They told him how they “dealt” with people who went to the west on intelligence missions and then severed contact with the authorities. 

“Wherever you go, we can always take you back. You have no other way except to work for us,” they said. When they dropped him off at the airport, they said, “Little brother, if you ever start to forget what we told you, just look at the moon. Wherever you can see the moon, we can find you.”

It was early 2018. The Chinese agents sent Omer to Dubai, with the hope that he would continue on to Europe to spy on the Uyghur diaspora.

He had instructions to infiltrate Uyghur groups and send back information about activists working to draw attention to the human rights crisis in northwest China.

Omer said the Chinese agents had spent months grooming, threatening and brainwashing him, and in turn, Omer persuaded his handlers that they’d produced a loyal Chinese citizen, who would be able to do the state’s bidding. 

In Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan, more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are thought to have been locked up in concentration camps, as well as detention centers, prisons and forced labor complexes. 

Omer, 31, is one of very few Uyghurs to escape Xinjiang in recent years. He’s fled almost as far as it is possible to go: to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town at the northernmost tip of Norway, just a few miles away from the Russian border. He arrived in January.

Here in the Arctic, where the northern lights flicker overhead and every sound is muted by the snow, he feels safer than he’s felt in years.

“I sleep better here,” he said. “It almost feels like I’ve come to the edge of the world.”

There are roughly 2,500 Uyghurs in Norway. With its famously egalitarian laws and democratic values, Norway — the world’s top-ranking democracy, home to the Nobel Peace Prize — seems like it should be the safest place on earth. 

It’s not — not for the Uyghurs trying to live here. 

“Close to 100%” of Uyghurs living in Norway face surveillance, intimidation and censorship from the Chinese state, according to Uyghur activists in Norway.

They describe a collective sense of unease among Norwegian Uyghurs — a feeling of constantly being watched. 

“Uyghurs here often say we would like to live free from psychological pressure, just like the Europeans do,” said Bahtiyar Omer, director of a Norwegian Uyghur justice group in Oslo (Bahtiyar Omer and Memettursun Omer are not related). “But it’s really difficult, and we never feel secure.”

Last year, his mother in Xinjiang told him that police had been visiting her regularly. She warned him to be careful in Norway. “She told me, ‘The police know everything. They even know what’s happening inside your house.’” 

He described how police will call Uyghur Norwegians via WhatsApp from inside their relatives’ homes in Xinjiang, and begin pressuring them to hand over information and stop their activism. The calls trigger tremendous anxiety for Uyghurs in Norway, who fear their families will be taken hostage if they don’t respond. 

“This is just the way the Chinese government tests out different methods and sees who can easily be controlled,” Omer said. 

The aim is to silence the Uyghurs in Norway.

In the past, Uyghurs in Europe have pleaded with their families back in Xinjiang to be careful, to watch out for the authorities and to not speak out against the Chinese line. Now, the same thing is also happening in reverse. Uyghurs inside China are warning their families abroad to keep silent, to stop their activism, and to watch out for themselves — in Istanbul and London, on the snowy streets of Oslo, and in small Norwegian towns far above the Arctic circle.

I was afraid when I came to Norway. That’s why I changed my name,” said Merdan, 34. Officially, he goes by the Norwegian name “Martin Gunnar.” But everyone knows him by his original Uyghur first name, Merdan. 

Merdan left his homeland in 2010 after being brutally tortured in Chinese prisons. 

He was living in an asylum camp in southern Norway when he got a phone call from a Chinese official who told him to keep silent about what he witnessed in Xinjiang’s prisons.

“He said if I told anybody what I experienced it would be dangerous for my family in East Turkestan,” he said.

During his early years in Norway, Merdan lived in fear of the officer’s words.

But in 2018, as the crisis in Xinjiang deepened, he decided he could no longer remain silent — even if it meant his family would be harmed. 

“No matter what we do, our parents will suffer under the Chinese government,” he said. 

Merdan began to speak out. He organized Uyghur youth activist groups in Oslo, began running an Islamic Uyghur cultural center, took media training, and built a home studio where he filmed news videos about the Uyghur crisis on YouTube. He also re-adopted his Uyghur first name.

Merdan said he has gone past the point of caring what information the Chinese authorities gathered about him. An ebullient figure with an easy laugh, he’s often seen wearing a Uyghur doppa — a traditional hat. 

He drives around Oslo in an Audi, with a Red Bull in the cupholder, his doppa on the dashboard, and an unmistakable license plate that defiantly says “UYGHUR”. He paid just over $1,000 to have rights to the vanity plate for a decade. 

“When I first got the license plate I drove five or six times past the Chinese Embassy. Because I’m not a terrorist, I’m doing nothing wrong.”

