China's Far West provinces (inc. Tibet)

[AdamG]

Thousands of Muslims gathered at a mosque in northwestern China on Friday to protest its planned demolition in a rare public pushback to the government's efforts to rewrite how religions are practiced in the country. A large crowd of Hui people, a Muslim ethnic minority, began congregating at the towering Grand Mosque in the town of Weizhou on Thursday, local Hui residents told The Associated Press by phone.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands...173224239.html

Weizhou (China) (AFP) - Authorities in northern China delayed the demolition of a massive mosque on Saturday after thousands of people demonstrated to stop its destruction, local residents said, amid a nationwide government drive to tighten restrictions on religious activities. Across China, officials have sought to limit religious freedoms for Muslims as part of a widespread attempt to bring believers in line with the dictates of the ruling Communist Party. Protesters began gathering Thursday ahead of a deadline to demolish the grand mosque in the town of Weizhou in the northern Ningxia region, local residents said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mosque-pr...084809410.html

[AdamG]

China has rejected claims one million of its mostly Muslim Uighur minority are being held in internment camps, while it has also insisted "there are no such things" as re-education centres.

The country responded to concerns, raised by a member of a UN human rights committee, that its Xinjiang region has been turned into "something resembling a massive internment camp, shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone".

Human rights expert Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, last week highlighted reports that more than one million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities are being held in counter-extremism centres.

https://news.sky.com/story/china-den...camps-11471917

[davidbfpo]

Via SWJ Blog on Twitter, even if on the BBC I'd missed it. It is a short summary, with nothing new.
Link:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-45474279

[davidbfpo]

A Soufan Group commentary and a couple of passages:

What most recent analysis on the subject glosses over, however, is that China has attempted to portray broad segments of the Uighur population as a potential terrorist threat while offering no evidence of tangible connections to militancy.
(Ends with) While the government feels that a draconian counter-terrorism strategy has been successful in limiting attacks on Chinese soil, many recently implemented policies may prove to be counterproductive in the long-term.

Link:http://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrie...d-in-xinjiang/

[davidbfpo]

A first-hand report on the situation from a previously unheard of Russian website. Makes you think.
Link:https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/10...illion-uyghurs

[Bill Moore]

Great article David, thanks for posting.

Meduza is a Russian language blog, but not a Russian State Blog. They're based in Latvia.

Anyone interested in the CPC's population control measures that leverages the latest technology along with Uighurs armed with spears who are subordinate to Chinese armed with automatic weapons should read this article. There is more and more evidence that Xi is increasingly paralleling many of Hitler's behaviors. Seeking a pure race at home, note one comment fro the article.

In Beijing, officials no longer claimed that the opposition was composed of a small number of extremists. “It’s impossible to tear out weeds one by one,” said one party official in Kashgar. “We need chemicals that can deal with all of them at once.”

The communist party (CPC), like Hitler believes expansion outside their borders is essential to their survivable. Like Hitler, they seem to be borrowing the same two models, one British and one U.S. Hitler admired the way the British established their empire and used state owned enterprises like British Petroleum and the East India Company to exploit regions they colonized for financial gain at the expense of the locals. The U.S. model Hitler referred to was removing the native Americans off their land and putting them in reservations. The CPC is currently doing this in Xinjiang. They seek to expand their socialist model with CPC characteristics globally. Will they export these population control measures to authoritarian governments?

Anyone coming into Xinjiang goes through 5 hours of customs inspections? Multiple checkpoints, X-ray machines, computer/phone scans, review all written material brought in, iris scans, other biometric data conducted, apps uploaded to computers and phones so they can monitor for dangerous material / communications later. Check points throughout the town and in the stores.

This sounds familiar, a typical form of communist surveillance.

New teams of “active citizens,” usually composed of police officers or members of the Communist Party along with at least one Uyghur, are another change in Xinjiang life. They regularly visit Uyghur families to ask, as my new acquaintance put it, “strange questions,” and to search houses for forbidden books and other objects. These searches can last several hours — or several days.

This would be funny if it wasn't true:

Iman’s reeducation took place in a cell where he was kept with 19 other Uyghurs. The prisoners were made to march in their cell and chant the slogan “Earnest training, eager learning!” and they watched propagandistic films for hours. During a post-lunch break, the prisoners were permitted to sit for a while on their plank beds, and then their marches and propaganda viewings continued until dinner. Iman befriended a 60-year-old cellmate who was accused of preaching the Koran in messages sent to his daughter through an online messenger. The man received a sentence of seven years. Iman was luckier — after 17 days, he was released, but after his time in the camp, cameras recognized him on the streets, and people began to refuse him access to public transport and local supermarkets.

The author sums it up.

I came to Xinjiang to see life with my own eyes as it had been many centuries ago, if not millennia. Now, what you can find here is a future that exceeds the most daring fantasies of George Orwell or Evgeny Zamyatin.

[davidbfpo]

This is a forthcoming volume 'Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in China: Domestic and Foreign Policy Dimensions' and the Editor is an Australian SME, Michael Clarke on the issues.

The Amazon notice refers to:

Four areas of investigation are looked at: the scope and nature of terrorism in China and its connection with developments in other regions; the development of legislative measures to combat terrorism; the institutional evolution of China's counter-terrorism bureaucracy; and Beijing's counter-terrorism cooperation with international partners.

Link:https://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Cou...orism+in+China

The Introduction is available to view. Not cheap at US$50, so perhaps one to suggest to your library?