Day: April 18, 2024

The hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs subjected by China to detention, forced labor and cultural erasure underscores the urgency for global action, panelists said at a two-day interfaith conference on disrupting Uyghur genocide organized by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity that wrapped up Thursday.

Survivors, experts, religious leaders and activists participated in panels to discuss the situation of the Uyghurs and called on governments to promote pro-Uyghur policies and to pressure businesses that profit from Uyghur forced labor, said a notice about the conference on the foundation’s website.

An estimated 1.8 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups have passed through “re-education” camps in Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest, as part of a larger effort by Beijing to wipe out the Uyghurs along with their culture, language and religion. Some of the detainees have been subjected to torture, rape and psychological abuse.

These actions and policies, the United States and other Western governments say, amount to genocide and crimes and against humanity against the 11 million Uyghur people.

China denies the human rights abuses and says the camps were vocational training centers and have since been closed. Restrictions placed on Uyghurs are to counter religious extremism and terrorism, according to Beijing.

Western diplomats have raised the Uyghur genocide issue “directly and forcefully” with Chinese officials, Ellen Germain, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the U.S. State Department and a panel speaker, told Radio Free Asia.

Additionally, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021 and the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, require the U.S. government, State Department and Department of Homeland Security, among others, to take action that will impose consequences on those who commit genocide or other atrocities, she said. 

“We recognize that it’s never enough for those who are suffering,” Germain said.

‘We are not afraid’

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, named for the Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, writer and human rights activist who died in 2016, has thrown its support behind raising awareness of the Uyghur genocide through protests, op-eds, funding and events such as conferences.

In 2023, the foundation awarded grants amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars to three Uyghur groups dedicated to Uyghur rights advocacy and education amid ongoing repression against the ethnic group by Chinese authorities.

“We’re not afraid of the Chinese Communist Party because they are in the wrong, and what they are doing is intolerable,” said his son, Elisha Wiesel, the foundation’s chairman. 

“And if we can help to get the world to see that, to get the American public in particular to see that, that’s part of our role, and we need to do it in serving my father’s memory,” he said. 

Forced sterilizations of detained Uyghur women, the destruction of thousands of mosques throughout Xinjiang, and the assignment of Han Chinese civil servants to stay in the homes of Uyghur families are other ways the Chinese government has sought to wipe out the Uyghurs and their culture. 

“That is a genocidal activity to suppress the birth rate of a people, to change their buildings and remove their character, to forcibly remove their traditions by inserting people into the family life to prevent certain traditions from being followed,” Wiesel said. 

Two major challenges

The foundation faces two major challenges in trying to raise awareness about the Uyghur genocide, Wiesel said.

The first is the Chinese government’s “information blackout policy,” making it nearly impossible for Uyghur families living in Xinjiang to communicate with relatives overseas or for the press to get first-hand information on what’s happening there. 

“If the Western free press doesn’t have access to the atrocity, it can’t report it,” Wiesel said. “And then, it’s almost as though it doesn’t happen.”

The second is that it is difficult to get celebrities to draw attention to the genocide because China is a major market for U.S. and Western movies and goods, such as sneakers. 

“So, all of a sudden [China] has dollars and cents to impact celebrities, which makes it much harder now that their bottom line is at stake,” Wiesel said. “It’s much harder to activate them.”

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

China’s top diplomat met the outgoing Indonesian president and his successor in Jakarta on Thursday, as Beijing deepened its engagement with future leader Prabowo Subianto, amid a competition for regional influence with the United States.

The meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was part of a joint commitment to advance the partnership between the two countries, said Prabowo, who visited Beijing in early April after his landslide win in the February general election.

“It is a great honor for me to welcome him [Wang] today. Thank you for the kind reception I received in Beijing a few weeks ago,” Prabowo said, according to an Indonesian defense ministry statement.

Chinese President Xi Jinping had invited Prabowo to visit, and the latter accepting the invitation raised eyebrows in Indonesia because no president-elect had made a foreign visit such as this one without being sworn in. China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner.

Wang, too, mentioned Prabowo’s Beijing trip, according to the same statement.

“We really appreciate and welcome Defense Minister Prabowo’s visit to China,” he said.

“We are committed to continuing to increase bilateral cooperation with Indonesia, both in the defense sector and other fields such as economic, social and cultural.”

Wang is scheduled to go to East Nusa Tenggara province on Friday to attend the China-Indonesia High-Level Dialogue Cooperation Mechanism, a process to support more effective bilateral cooperation. His Jakarta stop was the first of a six-day tour that also includes Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.

