Hong Kong residents show support for mainland China Covid protests

Dozens of protesters gathered in Hong Kong in solidarity with anti-lockdown demonstrations in mainland China. The protest was held to commemorate the 10 people who died in a fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang region, and show solidarity with the protests that took place over the weekend in cities across China against stringent Covid-19 measures.

Hong Kong police warned some protesters for violating a ban on gatherings of groups of 12 or more people and cordoned off the area to record protesters' identities. They were then allowed to leave

What will it take to stop China’s Uighur genocide?

 Disturbing new details are emerging about the treatment of China’s ethnic Uighur population in the country’s far west region.

The Xinjiang Police Files, an unprecedented data leak, includes nearly three thousand mugshots of detainees believed to be held in reeducation camps. The documents also reveal shoot-to-kill orders to prevent detainees from escaping, and a push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping for more detention centers because the existing ones are overcrowded.

Winter Olympics: Snowboard company Burton defends working in Xinjiang (yes, there's a video)

Despite allegations of genocide against ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang, China, many foreign firms are hoping to make the most of the winter sports boom that's expected there from the Winter Olympics next month.

Watch our interview with Craig Smith, chief executive of snowboarding firm Burton China, as he defends operating in the region.

Corporations have little concern for those that might be harmed by their actions. Their only concern is generating profit. If people are imprisoned or die. That's just the cost of doing business. 

 

Held in chains for using WhatsApp

 

Amid growing international concern about China's human rights record, an unofficial tribunal in London has ruled China has committed genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

China responds to UK sanctions over Xinjiang with sanctions

 British Secretary of State Dominic Raab rejected sanctions imposed on UK individuals by China: An apparent bit of tit-for-tat after Britain, along with the European Union, the US and Canada sanctioned several Chinese over allegations of human rights abuses in the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region.

New evidence of China moving Uighur minority workers in order to uproot communities - BBC News

 

A BBC investigation has found evidence that China’s policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities from north-west Xinjiang to factory jobs far from home is being used to uproot and assimilate the population.

Xinjiang: China's Muslim minorities

 

Beijing has been subjecting the ethnic Uighur minority in the region of Xinjiang to repressions for years. Now, it has grown into a form of cultural warfare that even affects Uighurs in exile. Human rights activists say China is committing genocide.

China reportedly expands Xinjiang Uighur detention camps

Researchers in Australia have identified and mapped more than 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang, that northwestern part of China where the government has interned hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, Muslim minorities including the Uighurs.
 

Rare footage of former model held for “re-education” in China’s detention system

The BBC has obtained rare footage from inside China’s secretive system of mass incarceration in the far western region of Xinjiang. In a self-shot video a former fashion model, who is from the Uighur ethnic group, can be seen handcuffed to a bed.

Why more than 1 million Uighurs are being held in camps in China

In Xinjiang province, China, more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are being held in 're-education' camps that the government claims are benign vocational centres teaching useful career skills. But former camp detainees have described them as de facto prisons implementing mass brainwashing and obedience to the Communist party. As more evidence emerges of torture, forced sterilisation of women and other methods of population reduction, should the situation in Xinjiang be termed a genocide? 

China's ambassador denies abuse of Uighurs in Xinjiang during Andrew Marr interview

China’s ambassador to the UK gave a brazen defence of his country’s human rights record on Sunday, insisting the Uighur people live in “peaceful and harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups”, as he was confronted with footage of shackled prisoners being herded on to trains in Xinjiang.

Leaked files reveal China’s mass detention camps for Uighurs 

Leaked Chinese government documents reveal the prison-like detention and indoctrination taking place at camps in China’s Xinjiang region, where ethnic minority Muslims — known as Uighurs — are being held. The documents were obtained, verified and translated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in collaboration with CBC News. 

