Tag: Uighur Muslims

Uyghur Siblings Detained on Indo-China Border in 2013 Shifted to Haryana Jail

They have been in detention under the Public Safety Act for the past eight years after they completed their one-and-a-half-year sentence in 2015.

Srinagar: Amid media attention on the plight of three Uyghur siblings arrested at the Indo-China border in 2013, Jammu & Kashmir’s bureaucratic administration has shifted them to a Haryana prison even though they are not acclimatised to hot weather conditions. This, despite the brothers’ request to be sent to a colder place while they were lodged in Jammu’s Central jail.

They have been in detention under the Public Safety Act (PSA) for the past eight years after they completed their one-and-a-half-year sentence in 2015.

Shifted to Haryana

J&K’s prison authorities on June 24 shifted Adil, Abdul Khaliq and Salamu, natives of the Kargiliq area of Xinjiang province of China, to Haryana’s Karnal. “I came to know that they were removed from Central Jail Jammu on Saturday and were shifted to Haryana. I don’t know whether they have reached the jail safely,” said Muhammad Shafi Lassu, a lawyer and human rights activist fighting to seek their release.

They were shifted to Haryana after the J&K home department on May 30, 2023 ordered their removal from the Central jail in Jammu.

On June 20, the home department ordered their detention under the PSA for a period to be decided by an advisory board or till their deportation to their native country. Since 2015, the authorities have kept issuing fresh orders against them every six months to keep them in detention under the PSA, which has been termed a “lawless law” by Amnesty International. The latest detention order was set to expire on June 24, 2023.

Official photo of the Uyghur siblings from Indian police records. Photo: Special arrangement

Lassu said that the government’s decision to shift them to Haryana is grave injustice to the siblings. “When they were lodged in Central jail Jammu, I had written to J&K home department to shift them to colder places like Ladakh or Kashmir as they were not acclimatised to hot weather conditions prevailing in summers in Jammu,” he said.

US-based Uyghur lawyer and human rights advocate Rayhan Asat told The Wire that shifting them to Haryana was a “heartless act” and “exposed the government’s lack of compassion”. “Three young men have been subjected to nearly a decade of wrongful imprisonment in what is a total miscarriage of injustice. When these boys demanded livable conditions and requested to be moved from their overcrowded prison that was made even more intolerable by the scorching summer conditions, the Indian government callously relocated them to a city besieged by relentless heat waves,” she said.

“I fervently implore the Indian authorities to promptly and unconditionally release these innocent boys and provide them with the compensation they so rightfully deserve after enduring ten years of wrongful incarceration,” said Rahyan, who is a fellow with the Atlantic Council.

They have been shifted to Haryana at a time when their plight has caught the attention of rights bodies and the Uyghur diaspora in Western countries after news reports of their ordeal appeared in media outlets like the Berlin-based Fair Planet, Al-Jazeera and Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Authorities of the J&K prison department refused to comment on the matter.

“I have been on leave for the past 10 days and cannot say anything about it,” said Veerinder Kumar Bhat, Superintendent of Central Jail, Kotbhalwal, Jammu.

J&K’s principal secretary, home department, Raj Kumar Goyal didn’t respond to repeated calls from this reporter.

An official of the Haryana prison department, wishing not to be named, confirmed that they have been lodged in Karnal jail.

Arrest, trial and asylum plea

Adil, Abdul Khaliq and Salamu – then aged 23, 22 and 20 respectively – were detained by the Army near Sultan Chusku glacier in Ladakh’s Leh district on June 12, 2013. The next day, the Army handed them over to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which interrogated them for more than two months before handing them over to the local police.

Later, the police presented a chargesheet against them in a court in Nobra, Ladakh.

On July 17, 2014, the court sentenced them to one-and-a-half years in prison for entering India without valid travel documents and possession of knives at the time of the arrest.

After completing their sentence in 2015, the trio was immediately booked under the PSA – which is also used to keep foreigners behind bars till their repatriation.

Also read: Detained in J&K, 3 Uyghur Asylum Seekers Hope Against Hope for Relief

In February 2016, the brothers petitioned the Union home ministry (MHA) to grant them asylum in India, citing China’s atrocities against the Uyghurs. Turning down their plea, the home ministry decided to repatriate them to China and asked the J&K government to complete the required formalities.

“This has reference to the Superintendent, District Jail, Leh Ladakh’s letter NO. ESSST/DJL/2016/ 1780, dated 29-2-2016 on the subject cited above. The matter has been considered by this ministry and it has been decided to deport/ repatriate three Chinese nationals Adil/ Abdul Khaliq and Abdul Salam sons of Thursum R/0 Xinjiang, China (Uighur) presently lodged in district Jail Leh to their native country,” read the MHA’s communique to the J&K government in 2016.

“You are therefore requested to complete the deportation process of the above China (Uighur) nationals in consultation with Ministry of External Affairs (South East Asia division) for issuance of travel documents for deportation to their native country at the earliest provided that there is no pending court case against them and they are not required in any other case,” the letter adds.

However, the trio approached the J&K high court against their repatriation to China, and the matter is still being heard in court.

India’s refugee policy and stance on Xinjiang

India doesn’t have a refugee law or policy, which allows the authorities to deal with refugees arbitrarily.

Despite its strained relations with China, India prefers to remain silent on the human rights situation prevailing in China’s Xinjiang province.

Ladakh, which was part of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir till October 30, 2019, shares a border with Xinjiang.

In 1949, top Uyghur leader, Isa Yusuf Alptekin along with a few hundred Uyghurs arrived in Kashmir to seek asylum after Beijing occupied East Turkestan (Xinjiang). They lived in Kashmir for five years until their departure to Turkey.

The Familiar Stench of the Forced Loyalty Slogan, the Demands for Segregation

It is also apparent that a concerted and barely concealed plan seems afoot to demand that Muslims be kept segregated from the ‘true Indians’, namely, Hindu Indians.

On August 8, the Delhi Police said no permission had been sought by the organisers of a meeting to propagate their “Bharat Jodo Abhiyan” at Jantar Mantar that day, yet many hundreds turned up in answer to the call.

