Day: April 22, 2022

A Uyghur academic who studied in Germany has been sentenced to 13 years in prison in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, according to a security officer at a university where the man worked.

The officer who spoke with RFA did not give the reason for the imprisonment of Ababekri Abdureshid, a lecturer at Xinjiang Normal University in Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi).

“He was sentenced for 13 years in prison, I believe,” the security officer said, adding that Abdureshid’s family would know the reasons behind his arrest and imprisonment.

“We don’t know anything about this man’s case,” he said.

The scholar, who studied for a year as a visiting scholar in Germany in 2012, was apprehended in early 2018 after returning to Xinjiang, according to his friend and former colleague, Husenjan, who now lives in exile in Norway.

Husenjan said he heard through social media from sources in Xinjiang that Abdureshid had been sentenced.

“I got the news from a very close colleague of Ababekri Abdureshid that he was sentenced to over 10 years in prison,” Husenjan told RFA. “[He] published academic articles on Uyghur culture and literature in both regional and national magazines.”

Abdureshid, a university lecturer on philology, the study of languages, faced a difficult choice between staying in Germany or returning to Xinjiang. He decided to return home even though Uyghur higher education had been deteriorating, Husenjan said.

When RFA contacted officials at Xinjiang’s Education Bureau for information about Abdureshid’s incarceration, they suggested calling judicial authorities.

In an earlier report, RFA confirmed Abdureshid, who had been missing since 2018, was in captivity, although it was unknown whether he had been sentenced to prison.

Abdureshid was born in 1981 in Qaraqash (Moyu) county, Hotan (Hetian) prefecture, the second-largest county in Xinjiang by population with more than half a million Uyghurs. He was admitted to the Xinjiang University in 2006 to pursue a master’s degree in modern Uyghur literature.

From 2009 to 2012, Abdureshid studied for a doctorate at Minzu University of China in Beijing. During this time, he was a visiting scholar in Germany for a year.

While in Germany, Abdureshid once visited Turkey and met with colleagues there to exchange views on research topics, according to Husenjan, who added that the scholar’s connections to colleagues and friends in Germany and Turkey were a further reason for his detention by authorities in Xinjiang.

Officials at Xinjiang Normal University have consistently refused to comment on Abdureshid’s imprisonment when contacted by RFA.

But a Chinese judicial official in Korla (Kuerle), capital of Bayin’gholin Mongol (Bayinguoleng Menggu) Autonomous Prefecture, told RFA that the Chinese government had sent people who returned from studies in foreign countries to “re-education centers.”

After he had returned to Xinjiang, Abdureshid married and began working at the university in 2013. He was interrogated by Chinese police multiple times for refusing to drink alcohol.

Chinese authorities have arrested numerous Uyghur intellectuals, businessmen, and cultural and religious figures in Xinjiang as part of a campaign to control members of the mostly Muslim minority group and, purportedly, to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.

More than 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are believed to have been held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in in the region.

The purges are among the abusive and repressive Chinese government policies that have been determined by the United States and some legislatures of Western countries as constituting genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs.

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

A Hong Kong university has evicted a student newspaper and radio station, after another cut ties with its student union, amid an ongoing crackdown on freedom of speech on university campuses in the city.

The student newspaper and radio station at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), which cut ties with the student union last year after it played a key role in recent pro-democracy protests,

“CUHK Campus Radio moved out of Room 302 of the Benjamin Franklin Centre on April 20,” the radio station said in an announcement on its Facebook page on Thursday.

“[We] started broadcasting in 1999, 23 years ago, and now we have reached the end,” the statement said.

Students running the CUHK Student Press were also told to move out of the club room by university management on the same day, so repairs could be carried out. Asked if they could return after the work was completed, management declined to reply.

The newspaper had been running since 1969, and hosted a huge archive of former news and features produced by students, the more historically valuable of which were sifted out and removed by student journalists before they vacated the space, local media reported.

No mention was made of the eviction on the paper’s Facebook page, and no stories had been posted since April 20, when the paper reported on a compulsory vaccination program for students.

The evictions came after the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) cut ties with its student union.

Campus protests

Both CUHK and PolyU were besieged by riot police during the 2019 protest movement, and saw days of pitched battles between protesters and riot police in November of that year.

Rights groups hit out at the Hong Kong police for ‘fanning the flames’ of violence, as desperate protesters were trapped for several days inside the PolyU campus, while hundreds more waged pitched battles with riot police on the streets of Kowloon.

The U.S.-based group Human Rights in China condemned police action in and around Poly U as “trapping students, journalists, and first aiders, and reportedly handcuffing the latter group.”

