All Reading
This section contains a curated list of useful articles, investigations, books and other reading materials. The list is updated on a weekly basis and suggestions for additions are welcome.
Starting Points:
Crowd angered by lockdowns calls for China’s Xi to step down
Protesters angered by strict anti-virus measures called for China’s powerful leader to resign, an unprecedented rebuke as authorities in at least eight cities struggled to suppress demonstrations.
Protests over China’s COVID controls spread across country
Protests against China’s pervasive anti-virus controls that have confined millions of people to their homes spread to other cities after complaints they might have worsened the death toll in an apartment fire in Xinjiang.
10 killed in apartment fire in northwest China’s Xinjiang
A fire in an apartment building in China’s Xinjiang region killed 10 people and injured nine, authorities said Friday, amid stringent COVID-19 lockdowns keeping residents in their homes.
China’s Xi, in Xinjiang, signals no change to Uyghur policy
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, on a visit this week to the Xinjiang region where his government is widely accused of oppressing predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, showed no signs of backing off policies that have come under harsh criticism from the U.S. and many European countries.
Lawyers call on international court to investigate Uyghur treatment
Lawyers on Monday renewed calls for the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups in China’s Xinjiang region, in the latest attempt to have the ICC investigate widespread allegations of abuse against Uyghurs by Chinese authorities.
Bachelet won’t seek 2nd term as UN human rights chief
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said she will not seek a new four-year term, after a tenure that has been recently overshadowed by criticism of her response to China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in western Xinjiang.
UN human rights chief asks China to rethink Uyghur policies
Michelle Bachelet, a top U.N. human rights official who recently visited Xinjiang, raised concerns with Chinese officials about the impact of measures on the rights of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups.
China claims sabotage as UN rights official visits Xinjiang
China on Tuesday said the U.S., Britain and other foreign powers are seeking to sabotage its foreign relations by orchestrating criticism surrounding a trip by the top United Nations official for human rights.
Terror & Tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains
Four years after Beijing launched a brutal crackdown that swept up to a million or more Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities into detention camps and prisons, its control of Xinjiang has entered a new era.
Airbnb asked to drop Olympic ties over China rights issues
Airbnb Inc. is being asked to drop its sponsorship connections to next year’s Beijing’s Winter Olympics by a coalition of 150 human-rights campaigners. The coalition is headed by groups that oppose rights violations in China including the detention of Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children. While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”
China’s ‘War on Terror’ uproots families, leaked data shows
For decades, the Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China’s far west. On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. In the winter, he bought coal for the poor. But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer’s native Xinjiang region three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China. Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.
US sportswear traced to factory in China’s internment camps
Behind locked gates, men and women are sewing sportswear that can end up on U.S. college campuses and sports teams. The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from a factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S.
Digital police state shackles Chinese minority
Mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and over its Uighurs.
In Western China, Thought Police Instill Fear
Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police. Not his neighbors, not his classmates, not his mother.