During his UN General Assembly address yesterday 22 September, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for enhanced international solidarity to fight the coronavirus while China’s ethnic minorities are under increasing pressure.
Xi said:
“We should see each other as members of the same big family, pursue win-win cooperation, and rise above ideological disputes…More importantly, we should respect a country’s independent choice of development path and model.”
Yet the talk of solidarity seems to be nothing but empty words from the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Today, a new report was published which states that:
“China is coercing hundreds of thousands of people in Tibet into military-style training centres that experts say are akin to labour camps.”
The study compares the situation to what has been documented among ethnic Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
“In both Xinjiang and Tibet, state-mandated poverty alleviation consists of a top-down scheme that extends the government’s social control deep into family units.”
The Jamestown Foundation’s report is based on state media reports, policy documents and satellite imagery which Reuters news agency has corroborated. It concluded:
“The systemic presence of clear indicators of coercion and indoctrination, coupled with profound and potentially permanent change in modes of livelihood, is highly problematic.”
During his UN address, Xi Jinping said:
“China will continue to work as a builder of global peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order”.
Meanwhile, in Xinjiang, more than one million Uyghurs are being held in mass detention centres according to a UN human rights panel. The detentions are being described as a method to combat religious extremism but seem to actually be a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.
According to a new report from an Australian think tank, China has built nearly 400 internment camps in the Xinjiang region, with construction on dozens continuing over the last two years.
China has been accused of ethnic cleansing and earlier this summer, a report accused China of forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices in Xinjiang in an apparent attempt to limit the population of Uyghurs.
The International Observatory of Human Rights has campaigned extensively calling for the end of unjust detention of the Uyghur people.
Watch IOHR TV’s exclusive investigation into China’s cultural genocide of the Uyghur community.
Efforts to assimilate ethnic minority groups have accelerated under the leadership of Xi and repressive language policies have become more common. Since 2017, the Tibetan and Uyghur languages in education have been under growing restrictions in favour of Mandarin Chinese.
Earlier this month, similar language policies were introduced in Inner Mongolia which sparked widespread protests with thousands of ethnic Mongolians taking to the streets in opposition to Beijing’s plans to replace the Mongolian language with Mandarin Chinese as the language of instruction schools.
After the Second World War, the southern part of Mongolia was annexed by China, becoming the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Enghebatu Togochog, director of the US-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, told the Guardian that the region had been targeted for decades with policies that amounted to ‘cultural genocide’, and people had no faith that the language changes were for their benefit.
“In the past 70 years Mongolian people have gone through a lot, including genocide, political oppression, economic exploitation, cultural assimilation and environmental destruction. So after 70 years of China’s heavy-handed policy, the Mongolian language is the last remaining symbol of Mongolia.”
Hong Kong, a city that has up until now largely been excluded from the oppression imposed on mainland China, is experiencing a major crackdown since the new National Security Law was introduced three months ago. Several pro-democracy activists have been arrested under the law, which is supposed to target “secession, subversion and terrorism” with punishments up to life in prison.
Press freedom has deteriorated sharply with harassment of journalists and subsequent police raids on newsrooms, books have been removed from libraries and a notice has been issued by the city’s education bureau ordering that children in nurseries, schools and special education establishments be taught to obey the new law.
IOHR spoke to a Hong Kong analyst about what the new law, which critics have called “the end of Hong Kong” will mean for the city.