Category: East Asia

Hundreds of students in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin gathered on the Tianjin University campus late on Thursday, in protest at COVID-19 restrictions. Chanting “Down with formalism! Down with bureaucracy!”, the students gathered on the university’s Beiyang Square, calling on university leaders to come out and talk to them about arrangement for classes and exams amid ongoing zero-COVID restrictions. The scenes were eerily reminiscent of the early stages of the 1989 student movement, which later took over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for weeks on end with demands for democratic reforms and the rule of law. Those protests culminated in a bloody massacre of civilians by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the night of June 3-4, with an unknown number of casualties. Students are calling on the university administration to clarifying arrangements for online classes, final exams, and when students need to be back on campus if they decide to wait out the lockdown at home. The protest came after no response was forthcoming. Video clips posted to social media showed hundreds of young people gathered under streetlights on Thursday evening, shouting “Down with formalism! Down with bureaucracy!” and calling on management to come forward for dialogue. One poster called on the school to let students go back home to take online classes, only coming back for their exams, but the university authorities have refused to say when these will take place. It called for further protests outside Zhengdong Library on Saturday. Sick of confinement Social media posts said the students are sick of being confined to their dorms and forced to take online classes, which they could do from home. Posts also said the university had conceded to most of the students’ demands. A Tianjin resident surnamed Xu said the school had to compromise to avoid larger protests ahead of the politically sensitive 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre next week. “The college students are knowledgeable, literate, and united, and the protests are definitely legitimate,” Xu said. “The [university] made concessions, because they had to; it’ll soon be the anniversary of June 4, 1989.” The protests came after the Tianjin municipal government locked down the city’s Nankai district, forcing residents to stay home, and carry out regular COVID-19 tests. Less stringent restrictions are already under way in Heping district. Tianjin University’s Beiyang campus has been under COVID-19 restrictions since Jan. 8, with more than 15,000 students confined to their dorms since then. Students are angry that the university has made no move to explain or justify the lockdown since announcing it. Petty officials Jiangxi-based current affairs commentator Zhang Kun said the lockdowns have left regular citizens at the mercy of petty officials. “The country is being run by mediocre people, and the incompetent are doing evil,” Zhang told RFA. “The slightly more competent ones have been purged.” “The longer this zero-COVID policy persists, the worse it’s going to get,” he said. “The reality has hit everyone in the face.” The Tianjin protest came after hundreds of students gathered at two Beijing universities earlier this week with similar demands. Hundreds of students at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) and at Beijing Normal University (Beishida) gathered to show their displeasure with current restrictions on their movements, as the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to roll out its zero-COVID policy across the country following a grueling weeks-long lockdown in Shanghai. This year’s Tiananmen massacre anniversary is all the more sensitive as it falls ahead of the 20th party congress later this year, during which CCP leader Xi Jinping is hoping to be voted in for an unprecedented third term in office. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Two weeks before a visit by the U.N. human rights chief, China’s state security police warned Uyghurs living in Xinjiang that they may suffer consequences if their relatives living abroad spoke out about internment camps in the region.  Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, is now on a six-day trip to China, including the coastal city of Guangzhou and Urumqi (in Chinese, Wulumuqi) and Kashgar (Kashi) in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). She began the tour on May 23.  On May 12, U.S.-based Kalbinur Gheni posted a tweet asking Bachelet to meet with her sister, who is incarcerated at a women’s prison in Sanji (Changji), a city next to Urumqi, capital of the XUAR.  Gheni said members of China’s state security police in Korla (Kuerle), the second-largest city in Xinjiang, visited her mother in Cherchen county the next day and pressed her to convince Gheni not to tweet more about her sister’s detention.  “‘Your daughter in the United States is speaking out against the government. If you don’t talk to this girl and ask her to agree to delete everything on Twitter, you will be convicted of being a two-faced person yourself,’” Gheni recalled the security officials told her mother.  “When I called my mom on the second day after my tweet, my poor mother cried and shouted saying that if I didn’t delete what I had posted, she would sever her blood relationship with me,” Gheni said. The agents threatened to charge her mother with the “crime” of being “a two-faced person” if she failed to persuade Gheni. The Chinese Communist Party uses the term to describe people — usually officials or party members — who are either corrupt or ideologically disloyal to the party.  Gheni’s sister, Renagul Gheni, was a primary schoolteacher in Cherchen county when authorities allegedly took her to an internment camp in 2018. Two years later she was sentenced to 17 years in prison — seven years for praying during her father’s funeral and 10 years for possessing a Quran.  Gheni said security officials had pressured her family over her tweets about her sister before the latest incident. “The same state security official has been contacting me directly over a year now,” Gheni told RFA, adding that the agent has told her that he is taking care of her family members in Xinjiang.  Gheni’s younger brother, who had not spoken to her for more than two years, also had left a message asking her to delete her Twitter posts.  “After this tweet, my brother with whom I had lost contact for over two years, left a voice message on WeChat saying, ‘We heard that while abroad you have made anti-China statements. Will you let us live or not? Stop making these statements and delete everything you posted.’”  On May 23, Gheni tweeted: “I will keep up the fight, I won’t give up on my loved ones.”  ‘No Uyghur is safe’  U.S.