Day: March 7, 2024

When Helen* fled her home in Myanmar’s Kayah state, she had only two diapers to take for her soon-to-be-born baby. She had spent the first months of her pregnancy avoiding the war, but the fighting caught up to her hometown and she was forced to leave. Her daughter was born in a hut on New Year’s Day, on a farm where she has been hiding ever since.

A few thousand miles away, in Chongqing, China, ​​Ma Jing doesn’t plan to have children at all, despite being married, with a stable job, and being faced with tremendous cultural and political pressure to raise sagging birth rates.

Every person alive was born to someone, meaning that someone made an immensely intensive investment: motherhood. 

Across the world, women are grappling with the steep cost of that investment, and that’s certainly true in Asia. 

For some, it is facing down the daily anxieties of war, hunger or poverty while raising a child. For others, it is risking bodily harm or social opprobrium related to the decision to have or not have children. 

For this year’s International Women’s Day, the UN has declared as its theme “Invest in women”, urging governments to increase what it calls “gender responsive financing” and public spending on social services.

Yet for many, the investment costs of motherhood can be a much more complicated calculus than is summed up from what money can buy.  

Women in higher income economies around the world are having fewer children and the trend is also true in richer Asian economies. 

Out of the ten places with the lowest fertility rates around the world in 2020, five are in Asia, according to figures from the World Bank.

That year, Hong Kongers were having on average 0.8 children per woman – the second lowest fertility rate in the world after South Korea.

Culture of motherhood

Since then, the figure has fallen further still, with fertility rates reaching their lowest level on record in 2023. A staggering 40% decline was recorded from 2019 to 2022, according to government statistics.

Yet Hong Kongers were moving to England and Wales to have children, RFA Cantonese found last year – and the reasons were not all financial.

For L*, a single mother who was pregnant while seeking asylum in Britain, the culture of parenthood there made her decide to stay – a sentiment echoed by other Hong Konger parents in the U.K. who spoke to RFA.

“Britain makes people feel that children are welcome to be born here,” L said. Instead of being turned away or questioned about her being pregnant alone, “they (hospital staff) would take special care of me,” she said. 

She was unimpressed with the Hong Kong government’s plan to provide couples with a subsidy to have children. It won’t matter, she said, if the city’s political and social environment make it unappealing to have a family. 

Indeed, social pressure often trumps official policy.

A rhyme that was popularized in China after Beijing began encouraging women to have three children ridiculed the policy: “To have four ‘olds’ above/And three babes below/The two in the middle/Might as well be buried with a hoe”. 

Women in China told RFA Mandarin in 2021 – the year of the policy change – that the pressure it would place on them to support both elderly parents as well as several young children made it practically unthinkable. In fact, for some, it was not appealing to get married at all, much less plan for children. 

Wartime worries in Myanmar

“One of my girlfriends said to me ‘it is easier to buy a house than to find a [suitable] boyfriend’,” said Sun Qi, 34, of Shanghai.

“[My] main reason [for not having children] has nothing to do with money,” said Li Dan, also in her 30s and living in Shanghai. “The main reason is that I am single.”

(Single motherhood, though rising, is still uncommon and generally frowned upon in China).

Though there has been no fighting in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, Thae Oo, a young married woman, told RFA Burmese that she has decided not to have children because the conflict could come at any time.

She did not want her future children to grow up in the middle of the conflict, she said.

“In normal times, there are no difficulties, but this time, I am struggling to survive, so I decided not to bring a child into this world because I think it shouldn’t be a hardship to my child,” she said. 

But often, women do not get a choice.

A 2020 report from the New York-based Guttmacher Institute, a charity that researches women’s reproductive issues, found that there is an unmet need for contraceptives for some 21 million women across nine lower and middle income countries in Southeast Asia and 23 million across East Asia. The study defines unmet need as sexually active women who said they wished to avoid pregnancy. 

Po Po told RFA Burmese that having been internally displaced from Kyunhla Township, access to modern contraception is impossible. 

