Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) on Sunday defended detention camps in Xinjiang and Hong Kong’s new security legislation, brushing off human rights concerns raised by European nations and cautioning against interference in Chinese affairs.
Wang is on his first European tour since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, seeking to revive trade and relations strained by the resulting global health and economic crisis.
Speaking in Paris, Wang repeated the claim that all those sent to re-education centers in Xinjiang have been released and placed in employment — even as rights groups and families report continued detentions of Uighurs and the loss of contact with loved ones.
“The rights of all trainees in the education and training program, though their minds have been encroached by terrorism and extremism, have been fully guaranteed,” Wang told a conference at the French Institute of International Relations. “Now all of them have graduated, there is no one in the education and training center now. They all have found jobs.”
The Chinese government has detained an estimated 1 million or more members of ethnic Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, holding them in internment camps and prisons, where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language, and physically abused.
China has long suspected the Uighurs of harboring separatist tendencies because of their distinct culture, language and religion.
Asked about Hong Kong’s security legislation, Wang said: “We certainly couldn’t sit idly by and let the chaos go on, so we enacted a law maintaining national security that specifically suited Hong Kong’s situation.”
Wang called both issues internal Chinese affairs and said that foreign powers should not interfere.
At a meeting with Wang on Friday last week, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed “his strong concern about the situation in Hong Kong, and around human rights, notably the Uighurs, and the need for China to respect its international commitments,” Macron’s office said.
French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian raised similar concerns, as did officials on other legs of Wang’s European trip, which includes visits to Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS