Day: March 22, 2022

The Department of Justice on March 16 indicted five people and unveiled several plots to undercut criticism of China on U.S. soil. Authorities say the suspects planned to physically assault a Chinese-born U.S. congressional candidate who was critical of the Communist Party, attempting to bribe tax officials in exchange for information about an advocate for democratic reform in China, and spying on members of the Chinese dissident community in the U.S.

Authorities in Phnom Penh again rounded up more than 100 striking NagaWorld Casino workers Tuesday, in the latest in a series of brutal mass arrests since the strike started more than three months ago. 

Hundreds of security forces violently pushed about 140 striking workers onto 140 buses as they attempted to demonstrate near the casino to demand it reinstate laid-off workers and recognize their union.

“The authorities rushed in with anger,” An SreyPe, who was among the protesters, told RFA’s Khmer Service. “They assaulted and cursed the women among us, but our demands continue to be the same. We will protest until we have a solution.” 

An SreyPe said she was injured when the authorities pushed her against the bus and her leg was caught in the door. They also sexually assaulted her in the process, she said, but did not elaborate.

Another protester said that the authorities used excessive force and confirmed they were specifically targeting women.

“Their punches are not meant to prevent a protest. They intended to hurt us,” said Srey No. Authorities hit her in the face during the crackdown and she suffered black eyes. “I am sad. We are only fighting for our livelihoods.”

Thousands of NagaWorld workers walked off their jobs in mid-December, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of eight jailed union leaders, three other jailed workers and 365 others they say were unjustly fired from the hotel and casino, which is owned by a Hong Kong-based company believed to have connections to family members of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Cambodian authorities have called the strike “illegal” and alleged that it is supported by foreign donors as a plot to topple the government. But a series of mass arrests in recent weeks have been attributed to alleged violations of pandemic health regulations in Cambodia’s capital. Activists said the charges were trumped up to break up the strike.

The eight union leaders have since been released on bail but still face charges.

Authorities on Tuesday forced the 140 workers into buses around 2 p.m. and drove them around Cambodia’s capital, preventing them from leaving the buses. The workers were finally released around 6 p.m. on the outskirts of the city.

In previous arrests, the strikers were taken to quarantine facilities in Phnom Penh or its suburbs.

RFA was unable to reach Phnom Penh police spokesman San Sok Seiha for comment Tuesday.

The workers are continuing to protest because there has been no solution, Am Sam Ath of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights told RFA. 

“Our concern is that because there is no solution, the workers will continue their protest and more arrests will be made,” he said. 

The union and the casino will meet Wednesday for talks. The Ministry of Labor urged parties to file complaints to the court if there is no solution. 

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

The U.S. government imposed new sanctions against Chinese officials over the repression of Uyghurs in China and elsewhere, prompting an angry response from Beijing and a pledge to respond with sanctions of their own.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said the U.S. would restrict visas on unnamed individuals he said were involved in repressive acts by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) against members of ethnic and religious minority groups inside and outside the country’s borders, including within the U.S.

“We are committed to defending human rights around the world and will continue to use all diplomatic and economic measures to promote accountability,” he said.

Blinken did not disclose the names of the targets of the new sanctions.

The U.S. repeated its call for Beijing to end efforts to prohibit political dissent by targeting members of emigre or diaspora communities, including attempts to silence Uyghur American activists and other Uyghurs by denying members of their families permission to leave China.

Blinken also called for the Chinese government to end the genocide and crimes against humanity in the far-western Xinjiang region, its repressive policies in Tibet, and the ongoing crackdown on individual rights in Hong Kong.

China has held up to 1.8 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in a network of government-run detention camps since 2017, saying that they are vocational training centers meant to prevent religious extremism and terrorism in Xinjiang. Authorities also have taken repressive measures to erase Uyghur culture, language and religion in Xinjiang.

“Imposing visa restrictions on Chinese officials responsible for, or complicit in, policies or actions aimed at repressing our religious leaders, intellectuals, scholars and Uyghurs in general is a useful tool, along with other sanctions to reprimand China for its ongoing genocide,” Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs said in a statement in response to Blinken’s announcement.

During a regular press conference on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Blinken’s statement was based on ideological bias and political lies and that it maligned and smeared China.

Wang launched into a tirade against the U.S. for its own human rights violations, including what he called the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and persistent and systemic racial discrimination.

“We urge the U.S. to earnestly reflect upon and rectify its numerous crimes,” Wang said.

“In the meantime, it should view China’s human rights situation in an objective and just manner, stop denigrating and suppressing the Chinese side and immediately revoke its so-called sanctions against Chinese officials. Otherwise, the Chinese side shall take reciprocal countermeasures in response.”

On Monday, Blinken declared the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against the Rohingya Muslim minority a genocide that killed thousands and forced an exodus to neighboring Bangladesh.

