Arsenal player tweets about Xinjiang
Mesut Özil is a third-generation Turkish-German professional soccer player who is signed with the British Premier League club Arsenal. The club has a large following in China. Today, Özil tweeted two graphics showing the flag of East Turkestan (the name of a short-lived independent Uyghur state) and slogans in Turkish about the oppression of Uyghurs.
His tweet was soon circulated on Chinese social media, with much angry commentary. Arsenal Football Club has already taken action, posting an announcement to Weibo (in Chinese):
Arsenal Football Club must make a clear statement here: The published content was all Özil’s personal opinion. Arsenal as a football club has always adhered to the principle of not getting involved in politics.
Will this get as bad as the NBA affair? Perhaps not: A Turkish-German man who plays for an English team does not provide as clear a target as the American-only NBA and its small numbers of teams.
Other Xinjiang-related news:
“There was no learning at all.” That is the title of “an abridged first-person account of Xinjiang camp eyewitness Nurlan Kokteubai,” translated by Gene A. Bunin.
Out of the “education” camp, into the labor camp? The data supports the Chinese government’s claim that detainees are being released from internment camps, says scholar Adrian Zenz writing in Foreign Policy (porous paywall), “but not in the way that the government is trying to sell it.”
Rather, it is part of a rapidly growing set of evidence for how Beijing’s long-term strategy to subdue its northwestern minorities is predicated upon a perverse and intrusive combination of coercive labor, intergenerational separation, and complete social control.
