Day: January 18, 2022

Chamath Palihapitiya’s comment that “nobody cares” about the persecution of Uyghurs in western China prompted a flurry of condemnation from a variety of quarters, including the NBA team the billionaire investor partly owns, which released a statement saying that he had little involvement with its operations.

Chamath Palihapitiya, who runs Social Capital in Palo Alto, California, said on a podcast on Monday that China’s ongoing persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which the U.S. and other countries have called a genocide, did not register with him as an issue of much concern.

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay. You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line,” Palihapitiya said.

Social Capital invests in 74 startups, mostly in the technology sector. The company’s website says that its “mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems.”

The Warriors joined Uyghur advocates, business leaders, and U.S. officials in condemning the statement, calling him “a limited investor who has no day-to-day operating functions” with the team.

“Mr. Palihapitiya does not speak on behalf of our franchise, and his views certainly don’t reflect those of our organization,” the Warriors said.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, a Uyghur rights advocacy group, noted that the Biden administration and U.S. Congress have recognized China’s campaign of persecution on Uyghurs as a genocide.

“It is really inhuman for a businessman to say he doesn’t care about Uyghurs in his search of profit and money in China,” he told RFA, referring to Palihapitiya. “He may have become rich, but he has lost his humanity.

“Their continued investment in China and statement that they don’t care about the plight of the Uyghurs will embolden China and result the deaths of many more people,” Isa said.

‘An unprecedented callousness’

In a tweet, Palihapitiya sought to clarify his earlier comments but did not apologize for them.

“In re-listening to this week’s podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy. I acknowledge that entirely,” he wrote in a statement he posted on Twitter. “As a refugee, my family fled a country with its own set of human rights issues so this is something that is very much a part of my lived experience. To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.”

But Nury Turkel, the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) , said that Palihapitiya’s comment reflects a broader problem: the willingness of executives in the business and sports communities to ignore China’s human rights abuses in pursuit of money-making opportunities.

“This kind of unrepentant and unconscionable behavior should be met with consequences,” Turkel tweeted.

“It’s appalling that Chamath engages in genocide denialism and playing the whataboutism card considering his family background of suffering human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The communist regime he is defending will not hesitate to lock him up if he criticizes China in the same way he does with the United States,” Turkel, a Uyghur-American lawyer who has been sanctioned by the Chinese government along with fellow USCIRF commissioners, said in a later comment to RFA.

German researcher Adrian Zenz, who has documented China’s abuses against the Uyghurs, told RFA on Tuesday that Palihapitiya’s comments were “like an attempt to normalize a massive human rights violation to make it appear that we can coexist, that we can live with it.”

But Zenz also said that even though Palihapitiya “expressed the sentiment of an unprecedented callousness,” the effect in the end was the same as people who say the genocide is terrible but do nothing.

“He’s at least being honest about it,” Zenz said.

U.S. Rep. Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, also criticized Palihapitiya.

“I’ve had enough of CEOs who criticize injustice in the U.S. (which is fine but costs them nothing), while kissing up to the Chinese government. Congress cares about the Uighur genocide, and we’ve only just begun to stop greedy corporations from profiting from it,” Malinowski tweeted.

Diplomatic boycotts of Beijing Olympics

Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state under the Trump administration, called on the NBA to speak out against Palihapitiya.

“If the @NBAtruly stands for justice, they will denounce these comments by @chamath and denounce the CCP’s genocidal oppression of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang,” he said referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

Western countries, including the U.S., the United Nations, and some foreign parliaments have declared that the Chinese government’s severe abuses against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang amount to genocide and crimes against humanity.

In December, President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law.

Additionally, the U.S. and several other nations have announced diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Winter Games, sending athletes but no officials.

Support for Palihapitiya’s sentiment was limited, with Andy Mok, a commentator for China’s state-run CGTN media network, tweeting “@chamath is a rock star.”

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Tuesday that he was not aware of Palihapitiya’s comments.

“I can tell you that Xinjiang-related affairs are purely China’s internal affairs, which brook no interference by any external forces,” he said during a regular press conference when asked for the government reaction to the executive’s statement.

Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A Tibetan activist is again speaking out against language restrictions after spending five years in prison for discussing the issue with Western media, RFA has learned.