“Don’t even mention birth control pills”, she said, “It’s a situation where you can’t even buy a pill”. Instead, “people find their own way to prevent having children,” she said.

An Sokhim of Cambodia had not planned to have children immediately after marriage because of poverty. But the Phnom Penh resident did not have access to contraceptives and found herself pregnant. She had children, but was not ready to be a mother, she said.“At the time of my delivery, we were really broke, so for every meal – morning, lunch and dinner – I just ate dried package noodles. Life was very tough, ” she said. 

High safety risks

Risks are high and chances of recourse when things go wrong are low. Women in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar – three countries with the highest birth rates, but also the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the region – told RFA of horrors of deliveries that ended in death or harm, low trust in the medical care they could expect to receive and not having access to care in the first place. 

In Phnom Penh, Yen Sopheap was lucky to have the funds to give birth in a private hospital. 

“At that time, it was recommended that we give birth at the public health center, but I said I did not want to give birth there,” she said – she had witnessed a friend die at one such place when she went into labor.

 

Several rural Cambodian women said they would have to abort any unintended pregnancies, because doctors would certainly turn them away if they could not pay for delivery, and they could not afford to raise them anyway. 

After Helen delivered her baby in hiding in Myanmar, she lost so much blood that she apparently suffered a stroke. “I don’t have the luxury of a doctor to entrust my pregnancy to or a way to connect with healthcare providers,” she told RFA Burmese.

To “invest” in its most commonly used sense today has meant to put forward a commitment of money that leads to (hopefully) a greater return.

Certainly access to hospitals and childcare and contraceptives and education would do much to relieve the vexations women face, in rich countries as well as poor; in Asia as with anywhere else; when facing a question of motherhood, as with anything else.

But what is the investment that can be made to stop conflict that robs mothers of safety, cultural stigmas that censure choice or social incentives that devalue motherhood? That is a much trickier question to answer. 

*RFA has used pseudonyms to protect the safety of sources.

Reporting by RFA language services

In September, environmentalists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano planned to take a nighttime bus ride to Orion village along Manila Bay in the Philippines to protest construction threatening to displace local residents.

As Castro and Tamano prepared to board, a military SUV raced up from behind and a half a dozen masked men jumped out to seize the pair.

The women, who are around 5 feet tall and in their early 20s, cried for help and tried to fight back. But they said they were quickly overpowered, tied up, blindfolded, gagged and shoved inside the vehicle to be whisked away to an unknown location.

“I was actually thinking while we were in the car, ‘Oh, it’s my end,’” Castro, 23, told Radio Free Asia. 

It’s a fear environmental activists across Southeast Asia can relate to. Instances of harassment and abuse similar to Castro and Tamano’s ordeal occur with distressing regularity in the region, even as countries seek massive foreign investments to help them deal with the growing threat of climate change.

The two young activists are, in fact, among the lucky ones. They were eventually released and have continued their work, though they face defamation charges for saying the military is responsible for their abduction.

According to London-based international NGO Global Witness, 281 activists in the Philippines have been killed since 2012. In 2022, at least 16 environmentalists were killed in Asia, including 11 in the Philippines and three in Indonesia. Environmentalists are also under threat in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.

“Defending the environment is a very dangerous activity in Southeast Asia,” said Lia Mai Torres, the head of the secretariat at the Manila-based Asia Pacific Network of Environment Defenders.

“We have enforced disappearances. We have bombings in our communities and militarization. We have killings of farmers and indigenous people just for working on their land.”

Red-tagged

Castro and Tamano worked with AKAP KA Manila Bay, advocating for coastal communities in Bataan province facing displacement from land reclamation.

The area surrounding the bay’s more than 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) features the country’s largest cargo shipping hub, expanding commercial activity, including a rising number of tourism-focused businesses, and new construction of upscale residences.

The two women say the development is having a devastating effect on the people of Bulacan province, where they grew up. Dredging has slashed fish catches, destroyed mangroves and forced more than 700 families to move. It has also increased flooding, including in inland areas.

