Day: January 3, 2023

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his country will not give in to pressure from China to extradite Uyghurs who have Turkish citizenship, even if it has strained their relationship.

“Turkish-Chinese ties have suffered over Beijing being disturbed by our attitude on the Turkic Uyghurs issue,” Cavusoglu told reporters at a year-end press briefing in Ankara on Dec. 29, according to Turkish media reports.

“They have extradition requests for people who are our citizens, who live in Turkey all the time. Therefore, we don’t grant any such requests,” he said.

Turkey has been one of the most hospitable countries to Uyghurs, with whom Turks share ethnic, religious and linguistic connections. Roughly 50,000 Uyghurs live in Turkey, forming the largest Uyghur diaspora outside Central Asia. 

The Turkish government has offered Uyghurs a safe place to live outside northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, where they face persecution and are subject to human rights violations.

In recent years, the Turkish government has been accused of deporting Uyghur dissidents to China via third countries adjacent to Xinjiang, making it easier for Beijing to secure their extradition and possibly put them in “re-education” camps or prisons.

Cavusoglu said reports in past years that Turkey has been sending Uyghurs back to China were “total lies.” 

“We defend Turkic Uyghurs’ rights in the international arena, and this disturbs China,” he said. “But this is a humanitarian issue.”

Still waiting

Cavusoglu cited a report on Uyghurs in Xinjiang issued in late August 2022 by former U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet that said serious human rights violations had been committed in the context of counter-extremism strategies that “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

“We have to react to it,” he said about the rights violations detailed in the report.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a 2019 visit, he raised the treatment of Uyghurs in private talks and accepted an invitation to send a humanitarian delegation to the Xinjiang region to observe how the minority was being treated.

But the issue caused friction between the two countries after the Turkish government submitted a request to China outlining where the delegation wanted to visit and whom it wanted to speak with, and Beijing did not respond.

“It’s been five years since Xi proposed this. Why have you been preventing this delegation from visiting for five years, why don’t you cooperate?” Cavusoglu said, adding that even the Turkish ambassador in Beijing cannot visit Xinjiang.

Ulterior motives?

Turkish opposition parties say that the foreign minister’s words were motivated more by the desire of the ruling AK Party, or Justice and Development Party, to obtain votes than true concern for the Uyghurs.

“Mevlut Cavusoglu’s words don’t match with reality,” said Fahrettin Yokus, deputy of the nationalist Good Party. “He is raising the Uyghur issue because their party wanted to get votes in the upcoming election in 2023.”

“Turkish people care about the East Turkistan issue,” Yokus said, using Uyghurs’ preferred name for Xinjiang. “Unfortunately, the Turkish government did not take the Uyghur issue seriously. Making this statement now, this honorable foreign minister is attempting to hide their shortcomings.”

Among the shortcomings are declaring that the government would respect China’s territorial integrity concerning Xinjiang and closing its eyes to the severe rights violations, including the vast network of internment camps in which an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims were detained, Yokus said.

Selcuk Ozdag, deputy leader of Turkey’s opposition Future Party, said the government had not expressed its firm stance on the Uyghur issue until now because it had hoped to get a low-interest loan from China and bring more Chinese investment to Turkey.

“The Turkish foreign minister made this statement because their expectation from China did not materialize, and the election season is approaching very soon,” he said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Hu Peng doesn’t have much to celebrate this New Year. His 90-year-old father died of COVID-19 on New Year’s Eve in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin after suffering cardiopulmonary failure.

Hu spoke to Radio Free Asia about the harrowing scenes in hospital, as the virus wreaks havoc in Tianjin amid a nationwide wave of sickness and death that has followed the lifting of the zero-COVID policy.

“I called the emergency number, 120, but they said there were 90 people ahead of me in the queue,” Hu said. “Eventually they asked me which hospital we were going to, and I told them the Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University.”

“The guy told me not to even think about going there because there are currently long lines coming out of the hospital gates,” Hu said. “So he arranged for us to go to the ER at Tianjin Hospital, which was packed full of people.”

“The corridors were full of people lying down next to each other, and ICU beds were hard to come by,” he said. “The doctors told me they usually only treat orthopedic cases, but there were four elderly people there over the age of 80.”

“They said it wasn’t even their specialty.”

The emergency room was so crowded that there was nowhere to sit, Hu said.

“There was an 89-year-old patient next to my dad, whose daughter said she wasn’t even able to get him onto the general ward of the Tianjin No. 1 Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, despite having a former classmate who is a departmental director there,” he said. “So that’s why they had come to the ER.”

Another nightmare

Hu’s father remained at the hospital for four days, but eventually died of COVID-19, plunging Hu into another kind of nightmare: trying to book a funeral home and cremation services in the middle of a wave of deaths across the country.

