Although physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom, economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem. The economic indicator on the RSF World Press Freedom Index now stands at an unprecedented, critical low as its decline continued in 2025. As a result, the global state of press freedom is now classified as a “difficult situation” for the first time in the history of the Index.

[…] For over ten years, the Index’s results have warned of a worldwide decline in press freedom. In 2025, a new low point emerged: the average score of all assessed countries fell below 55 points, falling into the category of a “difficult situation.” More than six out of ten countries (112 in total) saw their overall scores decline in the Index.

For the first time in the history of the Index, the conditions for practising journalism are “difficult” or “very serious” in over half of the world’s countries and satisfactory in fewer than one in four.

[…] Out of the 32 countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region, 20 have seen their economic score decline in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index. The systemic media control in authoritarian regimes is often inspired by China’s propaganda model. China (178th) remains the world’s largest jail for journalists and reentered the bottom trio of the Index, coming just ahead of North Korea (179th). Meanwhile, the concentration of media ownership in the hands of influential groups linked to those in power — as seen in India (151st) — combined with growing economic pressures even in established democracies, means that press freedom in the region faces mounting repression and increasing uncertainty. [Source]

For the first time, Hong Kong slipped into the “red zone,” or the lowest category of the index, alongside China. RSF also noted that Hong Kong is among the territories that now directs subsidies toward pro-government media. Tom Grundy from the Hong Kong Free Press reported on the city’s uniquely precipitous drop in the rankings:

“At RSF, we have never seen such a sharp and rapid deterioration in the press freedom record of any country or territory,” the watchdog’s Asia-Pacific Bureau Advocacy Officer Aleksandra Bielakowska⁩ told HKFP. “Today, Hong Kong increasingly resembles neighbouring China, the world’s largest prison for journalists.”

[…] Hong Kong saw sharp dips in all five of the watchdog’s indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, socio-cultural context, and safety – adding up to a historic low score of 39.86.

The free expression NGO said: “The main factor behind this decline is the deterioration of the political indicator (-7.28 pts), notably due to the September 2024 conviction for ‘sedition’ of Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, former editors of Stand News. This is the first sedition case against the media since the UK handed over the territory in 1997.” [Source]

The 2025 RSF index of world press freedom is out.Hong Kong is ranked 140 out of 179, snuggly inbetween Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan. It is officially in the "red zone", together with China that is ranked 178. N-Korea is last. To put in context: HK was ranked 18, back in 2002.rsf.org/en/index

— lokman tsui (@lokman.org) 2025-05-02T06:57:31.409Z

HKFP is among the many media organizations facing the economic pressures highlighted by RSF:

HKFP has weathered threats, harassment, scrutiny from multiple government departments over the past year, but now facing a funding crunch. In full: buff.ly/ZxXDaLL

— Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (@hongkongfp.com) 2025-05-02T23:01:04.657Z

RSF’s Asia-Pacific advocacy manager Aleksandra Bielakowska highlighted how foreign media’s ability to operate in China has become severely limited, especially in borderland regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. She described it as “[n]ot just an authoritarian country, but a really totalitarian system where nobody can speak up, nobody can report on any issues.” “The difficulty is always safety as an exile media. Everybody is so afraid to talk with us and work with us,” said Shirley Leung Ka Lai, editor-in-chief of Photon Media from Hong Kong. She added that working anonymously creates obstacles for connecting with sources who are often reluctant to trust calls from unknown foreign numbers.

In a statement on Friday, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) of Hong Kong reaffirmed its support to journalists and stated that the day serves as a reminder to the city’s officials to respect their stated commitments regarding press freedom. Last month, the FCC released its Press Freedom Survey for 2025, which revealed a significant deterioration of working conditions for journalists in Hong Kong.

Of the 69 respondents, 43 (62%) said that their working environment as a journalist in Hong Kong had changed for the worse since July 2023, the time of the last press freedom survey. The National Security Law, its related trials, and the perceived exodus of international news organisations were mentioned as reasons for the change.

Respondents also noted that their sources have become more concerned about sharing their own opinions, with 44 (64%) saying that their sources are less willing to be quoted or discuss sensitive subjects.

Journalists are cautious about their own writing as well, with 45 (65%) saying they had self-censored in the last 18 months, and 12 (18%) saying they had self-censored “considerably”.

