Day: April 19, 2023

A Chinese tourism advertisement portraying a medieval Buddhist fantasy, shot in the prayer hall of Xinjiang’s second-largest mosque, has alarmed diaspora Uyghurs, who call it a desecration. 

They say it is particularly incensing during Ramadan, a time when mosques should host prayer and evening fast-breaking. 

The promotional video, put out by a local propaganda office, features a bare-armed Uyghur woman as a dancer from “Women’s Kingdom,” a fictional polity whose queen sought to marry the Chinese protagonist of the classic Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West. 

She twirls in the otherwise empty Kuchar Grand Mosque.

The video, which circulated on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, emerged amid a tourism campaign to draw Han Chinese to the far-western region of Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uyghur and other Turkic peoples now that COVID-19 travel restrictions have been lifted.

There were 35.2 million individual visits to Xinjiang between January and March of this year, resulting in 2.5 billion yuan in tourism revenue, an increase of 36% on the same period last year, according to state media.

But Uyghurs say such videos are both offensive and part of a wider attempt to diminish or erase their religion and culture.

The video was shared to Facebook by Uyghur activist and reeducation camp survivor Zumret Dawut. It has since been taken down from Douyin. Radio Free Asia could not identify or contact its creators. 

“The message [of the video] to the Uyghurs is that we can suppress and even destroy you by assaulting and breaking your dignity through humiliation – we can do anything we want to do,” said Ilshat Hassan, Deputy Executive Chairman of the World Uyghur Congress.

Spurious claim

The video begins with a Chinese narrator walking up the steps to the mosque.

“[When you] open the heavy door of Kuchar Grand Mosque, a beautiful Qiuci woman, concealed by a veil, steps forward, and shares memories of the Woman’s Kingdom with you,” the video’s narrator relates as the woman dances. 

Qiuci is the Chinese name for the medieval Buddhist kingdom of Kusen, near the present site of Kuchar.

The Chinese words used in the video for Grand Mosque, Da Si, are also used to refer to large Buddhist temples. Nowhere does the film indicate that the setting is a gathering place for Muslims. The mosque, first built in the 16th century and reconstructed after a fire in the 1930s, has never been a site of Buddhist worship.

The Chinese Communist Party ties the legitimacy of its rule in the Uyghur region to the spurious claim that Xinjiang has always been a part of China. 

To bolster this claim, it has etched episodes from Chinese fiction and historical annals onto Xinjiang’s landscape by altering the presentation of Uyghur sacred spaces. 

The Uyghur region’s most prominent shrine is the mausoleum of Afaq Khoja, a 17th century religious and political leader in Kashgar. It has long been marketed to Chinese tourists as the tomb of the “Fragrant Concubine,” who, according to Chinese legend, was Afaq Khoja’s granddaughter, sent as tribute to the Qianlong Emperor.

The transformation of the Uyghur region’s most prominent religious sites into tourist attractions, demolition of other mosques and shrines, criminalization of public expressions of Islamic piety, and pervasive surveillance have left Uyghurs with nowhere to observe Ramadan but home. 

Non-event

A Chinese travel agent in Urumchi contacted by RFA and asked about visiting Xinjiang mosques during Ramadan depicted Islam’s most sacred month as a non-event. There are no religious events bringing Muslims together to break the daytime fast, for instance.

“Normally there won’t be these kinds of collective activities at mosques,” she said. 

“Many people in Xinjiang are Sinicized, so there aren’t situations like in the Arab world where lots of people gather in one place and make religious observances together. I’ve lived in Xinjiang for many years, and I’ve never seen minority nationalities engaging in those kinds of collective activities,” she said.

Meanwhile, tourists wishing to visit mosques like Kashgar’s Id Kah and Kuchar’s Grand Mosque during Ramadan could freely do so, outside of the calls to prayer, the travel agent said.

“People who want to fast must do it at home,” the travel agent said. 

Asked whether it was possible to visit mosques in Urumchi, the travel agent had a firm response. 