“Basically, if you don’t have any connections, you won’t even be able to get a vehicle to come pick up the body from the hospital morgue,” Hu said. “I have a former classmate who runs a funeral home, and they sent a car pretty quickly to pick up the body.”

“When we got to the funeral home, it was packed with people,” he said. “They told me there that they used to cremate a little over 40 bodies a day, but they are now cremating 240 a day.”

“The guy said the bigger funeral homes are cremating 500 to 600 a day,” he said.

China said last week that it has been fully “transparent” about its COVID-19 reporting, amid criticism on social media over the government’s reporting of the outbreak and widespread pressure on funeral homes as deaths skyrocket. 

Funeral home staff and local residents have told Radio Free Asia that bodies are piling up in people’s homes awaiting cremation across China, as funeral homes work round the clock and recruit more staff to transport the dead amid a nationwide outbreak of COVID-19 that followed the loosening of restrictions. 

What has it achieved?

Hu said he wants to know what the point of the past three years of rolling lockdowns, mass tracking and surveillance and compulsory testing programs was, if they could be so rapidly abandoned.

“Three years of zero-COVID, and what has it achieved? We can’t get hold of antivirals or over-the-counter fever medicines.”

Chinese tech giant Tencent last month set up a social media platform in a bid to help people share common fever medicines amid a nationwide run on medicines that has spread beyond China’s borders, as Chinese nationals tap friends and relatives overseas for supplies.

China’s National Health Commission said last week that it will no longer be publishing daily COVID-19 infection figures, as the virus rips through the population. 

“They recruited all of those white-clad enforcers, built a bunch of quarantine facilities and made everyone do PCR tests, and basically wasted all of those medical resources,” he said.

“They could have ended zero-COVID six months ago, or they could have ended it in six months’ time. Either would have been better than ending it now, just as we’re coming into winter, when the elderly are prone to getting sick,” Hu said.

“Doing it now seems like it’s just sending all the old people to their deaths.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. left for his first state visit to Beijing on Tuesday to focus on strategic cooperation, amid calls by Filipino fishermen demanding a halt to Chinese harassment in the disputed South China Sea.

Marcos said he hoped to oversee deals in agriculture, energy, infrastructure and trade and investment when meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

“As I leave for Beijing, I will be opening a new chapter in our Comprehensive Strategic Cooperation with China,” Marcos told reporters at the Villamor Air Base in Manila before departing on the three-day trip.

“I look forward to my meeting with President Xi as we work towards shifting the trajectory of our relations to a higher gear that would hopefully bring numerous prospects and abundant opportunities for peace and development to the people of both our countries,” he said.

Marcos’ office said the trip would broaden cooperation between the two countries. Referring to the South China Sea dispute, it said “political and security issues” would be discussed in a bid to “settle problems in a friendly manner” to avoid conflict.

Last week, the department of foreign affairs said Marcos and Xi would witness the signing of an agreement “establishing direct communication” between the nations on matters regarding the contested sea region. The details of the proposed pact have not been released.

Marcos’ trip, his first to China since becoming the president last year, comes amid increasing Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. It also comes weeks after Manila accused Chinese boats of “swarming” in South China Sea waters within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea on historical grounds, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan. Beijing also claims historic rights to areas of the waterway that overlap Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.

Since taking office in June, Marcos has repeatedly stated that his government would assert a 2016 international arbitration court ruling, which Manila won and which invalidated China’s vast claims to the sea region.

Beijing has ignored the ruling.

Manila already has filed 65 diplomatic protests against Beijing under Marcos’s leadership.

Fishermen’s challenge

Hours before Marcos embarked on his trip, Filipino fishermen challenged him to raise with Xi the issue of continued harassment by Chinese militia forces.

“We urge the president to boldly demand Chinese President Xi Jinping stop the intimidating presence of Chinese militia and large fishing vessels,” said fishermen’s group Pamalakaya.

It said Marcos should not sacrifice sovereignty for more Chinese loans because Beijing’s encroachments in the disputed areas were far more costly than any loan it can extend to the government.

“All it takes is the Marcos administration’s strong political will to hold China accountable for irreversible damage to our territorial waters caused by its plunder and aggression,” Pamalakaya said.

A study by marine scientists from the University of the Philippines blamed China for the destruction of at least 550 hectares (1,359 acres) of coral reefs in Scarborough Shoal and 1,300 hectares (3,212 acres) of coral reefs in the Kalayaan Group of Islands.

China’s massive reclamation activities and other forms of destructive fishing practices have damaged these reefs, costing 33.1 billion pesos (U.S. $591 million) annually, the group said, citing the study.

Bilateral agreements 

Meanwhile, at least 10 key bilateral agreements are expected to be signed during Marcos’ state visit. These pacts are expected to boost two-way trade as both economies look for post-pandemic growth prospects.

