Xinjiang residents under tight control

[eseum]

Final words from the Trump Administration, story on Huffington Post:

Trump Administration Declares China’s Repression Of Uighurs ‘Genocide’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China committed “genocide and crimes against humanity” toward Uighur Muslims.

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-administration-declares-chinas-repression-of-uighurs-genocide_n_6007162ec5b6efae62fc3921

[Randy W]

And in the WSJ

A Genocide Test Faces the West
We know what China is doing in Xinjiang. It’s now official. How will woke corporations react?

Quote

 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s determination that the People’s Republic of China is engaged in a systematic genocide of the Uighurs was one of the most significant recent developments in U.S. foreign policy. The State Department found that the atrocities have expanded to shocking reproductive coercion: “PRC authorities have conducted forced sterilizations and abortions on Uyghur women, coerced them to marry non-Uyghurs, and separated Uyghur children from their families.” 

Because the announcement came shortly before President Biden’s inauguration, its far-reaching implications haven’t sunk in. The Trump administration would have done better to issue this finding before the election, but officially invoking the “genocide” label met significant resistance within the government, as it has in past presidencies. Mr. Pompeo deserves credit for pushing it through. 

The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also deserves credit for not making genocide a political issue: He immediately concurred in his predecessor’s determination. It is now America’s official, bipartisan position that China is engaged in “ongoing” genocide—the gravest of all international crimes.

 

 

[Randy W]

from the Washington Post (Feb. 22)

Companies reliant on products from Xinjiang will come under increasing pressure to certify that their supply chain does not depend on forced labor. Chinese officials, so far, have not cooperated in this process.

U.S. ban on China’s Xinjiang cotton fractures fashion industry supply chains

Cotton fields in Hami, in China’s Xinjiang region, during the harvest season in October 2018. U.S. sanctions on cotton from the region are upending global supply chains. (AFP/Getty Images)
 

Quote

 

Last month, Chinese cotton yarn maker Huafu Fashion sent a warning to investors.

“Multiple American brands have canceled orders,” Huafu said in a Shenzhen stock exchange filing, citing U.S. sanctions. “It’s brought negative effects to the company.”

Huafu — which said it lost at least $54.3 million last year vs. a net profit of $62.5 million in 2019 — is one of the few suppliers to publicly acknowledge the sanctions’ effects. But thousands of companies worldwide are affected after the United States blacklisted 87 percent of China’s cotton crop — one-fifth of the world’s supply — citing human rights violations against Muslim Uighurs in China’s northwest Xinjiang region.

 . . .

Cotton picked in Xinjiang winds up in garments cut and sewn across Asia, from Bangladesh to Vietnam, textile industry executives say. The U.S. ban applies to products “made in whole or in part” with Xinjiang cotton, “regardless of where the downstream products are produced,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.

 . . .

Justin Huang, president of the Taiwan Textile Federation, said Taiwanese textile manufacturers received notices in September from Western brands to confirm their cotton sources. He said brands no longer wanted Chinese cotton, since it was difficult to confirm from which region of China it originated.

 

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the WSJ - Updated Sept. 21, 2020

Auditors to Stop Inspecting Factories in China’s Xinjiang Despite Forced-Labor Concerns
Restricted access has made examinations difficult in a region where China’s repressive tactics against Muslim minorities have been criticized

Quote

 

HONG KONG—At least five organizations say they won’t help companies audit their supply chains in China’s Xinjiang region, where human-rights activists say a police-state atmosphere and government controls make it too difficult to determine whether factories and farms are relying on forced labor.

China’s increasingly repressive tactics in the northwestern region, where large numbers of Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been rounded up in internment camps, have prompted campaigns from human-rights groups. Western brands from Gap Inc. to Kraft Heinz Co. have come under increasing pressure to stop sourcing from Xinjiang, a major producer of cotton and tomatoes.

In recent years, concerns have grown that in addition to the camps, which Beijing says are for vocational education, Uighurs are forcibly sent to work in factories in the region or elsewhere in China.