Filipino military officials have denied any involvement in the pair’s abduction, asserting instead that they were taken by the leftist New People’s Army.

“They kept on linking our organization to the communist organization,” Castro said. “Whatever we said, it did not matter.”

Seventeen days after their capture, the activists said they were freed when they agreed to “voluntarily surrender” to military authorities as communists. In the Philippines, this widely used tactic is known as “red-tagging” and used to undermine or silence dissent.

Both Tamano and Castro said they would continue their environmental activism, despite the threat.

Quiet support

In Laos, Joseph Akaravong who was forced to flee the country when police issued a warrant for his arrest after he posted videos of villagers complaining about lost land to a hydropower dam. Houayheuang “Muay” Xayabouly remains jailed after helping flood victims and alleging corruption.

“In Laos, you will not find publicly open environmental rights defenders anymore,” said Emilie Palamy Pradichit, the founder and executive director of Manushya Foundation, a Bangkok-based feminist human rights organization. “Everybody is very paranoid, and we’re very, very scared of repercussions by the government.”

In neighboring Cambodia, authorities in Preah Vihear province allegedly forced activist Hiem Kimhong to sign a statement on Feb. 27 agreeing not to criticize them in interviews with RFA’s Khmer Service. He has helped villagers fight to keep their land from developers and criticized local officials for their apparent inaction.

“If authorities can’t resolve the issue and people still complain, I will echo them,” he said. “I am not afraid.”

Phuon “Keo” Keoraksmey is another Cambodian environmentalist who has been targeted by the government. 

In 2020, she joined Mother Nature Cambodia, a youth-led environmental movement. Several of its activists have been arrested and its founder, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, was forced to flee the country.

Keoraksmey herself was detained four months after joining the group while marching to the prime minister’s residence to protest against development around the Boeung Tamok Lak in Phnom Penh. 

She ended up serving 14 months for incitement. Upon her release in 2021, Keoraksmey resumed her activism, even though she still faces a second trial on plotting charges. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Keoraksmey said she takes strength in the quiet support offered to her by members of her community. She believes more people would speak out but for fear of being punished by their government.

“Occasionally, local river vendors give me clams for free,” Keoraksmey said. “When I ask why, they say they admire my work and want to support our cause in their own way.” 

Requests for comment to the relevant Lao and Cambodian ministries were not returned.

Mixed messages

The arrests and harassment come as the region is facing a grave threat in climate change.

Roughly 77% of the people in Southeast Asia live along its vast 234,000-kilometer coastline. Many are susceptible to rapidly rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events.

The area’s resource-dependent economies also make them especially vulnerable to climate shifts. The Asian Development Bank says Southeast Asia faces larger potential losses from climate change than most regions. The region’s GDP could fall by 11% by the end of this century due to its effects, the bank said.

The Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are among the top 20 globally for climate-related loss events between 2000 and 2019, according to a study published in 2021. 

And yet in Vietnam authorities have arrested at least 12 people with a history of environmental activism, mainly on what critics say are bogus tax evasion charges, according to rights group The 88 Project. 

Many of the activists had actually helped Hanoi develop its climate policy, which is widely regarded as ambitious and has attracted tens of billions of dollars in international support.

Pradichit at the Manushya Foundation said repressive governments like Vietnam’s exploit environmentalists to secure grants from developed countries and international financial institutions.

“But once they secured the funding,” Pradichit said, “the government puts them in jail.” 

She said the activists aren’t even necessarily pro-democracy or anti-state. But authorities fear them all the same for the type of open policy making they endorse. They emphasize public participation, access to information and consideration of environmental concerns in addition to profit.

A spokesperson for Vietnam’s Public Security Ministry said there is “absolutely no truth to the claim” the country is targeting environmental activists.

A worrying rise

In December, Vietnam signed a deal for U.S. $15.5 billion in funds to transition away from fossil fuels under the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, agreements by which wealthy countries help poorer ones prepare for climate change.

