3-29-2001 In 1996 Russia and the three Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed a cooperation treaty with China known as the "Shanghai Five" agreement. They were joined earlier this year by Uzbekistan.
Human rights groups claim that by signing this treaty the signatories secretly committed themselves to extradite to China Uighur activists seeking political asylum in Russia and Central Asia.
In a statement released on Monday (26 March) the Vienna-based Kyrgyz Committee for Human Rights in Exile says another, bilateral cooperation treaty was signed last January by Chinese and Kyrgyz law-enforcement agencies.
The committee's project coordinator, Almaz Dyryldayev, tells RFE/RL that increased collaboration between Chinese and Central Asian security agencies is a matter for growing concern.
The Chinese security services have signed a cooperation treaty with their Kyrgyz counterparts. This [treaty] is first and foremost related to the Uighurs. The Uighurs are struggling for independence in China. For that reason, the fight will be directed against those national minorities living on the territory of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.” Human rights activists blame Chinese security services for the murder of Uighur leader Nigmat Bazakov last year in Kyrgyzstan. https://www.rferl.org/a/1096089.html
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4-12-2005 At its most extreme, peaceful activists who practice their religion in a manner deemed unacceptable by state authorities or Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials are arrested, tortured and at times executed. The harshest punishments are meted out to those accused of involvement in separatist activity, which is increasingly equated by officials with "terrorism." …
a manual for government and Party cadres on implementing policy on minority religious affairs, circulated internally in 2000, that elaborates many of the repressive practices subsequently codified in the regulations;
regulations prohibiting the participation of minors in any religious activity;
documents acknowledging vast increases in the number of Uighurs imprisoned or held administratively for alleged religious and state security offenses, including through the discredited reeducation through labor system; and
regulations detailing how religious and ethnic minority matters come to be classified as "state secrets.” These documents are deemed extremely sensitive and are accordingly restricted to internal Party or Party and government circulation….For Beijing, Xinjiang falls into the same broad category of political concerns as Taiwan and Tibet….
In the 1990s however through a combination of economic and land ownership incentives Beijing engineered a rapid acceleration of the ethnic Chinese influx to Xinjiang. About 1.2 million people settled in Xinjiang during the decade, pushing the proportion of the ethnic Chinese population to 40 percent of the total of some 18.5 million people at present.[4] Ethnic Chinese migrants have tended to benefit from the economic development of Xinjiang to a far greater degree than Uighurs, a source of much tension….
In February 2002, the Xinjiang Party Secretary instructed the local authorities to crack down on these "separatist techniques" and detailed the "forms of infiltration and sabotage carried out in the ideological sphere by ethnic separatist forces":[20]
1. using all sorts of news media to propagate separatist thought;
2. using periodicals, works of literature and art performances; presenting the subject in satires or allegories that give free reign to and disseminate dissatisfaction and propagate separatist thought;
3. illegally printing reactionary books and periodicals; distributing or posting reactionary leaflets, letters and posters; spreading rumors to confuse the people; instilling the public with separatist sentiment;
4. using audio and video recordings, such as audio tapes, CDs or VCDs, to incite religious fanaticism and promote "holy war";
5. forging alliances with outside separatist and enemy forces, making use of broadcasts, the Internet, and other means to intensify campaigns of reactionary propaganda and infiltration of ideas into public opinion;
6. using popular cultural activities to make the masses receptive to reactionary propaganda encouraging opposition."[21]
From the wording of the document, published in the Party's official newspaper, the Xinjiang Daily, it appears that Xinjiang authorities equate any expression of dissatisfaction (buman qingxu不满情绪), even metaphorical or ironical, with separatist thought (fenlie sixiang分裂思想). The term "spreading rumors" (zaoyao造谣) used in the article is the same as that used in criminal law: "incitement to subvert the political power of the state and overthrow the socialist system by means of spreading rumors, slander or other means" (Article 105), an offense for which the punishment can be life imprisonment. The document asserts that the "expression of dissatisfaction" in works of art is a form of criminal activity and is liable to criminal punishment. Furthermore, the document uses the terms "sabotage" and "infiltration" to characterize such activities, thus reinforcing the idea that they are equivalent to violent action.
The fact that "popular cultural activities" (minjian wenhua huodong民间文化活动) are denounced as forms of "separatist" activity appears to be aimed at deterring people from engaging in activities that promote their history, culture, or tradition. …
China has also been very active in enrolling the support of its Central Asian neighbors in the crackdown against Uighur ethno-nationalist aspirations. It is the driving force behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security body composed of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan set up in 1996 (Uzbekistan joined in 2001). Under pressure from Beijing, since 1996 these Central Asian countries have effectively silenced independent Uighur organizations on their soil and on several occasions have repatriated refugees in response to requests by China. Some of those repatriated refugees were executed upon their return.[33] https://www.hrw.org/report/2005/04/11/devastating-blows/religious-repression-uighurs-xinjiang
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Surveillance cameras are seen are seen by a large video screen recently constructed on a corner of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Sept. 6, 2019 “To date over one hundred countries have bought, imitated or been trained by Russia and China in information control,” Weber writes in the report, titled The Worldwide Web of Chinese and Russian Information Controls. The study examines nine states across the globe where Chinese and Russian equipment, methods and attitudes about information control have gained influence or prominence.
“While journalists from the Bahamas, Lesotho and Peru participate in propaganda trainings in Beijing, Chinese surveillance gear is used in a military command in the East of Brazil and in Jordan’s House of Parliament,” said the study.