During that speech, Blinken also accused the government of continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.

“The more the U.S. repeats lies related to Xinjiang, the more it exposes its hypocrisy in claiming to be a ‘defender’ of human rights,” Wang said. He did elaborate on what alleged lies Blinken had told.

OIC meeting in Pakistan

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi also sought to downplay allegations of genocide against the Uyghurs at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Monday in Islamabad. He said that his attendance at the session reflected Beijing’s strong desire to ally with Islamic countries.

“The cooperation between China and Islamic countries enjoys huge potential, complementary advantages and broad space,” he said.

But Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu brought up the plight of the Uyghurs at the OIC session, which runs through Wednesday.

“In China, Uyghurs and other Muslims, have difficulties protecting their religious rights and cultural identity,” he said.

He asked if it was right to ignore the situation of the Uyghurs.

“We do not want Muslim countries to have problems with these countries, on the contrary, we want our good relations with those countries to improve the situation of Muslims,” Çavuşoğlu said. “We know that we are here on one mission with the OIC, the OIC only exists because we have the same mission, its duty is to be the collective voice for the Muslim World.”

Meanwhile, a Uyghur rights advocacy group urged the OIC, an intergovernmental organization of 57 member states that serve as the “collective voice of the Muslim world,” to condemn the genocide of Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang.

“It is absolutely inappropriate for an organization purporting to support Muslims around the world to invite the government responsible for abolishing religious expression for Uyghur Muslims, an outright genocide and an all-out war on Islam in the Uyghur homeland,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, D.C.

“The OIC has been shamefully silent on China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in recent years, despite expressing public concern for the treatment of Muslims in other countries,” he said in a statement.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress also criticized Wang’s attendance and urge the OIC to stand up for Uyghurs.

“If the OIC strives to be a trustworthy voice of the Muslim world, it cannot continue to close its eyes to the suffering of millions of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkistan,” he said, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang.

Reported by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Translated by Nuriman Abdurashid. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

A Uyghur woman who spoke for an hour with a Turkish politician a decade ago during his visit to a famous bazaar in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region was arrested for her transgression in 2017 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence, her husband said.

When then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan paid a historic visit to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in April 2012, he was warmly welcomed. Turkey shares linguistic and cultural ties with Uyghurs, more than 50,000 of whom have emigrated or escaped to the Middle Eastern country from Xinjiang.

Erdoğan’s first official visit to China in his new position began in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi), the region’s capital, and drew international attention. When he visited the Grand Bazaar in the city’s Dongkowruk (Erdaoqiao) area, one of Xinjiang’s top landmarks, many Uyghurs surrounded him to congratulate him and speak to him.

Meryem Emet (in Chinese, Aimati), a Uyghur married to a Turkish citizen who spoke fluent Turkish, was among those at the Grand Bazaar who spoke with Erdoğan at the time.

Afterwards, she was targeted by Chinese security forces for her hour-long conversation and later imprisoned, said Abdüllatif Kuçar, her husband who lives in Istanbul with their two children.

“The mother of my children was sentenced for 20 years and is currently in a Chinese jail,” he told RFA last week. “Although she was born and raised in Urumqi, she was summoned to Kuchar, and they jailed her there.”

Emet was arrested in 2017 amid a wider crackdown by Chinese government authorities on predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang. She was taken to an internment camp in Kuchar (Kuche) county in southern Xinjiang’s Aksu (Akesu) prefecture.

Emet’s detention drew the attention of the U.N. human rights office (OHCHR) and international human rights organizations.

Even though Emet, an only child, had not been born in Kuchar, her ancestors were from there, as was her husband.

“When Erdoğan went to Urumqi, my wife met him, and afterwards, they [Chinese authorities] took her away many times for interrogations,” said Abdüllatif Kuçar, who is now hospitalized with late-stage cancer.

When authorities questioned Emet about her conversation with Erdoğan, she told them that she said “hosgeldiniz,” or “welcome” in Turkish. Erdoğan asked Emet how she knew Turkish and invited her to a meeting room where the politician, his wife and daughter talked to her for an hour, Kuçar said.

When Nur Bekri, the now imprisoned former chairman of the XUAR between 2008 and 2014, entered the room for a meeting with Erdoğan, he told Emet to get out, Kuçar recalled. But Erdoğan told Nur Bekri, “Don’t interfere. She is our bride.”

Later, when Emet’s mother became seriously ill and died, authorities confiscated Emet’s passport, Kuçar said.

“They have destroyed our family since then,” he said.

“They have all sorts of excuses to make in order to imprison people who have committed no crime,” Kuçar said about the Chinese authorities.

