In the land where the bulldozing of graveyards, splitting of families, demolition of homes, destruction of books, erasure of expression, sterilization of women and detention of intellectuals is not quite draconian enough, Chinese President Xi Jinping has demanded an even deeper clampdown.
Appearing in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) on his way back from cornering the BRICS bloc, on Aug. 26, Xi ordered further Sinicization of Islam, dancing propaganda, controls on speech and refutation of “false public opinion” in the colony, which he regards to be a core node of China’s Belt and Road initiative. In that way, its resources can be tapped off to enrich Beijing and to maintain a stranglehold over the solar tech that the rest of the world needs to avoid climate meltdown, thereby compelling it to complicity in abuses like forced labor.
Flying in the face of the United Nations, which suspects that Xi’s regime may be committing crimes against humanity in East Turkestan, the comments are frightening and ominous for all minority peoples there, who are already in the middle of yet another 100-day Strike Hard campaign that bans gatherings of more than 30 people and involves raids on Uyghur homes. Hot upon Xi’s words came yet more delayed reports of opaque arrests, including one that was apparently triggered by a gentleman’s traditional singing at a wedding. Xi’s stated aim for the Uyghur homeland is “China-style modernization” and its transformation into a tourism attraction, a particularly effective way of normalizing abuse.
Overkill is terrorizing Tibet in the summer of 2023, too. At the individual level, Tashi Wangchuk, a well-known peaceful activist for Tibetan language rights, has now been attacked in the street by masked men and perhaps denied medical care in the aftermath, according to news relayed by the NGO Free Tibet. This comes after he has already suffered alleged torture, deprivation of his political rights and a five-year prison sentence for “inciting separatism,” which seems to have been induced by his filing of a lawsuit to force implementation of China’s constitution in regard to the Tibetan tongue and speaking to The New York Times when doing so. The latter was used as evidence against him.
Beyond the individual, Politburo member Chen Wenqing (陳文清), who is responsible for China’s police, spy, judicial and carceral systems, has signaled an expansion of the policy that has already transformed the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) into the joint least free location on Earth, as measured by Freedom House. Chen is requesting provinces adjacent to the TAR with large ethnic minority populations to ensure stability and protect China’s unity, too.
This is the kind of rhetoric that has already led up to 1,000,000 Tibetan children — who may soon be referred to as Xizangers, if China has its way — to be detached from their families and culture via state-imposed boarding schools, a repressive policy to which the U.S. State Department has freshly reacted with visa sanctions. U.N. experts have previously described the residential school system as a “mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards.”
Further to the east, where even possibilities in the afterlife are now coming under restriction, a graffitied poem in the city of Zhengzhou held up a cracked mirror to the outpouring of invective against the Chinese Communist Party that was splattered across London’s Brick Lane a few weeks beforehand. In the tamer Zhengzhou version, a popular poem to its writer’s mother was whitewashed despite lacking any political content, perhaps because poetry encourages expression of inner thought and interpretation of meaning, both of which are dangerous to dictatorships. Conveyed to a global audience by the China Digital Times, its elimination provoked copycat verses and scrawled references to Li Zhi (李志), a singer who has faced partial erasure for work that used to touch on topics like Tiananmen and democracy.
Encapsulated also by the closure of prominent social media accounts for sexual minority, transgender and feminist groups just prior to Chinese Valentine’s Day on Aug. 22, hints are as close as China can get to freedom of expression right now and for good reason. In ten years up to 2023 alone, a conservative estimate of more than 130,000 of its citizens are believed to have been detained in secret locations incommunicado from friends, relatives or lawyers, according to the NGO Safeguard Defenders, which publicized the figures on International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances (Aug. 30).
Some of these people have been held merely for expressing opinions or conducting research, and many are subsequently hit with prison time. What is more, the statistics constitute only liuzhi (留置) and Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (指定居所監視居住), two of the Chinese government’s systems for disappearing people that are legal under national law. They exclude those who have been “mentally illed,” rounded up into camps or otherwise vanished into unknown and uncontactable locations.
Even state figures for the two forms of legal abductions reveal over 30,000 detentions, and China’s penchant for underestimations ought to be clear to all by now.
Image: Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天, CC BY 2.0
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