In addition to his work as an activist and filmmaker, Merdan spends his nights doing nursing training, visiting care homes and retirement residences to take care of the local elderly.

He does this work to feel a connection with his parents back in Xinjiang. “I cannot get back to my own country, and take care of my own parents. So I just think, if I can take care of other people’s parents, then I hope somebody can take care of my parents,” he said. 

In 2019, he got a video call. His father was sobbing while filming his mother, whose knees were broken and bandaged. 

“If you don’t stop what you’re doing, maybe we will come to further harm,” Merdan’s father said. “Look at your mother’s situation — it’s all because of you.” Merdan believes that his father meant the Chinese authorities would punish his mother if he carried on with his activism. 

In 2019 and 2020, his phone rang twice more. A man’s voice introduced himself as an officer with China’s security services. He asked, “Don’t you care about your parents? Don’t you care about your children?” The officer listed the names of Merdan’s children and their Oslo schools.

“They threatened me, suggesting ‘maybe I would get into a car accident’ or that ‘thieves might come into my house while I was on night shift,’” he said. 

The agent told Merdan that he knew about his loans from Norwegian banks, and proceeded to list the amounts. 

He offered to send Merdan money, indicating that in return, Merdan would spy on other Uyghurs, and stop his activism. Merdan refused. Instead, he installed multiple surveillance cameras around his house in Oslo.

“I told him, are you stupid? You don’t need to send money to Uyghurs to spy on me and collect my information. You might as well just give all the money to me! I’m making videos about what we are doing!” Merdan said. “Everything is open, we have nothing to hide!”

Merdan believes the Chinese authorities are setting up spies with the aim of creating rifts within the Uyghur community.

Uyghurs spy on each other, he explained, “not because of the money. They do it because they’re scared that their parents will get tortured or arrested, sent to the concentration camp or the jails.” 

“Nobody can trust anybody,” he added. 

The Chinese embassy in Oslo has been a source of anxiety for Uyghur Norwegians, who report regularly receiving automated calls from embassy phone numbers, informing them they need to come in and retrieve “emergency documents” or face being blocked at the border. One Uyghur man described getting as many as 20 calls in a matter of weeks while he was a student in high school.

The Chinese Embassy in Oslo denied all claims Uyghurs made of being tortured in prisons, coerced to spy, hacked, threatened, or contacted by the embassy or the Chinese authorities. “What you mentioned are totally groundless rumors and lies fabricated by anti-China forces,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “There is no evidence so far to support any of those accusations. In front of indisputable facts, a lie repeated a thousand times will remain a lie.”

In 2019, Oslo-based researcher and law student Muetter Iliqud, 24, began writing anonymous articles about Uyghur human rights issues for a Norwegian website run by Uyghurs. 

But her efforts to keep her writing secret were in vain. Several months after she began writing, her grandmother, living just outside Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, got a knock on the door. The Chinese National Security Bureau officers had arrived with printed versions of Iliqud’s work.

“I have no idea how they figured it out,” Iliqud said. Her grandmother received a warning from the police, who also asked her for Iliqud’s contact details in Norway. “She ended up in trouble because of my anonymous articles.” 

When Iliqud heard about these visits, she felt a wave of guilt. “I felt like it was my fault that my family was threatened. But then I kept telling myself that I did nothing wrong.”

Iliqud stopped using a pseudonym, and instead became more vocal. “I realized there was no sense in being anonymous, because they can just find out anyway,” she said.

Iliqud works for the Uyghur Transitional Justice Institute, a project that gathers data about Uyghur disappearances in Xinjiang. Harassment, surveillance and hacks are an occupational hazard for the Institute. 

In 2021, when Iliqud gave expert evidence at London’s Uyghur Tribunal, which was investigating whether China’s actions in Xinjiang constitute genocide, her phone bleated out alerts that she was being hit with brute-force hacking attempts to her social media and email accounts.

“China, Iran and other authoritarian states use their intelligence services to identify and spy on dissidents and refugees in Norway, and will continue to do so in 2022,” said Martin Bernsen, senior advisor at the Norwegian Police Security Service. He added that their aim was to “eliminate” political opponents. 

He described how regimes like China’s often will infiltrate exile communities’ events and activist groups, while foreign intelligence officers try to gain access to Norwegian immigration databases.

Last autumn, 101 Uyghurs arrived in Norway from Turkey. As life under Recep Erdogan’s regime has become more difficult, with the looming prospect of an extradition treaty between Ankara and Beijing, there has been an exodus of Uyghurs from Turkey.

They bought a ticket from the Turkish city of Antalya to Belgrade, Serbia, with a stop-off in Oslo. Chinese citizens don’t need a visa to Serbia, so they were allowed to board the plane, and disembarked during the Oslo stopover. 

