After #China released videos featuring #Uyghur men and women in #Xinjiang denying US accusations that #Beijing is committing human rights violations against them, a text received by @AP showed that the videos are part of China's propaganda campaign. apnews.com/article/asia-p…
The videos, which officials have insisted are spontaneous outpourings of emotion, have also featured prominently in a series of government news conferences held for foreign media.
But the text obtained by AP is the first concrete confirmation that the videos are anything but grassroots. Sent in January to government offices in the northern city of Karamay, the text told each office to find one Uyghur fluent in Mandarin ...
... to film a one-minute video in response to Pompeo’s “anti-China remarks.”
“Express a clear position on Pompeo’s remarks, for example: I firmly oppose Pompeo’s anti-Chinese remarks, and I am very angry about them,” the text said. “Express your feelings of loving the party, ...
... the country and Xinjiang (I am Chinese, I love my motherland, I am happy at work and in life, and so on).”
“There’s something instinctive about these videos which feels ingenuine, but the significance is that there’s hard evidence here that the Chinese government is requesting these kinds of videos,” said @AlbertYZhang from @ASPI_org.
Xinjiang spokesperson Xu Guixiang did not directly deny the authenticity of the text, but said it didn’t follow the usual format of state orders and that his understanding was that “the government has never issued this kind of notice or made this kind of request.”
“This didn’t require government organization. Many among the masses made this totally spontaneously,” Xu said in a recent interview. “Pompeo’s anti-China remarks arose the intense resentment of various ethnic groups in Xinjiang.”
Tahir Imin, a Uyghur activist who fled China in 2017, said the videos are almost certainly state-orchestrated and coerced, given that information in Xinjiang is heavily censored.
“People don’t know who Pompeo is or what he’s saying,” Imin said. “How would they know what Mike Pompeo is saying about the Uyghurs?”
The AP was unable to authenticate the text independently. However, friends of Firdavs Drinov, the man who sent a screenshot of the text to the AP, said he had obtained it from a friend with family working for the Karamay government.
Three days after he sent it, police detained Drinov and the friend, holding a special meeting on how to punish him, two other friends said.
@nyrola said that after she started tweeting about the detention of her cousin, police pounded on her mother’s door in Xinjiang clutching printouts of her tweets. “Make your daughter delete these,” they said, threatening to detain her if Elimä didn’t comply.
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