“[We] received an email from the Student Affairs Office on the evening of [April] 14 … [in which] the union was officially ordered to drop Hong Kong Polytechnic University from its name,” the Poly U student union said in a Facebook post.

“All organizations linked to the union are required to move out of the PolyU campus on or before July 15, 2022,” it said.

“The union has been trying to negotiate … with the university for years, but has been unable to reach a consensus,” the statement said. “The university will stop providing all venues and other support [previously] provided to the student union.”

The April 15 post called on students to pay attention to the move.

“A student union is not just a student organization, but also an expression of collective consciousness,” it said. “We hope PolyU students won’t give up their right to protect themselves.”

Meanwhile, the Law Society of Hong Kong served notice on a prominent human rights law firm, which will be forced to close in June after representing an 18-year-old woman who accused several police officers of gang-rape during the 2019 protest movement.

Vidler & Co. also represented Indonesian reporter Veby Mega Indah, who lost vision in one eye after being hit by a non-lethal projectile fired by police while covering the protests, although she later terminated her instruction of the firm.

Firm founder and senior partner Michael Vidler told RFA he wouldn’t be able to comment on the reasons for the Law Society’s order to cease practicing until June 3, owing to a legal injunction in force until that date.

Vidler has also worked with other high-profile Hong Kong dissidents including Joshua Wong, and in 2013 assisted a trans woman — in W V. Registrar of Marriages — to win the right for any transgender person in the city to marry as their affirmed gender.

In January, the Education University of Hong Kong became the latest of the city’s universities to cut its student union loose, amid an ongoing clampdown on public speech, under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The university said it hadn’t “authorized” the union.

Hong Kong student unions have provided various types of activities and benefits for students for decades, receiving funding and premises to do so, as well as participating in the formulation of policy by sending elected representatives to sit on university committees.

But since the national security law took effect on July 1, 2020, they have been increasingly criticized by officials and denounced in the CCP-backed media, often a harbinger of official reprisals.

Media reports said the University of Hong Kong (HKU), CUHK, City University, Polytechnic University, Lingnan University and Baptist University have all stopped collecting student union dues since the start of the current academic year.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

China’s zero-COVID policy of mass compulsory testing, stringent lockdowns and digital health codes has sparked an emigration wave. Keyword searches on social media and search engines, as well as immigration lawyers, attest to spiking interest in emigration to Western countries among middle-classes fed up with food shortages, confinement at home, and other intrusive policies. The tide of emigrants has sparked a meme playing on the Chinese character “run” in late supreme leader Mao Zedong’s birth name, Mao Runzhi, and the English word “run.”

Indonesia will ask the China Development Bank to finance 75 percent of the nearly U.S. $2 billion cost overrun for the construction of a Beijing-backed fast train project linking the capital Jakarta with Bandung, a project official said Thursday.

The cost of the rail line, which is now projected to be completed next year, has swelled to nearly $8 billion. The project is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s $1 trillion-plus program to finance and build infrastructure projects across the globe.

“Obviously the first one to be offered is CBD [China Development Bank], the lender financing 75 percent of the project,” said Dwiyana Slamet Riyadi, president director of the consortium, PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia China (KCIC), according to a report by Tempo, the Indonesian news outlet.

Dwiyana said the Indonesian government had proposed that the same financing structure apply to the cost overrun, with the consortium covering 25 percent. 

KCIC is a joint venture of a consortium of four Indonesian state-owned companies – KAI, Wijaya Karya, PTPN VIII, and Jasa Marga – and a consortium of Chinese companies.

The Indonesian consortium controls 60 percent of KCIC, while China Railway Engineering Corp. and other Chinese companies control the rest.

The 89-mile (143.2-km) Jakarta-Bandung rail line is expected to slash travel time between the Indonesian capital and Bandung from three hours to 40 minutes, officials have said.

In January, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said the project was expected to be operational by June 2023.

The contractor, meanwhile, said the project was 82 percent complete.

Since construction began in 2017, the project has been dogged by criticism about its impacts on surrounding areas as well as concerns about rising costs.

On Wednesday, Minister of Transportation Budi Karya Sumadi witnessed the laying of the first section of track for the rail link in West Java.

Last October, Jokowi decided to allow the government to share the cost of the railway project, contradicting an earlier pledge and decree in 2015 that prohibited the use of state funds for its construction. A presidential spokesman said Jokowi’s directive would allow the project to be completed.

A month later, the finance minister told a parliamentary panel that the government had decided to inject 4.3 trillion rupiah ($299 million) into the project. Critics had expressed concern that the move could deplete state coffers and lead Indonesia into a debt trap.