Memettursun Omer was one of the people on board.

When he was a child in Guma, a county in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert, Omer’s parents told him stories about places in the far north, where there was no darkness in summer, and no light in winter, and where during Ramadan, people sometimes had to fast for 20 hours a day. 

Omer thought it was a fantasy — something the adults had just dreamed up.

In January, he was posted to the Arctic border town of Kirkenes, where the Norwegian immigration authority has just opened up an asylum reception center, alongside around 60 other Uyghurs.

During his first few days there, the sun did not rise at all. “I never dreamed I would end up this far north,” he said.

He spent days walking around the icy border town in the blue twilight of the polar winter, gazing out at the desolate wilderness.

“I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by people. But here, there’s hardly anyone around. It’s all so different,” he said. 

“I thought to myself, will this be my life forever?” He posted videos of the northern lights on Instagram.

As a young man, Omer loved China. His WeChat pages were frequently peppered with Chinese flags, and as a chef training in Beijing, he had a lot of Han Chinese friends and colleagues.  

“I was always against Uyghur people who were standing up to the Chinese,” he said. “I believed the Chinese government wouldn’t do anything to innocent people. And I never thought they would do anything to me — because in order for that to happen, I’d have to do something bad.”

Omer was arrested in Xinjiang in 2017 after traveling abroad. Uyghurs in Xinjiang are invariably targeted by police following foreign trips, which Chinese authorities claim is grounds for arrest on suspicion of terrorist activities. He spent more than ten months in detention centers and high-security prisons.

He was tied to a tiger chair, interrogated and electrocuted. At night, as he slept, 360-degree cameras watched him from all sides. If he turned over in bed, the camera would whirr to follow his movement. If he moved again, a guard would yell through the speaker system to keep still.

His interrogators told him “we are going to be best friends.” He was forced to meet regularly with them, and field their questions about his relatives living in Europe.

He managed to convince the agents that his father was a prominent activist in Germany, with influence within the World Uyghur Congress, a leading Uyghur human rights organization. 

The Xinjiang agents hatched a plan that he would infiltrate the group and send intelligence back to his handlers.

“They wanted me to go to Germany, and get in with their group, collect phone numbers and addresses, find out which flights they were taking, which restaurants they ate at,” he said. He was instructed to pass back information via regular WeChat video calls. 

Over and over again, Omer said he was threatened about what would happen if he dropped his handlers. 

“You need to remember, your older brothers are still here in Xinjiang,” the agent told him. “If you just disappear, we can make them suffer.” They forced him to sign a deposition admitting he was a terrorist. “Wherever you go, we can use this to show you’re a criminal, and bring you back to China.” 

Despite their threats, Omer had no intention of becoming a spy. He planned to escape the agents’ control as soon as he left China.

He flew to Dubai, where he immediately called his father in Turkey and told him what was going on. From there, he went to Istanbul, where he attempted to start a new life. 

As spring arrived in Istanbul in 2018, Omer reunited with his father, found a job as a chef, and got engaged. He tried to forget what the Chinese agents had told him. But it proved difficult: he was continually dogged by desperate calls and messages from his handlers. He keeps the voice notes on his phone to this day. 

Sitting in his living room in Kirkenes, he played them one by one, as snow floated down outside. The tinny voice of the official rang out into the room. 

“We didn’t send you out there so you could behave like this,” the official drawled in one recording. “You’re forgetting who you are.”

During phone calls, the threats began. “You don’t need us to tell you how we do things. We’ll kill you — even if you’re in Germany. We’ll deal with this problem according to our own rules.”

The messages “had a psychological way of crushing your mind,” Omer said. “I felt like I was still in prison. I was scared and paranoid every day. Even thinking about it now, I’m afraid.”

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In the summer of 2018, Omer gave the voice notes to Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service, which serves the Uyghur diaspora. RFA published the messages, and promptly the calls from China stopped. 

Omer’s handler attempted to contact him again just once more, with the message “don’t be like this, little brother.” 

Omer responded with a “winky tongue face” emoji. 

Although the messages went quiet, Omer lived in fear that Turkey wasn’t really safe — that he might be spirited back to China at any time, trapped once again in Xinjiang. 

In September 2021, Omer flew to Norway. 

“We don’t have a choice in coming here. There’s no other way. We cannot go back,” Omer said. 

Two weeks into his time in Kirkenes, Omer saw his first sunrise. Now, as the spring equinox approaches, the days are getting longer. Kirkenes lies at such an extreme latitude that for six days each month, the moon can’t be seen.

The Chinese agent’s words — that the state would be able to find Omer wherever the moon shines — are beginning to fade.

The post China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic appeared first on Coda Story.

