Dilip Simeon's blog

What is most striking about these new tactics is their boldness and unrepentant tone. Instead of denying or apologizing for them, the CCP seems to proudly proclaim them as part of a new Chinese model of development, albeit one that has no use for liberal values from the West. In the new world of resurgent Chinese wealth and power, what is valued is strong leadership, short-term stability, and immediate economic growth. “As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership. As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accu...

NB:  I agree with much of Gray's argument about the fragility of liberal democratic values, but would like to underline one of his sentences, containing the phrase about earlier generations of 'liberal and socialist thinkers downplaying the colossal human toll of communism in Russia and China '. There's no denying this, but let us also remember that of the approximately 65 million fatal casualties in World War 2 , the USSR alone bore over 20 million deaths, and China close to 11 million. No country, army or society paid such a gigantic cost for defeating Nazism. Compared to the USSR and China combined, the costs to the USA and UK were minimal. Let us keep humanity in focus, not 'communism' and 'capitalism.' And  if we were to add the impact of Western colonialism to the mix, its imposition of 'free-market economics' led to tens of millions of dead Indians and Chinese, memorialised in  Late Victorian Holocausts .  DS The West isn’t dying – its ide...

'If the Chinese government was more reasonable Ilham Tohti could be one of their greatest allies — this is a peaceful, moderate, thoughtful scholar who has spent his whole life trying to find solutions to China’s ethnic tensions' Chinese authorities began trying the Uighur academic Ilham Tohti on charges of “separatism” on Wednesday morning, in what human rights groups have called a “travesty of justice” that underscores the government’s unwillingness to field even moderate criticisms of its ethnic policies.  Tohti, 44, is being tried at the Urumqi intermediate court in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, more than 1,800 miles (3,000km) west of his home in Beijing. He will almost certainly be convicted; possible sentences range from 10 years to life in prison. He firmly denies the charge. According to Tohti’s lawyers Liu Xiaoming and Li Fangping, the trial will last two days, with sentencing at a later date. Tohti, a former economics professor at the ...

ISTANBUL (AP) — Every morning, Meripet wakes up to her nightmare: The Chinese government has turned four of her children into orphans, even though she and their father are alive. Meripet and her husband left the kids with their grandmother at home in China when they went to nurse Meripet’s sick father in Turkey. But after Chinese authorities started locking up thousands of their fellow ethnic Uighurs for alleged subversive crimes such as travel abroad, a visit became exile.  Then, her mother-in-law was also taken prisoner, and Meripet learned from a friend that her 3- to 8-year-olds had been placed in a de facto orphanage in the Xinjiang region, under the care of the state that broke up her family. “It’s like my kids are in jail,” Meripet said, her voice cracking. “My four children are separated from me and living like orphans.” Meripet’s family is among tens of thousands swept up in President Xi Jinping’s campaign to subdue a sometimes restive region, including the internme...

This past weekend, The New York Times’ China correspondents, Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy,  published  an expose of over 400 internal Chinese government documents relating to Beijing’s mass detentions of Uighurs , Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang. This trove of documents includes 96 internal speeches by Chinese President and Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping, as well as hundreds of speeches and directives by other CCP officials on the strategies of surveillance and control implemented in the region. The documents confirm  previous analyses  by researchers on key aspects of the Chinese government’s so-called “reeducation” system for Uighurs. They also reveal new details on both the timing and rationale for the mass detentions and the extent of opposition within the CCP to this approach. Most importantly, however, the documents confirm Xi’s high level of personal involvement in driving the campaign of repressi...

BEIJING: Beijing effectively bans Tibetans and other ethnic minorities from obtaining passports, Human Rights Watch said on Monday, amid a surge in Chinese tourists travelling abroad.  Chinese authorities have created a two-tier system, the report said, one for areas populated by the country's ethnic Han majority and another, more cumbersome system for areas inhabited by the country's Tibetan and Muslim minorities.  "If you are a religious minority who lives in a part of the country where most people are minorities, it's virtually impossible to get a passport," Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said.  In most parts of China, a passport must be issued within 15 days, and if there is a delay the authorities must notify the applicant.  But in Tibet and Xinjiang, inhabited by 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, officials use an older method for passport applications that requires more documents and sometimes political vetting,...

Hundreds of pages of leaked internal government documents reveal how China’s mass detention of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang came from directives by Chinese leader,  Xi Jinping , to “show absolutely no mercy” in the “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”.  More than  400 pages of documents obtained by the New York Times  show the government was aware its campaign of mass internment would tear families apart and could provoke backlash if it became widely known. Beijing has repeatedly refuted criticisms of its  crackdown in the predominately Muslim region , which has seen more than 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities sent to camps where they are often subjected to political indoctrination. China has organised tours of the camps, which it describes as voluntary “vocational training centres” intended to provide “students” with job skills. The documents, leaked by a member of the Chinese political establishment who...

Now is the time to act on China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. China’s efforts to destroy the ethnic Uighur identity through  mass internment camps and militarised surveillance  must be raised loudly and clearly condemned during a UN human rights review of China on Tuesday in Geneva. Countries afraid of standing up to  China  on their own can speak out on 6 November on a UN platform, known as the universal periodic review (UPR), where all countries equally take turns to be scrutinised by their peers about every four years. The UPR tests UN member states’ commitment to promoting and protecting human rights, but more pragmatically, it gives governments a shield to protect themselves when speaking up. China's hidden camps What's happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang? These countries are at less risk of China angrily cutting economic or political ties if they criticise its policies in Xinjiang as a part of a UN process. As peers, their opinion carri...

A chill is blowing through Chinese civil society as activists, journalists and academics report receiving police warnings and censorship of their social media platforms in recent weeks as Beijing prepares to host the Winter Olympics beginning on Friday. In mid-January, the Beijing-based human rights activist Hu Jia said in a tweet that China’s state security apparatus was summoning activists around the country to question them and warn them to stay silent. The author Zhang Yihe and prominent journalist Gao Yu said they had lost some or all of their access to WeChat, China’s dominant social media platform. Academics including Guo Yuhua, the outspoken Tsinghua University sociologist, and He Weifang, the Peking University law professor, reported similar issues. Ahead of the Games, authorities also detained two prominent human rights activists: the lawyer Xie Yang and writer Yang Maodong. They are held on suspicion of “inciting state subversion”. A third rights lawyer, Tang Jitian, went mi...

Mass internment camps did not begin or end with the Nazis – today they are everywhere from China to Europe to the US. How can we stop their spread? By Daniel Trilling At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China,  “political education” camps  designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by high-tech surveillance. In Syria, a  prison complex  dedicated to torture and mass execution... In north-east India, a  detention centre  capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural  encampments  where thousands of people are being  forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On islands and deserts at the edges of wealthy regions – Greece’s Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Oce...

For Joshua Wong, Lee Cheuk-yan and James To – three of Hong Kong’s highest profile pro-democracy activists – the possibility of going to jail in  China  has never been more real. The  national security law passed in Beijing and enacted in Hong Kong  on 1 July appears to be tailor-made for them in many ways. In less than a week Hong Kong’s atmosphere has changed dramatically.  People have been arrested for possessing materials deemed “subversive”. Colourful “Lennon walls” with pro-democracy messages have been torn down or replaced by blank notes after police warnings. Political groups have disbanded. Authorities have ordered schools to remove books that might “endanger” national security while  public libraries have pulled sensitive books .  Police no longer need search warrants for national security cases. A hotel in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay has been turned into the national security office and opened on Wednesday. Hongkongers face a Kafkaesque reali...