“I hope to return home to the Philippines with a harvest of agreements and investments that will benefit our countrymen and further strengthen the foundation of our economic environment,” Marcos said.

The trip is Marcos’ first bilateral visit to a country that does not belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

His mother, Imelda Marcos, laid the groundwork for establishing diplomatic ties with Beijing in 1975. The president considers this visit “a continuation of that legacy of strengthening the bonds of friendship between the Philippines and China,” according to his office.

Basilio Sepe and Jojo Riñoza in Manila contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

The European Union has offered to provide Chinese authorities with free doses of COVID-19 vaccines, as Beijing struggles to cope with new outbreaks of the virus after relaxing President Xi Jinping’s notorious ‘zero-COVID’ policy, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson for the European Commission, the executive organ of the EU, told reporters that the EU’s Health Commissioner reached out to Chinese officials “to offer EU solidarity and support,” including public health expertise and “variant-adapted EU vaccine donations.”

In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning claimed that China’s vaccination rates were rising and its supplies of the doses were “adequate.” But she also added that China was open to “strengthening solidarity and cooperation with the international community.” 

While the EU offer did not specify which type or brand of vaccine was offered, Chinese authorities have continuously insisted on offering only domestically-made vaccines – which notably do not use the mRNA technology common in most Western COVID-19 vaccines. 

Until last month, China’s insistence on enforcing the ‘zero-COVID’ policy led to widespread restrictions across the country – and protests erupted at the end of 2022 to call for the lifting of draconian lockdown measures. 

Now, facing a lower vaccination rate among the population, Chinese hospitals are seeing a surge in infections and medical officials are scrambling to treat patients. 

In December, Germany shipped over 100,000 Pfizer doses to China, but they were sent to German embassies, consulates, and companies in the country. Other EU countries said they were looking at ways to get Western vaccines to their citizens in the country.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reported that scientists advising the World Health Organization called for a “more realistic picture” of COVID infections in China, indicating growing international concerns about the virus spreading to other countries or developing a new variant that may be resistant to current vaccines. 

The WHO invited Chinese scientists for a closed-door virtual meeting on Tuesday in order to facilitate a conversation about the state of the outbreak in the country. 

“It is in the interests of China itself to come forward with more reliable information,” Dutch virologist Professor Marion Koopmans, who sits on the WHO committee, told Reuters before the meeting. 

Edited by Joshua Lipes. Reuters contributed to this report.

Angered by a nationwide ban on fireworks in cities, crowds in the central Chinese province of Henan attacked and overturned a police vehicle late Tuesday, while social media posts showed residents in other cities setting off fireworks in defiance of the orders.

Revelers on Hongdaoyuan Square in Henan’s Luyi County “deliberately vandalized a police car … causing chaos at the scene,” police said in a statement on the standoff, which it said took place at around 11.00 p.m. local time on Jan. 2. Six people were arrested.

Several video clips of the incident were uploaded to social media that showed people jumping onto a police car and another man in a Balenciaga jacket displaying the police car license plate he had ripped from the vehicle to the surrounding crowd.

The incident was sparked by police trying to enforce a fireworks ban, which led some in the crowd to prevent the police car from leaving and others to throw drinks and start smashing it, before the most visible protesters jumped onto the car and removed its license plates.

A later video clip showed the police car overturned, according to the Twitter account “Mr Li is not your teacher,” which curates and reposts video footage from incidents in mainland China to Twitter, on the assumption that they will be deleted or blocked by Chinese social media platforms.

Emboldened

Jia Lingmin, a resident of Henan’s provincial capital Zhengzhou, said fireworks have been banned until Lunar New Year, which starts later this month, but that there were plenty going off around the city on the New Year’s weekend.

“There have been sporadic fireworks going off in my neighborhood, and the surrounding area,” Jia said. “[The ban] will be lifted at some point during Lunar New Year.”

Fireworks set off in defiance of the ban were also reported in Guangxi, Shandong, and Chongqing, according to social media posts.

Political commentator Wang Jian said the fireworks were a deliberate act to defy the ban, and came after people saw the government’s response to the “white paper” movement in late November against strict anti-virus measures.

“People across the country are violating the ban,” Wang said. “Fireworks are banned in all cities, but are being set off everywhere.”

Spontaneous street protests across China in late November saw some people holding up blank sheets of printer paper and others repeating slogans calling for an end to the zero-COVID policy, and for Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party to step down and call elections, while others held vigils for the victims of a lockdown fire in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi.

“It’s another revolution, or at least passing on the torch [lit by the white paper movement],” Wang said. “The Chinese have learned that they can use protest to get what they want, which is a huge improvement on the way things were.”