“It is this feeling that we Uyghurs cannot escape China wherever we go,” said Buzainuer Wubuli (Zeynure Obul). “Uyghurs in our homeland are being disappeared in prisons and camps. Outside the country, Uyghurs are not allowed to live in peace anywhere.”

For the past 10 years Wubuli’’s husband has faced constant harassment and detention by Turkish authorities — further evidence of China’s reach in Turkey, according to Wubuli — pushing him to finally leave the country with a plan for his family to follow. He was unaware that China had issued a red notice for him and was arrested in July 2021 while in transit in Casablanca. Today Idris Hasan is being held in a Moroccan prison.

Following international outcry, Interpol canceled the red notice for Hasan. However, Moroccan authorities decided to follow through with Hasan’s deportation in light of a recently signed extradition treaty with China. Hasan would be the first Chinese national extradited under the treaty that was signed in early 2021. The UN Committee Against Torture has pressured Moroccan authorities to pause the extradition while it reviews Hasan’s case, a process that could take weeks, months, even years.

This has left Hasan’s wife and children living in limbo. However, Wubuli has launched her own campaign of resistance for her husband’s release.

This is her story.

The post China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide appeared first on Coda Story.

Translators and interpreters like Mahmut have been indispensable for non-Uyghur journalists reporting on the Uyghur genocide. With more than one million Uyghurs imprisoned by the Chinese state, Mahmut’s ethnicity alone means that in Xinjiang she has a significant chance of being arrested and sent to a camp.

Journalists — and advocacy groups, police-makers, and academics — are forced to rely on a small number of dedicated bilingual Uyghur-English speakers. Experienced translators estimate there are 10 to 20 people in the world capable of and willing to do public Uyghur-to-English interpretation, meaning to expose themselves to working in the view of the public —and under the gaze of the Chinese state. 

In the past several years, meticulously reported journalism has sent out global shock waves, and has fueled a movement to hold China accountable. Journalists have contributed essential reporting to public understanding of the scale of abuses in Xinjiang. Their ability to work, however, is hampered by the risks facing the Uyghur language translators they must hire to conduct their interviews and research. 

Journalists reporting on Uyghurs say they confront a growing risk to their physical safety from China’s security apparatus, online trolls, and numerous other sources. Uyghur language translators face these same risks –and more because of their families living in Xinjiang. Uyghur translators almost always have close family and other relatives and friends living in China and they, as much as the translators living abroad, are vulnerable to state reprisal, which can include torture and imprisonment.

That has meant that Uyghur translators are in a “dire shortage,” said Elise Anderson, an American scholar and Uyghur translator. Anderson is among an even smaller number of non-Uyghurs fluent in the language who are willing and able to work as translators. 

In fact, there are many fluent Uyghur-English speakers outside China. There is a growing diaspora of native speakers in both languages who have interpretation-level fluency, such as Uyghur university students studying in the West. There are an estimated 12,000 Uyghurs in Europe. Many are young, however, and Uyghur students say they are especially vulnerable. Many young Uyghurs study and work at universities and institutions where China has significant influence.

Mahmut is a well-known singer — a member of a group of London-based musicians from across Central Asia. She also runs the U.K. office for the World Uyghur Congress, an international advocacy organization founded in 2004. But she spends a lot of her time traveling internationally to interpret for journalists, academics and NGOs wanting to speak to former detainees about China’s sprawling network of detainment camps.

My eyes are weary from looking out for you.
My hands are sore from praying for your return
My heart bleeds from being torn apart,
My dear son, when will you return?
Everyday I wait on the road,
Yearning for your appearance all day long
the nights are sleepless until dawn breaks
My dear son, when will you return?
Without you by my side I am alone
No food can pass my lips as my throat is too dry
I worry if you have eaten or not
My dear son, when will you return.

Born in a town called Ghulja in Xinjiang, near the Kazakhstan border, Mahmut last returned home more than 20 years ago. Six years ago, the Chinese state prohibited her family from visiting her in the U.K. Five years ago, China launched the rapid construction of an enormous web of detainment camps under the Chinese Communist Party official Chen Quanguo. Four years ago, Mahmut heard from her brother for the last time. He said, “Leave us in God’s hands. We leave you in God’s hands too.” Often dressed in stylish Uyghur-patterned clothing, Mahmut is a target of the Chinese state.

“When I had cancer in 2013, I sent a letter from the oncologist who stated the seriousness of the disease and said that I need family to look after me,” she said over the phone. “Even with that letter, they wouldn’t allow any of my nine siblings to have a passport and travel.”

In late 2016, Mahmut’s family stopped answering her phone calls. Her brother informed her that any association was too dangerous. She says that some people she knows who traveled back to Xinjiang were stopped by state security police and enquired about her work in the U.K.

