Sam Brownback, ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, told a State Department press conference on Thursday he has received reports of U.S. citizens and legal residents imprisoned in China’s re-education camps for Muslims in Xinjiang province.
The U.S. State Department published its annual report on global human rights abuses on Wednesday, spotlighting China’s mass detention of Uighur Muslims in the rollout. The head of the State Department human rights bureau compared China’s actions to the horrors of Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Furious Chinese officials responded by accusing the United States of “prejudice” and a “Cold War mentality.”
Chinese officials on Tuesday referred to the massive detention camps holding roughly a million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province as “vocational education centers,” and even “boarding schools,” and suggested the camps might “gradually disappear” once society “no longer needs them.”
A Dutch cybersecurity analyst claimed on Monday to have discovered a database created by Chinese police that contains private information about 364 million social media users, revealing a government surveillance network of breathtaking scale and uncertain purpose.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Reps. Eliot Engel (D-NY) and Ted Yoho (R-FL) wrote an open letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday criticizing the Trump administration for taking “no meaningful action” to protect the Uighur Muslims from abuse by China.
China’s envoy to Turkey, Deng Li, on Thursday issued a very thinly-veiled threat against Turkish “commercial and economic” interests if the Turkish government does not mute its criticism of how China treats the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
Beijing is taking an increasingly harsh tone in defending its so-called de-radicalization program in China’s Muslim-majority Xinjiang, telling foreign diplomats recently that “absurd preachings” from Islamist extremists in the province have yielded “murderous devils,” Reuters reported Thursday.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHCR) in Geneva on Monday that his government is concerned over China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
The Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher company on Wednesday announced it will no longer sell its equipment in the Xinjiang province of China because the Chinese government is using the gear to track Uighur Muslims through their DNA.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper praised the nation’s internment camps for Muslim ethnic minorities once again on Sunday, announcing that diplomats from Cuba, Venezuela, and other dictatorships will receive tours of the “vocational centers” to tell the world of their success.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency touted United States support in defending the rights of Chinese Uighur Muslims, noting Friday that America’s embassy in Ankara expressed solidarity with the country for challenging the Communist Party’s mass internment of the ethnic minority.
The Chinese government issued a warning to its citizens Tuesday urging them to “be wary and pay attention to their personal safety” while in Turkey, a response to the Turkish government’s condemnation of Beijing imprisoning up to two million of its Muslim citizens in internment camps.
China on Sunday responded to reports of noted Uighur poet and musician Abdurehim Heyit’s death in prison by posting a video of a man who claimed to be Heyit declaring himself to be in “good health.” The man was also suspiciously enthusiastic about being under investigation by Chinese authorities.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a stern condemnation of China’s policy of using internment camps to torture and “re-educate” Uighur nationals and other Muslims into communist atheist ideology and Han culture on Saturday, triggering an outraged response from Beijing Monday accusing the Turks of human rights violations against Kurdish citizens.
Chinese officials in Xinjiang province, the troubled home of the Uighur Muslims, reportedly compelled Muslims to eat pork and drink alcoholic beverages during the Lunar New Year holiday this Tuesday. Muslim dietary practices forbid both activities.
The Chinese government invited representatives from 12 neighboring, mostly Muslim-majority countries this week to tour some of the internment camps built in western Xinjiang province to indoctrinate, torture, and exploit the labor of Chinese Muslims.
China’s ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian, published an opinion column in the official Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily on Friday suggesting that China has the world’s “fastest human rights progress,” “anyone could express his or her views anywhere anytime” in the country, and those who condemn Chinese authoritarianism are hypocrites.
Some Muslim Uighurs from China’s Xinjiang province residing in Pakistan have accused Islamabad of silencing their complaints about Beijing’s abuse of Muslims at the behest of China, the cash-strapped South Asian country’s most significant economic ally, Al Jazeera reported Monday.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry condemned the American company Badger Sportswear for announcing it would no longer purchase clothing from a company based in Xinjiang, where the communist government has built dozens of internment camps to house, enslave, and torture Muslim minorities.
