Niva Yau is a Hong Kongโborn scholar who lives in Kyrgyzstan, from where she observes Chinaโs relationships with its western neighbors. She told me all about Beijingโs business in Kabul a year after America pulled out of Afghanistan.
Beijing is trying to stop the publication of a United Nations report on Xinjiang that is expected to be critical of Chinaโs human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities.
"I like living at home with my parents. To take care of them in their old age would be a great honor, and I could live out my days alone, working in my hometown until my death. If I could choose, thatโs the destiny I would pick."
Rayhan Asat and her brother worked for better Uyghur-Han relations in China. Then he was forcibly disappeared. So Rayhan was outraged by the recent visit of the UNโs human rights chief to Xinjiang that became a photo op for Beijing. She also had some pointed criticism for The China Project.
Dissatisfied with UN rights chief Michelle Bacheletโs recent visit to China, some Western countries have called for the International Labor Organization to carry out a mission to investigate Xinjiang.
A citizen in eastern China describes how Uyghur โmouths have been sealedโ over the past five years.
Ma Xingrui, the new party secretary of Xinjiang, is tasked with repairing the damage left by his predecessor, Chen Quanguo, who initiated the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II. But he will also need to execute Beijingโs new policy of thwarting what it calls the โtwo plots.โ
Zhang Jun, Chinaโs envoy to the UN, raised concerns over a Security Council report on Afghanistan-based terrorism. The Uyghur militant group that Beijing is particularly concerned about, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), is not considered to be an organized threat by the U.S.
The camp system in Xinjiang โ the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II โ is the first to employ a comprehensive digital surveillance system across an entire population, a "super panoptic" that uses automated, real-time assessments of massive amounts of data to sort populations based on their racial phenotypes and digital records.