what the Chinese government is doing, Yangtso said.

“The Chinese attitude toward mining in Tibet is that China has the exclusive right to exploitation, and this is clear from what the Chinese government has done in the past,” he said.

Also speaking to RFA, TCHRD researcher Tenzin Nyiwoe said that the forced relocation of Tibetan pastoralists from their grazing lands into urban settlements has greatly disturbed the nomads’ traditional ways of life.

“This is one of the most important points raised in our report,” Nyiwoe said.

China’s claims to be taking a leadership role in global climate management should be closely examined at the coming Glasgow summit, and their policies on the Tibetan Plateau should be questioned, said Mirza Rahman, an independent researcher on environmental issues from Northeast India.

“Tibet’s ecology is very important to climate security,” Rahman said.

Reported by Lobe Socktsang for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Southeast Asian foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting Friday to discuss barring the Burmese junta chief from an upcoming ASEAN summit, Indonesia’s ambassador to the regional bloc said Thursday.

News of the meeting came after the Burmese junta spokesman confirmed that Erywan Yusof, the special envoy from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, had “postponed” a trip to Myanmar scheduled for earlier this week.

The Tuesday trip was postponed because Myanmar’s military leadership did not allow Erywan to meet with all parties, including deposed National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said Ade Padmo Sarwono, Indonesia’s ASEAN envoy.

“The meeting will be closed and limited to discussing the issue of Myanmar, especially information obtained from special envoy Dato Erywan,” Ade told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, when asked if the bloc had decided on Min Aung Hlaing’s attendance at the Oct. 26 to 28 ASEAN summit.

He said Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s junta chief, should not be invited to the ASEAN summit because the bloc does not recognize the junta administration.

Ambassador Ade declined to comment on whether the diplomat appointed by the Burmese junta as foreign minister would attend Friday’s meeting.

Myanmar’s military, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, toppled the elected NLD government on Feb. 1, claiming that last year’s polls were rigged. Since the coup, Burmese security forces have killed close to 1,170 people, mostly anti-coup protesters.

Last week, the ASEAN special envoy told reporters the junta had “backtracked” on a five-point consensus agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing when he and other ASEAN leaders met in Jakarta on April 24.

Friday’s unscheduled meeting to discuss the participation of Min Aung Hlaing was initiated by ASEAN chair Brunei, Ade said.

Until now, Myanmar military-appointed officials have participated in all ASEAN sub-meetings since the coup and splashed photographs of these virtual gatherings on state media and social media.

Myanmar, which became part of the 10-member ASEAN in 1997, has been in a similar position vis-à-vis the bloc before.

It was to take over the revolving chairmanship of ASEAN in 2006 when the country was under military junta rule. But it was persuaded to give the position to the Philippines after Western countries threatened to boycott ASEAN meetings.

NLD denies junta’s claim

Meanwhile, the junta did not comment on this week’s upcoming meeting, but after news broke about it on Friday, the foreign ministry posted a statement on Facebook.

Detailing the chronology of its interactions with the ASEAN envoy, the statement essentially said that the envoy’s Myanmar visit did not take place because the ministry did not agree to certain requests from the envoy.

“Myanmar has demonstrated flexibility in any possible ways and means to facilitate the special envoy’s visit to Myanmar,” the statement said.

“As Myanmar has been prioritizing peace and tranquility in the country, some requests which go beyond the permission of existing laws will be difficult to be accommodated. In this respect, the special envoy and international community need to show some understanding on such a situation.”

Earlier, junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun told Radio Free Asia, a BenarNews sister entity, that the envoy could meet members of all parties who did not face trial, “including NLD members.”

He said Myanmar’s junta-appointed election commission had invited “all major parties” for the meeting on Oct. 12, but U. Bo Oo, a senior NLD leader, took issue with that assertion.

“I have not heard that the National League for Democracy (NLD) has been invited yet,” the vice-chairman of an NLD township committee told RFA.

Without referring to the trip or its cancellation, the ASEAN envoy had issued a statement Tuesday saying he “reiterates his commitment to making a visit to Myanmar, and to be accepted have access to all parties concerned in order to fulfil his role as mandated in the five-point consensus.”

The fifth point of that consensus says: “The special envoy and delegation shall visit Myanmar to meet with all parties concerned.”

In Washington on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that the Burmese regime must be accountable to ASEAN’s five-point consensus.

In a telephone call with Erywan in his capacity as Brunei’s second foreign minister, Blinken reaffirmed the need to “facilitate a meaningful visit by Foreign Minister II Erywan to Burma to include engagements with all stakeholders.”