“The families of people who are active, they are considered to be significant people, and are surveilled more heavily compared to others, and so in order to avoid really severe punishment, the only thing they can do is to completely cut off or declare that she is not my sister anymore,” Mahmut said.

The Chinese state has a long history of oppressing its Uyghur minority, including a crackdown on Uyghur culture and religion during Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution, when longstanding Han prejudices against minority beliefs were reinforced. Repression of Uyghurs has accelerated in the 21st century, first as part of the United States’ post-9/11 War on Terror and then following 2009 riots in the city of Urumqi.

These events combined with some high-profile terrorist attacks, committed by Uyghurs, led to President Xi Jinping announcing a “People’s War on Terror” against Muslim minorities. A rapid build-up of surveillance in the region followed. By 2021, the independent Uyghur Tribunal had declared that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

As pressure increases on Uyghurs within China, so too has transnational repression. The lawyer Rodney Dixon, representing two Uyghur advocacy groups, has repeatedly sought to bring a case to the International Criminal Court alleging that Chinese agents have been operating in Tajikistan to deport Uyghurs and convert others into being informants.

Deportations of Uyghurs to China have been occurring in multiple countries. In December 2021, a Moroccan court approved the extradition of Idris Hasan, who had worked at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Turkey and also worked as a translator. 

Among the few younger Uyghurs willing to take the risk of working as a translator is Arslan Hidayat, a 34-year-old Uyghur-Australian activist and YouTuber who speaks fluent English and Uyghur.

Pro-Beijing online influencers have tried to discredit Hidayat, who says that when he is not being accused of working for the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy, he is accused of supporting ISIS or Turkestan Islamic Party, the loose successor to the obscure East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an organization that the U.S. had labeled a terrorist organization. “We are labeled as sell-outs and puppets of the West,” said Hidayat.

Hidayat says if he tries to respond to his online attackers, trolls will unleash a torrent of new allegations. The only successful tactic is silence. Still, he frequently posts videos on his channel Talk East Turkestan.

Hidayat believes public translation work forces translators into the role of activists, opening up translators to new risks. Hidayat has never received direct threats, but when he recently returned to Australia after living in Turkey, his mother received phone calls from several of her friends warning that her son was linked to terror groups around the world. She believes these friends had been contacted by the Chinese embassy in Australia.

Of greater concern for Hidayat, like all the ethnic Uyghur interpreters and translators I spoke to, is that he still has family in China who have been interviewed by police and have been forced to distance themselves from him. “I must be doing something impactful for them to approach my family in this manner,” he said.

Zubayra Shamseden has similar experiences, receiving messages that discredit her translation work, and since 2015 she has not spoken to her family back home. One of her brothers is a political prisoner and her entire family is under constant surveillance. “Because of my work my family is paying a heavy price, but they are willing to sacrifice for what I do.”

Other translators work behind the scenes. I spoke to two translators who anonymously work on testimonies.The targeting of translators working with journalists is a facet of China’s larger project to erode or even extinguish the Uyghur language, say scholars. The Uyghur language has been banned from schools, Uyghur language newspapers have closed, and Uyghur language books are largely missing in Xinjiang while intellectuals are being targeted for punishment.

“Many Uyghurs have found safe havens abroad, but they’re still dealing with educational systems that do not have a space to accommodate the Uyghur language. Language is one means of intergenerational transmission of knowledge and ways of life,” said Elise Anderson, the Uyghur-speaking researcher at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. “People have been forced into a situation where no matter where they are in the world and no matter what they’re doing, it’s very difficult for them to pass on their native language to their children in the way they would most prefer.”

The post Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story appeared first on Coda Story.

When the journalist arrived, he was greeted by a person who didn’t look familiar. He wasn’t a childhood friend. Instead, the man told the reporter, he worked with one of China’s state security agencies. He explained that before their meeting, he had paid a visit to some of the reporter’s family members back in Tibet — who were fine, he assured him — and then waved over two men sitting at a nearby table. The trio then besieged the journalist with questions — “Who are your sources in Tibet? How do you get your information?” — but the reporter refused to answer and hurried out of the hotel.

A few weeks later, he was ambushed on his walk home from work. According to one of the reporter’s former colleagues, two men sprung out of a vehicle, thrust a black hood over his head, and pushed him into the car. The van drove around for hours as the men interrogated the reporter about his contacts in Tibet and searched through his phone. Again, he refused to answer. After several hours, the kidnappers dropped the reporter off near his house, warned him not to turn around for five minutes, and sped away. 

According to a U.S.-based Tibetan journalist who had worked with the kidnapped man, this was the end of his colleague’s career in media. He was terrified that his journalism work could put him and his relatives back in Tibet in harm’s way. “He was so worried about his family he quit reporting right away,” he explained. “He said, ‘I’m not going to risk my life and my family’s lives.’”

