China watchBeijing’s Persecution of Uyghurs Reaches Nearly 30 Countries: Report
China persecutes the Uyghurs not only inside China, but in other countries as well. Its anti-Uyghur campaign has expanded overseas, and so far has reached 28 countries. The Chinese campaign has been successful because these countries’ governments, out of fear of Beijing’s power and influence, have been eager to accommodate China and its demands.
A new report argues that Beijing’s persecution of Uyghurs overseas has spread to nearly 30 countries around the world, largely because the governments of these host countries fear Beijing’s power and influence.
The report, titled No Space Left to Run, China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs, examined the methods China has used to silence Uyghur dissidents beyond its borders.
Compiled jointly by rights group Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the report argued that at least 28 countries across the world complicit in China’s harassment and intimidation of Uyghurs, with countries in the Middle East and North Africa as worst offenders.
Modern Uyghurs are primarily Sunni Muslims, but the countries most willing to help the Chinese campaign against the Uyghurs are the Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
“The largest offenders of transnational repression of the Uyghurs are Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey,” Bradley Jardine, research director at Oxus Society and one of the authors of the report, told VOA, adding that some of these countries have no legal protections for vulnerable minorities and the rule of law tends to be weak or susceptible to political interference.
“This has made the Middle East fertile ground for China’s campaign of global intimidation,” he continued.
The report says that often, these major offenders are economically dependent on China. They tend to use Uyghurs living overseas as bargaining chips when negotiating with Beijing.
“The main motivations tend to be opportunism. The major offenders in the report tend to have very strong economic or security ties with China, cracking down on Uyghur minorities in exchange for investments, concessions or military hardware,” Jardine told VOA.
He added that the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 has given China significant leverage around the world as countries deepen their economic interaction with China.
Here is the report’s Introduction:
In March 2019, Kazakhstan security services dragged Serikhzhan Bilash from his hotel room. An ethnic Kazakh activist, Bilash had been providing the world with a window into China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in the Uyghur Region through his work with Atajurt, a human rights organization in Almaty.(1) Such activism poses nothing short of a major inconvenience for Kazakhstan and the PRC, which are in the midst of deepening their economic, security, and political relations.
