While China’s numbers have largely recovered to pre-pandemic levels, they have declined as a share of total immigration, compared to India in particular. And not convinced that attracting the “ultra-rich” will benefit Canada and Canadians (part from Realtors, luxury car dealerships etc):
China is in turmoil.
The once-roaring housing market of the world’s second-largest economy is collapsing.The regime’s harsh zero-COVID restrictions are causing bitterness and anger.
Beijing’s stepped-up quest for “common prosperity” has many worried their savings and assets aren’t being treated as actually theirs — and could be confiscated by Communist party rulers in the name of equality.
More people, especially the rich, want to escape.
In the past 30 years, Canada has been one of the top destinations for people from China seeking a financial haven and more stable lifestyle. China has long been Canada’s second-largest source country, after India, for new immigrants.
And the country’s recent outbreaks of both financial and social chaos are igniting more desire to get out. A global investment migration consultancy, Henley & Partners, estimates 10,000 to 13,000 ultra-wealthy residents of China are seeking to pull $48 billion out of the country this year.
Canada is a big draw. The Migration Policy Institute found two years ago that Canada was the third most-popular choice for Mainland’s China’s migrants. That was before this summer, when China’s real-estate sales dived by 59 per cent compared to 12 months earlier.
Now, the 2022 Hurun Report, which surveys the desires of high-net-worth Chinese, has found their No. 1 choice for a country to move to is Canada.
But there’s a problem. The people of China, population 1.4 billion, face increasingly strict homegrown barriers to starting a new life abroad.
The Hurun Report, which each year measures the desires of rich people from China, found that this year that Canada had risen to become their No. 1 destination for immigration. (Source: 2022 Hurun Report)
That’s even while there is an emerging term for the exit-minded phenomenon in China — “run-ology.” It’s used widely online to capture both the desire to leave the country and tips on how to do it.
While many Chinese are no doubt happy to stay in their country of birth, many are seeking another shore because of intense frustration over the country’s COVID-19 restrictions.
And that’s not all. A deeply felt mistrust of Chinese leaders came to the fore his month when video emerged of tanks blocking the entrances to some banks in China, ostensibly to stop people from withdrawing their money.
While debate ensued between official Chinese media and Western news outlets over the exact purpose of the tanks, few disputed that China’s police have crushed mass demonstrations after depositors’ funds were frozen as banks have been investigated for fraud.
The backdrop to the bank-savings anxiety has been President Xi Jinping’s stepped-up efforts to develop a patriotic “common prosperity.” It’s already lead him to crack down hard on, among others, the country’s more than 600 billionaires.
One of many notorious cases centres on billionaire Xiao Jianhua, a Canadian passport holder who disappeared after being abducted in Hong Kong five years ago. He is now apparently facing a secret trial in China
China doesn’t recognize that Canada has any diplomatic influence in regard to Xiao. Even though Xiao gave up his Chinese passport because China does not allow dual citizenship, China is still treating him, roughly, as one of its own.
In a related move, Beijing has announced strict 2022 curbs on all “non-essential” overseas travel, purportedly because of COVID. In the face of a spike in outbound trips, leaders have cut the number of travel passports and visas it will issue to a fraction of previous levels.
It’s also harder to get money out of the country.Canadian legal specialist David Lesperance, who specializes in migration for the rich, says he’s receiving three times as many requests from China that he had last year. And Jenga, a firm that handles international money transfers, reports it has seen demand from China double in 12 months.
That’s especially worrying for China in light of its troubled economy. The mammoth speculative bubble that was China’s real estate market, which accounts for an incredible 30 per cent of the nation’s GDP, has been bursting.
China’s Evergrande, the world’s most indebted real-estate developer, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Construction on its new residential towers has halted. China’s housing crisis has wiped a trillion dollars off the value of the sector.
The U.S. Federal Reserve has expressed concern the dramatic downturn in China’s housing market will spillover into Western economies, as many Chinese citizens’ debt grows and an economically weakened China is forced to retrench. The vacancy rate in major Chinese cities is now 15 to 35 per cent, according to the journal Foreign Policy.
Many Chinese nationals who have held onto their assets and wealth are looking elsewhere to invest, even as their leaders make it a challenge. China is talking tougher about enforcing its foreign exchange controls, which allows citizens to send offshore only US$50,000 a year.
But Canadian mortgage broker Ron Butler is among those who share the “growing belief that more capital from China will flow out to other countries’ real estate.”
Yes, we are hearing capital controls are running hot in China. But we know that a workaround is always found and tightness eventually slackens.”
In addition, people from China who obtain foreign residency or citizenship can move money out of their country more easily. Immigration lawyers and consultants say that’s a prime reason for the attractiveness of Canada, which already has 1.8 million people of Chinese ancestry, about half of whom are from China, mostly living in greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver.
Ottawa has long generally welcomed outside money, which typically goes into real estate rather than other businesses. B.C., through its foreign-buyers tax, beneficial ownership registry and speculation tax, is now one of the only provinces trying to monitor such offshore wealth.
Last year, Canada approved 31,005 individuals from the People’s Republic of China as permanent residents. While by no means are all well-off enough to immediately buy a dwelling, that was a jump from 16,525 migrants in the pandemic year of 2020. It was similar to 2019. The pace of immigration from China in the first half of 2022 appears more rapid than ever.
Meanwhile, others from China who want to put money into Canadian real estate, but don’t want to give up their Chinese citizenship, have been opting for Canada’s popular 10-year multiple-entry visas, which permits them to live here six months at a time. Although the Immigration Department didn’t provide the latest figures, Canada had previously issued more than three million 10-year visas to Chinese nationals.