Prabowo and Wang discussed cooperation in the defense industry and sector, with potential measures such as educational and training collaboration, as well as joint exercises, said Brig. Gen. Edwin Adrian Sumantha, spokesman at the Indonesian defense ministry.

In fact, the ministry statement said that “China is Indonesia’s close partner and has had close bilateral relations, especially in the defense sector, for a long time.”

Of course, China has also invested billions of U.S. dollars in infrastructure projects in Indonesia, including as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative – the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed train, which began commercial operations in October 2023, is one such BRI project.

The two countries have drawn closer during outgoing President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s two terms, and Beijing would like that to continue as the U.S. tries to catch up with China’s gargantuan influence in Southeast Asia, analysts have said.

Indonesia, China call for ceasefire in Gaza

Both Indonesia and China shared the same position on Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza, said Wang’s Indonesian counterpart, Retno Marsudi.

Israel’s air and ground strikes have killed more than 33,000 Palestinians following the Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state by Palestinian militant group Hamas, which killed around 1,100 Israelis.

“We … have the same view regarding the importance of a ceasefire in Gaza and resolving the Palestinian problem fairly through two state solutions,” Retno told reporters in a joint press conference after meeting with Wang. 

“Indonesia will support full Palestinian membership in the U.N. Middle East stability will not be realized without resolving the Palestinian issue.”

For his part, Wang slammed Washington for repeatedly vetoing resolutions calling for Israel to end the attacks on the Palestinian territory it occupies.

“The conflict in Gaza has lasted for half a year and caused a rare humanitarian tragedy in the 21st century,” Wang told the media at the same press conference, according to the Associated Press.

“The United Nations Security Council responded to the call of the international community and continued to review the resolution draft on the cease-fire in Gaza, but it was repeatedly vetoed by the United States.”

The conflict in the Middle East offered a strategic opportunity for China to further expand its influence in Southeast Asia, said Muhamad Arif, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Indonesia.

“China is trying to strengthen its position as a key player in the region,” Arief told BenarNews.

China could present an alternative approach to the conflict in Gaza, he said, which may find approval in Southeast Asia’s largest country, Indonesia, and other Mulism-majority states in the region, such as Malaysia and Brunei.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

The leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile on Wednesday said he was hopeful that a U.S. bill  urging China to resolve issues related to Tibet through dialogue with the Dalai Lama or Tibetan leaders would be approved by the Senate.

The Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act, also known as the Resolve Tibet Act, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 15. 

The bill, which also empowers the State Department to counter disinformation on Tibet, 

was unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, advancing the bill to the Senate floor. 

“Fortunately, His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s support has garnered bipartisan backing for the Tibetan cause,” Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the democratically elected leader of the Central Tibetan Administration, told RFA in an interview in Washington. 

“We are optimistic that this bill will soon be enacted into law,” he said. “We hope and aim for passage [of the bill in the Senate] before the U.S. elections” in November.

“Currently, we have progressed about 75% towards the goal,” added Tsering, who earlier this week met with key lawmakers, including Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, one of those who introduced the legislation.

Others involved in drafting the bipartisan bill include Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Sen. Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat.

Bill’s highlights

The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled Tibet into exile in India in the midst of a failed 1959 uprising against rule by China, which invaded the independent Himalayan country in 1950.

Since then, Beijing has sought to legitimize Chinese rule through the suppression of dissent and policies undermining Tibetan culture and language. 

The bill calls for a resumption in negotiations between Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama or his representatives. Since 2010, no formal dialogue has happened and Chinese officials continue to make unreasonable demands of the Dalai Lama as a condition for further dialogue. 

It also urges China to recognize the rights of Tibetans whose status needs to be negotiated according to international law, Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Radio Free Asia.

The bill states that claims made by Chinese officials and by the Chinese Communist Party that Tibet has been a part of China since ancient times are historically inaccurate. 

It also challenges China’s claim that Tibet is restricted to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and says Tibet includes the Tibetan-populated regions of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, in addition to the TAR.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, China has used harsh tactics to promote party ideology over local traditions, cultures and religious practices. 

In the Tibet Autonomous Region and the southwestern Chinese provinces where many Tibetans live, that has meant prohibiting photographs of the Dalai Lama, pressuring monks to denounce the spiritual leader, restricting communications with people outside of the area, and forcing Tibetan children to attend “colonial” boarding schools.

‘Raise pressure’

The bill now heads to the Senate, and can take one of two directions — a shortcut that may result in a likely Senate approval before June, or the standard route, which may extend into late July, said Tsering. 

