While human rights organizations often focus on Beijing's repression of Tibetans and rights advocates throughout China, one group of people, the Uyghurs, has not received the attention a plight of their magnitude should warrant.
This could, in part, be the result of Uyghurs being concentrated in Xinjiang, whose remoteness makes reporting on the situation there more onerous. Beijing's cynical exploitation of the US-led "war on terrorism" since Sept. 11, 2001, as it represses this Muslim minority is also part of the reason why their suffering remains largely unknown. Readers may recall Huseyin Celil, the Canadian Uyghur who in April was sentenced to life in prison for alleged "terrorist activities." Celil, sadly, still languishes in jail and Ottawa has grown conspicuously silent on the matter. In the past six years, more than 3,000 Uyghurs have been arrested on similar charges.
Last week, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Rebiya Kadeer, who lives in exile in the US after spending five years in prison for defending Uyghur rights (or, as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang (
Meanwhile, in an Oct. 18 letter to the National People's Congress, Amnesty International called on Chinese authorities to end a practice known as reeducation through labor (RTL). Amnesty reports that hundreds of thousands of Chinese have been affected by RTL, which can be imposed for "crimes" -- such as criticizing the government or following banned beliefs -- that are not considered serious enough to be punishable by criminal law.
While no one has so far come out and put two and two together, the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of women from a specific ethnic group and religious belief bears all the hallmarks of the RTL policy and promises to be as devastating to Uyghur communities as the reeducation program during the Cultural Revolution was for the educated classes. The removal of 240,000 women of reproductive age (most of them are believed to be between 16 and 25 years old) from a population of approximately 8.3 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang will have severe implications for the birth rate there.
As was the case during the Cultural Revolution, Beijing hopes the women subjected to forced transfer will marry Chinese from a different background -- in the present case non-Uyghurs/Muslims -- and thereby break the bonds that tie them to their community.
This, however, is only a new rung in Beijing's long history of trying to erase Uyghur identity. Starting in 1990, China began promoting mixed marriages in Xinjiang, offering Uyghurs better social benefits if they married non-Uyghur Chinese and, conversely, 3,000 yuan (US$402) stipends for Han Chinese marrying Uyghurs. Birth control, forced abortion and sterilization (which the People's Daily claimed in 2001 was "voluntary") have also been reported.
The ramifications of such practices on the social cohesion of Uyghurs have yet to be fully understood, but it is clear they represent an attempt to assimilate the ethnic minority, with the long-term objective of watering down, if not altogether eradicating, its identity. In other words, we are witnessing nothing less than ethnic cleansing. Also, as international conventions define a child as anyone below the age of 18, the forced employment of many Uyghur women is child labor.
Surely all those women cannot be "terrorists." Their only "crime" is being female and belonging to the Uyghur ethnic minority.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
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The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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