Whichever way you look at it, recent developments confirm that what happens in China matters to Canada.
A prominent Chinese human rights scholar working in Vancouver says her career and personal safety are at risk because of an expired passport and delays in Canada’s immigration system.
Guldana Salimjan is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, who also directs the University of British Columbia’s Xinjiang Documentation Project, a federally-funded program documenting the internment of ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region. The project has been referenced during debates in Parliament.
Salimjan has a job pending at Indiana University in the U.S. — but no paperwork to cross the Canada-U.S. border.
Fearful that renewing her Chinese passport would bring her to the attention of Chinese authorities who do not approve of her work, Salimjan has applied for a unique Canadian travel document that could help her.
But so far, because of system issues, it has not.
In February, Salimjan applied for a certificate of identity — a Canadian travel document for refugees, stateless people, and permanent residents who cannot obtain a passport from their country of origin — so she can get an American visa to begin working in August, and reunite with her husband who also teaches at Indiana University.
An ethnic Kazakh from Xinjiang and a Canadian permanent resident, Salimjan specified in her application that visiting the local consulate to renew her Chinese passport, which expired last year, means she would have to disclose her personal information to Chinese authorities.
She says she’s afraid the Chinese government could use that information to harass her and her family in China, whom she hasn’t visited since 2016.
“Because of my research … I know that it is going to be extremely difficult for me to renew my Chinese passport,” she said.
But after making more than 20 inquiries to the federal agency — personally and with the help of local Liberal MP Terry Beech — she still hasn’t received the document.
“I don’t know when I will be able to get this document, which is really painful,” she said. “I’m already separated from my family in Xinjiang, [and] now I’m going to be separated from my husband.”
‘It often prompts an investigation of the person’
Last week Salimjan also submitted a letter of support signed by six professors from SFU and UBC, outlining her need for the document on humanitarian grounds, in the hope of expediting the application process.
Co-signer Darren Byler, an anthropologist at SFU and senior editor of the Xinjiang Documentation Project, says Salimjan’s forthcoming work at Indiana University could help expand the project to the United States, but he argues she shouldn’t be renewing her Chinese passport to get to America.
Byler cites the experience of other Xinjiang students at North American universities, who received one-way return-home permits from the Chinese embassy to fly back to China to renew their passports — only to be taken to detention camps upon arrival.
“It’s really not possible for her to renew her Chinese passport either through the consulate or through a return to China,” he said.
“It makes them quite aware of your presence … it often prompts an investigation of the person.”
Fellow co-signer Helen Leung, chair of SFU’s gender, sexuality, and women’s studies department where Salimjan teaches, says the certificate of identity is an indispensable document for people in exile.
She recalls her parents fleeing China for Hong Kong during the Second World War, who didn’t have a passport and travelled with a certificate of identity issued by the colonial British government, until they became Canadian citizens.
“They were stateless, just like Guldana is,” Leung said. “I understand the importance of having that document when you are essentially stateless.”
On Monday, to Salimjan’s surprise, IRCC emailed her saying urgent services for certificate of identity applicants have been suspended until further notice — a detail Salimjan says she hadn’t seen on the agency’s website before.
‘That is just not acceptable’
The federal government recently promised to address challenges around applications for Canadian immigration status and travel documents.
Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a new federal task force to help tackle major delays with immigration applications and passport processing, a situation he described as unacceptable.
NDP immigration critic and Vancover East MP Jenny Kwan says the Liberal government should also address what she calls “contradictory” information on the IRCC website, which does not immediately communicate to applicants like Salimjan that expedited applications for certificates of identity have been suspended.
“That is just not acceptable,” Kwan said.
CBC News reached out to IRCC for comment on Monday, who requested for Salimjan to sign a consent form permitting the agency to disclose information to CBC about her application.
The signed consent form has been sent to IRCC along with Salimjan’s application tracking number.
As of publication time, IRCC has yet to comment on her case.
Meanwhile, with no solution in sight, Salimjan says she is missing her husband.
“[It] breaks my heart to think about my husband just living and working by himself in Bloomington.”
Need for greater due diligence in funding and in all areas:
Two Canadian community organizations — one of which has received thousands of dollars in federal funding — are prime examples of how the Chinese government has tried to covertly shape opinions worldwide about human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, says a new report by Australian academics.
A profile of the Xinjiang Association of Canada and the Ontario-based Council of Newcomer Organizations — which was co-founded by a former Liberal MP — forms one of four case studies in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cultivating Friendly Forces report.
The two groups and their leaders have consistently promoted Beijing’s talking points on the region in the face of growing evidence of mass human rights abuses against Xinjiang’s Muslim populations, says the working paper by James Leibold, a professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, and Lin Li.
The groups have been supported by China’s diplomatic missions in Canada, while at least two of their directors were invited to attend events in China as privileged “overseas Chinese” leaders, says the report, based mostly on Chinese-language media reports and other open source material from the internet.
“The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) uses these organs as conduits for the spread of propaganda about the ‘harmony, prosperity and happiness’ of people in Xinjiang while deflecting and denying international criticism of its well-documented human rights abuses in the region,” the analysis charges.
Such groups “can sow distrust and fear in the community, mislead politicians, journalists and the public, influence government policies, cloud our assessment of the situation in Xinjiang and disguise the CCP’s interference in foreign countries.”
The report urges more efforts by the media, academia and government to expose the Chinese government’s global interference, including with the use of effective foreign-influence registries.