Beijing has approved a measure ordering Muslim communities within its borders to “uphold the sinicization of their religion” during the next five years, which refers to making Islam more Chinese by instilling Communist Party values, China’s state-run Global Times reported this week.
Chinese officials, ahead of a scheduled international inspection, are “drastically” intensifying efforts to conceal evidence of hundreds of tortuous “re-education centers” for Muslims in Xinjiang, the Epoch Times reported Thursday, citing sources and recent activity in the region.
Chinese officials announced the shutdown of three mosques on Saturday for conducting “illegal religious education.”
Up to 200 businessmen from China’s top ally Pakistan are complaining that their Uighur Muslim wives have been caught in the net of Beijing’s crackdown on Islam adherents and are urging Beijing to release them, the Associated Press (AP) reported Monday.
China’s state-run Global Times on Monday applauded the northwestern province of Gansu for abolishing “four halal-related local identification standards,” praising the end of Islamic dietary codes as an effort to “better protect the rights of minorities and curb religious extremism.”
The Chinese government published a paper on Wednesday entitled “Progress in Human Rights Over the 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up in China.”
China’s state-run Global Times argued on Monday that most Chinese people “laughed” at Mihrigul Tursun, a Muslim Uighur woman who revealed last week she had suffered beatings, electrocution, and the killing of her infant child in an internment camp set up by Beijing.
China is rapidly expanding the construction of its so-called “vocational” centers used to incarcerate, torture, and subject up to a million members of the country’s Muslim minority to communist indoctrination, according to a bombshell Reuters investigation published this week.
China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday pushed back against complaints about China’s abuse of the Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province, accusing a Uighur woman of lying about torture and murder at the gigantic internment camps much of the Uighur population has been herded into.
China is building “dozens” of new orphanages to lock up thousands of Muslim Uighur children as young as six months old “like farm animals in the shed,” the religion editor for the Atlantic revealed on Wednesday.
Chinese authorities in Muslim-majority Xinjiang ordered members of the majority-Muslim Uighur ethnic minority this weekend “to surrender within 30 days” if they have been accused of “terrorism,” or dissent from the Communist Party.
A Canada-led coalition of 15 unidentified Western ambassadors in Beijing is pushing for a meeting with Xinjiang’s Communist Party boss to discuss the rampant human rights abuses against the province’s Muslim Uighur minority, Reuters reported Thursday.
Contents: Fifteen countries challenge China’s human rights in Xinjiang province; China’s crackdown on religions continues
An ethnic Kazakh held prisoner in one of China’s Uighur concentration camps confirmed to National Public Radio (NPR) Tuesday that the Communist Party forces those detained there to praise Chinese leader Xi Jinping before eating.
China’s state media outlets praised official Zhang Jun and its United Nations delegation on Monday for celebrating the country’s alleged human rights progress before the international forum, failing to mention Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s expansion of political re-education camps and terror campaigns against religious minorities.
China rejected calls on Tuesday from Western members of the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to shut down the massive detention camps constructed in Xinjiang province to imprison a sizable percentage of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group.
The BBC unveiled compelling evidence this week confirming that China is building a massive network of internment camps to imprison members of its Muslim Uighur minority accused of terrorism without trial.
Radio Free Asia (RFA), one of the most prolific outlets in covering the ill treatment of China’s Uighur Muslim minority, reported this week that a Uighur television host is facing over a decade in prison for hosting a segment on local poverty.
The Chinese state-owned Global Times suggested this week that the internment camps established by Beijing to torture, harass, and imprison hundreds of thousands of members of the Asian country’s Uighur Muslim actually encourage “interfaith harmony.”
China’s state media posted several articles on Monday and Tuesday defending its use of internment camps to force ethnic Uighur Muslims to abandon their language and faith, including an interview with an official in western Xinjiang province who claimed the camps were “vocational education institutions” equipped with basketball courts and hairdressing classes.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper resumed attacks on the Trump administration Sunday in response to what it calls a “barrage of high-profile accusations” from Washington, particularly an extensive speech by Vice President Mike Pence two weeks ago identifying China as a global threat.
