A damming report by the UN Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of slavery brings fresh hope to the Uyghur community.
A top UN official has confirmed Uyghurs are being forced to work against their will in Xinjiang, provoking fury and fresh denials from Beijing.
The independent UN expert,
A damming report by the UN Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of slavery brings fresh hope to the Uyghur community.
A top UN official has confirmed Uyghurs are being forced to work against their will in Xinjiang, provoking fury and fresh denials from Beijing.
The independent UN expert, Tomoya Obokata, Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of slavery, released the damning verdict that forced labor in Xinjiang, amounted to “enslavement, as a crime against humanity.”
, Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of slavery, released the damning verdict that forced labor in Xinjiang, amounted to “enslavement, as a crime against humanity.”
A Uyghur activist looks at the truth behind Xi Jinping’s visit to Xinjiang: peace in appearance only.
Why would Xi Jinping hide his visit to “Xinjiang” from his people and the world, and why did the Chinese media not report on it until three days after it began?
No matter how powerful the killer is or how modern his weapon, the magnitude and brutality of the crime he commits is so well-known that he cannot be free from the weakness of criminal guilt.
In this newsletter we are pleased to announce the sixth book in our series on the mighty revival that has swept China during the past 50 years. The China Chronicles are proving to be a great encouragement and are enriching the spiritual lives of those who read them.
Xinjiang (pronounced “Shin-jeung”) is a vast region in northwest China that is two and- a-half times the size of Texas (or seven times larger than the United Kingdom). It has been much in the news in recent years because of the genocide the Chinese Communist Party has committed there against more than one million Muslim Uyghur people.
The hacked files revealed the extent and the intent of the genocide in Xinjiang.
“Shoot them dead!” Orders to kill escapees from the camps were ringing in Zuhre’s ears as she poured through the documents and every one of the photographs for the second time. Her own relatives still unaccounted for, she almost envied those who now knew the fate of their loved ones. But she would still rather know than remain in the terrible darkness of wondering and not knowing. She vowed to keep looking and hoping.
For the first time, a respected scholar in his community is coming out about his experiences in a camp complex so large it’s terrifying. Hidden between high mountains, supposedly 100,000 prisoners are locked up just east of the Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. Until now, it was believed that the largest camps were built for 10,000 inmates.
This academic managed to flee to a European country with his wife. Only after some convincing by politically influential Uyghurs did he finally agree to talk. The elderly couple were afraid of reprisals from the Chinese government.
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which its non-Han inhabitants prefer to call East Turkestan, is the most tightly surveilled area of China, yet the CCP feels it is not enough. From January 1, 2022, new “Regulations of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on the Construction of Public Safety” will come into force. They were adopted at the 28th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th People’s Congress of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on September 28, 2021, and published in the last month of October. An official commentary was published on October 13.
“It’s illegal to even have a knife.” Prime Minister Salih Hudayar explained this fact about his homeland during a interview. “Every family household has one knife, and that knife is chained to the wall of their kitchen and etched with a barcode that has their entire family’s information.”
The blade-banning region where Hudayar was born is known by most of the world as Xinjiang, China. But he refuses to use that name. He and millions of other Turkic-speaking Uyghur people yearn to “break free” from China. They long for “independence” from China. So they don’t call their homeland Xinjiang; they call it “East Turkistan.”
Salih Hudayar, founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, leads a rally outside the White House to urge the United States to end trade deals with China and take action to stop the oppression of the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples. The ETNAM and East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) groups submitted evidence to the international criminal court, calling for an investigation into senior Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, for genocide and crimes against humanity. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Xinjiang is a Mandarin name given by the Chinese in the 1880s after their Qing Dynasty had “invaded and occupied” the region. It translates to “New Territory.” After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the region remained mainly under the control of former Qing officials. But the Uyghurs began pushing for independence, and in 1933, established their first republic.
Chinese forces invaded from the south and east. Soviets from the north and west helped them, fearing that an independent Uyghur nation would encourage Turkic-speaking Soviet states such as Kazakhstan to rebel against Moscow. The Uyghur republic was “destroyed” six months after its founding.
In 1944, the Uyghurs made a new “declaration of independence” and formed a second, much stronger “Republic of East Turkistan.” But the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and then turned their attention to the region.
Hudayar said, “The Chinese Communists along with the Soviets assassinated the top 30 leaders of our republic, and they overthrew our independent state.”