Ironically, the push for clean energy in some cases contributes to pollution problems activists are fighting against. A mining boom of minerals needed for batteries – including lithium, nickel and cobalt – has incentivized “extractivist development models that put frontline communities at risk,” according to Hanna Hindstrom, a senior investigator at Global Witness.

She said she has seen a “worrying rise in the criminalization of environmental campaigners in the region.”

Donor countries for the Just Energy Transition Partnerships and similar projects should require governments to adhere to certain basic human rights and include local and indigenous communities in their project development efforts, Hindstrom said.

“We cannot have ‘just’ transitions without protecting environmental defenders,” she said.

Activists have appealed to donor countries to pressure governments to stop abusing environmental advocates, but to little avail, said Torres, at the Asia Pacific Network of Environment Defenders in Manila.

“When you speak in front of an audience, in meetings with diplomats, they always say that they sympathize with environmental defenders, that they want to improve the situation,” Torres told RFA. “But I think what’s lacking here is the political will to actually do something.”

She said countries are reluctant to press the issue for fear of damaging their diplomatic relationships.

A hard job made harder

Filipino activists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano spent eight days in captivity without their friends and family knowing what had happened to them. 

Eventually, Tamano said, they were forced to act as if they had voluntarily surrendered at a military camp in Bulacan. In February, the country’s Supreme Court issued a protection order and said their captivity was a clear violation of their rights.

But the Philippines Department of Justice recommended the two face defamation charges for taking “advantage of the benevolence of the [Philippine military] to embarrass and put them in a bad light.”

Instead of listening and working with environmentalists, the government is threatening and attacking its own people, Castro said.

“Obviously, facing climate change and environmental problems is hard, but it became harder because of the repression of the government.”

Edited by Jim Snyder and Boer Deng.

Hong Kong’s government announced on Thursday it will push ahead with stringent new security legislation known as “Article 23,” aiming to pass it as soon as possible — a process that could still take weeks.

“[Hong Kong] has to enact the Basic Law Article 23 legislation as soon as possible – the earlier the better,” the city’s leader John Lee said on Thursday. “Completing the legislative work even one day earlier means we can more effectively safeguard national security one day earlier.”

Lee said he had written to the Legislative Council about the Safeguarding National Security Bill, which the government says will plug “loopholes” left by the 2020 National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in the wake of the 2019 protest movement.

In Hong Kong’s legislative process, three readings are necessary to pass a bill, so it may still take weeks to approve. After a first and second reading, the council will set up a committee to scrutinize the bill, after which it will be introduced to the general meeting for a vote on subsequent Wednesdays.

The law will criminalize “treason,” “insurrection,” the theft of “state secrets,” “sabotage” and “foreign interference,” among other national security offenses, and is highly likely to be passed by the Legislative Council in the absence of opposition lawmakers.

But rights experts including the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Defenders, foreign governments and activists have warned that the law will criminalize actions like peaceful protest or political opposition that should be protected under international law.

The announcement came after lawmakers discussed the bill for most of Thursday, with some expressing concerns that the law could be used to curb public speech or the media. 

Insulting mainlanders

Justice Secretary Paul Lam appeared to confirm that it could, saying that the law would be used to target those who “incite hatred,” citing the example of “insulting words” used about visitors from mainland China in recent years.

A Hong Kong resident in her 40s who gave only the surname Chan for fear of reprisals said she would prefer to be allowed to complain about bad behavior on the city’s streets.

“I have frequently encountered uncivilized people and behaviors on the streets, like public urination, begging, eating and drinking on public transportation, among other things,” she said. 

Mainland Chinese tourists have been castigated by Hong Kongers in recent years for allowing their children to relieve themselves in public, fueling tensions between “little pink” supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and Hong Kongers with a strong sense of civic pride.

“If I see that kind of behavior I speak up — but if the person is from mainland China, will I be violating the Article 23 law if I do so in future?” she said.