“It isn’t possible to visit those places. Because they’re locked. The mosques near the Grand Bazaar are locked too,” she said. “There’s no requirement to pray at mosques, right? People can pray at home, right? Ask questions like this to the relevant government official.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

A four-member delegation from Australia’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Tibet who met with the Dalai Lama on Tuesday offered support to preserve Tibet’s language and culture amid China’s efforts to restrict Tibet’s linguistic and cultural rights.

MP Sharon Claydon, who also serves as deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, Sen. Janet Rice, MP Sophie Scamps and MP Susan Templeman arrived in Dharamsala, India, on Monday for a four-day visit. The hillside city in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh is home to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, and to the Tibetan government-in-exile.

The delegation was accompanied by Zoe Bedford, executive officer of the Australia Tibet Council and Karma Singey, the Dalai Lama’s representative for Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. 

The bipartisan Australian All-Party Parliamentary Group for Tibet seeks to put pressure on the Australian government to encourage negotiations between Beijing and the Tibetan government-in-exile, while recognizing that Tibet is an occupied country which had independent ties with Britain.

“His Holiness told us that our concern and support for the Tibetan cause gives hope to the millions of Tibetan people and to His Holiness,” Rice said after the delegation’s audience with the Dalai Lama.

“We discussed China and many other things and the core message of His Holiness is that the courage of the Tibetan people is more powerful than the threat that the Chinese Communist government poses,” she added. 

About 2,500 Tibetans live in Australia, many of whom are former political prisoners, according to the Australia Tibet Council, an NGO that campaigns for the freedom and human rights of Tibetans.

The delegation also met with Penpa Tsering, the leader, or Sikyong, of the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, as the government-in-exile is called.

The Dalai Lama and the CTA have long advocated a Middle Way approach to peacefully resolve the issue of Tibet and to bring about stability and co-existence based on equality and mutual cooperation without discrimination based on one nationality being superior than the other. 

There have been no formal talks between the Dalai Lama and Beijing since 2010, and Chinese officials have made unreasonable demands of the Dalai Lama as a condition for further dialogue.

Chinese communists invaded Tibet in 1949, seeing the region as important to consolidate its frontiers and address national defense concerns in the southwest. 

A decade later, tens of thousands of Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa, the regional capital, in protest against China’s invasion and occupation of their homeland. But People’s Liberation Army forces violently cracked down on them and surrounded the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, forcing him to flee to Dharamsala.

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

A provincial court ordered the arrest of two senior Candlelight Party officials on fraud charges, the latest such charges – which critics called politically motivated – that stem from political party registration documents filed last year.

Seng Visal, the Candlelight Party’s finance officer in Prey Veng province, and Bin Chhong, a commune council member in Prey Veng, were arrested and charged with submitting fraudulent documents to the Ministry of Interior for last year’s local commune election candidate lists. 

The two officials were members of the National Heart Party at the time. They have since switched their allegiance to the Candlelight Party – the main opposition party and the biggest threat to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.

The CPP filed the complaint against the two officials as a way of intimidating opposition party activists ahead of the July parliamentary elections, said Dim Yun, the executive director for the Candlelight Party in Prey Veng. 

“I am very disappointed with the arrest. This is very inappropriate. During the election, the government should allow more political parties and not arrest any party’s activists,” he said. “This is not about criminal offenses, it is a politically motivated case to intimidate opposition party officials in Prey Veng.” 

Four other Candlelight Party officials have been arrested on similar charges in recent weeks. 

In previous similar cases, the Ministry of Interior has said that the National Heart Party collected several hundred forged thumbprints on documents it filed when it registered ahead of the 2022 commune elections. 

Aimed at intimidation

But any problems that the ministry had with last year’s candidate lists should have already been resolved, said Am Sam Ath of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, or Licadho.

“These arrests will lead to criticism saying the arrests were aimed at intimidating the opposition party officials who will compete in the election,” he said. 

Seng Visal and Bin Chhong were questioned at Prey Veng provincial court for four hours before their arrest, their lawyer Sam Sokong told Radio Free Asia. They are being held without bail even though their alleged crime is minor and they have full-time jobs, he said.

“According to the law, they have permanent jobs – particularly Bin Chhong, who is a commune councilor – so they should be safe to be released on bail,” he said.

