Latest news with #Uighur
Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
Harvard accused of collaborating with Chinese Communist Party
Republicans in Congress have opened up a new front in their attacks on Harvard University, accusing it of collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party, training its paramilitaries and working with its scientists on 'dual-use' research. The university is fighting back against a full-scale assault on its status and funding by the Trump administration, which has accused it of 'fostering antisemitism' due to pro-Palestinian activism by its students. Now, a letter to the university signed by three prominent Republicans highlights longstanding concerns, also expressed about UK and other western universities, over Harvard's engagement with Chinese partners. These partners include universities and researchers with links to the Chinese quango behind much of the ruling apparatus in Xinjiang, where millions in the Uighur minority have been held in
Korea Herald
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Korea Herald
Kazakhstan vows stronger interethnic harmony
Kazakh leader calls for stronger interethnic unity amid global uncertainty Korea Herald correspondent ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Kazakhstan vowed stronger interethnic harmony to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan on Thursday. Taking place at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Kazakhstan's capital Astana, the assembly discussed the nation's statehood and societal cohesion. The APK was established on March 1, 1995, by the first President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and has evolved from an advisory body into a constitutionally recognized institution of the Kazakh government in 2007. Chaired by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the assembly brought together more than 2,000 members from diverse ethnic, social and professional backgrounds. 'Only where there is unity, there is life,' remarked the president at the assembly's 34th session, pointing to the value of unity amid global uncertainty. 'Some ethnocultural associations have gathered unique private collections of art and ethnography that should also become part of the national cultural heritage,' Tokayev suggested. 'Kazakhstan is home to nine Russian drama theaters and four unique ethnic theaters — Uighur, Korean, Uzbek and German,' said Tokayev. According to the president, Kazakhstan ensures equal opportunities regardless of ethnicity, language, or religion, calling the commitment to fairness the foundation of a just state. Kazakhstan's multicultural identity is reflected in its rich cultural infrastructure, including nine Russian drama theaters and four ethnic theaters — Uighur, Korean, Uzbek, and German, he said, applauding ethnocultural associations. Organizers say that the assembly unites people who value social harmony with over 1,000 ethnocultural associations, APK institutions, and community initiatives such as councils of mothers and elders, a youth wing and volunteer-driven centers. 'We are different, but equal,' Tokayev said, underscoring that all ethnic groups living on Kazakh soil have the opportunity to fully develop their language, culture and traditions. But he also warned against provocations targeting ethnic harmony. 'Any provocative actions aimed at inciting discord in our society or destabilizing the situation will be stopped and punished by law,' he said, reinforcing that 'ideological strife is absolutely alien to our (Kazakh) worldview.' Citing Kazakhstan's historical tradition of hospitality, Tokayev recalled how the nation received millions who resettled during the Soviet era. Kazakhstan has a long history of people moving there from other regions. In the 20th century, many Russians, Slavs and other Soviet ethnic groups arrived in several waves. In the 1930s, many came to work in factories, while others were forced to move due to Stalin's purges. In the 1950s and 60s, more people arrived as part of the Virgin Lands campaign. During World War II, Kazakhstan became a safe place for over a million people escaping the Nazis, and was also a destination for groups, such as Crimean Tatars, Germans, Koreans, and North Caucasus Chechens and Ingush who were deported from Russia. 'Kazakhs accepted them as brothers. Millions of their descendants are now full-fledged, responsible citizens of Kazakhstan,' he said. 'I have instructed the Akims to regularly hold meetings on interethnic and interethnic relations,' said Tokayev. An Akim is the head of a local government in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan who looks after administrative duties to implement policies within their region. 'All ethnic groups living on Kazakh soil have the opportunity to fully develop their language, culture and traditions," Tokayev highlighted. Meanwhile, he also underscored Kazakhstan's friendly ties with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. 'There are no unresolved issues between us,' he noted, adding that regional cooperation is a hallmark of Kazakhstan's diplomacy. To mark the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, citizens were awarded state honors by presidential order for promoting peace, friendship and interethnic harmony. "We need unity. Unity means happiness, kindness, support for each other, and love for people,' Anel Marabayeva, one of the recipients of the President's award, told The Korea Herald. 'Interethnic coexistence, unity, kindness, and mutual support are the backbone of a diverse society,' she added. sanjaykumar@
Daily Mail
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
I was brutally raped by the man I'd been forced to marry to save my mother. And that was just the start of the horror: A survivor reveals the chilling truth about gang rape and torture in China's death camps