“I think that the foundational support and the bipartisan support that we have, it will put us on an excellent path, going forward, in the passage of this bill through the Senate,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, a co-sponsor of the bill, told RFA after the Senate committee’s vote. 

Tencho Gyatso, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, and American actor Richard Gere, the organization’s chair, accompanied Tsering to the meetings with key lawmakers.

The Senate committee’s vote shows that “Congress is making it a priority to resolve China’s brutal occupation of Tibet through dialogue,” Gyatso said.  

“China needs to get back to negotiations with Tibetan leaders, and this bill will raise the diplomatic pressure on China significantly,” she added.

In his interview with RFA, Tsering expressed concern about the impact of China’s assimilation policies, particularly on China’s increasing restrictions on linguistic and cultural rights in Tibet and its use of the boarding schools where rights groups have said Tibetan children are forcefully separated from their families and learn from Chinese-language curriculum.

“If this trend persists over the next decade, it will pose a significant challenge, transforming Tibetans into Chinese,” he said.

“Concerns about this policy are high among Tibetans from Tibet,” he added. “We are closely monitoring and analyzing its implications.”

Additional reporting by Nordhey Dolma and Yeshi Tashi for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan and by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

A former opposition party lawmaker now living in Canada has asked Prime Minister Hun Manet to intervene in his case and ask prosecutors to drop criminal charges so that he can return to Cambodia to visit his ailing parents. 

Hun Manet responded to Kong Saphea’s plea on Thursday, saying on Facebook that he would work on a solution.

The prime minister also posted an image of a letter sent by Kong Saphea in February in which the former lawmaker expressed regret for his past actions against the government.

“For Kong Saphea. I’ve received your apology letter,” Hun Manet wrote. “I welcome you. I will manage according to our procedures so that you can return to Cambodia. I do hope that I will have an opportunity to meet and talk in the future.”

Kong Saphea was among a group of 60 officials and activists from the Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, who were sentenced to prison in 2022 after they were found guilty of plotting to overthrow the government. 

The charges were widely condemned as politically motivated, and Cambodia’s judiciary continues to be criticized for its lack of independence. 

In 2017, the CNRP was dissolved by Cambodia’s Supreme Court in a decision that paved the way for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, to win all 125 seats in the 2018 election.

Kong Saphea moved to Canada before the 2022 conviction. His letter in February was addressed to Hun Manet and former Prime Minister Hun Sen and requested a pardon from King Norodom Sihamoni for the 2022 conviction.

“I’m not defecting to the CPP, but I wrote the statement requesting a pardon because I want to get a chance to take care of my elderly parents in Cambodia,” he wrote in an email to Radio Free Asia on Thursday.

Hun Manet took over as prime minister in August, after his father – Hun Sen – stepped down after decades in power.

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed.

A photo shared by Chinese-speaking social media users claims to show American soldiers stationed on Taiwan’s Kinmen islands this year. But the claim is false. The photo in fact shows U.S. troops attending a New York funeral in 2007.

The claim was shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Feb. 27.

“The year 2024 has just arrived, and US Special Forces have been stationed in Kinmen, a small island just 2 kilometers from Xiamen, after the Kinmen fishing boat incident,” the claim reads in part.

The photo began circulating following an incident on Feb. 14, in which two Chinese men drowned near Kinmen, an island under Taipei’s control that is just 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Chinese city of Xiamen, while being chased by a Taiwanese coast guard vessel.

The incident has exacerbated tensions between Beijing and Taipei, especially after a survivor allegedly claimed the boat was “rammed.”

Similar claims have been shared on X here and here.

But the claim is false.

A funeral in New York

A reverse image search on Google and TinEye found the same photo published on the website of Yellow Ribbon America, a group that provides support for U.S. military personnel, their families and communities. 

“U.S. Army Rangers with the 75th Ranger Regiment make up the ‘honor platoon’ in a funeral procession to the gravesite of Gen. (retired) Wayne A. Downing during his interment service at West Point, NY, Sept. 27, 2007,” the caption of the photo reads. 

A keyword search found an exact matching photo posted on the website TogetherWeServed, an online community of the U.S. military veterans, stating that the funeral of Gen. Wayne A. Downing was held on Sep. 27, 2007 at the West Point Cemetery, which is located on the grounds of the United States Military Academy in New York state.

US troops in Taiwan

In 2021, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen acknowledged for the first time since 1979 — the year the last U.S. garrison departed following Washington’s shift of diplomatic recognition to Beijing — that American troops were present on the island to train with Taiwanese soldiers. 

