East Turkistan

Appeasing China, Miscellaneous, News Item, Tibet

Tibet’s Exiled Administration Promoting China’s ‘Common Destiny’ Propaganda Film

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Tibet's Exiled Administration Promoting China's 'Common Destiny' Propaganda Film
Tibet’s Exiled Administration Promoting Chinese Propaganda Film

Image: screenprint

Anyone within the Central Tibetan Administration (formerly the exiled Government of Tibet now CTA) care to explain why on earth the editorial team of their website has featured a promotional review of a film which, while posing as an artful exploration of lives and communities transformed through economic and infrastructure developments, is essentially  propaganda.

Last time we checked the CTA (headed by Doctor Lobsang Sangay) was, apart from peddling an appeasement deal-of- surrender to China, engaged in exposing and opposing the suppression of Tibet and erosion of Tibetan culture. It regularly issues statements and reports on the expansionist agenda of China, cautions the international community on the corrosive influence of Chinese corporations and regularly criticizes projects, that have exploited and massively degraded the environment of occupied Tibet. From concerns about Huawei to open hostility towards mining companies which are opening up Tibetan mountains the CTA has a respected and established record of challenging and reporting upon the genuine concerns posed by China’s political, economic and corporate objectives.

Tibet's Exiled Administration Promoting China's 'Common Destiny' Propaganda Film
From glamorizing secret agents in his Bond films to partnering the Chinese regime and romanticizing the supposed benefits of China’s political and economic global hegemony

Image: chinanewscn

With that in mind the decision of its website to give such full-page prominence to ‘Common Destiny’ (a film receiving the approval and support of China’s regime) and heavily promoted by the propaganda mouth-piece Xinhua during it’s screening at the Venice Film Festival in September, is all the more baffling.

The editors of the CTA site have copied and pasted a review written by Tom Baxter, formerly working in communications at Greenpeace East Asia,  the environmental campaigning organization with offices in China that’s offered not a word of opposition or critique on the nuclear poisoning of occupied Tibet and East Turkistan. Does that explain the ‘softly-softly’ content of the author? He seems to broadly follow the official narrative issued by the film makers, a story of individual lives seemingly transformed by the controversial development project run by China’s regime. The series of inspiring personal stories from differing countries where the project operates, while no doubt uplifting serve another and darker purpose. Did such an objective, we speculate, concern New Zealand Director Martin Campbell, British screen-writer Guy Hibbert or the American director of photography? Perhaps they were too consumed by the allure of assembling of people centered accounts of hopes and dreams? Uncaring that these tales of realization come with a troubling economic and environmental cost. A fact well known to those countries signed into a developmental program of Chinese economic hegemony

Tibet's Exiled Administration Promoting China's 'Common Destiny' Propaganda Film
Signed up to write the script for this propaganda, while beyond the comforts of his office the economic and environmental impacts of China’s program is generating considerable suffering and destruction.

Image: chinanewscn

But this ‘documentary’ was never going to consider such contexts, the crippling debts, failed infrastructure projects or the political and economic dominance imposed upon those partnering governments by China’s regime. No inclusion or reference to the environmental impacts of such developments. Those major issues had no place in this carefully engineered propaganda, the audience is engaged with the various personal narratives, distracted by the emotion, struggle and relative triumphs. A strategy which no doubt was factored into the film from its beginnings and obediently employed by six other (Chinese) directors all of whom were approved by China’s government! The production company behind this exercise in disinformation was none other than Beijing Silk Road Media Group, a public-relations arm of the project and by extension fully committed to the ideology and dictates of China’s regime. Interestingly its producer Liang Yan claimed at the screening that the film is not backed by government, anyone buying into that should seek reality counseling immediately!

There is no genuinely independent film-making within China especially when the subject is a cornerstone of the Chinese regime’s global economic policy. As such there would have been a very close scrutiny of its production. content and promotion, what has been produced is yet another slick, emotion focused distraction that promotes the supposed triumphs of the Belt Road Strategy. It also features key propaganda themes exemplified by the account of a Uyghur boy dreaming of winning a basketball scholarship. Touching story, right? But wait a minute while young Yusuf Jiang (note the Chinese second name) is aspiring to realize such ambitions Uyghur children of all ages are being torn from their families and detained within indoctrination centers to be brainwashed into obedient Chinese speaking citizens. Did that well-documented reality not trouble Martin Campbell or Guy Hibbert? Would not their creative talents not be better served by making a documentary on the cultural genocide waged against Tibet or the Uyghur homeland of East Turkistan?