The U.S.-based Tibetan journalist, who was privy to the events leading up to and including the kidnapping, asked for anonymity and to withhold the location of the kidnapping to protect his colleague’s identity.

Fear of retaliation against family members back home, which forced the Tibetan reporter out of his media job, is a key feature of China’s pressure campaign against diaspora journalists and writers, particularly for members of religious and ethnic minority groups like Uyghurs and Tibetans. 

They are among the 55 ethnic minorities in the country outside of the Han Chinese majority, who make up more than 90% of the population. Under China’s President Xi Jinping, Beijing has pursued a sweeping policy of “Sinicization” aimed at assimilating the country’s ethnic minorities into the dominant Han culture. This approach includes a crackdown on local languages and religions and has been accompanied by wide-ranging and ambitious initiatives by the Chinese government to silence its critics. Both efforts can be seen as separate expressions of the same larger goal: to create a homogenous national identity defined by the state, with no room for alternative points of view. People who challenge the government’s sanctioned identity narratives can be subject to pressure, even when they live far away from China.

Borders do not necessarily constrain the government’s reach.

Writers and journalists from the country’s ethnic minorities, therefore, find themselves at the hostile intersection of China’s multi-pronged war against independent speech and identity. 

In Tibet, which has been under Beijing’s control for decades, the Chinese government’s long-simmering campaign of cultural erasure can be seen as a progenitor of the oppression it later unleashed on Xinjiang, which has been described as a genocide by U.S. officials. There, more than one million Uyghurs have been sent to concentration camps and the relatives of exiled reporters face relentless persecution, intimidation, and harassment. Many people I interviewed pointed out that the former party secretary in Tibet subsequently became the Chinese party secretary of Xinjiang. In Tibet, he expanded policing and cultural assimilation, and developed a widespread surveillance system. Experts say he continued to implement those same policies in Xinjiang. While the repression and government justification for it is distinct in each respective region, some see Tibet as a testing ground for the campaign later deployed in Xinjiang.

Beijing’s pathology around minorities’ distinct cultural identities is rooted in an understanding that they can act as a counterweight to the government’s desire to control the narrative. “They recognize the power of words and culture as an animating force,” said James Tager, the director of research at PEN America. “And they have these policies of culture diminution or cultural erasure, particularly in Xinjiang, and similarly, somewhat less intense but somewhat more sustained, is the effort to diminish Tibetan culture. Peaceful cultural advocacy is potentially criminal in China.”

According to the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world” — referring to the suite of tactics from surveillance technology to physical violence, intimidation, and harassment that governments use to persecute citizens of their own countries who live overseas. In China, the targets of this campaign include ethnic minorities like Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians, as well as Han Chinese reporters and writers covering China critically. Their experiences are a case study of what a well-resourced regime can do when it weaponizes technology, repression, and fear to create a sweeping information suppression apparatus that reaches around the globe. 

“The full scope of censorship needs to be understood as not only what is explicitly being banned but by the message that the targets of the censorship internalize. It’s called the chilling effect,” explained Tager. “And many writers across cultural and social spheres will feel chilled because they know that people who are seen as too critical of (Chinese Communist Party) governance may put their family members within China at risk.”

For Tibetan diaspora journalists, threats of retaliation against family members remain a powerful tool in the transnational repression playbook. The region has been under China’s control since the 1950s, when it was invaded by the newly formed People’s Republic of China. After an unsuccessful uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India and set up the Tibetan government in exile, where some 90,000 Tibetans currently live, and which remains a focal point for the exile media community as it seeks to cover one of the world’s most restrictive media environments from outside. 

Tibet is ranked as the worst place globally for civil liberties and political rights according to Freedom House — tied with Syria and above South Sudan, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. Media outlets within Tibet are controlled by China, international broadcasts are routinely jammed, foreign journalists must apply for — and are often denied — permission from the Chinese government to go to the region, and Tibetans who pass information to foreign media risk arrest. Today, human rights groups and exile journalists say it has effectively become walled off from the foreign press. 

“Nowadays people tend to think that because Tibet is not coming up too much in the news, it’s because nothing is happening in Tibet. That’s not true,” Kalden Lodoe, the Tibetan service director at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C., told me. “The information flow is totally blocked there.” 

For journalists covering it from afar, like Lodoe’s team, “we feel like we are digging into a very strict police state where people are watched constantly,” he added. “It’s escalated and it’s only going to get worse. They have created this fearful society where if you have any contacts outside you will be in trouble.”

