Tag: china

The woman in the picture is small and wears an oversized hood, and “she is shielding her face with the sign, kind of hiding behind the sign,” WhitePaper noted. Her image contrasts sharply with those in so many Chinese textbooks depicting Communist martyrs fearlessly fighting for the survival of the Party. “She certainly comes across as a bit timid,” he said. She has the posture of someone who wasn’t trying to be a hero, “yet she holds tightly the sign and the flowers.”

The most important element of the report is that the violations in Xinjiang and the policies carried out in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity under international human-rights law. This means that China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang, which is extraordinarily significant.

They can warn the police if a victim of a fraud tries to travel to Beijing to petition the government for payment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same number. They can signal officers each time a person with a history of mental illness gets near a school.

just to clear the air, a municipal secretary told reporters, “We are not going into lockdown, and it is unnecessary to do a lockdown.” In the following days, Shanghai entered what is known to the rest of the world as a “lockdown.” But the accurate term, according to officials, translates as “whole-area static management.”

Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.

on January 23, 2020, the city of Wuhan went into lockdown. The next day, Chen boarded the last train from Beijing to Wuhan. “When disaster happens, if you don’t rush to the front lines as soon as possible, what kind of journalist are you?”

Two women who tried to visit the chained woman were detained and beaten by local police officers in February. Their posts and social media accounts were deleted. Some social media users who shared their posts said they had gotten calls from the police.

Joshua Lam and Libby Lange, graduate student researchers at Yale University, analyzed a sample of nearly 290,000 tweets that mentioned Xinjiang in the first half of 2021. They found that six of the 10 most commonly shared YouTube videos in the tweets were from the pro-China influencers.

The full self-portrait won’t be released until after the meeting—which consists of four days of closed sessions—but it’s been clear for months that Xi is determined to eradicate what he calls “historical nihilism,” the corrosive doubt that could threaten the dominance of his party. During the summer, China’s official online Rumor Refutation Platform, a Web site that collects public tips and reports levels of purportedly false content online, warned of attempts to “smear Party history” through what it called efforts to “slander and discredit revolutionary leaders.” Under Chinese law, a person found to have spread a rumor faces up to fifteen years in prison. A list of the “top-ten” most-circulated “rumors” ranged from deep strategic questions—“Did the Communist Party avoid confronting the Japanese army directly?”—to sensitive details, such as the suggestion that Chairman Mao’s son died during the Korean War because he gave away his battlefield position by “cooking egg fried rice.” (Mao Anying died in an air strike in 1950. The fried-rice story, which has never been confirmed, outrages nationalists and Party agencies.)

The Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs was in full swing. This campaign had begun in Kashgar, Khotan, and other predominantly Uyghur parts of southern Xinjiang. Now it had reached Urumqi, the regional capital, where our acquaintances were regularly disappearing. Every day, hundreds of Uyghurs who had moved here over the decades—finding work, starting families, buying houses, coming to consider themselves locals—had been shipped out to concentration camps known as “study centers.” Nearly everyone I knew from the labor camp where I’d been imprisoned two decades earlier had already been rearrested. My turn would clearly come soon.

Western intellectuals and artists would have felt much less sympathy for the Devil had they heard about the ordeals of their counterparts in China, as described in “The World Turned Upside Down” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a thick catalogue of gruesome atrocities, blunders, bedlam, and ideological dissimulation, by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. Yang mentions a group of elderly writers in Beijing who, in August, 1966, three months after Mao formally launched the Cultural Revolution, were denounced as “ox demons and snake spirits” (Mao’s preferred term for class enemies) and flogged with belt buckles and bamboo sticks by teen-age girls. Among the writers subjected to this early “struggle session” was the novelist Lao She, the world-famous author of “Rickshaw Boy.” He killed himself the following day.