To respond to the concerns, some Western brands have turned to outside companies or nonprofits to vet their suppliers. Human-rights and labor activists, however, argue that auditors risk becoming enablers that help brands justify sourcing in Xinjiang, and that, given the lack of access and heavy policing in the region, they can’t realistically carry out proper examinations of factories. Beijing has denied the existence of forced Uighur labor.

The withdrawal of some of these auditing groups adds to the difficulty for brands to work with Xinjiang-based suppliers, bolstering a campaign by rights groups—and Washington—to cut Xinjiang off from global supply chains following Beijing’s repression of Turkic-speaking minorities in the region. Five organizations have told The Wall Street Journal they won’t provide labor-audit or inspection services in Xinjiang, including Bureau Veritas SA of France, TÜV SÜD AG of Germany, Sumerra LLC of the U.S., RINA SpA of Italy, as well as American nonprofit certification organization Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production.

Three of the five—Bureau Veritas, TÜV SÜD and WRAP—have previously conducted or commissioned labor audits in the region. Some groups the Journal contacted acknowledged the challenges of detecting forced labor in Xinjiang, but they said they are concerned that blacklisting the region could push abuses further underground.

PICTURE - Xinjiang Top Exports 2019

 

 

[Randy W]

from the WaPo

China scrubs evidence of Xinjiang clampdown amid ‘genocide’ debate

Quote

 

As Western governments assess whether the crackdown on Uyghurs and other minorities in China’s Xinjiang region constitutes genocide, Beijing has slowed the information flow from the area to a trickle, obscuring conditions.

The restriction of information — coupled with inaction by intergovernmental organizations — has left individual countries to make determinations as best they can.

Surveillance and censorship have long hindered a full view of conditions in Xinjiang. But last year Beijing locked down borders, citing the coronavirus; expelled foreign journalists who reported on Xinjiang; and scrubbed information off websites across the region.

“Regimes committing these kinds of crimes typically try to prevent damaging information from getting out,” said Deborah Mayersen, an Australian expert on genocide.

 . . .

The State Department, which started calling the Xinjiang crackdown a “genocide” in January, has said senior Biden administration officials will raise Xinjiang when they meet Chinese counterparts on Thursday in Alaska.

U.S. bans imports of cotton and tomatoes from China’s Xinjiang region, citing forced labor

 . . .

Gene Bunin, a researcher who documents Uyghur testimonies, said he does not know of a single former detainee who managed to leave China in 2020. Coupled with harsh restrictions on Xinjiang residents communicating with outsiders, that means scant new first-person testimony for a year.

Another Xinjiang expert, Timothy Grose, said that because of the dearth of new details, he recently ended a multiyear project to tally detention numbers in Xinjiang.

“The places I was getting current information, since covid, they’ve not gone silent, but their content has changed,” said Grose, a professor at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana.

Adrian Zenz, a U.S.-based Xinjiang researcher, said much of the recent scholarship has become “semi-historic” as it has grown more difficult to research current conditions.

 . . .

Hunt for evidence
Understanding of Xinjiang is hampered by a grim reality: Since the crackdown began, few Uyghurs have been able to leave China or communicate with the outside world.

Bunin, the researcher compiling Uyghur testimonies, estimates that only a few dozen Uyghurs have managed to leave China after detention in a camp, plus several hundred ethnic Kazakhs from Xinjiang.

That is a much smaller pool of first-person testimonies compared with Myanmar. After the 2017 crackdown, more than 1 million Rohingya refugees fled into Bangladesh, where researchers could interview them.

 

 

[Randy W]

from the Global Times on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/115591005188475/posts/3950484888365715/

Quote

Are #Xinjiang workers in other Chinese cities “forced to work” or are they pursuing a better life? Check out this report on Xinjiang ethnic minority workers’ situation. The answer is obvious:

Edited March 25, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

from the WSJ. I'm hearing that Nike is also being targeted.

H&M Criticized in China Over Xinjiang Forced-Labor Stance
State media, social-media users and celebrity endorsers lambast fast-fashion company—with some calling for a boycott—over months-old statement

H&M, which operates more than 400 stores in China, including Shenzhen, said Wednesday that its supply-chain principles didn’t represent any political position. PHOTO: ALEX TAI/SOPA IMAGES/ZUMA PRESS

Quote

The outrage appears to be in response to a statement the company issued last year expressing concern about reports of forced labor and discrimination against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. H&M said in the statement that it didn’t source products from the region and that it strictly prohibits forced labor in its supply chain, regardless of country.
On Wednesday, in response to the backlash, the company said it followed international guidelines for sustainability and that its supply-chain principles “did not represent any political position.”
“We are committed to long-term investment and development in China,” the company posted on its official Weibo account, adding that it cooperated with more than 350 manufacturers in China.

 

[Randy W]

This is a fairly good video about what China is facing from the outside world -

 What's happening with China's Uighurs? I Start Here
 AI Jazeera English 281,553 views Feb 28, 2021

 

Quote

Human rights groups say the Chinese are committing horrific crimes against Uighurs. 
The UN has raised the alarm. The US and Canada have called it genocide.
But China has repeatedly denied the accusations. 
So what do we know?  And should the world be doing more?

 

[Randy W]

 . . . and from the SCMP

The China-based foreigners defending Beijing from Xinjiang genocide claims

• Chinese foreign ministry highlights remarks by Shenzhen-based Canadian to counter allegations of human rights abuses
• Counter-narrative describes Western efforts to undermine and destabilise China by criticising policies in its remote western region

Canadian Daniel Dumbrill’s video address to an online panel discussion on Xinjiang was screened ahead of a Chinese foreign ministry press conference. Photo: Handout
 

Quote

 

Foreigners who depict China in a positive light are becoming increasingly important to Beijing’s counter-narrative to allegations of an ongoing genocide in the far-western region of Xinjiang.

In a rare move, China’s foreign ministry last week used a speech by a Shenzhen-based Canadian vlogger to hit home its point that Western countries are targeting Xinjiang to contain China, rather than because of alleged human rights abuses being committed against the region’s Uygur ethnic minority.

 . . .

China’s foreign ministry played Dumbrill’s video before its press conference last Friday, followed by the screening of part of a 2018 speech by former US secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson. The career army officer said if the US Central Intelligence Agency wanted to destabilise China, the best way to do so would be to mount an operation using Uygurs in the remote western region.

 

 

Edited March 30, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

An interesting read from CGTN that addresses the situation in Xinjiang, explaining why China's approach to dealing with terrorism has "worked"

Opinion: Yes, Xinjiang’s fight against terrorism is not in line with Western values, but it worked

The Grand Bazaar in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, which witnessed a bloody terrorist attack before, has now become a tourist hotspot with huge flow of visitors.

Quote

 

Let me get this straight: Yes, the way Xinjiang defeated terrorism do NOT conform to the Western values, but who said the Western values are the only or universal principle for all other countries to follow, especially when these countries are solving a problem that the West have failed to solve?

Xinjiang has now brought both the population in poverty and the cases of terrorist attacks to zero. For 4 years, China saw no terrorist attacks, compared to the peak in 2013 to 2015, when there could one major attack every one or two months. Besides, by the end of 2020, Xinjiang eliminated absolute poverty for all residents, like all other provinces or regions in China.

If Xinjiang had followed the Western values, it would not have achieved any of these goals.

But interestingly, several Western fashion brands, including H&M, Nike, and Adidas, join the campaign against Xinjiang and boycotted its cotton to make a point over the alleged “forced labor” in the farms, one of the three major accusations from the West on Xinjiang. The other two are “genocide” and “concentration camps.”

 . . .

The solution Xinjiang took to fight illegal imams is to empower legal religious activities, by training more imams to spread the message in the mosques that Islam is a peaceful religion that never encouraged Muslims to kill innocent infidels.

Look at this example I kept following in my coverage, Xinjiang Islamic Institute. China invested over 200 million RMB in 2014 and completed its expansion in 2016. Before the expansion, the institute only trained a few dozen clerical personnel each year. But after 2016, hundreds of people graduate each year, and they all get distributed at their will to the mosques across Xinjiang to spread the truth about the peaceful nature of Islam.