By all accounts, the chief protagonist of the meet was Ashwini Upadhyay, a BJP politician and an advocate who practices in the Supreme Court.

Anti-Muslim slogans reminiscent of the fury and hate of Partition were raised there. An organisation called the Hindu Raksha Dal has averred that the crowd belonged to its members. Pamphlets calling for the genocide of Muslims were freely handed out.

The Hindu Raksha Dal spokesman can be heard to say that if some people have raised such slogans they should be let off, because such things do happen sometimes.

Alas, such large-heartedness is never forthcoming from the right-wing whenever slogans are raised by JNU, Jamia or Aligarh students against Hindutva hate or police violence.

Amol Pritam, a reporter for National Dastak, was surrounded by  the crowd and asked to chant “Jai Shri Ram.” He was accused of working  for a “jihadi channel.” The brave and principled young man refused to obey them, because he thought it a political slogan and a political demand.

He said that had the crowd beaten him up, he would only have suffered bodily hurt. But had he agreed to their coercive demand, his conscience would forever have been damaged.

As can be seen in the video, a large posse of the Delhi Police were present at the scene, barely a kilometre away from parliament, which was in session at the time.

But, for reasons best known to them (and us), they stood by and took no action on the spot.

We may recall that strict instructions were issued to farmers holding a ‘Kisan Sansad’ at Jantar Mantar earlier this month that their numbers must not exceed 200 – an instruction they have meticulously followed.

But the so-called “Bharat Jodo” crowd (more appropriately captioned ‘Bharat Todo’ or ‘destroy India’) seems to have been left to do its work without interference from the authorities otherwise apprehensive about the threat of COVID-19.

The crowd’s inflammatory calls for genocide against Muslims – barely a year after mob violence took the lives of 53 people in Delhi, most of whom were Muslim – clearly merited swift intervention and the filing of serious charges. In the past few years, Delhi Police have filed charges of sedition against JNU students and others in the city even when they made no call for violence. Yet, when six Hindutva leaders and activists were arrested for the Jantar Mantar event – that too after a public outcry – they were only charged with ‘ordinary’ IPC offences.

A demonstrator against the Bharat Jodo Rally is detained at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, August 10, 2021. Photo: PTI/Arun Sharma

Earlier, at a site designated for the building of a Haj House in Dwarka, a large enough crowd had gathered to object to the proposed building. That meeting also had some BJP leaders in attendance.

The crowd there contended that such a building would cause “terrorism”, a “Shaheen Bagh-like episode” in their vicinity and lead to the migration of Hindus.

Needless to say, no such thing has ever happened at any of the many Haj Houses that exist around the country to facilitate the orderly transit of Muslim pilgrims headed for Mecca.

In another incident in a Moradabad neighbourhood, protests were mounted by some Hindu residents against the sale of two properties to Muslim buyers on the same ground of cultural and social ‘purity’.

In 1935, Hitler had changed German law to require all Germans, including the bureaucracy and the armed forces, to swear allegiance not to the constitution but to the Fuhrer personally.

Thus was born the salutation, “Heil Hitler”, the ultimate oath of loyalty to Germany.

Formally, the Indian-Weimar may not yet be quite there, but saying “Jai Shri Ram” now clearly seems the required proof of loyalty to the nation. That this requirement is not restricted only to Muslims is demonstrated by the case of the reporter cited above. This requirement, as the conduct of the crowd on August 8 suggests, is intended to be enforced at the risk of life itself.

It is also apparent that a concerted and barely concealed plan seems afoot to demand that Muslims be kept segregated from the ‘true Indians’, namely, Hindu Indians, although, ideally, sent to Pakistan where we are told they belong. This is the logic behind the Hindutva activism on ‘love jihad’, ‘land jihad’, ‘vendor jihad’, etc.

Ghettoisation serves the purposes of banishing the community from “authentic”  national space, reducing their livelihood options to subsistence levels, if not worse.

Incidentally, Mohan Bhagwat, head of the RSS, had recently said that those Hindus who make demands on Muslims of the kind that were made at the “Bharat Jodo” meet are not Hindus.

We wait with bated breath for the sarsanghchalak to speak to the occurrence.

Also Read: Two of 6 Arrested for Jantar Mantar Hate Speech Were Well Known Anti-Muslim Campaigners

Opposition politics

At a dinner hosted recently by Kapil Sibal of the Congress, attended remarkably by all but one opposition party, it was unanimously felt that the right-wing must be defeated in the next general elections in 2024 if the constitutional republic is to be salvaged from final collapse.

Whether or not Sibal had any green signal for the meet from his party ‘high command” may be subject for valid speculation, as indeed the likely future developments within the grand old party, but the perception that was collectively voiced there seems most germane, given what has been outlined above.

If India’s Weimar fails to survive, like its predecessor, the historic culprit will indeed be India’s disparate political opposition, notwithstanding the fact that it may yet again garner a substantial majority of the popular vote.

As to India’s Muslims, paradoxically, the Jews of the world – those whose collective historical memory remains unclouded by Zionist zeal – may best understand their frame of mind. As a corollary, notice that the present Indian government rarely makes reference to human rights in China, especially of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province.

We still believe that the vast majority of Hindus across all caste formations remain secular, law-abiding, and peace-loving, and value the riches of India’s composite culture. But what conundrums history holds for us.

‘We Are Very Free’: How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uighurs

A months-long analysis of more than 3,000 of the videos by ProPublica and The New York Times found evidence of an influence campaign orchestrated by the Chinese government.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.

A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.

Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.

“Pompeo said that we Uighurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.

“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.

“We are very free,” the retiree said.

“We are very free now,” the store owner said.

“We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.

“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.

These and thousands of other videos are meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.

Most of the clips carry no logos or other signs that they are official propaganda.

But taken together, the videos begin to reveal clues of broader coordination — such as the English subtitles in clips posted to YouTube and other Western platforms.

Uighur Muslim worshipers attend an early afternoon prayer session at the Kashgar Idgah mosque in Xinjiang province. Photo taken August 5, 2008 Photo: Nir Elias/Reuters

A monthslong analysis of more than 3,000 of the videos by ProPublica and The New York Times found evidence of an influence campaign orchestrated by the Chinese government.