Ten respondents (16%) reported facing minor interference in their reporting, and one noted significant interference.

The perception of the media environment is also noteworthy, with four people (6%) saying they are “very concerned,” and 36 people (52%) being “slightly concerned” about the possibility of arrest or prosecution over their reporting or opinion articles or work they have edited. [Source]

For more on this topic, see CDT’s past coverage of press freedom in China and Hong Kong, including last year’s annual report of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, which showed a similar picture of surveillance, obstruction, and intimidation of journalists.

Over the past 100 years, the most important achievement of theoretical innovation and practical development of the Party’s labour movement cause has been the formation of the trade union development path with Chinese socialist characteristics. This path adheres to the Party’s comprehensive leadership over the labour movement cause and trade union work, ensuring that the labour movement always advances in the correct direction.

[…] Trade unions at all levels must fully implement the decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee, promote the high-quality development of trade union work, and write a more magnificent chapter of our country’s labour movement cause in the new era.

We must adhere to the correct political direction and unite the broad masses of workers and labourers closely around the Party. We must resolutely uphold the authority and centralised unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, and implement the Party’s leadership throughout the process and in all aspects of trade union work. Persist in using the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era to arm minds, guide practice, and promote work; resolutely shoulder the political responsibility of leading the workers and labourers to listen to the Party and obey the Party… [Source]

Some Chinese state-media reports unintentionally revealed the tension between the government and the people over what constitutes fair labor practices. One example, described by China Media Project (CMP), involved the aftermath of a heroic rescue of a child stuck in a narrow well by Bupatam Abdukader, a 24-year-old female auxiliary police officer in Xinjiang. As the story went viral online, many netizens wondered why she had been working in an informal role with pay and benefits that lagged behind her formally employed counterparts. This public pressure led Xinjiang authorities to give her a promotion, but only within the confines of her auxiliary status. This in turn led to more public pressure and forced the authorities to make an announcement—praised by CCTV and a Xinhua-run official journal—advocating the importance of following strict procedures of career advancement. CMP summarized the situation as such:

At its core, Bupatam’s story is about a gap in visions of what heroism means, and how it should be rewarded. While public sentiment called for the officer’s brave human acts to be rewarded with real and tangible benefits, and the dignity that comes with truly equal status, the authorities managed to contain her within the Party’s limited vision of heroism. In that vision, the hero’s extraordinary sacrifice works only to serve and preserve the system — even if that system is premised on the most ordinary perpetuation of inequalities. [Source]

In other cases of divergent visions of ideal labor conditions, netizens directed their criticism directly at the media. This was seen in reactions to a viral Weibo topic, covered favorably by state-aligned media, about a construction worker who had ostensibly saved two million yuan over nine years by carrying bricks on his back. In one WeChat article commenting on the story last week, author Song Qingren wrote skeptically about state media’s propagandistic glorification of such low-paid and physically gruelling work, and noted that only a few carefully selected comments with scant likes appeared under the high-engagement post: “Propaganda is very inspiring, sure, but will people actually buy into it? No, not only will people disbelieve such content, they will sigh in frustration and proceed to ridicule and mock it. And the more the media publishes such content, the lower they will fall in the public’s estimation, the more they will be despised.” Another WeChat article, by Unyielding Bamboo, excoriated media coverage that purports to be encouraging but in fact treats workers as little more than beasts of burden to be exploited:

The media, rather than doing what they ought to be doing—that is, exposing and reporting on serious issues—are instead encouraging people to sacrifice their health and well-being in pursuit of profit. Rather than tell the truth, they fritter away their time penning fictitious scripts; rather than bring problems to light, they focus on manufacturing delusions. I simply cannot comprehend such misplaced priorities. [Chinese]

Avenues for successfully pushing back against poor labor conditions are limited. As China Labor Watch has argued, workers in China “are routinely denied their fundamental right to strike and to both form and join unions of their choice and take part in relevant activities.” Those that attempt to strike are often met with violence. In April, police reportedly beat some of the hundreds of female workers at Hubei’s Chenlong Electronics who went on strike to protest six months of unpaid wages and two years of missing social security contributions. Nonetheless, China Labour Bulletin has documented at least 573 strikes across the country since the start of 2025, almost identical to the number of strikes in the same period from last year.

