On this episode of China Uncensored,
when terrorist become propaganda.
Hi, welcome to China Uncensored,
I’m your host Chris Chappell.
If you’ve been watching this show,
you’ve heard about Xinjiang in Western China.
It’s home to the Uighur ethnic minority.
Where more than a million people—
and by some estimates 3 million people—
have been put into reeducation camps.
And forced to violate their religion.
And their children put into orphanages.
So to learn more,
I went down to Washington DC to speak with
Nury Turkel.
He’s a Uighur lawyer and human rights activist.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having us.
So what is life like for Uighurs in Xinjiang?
It must be pretty safe.
I hear there's lots of Chinese police around.
It is very safe, probably the safest place
in entire China,
maybe entire world.
The Chinese government is pouring in
with the mindset of making Uighurs
feel safe to build lots of security apparatus.
The streets are full of cameras.
The Chinese government wants to make sure
that your phone is not hacked,
so they run it through data scan and they-
And they force you to do that, right?
Yeah, and they wanted to take your DNA samples
to make sure that you don't have any terminal
illness.
Yeah, what is up with that DNA sampling?
There are different theories.
There are different ways of explaining the
Chinese motive.
One is they wanted to establish a database
for this new system
that they're building up to monitor its citizens,
and the second possible reason is that they
wanted to engage in
some bioengineering in the future.
Like create a super Uighur?
Super Uighur, maybe a European-looking,
ethnically Chinese-looking Uighur who appreciates
this universally-accepted Chinese culture,
speak Chinese, talk like a Chinese, act like
a Chinese,
think like a Chinese.
Wait.
Seriously?
Is that something they can do with DNA?
I think that scientifically that's possible.
That's absurd.
And Chinese are very capable when it comes
to
that kind of technological advantages.
Well, when you don't have a state that's answerable
to the people,
you can get a lot of science done.
The Chinese government have invested
a substantial of money in the recent development,
in addition to taking advantage of American
and European inventions
by forcing companies doing business to share
business intelligence
and the technological inventions.
The Chinese government has been using the
technological advantages a
nd resources that they have to increase their
state security apparatus,
eventually turning the country into a Orwellian
society on steroids.
And so a lot of this is technology that's
coming from the West.
Technology is supposed to be helping to make
our lives better,
but to the Chinese government's benefit it's
making
the Chinese government much more secure,
particularly the Chinese Communist Party and
Xi Jinping's China.
So would you call Xinjiang a surveillance
state?
It is a-
Trick question.
It's an autonomous region, not a state.
It's surveillance state in the way that the
Chinese
want to make sure that people are happy, smiling,
chanting,
and denouncing their ethnic identity, religious
belief,
and waking up to worship the Xi Jinping instead
of their God.
So by doing that, they wanted to surveil people's,
monitor people's private lives,
in addition to installing barcodes on the
doors-
Whoa.
And randomly checking your phones,
making you go through iris scans.
In some instances,
the Chinese government is so concerned that
some Uighurs
may have a bad dream at night so they send
the Chinese cadres
to sleep in Uighur bedrooms to make sure that
they will not wake up
in the middle of the night afraid of the Xi
Jinping's regime.
Oh, I can't imagine that being abused in any
way.
So I want to ask about the political reeducation
camps in Xinjiang.
So at first, the Community Party denied that
they existed.
Now they're saying that local governments
can educate and transform
extremists in these vocational training centers.
That sounds very lovely.
Two thoughts.
One, the entire world, I would call civilized
world,
believe that the Chinese government will come
up at the UN
and apologize to the Uighur people
and bring justice to those officials
who committed this heinous crime.
I think the civilized world is very disappointed
that they haven't seen such a decency,
forgetting that authoritarian dictatorship,
the ones that in Beijing, are known for conflating,
denying, and confusing.
So people should not be surprised that
the Chinese government initially denied.
So what they're doing now is to say that in
order
to achieve their conversion programs,
basically converting the Uighurs from who
they are
to something that they're not and claiming
that they
are providing this vocational training programs,
as if that those Uighurs will be trained
and sent to coastal cities to work in foreign
assembly lines.
Maybe the Uighurs will be making your iPhones
after finishing these reeducation camps.
So what is life like in a reeducation camp?
The life in the reeducation camps is exactly
the way
how the Chinese design it and want it to be.
You spend half of your day with flag-raising
ceremony
singing Chinese Communist Party songs
and phrasing Xi Jinping's ruling
in a way that you worship spiritually,
and then you have very basic meal,
and then in the afternoon you watch anti-separatist
movies,
videos,
go through indoctrination programs.
So that's a typical daily routine based on
personal accounts
by those who were detained,
but the Chinese government calls it reeducation.
Reeducation means you get up in the morning,
you have nothing but to please your jailers,
the guys with the black uniform, machine guns,
and helmet walking around,
as you have seen on the pictures in barbwire
compounds.
And then the Chinese want you to despite your
age,
despite the environment that you grow up,
despite what you appreciate in life, you gradually
or by force accept the Chinese way of life.
The one problem that both government and some
people in China
have a problem with or have a difficulty to
grip with is
as if their preference in life culturally,
linguistically is something universal as such
the Uighurs
should accept and become one of them.
So us-against-them mentality has been in practice
in Chinese society,
quietly encouraged by the Chinese government-controlled
state media.
