Beijing says Xinjiang is ‘model of human rights protection’

According to the latest state media readout (English, Chinese) of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meeting with Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 last week, the “residents of various ethnicities [are] living happily…thanks to China’s prosperity.”

Turkey stays committed to the one-China policy, Erdogan said, stressing that residents of various ethnicities living happily in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region thanks to China’s prosperity is a hard fact, and Turkey will not allow anyone to drive a wedge in its relations with China. He also expressed the readiness to deepen political mutual trust and strengthen security cooperation with China in opposing extremism.

Here’s other Xinjiang news:

• VICE’s recent Xinjiang documentary, “China’s vanishing Muslims: Undercover in the most dystopian place in the world,” has sparked a discussion about journalistic ethics from the Chinese Storytellers newsletter. Watch the doc and judge for yourself:

• The most recent episode of Planet Money, the NPR podcast about economics and technology, features a witness account of forced DNA collection from Uyghurs.
• “Authorities continue to harass Han shop and restaurant owners, demanding mandatory participation in ‘anti-terrorism’ measures that target their Muslim compatriots,” reports Bitter Winter.
• State broadcaster CGTN says: “There are no so-called ‘re-education camps’; in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region…the facilities are vocational education and training centers aimed at preventing terrorism and extremism. It is not true that the trainees and their children are separated for long periods.” The China Daily takes it even further with this ludicrous headline: Xinjiang serves as a model of human rights protection.

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Requiem for the ‘Living Dead’: Ten years after 7-5