Tashi Wangchuk, a resident of Yulshul township in western China’s Sichuan province, was released on Jan. 28, 2021, after completing a prison term for “inciting separatism” and is now subject to near-constant monitoring by authorities.

Wangchuk, who is around 35 years of age, called this month on Chinese authorities to allow the use of Tibetan in schools, government jobs and other sectors of Tibetan public life, but was summoned and questioned on Jan. 17 by local police, the language rights advocate said on his social media Weibo account next day.

“One of the questions I was asked under interrogation was who had given me the responsibility to advocate for use of the Tibetan language,” Wangchuk said.

“I think that the officials in Yulshul city and the police bureau are just using their power to stop the public from addressing these problems and advocating for the use of their own language.

“This is how the Tibetan language has been endangered, and this is how I am raising awareness among government officials of the language rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

With no exams allowed in the Tibetan language for Tibetans applying for government jobs, young Tibetans have no choice but to study Chinese in their schools and ignore their own language, Wangchuk wrote on his Weibo account on Jan. 3.

“The situation has become so bad that some of them later can’t even read or write in Tibetan,” he said.

Wangdhen Kyab — a senior researcher at London-based Tibet Watch — told RFA that it had once been required that officials in government offices in Tibet learn and understand the Tibetan language.

“But now the situation has completely changed, and the Tibetan language has become increasingly marginalized under China’s so-called Bilingual Education Policy,” he said.

“Even after spending five long years in a Chinese prison, Tashi Wangchuk continues to advocate and fight for the Tibetan language, which shows that this is not a matter of concern only for an individual or his family, but for the long-term protection and survival of the Tibetan language.

“Tashi Wangchuk has spoken up fearlessly about this, and we can see that he will continue to do so despite the Chinese government’s constant harassment and warnings,” Kyab said.

While China claims to uphold the rights of all minorities to access a bilingual education, Tibetan-language schools have been forced to shut down, and school-age children in Tibet regularly receive instruction only in Mandarin Chinese.

Similar policies have been deployed against ethnic Mongolians in China’s Inner Mongolia and Muslim Uyghurs in northwestern China’s region of Xinjiang.

Formerly an independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force 70 years ago.

Language rights have become a particular focus for Tibetan efforts to assert national identity in recent years, with informally organized language courses in the monasteries and towns deemed “illegal associations” and teachers subject to detention and arrest, sources say.

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

Three Lao women say they are being held against their will in the Chinese-run Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in northwestern Laos, where they came to find work as “chat girls” in a call center for Kings Romans Casino.

When they arrived in mid-December at the SEZ, the women were first quarantined for about 14 days to ensure they did not have COVID-19, they said. The quarantine was extended to almost a month, even though none of them tested positive.

Now they say they are being confined against their will.

The women said that they want to return to their home provinces, but each owes 10,000 yuan ($1,600) to their employers plus expenses for food and accommodations. Their employers will not let them leave the premises until they repay their debts, they said.

Chat girls talk to casino customers by texting them over web applications like Line, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and have to meet a sales quota determined by their employer. But there are hundreds of Lao women doing the same job, which makes it hard for any one of them to meet the targets they are given.

Faced with debts they can’t pay many are at risk of being forced into prostitution.

The first woman, a 32-year-old from Vientiane, told RFA on Tuesday that said she and the others will be confined to the Kings Romans Casino until another employer buys them. One inquired but thought the price was too high.

“We have no choice but to be confined here and waiting to be called to work,” said the woman, who requested anonymity for safety reasons.

The woman said the trio wants to be rescued, but Lao authorities cannot easily enter the Chinese-run SEZ, which operates largely beyond the reach of the Lao government.

RFA reported in December that many of the workers are pressured to work as prostitutes to pay off their debts. Others get stuck waiting for months confined to small living quarters, including large truck containers.

Nevertheless, poor Lao women flock to the zone in hopes of a making a good living due to a dearth of jobs in other provinces.

A middleman, who arranges for women to move to the SEZ for jobs, said workers who fail to meet their customer quotas typically receive 3,000 yuan (U.S. $475) a month, while those who succeed receive 5,000 yuan (U.S. $790) a month plus a 15% commission.