Letting off steam 

In another clip posted to Twitter by constitutional scholar Zhang Lifan, a young woman is shown setting off rockets using a launch tube in the northern port city of Tianjin.

The moment when the public overturned a police car when #CCP police tried to arrest ppl for setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year. Zhoukou city, Henan Province, #CCPChina, Jan 2.#China #ChinaProtests #ChinaUprising #ChinaStory pic.twitter.com/v45X7mwJOn

— Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng 曾錚真言 (@jenniferzeng97) January 3, 2023

“The police came to stop them, but they didn’t listen, and everyone set them off,” Zhang commented.

“So are you going to do anything?” reads the text added to the video. “No, because you can’t do anything. There are fireworks going off everywhere.”

Henan current affairs commentator Li Fatian said Henan is a part of China that likes traditional celebrations, and were likely letting off steam after three years of rolling lockdowns, mass tracking and compulsory testing under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

“Zero-COVID went on for three years, so it’s … pretty clear that the lockdowns across the country, large-scale unemployment and the inhumane enforcement methods of recent years have caused a lot of anxiety and shortness of temper,” Li said. “There’s a lot of hostility in society.”

“Now, the government suddenly removes all restrictions and people still fear dying from this virus, so maybe they need to do this as a way of venting,” he said, adding that more protests are likely in the coming year.

“We’ve reached what you might call a tipping point,” Li said.

Balloons

In Nanjing, people let fly balloons in the eastern city of Nanjing on New Year’s Eve, where a large crowd gathered around the bronze statue of 1911 revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen to release balloons in honor of his memory.

While Sun is revered in mainland China as the revolutionary leader who toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), mass public honoring of that revolution is largely discouraged by Beijing, as it is too closely associated with the Kuomintang nationalist government who were defeated by Mao Zedong’s communists during the civil war (1946-1949).

Video clips showed eyewitnesses exclaiming at the size of the crowd, which effectively shut down nearby streets, blocking traffic, as they poured into the area to pay tribute to Sun, who has been dubbed the father of modern China.

“There has been a sea change in people’s hearts, with this commemoration of Sun Yat-sen,” former Communist Party school lecturer Cai Xia tweeted of the scenes. “This event is deeply meaningful.”

Wang agreed with Li that more protests look likely in 2023.

“When the Chinese Communist Party can no longer guarantee that everyone’s life will improve, nor guarantee a livelihood to many people, then people will start to challenge it, because what right does it have to remove your political rights?” Wang said.

“The Communist Party has broken the social contract, so they don’t have to obey it any more.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

The Cambodian government on Tuesday acknowledged that deaths had occurred at a controversial detention center and it has concluded a preliminary investigation into the facility’s shortcomings, but there are no plans to shut it down as a prominent human rights group has urged.

The Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, or LICADHO, reported last month that two people who were arbitrarily detained at the Prey Speu Social Affairs Center in Phnom Penh died of illness in August, with evidence suggesting that they were among more than 10 detainees who died at the center over a two-month period that started in July.

Touch Chan, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation, said that he was aware of the group’s report, but he was not able to confirm the death toll or causes of death at the Phnom Penh facility.

“Of course, we do not deny what LICADHO found,” he said. ”Some of the information is acceptable.”

Touch Chan said the ministry led a working group investigation of the center, which revealed some issues that they are ready to solve, but Prey Speu will remain open.

The ministry has not investigated the two deaths reported by LICADHO and has not yet received an autopsy report, though it has received autopsies for other deaths that occurred at the center, Touch Chan said.

Though the government claims it to be a vocational training center, LICADHO says Prey Speu’s true function is “an unlawful detention facility to hide from view Phnom Penh’s most marginalized and at-risk citizens,” and denies them adequate food and healthcare. 

In its report, LICADHO said that it has documented abuses at Prey Speu since its opening in 2004, and it has advocated its closure since 2008. 

Promise to improve

Relevant parties must reorganize the center’s management and improve some shortcomings to comply with human rights principles, Touch Chan said, but he refused to elaborate on what the shortcomings were because the findings were still awaiting approval by the minister.

The government-backed Cambodian Human Rights Committee will visit Prey Speu after the preliminary investigation has been concluded, committee spokesman Katta On said. He said his team would conduct a fact finding mission about the deaths with the center’s management.

“LICADHO’s report blamed the center’s negligence and called for its closure,” he said, acknowledging that the Ministry of Social Affairs’ report didn’t mention management issues. 

LICADHO Director-General Am Sam Ath said that the government has failed to make changes at Prey Speu despite repeated promises over the years.

“For many years there has been no change. I’m worried that conditions at this center are still the same, so LICADHO still insists that if there is no change, it should be closed until there are ways to improve it,” he said.

 Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.