The National Post contacted leaders of the two groups and China’s Ottawa embassy for comment on the report but had not received a response by deadline.
The report came as no surprise to Mehmet Tohti, head of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.
The Chinese influence campaign against the Uyghur diaspora has several facets, including intimidation of community members and “hostage taking” like the 2006 imprisonment of Canadian activist Huseyin Celil, as well as “disseminating disinformation and fake narratives,” he said by email.
“We may see more vigorous moves from China by awakening its sleeper cells in Canada and around the world to promote its narrative on Uyghur genocide and forced labour,” Tohti added.
Human rights organizations, media outlets and the United Nations have revealed large-scale repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang, including forced labour, mass sterilization and re-education camps believed to hold more than a million people.
The Canadian parliament, the U.S. and other countries have accused China of genocide, though Beijing denies the charges and insists it is simply bringing peace to a region afflicted by unrest and terrorism.
The report documents how China is trying to counter the charges, partly through the use of local community groups that purport to represent immigrants from Xinjiang or that simply promote Beijing’s line on the issue. It says the effort is spearheaded by the United Front Work Department, a party branch dedicated to extending China’s influence abroad and greatly expanded in recent years.
The 12-year-old Xinjiang Association of Canada is a good example of ties between such groups and China’s colonizing efforts in the region, says the report.
It’s made up mostly of Han Chinese — the country’s dominant group — and its launch was attended by the consul general and other Chinese diplomats in Toronto. The group invites local politicians and consular officials to events celebrating Uyghur and Han festivals, “then uses these public events to present a harmonious picture of Xinjiang and its diasporic population,” the working paper says.
Founding president Zhu Jiang’s parents migrated to Xinjiang from China proper as part of efforts to change its ethnic make-up and he joined the People’s Liberation Army at age 15. The report includes a photograph of Zhu in PLA uniform while a player for the Xinjiang Military Command.
He immigrated to Canada in 2001 and in 2019 was invited by the United Front Work Department in Xinjiang and China’s Toronto consulate to attend the lavish celebrations of the People’s Republic’s 70th anniversary. One local news outlet quoted him as saying the event’s military parade made him realize how much he “loved the motherland,” the National Post reported at the time.
Zhu has consistently defended China’s actions in the region, with state-run China News quoting him in 2019 as criticizing the U.S. House of Representatives’ Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.
Zhu was also for a time head of the Council of Newcomer Organizations, an umbrella group that included his Xinjiang association. As also reported previously by the Post, the council issued a statement last year decrying the House of Commons’ Xinjiang genocide motion, saying it was based on “unsubstantiated rumours.”
“The council’s statement was then reported by China’s state media to prove that members of the Chinese diaspora disagree with the Canadian parliament’s decision,” noted the report.
By last year, the council had received at least $160,000 in grants from various federal government departments, the most recent for an elder-abuse program.
Zhu was succeeded as head of the newcomer council by Han Jialing, who also has publicly documented ties to Beijing. As Zhu was at the anniversary celebrations in 2019, Han was “class captain” of a “carefully selected” group of overseas Chinese leaders invited to a seminar in China on the nation’s “great achievements” and thoughts of President Xi Jinping.
Leibold acknowledged in an interview that China is not alone in trying to shape opinion abroad. But its influence campaign differs from others in sheer scale — it has more diplomats registered in Canada than any nation other than the U.S. and more missions globally than anyone else — as well as the co-opting of community groups and the fact its efforts are largely covert, he said.
“What distinguishes it … is the tendency to operate in the shadows: the clandestine work that occurs behind the scenes, out of the public eye,” said the politics professor. “It’s … really quite different than what we see amongst free and democratic societies.”
Australian and New Zealand scholars such as Leibold have largely dominated academic attempts to investigate Beijing’s foreign influence efforts. But the work is becoming increasingly difficult as much of the information that was once freely available online is falling off the internet, he said. Indeed, the Council of Newcomer’s Organizations’ extensive website has disappeared.
And the research comes at a personal cost, said Leibold.
He said he’s been denied visas to visit China — the main subject of his research — while Li is “very worried” about possible retaliation against her friends and relatives in China.
A federal research unit detected what might be a Chinese Communist Party information operation that aimed to discourage Canadians of Chinese heritage from voting for the Conservatives in the last federal election.
The Sept. 13, 2021, analysis by Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, which tracks foreign interference, says researchers observed Communist Party media accounts on Chinese social media platform Douyin widely sharing a narrative that the Conservatives would all but sever diplomatic relations with Beijing.
The report, obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act, was prepared just a week before Canadians went to the polls.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals emerged from the Sept. 20 national ballot with a renewed minority mandate, while the Conservatives, led by Erin O’Toole, formed the official Opposition.
O’Toole, who is no longer leader, claimed on a podcast recorded this month that the Conservatives lost eight or nine seats to foreign interference from China.
Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, based at Global Affairs Canada, produces open data analysis to chart trends, strategies and tactics in foreign interference.
Its work supports the G7 RRM, an initiative to strengthen co-ordination to identify and respond to threats to the major industrial democracies.
The analysis of messaging about the Conservative party was part of RRM Canada’s effort to monitor the digital information environment for signs of foreign state-sponsored information manipulation in the general election.
Conservative MP Michael Chong, the party’s foreign affairs critic, said in an interview the analysis is “another piece of evidence that the Communist leadership in Beijing interfered in the last general election by spreading disinformation.”
RRM Canada says it manually reviewed Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, Xigua and Bilibili, and conducted open-source forensic digital analysis using website archives, social listening tools, and cross-platform social media ranking tools.