Perhaps in reaction to public pressure, some companies have enacted policies encouraging employees to work less, such as mandatory clock-off times and bans on after-hours meetings, according to Reuters. A Beijing law firm was also given a rare fine in March for failing to take corrective measures after illegally extending staff working hours. But as The Economist reported last month, this new phenomenon of limiting working hours might also be motivated more by the state’s economic self-interest than by a concern for labor rights:

These new policies align with two of the Chinese state’s current priorities. One is to try to curb a phenomenon known as neijuan—often translated as “involution”. People use the term to describe a situation in which extra input no longer yields more output, like running to stand still. The government wants to prevent this intense, self-harming competition. Perhaps not surprisingly, the new policy has met plenty of cynicism from involuted workers. One newspaper summarised their online snark with the question: “Are the companies that long enforced brutal overtime now going to lead the fight against involution?” Some point to Europe’s new ban on products made with forced labour, including “excessive overtime”, as the motivation for export companies to take action.

The second priority is to give people more time off in order to help bring about the much-needed switch in the economy away from exports and infrastructure towards consumption. In March the government presented a new “special action plan” to increase domestic demand, vowing to deal with “prominent pain points such as the prevalence of overtime culture”, and to protect “rest and vacation rights and interests”. It increased the number of public holidays this year by two days. Getting people to eat out and spend money is difficult if they are stuck at their desk. [Source]

Translations by Cindy Carter.

1. There can be no “national rejuvenation” without systemic political reform
2. The People do not want a political party with unchecked power.
3. China does not need someone to “point the way forward.” Democracy is the way forward. [Chinese]

The three banners hanging from a pedestrian overpass near Chengdu’s Chadianzi Bus Station. Local netizens confirmed the location of the photo, which is close to Chengdu’s Third Ring Road, based on the street layout and the illuminated signs visible in the background.

The date of the protest is significant because it was the anniversary of the April 15, 1989 death of former General Secretary Hu Yaobang—who for many symbolizes a more progressive, possibly even more democratic “path not taken.” (In the spring of 1989, mourning for Hu’s death coalesced into the massive protests that would later be crushed in the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown.) The language used in the slogans is quite measured, and references the CCP’s oft-lauded goal of “national rejuvenation.” Although Xi Jinping is not mentioned by name, the third slogan is a clear reference to the standard Party formulation of Xi Jinping “pointing the way forward” on various policy issues (at least 240, by one recent count).

Although such offline expressions of political dissent are rare in China, they are not without precedent. CDT Chinese editors have documented three other solitary protests that have occurred over the past three years. The Chengdu protest called to mind antecedents such as the January 2022 “Luohu Warrior” protest in Shenzhen. It also echoed the October 2022 Sitong Bridge banner protest in Beijing, in which solitary protester Peng Lifa displayed banners calling for more freedom, an end to pandemic lockdowns, and for work and academic strikes to topple Xi Jinping. The Chengdu protest also recalled the banner and loudspeaker slogans of Fang Yirong’s one-man protest on a pedestrian overpass in Xinhua county, Hunan province in July 2024.

The protester in Chengdu contacted several well-known whistleblower accounts on X—including Teacher Li (@whyyoutouzhele) and Yesterday (@YesterdayBigcat)—to amplify his message. He sent them his protest slogans, photos of the scene, and even a photo of his ID card, which revealed his identity as Mei Shilin, age 27, from Muchuan county in Sichuan province. Mei soon fell out of contact and his whereabouts are unknown; it is likely that he has been detained by public security officers. (Mei’s name and photo were only shared on social media after he had disappeared and after his identity had been revealed on YouTube.)

Content related to Mei’s protest has been thoroughly scrubbed from the Chinese internet, and CDT editors have noted that his name is now a sensitive word on numerous Chinese platforms and social media sites. Some Chinese netizens who learned of the protest via overseas sites voiced admiration for Mei’s bravery and expressed concern for his safety. A selection of Chinese-language comments from X about Mei’s bold protest have been translated below:

DEMAXIYA159: He’s a hero. It takes a lot of courage for an individual to do something this big. If every city had such a hero, the government would have to face up to its problems. If everyone had such courage, then dictatorship wouldn’t dare raise its head. Democracy means that everyone has the courage to raise their own voice.