The woman who spoke with RFA said she applied to an online job ad for positions that paid well and included free accommodations, food and medicine.

“But in practice at the Kings Romans Casino, everything is the opposite,” she said. “If I am hired, I don’t even know how much I’m going to make.”

‘We want to go home’

A second woman who is 21 and arrived at the SEZ from Pakse said she applied for a position in December because her family was experiencing financial difficulties, with her mother ill and her four younger siblings attending school.

“When I arrived, I saw a woman in the room waiting to be hired, and then another woman joined us later from capital Vientiane,” she told RFA. “Now, because of the rising debt, we don’t want to work here anymore. We want to get out of the SEZ.”

Their employer in the meantime continues to charge them for housing, the use of a teapot, food, bedsheets, and medicine, she said.

“Our parents can’t help us either because they have their own expenses, so we don’t want to be trapped here any longer,” the woman said.

The third woman, a 35-year-old also from Vientiane, told RFA that the trio were told they would be tested again for the COVID-19 virus by Jan. 20. If the results are negative, they may be hired to work as chat girls.

“But we don’t want to work anymore,” she said. “We want to go home because it’s not as expected. We can’t afford being quarantined any longer. We can’t wait anymore. All daily living expenses keep pushing our debt to the roof.

“We want to be rescued by the Lao authorities,” said the woman. “We can’t escape because all of our passports and our personal identity documents have been confiscated by the employer.”

The Golden Triangle casino has not responded to efforts by RFA’s Lao Service to seek comment on the chat girl program.

An official at the Labor and Social Welfare Department of Bokeo province, where the SEZ is located, said many Lao women have been trapped there and that officials have rescued some, though he did not explain why Lao authorities were allowed to enter the China-controlled zone in these instances.

“But the Chinese don’t want them to leave because they owe a lot of money,” the official said. “The employer has paid a lot of money to get them here, including their bus fare from their villages.”

The provincial official suggested that the three women submit a well-documented complaint with evidence to the department stating why they want to return home.

“For example, their parents are sick,” the official said. “In that case, they may be allowed to leave.”

Reported by RFA’s Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Six civilians were killed this week by military airstrikes in eastern Myanmar’s Kayah state that sent thousands fleeing the affected areas for safety, with one local rights group calling the attacks a crime against humanity.

Two children were among the dead following the assault by military jets on Nang Mae Khon in Demawso township on Sunday and strike against a Karenni displaced persons camp in Hpruso township late Monday, sources told RFA.

The two attacks forced around 200 residents of Hpruso’s Rakheebu Camp and 20,000 refugees from Nang Mae Khon to escape to nearby mountains, sources said.

“We are planning to flee to the mountain pass, too, as we are not sure when the military may attack again,” said one local woman now sheltering in the western part of Hpruso after escaping from her home.

“We will escape death if our fate allows. If not, we’ll be killed.

“There are 90-year-old men and women among us in our group, and it is very difficult for us to move safely when these elderly people are relying on us to help them escape the attacks,” the woman added, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Residents of the Rakheebu Camp were mostly villagers who had already fled an earlier army massacre in Moso village on Dec. 24, sources said.

“They were all very frightened,” said an aid worker in western Hpruso, where refugees were gathering. “They did not dare to sleep in their homes at night. They were all hiding in the forests. The whole village of Rakheebu has fled, and there’s no one left.”

The attack by Myanmar’s military on civilian targets was a clear violation of the Geneva Convention provisions against war crimes, said Aung Myo Min, minister of human rights for the National Unity Government set up to oppose Myanmar’s military rulers, who overthrew the country’s elected civilian government on Feb. 1, 2021.

“There was no need for airstrikes in these areas, as there were no major battles,” he said. “And even if they have to call in airstrikes, they must issue warnings ahead of time so that civilians aren’t harmed. But that is not what happened here.”

Myanmar’s ruling State Administration Council said on Sunday that it had launched airstrikes in the area after receiving reports that People’s Defense Force militias had gathered in Nang Mae Khon to attack government positions in the state capital Loikaw.

Junta spokesman Maj. Gen Zaw Min Tun said that PDF fighters had struck against Myanmar troops in Loikaw by gathering outside the town and attacking from two or three different places at once. “So our forces needed aerial assistance to hit them back,” he said.