Ever since, this region has officially been “controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. But it has remained a “flash point” between the Uyghurs, who are mainly Muslims, and the Han Chinese people, who are mainly Mandarin-speaking atheists, and who comprise 90 percent of China’s total population.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Uyghurs watched other Turkic nations, such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, declare independence. But the Chinese regime cracked down hard on the Uyghurs, including Hudayar’s family.
Hudayar’s father managed to flee to the United States in late 1997. His family joined him two years later, part of a Diaspora of thousands of Uyghurs in America who in 2019 elected Salih Hudayar as prime minister of East Turkistan’s government-in-exile.
In their homeland, frictions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese continued to intensify. Beginning in 2008, Chinese authorities said that Uyghur terrorists committed a series of attacks, mainly using knives, that they said killed hundreds of mainly Han people.
But Hudayar said three facts make this allegation virtually impossible to be true:
the liberal form of Islam Uyghurs practice; the Chinese government’s ban on knives; the fact that authorities punish not only perpetrators but their entire families.
He believes these heinous attacks were actually committed by the Chinese government and made to appear as Uyghur extremism. “China needed to portray the Uyghurs as terrorists,” he said, “so they carried out these false flag operations.”
Regardless of who committed the atrocities, or whether they happened at all, China used them to justify “deploying” hundreds of thousands of troops and security agents to Xinjiang. They have turned this region into something utterly terrifying.
By 2016, the Chinese Communist Party had transformed Xinjiang into one of the most strictly controlled “surveillance states” in the world. Uyghurs are now surrounded by hundreds of thousands of security checkpoints. In many areas, Hudayar said, they are positioned “almost every 500 meters.”
“If you are a Uyghur, security agents with access to millions of surveillance cameras are monitoring you when you walk or drive to the mosque, school, office, restaurant, shopping center, train station or just down the street.”
The South China Morning Post reported in 2019 that in the city of Urumqi, there are 360,000 known cameras—12 per 1,000 people—and the plan was to increase that number to “one public camera for every two people.”
“If you are a Uyghur, the regime has also forced you to submit to fingerprinting, facial photography, voice recording, iris scans and even blood sampling. They want to know who is who, they want to watch you continuously, and they want you to know it.”
Even more terrifying than the totalitarian security apparatus are the hundreds of euphemistically named “vocational training facilities” and “reeducation centers,” at least one of which has been built in every district of Xinjiang. In reality, they are “concentration camps.”
Prime Minister Hudayar said the U.S. Department of Defense was correct in May 2019 when it made the decision to label these fortified compounds concentration camps, partly because “people are being sent without any charges.” Inside, Chinese agents use psychological and physical force to indoctrinate them “to denounce their ethnic and religious identity and to embrace the Chinese state.”
“There is no God in communism,” he points out. So Uyghur victims are “brainwashed to literally worship the Chinese state as the highest being.”
The Chinese Communist Party has placed more than 1 million of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs into the concentration camps. Hudayar said the true figure is closer to 3 million. And there are only some 10 million Uyghurs to begin with.
Detainees are “forcibly medicated” and “forcibly starved,” Hudayar said. “Women in these camps are raped by security forces whenever they feel like it.” If you resist the indoctrination or the abuse, a Chinese prison guard can label you incorrigible and kill you. Then they can sell your organs.
Most Uyghurs follow the Muslim practice of avoiding alcohol or eating pork and eating only those foods approved under Islamic law, called “halal.” This means that the Uyghurs’ own kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs that have grown inside them since they were in their mothers’ wombs are, in the eyes of Muslims, halal.
Rather than denouncing, opposing or perhaps even fighting the Chinese government for these atrocities, Muslim nations have made zero public statements against them. In fact, it is Muslims in these nations who are the purchasers of these organs for transplants.
“Their organs, shamelessly, are sold to wealthy Muslims across the world, mostly in the Middle East, as halal organs,” Hudayar said. He explained that both satellite imagery and Chinese government procurement data shows numerous crematorium facilities in or near the concentration camps. Near some of the camps “there are special lanes labeled ‘For Organs Only.’”
In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party sent 1.1 million government agents to live in the homes of Uyghurs. “The official narrative,” Hudayar said, “is to build bonds and promote ethnic unity” and to guide the Uyghurs toward “loyalty to the state.”
But most of the Chinese officials sent to Uyghur homes are men, and the homes they are living in are the homes of men who were sent to concentration camps. Hudayar said there is video and photographic evidence that many of these male officials sleep in the same bed, under the same covers as the wives of the imprisoned Uyghur men. The agents state “that they are promoting ethnic unity between the Uyghurs and the Han Chinese population.”