Alric Lee, Executive Director of the Japan Hong Kong Democracy Alliance, said Lam’s comments on “insults” to mainland Chinese tourists give the impression that the government is favoring them over local residents.

“The definition of what constitutes … ‘insulting’ is vague, which is helpful to the authorities in dealing with situations that they can’t yet foresee,” Lee said. “It’s hard to say whether anyone will get convicted for this, but Hong Kongers will need to be careful regarding their interactions with mainlanders.”

‘Duty of loyalty’

Lam also declined to reassure lawmakers that the content of religious confessions would be exempt from the law.

“Treason is a serious matter, and everyone has the duty of loyalty that they must fulfill if national security is at stake,” he said.

But Lam said in response to questions about the law’s effect on the media that “professional ethics” should protect journalists from running afoul of the law.

“Hong Kong news media adopted a code of professional ethics in 2000, which states that information must be obtained through legitimate means,” Lam said. “If media workers follow those basic rules, I think that in most cases they won’t accidentally see secrets or accidentally break the law.”

In January, Amnesty International described the Article 23 legislation as “a dangerous moment” for human rights in Hong Kong, warning that authorities would likely “push through” this legislation with minimal meaningful consultation, and without ensuring its compliance with international law.

“The government has made clear it intends to double down on repression of civic freedoms under Article 23 by introducing steeper penalties and expanding cases in which the legitimate exercise of rights would be criminalized in the name of national security,” the group’s China director Sarah Brooks said in a statement on Jan. 30.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

The wife of a prominent political prisoner said she has been fined more than US$300 for posting his photo on Facebook overlaid with text saying, “Idiots judge the innocent.”

Nguyen Thi Chau was slapped with a fine of 7.5 million dong for the text and photo of her husband Nguyen Ngoc Anh, who is serving a six-year sentence for “anti-state propaganda” for videos he shared criticizing the Vietnamese government on several issues.

She posted the photo the first time about four years ago, and has since reposted it around 10 times.

According to police in the southern coastal province of Ben Tre, Chau’s fine is for “providing false information, insulting the prestige of agencies and organizations” under Article 101 of the Vietnamese government’s Decree No.15 on penalties for administrative violations against regulations on postal services and telecommunications.

Chau told RFA Vietnamese that the accusation against her is wrong. She said she had seen the photo and text on another social media post and she reposted it.

“I only posted information about my husband, not society. How come they accused me of that?” she said. 

“When I saw a photo of my husband with the phrase ‘idiots judge the innocent’ on the internet and believed my husband is innocent, I downloaded and put it up in Facebook posts from time to time,” she said. “I did not say that any agencies or organizations were ‘idiots.’”

Chau was told that she must remove the “false information” on her Facebook account within seven days upon the receipt of the decision, otherwise, the decision will be coercively implemented.

Freedom of expression

In a post about the fine on her Facebook account, Chau said that in a meeting with the cybersecurity officers, she told them that she would sign the decision not because she feared the consequences but because it would mean that the police were claiming themselves as ‘idiots’ as the phrase does not refer to any one person or government entity.

She said the police first questioned her about the photo on Feb. 28 but not at any point prior to that.

Chau believes that by imposing the fine, the police are trying to prevent her from sharing information about her husband and commenting on social issues on Facebook.

She said the fine violates her freedom of expression, a right enshrined in Vietnam’s constitution and international conventions that Vietnam has signed.

“Provisions on penalties of Vietnam’s laws are vague, so [the authorities] can do whatever they want while their citizens are not allowed to say anything, “ she said. 

“In Vietnam, how can you have ‘independence, freedom and happiness’ if you don’t have freedom of expression?”

Translated by Anna Vu and Long Nguyen. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster. 

As International Women’s Day coincides with the annual meeting of China’s National People’s Congress, moves are afoot to look at ways to boost flagging birth rates and kick-start the shrinking population.