Xinjiang government authorities were on high alert at the time of Erdoğan’s 2012 visit and became uneasy when accompanying Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, attended Friday prayers at the Noghay Mosque in Urumqi, exciting many local Uyghurs.

At the time, Turkish media reported that Erdoğan’s visit to Xinjiang as the first stop in his China tour was important because he wanted to attract Turkish investors to the region to revitalize trade relations and support the economic development of the Uyghurs.

A final visit

Authorities forced Kuçar to leave the country before Emet was arrested, and he went to Turkey.

After Emet was taken away, her three-year-old and five-year-old children were taken to state boarding schools in Urumqi, where they stayed for nearly 20 months.

When the Chinese government allowed Kuçar to travel to Urumqi in December 2019 to collect the children to take them to Turkey, he found them malnourished and traumatized, one of his relatives said.

Before returning to Turkey, Kuçar and the children went to Kuchar to visit Emet, meeting her for the first time in two years. But Emet acted like a “statue” and did not respond to the family, making her husband concerned about her wellbeing, said the relative, who declined to be identified for safety reasons.

The family member also said that the Chinese government sentenced Emet to 20 years for “marrying a foreigner” and meeting and for speaking with Erdoğan.

Kuçar told RFA that his children are well in Turkey, and that after receiving therapy and attending local schools, they had regained the Uyghur and Muslim identities they lost while living in the Chinese government-run orphanages.

Rights activists in Turkey familiar with the case said many Uyghurs who are now Turkish citizens have been unable to get their family members out of Xinjiang.

Hamidhan Gokturk, founder of the Uyghur News and Research Center in Turkey and former secretary of the East Turkistan Foundation, said the Turkish government has a responsibility to its citizens to help relocate their family members still in Xinjiang, regardless of the state of Sino-Turkish relations.

“Turkey like other countries such as France has to bring back its own citizens trapped in China,” he told RFA.

Family separations are part of the Chinese government’s efforts to eradicate Uyghur culture and language, along with systematic abuse, including arbitrary detentions on trumped-up offenses, against members of the predominantly Muslim minority group, according to human rights experts.

The U.S. and the legislatures of some Western countries have declared that the abuse of Uyghurs constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity, but China’s government rejects the accusations.

Translated by RFA’s Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

China’s latest COVID-19 wave continued to rise on Tuesday, with confirmed and locally transmitted cases in Shanghai rising for the fifth day in a row, as the authorities struggled to contain the highly contagious omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Shanghai has been pressing ahead with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s favored “dynamic zero-COVID” policy, carrying out more than 30 million door-to-door tests.

Officials have turned Shanghai’s Zhoupu Hospital into a dedicated COVID-19 facility, a Shanghai resident told RFA.

“Zhoupu Hospital has become an isolation hospital, and everyone has left,” he said. “They were given until 12 o’clock to leave, or they would be shut up inside.”

An estimated 50 million people had been placed under lockdown in various cities and districts across the country as of last week.

Ji Xiaolong, a resident of Yanlord Garden in Pudong New District, said his residential compound has been locked down for the past four days.

“The iron gates are locked and blocked with metal guardrails, and the iron sheets have been welded together,” Ji told RFA. “Nobody in the compound, which is two or three thousand people, is able to leave.”

“We have been locked down for four days,” he said. “There are foreigners who want to get out, but they can’t.”

Stretched medical resources

A Shanghai resident surnamed Feng said there are now barriers to people seeking medical attention.

“Shanghai’s medical resources are close to collapse,” she said. “They’re not taking COVID-19 patients at the hospitals now.”

“There was an 80-year-old patient with complications and a high fever, which is very dangerous, but the hospital wouldn’t take them,” Feng said.

“I called the center for disease control and prevention, and they said I wouldn’t be able to get them into a hospital.”

Meanwhile, tens of millions of people remain under strict lockdown as the local government tries to eliminate an outbreak in the northeastern province of Jilin.

Video footage from Jilin showed truck drivers being isolated in their cabs, or diners isolated on the spot at restaurants or other businesses temporarily requisitioned for quarantine or isolation purposes, including convenience stores, inside private cars, grocery stores, and even hospitals.

A resident of the northeastern port city of Dalian surnamed Liu, said partial lockdowns are also being imposed there, too.

“We are all under lockdown, with seals pasted on the door,” Liu told RFA. “The local residential committee members say that we will have to order takeout if we need to buy food.”

“Then, they break the seal on your door and deliver the food, before pasting a seal back on again,” she said.

Jilin lockdown

In all, 2,281 newly confirmed, locally transmitted cases were reported in China on Monday, compared with 1,947 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said, with the majority clustered in Jilin.

Transportation links in and out of the province have been shut down, as well as intraregional trips, with residents only allowed to travel if given prior approval by the authorities.

Cases in the provincial capital Changchun have also risen for five days straight, and the city authorities have suspended indoor shopping for three days, calling on residents to order online instead.