Yusuf Rendy Manilet, an economist at the Indonesian Center for Reform of Economics, a private think-tank, said renegotiating funding for the project is necessary.

“The government should also look at whether the risks [to state coffers] remain the same or there are adjustments or additional risks,” Yusuf told BenarNews.

The economist said potential overruns should have been agreed upon during the project’s planning stage.

“This needs to be especially noted considering that China will become one of Indonesia’s main economic partners in the next few years,” Yusuf said.

Now, the government and other stakeholders need to recalculate the cost because of the overrun, he said.

Knock-on effects from capital move

In February, the consortium said the high-speed rail service was expected to become profitable 40 years after completion – not 20 as earlier projected – partly because plans to move the national capital from Jakarta to Borneo could sharply reduce the number of riders.

Moving the seat of government away would cut the projected number of passengers using the railway connecting Jakarta to Bandung in West Java nearly in half because many government employees are expected to relocate to the new capital, a company spokesman said.

An AidData study released last year noted that Indonesia owes $17.28 billion in “hidden debt” to China, more than four times its $3.90 billion in reported sovereign debt.

Nearly 70 percent of China’s overseas lending is directed to state-owned companies and private-sector institutions and the debts, for the most part, do not appear on government balance sheets, said the U.S.-based international development research lab.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.

A Chinese national living in the Netherlands and his family in China have been harassed by Chinese police over posts to social media he made while out of the country, including voicing support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion, RFA has learned.

Gao Ronghui, who hails from Pingtan county in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, provided audio recordings of phone calls with police from Suao police station in Pingtan county, who have also visited his parents and elderly grandmother, he said.

“Did you take part in the demonstration?” the officer is heard asking Gao, who had told him he supports Ukraine. Gao replies: “I saw the demonstration in the square.”

“As Chinese citizens, we don’t take part in demonstrations,” the police officer tells him, repeating: “You can’t take part.”

In another section of the audio file provided to RFA, the police officer asks him if he wrote “reactionary comments” on Twitter.

“Let me tell you this: the internet is wide open. Just because you’re in a foreign country, doesn’t mean that China doesn’t know what you’re doing,” the officer warns him. “We know everything, do you understand?”

The officer then orders Gao to “delete everything you wrote online, and on Twitter.”

“This has to be deleted immediately and we can pretend we never saw it and all will be forgiven,” the officer says, before threatening his family. “If there is a problem with your political stance, it will affect your family for generations, if you have kids, where they go to school, anything you want to do. Politics is a massive thing.”

High blood pressure

Gao told RFA that he had shut down his Twitter account temporarily after the phone call.

“My grandmother had high blood pressure because of this, and my mother was depressed for two or three weeks, and spent about three days in hospital on a drip,” he said.

“I feel very confused and helpless right now,” Gao told RFA. “I feel that the CCP is depriving me of my freedom even here in the Netherlands.”

“I want to tell them that the only person responsible for their actions is the person doing them … [but] they have silenced me. They, the system, they’re the ones who should change, not me. It’s the 21st century,” he said.

Gao said he fled China after police raided his family home in July 2021 over social media posts he had made, then summoned him for questioning.

“I walked to the police station from a friend’s house that day. It took 20 minutes, and during that time I deleted everything on my phone,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t have committed any crime other than just spreading the truth.”

“When I got to the police station, I was severely beaten and abused, and they forced me to sign a guarantee that I would support the [ruling Chinese Communist] Party (CCP) line, and not post anything that would endanger national security,” Gao said. “From that day on, I started planning to leave the country.”

‘Feel the iron fist’

Gao said he finally felt free after arriving in the Netherlands, and began expressing his political views freely in public, supporting practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which has been heavily suppressed by the CCP inside China, and showing solidarity with Ukraine.

“[I even] sprayed the Chinese embassy with paint to vent my anger,” Gao said. “I knew this was wrong, and I went to the police station and turned myself in, but the Dutch police told me it was okay.”

“Around that time, I started to criticize the CCP again on Twitter, in solidarity with the suffering Chinese people. I know that if I don’t speak up for them today, no one will speak for me tomorrow,” he said.

But Gao wasn’t as free as he had hoped he would be, and the long arm of Chinese law enforcement has succeeded in controlling his actions by threatening his family.

He said he hoped public anger over the recent lockdowns in Shanghai and other parts of China under the CCP’s draconian zero-COVID policy would fuel political opposition back home.

“I think some Chinese people are going to wake up because of the Shanghai lockdown, as they feel the iron fist themselves,” Gao said. “We should stand united to change China.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.