Hudayar has collected numerous testimonies from Uyghur women who say that these government agents have raped them, repeatedly. In some cases, a government agent says he wants to marry a certain Uyghur woman. If the woman declines, Hudayar said the government tells them: “If you refuse, then we will send your other relatives into concentration camps.”
“Tens of thousands of Uyghur women have been forcibly married to the Chinese men,” he said. “And in numerous instances, young women have committed suicide because they don’t want to marry the Chinese men, while at the same time, they don’t want their parents to be locked up and sent to concentration camps because of them.”
Meanwhile the Chinese “are also sterilizing Uyghur women that were already married and that had a few kids, to prevent them from having any more kids in the future.” As he put it, the Chinese are “preventing the future” of Uyghur existence.
Prime Minister Hudayar said that the situation in Xinjiang, or East Turkistan, is just one part of the story. “It is a very common thread of China trying to dominate more and more of the world,” he said. “First they invaded southern Mongolia, or what China calls Inner Mongolia. Then they invaded East Turkistan. Then a couple of months later, they invaded Tibet. Essentially, they’ve been doing the same policies of colonization, genocide and occupation in all three of these countries.”
Chinese government troops and agents have ruthlessly “forced” Mongolians, Uyghurs and Tibetans to submit not only a large percentage of their incomes, but also themselves, their families, their bodies and their minds to the Communist Party.
And Hudayar says this is only the beginning. China’s behavior around the world shows that the Communist Party’s ambitions have no bounds.
“Look at institutions like the Confucius Institutes and Chinese soft power through the Belt and Road Initiative,” he said, and how China is “setting up many colonies in Central Asia, even parts of Africa, teaching the local population Chinese and buying off their political elites to make them more aligned with China.”
Controlling a huge and growing economy, Chinese leaders are also “using loans and entrapping nations through debt traps, and pretty much taking away those countries’ sovereignty piece by piece.” The perverse Chinese regime wants to dye the planet red.
“They want the world to bow down to China,” Prime Minister Hudayar said. “Their ultimate goal is essentially global domination.”
China wants power, wants control, wants no questions asked. Its East Turkistan concentration camps show what it will do once it gets control. Prime Minister Salih Hudayar is right that Xinjiang is just the beginning.
The horrors now happening under the Chinese Communist Party in East Turkistan are only the beginning. The tragic suffering of the Uyghurs is only a preview of how horrendous the times will be ahead. We are now seeing only the first gales of this “catastrophic storm.”
People around the world are about to be dominated by “genocidal tyrants.”
China has carried out a systematic campaign against mosques, destroying or damaging thousands of them throughout the “Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region” (XUAR), according to a report from the Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI).
Despite Beijing’s repeated claims that Xinjiang has more than 24,000 mosques, the think tank estimates there are fewer than 15,500 left. “This is the lowest number since the Cultural Revolution, when fewer than 3,000 mosques remained,” the report said.
ASPI analysis found that since 2017, approximately 8,450 mosques were destroyed across Xinjiang, and another estimated 7,550 mosques were damaged or had Islamic-style architecture and symbols removed. The report found an additional 30 percent of Islamic sacred sites, including shrines, cemeteries, and pilgrimage routes have been demolished in the region, and another 28 percent have been damaged or altered.
A majority of the sites remained empty, others were turned into roads or parking lots or used for agriculture, while some sites were leveled and rebuilt on a smaller scale, according to the report. The only areas where mosques remained primarily intact were in tourist areas like Urumqi and Kashgar.
To collect the data, ASPI found the precise coordinates of more than 900 sites before 2017, including 533 mosques and 382 shrines and other holy sites. These sites were then compared to recent satellite photos and cross-referenced with census data to make “statistically robust estimates,” according to the Guardian.
According to Reuters, China’s foreign ministry denied the claims made in the ASPI report, and said there are over 24,000 mosques in Xinjiang, “more mosques per capita than many Muslim countries.”
But where is the outrage over the fact that at least 500 churches in London have been turned into mosques?
China has built 380 Muslim detention centers in the Xinjiang region since 2017, with 14 still under construction, according to new satellite imaging obtained by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. International pressure led to China declaring that its “reeducation program” of Uyghur Muslims in the region was winding down as most people had “returned to society.”
But, in reality, China is expanding its “detention” program.
Detention facility near Kashgar in Xinjiang.
One of the newest complexes was erected in Kashgar, western China. Built to hold at least 10,000 detainees, the massive compound with a brutality entrance gate, 45-foot-high walls and 13 residential buildings, has no identifying sign.
Instead, its walls simply have an inscription quoting the founder of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese: “Stay true to our founding mission and aspirations.”