The operation has produced and spread thousands of videos in which Chinese citizens deny abuses against their own communities and scold foreign officials and multinational corporations who dare question the Chinese government’s human rights record in Xinjiang.

It all amounts to one of China’s most elaborate efforts to shape global opinion.

Beijing is trying to use savvier and more forceful methods to broadcast its political messages to a worldwide audience. And Western internet platforms like Twitter and YouTube are playing a key part.

Many of these videos of people in Xinjiang first appeared on a regional Communist Party news app. Then they showed up on YouTube and other global sites, with English subtitles added. (The excerpts of dialogue in this article are translated from the original spoken Chinese or Uighur by ProPublica and The Times. They are not taken from the English subtitles in the original videos.)

On Twitter, a network of connected accounts shared the videos in ways that seemed designed to avoid the platform’s systems for detecting influence campaigns.

China’s increasingly social-media-fluent diplomats and state-run news outlets have since spread the testimonials to audiences of millions worldwide.

Western platforms like Twitter and YouTube are banned in China out of fear they might be used to spread political messaging — which is exactly how Chinese officials are using these platforms in the rest of the world.

They are, in essence, high-speed propaganda pipelines for Beijing. In just a few days, videos establishing the Communist Party’s version of reality can be shot, edited and amplified across the global internet.

How the Videos Work

The dialogue in hundreds of the Xinjiang videos contains strikingly similar, and often identical, phrases and structures.

Most videos are in Chinese or Uighur and follow the same basic script. The subject introduces themselves, then explains how their own happy, prosperous life means there couldn’t possibly be repressive policies in Xinjiang.

Here’s a typical clip, shot as a selfie.

A four-character Chinese phrase meaning “born and raised” appears in more than 280 of the more than 2,000 videos attacking Pompeo that ProPublica and the Times found on YouTube and Twitter.

The locked door of a neighbourhood mosque is seen in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, China, March 23, 2017. Credit: Reuters

The people in more than 1,000 of the videos say they have recently come across Pompeo’s remarks, most of them “on the internet” or on specific platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

An expression meaning “complete nonsense” and close variations of it appear in more than 600 of the videos.

Establishing that government officials had a hand in making these testimonials is sometimes just a matter of asking.

In one clip, the owner of a used car dealership in Xinjiang says: “Pompeo, shut your mouth.”

When reached by phone, the man said local propaganda authorities had produced the clip. When asked for details, he gave the number of an official he called Mr. He, saying, “Why don’t you ask the head of the propaganda department?”

Multiple calls to Mr. He’s number were not answered. Seven other people in the videos whose contact information could be found either declined to be interviewed or couldn’t be reached. (The name of the car dealership’s owner is being withheld to protect him from retribution by Chinese officials.)

In another sign of government coordination, language in the videos echoes written denunciations of Pompeo that Chinese state agencies issued around the same time.

Beginning in late January, government workers across Xinjiang held meetings to “speak out and show the sword” against “Pompeo’s anti-China lies,” according to statements on official websites.

The clips’ effectiveness as propaganda comes in part because they will probably be most people’s only glimpse into Xinjiang, a remote desert region closer to Kabul than to Beijing.

The Chinese authorities have thwarted efforts by journalists and others to gain unfettered access to the indoctrination camps where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been sent for reeducation.

On government-led tours of the region, foreign diplomats and reporters have been allowed to speak with locals only under Chinese officials’ watchful eyes, often in settings that seem staged and scripted.

For Western platforms hosting the Xinjiang testimonials, the fact that they are not immediately obvious as state propaganda poses a challenge.

To promote transparency, sites like YouTube and Twitter label accounts and posts that are associated with governments. The Xinjiang videos, however, carry no such tags.

YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines. Twitter declined to comment on the videos, adding that it routinely releases data on campaigns that it can “reliably attribute to state-linked activity.”

How the Videos Spread

The video campaign started this year after the State Department declared on Jan. 19, the final full day of the Trump presidency, that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang.

“I’ve referred to this over time as the stain of the century — it is truly that,” Pompeo said.

An ethnic Uighur man talks on the phone in front of the Id Kah Mosque in the old town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, China, March 22, 2017. Photo: Reuters

Within days, videos criticising Pompeo began appearing on an app called Pomegranate Cloud, which is owned by the regional arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily. The name of the app is a reference to a propaganda slogan that calls on people of all ethnic groups in China to be as closely united as pomegranate seeds.

From there, the videos often jumped onto other Chinese platforms before making their way onto global social media sites like Twitter and YouTube.

On Twitter, ProPublica and The Times found, the clips were shared by more than 300 accounts whose posts strongly suggested they were no ordinary users. The accounts often posted messages that were identical but for a random string of characters at the end with no obvious meaning, either four Roman letters, five Chinese characters or three symbols such as percentage signs or parentheses.

Such strings were found in about three-quarters of the accounts’ tweets. They caused the text of the posts to vary slightly, in an apparent attempt to bypass Twitter’s automated anti-spam filters.

There were other signs that the Twitter accounts were part of a coordinated operation.

All of the accounts had been registered only in recent months. Many of them followed zero other users. Nearly all had fewer than five followers. The bulk of their tweeting took place between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Beijing time.

The text of several of the accounts’ tweets contained traces of computer code, indicating that they had been posted, sloppily, by software.

Twitter suspended many of these accounts in March and April, before ProPublica and The Times inquired about them. Twitter said the accounts had violated its policies against platform manipulation and spam.

The accounts did not upload Xinjiang clips directly to Twitter. Rather, they tweeted links to videos on YouTube or retweeted videos that had been originally posted by other Twitter accounts.

Those YouTube and Twitter accounts often posted copies of the same Xinjiang videos at roughly the same time, according to analysis by ProPublica and The Times. Nearly three-quarters of the copied clips were posted by different accounts within 30 minutes of one another. This suggests the posts were coordinated, even though the accounts had no obvious connection.

Most of these accounts — seven on Twitter and nearly two dozen on YouTube — posted dozens of videos that originally appeared on Pomegranate Cloud. The accounts seem to have served solely as warehouses to store the clips, making it easier for other accounts in the network to share them.