But young women in today’s China are increasingly choosing not to marry or have kids, citing huge inequalities and patriarchal attitudes that still run through family life, not to mention the sheer economic cost of raising a family.

Since ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping called on women to focus on raising families last October, delegates to the National People’s Congress have been working a slew of possible policy measures to encourage them to have more babies, including making it easier for women to freeze their eggs and delay motherhood, flexible working policies, insurance coverage for fertility treatment and extended maternity leave.

But for many Chinese women, who grew up influenced by a feminist movement that has changed the character of social media debate despite ongoing censorship and persecution, the government’s attempts at “encouragement” are having little effect, according to leading feminists who spoke to RFA Mandarin recently.

Feng Yuan, a veteran women’s rights activist who took part in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, said the state has always sought to control women’s bodies, citing the forced sterilizations and late-term abortions of the decades-long “one-child policy,” which ended in 2016 amid concerns over a rapidly aging and shrinking population.

“The one child policy was also about being under the control of the state,” she said. “Prior to the one-child policy, the state was encouraging child-bearing, and even praised women as heroic mothers if they had five or six kids.”

Fertility is ‘a battlefield’

Since the Communist Party took power in 1949, Chinese women have rarely had a sense of their bodily autonomy — their fertility “has always been a battlefield,” Feng said.

Now, the government wants more babies again, but this time around, women are far more aware of their bodily autonomy.

“We definitely have more autonomy than we used to, and we can see a lot of people choosing not to marry,” Feng said. “Voluntary infertility is also on the rise, which is another result of growing bodily autonomy.”

Sociologist Xu Fang, who lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, said women are also much more highly focused on achieving their personal goals than they once were.

“A lot of young women who have just graduated from college and who have gotten all kinds of recognition along the way must be thinking more about getting a good career … because this is what they know how to do,” Xu said.

“[For them], marriage and children are too complicated.”

The figures seem to support this analysis.

The number of Chinese couples tying the knot for the first time has plummeted by nearly 56% over the past nine years, with such marriages numbering less than 11 million in 2022.

A November 2023 poll on the social media platform Weibo found that while most of the 44,000 respondents said 25 to 28 are the best ages to marry, nearly 60% said they were delaying marriage due to work pressures, education or the need to buy property.

And attitudes are strongly skewed by gender, too. A survey of 18-26 year-olds in October 2021 found that more than 40% of women were either choosing not to marry or unsure whether to marry, compared with just over 19% of men in the same age group.

Out of touch

The women surveyed cited lack of time, high financial costs and discrimination against working mothers, amid a broader background of rampant ageism in the workplace.

Xu said China’s exclusively male senior leadership is also out of touch with the things that matter to women.

“You can imagine that these men aren’t doing much housework, have no childcare experience, so their mentality doesn’t take the actual needs of women into account,” she said. “That’s why I don’t think the fertility rate will go up.”

But even if women do exercise their bodily autonomy and resist the state’s attempts to turn them into “baby machines,” as some online comments have complained, that doesn’t mean they won’t face growing social pressure to conform, especially if the government is stepping up propaganda to force them into “traditional” roles, Feng said.

“Pressure from family members, their husbands and their family, their own parents will all be supported by government policy and encouragement measures, which will increase the pressure on women,” Feng said.

Currently, the government is paying out childcare subsidies worth between 300-1,200 yuan (US$42-167) a month to families with two or three kids. Yet birth rates fell from 13.57% in 2016, the year that the one-child policy ended, to just 6.39% in 2023.

According to Feng, such measures aren’t enough to change the minds of young women concerned about getting trapped with an overwhelming workload — both inside and outside the home — that isn’t shared evenly with their husband.

Many women are citing gender inequality within families as a key reason not to get involved, she said, adding that flexible working hours and egg-freezing are unlikely to do much to change that.

Xu Fang said that Chinese families used to be much bigger, allowing people to share the burden of childcare across more family members. 

Now, everyone of child-bearing age today was likely an only child, leaving two parents alone in caring for two or three kids, she said.