The analysts first noticed the narrative about the Conservatives in two articles published Sept. 8 by the Global Times, a state-owned media tabloid.
RRM Canada believes the Global Times coverage was prompted by a story in the Ottawa-based Hill Times newspaper that examined Canadian parties’ positions on Canada-China relations. The analysis says it is likely that the Global Times was the first Chinese publication to pick up on the Ottawa publication’s content, with its two articles getting over 100,000 page views apiece.
RRM Canada notes the timing coincided with the first federal leaders’ debate and increasingly close poll numbers. Similar pieces published by major Canadian media outlets earlier in September, as well as the Conservative party platform released in August, elicited no response from state-controlled media in China, the analysis says.
Several popular Canada-focused WeChat news accounts began engaging with the Global Times narrative on Sept. 9, copying the content and form without crediting the publication, “obscuring the narrative’s point of origin,” the analysts found.
Accounts also added commentary about the Tories to the articles, such as “Chinese are frightened by the platform,” and questioned whether “Chinese compatriots should support the Conservatives if they use this rhetoric.”
“Unless otherwise credited, WeChat users would not know that the narrative about the Conservatives and O’Toole originated from the Global Times and would assume the articles were original reporting from the Canadian WeChat accounts.”
Many WeChat news accounts that serve Canadians are registered to people in China and despite being well-established news sources, “some may have unclear links” to Chinese Communist Party media groups, the analysis says.
The researchers were “unable to determine whether there is co-ordination between the CCP media that originally promoted the narrative and the popular WeChat news accounts that service Chinese-speaking Canadians that are now amplifying the narrative,” the Sept. 13 analysis cautions.
“RRM Canada is also unable to determine whether there was inauthentic activity that boosted user engagement with the narrative as Chinese social media platforms are completely non-transparent.”
However, Communist Party media accounts on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, published videos that repeated a Sept. 8 Global Times headline, the analysis says. For instance, the Douyin account of Xinhua, China’s state press agency, shared a video saying the Conservative platform mentions China “31 times” and that an “expert” says the party “almost wants to break diplomatic relations with China.”
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment on the RRM Canada analysis.
Among the Conservative platform planks in the election campaign were promises to stand up to Beijing on human rights issues, diversify supply chains to move them away from China, adopt a presumption against allowing Beijing’s state-owned entities to take over Canadian companies, and work toward less global reliance on critical minerals from China.
Chong says it’s clear that proxies were spreading disinformation on behalf of Beijing in the federal election.
“It’s hard to measure whether that was the reason for the loss of some Conservative MPs. But I think we can safely say that it was a contributing factor.”
If Beijing comes to the same conclusion, China “may very well be emboldened to do something much bigger in a future federal election, undermining our democratic process,” Chong said.
Under a federal protocol, there would be a public announcement if a panel of senior bureaucrats determined that an incident — or an accumulation of incidents — threatened Canada’s ability to have a free and fair election. There was no such announcement last year.
At a House of Commons committee meeting early this month, Bill Blair, public safety minister during the election campaign, said while “we’ve all heard anecdotes and various opinions,” he had not directly received “any information from our intelligence services” that provided evidence of foreign interference in the campaign.
Deputy minister Rob Stewart told the meeting there were, “as you would expect,” activities on social media that would constitute disinformation and attempts to influence votes. “There was no threat to the overall integrity of the election.”
The Canadian Election Misinformation Project, which brought together several academic researchers, found Chinese officials and state media commented on the election with an apparent aim to convince Canadians of Chinese origin to vote against the Conservative party in 2021.
“Misleading information and information critical of certain candidates circulated on Chinese-language social media platforms. However, we find no evidence that Chinese interference had a significant impact on the overall election.”
The Conservatives “could have done a better job” of countering such messaging, Chong said. “Clearly we didn’t, and that’s a lesson learned.”
Even so, the federal government needs to actively counter foreign disinformation between election campaigns, Chong said. During campaigns, the government should make analyses from the Rapid Response Mechanism immediately available to inform the public, he added.
Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University who closely watches China, agrees that more transparency would be beneficial.
He argues for broadening the analytical process, perhaps through creation of a centre that includes non-governmental players, gathers information from various sources and regularly publishes reports about apparent foreign interference.
“That takes it out of the domestic political arena, which is always going to be highly charged.”
The international conference was supposed to gather some of the most promising and most established Asia studies scholars from across the world in lush Honolulu.
Instead, at least five Chinese scholars based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were prevented from attending virtual events via Zoom, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter.
They said Chinese security officers and education officials directly intervened, citing education regulations published during a global coronavirus pandemic which require all Chinese scholars to receive university permission to attend any international event in-person or online.
“After years of encouraging and funding PRC scholars to participate internationally, the intensifying controls of recent years are now full-scale, and academic work, at least on China, is to be quarantined from the world,” saidJames Millward, a history professor at Georgetown University who attended the conference. “The doors have slammed shut fast.”
The conference, which ended last weekend, was an annual gathering organized by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), one of the largest membership-based organizations in the field. For emerging scholars as well as more senior academics, the conference is an opportunity to network and to hear the latest research on Asian countries across a variety of disciplines.
Because of the ongoing COVID pandemic, AAS decided this year to hold a mix of in-person events and online-only panels.
In one case, a group of police officers visited the home of a scholar in China after they had presented their research paper to an online Zoom panel earlier in the week, questioning the scholar for hours, in part because they considered the title of the paper “incorrect.”
“It was deeply frightening,” said one academic who attended the panel but requested anonymity to protect the identity of the scholar involved.