Authorities impose harsh penalties on Tibetans who communicate with journalists or family members living overseas who send information to exile media. According to data provided to Coda by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, over the last decade, 98 Tibetans have been detained for contacting journalists and source intermediaries outside the region. Sixteen are currently imprisoned and serving their sentences. Prominent cases include Kunchok Jinpa, a Tibetan tour guide who was detained in 2013 and later sentenced to 21 years in prison for “leaking state secrets” by providing information to foreign reporters about protests in Tibet. Jinpa died last February while serving his sentence due to reported paralysis and brain hemorrhage. Another well-publicized case is the imprisonment of Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan language advocate who was released from prison in China last year after spending five years behind bars over a charge of “inciting separatism” based on an interview he gave to The New York Times.

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Some diaspora writers and journalists fear their work could expose relatives and sources in Tibet to detention or arrest, and sources in exile can be wary of communicating with the press for the same reason. They say that exiled journalists’ and writers’ family members still living in Tibet come under pressure from Chinese authorities. 

Sonam Tobgyal, a researcher with the U.K.-based human rights nonprofit Tibet Watch, said families living in exile with relatives still in Tibet have received threatening calls from unknown numbers after news leaks from the region that officials suspect they are connected to. “They will say, ‘If you do this again, your family is in your hands,’” he said.

“This is how they threaten, saying, ‘You are responsible for the safety of your family.’”

In Xinjiang, the relatives of diaspora reporters are also under siege. As of March 2021, more than 50 family members of journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service have been arrested by Chinese officials, according to the broadcaster, including relatives who have gone missing.

“The tactical maneuver is to make everyone think twice before they think or write or publish and to think about whether there could be negative consequences for their family members, their friends, and their communities,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.

In Tibet, the relative of one Radio Free Asia reporter was severely beaten and detained for a week after speaking to the news service, according to Lodoe. Two additional relatives of the same reporter were arrested and imprisoned for sharing information with the agency, and the family members of other Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan journalists have gotten visits from local officials. “People are very scared,” he said. “For example, our reporters in Washington, D.C., their families have told them, in coded language, ‘we are fine, please don’t call us.’ It’s not just one or two. Many reporters will not even talk to their parents nowadays.”

The lingering possibility of family and source retaliation carries a heavy psychological toll for exiled Tibetans working in the public eye. A Tibetan writer based out of India, who asked to be anonymous to protect his family’s safety, told me authorities have stopped by the home of his family members still in Tibet and interrogated them about his work and his whereabouts. “I recently got a message from my sister saying, ‘don’t come back to Tibet,’ the police were searching for me,” he said. Because of the risks, he added, “I hardly communicate with my parents. If I talk with them, we talk about sensitive issues in a code way.”

In the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Tibet was gripped by anti-government protests marking the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Eager to avoid bad international press in the lead-up to the games, Beijing moved swiftly to stamp out coverage of the protests, barring foreign reporters from entering Tibet and censoring and blocking international news reports and broadcasts. Tibetans who passed information to foreign media faced stiff penalties, including detention and imprisonment. Later, China responded to the unrest by ratcheting up control of the media and expanding surveillance and policing, according to human rights groups. 

Experts and journalists I spoke to said the situation in Tibet has worsened in the fourteen years since the protests, aided by a sophisticated surveillance dragnet in which police, cameras, facial recognition, online surveillance, and self-censorship are ubiquitous. “China is more effective now because they’re employing their whole state and human resources to spy, monitor, and surveil everything,” said Tibet Watch’s Tobgyal.

“It’s very difficult and it’s not getting better, but more disastrous.”

The Chinese messaging app WeChat has complicated the communication landscape for people within and beyond Tibet. The platform, which is China’s most popular messaging app, has given a place for diaspora Tibetans and their loved ones at home to stay in touch, while simultaneously exposing them to government surveillance. A 2020 report by the Canada-based cybersecurity research organization Citizen Lab found that the platform surveils accounts from outside of China and uses that content to train censorship algorithms deployed on accounts registered in China. Tibetan WeChat users have reportedly been detained for sharing photos of the Dalai Lama, spreading “rumors” about coronavirus on the app, and setting up a chat group without registering it with local authorities as required.

Despite the privacy and security risks, the app became widely adopted by Tibetans overseas, with an estimated 70% of the diaspora population using the platform as of 2019. In 2020, however, India banned the platform — a move Tenzin Dalha, who researches Chinese cybersecurity with the Tibet Policy Institute, said has presented communication barriers between exile reporters and Tibetans and their contacts back at home. Some use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the ban, but others do not have the technological know-how to figure it out. For the latter group, Dalha explained, “their communications completely broke down since the Indian government banned WeChat. There’s become more like a communication vacuum between inside and outside Tibet.”

Now, as all eyes are on Beijing for the Olympics, sources I talked to describe a complete information blackout from Tibet. Updates from the ground have halted, leaving family members living overseas in complete darkness about what’s happening at home. 