Tibet's Exiled Administration Promoting China's 'Common Destiny' Propaganda Film
The film features a Uyghur boy dreaming of becoming a basketball player, a very different reality experienced by countless numbers of Uyghur children jailed within indoctrination centers.

Image: RFA

What also of the Central Tibetan Administration and its promotion of this Chinese orchestrated disinformation? Was it some gross error of editorial judgement that decided to feature this film on their site? A calculated decision to curry favor with China, a signal of further appeasement? No matter the reasons, giving publicity to such propaganda while the same regime behind the film is waging a genocidal assault against Tibet’s culture and national identity raises worrying questions. Particularly for any Tibetan who expects their exiled Administration to be championing the just cause of national freedom rather than uncritically disseminating the lies and disinformation of China’s government!

News Item, Tibet

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

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The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

Image: voa/reuters updated by @tibettruth

Have you wondered why the issue of Tibet seems to have dropped off of the media radar? There has over the past few years been a remarkable silence, broken occasionally by reports of self-immolation protests. Yet increasingly the information coming out appears to have reduced dramatically. There’s one man who could offer an explanation, but he’s something of a biased participant. Mr Chen Quanguo the communist Chinese party (CCP) official directly responsible for imposing a mass surveillance system and ruthless police-state in occupied Tibet, and more recently within so-called Xinjiang (East Turkistan). Like this Chinese regime mobile facial recognition center below.

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

Image: businessinsider

This communist Chinese regime psychopath, formerly Party Secretary (2011-2016)  in the Tibetan region known as U-Tsang, devised a strategy of control that divided Tibet using a grid-system. Into each was established Chinese police stations at regular intervals across the entire region which formed an inter-locked, inescapable security presence. He also organized, through bribery and intimidation Tibetan households to spy on each other. This was assigned the euphemism of the “double-linked household management system.”

These draconian measures were not enough for Quanguo, he also throttled and distorted the flow of information, cracking down on relatively independent news sources, replacing them with media outlets loyal to the CCP. He transformed ‘Tibetan’ TV new channels into 24/7 conduits for Chinese regime propaganda. Anyone having satellite television was required, by fear of prison, torture and forced labor, to have only a reception fixed to channels approved by the authorities.

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

From what information which has emerged by the end of 2016, Quanguo had built over 700 police stations, which are called ‘convenience police stations,’ and created 81,140 ‘double-linked households’ that monitored around three million Tibetans.

With a seemingly limitless budget, he vastly increased the number of Chinese ‘police’ in occupied Tibet and played a key role in the introduction and expansion of technological surveillance which has added to the infrastructure of daily oppression and fear experienced by Tibetans. CCTV now monitors virtually every street, roads, public space in towns across occupied Tibet. This has been augmented recently by the implementation of facial-recognition systems, engineered, installed and maintained by Chinese tech-corporations such as Huawei, Sense Time, CIMC and Tencent Technology (which enjoy fruitful commercial and research relations with western companies and institutions such as MIT).

Below selected Tibetans pose for the launch of a facial recognition system in local banks in downtown Lhasa. Notice what looks like a Master Card logo on the cash-machine?

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

Image: archivenet

Such disturbing surveillance is being enhanced by a program of bio-metric identity cards forced upon Tibetans. Without which the meager support (housing rights, fuel or food supplies) offered by the occupying Chinese authorities is withheld. Meanwhile, the internet, social media and cellphone apps such as Tik-Tok are monitored and censor any mention of human rights, Tibet or the Dalai Lama.

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

Image: getty

Having successfully engineered complete and effective totalitarian control over the Tibetan population Quanguo was appointed to target a similar system of oppression and surveillance against the people in neighboring East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang). Which he is presently realizing, having criminalized Uyghur culture and identity, forced countless thousands into concentration camps and detained huge numbers of infants within indoctrination centers. While the potential of big-data, AI and facial-recognition systems is discussed across western media, some regarding the expanding technology as offering positive social opportunities, Chen Quanguo and his thuggish comrades within the CCP have reminded the wider-world of the very genuine dangers such advances present.

