In the land where accusations of authoritarianism are resolved by reconfiguring the internet to redefine the term, a woman named Nurimangul Hashim has possibly been beaten to death during interrogation after accusing police of murdering her husband, Memettursun Imin. Both were Uyghurs.
Hashim was detained following Imin’s funeral, but exactly what happened next is unknown. The official version is that she died of a heart attack, but a police officer who spoke to Radio Free Asia suggested that she may have lost her life as the result of a blow received in custody from a baton or punch.
The reason behind Imin’s death is equally uncertain, except to say that he died in prison in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) when serving a sentence for the “crime” of accessing overseas websites, one of six men from the same village to leave this world in similar circumstances.
More stories like this are imminent, as China is cracking down on the use of both foreign and domestic social media by Uyghurs, which may presage yet another wave of repression because it severs their already minimal ability to tell the rest of the world about what is happening in their homeland.
While non-Uyghur citizens are afforded greater internet freedom, they had better be careful how they use it. Authorities are deleting “personas that go against public order and morals,” livestreams where guests inconveniently ask whether Chinese President Xi Jinping might be a dictator and micro-dramas that portray unharmonious families in what is supposed to be the child-raising paradise of the Middle Kingdom.
The communications attack continued more widely as Apple complied with a government request to bolt the door on Chinese citizens by denying them the ability to download apps such as Signal, Telegram, Threads and WhatsApp, which previously could have been accessed through virtual private networks. Separately, it was revealed that almost every single keyboard app for typing Chinese contained a vulnerability enabling keystroke data to be intercepted.
Some have since been patched, but digital eavesdropping has a physical world counterpart: Community networks that enforce the Chinese Communist Party vision at the local level. The tool by which Beijing imposed a vice-like grip on its population during the COVID-19 pandemic, these networks are set to be professionalized in order to “maintain social stability and consolidate the party’s long-term rule.”
Among their tasks will certainly be informing upon members of society who do not conform to Xi Jinping’s worldview in a national atmosphere where forced confessions and de facto hostages are resurfacing in Ministry of State Security videos and leaderboards of its “top ten” espionage cases.
COVID’s legacy also loomed large in an Associated Press deep dive into how the Chinese scientific community has been leashed and muzzled to waylay investigations into the origin of the virus. To this day, several researchers cannot exit the country or communicate with the World Health Organization and experience unspecified “trouble” with authorities. Lessening the risk of another pandemic with multiple millions of fatalities by determining the pathway of the previous one now looks all but impossible to achieve.
If that is how Beijing treats its scientists, its sporting heroes fare little better. Exposed by The New York Times and German television channel ARD, 23 members of the Chinese swimming team for the Tokyo Olympics were revealed to have tested positive for a banned substance prior to the games but were allowed to compete anyway because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accepted China’s excuse of kitchen contamination without an on-location investigation.
If, as some suspect, this was indeed an instance of deliberate performance enhancing, the scale suggests a systematic approach in which the athletes concerned will have had little choice over what goes into their bodies, just like other, less fortunate citizens seem to have little control over what is removed from them.
WADA has defended itself robustly, but suspicions remain, not least because of Beijing’s activities to compromise other international bodies, including the United Nations. This latter was highlighted in a witness testimony provided to the U.K.’s Foreign Affairs Committee on April 16 by Emma Reilly, a former human rights officer at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Reilly described how “rules are broken to placate China” at the U.N. and favors specifically extended to Beijing enabling it advance knowledge of human rights activists who would present evidence against it. Staff lied about the practice to member states but received no sanction for doing so. In one instance, Uyghurs had to walk through a propaganda exhibition named “Xinjiang is a Wonderful Land” in order to access a room at the U.N. offices in Geneva where a resolution related to mass human rights abuses in that “wonderful land” would be discussed.
According to an accompanying written statement by Reilly, activists whose names were confirmed to Beijing by the U.N. “reported that their family members were visited by Chinese police, forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, as regards Uyghurs, put in concentration camps. In some cases, their family members died in detention.”
Another witness, Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at International Crisis Group, testified that there have been efforts by Beijing to “fill senior positions at the U.N. or insert Xi Jinping language into U.N. texts.” Gowan did, however, clarify that this practice has encountered significant resistance since 2020, which one hopes will extend to Beijing’s involvement in a U.N.-led panel that is to set voluntary principles to address environmental and human rights abuses in the mining industry.
Attempts to subvert global norms via multilateral bodies are also central to China’s expansion of the architecture for an authoritarian internet, according to “The Digital Silk Road”, an examination of its practices in the Indo-Pacific region. Authored by Article 19, a freedom of expression-focused organization, the report opines that, folded within the infrastructure drive of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, companies such as Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba Group serve as proxies for the Chinese Communist Party, which exports the technical and legislational foundations for governments in countries like Cambodia, Malaysia, Nepal and Thailand to restrict information, skewer discussion and surveil internet users. In contexts such as the unsettled Thai south, this implies the capacity to create conditions like those that have led to the destruction of Uyghurs in East Turkestan.
The growing portrait of a desperate human rights situation in China overspilling to the geopolitical neighborhood was further expressed in reports for 2023 that were released this month by both the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International. The State Department summarizes a who’s who of abuses conducted and facilitated within the Middle Kingdom that run from enforced disappearances at a “nationwide, systemic scale” to “arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings,” and culminate in an accusation of genocide.
However, it also observes the obstruction under their jurisdiction by Kazakhstani security services of a film festival with content related to China’s suspected atrocities against Turkic peoples, as well as the denial of equal rights in terms of freedom of association and collective bargaining for staff in mines that are owned and operated specifically by Chinese firms in Kyrgyzstan.
Aside from characterizing China as a country which is “shielding itself from international scrutiny for the crimes against humanity it continues to commit,” Amnesty International meanwhile lambasted Beijing for acting “against international law, by protecting the Myanmar military and its unlawful air strikes,” which have contributed to the displacement of over half a million people last year alone. It went on to document Laos, Egypt and Thailand detaining and or deporting people at the tacit or explicit behest of the Chinese government.
This is the tip of the iceberg as revealed by the Madrid-based NGO Safeguard Defenders, which has just produced a ten-year overview of Xi Jinping’s “Operation Foxhunt,” a campaign of global terror that has, by hook or by crook, forced countless individuals to return to China from abroad for punishment. Conducted hand in hand with an anti-corruption drive, the operation has run roughshod over the sovereignty of other states and resorted to a “combination of pressure techniques employed on family members and loved ones in China, including collective punishment, as well as direct stalking, harassment and threats,” not to mention kidnapping. This often renders legal processes and protections against extradition obsolete.
For those who find themselves thus repatriated to the motherland, the prospects are bleak. As the bodies of Nurimangul Hashim and Memettursun Imin attest, not even survival is guaranteed.
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