Nowadays, almost no one would buy the illegal preaching in Xinjiang anymore.

 . . .

Additional solution: Strike hard campaign against terrorism

 . . .

III. How does the West respond to terrorism under Western values?

The U.S. fight against terrorism involved major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying they were "fighting terrorism by establishing a democracy” in the Middle East.

As a result, 20 years later, the Afghan or Iraqi children born at that time have grown up amid bombing, and the U.S. military is still mired in a quagmire, facing increased threats by relatively new terrorist groups, such like ISIL, which traded sex slaves, burned prisoners of war alive and uploaded their atrocities to social media. Now the U.S. forces are in a dilemma and must negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

 . . .

The U.S., under its Western values, fought wars on terror only to let its European allies take in the flooding refugees and let ordinary Iraqis and Afghans suffer over 20 years of bloodshed. And now it wants to teach Xinjiang, a region with no terrorist attack for four years and no poverty since last year, how to fight terrorism under the Western values.

What do you think are the lessons Xinjiang should learn from the U.S.?

 

 

[Randy W]

from the SCMP - danged if you do, danged if you don't.

I think China may not realize that they're serious about not buying Xinjiang cotton.

Xinjiang cotton: BCI attacked for removing statement on forced labour

• Communist Youth League, China News Service accuse Better Cotton Initiative of removing a statement in which it said it boycotted Xinjiang cotton without explanation
• BCI says statement was removed due to a cyberattack on its website and its policy remains unchanged

 

Quote

 

 . . . the statement was removed when foreign clothing retailers, many of them BCI members such as H&M  and Nike, faced boycotts in China for avoiding cotton produced in Xinjiang in March.

The Communist Youth League and Chinese state media publicised the removal of the statement this week, and accused the BCI of being hypocritical and ungrateful.

 . . .

The Economist’s China affairs editor Gady Epstein said on Twitter on Thursday that he had asked the BCI about the statement’s disappearance and was told “they took down the statement in response to DDoS attacks and would eventually ‘repost relevant information’”.

 . . .

The BCI told the South China Morning Post it had no comment to make on the issue.

 

 

[Randy W]

“I felt like I was no longer a normal woman”: China is escalating the suppression of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, using invasive birth control.

from the NY Times
https://www.facebook.com/5281959998/posts/10152678395644999/

China Targets Muslim Women in Push to Suppress Births in Xinjiang
In most of China, women are being urged to have more babies, to shore up a falling birthrate. But in Xinjiang, they are being forced to have fewer.

Quote

 

Ms. Sedik could have had two children. The rules at the time allowed ethnic minorities to have slightly bigger families than those of the majority Han Chinese ethnic group, particularly in the countryside. The government even awarded Ms. Sedik a certificate of honor for staying within the limits.
Then, in 2017, everything changed.
As the government corralled Uyghurs and Kazakhs into mass internment camps, it moved in tandem to ramp up enforcement of birth controls. Sterilization rates in Xinjiang surged by almost sixfold from 2015 to 2018, to just over 60,000 procedures, even as they plummeted around the country, according to calculations by Mr. Zenz.
The campaign in Xinjiang is at odds with a broader push by the government since 2015 to encourage births, including by providing tax subsidies and free IUD removals. But from 2015 to 2018, Xinjiang’s share of the country’s total new IUD insertions increased, even as use of the devices fell nationwide.
The contraception campaign appeared to work.
Birthrates in minority-dominated counties in the region plummeted from 2015 to 2018, based on Mr. Zenz’s calculations. Several of these counties have stopped publishing population data, but Mr. Zenz calculated that the birthrates in minority areas probably continued to fall in 2019 by just over 50 percent from 2018, based on figures from other counties.

The threat of detention was real.
Three women told The Times they had met other detainees in internment camps who had been locked up for violating birth restrictions.
Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, said she helped one woman write a letter to the authorities in which she blamed herself for being ignorant and having too many children.
Such accounts are corroborated by a 137-page government document leaked last year from Karakax County, in southwestern Xinjiang, which revealed that one of the most common reasons cited for detention was violating birth planning policies.