An ethnic Uighur demonstrator wears a mask as she attends a protest against China in front of the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, October 1, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Huseyin Aldemir

How the Campaign Is Evolving

The effort continues to evolve. In some cases, state media and government officials have begun to openly spread the clips attacking Pompeo. Other videos have found new issues and people to target.

In one clip, a woman denies accusations of forced labor. “I have five greenhouses, and no one forces me to work,” she says.

She turns the camera toward several other women behind her.

“Friends, is anyone forcing you to work?” she asks. “No!” they cry in unison.

The clip was posted by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper, on the Chinese platform Kuaishou on Jan. 25. Two days later, the video was posted on Twitter and YouTube by the warehouse accounts within 30 minutes of one another. Just over a week later, two representatives for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted the clip on Twitter as well.

The ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment, nor did the Xinjiang offices of the Communist Party propaganda department.

Two months later, another wave of videos, shot in the same style and distributed in a similar way, raged against H&M and other international clothing brands that have expressed concern about possible labor abuses in Xinjiang’s cotton and textile industries.

In one video, a Uighurs woman sits on a couch with her husband and young son.

“Mom, what’s H&M?” the boy asks.

“H&M is a foreign company that uses our Xinjiang cotton and speaks ill of our Xinjiang,” she says. “Tell me, is H&M bad or what?”

“Very bad,” the boy says stiffly.

The clip was posted on Pomegranate Cloud on March 29. Six days later, it was posted on Twitter and YouTube, 20 minutes apart, by two warehouse accounts. As with all of the other clips that appeared on those platforms, English subtitles were added somewhere along the way, seemingly for the benefit of international audiences.

The anti-H&M campaign continues. By June 21, more than 800 cotton-related videos had been posted to Pomegranate Cloud, a large share of which were later reposted on YouTube or Twitter.

New videos are being uploaded to Pomegranate Cloud nearly every day. That means the campaign, which has already enlisted thousands of people in Xinjiang — teachers, shopkeepers, farmhands — could keep growing.

The audience outside China for the videos could also keep expanding.

The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views.

In a phone interview, Pompeo said friends, and occasionally his son, had come across the Xinjiang testimonials online and sent them to him.

As clumsy as the videos seem, he said, their influence should not be dismissed: “In places that don’t have access to a great deal of media, that repetition, those storylines have an ability to take hold.”

China’s propaganda efforts will keep getting better, Pompeo added. “They’ll continue to revise and become quicker, more authentic in their capacity to deliver this message,” he said.

Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education centre in Dabancheng in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China September 4, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Thomas Peter/File Photo

How the Videos Divided a Family

For one Uighur activist living in exile in the United States since 2005, the videos have had a more personal impact.

Several of the Xinjiang videos feature family members of Rebiya Kadeer, 74, whom the Chinese government has accused of abetting terrorism. In one clip, two of Kadeer’s granddaughters lash out at Pompeo while out shopping for a wedding.

“Grandma, I recently saw online that Pompeo’s making reckless claims and talking nonsense about our Xinjiang,” one granddaughter says. “I hope you won’t be fooled again by those bad foreigners.”

Kadeer said the videos were the first time she had heard her relatives’ voices in years.

“I have been crying in my heart about my children,” she said in a phone interview.

Kadeer said the videos had given her a chance to see what had become of her granddaughters. The last time she saw them, they were infants.

“Some people will believe these videos and believe Uighurs are living a happy life,” she said. “We can’t say they have locked up everyone. But what they’re saying in these videos — it’s not true. They know they’re not speaking the truth. But they have to say what the Chinese government wants them to say.”

This story was originally published on ProPublica.

Mosques Disappear as China Strives To ‘Build a Beautiful Xinjiang’

The Jiaman mosque in the city of Qira, in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang, is hidden behind high walls and Communist Party propaganda signs, leaving passersby with no indication that it is home to a religious site.

Qira, China: The Jiaman mosque in the city of Qira, in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang, is hidden behind high walls and Communist Party propaganda signs, leaving passersby with no indication that it is home to a religious site.

In late April, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, two ethnic Uyghur women sat behind a tiny mesh grate, underneath a surveillance camera, inside the compound of what had long been the city’s largest place of worship.

Reuters could not establish if the place was currently functioning as a mosque.

Within minutes of reporters arriving, four men in plain clothes showed up and took up positions around the site, locking gates to nearby residential buildings.

The men told the reporters it was illegal to take photos and to leave.

“There’s no mosque here … there has never been a mosque at this site,” said one of the men in response to a question from Reuters if there was a mosque inside. He declined to identify himself.

Minarets on the building’s four corners, visible in publicly available satellite images in 2019, have gone. A large blue metal box stood where the mosque’s central dome had once been. It was not clear if it was a place of worship at the time the satellite images were taken.

In recent months, China has stepped up a campaign on state media and with government-arranged tours to counter the criticism of researchers, rights groups and former Xinjiang residents who say thousands of mosques have been targeted in a crackdown on the region’s mostly Muslim Uyghur people.

Officials from Xinjiang and Beijing told reporters in Beijing that no religious sites had been forcibly destroyed or restricted and invited them to visit and report.

“Instead, we have taken a series of measures to protect them,” Elijan Anayat, a spokesman for the Xinjiang government, said of mosques late last year.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Wednesday some mosques had been demolished, while others had been upgraded and expanded as part of rural revitalisation but Muslims could practise their religion openly at home and in mosques.

Asked about restrictions authorities put on journalists visiting the area, Hua said reporters had to try harder to “win the trust of the Chinese people” and report objectively.

Reuters visited more than two dozen mosques across seven counties in southwest and central Xinjiang on a 12-day visit during Ramadan, which ended on Thursday.

There is a contrast between Beijing’s campaign to protect mosques and religious freedom and the reality on the ground. Most of the mosques that Reuters visited had been partially or completely demolished.

A Chinese national flag flies outside the former Xinqu Mosque that had its minarets and central dome removed in Changji outside Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, May 6, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Thomas Peter

‘Life is beautiful’

China has repeatedly said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from separatists and religious extremists who plot attacks and stir up tension between Uyghurs who call the region home and the ethnic Han, China‘s largest ethic group.