For brides around the world, their wedding day is meant to be a magic moment, often filled with family, friends and fond memories. But for Gul, then a 23-year-old model in Shanghai, it was among the darkest of days. 'When I had the wedding, it felt like a funeral to me; and when I signed the marriage certificate, it felt like I was signing my death certificate,' she told me. 'I did not wear the dress. I did not receive greetings from family members. I did not say anything to my friends. I did not even share a picture on social media.' The reason for her misery? She had been forced into matrimony with a man she loathed by the Chinese dictatorship which, as we shall see, insisted it was the only way she could save herself and her mother from incarceration in a hellish concentration camp. The marriage was consummated in the cruellest way imaginable: she was raped as she lay on their bed, while recovering from a savage beating by her drunk new husband that left her unconscious with a broken jaw and nose. For Gul is a Uighur – and the ruthless Communist regime is trying to wipe out the culture, language, religion and traditions of this Muslim minority from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang using some of the most sinister methods of repression on our planet. In the cause of what they call 'ethnic unity', police pressurised her to marry a Han Chinese man – a member of the country's majority ethnic group – and she felt powerless to resist. Her mother was freed on her wedding day from one of the camps that hold an estimated one million Uighurs. 'We all knew what happened if you said no to them,' said Gul. 'We all knew of people being arrested and sent to the camps and the bad life they suffered, feet shackled together and being tortured.' Gul can only tell me her story because she managed to escape both her husband and China, taking her five-year-old daughter with her. And what she relates is a shocking exposition of the barbarities inflicted by Beijing on the 12million-strong Uighur population. Her revelations follow a political storm that this week forced Energy Minister Ed Miliband into a U-turn on the use of solar panels linked to forced Uighur labour in the Xinjiang region. Labour had earlier blocked a House of Lords legal amendment that would have forced state-owned GB Energy to make sure solar panels that Britain imported from China were not among the many produced by slave labour. But such was the outcry from campaigners and Labour MPs over the Government's decision to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in its dash for Net Zero, that the Government has now had to make a humiliating reverse. Fresh concerns over the sinister role of the Communist state after the attempted closure of British Steel's Scunthorpe site by the Chinese firm Jingye, with warnings to ministers over Beijing's influence over Britain's critical infrastructure, may also have influenced the decision. Under China's reign of terror in the Xinjiang region, entire villages have been sent to 're-education' camps, which often contain factories within their walls for forced labour. Survivors tell of gang rape and torture, while the regime has destroyed mosques, imposed rigid surveillance on Uighurs and inflicted mass sterilisation of women – as I have heard from several victims. This all follows the mass migration of Han Chinese people into Xinjiang, a movement orchestrated by Beijing to dilute minorities and plunder natural resources. China has been promoting and incentivising mixed ethnicity marriages in Uighur regions since 2014, sparking claims and rumours about the use of forced marriage. But Gul, now 31, is the first Uighur woman subjected to this atrocity to speak out publicly. She is hiding her full identity to protect relatives still in the country. She fled to Switzerland last year and we spoke for almost five hours. Clearly traumatised from the abuse she suffered, and frequently breaking into tears, she said she wanted the world to know about 'the evil of their system'. The first ten years of Gul's life were blissfully happy. She had been adopted and lived with her mother and grandparents close to the fabled Silk Road city of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang. Then came a hostile new stepfather, school bullies and years of struggle. At 16, she went to live in Urumqi, the regional capital, and later met a woman who ran a modelling company. 'She said my face and figure was good, so I could work with them – and after about three months, offered me training in Shanghai,' Gul said. So the young Uighur woman went off to live in the world's third-biggest city and learn modelling. She posed for clothing companies, attended shop openings, stood in front of malls to entice customers and even picked up some walk-on film roles. 'Life was enjoyable. It was hard work because we had to stand for a long time, wear very high heels, sometimes change into hundreds of clothes, so it could be tiring – but I earned a good salary and could buy what I wanted. It was a good time.' She made friends and went to nightclubs in the pulsating metropolis. But there was endless harassment from police officers. They would stop her at checkpoints for her identity card, repeatedly question her about her activities and acquaintances and even force her to move flats. 'The police told me that places should not be rented to Uighurs and that they should not be allowed to live in proper China, nor allowed to have property or shops in China.' Gul's move to Shanghai had taken place in 2012 – the year Xi Jinping took power and ramped up repression in Xinjiang. He ordered officials to show no mercy after anti-government protests and attacks. The huge network of concentration camps was introduced along with forced labour programmes and the world's most intrusive surveillance system to clamp down on Uighurs. 'They think all Uighurs are terrorists,' said Gul. 'Even now I feel stressed whenever I see someone in uniform; even here in Switzerland I feel the same.' In 2016, she returned to Xinjiang on a visit and noticed 'everything was changing'. Permits were suddenly needed for Uighurs even to visit nearby towns. There was a proliferation of checkpoints, facial recognition cameras and security forces across the region. Friends started disappearing into the newly established 'study' camps. A 90-year-old family neighbour also vanished. 