There is a rather chilling account of the Chinese authorities’ treatment of China’s Uighur people in the Sydney Morning Herald which deserves your attention:
Gulmire Zunun had been living in Australia for nine years and was looking forward to her father visiting from China. He was in his late 70s so he didn’t want to delay.
Australia gave her dad a visa and he headed for the airport. But China’s immigration authorities blocked him. After turning him back, China’s authorities questioned the former school teacher.
They kept him under close scrutiny in his home city of Urumchi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in far northwestern China. Yes, his crime was to be a member of the Uighur ethnic minority.
Two years later, Beijing launched its mass round-up of Uighurs to send them into its vast complex of detention centres, part of a system The Economist magazine calls “Apartheid with Chinese characteristics”. The authorities picked up the old man, then aged 81.
He was told that he was being sent to live in an aged care facility, according to Gulmire, who lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.
But her dad was healthy and wanted to stay in his home. He explained that he had relatives who were happy to visit to give him any care he might need in future. To no avail. He disappeared into a so-called aged care facility where no visitors were allowed.
He was released after two years, near death. Zunun Niyazi died 20 days later, on August 26. “People are released before they die so they don’t become statistics in the camps,” Gulmire explains.
Read the whole thing.
The Chinese authorities consider Han Chinese peasants as barely human and the Uighurs as not even that. The Chinese authorities are fascists engaging in a genocide of the Uighurs in a search for ethnic and cultural purity. Characterizing it as “apartheid” is giving those authorities too much credit. It’s worse.