A mass crackdown that includes a campaign of restrictions on religious practice and what rights groups describe as the forced political indoctrination of more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims began in earnest in 2017.

China initially denied detaining people in detention camps, but has since said they are vocational training centres and that the people have “graduated” from them.

The government says there are more than 20,000 mosques in Xinjiang but no detailed data on their status is available.

Some functioning mosques have signs saying congregants must register while citizens from outside the area, foreigners and anyone under the age of 18 are banned from going in.

Functioning mosques feature surveillance cameras and include Chinese flags and propaganda displays declaring loyalty to the ruling Communist Party.

Visiting reporters were almost always followed by plainclothes personnel and warned not to take photographs.

A Han woman, who said she had moved to the city of Hotan six years ago from central China, said Muslims who wanted to pray could do so at home.

“There are no Muslims like that here anymore,” the woman said, referring to those who used to pray at the mosque. She added: “Life in Xinjiang is beautiful.”

‘Ethnic unity’

Some state-sanctioned mosques are shown off to visiting journalists and diplomats, like the Jiaman Mosque in Hotan.

“Everything is paid for by the party,” said a Hotan official at the mosque on a visit arranged for Reuters by the city propaganda department.

The official, who went by the nickname “Ade” but declined to give his full name, said men were free to pray at the mosque five times a day, according to Islamic custom.

While reporters were there, several dozen men, most of them elderly, came to pray as dusk fell. Afterwards, they broke their fast with food provided by the local government.

The mosque, more than 170 years old, is one of four in the region earmarked as cultural relics, with funds for renovation from the central government, the Xinjiang government said.

As the mosque’s leader or imam removed his shoes, Ade demonstrated a machine given by the government that shrink-wraps shoes in plastic.

“Now you don’t even need to take your shoes off in the mosque, it’s very convenient,” he said.

A part of a minaret broken off from the former Xinqu Mosque lies near a Chinese national flag in a yard adjacent to the former house of worship in Changji outside Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, May 6, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Crumbling minarets

In Changji, about 40 km west of the regional capital, Urumqi, green and red minarets of the city’s Xinqu Mosque lay broken below a Chinese flag flying over the deserted building’s courtyard.

Reuters analysed satellite imagery of 10 mosques in Changji city and visited six of them.

A total of 31 minarets and 12 green or gold domes had been removed within a period of two months after April 2018, according to dated images.

At several mosques, Islamic architecture was replaced with Chinese-style roofing. These included Changji’s Tianchi road mosque, whose gold dome and minarets were removed in 2018, according to publicly available satellite images.

The Xinjiang government did not respond to a request for comment on the state of mosques in the region.

Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute estimated in 2020, after a survey of 900 Xinjiang locations, that 16,000 mosques had been partially or completely destroyed over the previous three years.

Signs outside the Xinqu Mosque, with the crumbling minarets, said a housing development would soon be built on the site.

“For ethic unity, build a beautiful Xinjiang,” a sign read.

(Reuters)

Western Countries Sanction China Over Xinjiang Abuses; Beijing Retaliates Against EU But Not US

The United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials, the first such coordinated Western action against Beijing under new US President Joe Biden.

Brussels/Washington/Beijing: The United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials on Monday for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the first such coordinated Western action against Beijing under new US President Joe Biden.

Beijing hit back immediately with punitive measures against the EU that appeared broader, including European lawmakers, diplomats, institutes and families, and banning their businesses from trading with China.

Western governments are seeking to hold Beijing accountable for mass detentions of Muslim Uighurs in north-western China, where the United States says China is committing genocide.

China denies all accusations of abuse.

The coordinated effort appeared to be early fruit in a concerted US diplomatic push to confront China in league with allies, a core element of Biden’s still evolving China policy. Senior US administration officials have said they are in daily contact with governments in Europe on China-related issues, something they call the “Europe roadshow”.

“Amid growing international condemnation, [China] continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a statement ahead of meetings with EU and NATO ministers in Brussels this week.

Also read: Leaked Chinese Govt Documents Reveal Details of Massive Crackdown on Uighurs, Reports NYT

Canada’s foreign ministry said: “Mounting evidence points to systemic, state-led human rights violations by Chinese authorities.”

Activists and UN rights experts say at least 1 million Muslims have been detained in camps in Xinjiang. The activists and some Western politicians accuse China of using torture, forced labour and sterilisations. China says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.

The European Union was the first to impose sanctions on Monday on four Chinese officials, including a top security director, and one entity, a decision later mirrored by Britain and Canada.

Those also targeted by the United States were Chen Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, and another senior official in the region, Wang Junzheng. The United States had already last year designated for sanctions the top official in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, who was not targeted by the other Western allies on Monday to avoid a larger diplomatic dispute, experts and diplomats said.

The foreign ministers of Canada and Britain issued a joint statement with Blinken, saying the three were united in demanding that Beijing end its “repressive practices” in Xinjiang. Evidence of abuses was “overwhelming”, including satellite imagery, eyewitness testimony and the Chinese government’s own documents, they said.

Separately, the foreign ministers of Australia and New Zealand issued a statement expressing “grave concerns about the growing number of credible reports of severe human rights abuses against ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang” and welcoming the measures announced by Canada, the European Union, Britain and the United States.

Also read: China Begins Trial of Canadian Ex-Diplomat Michael Kovrig Charged With Espionage

First major EU sanctions in decades

The move by the US and its allies follows two days of talks between US and Chinese officials last week, which laid bare the tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

The EU accused Chen Mingguo of “arbitrary detentions and degrading treatment inflicted upon Uighurs and people from other Muslim ethnic minorities, as well as systematic violations of their freedom of religion or belief”.

Others hit with travel bans and asset freezes were senior Chinese officials Wang Mingshan, the former deputy party secretary in Xinjiang, Zhu Hailun, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau.

The EU has sought to avoid confrontation with Beijing, and Monday’s sanctions were the first significant measures since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, although Brussels targeted two computer hackers and a technology firm in 2020 as part of broader cyber sanctions.