Well, I mean, that's sort of how
the Communist Party has ruled all of China,
always making certain groups the enemy class
that you do have to struggle against.
So why is the Communist Party targeting Uighurs?
There are three possible reasons for the Chinese
government
to implement this Nazi Germany-like policies.
Some people think that we got to be careful
with the terminology,
but if you look at the legal definition of
cultural genocide,
what the Chinese government has been undertaking
purposefully,
systematically fits into the definition.
Reasonable people may disagree,
but there's no other way of seeing what they
have been doing as crimes against humanity
and cultural genocide.
Why are they doing it?
One, this is all about China's global ambition.
Xi Jinping announced this international project
called One Belt, One Road Initiative
that expands to more than 70 countries.
Of those 70 countries,
seven of them have borders with Uighurs'
ancestral homeland, East Turkestan.
So when you look at the map from the China
proper
all the way to Central Asia,
you got to go through this big landmass,
which is four times the size of California.
Of course, this is the unstated goal.
The Chinese never admit this is part of their
objectives,
but to some Chinese strategists or party leaders
or people who advises Xi Jinping,
the area must be fully controlled.
Otherwise, China's global ambition will be
hampered, number one.
Number two, this has a lot to do with
Xi Jinping's ability to keep China together.
So there's a thing called the domino effect.
The Chinese leader believed that if East Turkestan,
the Uighurs' homeland, gets out of hand,
it will affect negatively to other China-related
areas, s
uch as Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong.
So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that as
long as that region,
that people stays as they are,
will eventually will pose political threat.
Number three, the third reason
that some people are uncomfortable talking
has a lot to do with racism.
In Chinese society,
as well as the Chinese government's
way of conducting business
or implementing policies,
often time tell us that they have a lot of
racially-motivated policies being implemented.
This started with banning the Uighur language,
restricting female individuals,
children under age of 12,
students from entering mosque.
The human rights organizations,
various governments were complaining about
that,
and now the Chinese government under Xi Jinping's
leadership
believe that Uighurs' ethnic background is
a kind of tumor
and religious belief is mental disease.
So for fair-minded people,
I don't think this requires any explanation.
It's pretty evident.
If you flip through the history books,
you see a very similar mindset calling somebody's
ethnicity,
religion as something that need to be eradicated.
So it is inconceivable in the 21st century
in 2018,
we're having this conversation about China
that is systematically,
purposefully criminalizing the entire nation
because of their ethnicity and because of
their religious belief.
I might add the Uighurs have been practicing
Islam
as early as 12, 13th century,
so whoever is advising Xi Jinping
or it's unknown if it is his idea,
this policy will eventually fail.
It's not going to work.
It may work for a small group of people,
it may create a long-lasting emotional psychological
damages
to the Uighurs both inside and outside of
China,
but strategically this is not going to work.
This will create more resentment and strong
anti-colonial sentiment
among the Uighur people wherever you can find
them.
So after 9/11,
the Communist Party stopped calling Uighurs
separatists
and started using the term "terrorist.”
Why?
The Chinese government thought after 9/11
that the world
will be turned against Islam and there will
be a war
because this country was attacked.
To the Chinese government, it sounds like,
it seems like their long-awaited opportunity
just arriving,
because in the past the Chinese government
tried to justify
its harsh policies with respect to
Uighurs' cultural and religious freedom
by saying that they are extremists,
but Uighurs by nature are very moderate Muslim.
The word "terrorism" does not even exist in
the Uighur dictionary.
o the Chinese government were very effective
in its opportunistic approach.
About two weeks after 9/11,
Chinese Party secretary for the local government
came out, said,
"China is also a victim of terrorism."
At the same time in the central government
level
and in a diplomatic effort,
they find an opportunity to get on board on
intelligence
sharing purposes of War on Terrorism,
because if it's intimate relationship with
Pakistan
and Pakistan being one of the few countries
recognized Taliban regime,
along with Saudi Arabia and others,
were in the good position to obtain some valuable
intelligence
and share it with the United States.
So because of that opportunity,
United States were kind of willing to work
with the Chinese
because this country was not expected that
level of attack.
In 2009, there was a turning point in the
modern Uighur history.
Uighurs took to the streets to protest
and Chinese responded with its security,
resulting not only in ethnic class but death
and injuries.
That has been widely reported.
And then some people think that this was the
wake-up call
for the Chinese to implement even much more
aggressive policies.
If people would like to learn more about you
or the Uighur cause,
where can they go?
They should visit three main websites.
One is UHRB.org, it stands for Uighur Human
Rights Project,
and also UighurAmerican.org,
that is the website for Uighur American Association,
and also World Uighur Congress website, UighurCongress.org.
Those are the three Uighur organizational
websites,
but I also encourage people to read the reports
done by Human Rights Watch
and Congressional Executive Committee on China,
which just published a new report a couple
days ago.
So there are a wealth of information available
publicly,
so I might say that the narrative that are
supported
by evidentiary information is overwhelming.
Well, thank you again for joining us
and sharing the story of the Uighurs.
Thank you so much.
I hope you enjoyed this interview but there's actually much more
to learn about the situation Uyghurs are facing inside of China.
I had Nury on the China Unscripted podcast.
If you listen to the podcast, you will learn more about the Uyghur people
their concerns,
and difficult times they are going through
under the leadership of China's superman, Xi Jinping.
Ah, the superman... I put the link below so you can check it out. You won't regret it.