“Russian surveillance equipment, for its part, is deployed in bordering countries like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as farther abroad in states like Algeria, Cuba, Mexico and Palestine,” Weber says….
“In China and Russia something similar to a military-industrial complex has been created. This security-industrial complex is made up of politicians dependent on security-related industries, private security companies, and the police,” writes Weber….
China’s Belt-Road Initiative, a plan launched in 2013 involves 137 countries….It notes that “82 percent of Chinese information controls exports go to BRI countries” under Beijing’s goal of weaving those nations more tightly to China through digital collaboration. “China also weaves journalist and media trainings into the BRI framework,” says the report. “The selling of technology and services is also integrated into the BRI.”
Weber’s survey finds a range of developments in information control technology transfer:
• In Egypt Huawei has built a “safe city” while another firm provides CCTV cameras for buses, while Egyptian journalists have received media fellowships and “were exposed to an autocratic media -landscape through visits to media houses like the People’s Daily.”
• One of Iran’s earliest surveillance equipment imports from China was of Huawei gear that gives government agencies access to mobile phones.
• Malaysia has been an “avid buyer” of Chinese surveillance technology and has said it will be using more Huawei equipment.
• Close Tanzania-China ties have “resulted in the Tanzanian government working to imitate the Chinese concept of censorship.”
• The information security form Meiya Pico has trained Thai experts in mobile and computer forensics, and Thailand “has also signaled that it intends to create its own Great Firewall in the image of China’s.”
• Uganda enjoys “far-reaching and steadily progressing” information control collaboration with China and has received 900 Huawei surveillance cameras.
• Zambia “has relied on censorship and surveillance gear supplied by Huawei and ZTE” to control its domestic population.
• Venezuela’s smart-card ID system emulates aspects of China’s social credit system, showing that schemes that use big-data collection to monitor behavior “is no longer confined to China.” https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/information-controls-09172019153506.html
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Nepal deported six Tibetans who had crossed into the Himalayan country to seek asylum, handing them over to Chinese police shortly after they crossed the border last week, two witnesses told RFA’s Tibetan Service. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/nepal-deport-09092019064318.html
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Rapid demolition at the Yachen Gar Tibetan Buddhist center in western China’s Sichuan province has raised nearly half of the sprawling complex, leaving a vast patch of grass where thousands on nuns and monks once lived and studied, sources in the region told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
"Almost half of the entire Yachen Gar complex has been razed since the demolition of the nuns' dwellings began in July,” said a source in Tibet. …During 2017 and 2018, at least 4,820 Tibetan and Han Chinese monks and nuns were removed from Larung Gar, with over 7,000 dwellings and other structures torn down beginning in 2001, according to sources in the region. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/sichuan-yachengar-08282019173854.html
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September 20, 2019
Under its leader, Xi Jinping, China’s government has intensified efforts to assimilate ethnic minorities and curtail religions, such as Islam, that it considers carriers of foreign influence. For two years on the Xinjiang frontier China has sent hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Uighurs to what it calls reeducation centers where they are taught to renounce their religion and culture and embrace new state-prescribed identities as secular Chinese.
That tide of “Sinicization,” as Chinese policymakers call it, is surging nationwide. A recent unescorted trip through Gansu, a corridor that once ushered Silk Road caravans and Islam into imperial China, revealed an accelerating campaign to assimilate another Muslim minority, the Hui, a Chinese-speaking people with no recent record of separatism or extremism.
The campaign targeting the Hui does not feature mass internment or pervasive digital surveillance, the most striking aspects of the Xinjiang crackdown. But it is a purge of ideas, symbols, culture, products — anything deemed not Chinese. It permeates life in ways existential and mundane.
Domes and minarets are lopped off mosques and replaced with curving Chinese roofs. News broadcasts are forbidden to show pedestrians wearing traditional Hui skullcaps or veils. Arabic script is outlawed in public spaces, so practically every restaurant has a sun-beaten facade with dark traces where the word “halal” has been scraped off.
Strict new quotas throttle religious education to the degree that some Hui intellectuals predict their people could become largely irreligious, like most of China, in two or three generations.
Pressures are mounting against the Hui, the distant descendants of Persian traders, at a moment when the Communist leadership is stoking nationalism among the ethnic majority Han to bolster popular support. In officials’ speeches, on television and across billboards, one frequent refrain is the “China Dream” --Xi’s vision of restoring China’s historic power and wealth, its culture and its pride.
“The great rejuvenation of the Chinese people is actually a narrow-minded, xenophobic kind of nationalism,” said Li Yunfei, an imam from eastern China and one of the last dissident Hui writers. “Anything that is defined by them as coming from abroad they strive to eliminate through administrative means.”…
When party bosses inspected Tibetan regions in August they told local officials to implement Xi’s “important words on religious work,” tighten control over monasteries and “focus efforts to Sinicize religion.”…
a day laborer named Ma Junyi seemed strained as he spoke about the shifting sands. Residents were uneasy about new restrictions that cut the madrassa’s class sizes down to 30--a quota enforced by random checks, Ma said. Youngsters under 18, such as his 9-year-old daughter, were forbidden to set foot inside the mosque courtyard.
“We know leaders have their reasons,” Ma said. “But how can we pass on our traditions? It feels like we’re going extinct.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/boiling-us-like-frogs-chinas-clampdown-on-muslims-creeps-into-the-heartland-finds-new-targets/2019/09/20/25c8bb08-ba94-11e9-aeb2-a101a1fb27a7_story.html
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-Shasta
-Pleiades Red-band image from the Second Digitized Sky Survey
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