'I wondered, how can that be? What can he do at 90 against the government? I felt very angry for him,' she said. There was less surveillance back in Shanghai, but Gul still had to endure endless visits and calls from local police who were monitoring her. 'Sometimes they would phone three times a day. I'd say even my mother does not call me three times a day, asking: 'What are you doing?' ' In January 2018, Gul was ordered back to Xinjiang for a new identity card. Police took blood for DNA records, scanned her iris for high-tech surveillance systems – and then told her she needed to go into a camp to study Chinese and the law. Gul played for time. She said she would love to go but had to return to her job, then tried to bribe the officers with alcohol and cigarettes. But she could not board her flight home without permission from police – and they refused it. Then came the chilling threat that would change her life. 'They said: 'Now we are promoting ethnic unity, so Chinese and Uighur become one family. It is better to find someone to get married. Then we can allow you to leave and your street administration [local surveillance] will not call you all the time or arrest you. It is better for you.' ' Gul had heard rumours about Uighurs in rural areas being told to give their daughters to Chinese officials for marriage. Now they were urging her to get hitched to a Han man – and she knew refusal would be dangerous. 'They said: 'We can help you, we can find someone.' I thought if I said yes, they wouldn't push me. So I said yes and left, thinking that would be it.' Before they agreed to let her go, they told her to call her police monitoring contact in Shanghai. The contact held a long conversation with the Xinjiang officers and they exchanged numbers. Then Gul went back to Shanghai. It was about one month later that the police contact phoned to invite her for dinner. When she arrived at the venue, she was surprised to find it was a very expensive restaurant. She was filled with nerves. 'I thought maybe they would trap me, selling me to high officials as a sex trade. 'I had heard about this happening to Uighur girls, entrapped by police and forced into sex. I thought maybe if I drink a lot and sleep with them, maybe I can save myself.' She relaxed when she saw the officer sitting alone. But then, during the meal, he called to another man seated nearby and invited him over to join them –pretending their companion was a friend, although he later turned out to be a relative of the officer. I asked Gul what this man was like. 'Very ugly,' she replied instantly. 'And he was drunk.' The police officer, after rhapsodising about the beauty of Uighur women, told Gul that she could be good friends and 'maybe lovers' with the man, who worked as a cocktail waiter. Gul dismissed the idea, not seeing the reality of events unfolding in front of her. 'I said that if I had a boyfriend like him my parents would put me in a pen and feed me like a dog,' Gul said. 'The policeman asked: 'What are you talking about? We are promoting ethnic unity and he is handsome, like a Korean movie star.'' She was told to make contact with the man on WeChat, a Chinese social media platform. So she did, and the pair talked a bit, had a few meals together and went to a couple of films. But after he kept bothering her, demanding to be her lover and husband, she deleted him from her network. 'After that the local administration in Xinjiang began contacting me to ask why I was not coming back to go to school – they meant the re-education camp. I said I had permission to be in Shanghai. So they put my mother in the camp instead of me.' A relative working for the government explained that this was because of her refusal to agree to the marriage being arranged by officials. 'I felt so hopeless at such misfortune,' said Gul, who finally accepted her fate. After she signed the marriage contract, her mother was released. She persuaded her new husband – who was from a poor background – to accept a sham marriage that boosted his status without them living together. But when police discovered this artifice, they ordered her to move in with him that very night. Since he shared a small flat with four other men, she had to take him to her home. 'At first sight I did not like him and this only grew stronger,' said Gul. 'He was very smelly and did not clean himself or his clothes.' Her husband was often drunk and abusive, stealing alcohol from his workplace. 'When I didn't agree to sleep with him he would force me – and when I resisted, he became more excited to do that,' she said hesitantly, tears flowing down her face. After three years, the miserable woman – by now a mother to her husband's child – planned to divorce him. But her own mother, terrified of returning to the camp that she described as being 'like a grave', came to Shanghai with an aunt to plead with Gul to remain married. Then, in desperation after a failed suicide attempt early last year, she managed to establish contact with a Uighur activist in the United States. 'I said I can't save myself so I will die, but I don't want my daughter to stay in China. Can you find someone in the US to adopt her? She can never live like a human being in China.' Instead, the activist instructed her on how to flee the country. Thanks to her marriage, she could obtain a Chinese passport – then, in May last year, she sent her possessions to a friend in Germany, then flew to Dubai and freedom. Gul told me she decided to live in Switzerland since she had loved watching the film Heidi as a child with her grandfather. And now she has shaken off the evil Beijing propaganda that taught her to be ashamed of her culture. 'I have learned about our history, that we once had our own land and country – and about all that the Chinese government is doing to the people in Xinjiang,' she said defiantly. 'Now I am proud to be Uighur.'