ASEAN ‘leaders may need to step in’

Three ASEAN members may well assent to disinviting the Burmese coup leader from the regional summit later this month, based on recent comments by their top diplomats.

On Thursday, Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said ASEAN’s credibility would be in question if it let the junta leader and representatives attend any more ASEAN meetings.

“Well, we can continue with this keeping … them [Myanmar junta] at a distance, but … if we do, if we relent in any way, our credibility as a real regional organization disappears,” Locsin said in a conversation on Friday with the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank.

If ASEAN doesn’t prevent junta representatives from attending the meeting, “we’re a bunch of guys who always agree with each other on the worthless things,” Locsin said.

Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s foreign ministers indicated last week that Min Aung Hlaing should not attend the ASEAN summit.

However, ASEAN takes decisions based on consensus, so keeping the junta leader out of the summit “would be a significant bridge for ASEAN to cross,” said Thomas Daniel, an analyst at Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies.

“Member states that have stubbornly clung to the convenience of non-interference, preventing a more effective response to the violence that followed the coup, are likely to continue to do all they can to keep the status quo,” Daniel told BenarNews.

Another analyst, Aaron Connelly, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said foreign ministers alone may not be able to decide on barring Min Aung Hlaing.

“The [member-countries’] leaders may need to step in and come to a solution, particularly the Sultan [of Brunei] as ASEAN chair,” Connelly said on Twitter.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Hundreds of Cambodian families on Thursday refused compensation for their land from a Chinese-owned resort developer, the latest wrinkle in a decade-long land dispute, the villagers told RFA.

The Union Development Group (UDG) is building the U.S. $3.8 billion Dara Sakor project including a seaport, resorts, and casinos in Cambodia’s southwestern Koh Kong province.

The company was last year sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act for alleged land grabs, rights abuses, and corruption.

Authorities scheduled Thursday and Friday as days when the villagers would accept compensation for their land and put an end to the 10-year dispute, but some of villagers called the compensation scheme unfair.

Villagers have now been divided into three groups according to how affected they are by the developer, Koh Kong Provincial Deputy Governor Sok Sothy said at a meeting with the villagers and the Ministry of Land Management on Oct. 11.

The first group of 247 families would get U.S. $9,000, half a hectare (1 hectare = 2.47 acres) of land for a house and three hectares of land for farming. The second group of 255 families would get two hectares of farming land, and the third group of 831 families would get one hectare.

Under the compensation scheme, the villagers would receive new allotments of land by lottery.

The lottery for group three was held on Thursday, but only 327 of the 831 families accepted the offered compensation.

Sam Thy, a villager from group three, told RFA’s Khmer Service that his family was among those who had refused to accept the deal, saying authorities had forced them to agree without a discussion with the villagers and with representatives of NGOs present.

He said that $8,000 per hectare would be a fair price for his nine hectares of land, but is being given only a single hectare by lottery instead. 

Another villager, Tith Tem, 63, told RFA she has 60 hectares of land, but the authorities are only giving her one hectare.

“This is very unjust, and I cannot accept it,” she said, adding that many families in her village have been working and living on their land since the 1980s. 

Tith Tem urged the government to provide proper compensation.

“We want a transparency. The land I can get is not even half of what I lost. We can’t accept it. We will protest,” she said.

RFA attempted to reach Deputy Governor Sok Sothy for comment, but he was not available Thursday. He earlier told local media that provincial authorities will continue with their offers and the villagers have the right not to accept it. 

UDG’s investment in the area has caused lost income to the villagers for the past 10 years according to Hour In, the Koh Kong provincial coordinator for the Cambodian rights group LICADHO.

“The authorities should consider the scope of what the villagers are losing,” Hour In told RFA.

“The villagers are now saying that if the authorities cannot afford to resolve the issue in accordance with their requests, they should allow them to return to their properties,” he said. 

The Dara Sakor project has been mired in controversy ever since UDG’s parent company, Tianjin Wanlong Group, was granted a 99-year lease to 90,000 acres along 20 percent of Cambodia’s coastline in May 2008.

The lease was handed to Tianjin Wanlong without an open bidding process and has provided the company with more than triple the size of any concession allowed under Cambodia’s land law.

UDG soon began clearing large swathes of forest from the Botum Sakor National Park, which was included as part of the land lease, and forced hundreds of families to relocate. Many have yet to receive the compensation they were promised as part of the deal 12 years ago.