NPR reviewed the paper but is not publishing its title or subject to protect the identity of the writer. The paper did not touch on subjects which Chinese authorities normally consider sensitive, such as human rights, Tibet, Xinjiang or Hong Kong.
Chinese scholars on a separate virtual panel were also told by Chinese university administrators to cancel their presentations. Eventually, they emailed the other attendees to withdraw from the panel due to “medical reasons” but hoped to partake in AAS events again “in less sensitive times,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the incident.
“Topics that have seemingly been considered nonpolitical are now being yanked or deemed not permissible to be exchanging with international colleagues,” said another academic who attended the panel who also did not want to be named so as not to identify the Chinese scholars impacted.
Strict COVID prevention policies had already stymied the volume of intellectual exchanges between the PRC and the rest of the world. Those who study China have found themselves isolated by border closures that have made travel to and from China nearly impossible, rendering archives and field sites in China inaccessible for the last two years and counting.
Since 2016, China’s education ministry has required its academics to seek university approval for all overseas trips and collaborations. In September 2020, universities began applying these rules for online events held by international organizations, as well, though such rules had not been extensively enforced until now.
Academics say these controls will further deplete the already-sparse exchanges between China and the rest of the world while hobbling the careers of young Chinese scholars.
“We have already been anxious, because for those of us in modern China studies, it’s been two years with no end in sight about when we might be able to return to the archives,” said a third academic who went to the AAS conference. “You keep thinking maybe things will get better, so after the [Winter] Olympics, after [October’s Chinese Communist] Party Congress, there will be a loosening of restrictions, but unfortunately it continues to worsen.”
The AAS said it was aware some PRC-based scholars were prevented from attending and now is trying to ascertain exactly how many scholars were impacted. “The AAS firmly supports the right of scholars worldwide to take part in the free exchange of ideas and research through conferences and other forms of academic cooperation,” the association said in a statement posted on its website Wednesday.
AAS has previously come under heightened scrutiny within China. In March 2021, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sanctioned a member of one of AAS’ governing councils because of her research examining Chinese state policy in the region of Xinjiang, where authorities had detained hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Uyghurs. The academic, Joanne Smith Finley, had organized two panels on Xinjiang for the annual AAS conference just days earlier.
Indeed. Much easier to other countries than China despite the ongoing oppression and indeed genocide of Uyghur Muslims:
A U.S. declaration that China has committed genocide and crimes against humanity against its mainly Muslim minority in western Xinjiang province appears to have had little impact on the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which this week honored Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a high-level forum.
Invited by host Pakistan, Wang attended the 48th session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad as a special guest and spoke at the summit opening. He followed up Thursday with a surprise visit to Afghanistan, whose Taliban-led interim government is eager for Chinese investment and support.
The confluence of events was distressing to the Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based rights group, which condemned both Wang’s attendance at the summit and OIC’s silence on China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority, including mass incarceration in so-called reeducation camps.
“It was appalling to see that Pakistan invited Wang Yi as a ‘guest of honor,’ while Uyghur Muslims do not have the right to identify as Muslims or practice Islam,” Campaign for Uyghurs said on its website.
According to Hasan Askari, an international affairs analyst, Pakistan’s invitation to the Chinese foreign minister at the OIC summit as an observer is part of an OIC tradition that allows the host country to invite high level diplomats from non-member OIC countries.
The U.S. accused China of genocide and crimes against humanity in the Muslim majority Xinjiang region in western China, including forced labor, sterilization of Muslim women and arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims in internment camps.
Beijing denies the allegations and says people of all ethnic groups live happily in Xinjiang.
The OIC summit addressed the plight of Rohingya Muslims as well as Muslims in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere, but mostly ignored the Uyghur genocide in China, the Campaign for Uyghurs said.
Only Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu brought it up.
“In China, Uyghurs and other Muslims have difficulties protecting their religious rights and cultural identity,” Cavusoglu said at the OIC meeting. “Is it right to ignore the situation of the Uyghurs?”
Turkish politicians are usually the most outspoken defenders of Uyghur rights among Muslim politicians, said Robert Bianchi, professor of international law at the University of Chicago, because of their ethnic and cultural ties throughout Central Asia.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party “is particularly sensitive to demands from right-wing nationalists who are junior partners in his governing coalition,” Bianchi said. “He can’t survive without their support, so he often agrees to accept more Uyghur refugees and to speak out against Chinese repression.”
At the summit, Wang said that his country pledged to provide 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Islamic countries.
According to Abdulhakim Idris, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Uyghur Studies, many Muslim-majority countries receive billions of dollars from China in the name of financial investment.
“By receiving billions of dollars from China, these countries are not only forced to remain quiet on the genocidal atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan but also commanded from Beijing to do whatever the PRC wants,” Idris told VOA, calling Xinjiang by the Uyghurs’ preferred name of East Turkistan.
Another 54 cases were reported in the Jilin province, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the north, and 46 in the eastern province Shandong.
In his annual report to the national legislature Saturday, Premier Li Keqiang said China needs to “constantly refine epidemic containment” but gave no indication Beijing might ease the highly touted “zero tolerance” strategy.
Li called for accelerating vaccine development and “strengthening epidemic controls” in cities where travelers and goods arrive from abroad.
“Zero tolerance” requires quarantines and lockdowns on entire communities and sometimes even cities when as few as a handful of cases have been detected. Chinese officials credit the approach — along with a vaccination rate of more than 80% — with helping prevent a major nationwide outbreak, but critics say it is taking a major toll on the economy and preventing the population from building up natural immunity.