The steps were praised by the United States. “A united transatlantic response sends a strong signal to those who violate or abuse international human rights,” Blinken said.

While mainly symbolic, the EU sanctions mark a hardening towards China, which Brussels regarded as a benign trading partner but now views as a systematic abuser of rights and freedoms.

Also read: Uyghur Muslims Rights Abuse: US Sanctions Highest-Ranking Chinese Official Yet

Britain has repeatedly denounced torture, forced labour and sterilisations that it says are taking place on an “industrial scale” in Xinjiang and repeated its criticism of Beijing on Monday.

‘Pointless’

Beijing’s reprisal was swift. Retaliation included sanctions on European lawmakers, the EU’s main foreign policy decision-making body known as the Political and Security Committee and two institutes. On Tuesday, China also summoned the EU ambassador, Nicolas Chapuis, to lodge a “solemn protest” and demand that the bloc correct its error to prevent further damage to relations.

“The so-called sanctions based on lies are not acceptable,” Wang Yi, foreign minister and state councillor, said separately during a joint briefing with visiting Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

German politician Reinhard Butikofer, who chairs the European Parliament’s delegation to China, was among the most high-profile figures to be hit. The non-profit Alliance of Democracies Foundation, founded by former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was on the list, according to a statement by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Also included was Adrian Zenz, a German scholar whose research was cited by the state department last year when highlighting alleged abuses in Xinjiang.

The Netherlands summoned China’s ambassador to The Hague after Beijing announced its measures on ten Europeans, while the European Parliament, along with German, Dutch, Belgian and other foreign ministers, rejected the Chinese retaliation.

Also read: ‘Tough’ First Talks Between US, China Signal Continued Tension Under Joe Biden

“These sanctions prove that China is sensitive to pressure,” Dutch lawmaker Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, who was put on China’s sanctions list, said on Twitter. “Let this be an encouragement to all my European colleagues: Speak out!”

Restricted from entering China or doing business with it, Beijing accused its targets of seriously harming the country’s sovereignty over Xinjiang.

All 27 EU governments agreed to the bloc’s punitive measures, but Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, called them “harmful” and “pointless”.

(Reuters)

City of Lost Mosques: How Suzhou Tells the Story of China’s Islamic Past

From written records and imperial edicts, it is clear that Islamic communities in China enjoyed the favour of the emperors.

The labyrinth of alleys and lanes in the old city of Suzhou hides a secret: historical fragments of the long history of Islam in China. Regular stories in the international press highlighting the treatment of Muslims in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region tend to obscure the fact that Islam was once highly regarded by Chinese emperors.

From written records and imperial edicts engraved on steles (standing stone slabs monuments) it is clear that these Islamic communities enjoyed the favour of the emperors – especially during the Tang (618-907 AD), Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. Islam was looked on favourably by the imperial court because of its ethics, which – as far as the emperors were concerned – promoted harmonious and peaceful relations between the diverse peoples in the imperial territories.

Before the Panthay and Tungan rebellions in the second half of the 19th century in western China, when millions of Muslims were killed or relocated, Islam was considered by Christian missionaries in the country – and particularly by Russian scholars – as a growing threat. Islam was considered by many in the west to have the potential to become the national religion in China – which would have made China the biggest Islamic country in the world.

Islam and China: a special connection

Today, Suzhou is a vibrant, wealthy city of 12 million people only 20 minutes by high speed train from Shanghai. What remains of “Islamic Suzhou” lies just outside the city wall to the north-west. There is only one active mosque: Taipingfang, in the northern commercial and entertainment district of Shilu.

Taipingfan: the only remaining mosque in Suzhou. Photo: Alessandra Cappelletti, Author provided

Taipingfang was restored in 2018 and is where local and visiting Muslims go to pray. It’s in a busy part of the neighbourhood, squeezed in a tiny alley, surrounded by small restaurants and hotels, canteens, food stalls and butchers catering to Uighur and Hui Muslims. The butchers of Taipingfang – like those in Beijing’s Niujie area where the majority of the city’s Muslim minority lives – are popularly thought to sell the best meat.

Before 1949, Suzhou had at least ten mosques of various sizes and social importance. Many of them were vast buildings with precious furniture and sophisticated decorations, while others were smaller intimate prayer rooms. One of them was a women’s mosque presided over by a female imam.

The surviving entrance to the only women’s mosque in Suzhou. Photo: Alessandra Cappelletti, Author provided

The women’s mosque, Baolinqian, was one of a cluster of four mosques was built during the Qing Dynasty, all connected to the wealthy Yang family inside the city walls in the north-western part of the city. Built in 1923, it was established by initiative of three married women from the Yang family who donated the building and raised funding from other Muslim families to turn it into a women’s mosque. During the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), the mosque’s library, containing holy scriptures, was damaged and the building was turned into private houses. Nothing remains today to show it was a mosque.

Another Yang family mosque, Tiejunong, was built over three years during the reign of the Qing emperor Guagxu, from 1879 to 1881. It was the biggest in Suzhou with an area of more than 3,000 square metres, featuring seven courtyards. The main hall for Friday prayers had ten rooms and could hold more than 300 people. The courtyard included a minaret and a pavilion in which was housed an imperial stele

The side entrance of the former mosque building in Da Tiejunung – which was converted into a middle school during the Cultural Revolution. Photo: Alessandra Cappelletti, Author provided

Now a middle school, Tiejunong is recognisable from the external architecture and an ancient wooden engraved side door. Beyond a monumental entrance, there is still the idea of the main courtyard surrounded by trees. Now there is a huge football field, and the trees on the sides of the walkway are still visible from their chopped trunks. The ablution area covered by blue tiles clearly shows the past presence of a mosque.

Tiankuqian Mosque was built in 1906 and is now inhabited by poor city residents – most likely as a result of the practice during the Cultural Revolution of reallocating large, aristocratic or religious buildings as living accommodation for indigent families. The mosque used to cover an area of almost 2,000 square metres, with a main hall, a guest hall and ablution room.