In a separate report published by Taiwan’s Central News Agency on March 14, 2024, the region’s defense minister affirmed U.S. troops were also positioned on the outlying islands as part of an exchange program, described as a “learning opportunity” for the armed forces of the democratic island.

Edited by Shen Ke & Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Authorities in Xinjiang have banned Uyghurs from using social media apps including Chinese-owned TikTok and tools to circumvent censorship, according to a video released from Chinese police, in what experts say could be the beginning of another major crackdown on the region’s 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs.

A video notice about the ban was released April 8 by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-run economic and paramilitary organization also known as Bingtuan that has played a key role in suppressing the Uyghurs.

Violators face arrest, a fine of 15,000 yuan, or US$2,100, and a 40-point deduction under China’s social credit system, which affects people’s access to credit and business opportunities, according to the video.

In addition to TikTok, people are forbidden from downloading and using X, formerly Twitter, and YouTube, and buying and selling on the cryptocurrency platform Bitcoin, it said.

The announcement “suggests a significant likelihood of another round of mass oppression by China,”said Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, vice chairman of the executive committee of the World Uyghur Congress.

Bingtuan police also warned against using virtual private networks, or VPNs, or server accelerator cards, which get around China’s “Great Firewall” of government internet censorship.

Authorities are also broadcasting the warning against using foreign websites and apps across radio stations, televisions and social media platforms in Xinjiang, said a foreign businessman who works in the region, but declined to be named for fear of retribution.

Chinese police are conducting impromptu checks of phones in Uyghur homes and hotels, leading to abductions, he said.

Pivotal role in oppression

Bingtuan police and armed security forces participated in the mass arrests and detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in internment camps and prisons that began around 2017, which the United States and some Western parliaments have labeled a genocide.

A December 2023 report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project on the police surveillance structure in Xinjiang identifies the People’s Armed Police and the Bingtuan as the primary perpetrators of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uyghurs.

The latest ban came after a special meeting recently convened by Xinjiang’s Communist Party Committee, which stressed the need for “strictly maintaining secrecy related to Xinjiang.”

Sophie Richardson, former director of China affairs at Human Rights Watch, said the new ban could indicate the failure of Chinese policies in Xinjiang. 

“If the Chinese government really thought its policies were working well in the region, these kinds of threats and constraints simply wouldn’t exist,” she said.

Surveillance apps

The new cyber restrictions are nothing new in Xinjiang.

By 2016, Chinese police had forced people in the region to install government surveillance apps on their cellphones and computers. 

The following year, the Chinese government began a large-scale arrest operation based on WeChat activity records of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups.

According to news reports, China has amassed comprehensive information on Uyghurs in a large database and can monitor and track them around the clock.

Geoffrey Cain, a senior research fellow and policy director of the Tech Integrity Project and author of the book “The Perfect Police State,” said crackdowns always “start with apps,” but he added that the CCP itself has mastered the use of apps to collect data on China’s entire population. 

“They learned to do it with the use of concentration camps, and to put people in those concentration camps they used mass data gathering from their apps,” he told RFA. 

Chinese public security authorities have required Uyghurs with personal computers and smartphones to install “anti-fraud” spyware on devices. 

Now if someone tries to download foreign social media apps such as X or to use a VPN, the software immediately alerts police, who have the authority to freeze users’ bank accounts and terminate their phone service, Cain said.

Forcing people in Xinjiang and the rest of China to install spy apps shows that Chinese authorities are worried about political stability and they want to create a total security state by seeing “every person’s thinking, every person’s ideology,” he said.  

Denying the Uyghur genocide

Kokbore pointed out that Chinese government officials widely use social media platforms such as TikTok, X and Facebook to deny the Uyghur genocide. 

“China is putting efforts to conceal the ethnic genocide in the Uyghur region by tightly controlling information and punishing Uyghurs arbitrarily,” he said. 

Kokbore also noted the presence of X accounts with Uyghur profile photos that promote the Chinese government’s narrative of Uyghurs living happy lives under Chinese policies. Chinese reporters then use such platforms to conceal the atrocities.

Some U.S. lawmakers and government officials have determined that TikTok, a subsidiary of Chinese company ByteDance, poses a threat to U.S. national security. 

The U.S. House of Representatives on March 13 passed legislation that will ban TikTok in the United States unless its parent company can find a buyer for it. To become law, the bill must clear the Senate, where other efforts to ban the short-video app have stalled.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.