Meanwhile, police in the northern city of Sanhe are investigating 15 people who failed to submit to mass testing without a legitimate reason, city authorities said.

Government censors also appear to be deleting online comment criticizing the CCP’s COVID-19 policy, with financial blogger Liu Haiying’s article questioning the economic impact of the zero-COVID policy removed from Weibo on Monday.

Liu, who has more than 340,000 followers, had complained that a two-week lockdown could cost a Chinese city around 32 percent of its GDP growth for the month, pointing to slowing economic growth around the world.

“Almost 100 percent of the economic cost of fighting the epidemic is borne by the private sector,” Liu’s post said. “Countless families and tens of millions of small and micro enterprises have countless stories of sweat and tears, but there is no place to publish them.”

“It’s impossible for China to maintain zero-COVID because it needs to have dealings with other countries,” he wrote, in an article that garnered more than 2,000 likes before it disappeared.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Taiwan has no intention of militarizing Taiping Island – the biggest island under its control in the South China Sea – the Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-Cheng said Tuesday.

Chiu was quoted by local media as telling a committee at the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s legislature) that Taiwan “is closely monitoring the militarization of Chinese artificial islands in the South China Sea,” after a top U.S. commander said that Beijing has fully militarized at least three such islands.

U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. John C. Aquilino said that the construction of missile arsenals, aircraft hangars, radar systems and other military facilities at Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross “appeared to have been completed.”

The three reefs are located in close proximity to Taiping, also known as Itu Aba, that Taiwan authorities have occupied permanently since 1956.

Aquilino said that the militarized islands “threaten all nations who operate in the vicinity and all the international sea and airspace.”

Chiu said Taiwan, as well as Vietnam and the Philippines, two other claimants in the South China Sea which also control some reefs and rocks nearby, are all “closely monitoring China’s military developments.”

The minister, however, denied that Taiwan was also militarizing the Taiping, saying that it is the Coast Guard Administration, and not the Ministry of National Defense, that has a base on the island.

Taiping Island, which was essentially defined as a rock by an international arbitration tribunal in 2016, lies over 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from southern Taiwan. It has its own power station, an airport and a radar station.

Live-fire drills

The island, also claimed by China, the Philippines and Vietnam, is served by the coast guard but Taiwan’s military holds regular exercises there.

On March 11, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry issued a statement protesting against the live-fire drills held at an unspecified time at Taiping Island.

“Vietnam resolutely rejects and requires Taiwan not to conduct these illegal drills and not to repeat this violation in the future,” the statement said.

Taipei has not responded to the statement. The Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense has been conducting a series of exercises this month to boost combat readiness as Minister Chiu warned that “there are similarities between the situation in Ukraine and Taiwan.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 fueled fears that China might take its own military action against Taiwan, which is a self-governing democracy but regarded by Beijing as a breakaway province to be united with the mainland, by force if necessary.

But in the past month, as Russian forces have struggled to assert control in Ukraine, the focus in Taiwan has shifted somewhat from the question of whether Beijing will take offensive action to whether the international community would come to Taipei’s aid if it did.

A poll published Tuesday found that 59.7 percent of people were worried that, like Ukraine, they would have to face a Chinese invasion all by themselves.

The survey was conducted March 14 and 15 by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF), a think-tank, with 1,077 respondents aged 20 and above. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Face Chinese military action alone

Some 56 percent didn’t think the U.S. would join in a war against China if Beijing attacked Taiwan while 35 percent thought the U.S. would join.

They were responding to the question: “In the face of a powerful Russian army, Ukraine is fighting alone. Are you worried that one day Taiwan, like Ukraine, will face a Chinese military action alone?”

More people, however, believed that Japan would help defend Taiwan. The poll found that 49 percent of surveyed people thought Japan would help versus 43 percent who thought Japan would not offer help.

Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said they feared that Taiwan would not be able to defend itself without help from outside.

A similar poll by the same organization released just a couple days before Russia’s so-called “special operation,” found that 63 percent of Taiwanese still believed aggressive action by Russia against Ukraine would not lead China to attack Taiwan.

The ongoing war has led many to draw parallels between Ukraine and Taiwan. While analysts generally think that Beijing is keeping the approach of watching the situation before making any decision, the public is getting more worried.

The TPOF poll found that thanks to the war concerns, Taiwanese people now show a greater support for extending the current mandatory four-month conscription. Seventy-six percent of those polled said the current length should be extended to a year.

Men between the ages of 18 and 36 who were born in Taiwan or who hold a Taiwan passport are obligated to undergo military service.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) said that the war in Ukraine “has impacted the strategic situation in Eurasia and, in turn, the security environment of the Indo-Pacific region,” according to a report by the state news agency CNA.