“We don’t know what’s happening inside Tibet,” Tobgyal told me. “If you have family in Tibet, it’s scary. You aren’t able to talk to them and you don’t know what’s going on. So you have to anxiously wait.”

Beijing’s clampdown on press freedom in Tibet has broadened over the last several years. It now sweeps up writing that’s not politically inflected. Even a year ago, there were a handful of websites in Tibet that published content about Tibetan culture, language, and the environment, according to Tseten Wangchuk, a senior editor with the Tibetan Service for the U.S.-funded international news outlet Voice of America. Now, Wangchuk said, “They all shut down. I think there used to be a borderline, a gray area where you could talk about the environment, Tibetan language, and things like that. Now it seems like nobody can write about anything — any topic — that’s outside of government control.”

There are clear links between China’s hostility toward Tibetan cultural writing and its Sinicization campaign, which has sought to eradicate the distinct religious and cultural identities of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians. PEN’s James Tager said that Beijing sees cultural promotion as a threat. “Beijing tends to view expressions of culture through the lens of potential criminality. Particularly in ethnic minority communities, they treat cultural promotion, cultural engagement, cultural activism, as a substitute for political activism that they see as threatening and illegal.”

The assimilation project has taken aim at mother tongue education for ethnic minority groups. Under China’s “bilingual education” policy, schools in Tibet have shifted to teaching in Mandarin over Tibetan, according to human rights groups. A recent report by the U.S.-based Tibet Action Institute found that roughly 800,000 Tibetan school children are enrolled in boarding schools where they are taught primarily in Chinese. “Wait another 10 years and almost no one will speak Tibetan anymore,” said Human Rights Watch’s Richardson.

In Xinjiang, China’s campaign of repression, surveillance, and cultural erasure has been described as a genocide by the Biden administration. Chinese officials have sent more than one million Uyghurs to concentration camps, demolished mosques, and banned Uyghur language education in schools. Uyghurs living overseas, including prominent journalists, are subject to intimidation and threats. According to Alim Seytoff, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service director, eight U.S.-based reporters for the news division have family members in Xinjiang who are in detention or have disappeared. Seytoff said some of those reporters had relatives approached by Chinese authorities. “They basically said, ‘Tell your relatives in America working at Radio Free Asia to stop telling the world what’s happening,’” Seytoff said.

And in Inner Mongolia, the Chinese government in 2020 rolled out a new policy phasing out language instruction in schools from Mongolian to Mandarin, setting off massive protests. Enghebatu Togochog, director of the U.S.-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, said the policy generated such fierce blowback because language is seen as the final symbol left of Mongolian’s distinct cultural identity. Already, Togochog said schools have implemented the language change and said the organization has heard of instances in which officials have taken down Mongolian language signs. 

“Right now what we are facing is wholesale cultural genocide,” he said. “First our political rights were taken away. Then our way of life was completely changed. Language is pretty much the last defense of Mongolian identity, so just get rid of that and these people will become Chinese.”

China’s crusade against free expression has turned the country into the most aggressive jailer of journalists in the world. The regime has placed at least 127 reporters behind bars — more than half of whom are Uyghur — according to the global press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, which ranks China 177th out of 180 in its World Press Freedom Index. Beijing’s clampdown on the press has escalated dramatically under Xi Jinping’s leadership, who, Reporters Without Borders argues, has “restored a media culture worthy of the Maoist era, in which freely accessing information has become a crime and to provide information an even greater crime.”

Crucially, this campaign is not just limited to China. Over the last decade, China has invested heavily in its global media footprint, acquiring shares in foreign media outlets and vastly expanding the reach of international TV broadcasting. The state-owned China Global Television now airs in more than 160 countries while independent Chinese media overseas has shrunk.

Cedric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders’ Taipei Bureau Director, who has written extensively about press freedom in China, characterized Beijing’s approach to the press as: “If you can’t kill it, buy it.” The outcome, he added, “is that now, in 2022, there’s very few Chinese language overseas media that are critical of the Chinese regime.”

Adversarial reporters or journalists who cover Beijing’s policies in an unflattering light outside the country have come under diplomatic pressure from Chinese embassies overseas, including foreign reporters like a Swedish journalist who received a threatening email from the Chinese Embassy in Sweden in 2021, accusing him of spreading anti-Chinese misinformation and demanding he cease his coverage or “face the consequences of your actions.” 

For journalists with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service in Washington, D.C., the risks of the work are well understood.

“Our reporters understand the difficult situation we are in,” Seytoff told me. “But in spite of the detention and the disappearances of our loved ones, in spite of the fact that China is committing genocide against our people, and in spite of all of this tremendous psychological pressure on us, I think we have kept our cool. We are deeply devoted to journalism.”

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