-based Uyghur Gulruy Esqer told RFA that Chinese government authorities also tried to silence her by rearresting a relative in the XUAR. Esmet Behti, who was a history professor the Bingtuan Pedagogical School under the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, was rearrested in May 2021 in an attempt to silence Esqer. The teacher was first arrested in 2019 and taken to a detention camp but released nine months later.  “I thought he had been released because of my activism in the U.S. and that he would be safe from further harm by Chinese authorities, but I was wrong,” she told RFA. “No Uyghur is safe from Chinese authorities. That’s what I’ve now concluded. Any Uyghur on any given day or night might be taken away by Chinese authorities.”  Shortly before the start of Bachelet’s visit to the XUAR, the Chinese government launched a campaign there to “protect state secrets,” warning Uyghurs not to talk about or discuss “state secrets,” meaning the detention of Uyghurs or other measures to repress them.  International human rights organizations say that China’s efforts to silence Uyghurs abroad serve the same purpose as using propaganda to cover up the reality of rights abuses in Xinjiang.  Bachelet’s visit coincided with release of leaked Chinese police files on Uyghurs in the XUAR published online by German researcher Adrian Zenz, director in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.  The files detail the brutality of the Chinese authorities against Uyghurs and show top Chinese leaders’ direct involvement in the mass internment campaign.  Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet began a visit to China with a photo op with Beijing’s top diplomat that appeared to confirm the human rights community’s fears that the Chinese government will use the May 23-28 tour for propaganda and keep Bachelet from seeing the reality on the ground in troubled Xinjiang and other areas. With cameras clicking, Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave Bachelet “Excerpts from Xi Jinping on Respecting and Protecting Human Rights,” a book by China’s paramount leader, who has tightened Communist Party control and restricted speech and other freedoms to a degree not seen in decades.

A Uyghur athletic trainer who worked at a university in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2017, said Uyghur sources with knowledge of the situation and officials in the region. Behtiyar Abduweli worked at Ili Pedagogical University, also known as Yili Normal University, in the city of Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining). He is the son of the late Abduweli Jarullayov, a Uyghur singer and playwright. Behtiyar Abduweli is one of more than 20 educators at the university that an earlier RFA report said have been detained. Not all of the names of the educators have been publicly released. A disciplinary committee officer at the university and a Uyghur who lives in Ghulja but did not want to be named for safety reasons said authorities detained the sports trainer in 2017. “I heard that Behtiyar was also taken. You know, the PE teacher Behtiyar,” said the Uyghur source. A Chinese government official in Ghulja confirmed that Abduweli was arrested five years ago because of his leading role in Uyghur society. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have targeted Uyghur intellectuals, businessmen, and cultural and religious figures, imprisoning many of them in a vast network of internment camps in what Beijing says is an effort to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities.  The U.S. and the parliaments of other Western countries, however, have declared that such actions constitute a genocide and crimes against humanity. The university meshrep Uyghur educators at Ili Pedagogical University have long influenced Uyghur society through their academic research and teaching, as well as their adherence to Uyghur traditions and customs. More than 30 Uyghur teachers at the university organized a meshrep, a social gathering that celebrates Uyghur culture and traditions, in the 1990s and early 2000s. The events typically include poetry, music, dance and conversation, the Uyghur source said. The gatherings were organized by Abduweli and Abdullah Ismail, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of the school’s Marxism Institute who also is being detained. Their meshrep encouraged more Uyghurs in Ghulja to appreciate Uyghur customs but caused concern among Chinese officials who believed the gatherings were not in line with Chinese Communist Party policy. But the government did not explicitly ban the educators from holding the gatherings because there were no clear government rules or regulations prohibiting the meshrep. In 2017, as Chinese authorities ramped up their repression of Uyghurs, they officially declared that the meshrep is an indication of “religious extremism” and a “propaganda platform of ethnic separatism.” As a result, authorities began investigating the university teachers who participated in the gatherings, and Abduweli was the first to be detained, the Uyghur source said. An official from the Education Department at Ili Pedagogical University declined to comment on Abduweli’s arrest. A former Ghulja educator named Yasinjan, who now lives in Turkey, told RFA that Abduweli and Ismail, along with two other educators — Nijat Sopi and Dilmurat Awut — were all active members of the university meshrep. Abduweli criticized Chinese authorities for flooding the stadium where the members of the university meshrep played soccer matches in 1997, saying the action would affect the community’s social harmony, Yasinjan said. Abduweli’s outspokenness 25 years ago was defined in 2017 by Chinese authorities as “opposing the Chinese government” and “inciting ethnic tensions in the society,” he added. “Behtiyar Abduweli was the leading man in the meshrep gathering of the schoolteachers,” Yasinjan said. “He was the national-level referee in sports games. He was highly respected among his peers both in school and in Uyghur society.” Abduweli also ran a private canteen on campus and gave free food to some students with disabilities. Abdureshid Hamit, another detained educator from the university, also worked with Abduweli in the canteen, Yasinjan said. Another reason that authorities detained Abduweli was because he collected and saved his father’s writings, he added. Abdulweli’s “crimes” also included “encouraging other students who possess ethnic separatist ideas,” said the same Uyghur source who declined to be named.  A staff member of the university’s Political Science Department initially tried to answer questions posed by RFA, but when he heard Abduweli’s name, he anxiously said that he did not know about his case. The staffer suggested contacting local law enforcement for details. Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.