Having taken office in occupied East Turkistan Chen Quangou has applied all the lessons of surveillance and oppression from his time in occupied Tibet to target and suppress Uyghurs. Facial recognition cameras (circled) in the city of Kashgar.

 

The Chinese Psychopath Who Turned Tibet Into A Surveillance Nightmare

Image: archivenet

Apart from violating basic freedom such as the right-to-privacy, the unique bio-data of an individual, monitored, recorded and stolen by the hands of tyrannical regimes such as China’s enables greater restrictions and supervision. Eroding civil and political rights while empowering the capacity of a government to impose an increasing spiral of oppressive social, economic and political controls.

Appeasing China, News Item, Support Our Urgent Campaigns

Asking Save-The-Children To Speak Out Against China’s Abduction And Harrowing Abuse Of Uyghur Infants

tibettruth
Asking Save The Children To Speak Out Against China's Harrowing Abuse Of Uyghur Infants
On the issue of China’s abduction and abuse of Uyghur children all we’ve had so far from Save The Children is silence

Image: peldonrose

We have today issued an appeal to the organization Save The Children, asking them to speak-out against China’s harrowing abuse of Uyghur children, detained at what are in reality indoctrination centers. The emotional and psychological damage of forced separation from their parents is traumatizing countless numbers of infants across occupied East Turkistan.

Asking Save The Children To Speak Out Against China's Abuction And Harrowing Abuse Of Uyghur Infants
This little Uyghur girl was filmed weeping for her mother, completely ignored, no comfort. The executives of Save The Children need to look into her traumatized face and note the anguish, is their silence on this issue acceptable for an organization dedicated to championing children’s rights?

Image: printscreen supplied by @tibettruth

 

The full text of our communication may be read and/or downloaded here

Demonstrations, News Item, Tibet

China’s National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship

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China's National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship

Image: scmp adapted by @tibettruth

As Chinese police today fired live rounds at protesters in Hong Kong what a disturbing yet utterly appropriate reminder that 70 years ago today a regime was born that inflicted genocidal suffering upon its own people through insane ideological policies. The so-called Great Leap Forwards, in truth it plunged China’s people backwards into a feudal condition, tortured by famine and environmental catastrophe. Millions perished as a consequence of the crazed dogma of the Chinese communist party ruler-ship. The misery was extended by the harrowing excesses of what was laughingly described as a Cultural Revolution, the only culture which prevailed was one of terror, thought-control, mass arrests, labor-camps and countless numbers of people murdered or broken enduring the misery of prison. This brutal state-approved and engineered madness was inflicted across not only across China, but brutalized too the occupied territories of Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia and Manchuria. The destruction ran wild year-after year, families destroyed, monasteries dynamited, culture targeted for violent assimilation.

China's National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship
Tanks Parade In Downtown Beijing

Image: cnn

Nixon trumpeted a rapprochement with China, the CIA pulled the funding of Tibetan resistance fighters, the great betrayal had fallen. After Mao a respite, some hope flickered of an easing, but that proved to be illusory. The decade of the 1980s arrived bringing cynical moves of Deng Xiaoping and a supposed opening of the Chinese market, much was made of the economic reforms. Companies across the world licked their lips, while the machinery of terror remained, to maintain control for China’s corrupt authorities. The draconian policies continued, mass campaigns of forced sterilizations, censorship and a vicious denial of human rights were enforced. During 1987 through 1989 Tibetans again rose against Chinese rule, and the tanks rumbled past the Potala Palace. Many were shot, more tortured and disappeared. Then in the Summer of that last year Chinese students massed around a beacon for a democratic China, their dreams bled across the cold stones of Tiananmen Square following a government ordered massacre. As the blood was being washed away the US Administration was covertly arranging an emergency visit to Beijing, its envoy to reassure the Chinese authorities that business would not be interrupted.

China's National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship
Hong Kong

Image: thestar

Economic growth and the opening of Chinese markets witnessed throughout the 1990s a global rush to trade with China. The scent of money was on the wind and western corporations, backed by their governments wanted some of that profitable action. The human rights violations persisted, as did the oppression and tyranny, under the approving rule of Jiang Zemin. When questions were raised about doing business with a Chinese state that abused and tortured the response was to insist that ‘constructive engagement’ would result in progress. That economic liberalization would be followed by an improvement on civil freedoms and human rights. That was another deception. In 2001 China was admitted into the World Trade Organization and since that time its economy has risen to a position of global dominance, not without a creeping realization that there was a troubling cost to such expansion.