China has stepped in to wield significant influence in Cambodia in recent years as relations between Phnom Penh and Western governments have cooled amid concerns over the country’s human rights situation and political environment following a broad crackdown on the political opposition in 2017.

Chinese investment has meanwhile flowed into Cambodia, but Cambodians regularly chafe at what they call unscrupulous business practices and unbecoming behavior by Chinese businessmen and residents.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

The United Kingdom may be participating as an observer as the Philippines and United States look to resume full-scale joint military exercises next year after they were disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak, senior Filipino and American military officials indicated Thursday.

Last month, the U.K. along with the U.S. and Australia agreed to a trilateral military pact widely seen as being aimed at blunting China’s military might and expansionism in the contested South China Sea. 

Balikatan, a Filipino word that means “shoulder to shoulder,” is an annual, large-scale bilateral exercise between the U.S. and the Philippines, long-time defense allies. It was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic, but a series of drills on a much smaller scale were staged this year.

If and when the drills resume at full scale in 2022, the United Kingdom will likely send a “small contingent to observe” and join Australia and Japan – which have attended as observer-nations in recent years – on the sidelines, said Gen. Jose Faustino Jr., the Philippines’ top military officer. 

“I think there are ongoing talks of the U.K. participating as an observer for Balikatan 2022, that will be next year,” Faustino told reporters after meeting in Manila on Thursday with Adm. John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. 

Troops from Britain, Australia, and Japan would only attend the exercise under “observer status” because Manila does not have a military agreement with those three countries that is similar to its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States.

“It helps the nations who have not participated in these larger complex events understand the intricacies, the commitments, the preparation” in conducting these events, Aquilino said, referring to the role of observer nations.

Faustino spoke to reporters after he and Aquilino presided over a meeting of the Mutual Defense Board and Security Engagement Board.

“We will go full-scale ‘Balikatan’ next year,” the state-run Philippine News Agency (PNA) quoted the commander of the Philippine armed forces as saying.

“I believe we will look to renew and get back to a full-scale event, and we will both look for opportunities to increase the complexity, the scope all the way to look towards new partners participating in the future,” Aquilino said, according to PNA.

AUKUS agreement

The announcement to potentially include a British military contingent as an observer in the next Balikatan came weeks after the signing of the Australia-U.K.-U.S. defense agreement, which is otherwise known as AUKUS. 

Security analysts say the partnership would help Australia develop nuclear submarines and help deter China’s aggressive military posturing in the South China Sea.

The Philippines, one of the claimant countries in the disputed waterway, has expressed its backing for AUKUS, but neighbors Indonesia and Malaysia have voiced concerns about this new military development close to their shores.

The AUKUS agreement, Aquilino said, is an “agreement among allies to further increase the capability of the undersea environment to maintain the peace, stability, and security in the region.”

“This region is extremely important. We have just seen multiple EU nations deployed to the region, and the AUKUS agreement will ensure that security is maintained throughout the region,” he said.

While all countries enjoy the freedom of navigation, the AUKUS agreement would help to maintain a “rules-based international order,” said the top American military commander in the region.

The Philippines acknowledges the right of every country to develop their defense capabilities, Faustino said, but he emphasized that everyone must adhere to the law. 

During the meeting, both sides also discussed the possibility of allowing temporary U.S. bases in the Philippines, a former American colony, Faustino indicated. The U.S. military could use three Philippine bases – one on the main Philippine island of Luzon and one in the southern Mindanao region – as forward operating bases to store its equipment, Faustino said.

“There is no final list of what the probable sites will be, but we are looking at different areas, and we are considering, of course, how it will be beneficial to our armed forces and to the United States Armed Forces also,” the Filipino military chief said.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

Tens of thousands of people have left Hong Kong in recent weeks amid a citywide crackdown on dissent, a new emphasis on patriotic propaganda in the education system and the jailing or disqualification of most of its political opposition.

The city recorded more than 72,000 net departures of its permanent residents via the international airport from July 1 to Oct. 13, according to daily figures from the city’s immigration department posted to the local financial information service Webb-Site.

While the net departure figures come at a time when a 21-day COVID-19 quarantine is in place for new arrivals, they continue a trend seen in the government’s population statistics for the first half of 2021, which recorded a fall of nearly 90,000 in the city’s permanent population.

In the biggest decline in the city’s population since records began in 1961, Hong Kong saw a net outflow of 89,200 residents in the first half of the year, leading to a 1.2 percent drop in the city’s population, the Census and Statistics Department reported in August.