She said the only way to encourage women to have more children would be to reduce the unequal burden that motherhood places on them.

‘Government policy was wrong’

Veteran feminist and New York-based writer Lu Pin said the flip-flop from a hugely repressive one-child policy in 2016 to today’s demand for more babies has damaged the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s credibility.

“This is tantamount to admitting that this flagship government policy was wrong,” she said. “The government … have had to pay a price in terms of their credibility for this.”

She said a eugenicist policy allowing widespread abortions of any fetus not conceived in a heterosexual marriage, or with birth defects, has also contributed to the widespread use of abortion, which also runs counter to the government’s attempts to boost births.

Figures on abortion are hard to find, but were estimated by a health and family planning researcher in 2015 at around 13 million a year, more than half of which were repeat abortions. The abortion rate was estimated at 62%, compared with around 11% in Western Europe.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

Two members of the U.S. Congress have sent a letter urging Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to ban American citizens from traveling China’s far-western region of Xinjiang so as not to “perpetuate and conceal atrocity crimes” that China is committing against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities living there.

“​​American citizens and permanent residents, companies, and other entities should be warned about the risk of enabling atrocity crimes if they participate in tourism to the XUAR,” Rep. Chris Smith and Sen. Jeff Merkley, co-chairs of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, or CECC, wrote in the letter.

They said the State Department’s travel advisory for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or XUAR, should be raised to Level 4 – do not travel.

They also wrote letters to three U.S. travel agencies asking them to stop offering trips to the region.

The CECC is an independent American government agency that monitors human rights in China.

Chinese authorities tightly control who enters Xinjiang, where harsh repression of Uyghurs and other Muslims in recent years has amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, according to the United States, the United Nations, the parliaments of other Western countries and human rights groups. 

Uyghur rights groups have denounced Chinese-government approved travel to Xinjiang as “genocide tourism,” saying that they help China conceal its persecution of the 11-million strong Uyghur people.

While the State Department does not issue a separate travel advisory for Xinjiang, its advisory for China is at Level 3 – reconsider travel to the country due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.

The letter warned that individuals with a Turkic or Muslim background who travel to the XUAR face the risk of wrongful detention, enforced disappearance, exit bans and other serious human rights abuses.

Travel agencies asked to stop tours

The Uyghur Human Rights Project, or UHRP, based in Washington, said in a January report that at least 18 European travel companies offer tours to sites in Xinjiang connected to the repression religious beliefs, the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage, surveillance, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault and deaths in custody.

Smith and Merkley said Chinese authorities are investing heavily in promoting tourism in the Xinjiang while continuing to subject Uyghur and other Turkic residents there to unjust detention, forced labor and religious repression.

In separate letters, Smith and Merkley asked U.S. travel companies to stop offering tours that include visits to Xinjiang. They include Wild Frontiers Adventure Travel Ltd. of Sparks, Nevada; Geographic Expeditions, Inc. of San Francisco, California; and Abercrombie & Kent USA LLC of Downers Grove, Illinois.

All three companies were named in an August 2023 UHRP report.

“Make no mistake: under the current circumstances, tourism in the XUAR serves as a conduit for Chinese authorities’ repression of Turkic and Muslim peoples and facilitates the destruction and appropriation of their heritage and identity,” the letters said.

“It is our strong belief that well-intentioned tourists should not be put in the position of condoning or supporting atrocities — or be used as propaganda pawns — allowing the Chinese government to cover up its genocide and crimes against humanity,” they said.

The two CECC leaders also noted that conducting tours in places where genocide is occurring is antithetical to Wild Frontiers’ own commitment to responsible tourism. 

The company issued a statement in August 2023, saying it was “conducting a full investigation” of tours in the region. 

Smith and Merkley asked company founder and chief executive officer Jonny Bealby to provide information about the status of the investigation and how it was being conducted, saying they were compiling information for future reports and a congressional hearing where they may request his testimony.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.