‘Eradicating Ideological Viruses’: China’s massive Xinjiang crackdown

September 11, 2018

The Chinese government is conducting a mass, systematic campaign of human rights violations against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang in northwestern China, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 117-page report, “‘Eradicating Ideological Viruses’: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims,” presents new evidence of the Chinese government’s mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment, and the increasingly pervasive controls on daily life. Throughout the region, the Turkic Muslim population of 13 million is subjected to forced political indoctrination, collective punishment, restrictions on movement and communications, heightened religious restrictions, and mass surveillance in violation of international human rights law.

Chinese authorities have long violated Uyghurs’ cultural, linguistic, and religious rights, marginalizing them in their own homeland, notes Omer Kanat, a former journalist for Radio Free Asia.Now they are being rounded up on an unprecedented scale, documented in a new report from the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP – a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy), “The Mass Internment of Uyghurs,” he writes for The Diplomat.

“The Chinese government is committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “The campaign of repression in Xinjiang is key test of whether the United Nations and concerned governments will sanction an increasingly powerful China to end this abuse.” RTWT