President_JC23: Respect to that lone warrior. I hope he can stay safe.

wulijin11: Brave warrior, you did what I lacked the courage to do.

Running_Program: It takes a lot of courage to do this “within the wall.”

leaf_sen: It’s impossible to see this [news] in China because the internet is so completely controlled.

Mrdoorvpn: That brave warrior will definitely go down in history, whether you agree with him or not.

geleilaoshi: You are not alone!

rt_cou66416: Whoa, Peng Lifa has returned!

Fulefull: All of society is stagnant, but now and then, there’s a little spark.

wudiniu7764: The security guards in Chengdu are screwed. They’ll have to guard the bridges again. [Chinese]

Many observers and human rights groups are justifiably concerned for Mei Shilin’s safety. In a recent article titled “Another ‘Bridge Man’ in China Forcibly Disappeared,” Human Rights Watch China Researcher Yalkun Uluyol called on the Chinese authorities to immediately disclose Mei Shilin’s whereabouts. It remains unclear when and where Mei was detained, where he is currently being held, and whether he has access to legal representation. An update this week from Qian Lang, reporting for RFA Mandarin, discussed what steps the authorities might take next in a case that they almost certainly wish to suppress:

One of the two sources [familiar with the case], Qin from Chengdu, said if Mei was found by investigators to have overseas ties, he would be handed over to the State Security Bureau and transferred to the Municipal State Security Bureau Detention Center.

“If no substantial evidence of collusion with foreign forces is found, he will be handled by the Chengdu police,” added Qin, who wanted to be identified by a single name for safety reasons.

Legal experts believe authorities may charge Mei with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a common criminal accusation in China that authorities level against political, civil, and human rights advocates.

“They (the prosecution) may file a case for the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble because they don’t want to give him a more glorious charge, such as inciting subversion of state power or subverting state power,” Lu Chenyuan, a legal expert in China, told RFA.

“They are now more inclined to depoliticize (the Mei Shilin case) and want to reduce its political significance,” added Lu. [Source]

The safety and whereabouts of many previous protesters remain unknown. In the case of the “Luohu Warrior,” even his real name is unknown to the public, and for over three years, there has been no official information about where he is being held or whether he has been or will be tried. The most widely known of the protesters is Peng Lifa, dubbed “Bridge Man” after the famous “Tank Man” of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Peng Lifa disappeared soon after his Sitong Bridge protest and has not been heard from since. Peng’s courageous lone protest—which in turn inspired the late 2022 “White Paper Protests” that led to the end of China’s pandemic lockdowns—continues to resonate with a new generation of Chinese citizens. Fang Yirong, the young man in Hunan who used a banner and a loudspeaker to make his political demands heard, has likewise not been heard from since his protest in July of 2024.

As part of the investigation, ICIJ coordinated reporters across five continents to interview targets and analyze their cases. ICIJ also reviewed a 2004 Chinese police textbook and confidential guidelines for domestic security officers dating to 2013. The reporters then compared the tactics described in the internal documents with the experiences of the 105 targets, as well as with secretly recorded police interrogations, and phone calls and text messages between 11 security officers in China and nine targets overseas. The comparison shows the tactics recently deployed against the subjects mirrored the guidelines on how to control individuals labeled as domestic security threats.

Half of the targets interviewed by ICIJ and its media partners said the harassment extended to family members back home, who suffered intimidation and were interrogated by police or state security officials one or more times. Several victims told ICIJ that their family members in China or Hong Kong were harassed by police shortly after they had participated in protests or public events overseas. Sixty said they believed they had been followed or were targets of surveillance or spying by Chinese officials or their proxies; 27 said they were victims of an online smear campaign, and 19 said they had received suspicious messages or experienced hacking attempts, including by state actors. Some said their bank accounts in China and Hong Kong had been frozen. Officers from both the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of State Security — two of the Chinese agencies with intelligence capacity — were responsible for intimidating some of the targets and their families, the testimonies show. Twenty-two people said they received physical threats or had been assaulted by civilian CCP supporters.