No new cases were reported in Beijing and the city was largely back to normal, although masks continue to be worn in public places indoors.
One area that continues to feel the effects of tight COVID-19 control is the religious sector. Three of Beijing’s most famous Catholic churches, Buddhist temples and mosques stated Sunday they had been ordered closed in January with no date given on reopening.
Even before the pandemic, such institutions were under heavy pressure from the Communist authorities to follow through on demands from leader Xi Jinping that all religious centers be purged of outside influence, including the physical appearance of places of worship.
The latest daily case numbers mark some of the highest since the initial outbreak in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019 that is believed to have sparked the pandemic.
They bring China’s total to 111,195 with 4,636 deaths, according to the National Health Commission. At present, 3,837 people are receiving treatment for COVID-19, many of them infected with the omicron strain.
The Turkish government has rejected the citizenship applications of some Uyghurs who have been outspoken about the detention of their families in China, citing risks they pose to “national security” and “public order,” according to interviews and documents reviewed by Axios.
Why it matters: Turkey has been an important refuge for Uyghurs, who have faced repressive policies in China for years. But Ankara’s growing economic and security ties with Beijing have led to fears among some Uyghurs that they’re no longer safe in Turkey.
The denial of citizenship for some Uyghurs in Turkey fits a broader pattern of China’s growing ability to extend repression beyond its own borders, Elise Anderson, a senior program officer at the D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project, told Axios.
Chinese government authorities are “surveilling, tracking and hunting down Uyghurs, and in some cases, have succeeded in sending them backto the People’s Republic of China,” Anderson said.
Details: Alimcan Turdi, a Uyghur who moved to Turkey in 2013 for education opportunities for his children, told Axios he has numerous relatives in Xinjiang who were detained in mass internment camps in 2017 and he has not heard from them since.
He began organizing protests in Turkey and speaking out against the Chinese government on social media in 2019. In October 2021, Turdi’s application for citizenship in the country he had called home for more than seven years was rejected.
Turdi says he received no explanation other than a document that cited “obstacle to national security” and “public order” — allegations that he called “very upsetting,” given the loyalty he said he feels for Turkey. Turdi is now in the Netherlands, though his family remains in Turkey.
Axios spoke to four other Uyghurs who described similar experiences and provided documentation.
Amine Vahid, a Uyghur woman who has lived in Turkey since 2015, said both her and her 17-year-old son’s applications were rejected in October 2021 on “national security” and “public order” grounds.
Vahid said she has participated in protests in Turkey because she has relatives in the camps, but claims her son has never been involved in activism and is being unfairly punished.
One Uyghur woman who wished to stay anonymous told Axios she has never participated in protests or anti-China social media activity, but that applications for her, her husband and three children were all rejected for the same reasons.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and embassy in D.C. did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The big picture: Many Uyghurs are worried about their ability to remain safely in Turkey, which is home to one of the largest Uyghur diasporas in the world, with estimates between 30,000 and 50,000 people.
The Chinese government has asked Ankara to extradite some Uyghurs back to China; many Uyghurs believe at least one Uyghur family in Turkey has been deported. Egypt, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have deported numerous Uyghurs at China’s request.
The inability to obtain citizenship and the loss of residency status can plunge Uyghurs into statelessness and make it difficult for them to keep jobs and go to school in Turkey.
Background: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was once critical of China’s repression of Uyghurs, including suggesting in 2009, years before the construction of the camps, that ethnic violence in Xinjiang amounted to “genocide.” Uyghurs and Turkish people share linguistic, ethnic and religious ties.
But as Erdogan has turned away from the West in recent years and strengthened economic links to China, Ankara’s criticism has grown muted.
On a visit to Beijing in 2019, Erdogan warned that to “exploit” the Uyghur issue would damage Turkey-China relations and that he believed it was possible to “find a solution to this issue that takes into consideration the sensitivities on both sides.”
The bottom line: “Turkish people know about Uyghurs and care about Uyghurs,” Anderson said. “But at other times, Turkish authorities make moves that leave Uyghurs in fear.”
Time for Canadian Olympians and sport officials to speak up:
When three-time Olympian Gus Kenworthy took the remarkable, perhaps even brave decision to speak out against “human rights atrocities” while still in China at the Winter Games, the self-proclaimed “loud and obnoxious” British skier also proved that other athletes, had they chosen, perhaps could have used their Olympic platform to pipe up, too.
Because Kenworthy wasn’t hauled away and imprisoned, as Chinese critics of the ruling Communist Party routinely are. Doing so would have generated exactly the sort of global focus on the Chinese government’s authoritarian methods that it sought to avoid while global sports’ biggest show was in town.
And with the notable exception of Kenworthy, China largely accomplished that mission.
Olympians with any qualms about chasing medals in a country accused of genocide against its Muslim Uyghur population and of other abuses kept their views on those topics to themselves for the durations of their stay. And perhaps for good reason: They faced vague but, as it turned out, undeployed Chinese threats of punishment, constant surveillance and the sobering example of tennis star Peng Shuai’s difficulties after she voiced allegations of forced sex against a Communist Party official.
“We have seen an effective silencing of 2,800 athletes, and that’s scary,” said Noah Hoffman, a former U.S. Olympic skier and board member of the Global Athlete advocacy group pushing for Olympic reform.
Kenworthy, speaking to The Associated Press before his 8th-place finish in the halfpipe final on the Games’ penultimate day, laid out why.