Times
23-04-2025
- Business
- Times
Ed Miliband to ban Chinese ‘slave-trade' solar panels
Solar panels linked to Chinese slave labour will not be used by Britain's state-owned energy company after a government climbdown that could threaten its net-zero ambitions. In a major policy reversal, the energy minister Ed Miliband will introduce an amendment to legislation that will force GB Energy to ensure 'slavery and human trafficking is not taking place' in its supply chain. All solar panels, wind turbines and batteries must not contain materials suspected to have been produced through slave labour. Much of the world's supply of polysilicon comes from the Xinjiang region, where there are suspected human rights abuses of the Uighur population. The reversal was welcomed by some Labour MPs who had campaigned on the issue after they were ordered to block the same proposed ban when it was tabled by peers, last month. Labour instructed its MPs to vote down an amendment from the Lords which would have changed the Great British Energy Bill, preventing ministers from providing financial assistance to GB Energy if there were credible evidence of modern slavery in the company's supply chains. A government source said there had been 'recognition of the strength of feeling' after 92 MPs abstained on the previous vote. It is also understood that campaigners had lined up case studies of solar panels which were linked to slave labour being installed on public buildings. Critics said it would also heap further pressure on the government's 2050 net-zero ambitions by slowing the pace of the UK's transition away from fossil fuels. It has also pledged to achieve clean energy by 2030. Ministers are understood to have been 'convinced that GB Energy needs to be an industry leader' in rooting out slavery from supply chains. A government source said: 'We are committed to ensuring Great British Energy is a sector leader in this area, developing resilient, home-grown supply chains free from forced labour, and will bring forward proposals shortly on this.' Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow energy secretary, told The Times the move would lead to a 'real slowdown in the deployment of solar in the United Kingdom'. He said: 'It's a belated realisation that the use of slave labour in the manufacturing of solar technology is real, but Labour really need to answer serious questions about whether their own self-imposed targets can be met without these solar panels, and what they're going to do to address this.' John Flesher, deputy director of the Conservative Environment Network, said it was a 'long overdue move' which he welcomed — but warned: 'The government must now act to ensure that this knee-jerk U-turn doesn't damage our environmental goals and the solar industry.' He said the government now 'must be bold' and do 'much more to support British and allied supply chains to meet the demand', adding: 'If the government doesn't act, we will not only hurt efforts to decarbonise but miss out on an enormous opportunity for economic growth.' Campaigners have said that 97 per cent of solar panels sold in the UK include materials from Xinjiang. Senior government sources insisted pledges would still be met due to the building-up of domestic supply chains and pressure put on China. They said: 'There is an absolute abundance of solar panels, and it is more than possible to source our global need for solar panels in a way that is compliant with human rights.' Sources also said China was 'beginning to understand how important and serious this is' for countries buying materials from them, which Miliband stressed on a recent visit to the country. They said it was a 'buyer's club' of countries who were demanding better standards from China, adding: 'We've got to both diversify from China, but also we've got to keep going on … a buyer's group of countries who are demanding change.' Campaigners have said that solar and wind are heavily exposed to forced labour, with more than 500 allegations of human rights abuses linked to the extraction of key minerals in supply chains needed for the energy transition. About 40 per cent of Britain's solar industry has been reported as being at risk of being linked to Uighur forced labour. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham who has long campaigned on the issue, said she was 'relieved' by the move but would be holding ministers to further commitments. She added: 'This is the only way to make sure our transition to net zero is not carried through on the backs of slavery and exploitation.' Luke de Pulford, the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), said he was 'delighted the government has listened and acted'. He said: 'We cannot build a just transition on the backs of Uighur slaves. Since the 2015 Modern Slavery Act there have been two major changes to primary legislation on forced labour in supply chains. Lord Alton [of Liverpool], supported by IPAC MPs and civil society, was responsible for the amendments that led to both of them. 'We now need to ensure that the law has teeth, and that GB Energy doesn't allow a single solar panel with slave-produced polysilicon, a single battery with slave-processed raw materials, or a wind turbine with slave-produced metals to reach our shores.'
Spectator
23-04-2025
- Business
- Spectator
Is net zero possible without slave labour?
So, Ed Miliband has relented, and decided that after all it is not a good idea to build his green energy revolution on the back of slave labour in the Uighur region of China. Miliband had refused to back a Lords amendment to the Great British Energy Bill, first reported by Steerpike, which would have forced the putative government-owned green energy company to address the use of slave labour in its supply chains – Labour MPs were ordered to vote against it. Now the Energy and Climate Change Secretary has produced his own amendment to much the same effect. It is a victory for campaigners against modern slavery and also for commonsense – it would be absurd to tolerate forced labour in solar panel supply chains while we have government bodies cringing over Britain involvement in the slave trade two centuries ago.