While Hong Kong and Chinese officials have sought to play down the scale of the exodus, brushing aside the impact on the city’s economic and professional life, state media organization CRNTT did acknowledge a link between the ongoing exodus from Hong Kong and a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020.

Many of those leaving are heading to the U.K. under a visa-to-citizenship route for British National Overseas (BNO) passport holders and their families.

Nearly 65,000 Hong Kong residents submitted an application for the visa in the first five months following its launch, with more than 70 percent approved by the end of June, the Home Office reported in September.

An estimated 5.4 million Hong Kong citizens are eligible to apply for a BNO visa. The U.K. government has estimated that 300,000 people will take up the offer in the first five years of the scheme.

Seeking employment

A survey of their employment situation by the advocacy group Hongkongers in Britain (HKB) found that while 70 percent have at least a first degree and more than 10 years’ work experience, many say they are applying to blue-collar jobs including transportation and hospitality, where vacancies are currently high in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic.

So far, just one in three have secured a job, in a process that takes up to three months, but sent no more than 10 applications before they were successful, a labor survey by HKB found.

“The recent Hong Kong arrivals are in general a mature and agile workforce that is ready to potentially add/bring high value to the U.K. labor market and economy,” the report found, adding that they are “quite ready to fill in job vacancies not from their original work sectors.”

“Many of the early arrivals are middle-class parents with children … [who] saw the greatest need to leave Hong Kong as soon as possible (due to the political suppression of freedoms and education),” the report said.

Half identified the language barrier as an obstacle to finding work, while nearly 54 percent cited different workplace cultures, it said.

“Some of them are willing to take any job with vacancies, but the problem is that they have become over-qualified in the job market, especially for some larger employers,” survey author R. Yeung told RFA. “Over-qualified job applicants don’t even get to interview … because employers feel that they are just looking for stepping stones and will leave soon.”

HKB spokesman Julian Chan called on the British government to speed up the application process for National Insurance Numbers (NINO) and to provide clear guidelines to employers, chambers of commerce and other recruitment agencies to make sure they don’t turn down Hong Kong applicants because they are unfamiliar with their visa type.

“The intervention measures we recommend require the cooperation of relevant government departments, employers, recruiters, and citizen groups concerned with employment and immigration,” Chan said. “These measures should be implemented at the national, regional and regional levels to allow Hong Kong people to better integrate into the British employment market.”

Heading to Taiwan

Hongkongers are also heading for the democratic island of Taiwan, prompting the authorities there to consider relaxing visa restrictions for those fleeing their hometown.

According to the latest figures released by the Taiwan immigration department, 10,813 Hong Kong residents were approved to travel to Taiwan in 2020, with residency permits issued to 1,576.

More than 6,000 Hongkongers traveled to Taiwan between January and August 2021, with residency permits issued to 1,162 of them.

Taiwanese premier Su Tseng-chang said “appropriate” measures would be used to help Hongkongers arriving in the country, while further changes could be up for consideration.

Su was responding to a report in Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper claiming that the authorities are moving to relax restrictions on what people can do after they arrive.

“If they can relax some of the qualifications and restriction, I think it will be a huge help to many of our friends,” ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Liu Shih-fang told RFA. “There should be inter-ministerial coordination [to make that happen].”

Fellow DPP lawmaker Hung Shen-han agreed, saying the system has room for improvement.

“But I think the most important thing is our original intention [in welcoming Hongkongers], which is that Taiwan support the core democratic values of the international community,” Hung said. “We have to help each other.”

Bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who fled to Taiwan after being arrested in mainland China for selling political titles in Hong Kong, warned that applications should still be scrutinized for political leanings, however.

“It should also depend on the person’s background and their reasons for applying to come to Taiwan,” Lam said. “For example, they may be strongly pro-democracy, and made some contribution [to pro-democracy activism], or have taken part in the Hong Kong protest movement.”

He said failure to screen applicants could result in infiltration by agents of the CCP.

On Oct. 6, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam vowed to extend a citywide crackdown on anyone trying to “destabilize” the city and oppose China, with new laws in the pipeline targeting the media and online service providers, as well as expanded definitions of “espionage” and “terrorism.”

The national security law, which took effect on July 1, 2020, ushered in an ongoing and citywide crackdown on all forms of public dissent and political opposition, with election rules changed to ensure only pro-CCP candidates can run and dozens of former opposition lawmakers now behind bars on “subversion” charges.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.