New evidence for China's Uighur prison system

China has imprisoned as many as one million Uighurs – a Muslim minority based in the Xinjiang region in the northwest of the country. The Chinese authorities claim that the internment camps are vocational training centers set up to fight extremism and provide Uighurs with valuable skills. But DW and its German media partners NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung received a leaked document that contradicts that narrative – and confirms what many have long suspected: that China is imprisoning Uighurs based on little more than their religion and culture.

The science and the art of open-source journalism

From Xinjiang, China to Douma, Syria - how challenging stories are being reported using tools of open-source journalism.

Citizen journalism allows anybody with a mobile phone to document current events and produce content that is now routinely used by news organisations.

Open-source journalists often start with that kind of material - and then they apply some of the same investigative techniques that are used by police and intelligence agencies. It is a growth industry, partly because of the decline in press freedom across many parts of the world.

Tariq Nafi explores how open-source reporters have proved valuable on the story in Syria.

The China Complex

What is China? How ancient Chinese principles help explain the preservation, power and problems of modern China.

What is China? Where is it going? What is it going to do?

The world's most populous country, an economy set to become the biggest in the world, a communist state, a developing nation, the world's oldest surviving civilisation at the cutting edge of a technological revolution, an authoritarian regime brutally suppressing its minority groups - China is many things to many people, but running through its core, like a continuous silk thread, is one central principle: order.

The China Cables: Disrupting Beijing's Xinjiang narrative

Unprecedented leak of Chinese documents reveals the extent of camps in Xinjiang. Plus, the spyware hacking journalists.

The China Cables and the disruption of Beijing's Xinjiang narrative

It is one of the biggest human rights stories on the planet: China - specifically the province of Xinjiang - and the estimated one million Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities currently held in massive internment camps there.

Previously, most of what the world knew about Xinjiang came through satellite imagery, carefully controlled official tours of the camps plus the accounts of some of those imprisoned there.

Data leak reveals how China 'brainwashes' Uighurs in prison camps

The Chinese government has consistently claimed the camps in the far western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training.

But official documents, seen by BBC Panorama, show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished.

China's UK ambassador dismissed the documents as fake news.

The leak was made to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has worked with 17 media partners, including BBC Panorama and The Guardian newspaper in the UK.

About a million people - mostly from the Muslim Uighur community - are thought to have been detained without trial.

• 'I spent seven days of hell in Chinese camps'
• The leading Uighur geographer who vanished in China

BBC Our World 2019 Inside Chinas Camps

The Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government of the People's Republic of China,^[6][7][8] are concentration camps^[4][9][10] that have been operated by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional government for the purpose of interning Uyghur Muslims since 2014.^[1][11] The camps were established under General Secretary Xi Jinping’s administration.^[11][12] They have significantly expanded since a hardline party secretary, Chen Quanguo, took charge of the region in August 2016. These camps are reportedly operated outside of the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them.^[2][13][14] Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Muslims from other ethnic minorities in these camps, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism.^{[15][16][17][18][19]}

China says UN criticism of human rights record is 'politically driven'

The Chinese government doesn't understand irony.  How else does one explain the headline above. 

In 2010  Liu Xiaobo a human rights lawyer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  He was promptly jailed and died in prison all for the crime of advocating for the rights of his fellow citizens. 

Xinjiang  a province in western China which has a large Muslim population which the Communist party has tried to suppress, if not forcing them to give up their religious beliefs.  Recently clear evidence has been presented that shows China has created a large number of interment camps with an estimated population of 1 million prisoners.     

China has defended its human rights record after the first UN assessment since 2013 criticised the mass detention of lawyers and the continuing use of internment camps.

Beijing rejected claims made during the UN Human Rights Council’s universal periodic review that human rights in China had deteriorated, saying that some UN member countries were deliberately disregarding “the remarkable achievements made by China”.

During the review, UN member states singled out China’s policies in Xinjiang and Tibet and its treatment of human rights defenders. It called on Beijing to release detained Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, protect religious freedoms in Tibet, and stop harassing and detaining human rights lawyers.

Activists say as many as a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in internment camps in Xinjiang, where they are forced to undergo political indoctrination.