“We’re in China, so we play by China’s rules. And China makes their rules as they go, and they certainly have the power to kind of do whatever they want: Hold an athlete, stop an athlete from leaving, stop an athlete from competing,” he said.
“I’ve also been advised to sort of tread lightly while I am here and that’s what I am trying to do.”
He prefaced criticism with praise for China’s “incredible job with this Olympics” and carefully calibrated his words. But unlike other Olympians, he couldn’t bite his tongue until he got home. Kenworthy aimed jabs not only at the host country’s rights abuses and “poor stance on LGBTQ rights” but also at other athletes he said try “to appeal to the masses” and avoid ruffling feathers.
“I’ve already kind of accepted that that’s not what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m just gonna speak my truth.”
In fairness, Olympians found themselves squeezed on all sides in Beijing. Campaigners abroad hoped they would spark global outrage over the imprisonment in re-education camps of an estimated 1 million people or more, most of them Uyghurs. China, backed to the hilt by the International Olympic Committee, didn’t want critical voices to be heard. And their own voices told athletes to focus, focus, focus on the pursuit of Olympic success that they, their coaches and families sacrificed for.
The sweep and vagueness of a Chinese official’s threat before the Games of “certain punishment” for “any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit” appeared to have a particularly sobering effect on Beijing-bound teams. Campaigners who met with athletes in the United States in the weeks before their departure, lobbying them about Uyghurs and the crushing of dissent in Tibet and Hong Kong, noticed the chill.
“Prior to the statement, we had been engaging with quite a few athletes,” said Pema Doma, campaigns director at Students for a Free Tibet. They “were expressing a lot of interest in learning more and being engaged in the human rights issue.”
Afterward, “there was a very, very distinct difference” and “one athlete even said to an activist directly: ‘I’ve been instructed not to take anything from you or speak to you,’” she said in a phone interview.
Other concerns also weighed on Olympians, way beyond the usual anxieties that often come with travel to a foreign land, away from home comforts.
Warnings of possible cyber-snooping by Chinese security services and team advisories that athletes leave electronic devices at home were alarming for a generation weaned on social media and constant connectivity with their worlds.
Also wearing were daily coronavirus tests that were mandatory — and invasive, taken with swabs to the back of the throat — for all Olympians, locked inside a tightly policed bubble of health restrictions to prevent infection spreads. The penalty for testing positive was possible quarantine and missed competition, a terrible blow for winter athletes who often toil outside of the limelight, except every four years at the Games.
“Who knows where those tests go, who handles the results,” Kenworthy said. “It’s definitely in the back of the mind.”
“And there’s like all the cybersecurity stuff. It is concerning,” he told The AP.
Often, athletes simply blanked when asked about human rights, saying they weren’t qualified to speak on the issue or were focused on competition, and hunkered down.
On Twitter, Dutch speedskater Sanne in ’t Hof blocked, unblocked and then blocked again a Uyghur living in the Netherlands who posted critical comments of Olympians in what he called “genocide” Games. Mirehmet Ablet shared a screengrab with The AP showing that the skater had barred him from accessing her account, where she tweeted that she “enjoyed every second!′ of her first Olympics. Ablet’s brother was arrested in 2017 in the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang in far western China, and Ablet doesn’t know where he’s now held.
Hoffman, who competed for the U.S. at the 2014 and 2018 Games, said internal politics within teams may also have dissuaded athletes from speaking critically. Coaches can bench athletes who bring unwanted attention and “there’s pressure from your teammates to not cause a distraction,” he said in a phone interview. Athletes with self-confidence dented by sub-par performances may also have felt that they’d lost any platform.
“There’s lots of really subtle pressure,” Hoffman said.
But he’s hopeful others will speak up on their return and that “we do get a chorus.”
Feeling unmuzzled, some already are.
Back in Sweden with his two gold medals in speedskating, Nils van der Poel told the Aftonbladet newspaper that although he had “a very nice experience behind the scenes,” hosting the Games in China was “terrible.” He drew parallels with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany and Russia hosting the Sochi Olympics before seizing control of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
“It is extremely irresponsible,” van der Poel said, ”to give it to a country that violates human rights as clearly as the Chinese regime does.”
When people started to disappear in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang in 2014, then-PhD student Darren Byler was living there, with a rare, ground-level view of events that would eventually be labelled by some as a modern-day genocide.
The American anthropologist, who learned Chinese and Uyghur languages, witnessed a digital police state rise up around him, as mass detention and surveillance became a feature of life in Xinjiang. He spent years experiencing and gathering testimony on the impact.
“It’s affected all of society,” he told CBC’s Ideas.
Since those early days of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s so-called “People’s War on Terror,”Human Rights Watch says at least one million Uyghur and other Muslims in Xinjiang have been arbitrarily detained in what China calls “re-education” or “vocational training” camps, in prisons or “pre-trial detention” facilities.
Survivors have recounted being tortured and raped in the camps, scruitinized by the gaze of cameras 24/7, and perhaps most crucially, forced to learn how to be Chinese and unlearn what it is to be Uyghur.
Countless of their children, says HRW, are forced to do the same in residential boarding schools.
China — currently in the Olympic spotlight and steering clear of such topics — routinely denies accusations, including from Canada’s House of Commons, that its treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide.
China declared its campaign in 2014 after a series of violent attacks that it blamed on Uyghur extremists or separatists.
But what all Uyghurs are now facing is more sinister and lucrative than that, said Byler, now an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
It is, he said, a modern-day colonial project that operates at the nexus of state surveillance, mass detention and huge profits, and is enabled by high tech companies using ideas and technology first developed in the West.