When this building at Da Tiejunong was a mosque, this was the ablution area. Photo: Alessandra Cappelletti, Author provided

The structure of the main hall was like a large lecture place, containing – as the local historical records report – a ginkgo wood horizontal plaque written in calligraphy by master Yu Yue. Because many Muslim jade workers had businesses in the same district, donations made the mosque the most prosperous in the whole of China. And, in the 1920s, a school teaching Islamic and Confucian texts was opened there.

Many of the mosques had affiliated schools teaching the Arabic language and Islamic writings to the children of the Muslim communities. Suzhou is one of the first cultural centres where Islamic scriptures were published in the Chinese language. Translations from Persian into Chinese were made by the 16th-century Suzhou scholars, Zhang Zhong and Zhou Shiqi, making the city an early hub of Islamic intellectual culture.

But it was an Islamic hub hybridised in its Chinese context, a process described in Jonathan Lipman’s book, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China. Islamic texts were taught alongside Confucian ones, giving birth to an eclectic corpus of Islamic writings.

The oldest Suzhou mosque, Xiguan, takes its name from the adjacent Xiguan bridge in the centre of the old city. It was built in the 13th century during the Yuan dynasty, probably financed by the prominent Muslim Sayyid family, and its influential Yunnan’s provincial governor, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar al-Bukhari (1211–1279).

Map of Suzhou in the 13th century, when the city was known as Pingjiang. Photo: Author provided

The mosque was later incorporated into a government building during the Ming dynasty, so only written accounts remain of its existence in local Chinese records. This suggests – and it is already a well-known historical assessment – that the Yuan dynasty favoured Muslims from Central Asia in its administration and government service. This significant population group was much later, in the 1950s, classified within China as the Hui minority and constitute about half of China’s Muslims today.

Traces of the past

The Cultural Revolution effectively banned Islam in China, as religions of any kind were considered tools to oppress and silence the peoples’ needs.

As a result, little remains of these religious buildings today. But the traces that do still exist – a door, a stone, the structure of the façade, or simply a known address, written in an archive – are symbolic representations of a past life. These are clues to the diverse social context and spiritual geography that these places inspired and were part of.

As the American sinologist, Frederick Mote – a professor of history at Princeton University – argued, Suzhou’s past is embodied in words, not stones, and the fragments of Suzhou Islamic communities can be pieced together with the help of historical written records. These records of a diverse past are equally important to the future in a country where religions – every religion – are strictly controlled by the state due to what the authorities consider as their potential destabilising political powers.

The recent reports of efforts of ideological re-education performed by local authorities towards the Uighur population in north-western China make the situation even more complex and worth further observation and research.The Conversation

Alessandra Cappelletti, associate professor, Department of International Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

After Trump, Should Twitter Also Ban All the Dictators?

If Trump’s behaviour on Twitter was grounds for a permanent ban, why are officials from autocratic governments allowed to continue using the site to spread propaganda, justify repressive violence, and promote conspiracy theories?

If Twitter is going to start banning leaders and government officials for repeatedly justifying atrocities, the company is going to have its work cut out for it. The day before President Donald Trump was permanently banned from the platform for violating the site’s “glorification of violence” policy, the Chinese embassy in the US tweeted that Uighur women in the country’s Xinjiang region had been “liberated” by the Chinese government’s policies, and were no longer “baby-making machines”—a disturbing spin on a draconian campaign of population control that has involved the forced use of IUDs, sterilisation, and abortion. Twitter deleted the tweet over the weekend, without specifying what rule it had violated, though another one from the same day claiming that young people in Xinjiang benefit from the government’s policies remains.

On Friday, the same day Trump’s account was deleted, the site removed a tweet from the account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that described coronavirus vaccines developed in Britain and the US as “untrustworthy.” @khamenei_ir is an odd case: an unverified account that frequently shares the supreme leader’s statements and is generally considered to be associated with him. As of Monday, it’s still tweeting.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a speech during a gathering in Tehran, Iran, January 8, 2020. Official Khamenei website/Handout via REUTERS/File photo

If Trump’s behaviour on Twitter was grounds for a permanent ban, why are officials from autocratic governments allowed to continue using the site to spread propaganda, justify repressive violence, and promote conspiracy theories? Surely, justifying genocide is as egregious an offence as justifying an insurrection. Trump’s ban has led some Iranian activists to call for the Khamenei account to be banned as well. Outgoing US Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai got in on the action, asking why Khamenei tweets calling for the destruction of the “Zionist regime” don’t also constitute “glorifying violence.”

Also Read: A Twitter Ban Is a Tough Pill to Swallow, but a Medicine We Need More Of

Twitter has suspended state-linked accounts in a number of countries in the past, often without much explanation, and has gotten more aggressive about taking down individual tweets that violate rules. It also recently began labelling the accounts of government officials of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, a practice the company says it plans to extend to more governments. But the Trump ban is a major escalation and raises the question of whether a new precedent is being set.

It’s tempting to say that Twitter should just have a “no dictator” policy. However, it’s hard enough for governments and NGOs to define what constitutes a democratic or autocratic government, and it’s probably not a job we want to delegate to @jack (Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey). And given that Twitter and other social media companies are already often portrayed in many parts of the world as an agent of US influence, the company is going to have a hard time portraying itself as a neutral arbiter.

future tense

It’s not only Trump supporters who are concerned about the precedent set by the Trump ban. Steffen Seibert, spokesman for German chancellor and Trump Twitter abuse target Angela Merkel, said that it was “problematic” for political speech to be subjected to the decisions of the “management of social media platforms.” (Merkel doesn’t tweet.) Russian dissident Alexei Navalny called it an “unacceptable act of censorship” that would be exploited by “enemies of freedom of speech” around the world. At the very least, it makes sense for Twitter to be wary about doing this too often.

And at a time of escalating geopolitical tensions, we should also be wary about removing modes of communication for governments—even the most repressive ones. For all its flaws, Twitter messaging can still serve as a useful diplomatic tool. The world saw this a year ago when, following an Iranian missile strike on US bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US killing of General Qassem Soleimani, both Trump and Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif put out duelling statements about the event on Twitter. Both statements were misleading spin, but they also helped both governments save face enough to prevent a further escalation toward war.