“We used aircraft and helicopters, though, and we didn’t drop any bombs. Only rockets and other appropriate weapons were used,” he said.

The camps identified as refugee camps were actually PDF camps, he said.

The junta attacks on the refugee camps at Hpruso were a deliberate move to stop refugees from living there, said Ko Bayna, director of the Karenni Human Rights Group.

“This was not an accidental shooting. It is a crime against humanity to intentionally kill people and cause fear and panic. This was aimed at stopping people from living in this area,” he said.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.

China appears to be shifting from the so-called “nine-dash line” toward a new legal theory to support its expansive claims in the South China Sea, although analysts say its alternative is also problematic under international law.

In comments to reporters last week, Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said Beijing now “speaks less of the ‘nine-dash line’ and more often of the ‘Four Sha’.” He said the shift toward has been witnessed by member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and “is even more serious” than the old claim.

“Four Sha,” or Four Sands Archipelagos, are the four island groups in the South China Sea that Beijing claims to hold “historical rights” to.  China calls them “Dongsha Qundao,” “Xisha Qundao,” “Zhongsha Qundao,” and “Nansha Qundao.” Internationally, they are known as Pratas Islands, Paracel Islands, the Macclesfield Bank area and Spratly Islands.

The concept they may be eclipsing, the nine-dash line, is a U-shaped line encircling most of the South China Sea that China has been using to demarcate its sovereignty over the sea.

An international tribunal in 2016 invalidated the line saying China has no legal basis for it. Although Beijing rejected the ruling, other nations have endorsed it.

“The nine-dash line has proven to be a really easy target for critics of China’s South China Sea claims,” Julian Ku, a professor at the Hofstra University School of Law in Long Island, New York State, said.

“It was also directly considered and rejected by the South China Sea Arbitral Tribunal in 2016.”

“China’s Four Sha theory was not directly considered by the tribunal ruling, although it would also be difficult to support,” Ku said, adding: “Still, it is a less dramatic claim and it is also not based solely on historical claims.”

‘Slowly emerging’

Bill Hayton, a journalist-turned-scholar who wrote an acclaimed book on the South China Sea, said the Four Sha theory has been “emerging slowly, with a boost after the arbitration tribunal ruling.”

“The Four-Sha is an attempt to develop an UNCLOS-like justification for control over the South China Sea with some sort of legal basis,” he said. UNCLOS is the acronym for the UN Convention of the Law on the Sea.

“But everyone else is still rejecting it,” Hayton added.

Each of the archipelagos in the Four Sha consists of a large number of scattered outlying features, most of which are submerged under water. Beijing insists that they are to be treated as whole units for purposes of sovereignty and maritime entitlements.

The Zhongsha Qundao, or Macclesfield Bank area, is actually entirely underwater, and not an archipelago, experts say.

Ku from the Hofstra University said although the first-known attempt by Chinese officials to advance Four Sha as a new legal theory was recorded at a closed-door meeting with U.S. State Department officials in 2017, “the Four Sha are not new to China’s claims in the South China Sea.”

The Law on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone of the People’s Republic of China, adopted by China in 1992, declared the four island groups. They were also mentioned in a 2016 white paper issued by China disputing the Philippines’ claims in the South China Sea arbitral process.

“These new Chinese legal justifications are no more lawful than China’s nine-dash line claim but it is more confusing and less simple to criticize,” Ku said.

A U.S. State Department report on China’s South China Sea claims that was published this month, ‘Limits in the Seas’, does not mention Four Sha concept. But it does analyze the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sovereignty claim over Dongsha, Xisha, Zhongsha and Nansha. It concludes that China’s assertions of sovereignty are “unlawful.”

Change of approach?

The apparent shift from nine-dash line to Four Sha has caused concern among South China Sea claimants.

Malaysia is among the ASEAN nations’ whose territorial claims overlap with China’s in the South China Sea. The others are Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing does claim historic rights to areas overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.

In a response to a question posed by a reporter from BenarNews, a sister agency of RFA, Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin told reporters last Thursday that “they (China) have changed from using mostly the nine-dash line narrative to the Four Sha. I can see some policy change in the way they approach the South China Sea.”