The party sends out more than a million workers to regularly visit, and sometimes stay in, the homes of Muslims, as part of a campaign called “Pair Up and Become Family.” To many Uyghurs, the cadres were little different from spies.
The cadres were tasked with reporting on whether the families they visited showed signs of “extremist behavior.” For women, this included any resentment they might have felt about state-mandated contraceptive procedures.
When the party cadres came to stay in 2018, Zumret Dawut had just been forcibly sterilized.
Four Han cadres visited her in Urumqi, bringing yogurt and eggs to help with the recovery, she recalled. They were also armed with questions: Did she have any issues with the sterilization operation? Was she dissatisfied with the government’s policy?

“I was so scared that if I said the wrong thing they would send me back to the camps,” said Ms. Dawut, a mother of three. “So I just told them, ‘We are all Chinese people and we have to do what the Chinese law says.’”

 

 

[Randy W]

Japan's Muji Appeals to China by Advertising Use of Xinjiang Cotton

A Tokyo location of Muji. The retailer expects to have more than 300 stores in China by August. 
PHOTO: AKIO KON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Quote

 

The Japanese chain has publicly sided with the Chinese government in a way that many Western and Japanese companies won’t. Muji says it uses cotton from the Xinjiang region–where the U.S. State Department says mostly Muslim Uyghurs are forced to labor in internment camps—and doesn’t see a problem with advertising that fact. 

Muji, a Tokyo-based clothing and homewares brand owned by Ryohin Keikaku Co., gets about half its revenue outside its home market from China. A fraction comes from the U.S.

Last month, Muji’s parent said it conducted an on-site audit at more than 12,000 acres of farms and other facilities in the Xinjiang region in 2020 and found no material human-rights violations. Earlier, the company had said the audit didn’t identify significant issues other than some that could be fixed.

The April statement said Muji’s use of cotton from organic farms was helping to improve the lives of people working there.

 

 

[Randy W]

and an article about Xinjiang, from National Geographic, dated Dec., 2009.

The Other Tibet

The Uygurs, Muslim people of China’s resource-rich far west, are becoming strangers in their own land as Han Chinese pour in. Like the Tibetans, who face similar pressures, some Uygurs see a chance for a better life, but others protest the disintegration of their culture, even at the risk of death.

Quote

 

A week earlier an ethnic clash had broken out here, killing almost 200 people in one of China’s most deadly protests since the Tiananmen Square massacre two decades ago. So the Chinese government had sent tens of thousands of security forces into the city, the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Auton­omous Region, to restore order between the Han and the Uygurs.  . . .

Han security forces stood in ranks along every street in the city's Uygur quarter. They bristled with riot gear and automatic weapons. The only sound came from loudspeakers mounted on trucks that trawled the market streets, broadcasting the good news of ethnic harmony. If Urumqi had an edge of unrest on this Monday, it was sheathed in silence.

 

 

Well worth a read, about the situation in Xinjiang in 2009. Subscriber exclusive content, but available as a pdf at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-ADfJLtZySQ6pQCPvrP4STNsesoSf5c-/view?usp=sharing

[Randy W]

Texas can HAVE those silly bitcoin miners.

Northwest China's #Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has transmitted over 400 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of locally generated electricity to other parts of the country since 2010, according to the Xinjiang electricity trading center.
About 27 percent of the power was mainly generated by new-energy sources, according to the center.
Xinjiang is rich in energy resources, including wind and solar power, and boasts excess power-generation capacity. Making use of power-transmission channels built in recent years, the region now transmits electricity to 20 other Chinese regions.
The first transmission channel was put into use on Nov. 3, 2010. Since then the annual power transmission capacity of Xinjiang has increased from 3 billion kWh in 2010 to over 100 billion kWh in 2020.
From January 2020 to May 2021, the region transmitted 153.8 billion kWh of electricity to other parts of the country. The electricity helped reduce standard coal burning by 90,000 tonnes and carbon-dioxide emissions by 250,000 tonnes per day, according to the center.

from China Pictorial on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/ChinaPic/posts/3889533361172024

Edited September 26, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)