There’s also the awkward fact that Twitter often complies with government takedown requests, including from autocratic governments like Russia and Turkey. It’s hard to see how Twitter could simply ban authoritarian governments until it stops cooperating with them.

In general, a blanket no-autocrat policy makes less sense than flagging and removing individual problematic tweets, except for the most egregious repeat offenders.

Men are silhouetted against a video screen with a Twitter logo in this photo illustration. Photo: Reuters/Dado Ruvic

However, there is one simple standard that Twitter can and should enforce: If a government blocks its citizens from using Twitter, its officials should not be allowed to use the site either.

China has blocked Twitter since 2009, and its leaders, ministries, and embassies should not be allowed to use the site to propagandise to foreign audiences. Same goes for Iran and North Korea. Russian officials would get to keep their accounts—for now at least. Turkey has temporarily blocked Twitter in the past. Leaders that do this should lose access to their own accounts until access is restored to their citizens.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring uprisings, probably the last time social media companies like Twitter were genuinely viewed as an emancipatory force and an agent of democratisation. It’s probably not possible to go back to those times, but at the very least, authoritarian rulers shouldn’t be allowed to keep Twitter all to themselves.

Joshua Keating is a senior editor at Slate focusing on international affairs and the author of Invisible Countries.

This piece was originally published on Future Tense, a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.

This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

Trump Admin Bans Cotton Imports From China Producer Citing Uighur ‘Slave Labour’

The move could have a sweeping effect on companies involved in selling textiles and apparel to the United States.

Washington The Trump administration expanded economic pressure on China’s western region of Xinjiang, banning cotton imports from a powerful Chinese quasi-military organisation- alleging that it uses forced labor of detained Uighur Muslims.

The US Customs and Border Protection agency said, on Wednesday, its “Withhold Release Order” would ban cotton and cotton products from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), one of China’s largest producers.

The move, which could have a sweeping effect on companies involved in selling textiles and apparel to the United States, is among several the Trump administration has been working on in its final weeks to harden the US position against China, making it more difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to ease US-China tensions.

The targeting of XPCC, which produced  30% of China’s cotton in 2015, follows a Treasury Department ban in July on all dollar transactions with the sprawling business-and-paramilitary entity, founded in 1954 to settle China’s far west.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kenneth Cuccinelli, who oversees the border agency, called “Made in China” a “warning label.”

Also read: Uyghur Muslims Rights Abuse: US Sanctions Highest-Ranking Chinese Official Yet

“The cheap cotton goods you may be buying for family and friends during this season of giving – if coming from China – may have been made by slave labor in some of the most egregious human rights violations existing today in the modern world,” he told a news conference. Cuccinelli said a region-wide Xinjiang cotton import ban was still being studied.

The United Nations cites what it says are credible reports that 1 million Muslims held in camps have been put to work. China denies mistreating Uighurs and says the camps are vocational training centres needed to fight extremism.

Broad impact

While the Treasury sanctions target XPCC’s financial structure, Wednesday’s action will force apparel firms and other companies shipping cotton products into the United States to eliminate XPCC-produced cotton fiber from many stages of their supply chains, said Brenda Smith, CBP’s executive assistant commissioner for trade.

“That pretty much blocks all Chinese cotton textile imports,” said a China-based cotton trader, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Identifying cotton from a specific supplier will sharply raise manufacturing costs, and only the few large companies with fully integrated operations across the complex textile supply chain could guarantee that no XPCC product has been used, the trader said.

“It really depends on how much proof they want. If they want real proof that this cotton has not been used, that’s going to be extremely difficult,” he added.

Major clothing brands including Gap Inc, Patagonia Inc and Zara owner Inditex have told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that did not source from factories in Xinjiang – but that they could not confirm that their supply chains were free of cotton picked from the region.

The XPCC could not immediately be reached for comment. The China National Textile and Apparel Council declined to comment. The China Cotton Textile Association could not immediately be reached.

In September, CBP considered a much broader import ban on all cotton and tomato products from Xinjiang, but after dissent from within the Trump administration, it announced narrower bans on products from specific entities, including two smaller cotton and apparel producers.

US apparel makers had criticised a broader ban as impossible to enforce, but on Wednesday clothing and retail groups welcomed the XPCC-specific ban. The groups, including the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the National Retail Federation, said in a statement that they were on the “front lines of efforts to ensure forced labor does not taint our supply chains or enter the United States.”

Biden has pledged to work with US allies to bring pressure on China to curb human rights and trade abuses. Trump in recent weeks has increased action against major Chinese state companies, banning access to US technology and investments.

(Reuters)

UK Welcomes Indian and Chinese Efforts to De-Escalate Tension in Ladakh

Newly appointed British High Commissioner Sir Philip Barton expressed concern over Chinese action in Hong Kong as well as cases of human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

New Delhi: The UK on Thursday welcomed efforts by India and China to de-escalate tension along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh.

British High Commissioner Sir Philip Barton also expressed concern over Chinese action in Hong Kong as well as cases of human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The UK, he said, is aware of the challenges presented by “some Chinese actions” and has been working with its close allies like the US to deal with them.

“I would like to say that the progress we have seen in managing the tensions and the commitment the two special representatives made on boundary question on July 5 to disengage and de-escalate is welcome,” the newly-appointed envoy said during an online media briefing.

Also read: China’s Suppression of Uyghur Muslims Goes Unacknowledged

He said the Chinese actions in Hong Kong as well as along the LAC are “concerning”.

The British envoy also talked about the “tragic loss of lives” of Indian soldiers along the LAC and hoped that both sides would be able to achieve de-escalation of tensions through talks.

Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in a violent clash in Galwan Valley on June 15, triggering massive escalation of tensions between the two sides.

However, both sides agreed to de-escalate tension by withdrawing troops from friction points following a series of diplomatic and military talks.

The disengagement process between Indian and Chinse militaries began on July 6 after a telephonic conversation between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi the previous day.

Doval and Wang are Special Representatives for the boundary talks.

“We do not have a border with China but we do have particular responsibility for Hong Kong. The new national security law which China imposed is a very clear and serious violation of UK-China joint declaration,” Sir Barton said.

“We have also got great concerns around human rights abuses, in particular against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang,” he said.