Indonesia and the Xinjiang internment camps
In “Elite maneuvering, the Uyghur crisis, and Indonesian politics,” Tom Pepinsky annotates a Twitter thread that looks at the Indonesian government’s difficulties in criticizing the Chinese government, and “explains why Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim mass organization, has remained silent on the issue.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is doubling down on its defense of its gulag archipelago in Xinjiang. The latest from the Foreign Ministry:
China firmly opposes officials and media of certain countries “politicizing and stigmatizing” the efforts and measures taken by China to fight terrorism and eliminate extremism in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Huá Chūnyíng 华春莹 said.
She made the remarks at a routine press briefing on December 24 when responding to recent media reports in the United States and some other Western countries about the alleged “surveillance, detention and assimilation” in Xinjiang and other Muslims-populated regions in China.
“Those sensational news reports are irresponsible, either based on hearsay or citing false or fictional sources,” Hua said, adding that some Western politicians and media outlets have made a “fundamental mistake” by defining China’s efforts of fighting terrorism and upholding stability as specifically targeted at Uyghurs or Muslims.