China's National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship
Dictator Xi Jinping addressing today the massed ranks of military in Beijing

Image: chinanews/adapted for accuracy by @tibettruth

Along with the consumerism and commercial revolution, which in part has transformed Chinese society, China’s regime under, then President, Hu Jintao consolidated it’s power. While the world applauded China’s miraculous economic rise and salivated at the prospect of trade the denial of basic freedoms persisted. Torture, executions and prison camps maintained the social ‘harmony’. A condition inherited by the current glorious leader Xi Jinping, like Emperor Nero he has assumed the mantle of a supreme being. What cosmetic scraps of political accountability that previously linked his office to the Chinese communist party were swiftly abandoned. This dictatorship is engineering a new China, intensifying totalitarian control, extending state surveillance into every area of society, constructing more detention camps, dispatching thought-control police onto the streets. There exists only one truth according to this new cult; loyalty to the leader and complete obedience and devotion to the communist party of China.

China's National Day Glorifying A Brutal Dictatorship
Troops jackboot their way past their ‘Glorious Leader’

Image: chinanews

Today Xi Jinping observed a mass military parade in Beijing. The choreographed thousands dutifully waved their flags, as the jackboots, missiles and tanks paraded in celebration. In Hong Kong the bullets were flying. Seventy years have passed, the brutalized people of Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia, Manchuria, Hong Kong and China are asking how few are left for this corrupt and genocidal regime?

News Item

UN Women Staying Silent As China Forcibly Sterilizes Uyghur Women In Detention Centers

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UN Women Staying Silent As China Forcibly Sterilizes Uyghur Women In Detention Centers
Mehrigul Tursun Uyghur woman arrested by the Chinese regime, separated from her three infants who died under Chinese custody and had been medically operated on without her knowledge. Mehrigan was tortured, beaten, electrocuted and forcibly sterilized.

Image: Amnesty International Japan

As we write this post, in various regions of the world women’s NGOs are assembling to prepare for next year’s UN Commission On The Status Of Women which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995).

Contained within that declaration the following is urged of governments to:

“Take all appropriate measures to eliminate harmful, medically unnecessary or coercive medical interventions…” and that “Acts of violence against women also include forced sterilization and forced abortion, coercive/forced use of contraceptives…” (section D, paragraph 115).

UN Women Staying Silent As China Forcibly Sterilizes Uyghur Women In Detention Centers
Mrs Phumzile Mlambo Ngucka, executive director of UN Women has offered not a word of opposition or concern against China’s forced sterilizations of women. Her organization and that of UNCSW are actively ignoring serious human rights violations against Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian and Ha Chinese women.

Image: UN Women/Amanda Voisard

Now as is well known China operates a coercive population control program, which despite cynically engineered reports to the contrary targets women with a range of draconian measures, including forced sterilizations , forced medical intervention and forced contraception.

Yet the very same NGOs who will no doubt be praising the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action offer not a word of concern against China’s violations against women’s human and reproductive rights. Since 1995 Women’s organizations and UNCSW have been exposed and challenged for choosing to maintain a silence, offering no criticism, nor condemnation of such medical atrocities. Even though the UN agreement they worked towards, endorsed and approved in 1995 calls for action against such violations!

UN Women Staying Silent As China Forcibly Sterilizes Uyghur Women In Detention Centers
One of the many detention centers run by the Chinese regime in occupied East Turkistan. Places of misery, torture and suffering, where Uyghurs are indoctrinated, abused, tortured and forcibly sterilized!

Image: NYT

Which is why the same organizations will care little about the testimony of Ms Mehrigul Tursun a Uyghur who escaped from a Chinese regime detention center in occupied East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang). Last November she documented to the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC)  a range of human rights abuses she had suffered during her imprisonment. These included forced separation from her thee children, all of whom died in Chinese custody and had been medically operated on without her knowledge or approval. She was detained three times and detailed to the CECC being tortured, beaten and electrocuted. Mehrigul also disclosed that on arrival in the USA a full medical examination confirmed that she had also been sterilized! Atrocities which she presented to an Amnesty International conference in Tokyo earlier this month.