Outside the courthouse, about 50 supporters gathered to show solidarity with the officials before they went inside the court for questioning. 

After the questioning, Presiding Judge Hem Krishna ordered the arrests and that Seng Visal and Bin Chhong be detained while they await trial. Later, Prey Veng Provincial Prison Department officials refused to allow a defense lawyer and party officials to see them. 

Court spokesman Ath Sokhon refused to comment when contacted by RFA. 

Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

Myanmar’s Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear an appeal by former State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi against her convictions on corruption charges and the violation of election and state secrets laws brought by the ruling junta, people close to the court said.

The court has repeatedly rejected most of Suu Kyi’s appeals, though now it will hear her appeal against charges related to five cases dealing with the purchase and lease of a helicopter under the former civilian-led National League for Democracy (NLD) government and the commission of election fraud under the country’s Penal Code and colonial-era Official Secrets Act

Junta courts found Suu Kyi, 78, guilty of all charges against her in December 2022, prompting her legal team to submit appeals to rulings against her. Suu Kyi’s political supporters say the charges were politically motivated.

The move comes as the junta is planning to hold an election, despite ongoing nationwide conflict between the military and anti-regime forces and ethnic armed groups. In March, the junta dissolved the NLD and dozens of other political parties for failing to meet a political party registration deadline imposed under a new Political Party Registration law.

Suu Kyi, who faces a total of 33 years in jail for 19 cases, is being held in solitary confinement at a prison in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw.

The NLD leader’s attorneys are allowed to send her parcels via prison authorities once a week, but they are not allowed to meet with her in person.

Junta is ‘buying time’

Political observers and lawyers familiar with the cases against Suu Kyi believe the Supreme Court hearing will amount to naught.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeals because the junta wants to convince the international community that its judicial system is fair, said veteran politician Than Soe Naing. 

“I think the junta is buying time,” he told Radio Free Asia. “The international community has condemned the court rulings against Daw [honorific] Aung San Suu Kyi for operating an unfair judicial system and lack of evidence. Under this situation, they have agreed to hear Aung San Suu Kyi’s appeals because they want to portray that their judicial system is fair.” 

Nevertheless, the Union Supreme Court will not reject lower court rulings against Suu Kyi, said an attorney and NLD member who declined to be named for security reasons.  

“The only possibility is that they may reduce the sentence, but we cannot expect she will be acquitted,” he said. “They may move her to house arrest.” 

One of Suu Kyi’s attorneys, who also declined to be named for the same reason, said members of her legal team doubted that they would prevail at the Supreme Court hearing.

“We are thinking of ‘rule of law’ in our minds and doing it,” the lawyer said. “We never think there will be a good result at the end. We do not think we will win the appeals. One day, we need to make a record of whether there is rule of law or not. We are doing that.”

From prison to house arrest?

The United States, the European Union and other members of the international community, including U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, have called for the release of arbitrarily detained prisoners, including Suu Kyi and deposed President Win Myint.

During a meeting on Aug. 17, 2022, Noeleen Heyzer, the U.N.’s special envoy on Myanmar asked junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing to move Suu Kyi to house arrest from prison.

Min Aung Hlaing said he would consider the action only after the issuance of verdicts in the court cases against Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi served as Myanmar’s de facto leader following national elections in 2015, which the NLD won by a landslide. The party also won the 2020 national elections, but the military staged a coup on Feb. 1, 2021, and seized power from the democratically elected government. 

The army arrested civilian leaders of the national and state governments, including Suu Kyi, Win Myint, and several dozen other senior officials who were in Naypyidaw for the convening of the newly elected lower house of parliament.  

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

When Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen visited New York in March, a group of residents of the city who favor China’s reunification rallied outside the Lotte New York Palace where she was staying, holding up signs calling her a traitor and chanting slogans denigrating the idea of Taiwan’s independence.

Among the group of demonstrators was a man with a high forehead, straight black hair and a blue jacket who was holding both Chinese and American flags. 

