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piqer for: Global finds Globalization and politics
Nuala Lam is a bilingual freelance journalist with a focus on civil society, justice, and identity in China. She speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese and forms her analysis of contemporary China through both English and Chinese language media. She has worked for NGOs and news media in Beijing and Shanghai and has also spent extended periods in the Chinese countryside, seeing the country's diversity and uneven development first-hand.
Her postgraduate research at the London School of Economics focussed on English-language coverage of China, investigating the translation of journalistic ethics between differing political contexts. She also holds a first class degree in Chinese and History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Chinese Authorities Are Detaining Uighurs And Separating Families
Reporting is tightly controlled in Xinjiang, home to the Turkic, predominantly Muslim Uighurs — one of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. It’s notoriously difficult to cover the region, where accounts of journalists being tailed, even detained, are common. Recently there have even been cases of retaliatory detention of reporters’ families. This is why Emily Feng’s piece for the Financial Times is vital, and all too rare.
Recent months have seen reports of Uighurs being held in detention camps with the professed aim of preventing terrorism, though the pretext for detaining people can be as trivial as being suspected of wanting to travel abroad.
Given the scarcity of information about the camps it’s difficult to know exactly how many people are being held. US acting deputy assistant secretary for east Asian and Pacific affairs, Laura Stone, estimates that the numbers are in the tens of thousands. Others estimate a detention rate as high as 11.5 percent of the region’s Uighur and ethnic Kazakh adults.
With adults being detained on that scale, what is happening to their children?
Feng paints a picture of families torn apart and a system that can barely cope with the demand it has created, drawing on interviews with a Uighur political refugee, local residents and government officials, and former staff of one of the de facto orphanages that have sprung up to care for the children.
Why is this happening?
The headline of Feng’s piece adopts the anti-terror frame pushed by Beijing, though in a discussion on Twitter she stressed that we don’t actually know the reason behind these detentions.
It is, however, worth noting the region’s strategic importance. As an Economist article pointed out in May, Xinjiang is the country’s primary producer of oil and gas, and fuel imports from Central Asia and Russia predominantly enter China through the region. What’s more, the article notes that Xinjiang is now vital to China’s foreign policy as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
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