THREAD: Following our cover this week on Uyghurs, I wanted to highlight scholars, journalists, activists and exiles who have helped expose and explain what is happening in Xinjiang, from the camps to population control to the diminishing of Uyghur identity economist.com/leaders/2020/1…
Early work exposing the camps in 2017 was done by Uyghur exile journalists at Radio Free Asia rfa.org/english/news/u… and by @SophieHRW & @wang_maya at Human Rights Watch. HRW made this call to free detainees in Sept 2017, with receipts from state media hrw.org/news/2017/09/1…
Many scholars have been helpful to me in my own reporting on Uyghurs over the years, from my time in China well before the camps to now. One is @GroseTimothy. His latest explores how the CCP's forcible assimilation of Uyghurs penetrates into their homes tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
.@RianThum has written definitively on the CCP's destruction of Uyghur historical and holy places (while at the same time transforming Uyghur spaces into tourist attractions) madeinchinajournal.com/2020/08/24/the…
Read @j_smithfinley on the "cleansing of Xinjiang". She visited in 2018 and saw official language evoking "1984": 'The parallels between that masterpiece and a Xinjiang now in the grip of “de-extremification” and “thought liberation” are astonishing.' chinafile.com/reporting-opin…
UN experts on human rights have repeatedly called for action, here their latest statement in June ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/… Last month @HRW and more than 300 other orgs called for an international mechanism to address human rights violations in China hrw.org/news/2020/09/0…
More governments are speaking up too, and fewer are publicly backing China's treatment of Uyghurs despite intense pressure from the CCP. Some details in this thread
I mentioned the brave work of Uyghur exiles at RFA (a story of mine on that economist.com/china/2019/10/…) but must stress the bravery in the Uyghur diaspora to speak out, and of Kazakhs who were detained and got out of PRC. An early story (in Russian) from 2017 rus.azattyq.org/a/kitay-kazakh…
John Phipps wrote for sister mag 1843 on fear in the Uyghur diaspora of retaliation against family economist.com/1843/2020/10/1…. Zumrat Dawut, whom I interviewed for this story (along with unnamed others), has seen her brother put on video in PRC to dispute her economist.com/china/2020/10/…
THREAD: Our cover this week is about the persecution of China's Uyghurs. In our editorial, we urge governments and others to do more about this crime against humanity economist.com/leaders/2020/1…
Systematic efforts to suppress Uyghurs go far beyond the camps. Local documents (shared with us by @adrianzenz) in 1 county show nearly 10% of children in grades 1-6 lost at least one parent to detention. Many children are put in boarding schools. My story economist.com/china/2020/10/…
The local documents reveal a chilling terminology for children who've lost one or both parents to detention: "single-hardship" and "double-hardship." Extrapolating the data across Xinjiang implies as many as 250,000 children under 15 have lost one or both parents to detention
The Harvard Crimson identifies the official who in 2015 pushed to call off a campus event with a prominent Chinese dissident because then-President Drew Faust was in Beijing having just met Xi Jinping: William Alford, vice dean at the law school thecrimson.com/article/2020/4…
This is part of an in-depth look by @thecrimson at Harvard’s history of engagement with China, which carries such risks of self-censorship. I mentioned this episode, and the pressure universities can feel, in this story on Chinese students in the US google.com/amp/s/amp.econ…
Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer who was a visiting fellow at Harvard at the time, talked to me about the incident but, as with the Crimson, wouldn’t name the official who pressured him because he feared retaliation — in the US. The long arm of the CCP, externalizing censorship
I don’t know about you but I am looking forward to Br*t St*phens’ next piece: “What if Covid-19 is right?”
“Universities are now barring the virus from their campuses — and even calling off events altogether just so the virus can’t show up uninvited — another dispiriting sign of cancel culture on the left”
“Some politically correct scientists have taken to comparing covid-19 to an infectious disease, invoking dangerous stereotypes reminiscent of the Nazis.”
YouTube's global head of content policy, Chris Libertelli, was working on their new hate speech policy when I interviewed him in April. We talked about where to draw the line and I think it's worth sharing his comments [THREAD] 1/ nytimes.com/2019/06/05/bus…
"From Susan [Wojcicki] to Neal [Mohan] to everyone on down...it is an active area of discussion about where that line should be... The balance of free expression versus community protection is something that is talked about multiple times a day, every day in my job." 2/
[YouTube's content policy chief in April]: "Whether [the line] should move a lot or a little depends on the subcategory of the content that we're talking about. Should change happen? I think there's a sense that yes, there should be some change in the way we think about it" 3/