The Xinjiang Papers [pdf]
uyghurtribunal.com
uyghurtribunal.com
> The “Xinjiang Papers” are a cache of government documents from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), most of them classified, that were originally leaked to the New York Times by a “member of the Chinese political establishment” and published on November 16, 2019
> In September 2021, a set of digital files was leaked to the Uyghur Tribunal based in London during their second set of hearings (September 10th to 13th), by a person who wishes to remain anonymous. [...] A careful comparison of the files [shows they are the same].
> The files contain highly sensitive and permanent material in relation to Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang. Nearly all the material is classified as confidential. One document containing three speeches by Chinese President (more accurately: General Secretary) Xi Jinping is classified as “top secret”.
> The material provides substantial evidence linking numerous aspects of Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang to explicit statements and demands made by central government figures in 2014, including:
• Mass internment in re-education camps
• Poverty alleviation through coercive labor transfers
• “Optimizing” the ethnic population distribution by increasing Han population shares
• Criminalizing customary religious practices
• Forcing hundreds of thousands Han officials to “become family” with ethnic populations
• Implementing Chinese language-focused education in centralized boarding schools."
Wow.
I have met some academic China Studies researchers. They're a very interesting bunch -- not at all what you'd perhaps expect, and in my case either madly interested in history, or the development of the language, or the interaction of the society with the rest of the world. I'd never met someone in a China Studies department who was interested in Chinese politics. Eventually, one academic got drunk and told me the reason: criticising The Party was a career-ending move, not just for you but often for your department as well. Those archeological digs you wanted to go on? Those students you wished to go on an exchange, in order to improve their mandarin? Your ability to enter the country without fear? All gone in an instant, systematically recorded in a database of "bad things" and never regained. [(S)he was highly critical of the regime after a few glasses of wine, naturally, especially the way in which much archeology had apparently been concreted-over with little regards for history – not to mention the treatment of the Chinese peoples.].
This "optimizing thing" can also be translated as genocide? (sarcastic)
>I have met some academic China Studies researchers. They're a very interesting bunch -- not at all what you'd perhaps expect, and in my case either madly interested in history, or the development of the language, or the interaction of the society with the rest of the world. I'd never met someone in a China Studies department who was interested in Chinese politics. Eventually, one academic got drunk and told me the reason: criticising The Party was a career-ending move, not just for you but often for your department as well. Those archeological digs you wanted to go on? Those students you wished to go on an exchange, in order to improve their mandarin? Your ability to enter the country without fear? All gone in an instant, systematically recorded in a database of "bad things" and never regained. [(S)he was highly critical of the regime after a few glasses of wine, naturally, especially the way in which much archeology had apparently been concreted-over with little regards for history – not to mention the treatment of the Chinese peoples.]
Fearful dystopia.