 

 

 

Appeasing China, News Item, Tibet

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China’s Regime

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Note: This video from Bitter Winter has been featured in the context of its exposure of a major abuse of human rights perpetrated against Uyghur families and children by the Chinese regime. We have no affiliation with Bitter Wind nor share or endorse any particular religious belief which may or may not be associated with that organization.

Having just witnessed a video shot covertly inside East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang Province) of a hugely overcrowded dormitory containing Uyghur infants (whose parents have been incarcerated into Chinese run indoctrination camps) a question came to mind. What action has the organization Save The Children taken on this issue? Surely it would be deeply concerned at thousands of children being forced from their families into what are effectively prisons, traumatized and abused, and suffering a miserable existence under a daily regime of enforced Chinese language lessons and political brainwashing?

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China's Regime
Smothered in barbed-wire and CCTV the so-called ‘Kindness Kindergarden’ in Hotan city East Turkistan, detention and indoctrination center for Uyghur infants.

Image: ap

Yet on running an online search we’re finding it hard to locate any concern or word of opposition from the world’s premier organization dedicated to relieving the suffering and abuse of children. What’s going down here?  Uyghur families being torn apart, children removed from their parents, sent off to brain-washing centers and detained in ‘orphanages’. Why the deafening silence from Save The Children?

The organization is deeply embedded within China, and has been collaborating with the Chinese Regime for some years. It runs projects not only in occupied East Turkistan but in Tibet also. To do so it clearly has been required to comply with the dictates of China’s totalitarian government, which perhaps explains its reticence to comment on human rights violations. Could be also that a value judgement within their executive has concluded that in the balance its presence in China is worth such ethically worrying compromise and compliance when viewed against any progress it brings.

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China's Regime

Image: archivenet

Such a rationalization, however well intended, cannot conceal the reality that in remaining silent on the trauma and abuse inflicted upon the children of occupied East Turkistan and Tibet it is guilty of complicity. Furthermore it’s enthusiastic partnership with China sends a powerful signal to the Chinese Regime that Save The Children cares little enough of human rights abuses not to cooperate with the same authority and political ideology responsible for such violations! It’s an example of double-think, a cognitive dissonance and process of denial, selectively ignoring the cultural genocide waged against the people of East Turkistan and Tibet.

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China's Regime

Image: cnn

Meanwhile the self-congratulatory claims regarding their projects in East Turkistan should be viewed against the following curiously contradictory admission:

“It is not easy for Save the Children to support the development of bilingual education in Xinjiang, where there is increasing use of Mandarin as the principal or only language of instruction in schools. While this is seen as a way to improve the standard of Mandarin among minority graduates entering the work force, the emphasis on teaching Mandarin in schools has reduced the status of mother tongue, and raised concerns among ethnic minorities about its effect on the sustainability of mother tongue and local culture…..” (emphasis added) Source: The Challenges of Bilingual Education in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Republic of China David Strawbridge Education Advisor, Save the Children

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China's Regime
Tibetan children indoctrinated each day with Chinese political ideology and taught in Chinese.

Image: tibetoffice

Having conceded that reality and revealed its acute awareness of such cultural oppression the same report goes on to make the following delusional claim: “However, by working within the boundaries of government policies and ‘bilingual’ education practices, we have helped improve the quality of mother tongue and Mandarin teaching in minority schools.” emphasis added) Source: Ibid

There’s a worrying inconsistency at work there, and a tacit admission that the organization, although cognizant of the eradication of the Uyghur language and imposition of Chinese upon children, is an active and willing partner in such a process!

Save The Children Stays Silent As Uyghur And Tibetan Minors Traumatized And Abused By China's Regime

Image: archivenet

This collaboration and endorsement will trouble anyone who values human rights and opposes cultural destruction. That Save The Children continues to maintain a silence on the plight of Uyghur and Tibetan children, traumatized by a forced separation from their parents and brutally indoctrinated in what are effectively detention centers, justly denies them any moral credibility.

If like us you wish to express your concern on this situation and would like to call upon Save The Children to make public its position on the persecution and oppression suffered by Uyghur and Tibetan children then please contact any of the following:

Twitter: President-Elect Ms Janti Soeripto @jantiso and/or CEO Carolyn Miles @carolynsave

Email: BeijingOffice.China@savethechildren.org