“It is yet to be seen whether the Four Sha (approach) is more aggressive or the nine-dash line (is) more aggressive,” Saifuddin said.

Ku said he did not think the Four Sha claim would necessarily lead to more aggressive actions by China, but “it provides another justification for aggressive actions that it might want to take.”

Hayton, meanwhile, saw potential for escalation in the South China Sea as Four Sha concept “has given Chinese actors some new confidence that they can make a plausible case. We’ve seen a lot more assertive actions recently, like China’s harassing oil and gas off Malaysia and Indonesia,” he said.

In a related development, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has reiterated that his country will not use its strength to “bully” its smaller neighbors. He also highlighted the importance of settling disputes in the South China Sea peacefully.

“Stressing only one side’s claims and imposing one’s own will on the other is not a proper way for neighbours to treat each other and it goes against the oriental philosophy of how people should get along with each other,” Wang told a virtual forum organized by the Chinese embassy in the Philippines on Monday.

Muzliza Mustafa of RFA-affiliated BenarNews in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.

Police in Hong Kong have arrested two former flight attendants with the city’s flag-carrier Cathay Pacific for violating quarantine rules, as the city’s leader said the government is continuing to investigate a party attended by several high-ranking officials that has been linked to a cluster of COVID-19 cases.

The arrests came after Cathay fired two members of its aircrew for breaching its COVID-19 protocols with “unnecessary activities” during their quarantine period. The two men subsequently tested positive for the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam told reporters on Tuesday that investigations are continuing into dozens of pro-establishment politicians, high-ranking government officials and Cathay Pacific staff who attended a birthday party at the center of a large cluster of COVID-19 cases.

Beijing has asked Hong Kong’s leader to “take swift action” against 13 officials embroiled in the scandal around the Jan. 3 birthday party of National People’s Congress (NPC) delegate Witman Hung, after which two party guests tested positive for COVID-19.

Photos of the party showed Hung and many of his guests warbling into karaoke microphones into the early hours with no masks on at a bash that was attended by dozens of high-ranking establishment figures.

Beijing has warned that any delay could hurt Lam’s government’s credibility, with local media reporting that suspension, demotion, pay cuts or even dismissal are all possibilities.

“I can assure everyone that the investigation of Cathay Pacific and [Hong Kong government] officials attending the banquet isn’t over,” Lam said on Tuesday. “The public need to know the facts, and I also want to be fair to the company and to my colleagues.”

“What exactly happened? This has to be explained to the public,” she said.

Meanwhile, the city’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) said it was “shocked” at a government order calling on people to hand over more than 2,000 hamsters and other small animals to be destroyed after staff and hamsters at a Causeway Bay pet shop tested positive for COVID-19.

“[The announcement] did not take animal welfare and the human-animal bond into consideration,” the organization said via its Facebook page. “The SPCA sincerely hopes the [government] will not take any further drastic action before reviewing its approach.”

It said pet owners shouldn’t “abandon” their pets, but maintain strict personal hygiene.

Anyone who has bought a hamster in the city since Dec. 22, 2021 is now being “strongly advised” to hand it over so it can be tested for COVID, government broadcaster RTHK reported.

But the animals will be euthanized regardless of the results of the test, it said, adding that the infected hamsters were recently imported from the Netherlands, and that all of the pets at the shop would be destroyed.

Dozens of other pet shops selling hamsters have been told to close, and give the animals to the authorities to be put down, the report said, quoting Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) official,Thomas Sit as saying that the decision had been taken “out of caution.”

Around 150 of the pet shop’s customers are now in quarantine, RTHK said.

Lam told a news briefing on Tuesday that the animals were found to be infected with the delta strain of COVID-19, rather than omicron.

“What we are worried about now is that the hotel case [reported] earlier was infected with omicron, but the salesperson in the pet store was infected with delta, so we are very worried that there may be two mutated virus strains circulating in Hong Kong at the same time,” Lam told reporters.

Lam said 60-70 percent of confirmed cases in Hong Kong are currently omicron, with the rest delta.

A spokesperson for the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) called on Hong Kong residents to avoid all non-essential travel outside the city, particularly to places deemed high risk under government guidelines.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.