That man, Lu Jianwang, 61, is one of two people arrested this week and charged by the U.S. government as helping to run an unauthorized overseas Chinese police station in New York.

An acquaintance who knows Lu from the Chinatown community in Manhattan said he spoke in the past about being feted by officials back in his hometown in Fujian province in southeastern China.

“He often talks about how he was treated with great food and red carpet when returning to his hometown,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed for speaking out.

President’s Tsai’s visit to New York last month saw competing rallies with Taiwanese pro-democrats shouting support for Tsai while pro-Beijingers vented outrage that she was able to visit the United States – which Beijing views as a tacit form of diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. China regards the self-governing island as a renegade province.

In one photo, Lu can be seen among a huddle of protesters. One holds a placard reading: “Tsai Ing-wen is a Big Traitor of China.”

In New York, Lu served as president of the America ChengLe Association New York, a Fujianese community group named for Lu’s hometown, from 2012-2018. The association owns the building on East Broadway where the alleged Chinese police station was located, according to the New York Post. 

That station was allegedly set up by the Fuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau early last year and later closed in October as FBI agents investigated its activities. 

‘Relationship of trust’

The bureau is a branch of the Ministry of Public Security, or MPS, which the U.S. and other countries allege is behind efforts to target Chinese exiles who criticize the government.

The charging document includes a picture of Lu with a person identified as an MPS official and a sign in Mandarin that reads, “Fuzhou Public Security Bureau, Overseas 110 Report to Police Service Station.” 

Lu, 61, was allegedly asked to confirm that a Chinese dissident and democracy advocate was living at a California address, among other tasks.

According to the charges, Lu had a “longstanding relationship of trust” with China’s government, including with officials in the MPS.

Lu also told FBI agents that he had been given a plaque in 2015 for his work helping to organize counter protests to an anticipated demonstration against Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his visit to Washington, D.C.

The charging document also includes a picture of Lu receiving the plaque from what it says was the then deputy director of the MPS.

Embassy denies allegations

Lu and the other man who allegedly ran the station with him, Chen Jinping, 59, declined to be interviewed when contacted by phone.

“I am busy with some matters here at the court,” Chen told RFA. Efforts to reach their lawyers were not successful.

A spokesperson for the Chinese government has denied the accusations about the police stations and said U.S. media accounts have mischaracterized them.

“The Chinese government strictly abides by international law, and fully respects the law enforcement sovereignty of other countries,” said Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu in a statement to RFA. “There is no breaching of laws or regulations.”

But U.S. prosecutors allege that the station operated by Lu and Chen was part of a global campaign by the Chinese government to intimidate and harass people who speak out against Beijing and its authoritarian policies.

U.S. officials say MPS officials pressure former citizens to return to China to face corruption charges. The people targeted are often critics of the government.

Lu and Chen have been charged by Justice Department prosecutors with obstructing justice and conspiring to act as a Chinese government agent without registering as such with the U.S. government.

If convicted of the crimes, Lu and Chen could be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Lu and Chen are currently out on bail, according to John Marzulli, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office. He said prosecutors are collecting additional evidence that can be presented to a grand jury.

The China’s propaganda machine has been scrambling to soothe public anger amid reports that local “agricultural management” officials threatened to uproot backyard fruit and vegetable plots as part of a rural “beautification” campaign.

“Due to the need to create a civilized environment, the planting of climbing vegetables like beans or melons and squashes in front and backyards is strictly forbidden,” a notice placed in a village near the northern city of Xian dated April 1 said.

“That includes cucumbers, tomatoes, loofahs, pumpkins, zucchini, etc,” said the notice, which caused an outcry after it was photographed and posted by a social media user from the village. 

“The village committee will be sending personnel to carry out spot checks, and to destroy any [forbidden crops],” said the notice, which appeared around the time that most farmers and gardeners are planting beans and melons in China, just after the April 5 grave-sweeping festival of Qingming.

Within hours, the story had become one of the hottest searches on the Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo, Sina’s news site reported – and prompted a rapid climbdown from the committee in charge of Han village in Huyi, a semi-rural suburb of Xian.

