China Uses Coronavirus to Further Crush Uyghurs with Xinjiang Lockdown

The Chinese Communist Party announced it would “close off residential communities” in the occupied Uyghur region of East Turkistan, which the Party calls Xinjiang, on Wednesday after an influx of tourists allegedly triggered an outbreak of Chinese coronavirus.

Communist Dictator Xi Jinping began the process of turning East Turkistan into a totalitarian police state in 2017, building a vast network of concentration camps, implementing high-tech camera and GPS surveillance, and flooding the region with ethnic Han communists to monitor the moves of the indigenous people living there. At their peak, the concentration camps – which housed mostly Muslim members of indigenous ethnic groups from the region, including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz people – were believed to house 3 million people, many of whom were later reportedly shipped to cotton fields and factories to engage in slave labor nationwide.

East Turkistan joins several other regions in south and west China, including occupied Tibet, in facing a new wave of coronavirus lockdowns. Chinese state media outlets claimed the lockdowns were necessary as travelers enjoying the summer holiday had brought the virus into those more remote regions.

The state-run Global Times reported Wednesday that the Communist Party was only locking down Urumqi, the capital of East Turkistan, for now. The Chinese government has ceased using the word “lockdown” since June after it forced the entire population of Shanghai, its largest city, into house arrest this year, prompting an exodus of foreign investment and collapsing the Chinese economy.

“Urumqi, capital city of Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, will partially suspend public transportation and close off residential communities for five days starting from Wednesday as the city registered 27 positive [Chinese coronavirus] cases,” the Global Times reported. It claimed only “six urban compounds” in Urumqi would be locked down – which it referred to as “static management” – for five days.

The state newspaper noted that majority Han tourists from elsewhere in China were currently flooding East Turkistan, as it is “currently at the peak of annual travel season.”

“Since the current wave of epidemic flare-up, the region has received 8.82 million tourists from July 30 to August 7, and measures will be taken to protect their interests, according to local authorities,” the publication observed.

The Chinese government has not discussed how the lockdown would affect the Uyghur concentration camps in the region, as Beijing denies that they are still being used. China refers to the torture, slavery, and sterilization facilities as “vocational education and training centers” and, according to U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, claims that they have all been shut down.

Uyghur activists and experts predicted recently that the Communist Party may soon impose an even more restrictive regime in East Turkistan, citing as a sign of such changes that dictator Xi Jinping personally visited the regime in July. Xi visited Urumqi and enjoyed a choreographed exchange with alleged Uyghur cultural representatives and “learned about the work in nurturing talent, coordinating [Chinese coronavirus] response with economic and social development, promoting ethnic unity and progress and consolidating the sense of community for the Chinese nation, among others,” according to the government’s Xinhua News Agency.

“Historically all trips to East Turkistan by Chinese Presidents/CCP General Secretaries are a precursor to a more brutal campaign to colonize and assimilate East Turkistan and its people while solidifying Chinese occupation and rule,” Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, told Breitbart News in July. “We expect that things will get a lot worse, as Xi stated that ‘security measures’ in East Turkistan should become regular.”

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, noted that East Turkistan joins Tibet in facing a new wave of lockdowns allegedly prompted by tourism. Prior to the lockdowns there, the Chinese government trapped thousands vacationing on the tropical island of Hainan last week claiming it necessary to contain a coronavirus outbreak there. The Hainan outbreak, nearly 3,000 miles from East Turkistan, appears unrelated to the situation in the west of the country.

The Party newspaper predicted the lockdowns “will deal a certain blow to China’s tourist industry in August,” adding to manufacturing, export, housing, and foreign investment woes for the country’s economy. It offered some unsubstantiated optimism, however, that “overall enthusiasm for summer travel has not decreased and in the long run, public confidence in domestic travel will rise since the country’s epidemic measures are more precise and science-based.”

Global health authorities have loudly disputed the claim that China’s rolling, oppressive lockdowns are “science-based.”

“We know the virus better and we have better tools, including vaccines, so that’s why the handling of the virus should actually be different from what we used to do at the start of the pandemic,” World Health Organization (W.H.O.) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in response to the Shanghai lockdown in May, calling the endless lockdowns “not sustainable.”

Beijing responded by attacking Tedros as “irresponsible” – despite China supporting his rise to the head of the global agency – and accusing him of causing “an unnecessary negative influence on the effect, approach and global contribution of China’s antivirus work.”

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