Byler calls it “terror capitalism,” a new frontier of global capitalism that is fuelled by the labelling of a people as dangerous, and then using their labour and most private personal data to generate wealth.
“When we’re talking about a frontier of capitalism, you’re talking about turning something that previously was not a commodity into a commodity,” he said.
“So in this context, it’s Uyghur social life, Uyghur behaviour, Uyghur digital histories that are being extracted and then quantified, measured and assessed and turned into this pattern data that is then made predictable.”
The process Byler describes involves forced harvesting of people’s data and then using it to improve predictive artificial intelligence technology. It also involves using the same population as test subjects for companies developing new tech. In other words, Xinjiang serves as an incubator for new tech.
Also critical is using those populations as unpaid or cheap labour in a resource-rich area considered a strategic corridor for China’s economic ambitions.
“As I started to think more about the technology systems that were being built and understand the money that was flowing into this space, I started to think about it as more of a kind of security industrial complex that was funding technology development and research in the region,” Byler told CBC’s Ideas.
Byler said research shows that tech companies working with Chinese state security tend to flourish and innovate, thanks largely to access to the huge troves of data collected by various levels of government.
David Yang, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, conducted such research using thousands of publicly available contracts specifically for facial recognition technology procured by mostly municipal governments all over China.
A contracted firm with access to government data “steadily increased its product innovation not just for the government, but also for the commercial market,” for the next two years, said Yang.
‘Health check’
Surveillance is a feature of everyday life in Xinjiang, so the personal data crucial to the profits is constantly being collected.
Central to the harvesting is a biometric ID system introduced there in 2017 requiring citizens to provide fingerprints, facial imagery, iris scans and DNA samples.
There are also turnstiles, checkpoints and cameras everywhere, and citizens are required to carry smartphones with specific apps.
“It’s the technology that really pervades all moments of life,” said Byler. “It’s so intimate. There’s no real outside to it.”
It was in 2017 that Alim (not his real name) returned to Xinjiang from abroad to see his ailing mother. His arrest upon landing in China was the start of what he said was a descent into powerlessness — and the involuntary harvesting of his data.
Alim, now in his 30s, spoke to IDEAS on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals against remaining family in Xinjiang.
At the police station at home, as part of what he was told was a “health check,” Alim had a DNA sample taken and “multiple pictures of my face from different sides … they made me read a passage from a book” to record his voice.
“Right before the voice recording, I had an anxiety attack, realizing that I’m possibly going to be detained for a very long time,” Alim said.
The warrant for Alim’s arrest said he was “under suspicion of disrupting the societal order.”
In a crowded and airless pre-trial detention facility, he said he was forced to march and chant Communist Party slogans.
“I was just a student visiting home, but in the eyes of the Chinese government, my sheer identity, being a male Uyghur born after the 1980s, is enough for them to detain me.”
Once released through the help of a relative, Alim found that his data haunted him wherever he went, setting off police alarms whenever he swiped his ID.
“I basically realized I was in a form of house arrest. I felt trapped.”
Global connections
While the Xinjiang example is extreme, it is still an extension of surveillance that has become the norm in the West, too, but where consent is at least implicitly given when we shop online or use social media.
And just as the artificial intelligence technology used for surveillance in Xinjiang or elsewhere in China has roots in the computer labs of Silicon Valley and Big Tech companies in the West, new Chinese iterations of such technology are also being exported back into the world, selling in countries like Zimbabwe and the Philippines, said Byler.
China may be the site of “some of the sharpest, most egregious manifestations of tech oppression, but it’s by no means the only place in the world,” said lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar, who is associate director with the Refugee Law Lab at York University in Toronto.
One such place is the modern international border, not only in the U.S. but also in Europe, where Molnar is studying how surveillance technology affects migrant crossings.
Molnar said China’s avid investment in artificial intelligence is creating an “arms race” that carries risks of “normalizing surveillance” in competing countries with stricter human rights laws.
“How is this going to then impact average individuals who are concerned about the growing role of Big Tech in our society?” she said from Athens.
“It seems like we’ve skipped a few steps in terms of the kind of conversations that we need to have as a public, as a society, and especially including the perspectives of communities and groups who are the ones experiencing this.”
‘A lot more nuance to this story’
Despite human rights concerns, other countries are loath to condemn China over Xinjiang because it is such an important part of the global economy, said Byler.
But he points out that he focuses on the economics of Xinjiang partly “to destabilize this easy binary of ‘China is bad and the West is good.'”
China’s “People’s War on Terror” should be seen as an extension of the “war on terror” that originated in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks and is now a global phenomenon, said Byler.
“If we want to criticize China, we also have to criticize the ‘war on terror.’ We have to criticize or think carefully about capitalism and how it exploits people in multiple contexts,” he said.
“There’s actually a lot more nuance to the story.”
The West’s complicity, he said, begins with “building these kinds of technologies without really thinking about the consequences.”
Byler’s observations on the ground form the basis of two books he’s authored on the situation in Xinjiang — and of his policy suggestions to lawmakers, including Canadian MPs, about the repression in Xinjiang.
He’s called on lawmakers to demand China’s leaders immediately abolish the re-education detention system and release all detainees. He’s also called for economic sanctions on Chinese authorities and technology companies that benefit from that process and for expediting asylum for Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims from China.
“I am a scholar at the end of the day,” said the Vancouver-based anthropologist.
“Maybe I can nudge people to think in ways that advocate for change. It takes many, many voices and I’m just trying to do my best with what I know how.”
Multicultural Meanderings 