8-2-2019 Li Xin spoke to RFA's Mandarin Service in a recent interview after managing to leave China. Her name has been changed for fear of reprisals against her family back home: Some of my friends back home have been detained, as well as the friends of some family members. They saw each other in the concentration camp. One of our relatives went in because they were forcibly evicted and their home demolished, and some of the others were sent in their for taking medications or drugs, but a long time ago, but they were being locked up for something that happened years ago.
When it comes to Han Chinese the main group being persecuted is anyone who has a record of going overseas and also anyone whose home has been demolished, or people whose land the government wants but doesn't want to debate it with them. There has been a lot of public anger since the demolitions, and a lot of people wanted to argue with the government, but they got sent to concentration camp after they tried that….
RFA: But in many media reports Han Chinese seem to support the government's "stability maintenance" and "counterterrorism" efforts.
Li Xin: Well, the reality is that nobody dares to tell the truth if they're being interviewed by the media, least of all people who actually live there. Nobody would dare to say a word, and every single thing they say is scripted, as if they were actors. If you were to say anything at all that departed from the official script, your entire family could get sent to a concentration camp. That wouldn't be unusual at all. We did have someone in our neighborhood who spoke out against the persecution and treatment of Uyghurs. All he said was: Wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance. I don't know who informed on him, but his entire family was locked up in a concentration camp for so-called vocational training. They call it vocational training, but actually there's not much difference from a prison in appearance. But it is far more frightening than prison, because there is no legal process involved at all. These concentration camps are black jails. There is no record of detentions there, so everyone is terrified of them.
RFA: What do people who are the same age as you think?
Li Xin: I think the people who are the same age as me, who grew up with me, are pretty much still adolescents, the way they think. All they think about is what they are going to eat today, what game they are going to play. They don't worry about their future, because they don't even know what is going on right now. They enjoy Chinese Communist Party rule. They think that life is pretty peaceful now that they have detained all of the Uyghurs, and they never think about the sort of trouble that has brought down on their own heads. They think it's fine just to turn a blind eye to all of that. Don't talk about it. What's it to us if they are rounding up Uyghurs? I don't care about politics. That's how they think.
What could they do, even if they did express dissatisfaction with such things? They still have games to be played, TV shows to be watched. I think that this is all a fantasy, and that there are many dangers hidden in it, which can't be ignored.
These ideas are derived from our , and what our parents have instilled in us. This has been going on, generation after generation. My parents told me not to try anything. "What can you do? Why would you do this when you know people are being arrested?" they said. I asked them if they didn't think the government was behaving unfairly, but they just said "That's what people are like!" That's a word they use all the time. “People. That's what people are like, so why would you want to be any better?"
When our family member was taken away, I couldn't even ask about them. If I tried, they'd say "Do you want to go a concentration camp?" They invented a code-word for it, the Guangming Academy, because nobody wanted to name it. But we all knew it meant a concentration camp.
Reported by Liu Chih-hsin for the online Taiwan news magazine The Reporter—and republished and rebroadcast https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chinese-xinjiang-08022019131843.html
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-Chinese police line up in front of a monastery in Tibet in a Dec. 26, 2013 photo
Chinese authorities in Tibet are offering large cash rewards to informants in a bid to stamp out online activities considered threatening to Beijing’s control over the restive Himalayan region, with amounts paid out now tripled over amounts offered last year, sources say.
Rewards of 300,000 yuan (U.S. $42,582) are now being promised for information leading to the arrests of social-media users deemed disloyal to China, according to a notice issued on Feb. 28 by three government departments of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
Behaviors specified as illegal include online activities aimed at “attempting to overthrow [China’s] socialist system,” “advocating extremism,” “destabilizing national security,” and “defaming the People’s Republic of China,” according to the document, a copy of which was obtained by RFA’s Tibetan Service.
Also banned are online expressions of support for exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way Policy,” which calls for greater autonomy for Tibet while acknowledging Beijing’s sovereignty over Tibetan areas now part of China.
Attempts to send information on conditions in Tibet to foreign contacts will also be severely punished, the document says. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/reward-08082019170949.html
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