“The village cadres issued such inappropriate proposals because of the urgency to fulfill their personal management targets,” Sina’s news report said.

“The sub-district [in charge of Han village] has asked the village committee to correct the inappropriate proposals and explain to the villagers in a timely manner,” it said. “It has also criticized and educated the relevant village officials.”

New breed of enforcer?

By April 15, the Ministry of Agriculture had weighed in with a lengthy question-and-answer video warning its enforcement officials that “nothing can be done without legal authorization.”

It wasn’t clear if similar notices were posted in other areas, but the fact that the agricultural ministry issued an explainer and warned local officials not to overstep suggests it fears the issue could be widespread.

The public uproar comes amid simmering public anger over the violent enforcement of lockdowns, mass quarantine orders and brutal culling of family pets during three years of COVID-19 restrictions.

The report also sparked concern online that a new breed of Chinese law enforcement official – the agricultural management officer – would soon be following the example of their widely-hated city-dwelling counterparts, the chengguan, who are frequently filmed beating up street hawkers in the name of “urban management.”

According to late former Communist Party aide Bao Tong, the chengguan form part of ever-widening state control of every aspect of people’s lives under the authoritarian model of government seen in China since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Those controls are implemented on the ground by a bewildering array of different enforcement personnel, ranging from retired volunteers in red armbands, through chengguan to traffic cops, riot police, public security officers, People’s Armed Police and plainclothes state security police, as well as the PPE-clad “white guard” enforcers of the zero-COVID policy, which ended in December.

‘Layers of party control’

The proliferation hasn’t slowed under supreme party leader Xi Jinping, whose administration recently conferred law-enforcement powers on neighborhood committees and set up local militias to boost “stability maintenance,” a system of law enforcement aimed at forestalling dissent and nipping protest in the bud.

“The [1989] massacre paved the way for countless layers of party control, from national government to the urban police, or chengguan, and the auxiliary police, to ordinary people and dissidents governed as ‘special households,’” and for the mantra ‘Follow the party and prosper: oppose it and die’ to be encoded into the minds of all Chinese citizens,” Bao wrote in a 2022 commentary for RFA’s Mandarin Service.

Specific guidelines

According to the Ministry of Agriculture video, the job of agricultural management officers is to “stabilize grain supply” as part of a nationwide and comprehensive food security policy in 2023, which comes as Beijing revamps a Mao-era system of food distribution that analysts said could provide a network of emergency logistics in the event of war.

They should also concern themselves with which seeds, pesticides, veterinary drugs, feed and agricultural machinery are used by farmers, as well as enforcing animal and plant quarantine and disease prevention measures, and managing fisheries in China’s lakes and rivers, it said.

“The duty and mission of the agricultural law enforcement team is mainly to crack down on illegal activities like counterfeit and shoddy seeds, pesticides, and veterinary drugs,” the video said.

“Prohibiting the planting of melons and other vegetables in people’s gardens don’t fall within [their remit],” it said, calling for “more tolerant and prudent” approach to “minor violations by small farmers, farmers’ cooperatives and small agribusinesses.”

Mao-era nightmare

Current affairs commentator Zhang Jianping, who grew up in the countryside, said local agricultural officials were notorious during the Mao era for micro-managing every aspect of people’s lives.

“They would clamp down on any farmer who planted a few vegetables or kept chickens,” Zhang said. “Now it seems from reports in various places as if they’re up to their old tricks again, oppressing ordinary people.”

Zhengzhou-based rights activist Jia Lingmin said the danger of such law enforcement teams was that they could easily start to operate as unaccountable, “kangaroo” courts.

“This kind of punishment of ordinary people is just like a kangaroo court, which is a serious violation of the Constitution,” Jia said. 

Recent official reports from the central province of Hubei showed that authorities had fined hundreds of people recently for burning stubble in the fields, in a province that already boasts more than 5,000 agricultural law enforcement officers.

Hubei resident Mao Shanchun said the Chinese government is constantly trying to tighten up its control over people’s lives.

“[Where there is no independent judiciary], new institutions will emerge in a bid to strengthen social control,” Mao said. “But it’s ordinary people who pay the price.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.