Kashgar is considered the capital of Uyghur culture. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has based its campaign of cultural genocide in Kashgar is an indicator of its unrepentant intentions.
United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called China’s repression of the Uyghurs the “stain of the century.” According to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as of 2018, China has up to 2 million Uyghur Muslims in detention camps and “reeducation centers” in the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since the Jews in World War II.
Uyghurs in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
But the Chinese government has labeled it the “People’s War on Terrorism” following the 2009 deadly protests and riots against Chinese repression toward Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the region.
And so, the Muslim minorities are being forced to undergo “political indoctrination,” what some have called “systematic brainwashing” and proclaim support for the Chinese government. And as China’s Han ethnic majority is being encouraged to have more children, Uyghur women are being “forcibly sterilized” and subjected to “abortions” by the hundreds of thousands.
One of the main reasons why Uyghurs are sent to the detention centers is because of having three or more children. And so, since 2015, birth rates in Uyghur areas have dropped by more than 60 percent. Last year alone, they fell by 24 percent, compared to a 4 percent drop nationwide.
This mass “sterilization” meets the United Nations’ definition of “genocide.” Secretary Pompeo is reportedly weighing officially labeling China’s actions as “genocidal.” But despite these labels and condemnatory statements, not only is China continuing with the detention program, it is expanding it.
China currently is constructing 14 other detention centers, in addition to the 380 that it has constructed over the last three years, to “reeducate” the Uyghurs and other minority groups. The compounds are often next to the so-called vocational training schools where detainees are force fed Communist party propaganda and “de-radicalized.”
The new Kashgar compound is one of 60 built over the last year alone. These detention centers do not have any kind of rehabilitative features, says Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Nathan Ruser. “They seem to rather just be prisons by another name,” he says.
China’s statements minimizing the “war on terror” seem to be false. In fact, China is increasing the scope of its human rights abuses. Eminent among them has been the forced labor that Uyghurs have been subjected to.
“Make people who are hard to employ renounce their selfish ideas was the government directive behind molding China’s minority groups into an army of workers, after leaving the reeducation centers. The main goal is to change the minorities from their ingrained lazy, lax, slow, sloppy, freewheeling, individualistic ways so they obey company rules.”
President Xi Jinping’s plan is to have 1 million Uyghurs working in the textiles industry by 2023. There are about 1 million Uyghurs presently in concentration camps.
It would be easy to think that the Chinese government harbors some unique animus toward the Uyghurs. To be sure, the Communist Party “elevates” the Han ethnic group above all others. The Uyghurs are looked upon as “inferior” and treated accordingly.
But Xinjiang does also sit on China’s “special economic zone” as China’s largest producer of natural gas due to its rich supplies of oil and minerals.
It is therefore central to the “Belt and Road initiative”, China’s regional and international cooperative effort to create a global trade partnership between Asia, Europe and Africa. It is also the home of China’s highly advanced “direct energy weapons” facility.
Additionally, beyond the Uyghurs, there are already half a million Tibetans that China has forced into labor camps in the first seven months of this year alone. These also include enforced indoctrination, surveillance and punishments for insubordination.
The world has been up in arms over China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It has been condemned, demonstrated against, and many leaders have made statements denouncing and castigating it.
And yet not only is China continuing on the exact same path, it is actually stepping up its efforts. Mao Zedong said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Over and over again, when a human government is given great amounts of unchecked power, genocide, politicide, democide, repression and egregious human rights violations are inevitable. Xinjiang is just the beginning, such authoritarian governments and policies will soon dominate the world.
Thirty-seven countries, including Russia, Laos, North Korea and the Philippines, have actually defended China’s “war on terrorism.” Authoritarian regimes are backing and supporting one another and, to one degree or another, are working to grow their power and control over peoples just as China is doing.
China has been asserting its power in the South China Sea and tightening its control over the people of Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Throughout history, China has often taken on an expansionist policy to conquer, destroy, subdue and enslave people.
In recent years, the United States has acted like China has changed, but that same policy is materializing again, stronger than ever. It is all about power and prosperity, and Xinjiang is only the beginning.
We already see the support China and its form of government has around the world. This will only be exacerbated. These times will not only affect Xinjiang and Tibet, but the whole world. The fruits of this form of government will be evident for all the world to see.
Impact as many lives as possible through the public and private teaching of God’s Word so that people are able to understand it, are led to believe it, challenged to apply it, motivated to love it, and equipped to study it on their own.
Due to the sensitive nature of our work and for the security of the team members and those we meet with, all names and locations have been changed to protect their identity.
China - in His image 