Most of those interviewed by ICIJ and its partners said they had not reported state-sponsored threats to the authorities in their adopted countries, explaining that they feared retaliation from China or didn’t have faith in authorities’ ability to help. Of those who had filed a report, several said police did not follow up on their case or told them that they couldn’t do anything because there was no evidence of a crime. [Source]

The ICIJ investigation described the phenomenon of Beijing-backed “GONGOs” (government-organized non-governmental organizations) that monitor and intimidate human rights activists critical of the Chinese government. During China’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session at the U.N. Human Rights Council last year, CDT reported that the number of China-based “civil society” organizations listed in China’s UPR summary report nearly tripled over the course of two UPR cycles from 2013 to 2024, which may have dampened criticism of China’s human rights record. At The Washington Post, reporting in partnership with ICIJ, Greg Miller, Jelena Ćosić, and Tamsin Lee-Smith described the scale of Chinese NGOs at the U.N. that have hidden ties to the CCP:

The ICIJ investigation identified 106 NGOs that have received U.N. accreditation and are registered in or affiliated with China. At least 59 appear to violate U.N. rules meant to ensure that NGOs testifying in Geneva aren’t doing so under government influence or pressure.

More than 50 of the 106 NGOs included language in charter documents pledging loyalty to the CCP, with some acknowledging that they defer to the party on decisions of hiring and funding, the investigation found. Forty-six listed directors or others in leadership roles who simultaneously held positions in Chinese state agencies or the CCP. Records show that at least 10 received the bulk of their funding from Chinese government sources.

[…] The number of Chinese organizations with U.N. credentials has nearly doubled since 2018, the year of the initial U.N. report on Xinjiang. Many of these organizations were formed at least a decade ago but only sought NGO accreditation after 2018. The surge reflects an effort that has been backed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and involves nearly every level of government in China.

[…] Last year, 33 Chinese NGOs made nearly 300 appearances at Human Rights Council sessions, according to data gathered by the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), an independent nonprofit group. An examination of their statements and testimony found not a single instance in which any had uttered words that could be construed as critical of China. [Source]

Ethnic minority groups are often targets of Beijing’s transnational repression, as the ICIJ highlighted. Alongside the investigation is a report by Citizen Lab detailing how Uyghur-language software was hijacked to deliver malware that was extremely well customized to reach the target population of Uyghurs in exile. The report states that the cyberattack replicates a pattern of Chinese-government-aligned threat actors digitally targeting marginalized communities. Earlier this month, CDT documented other reports on the expansion of China’s digital repression of Tibetans, including those in diaspora, via a Chinese state-owned digital forensics firm that provides offensive cyber-operations training for Lhasa’s Tibet Police College. The Guardian, another ICIJ partner, recently uncovered an online campaign of transnational repression against Hongkongers in the U.K. The campaign included 29 accounts that published over 150 posts last August doxxing Hongkongers and exhibiting similarities to other online influence operations by a Chinese security agency. ICIJ partners provided other local case studies, as well.

Another focus of the ICIJ investigation was the Chinese Party-state’s attempts to instrumentalize Interpol. The Chinese government has increasingly used Interpol red notices to target a wide range of its citizens abroad, and China “does not appear to be among the countries currently subject to Interpol corrected measures for alleged misuse of the organization’s system,” the ICIJ wrote. Along with other ICIJ partners, Simon Leplâtre at Le Monde described how Interpol is used as a tool in China’s arsenal of transnational repression, using the story of Huang Youlong (referred to as "H."), a close confidant of Jack Ma:

Like H., hundreds of individuals whom China considers to be persons of interest have been targeted by abusive red notices. In collaboration with 42 media outlets and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Le Monde investigated several cases that illustrate China’s use of Interpol and the lack of safeguards within the institution. Despite attempts to reform it, Interpol, based in the French city of Lyon, still lacks transparency in its procedures and never publicly holds countries that abuse it accountable – a boon for authoritarian regimes.

Our investigation shows that Interpol is one of the components of China’s arsenal of repressive measures used against its targets abroad, whether they are political dissidents, members of minorities that are oppressed in China – such as Uyghurs or Tibetans – businesspeople and political leaders, either corrupt or the victims of purges.

[…] Ted Bromund, a researcher and expert witness in legal cases involving Interpol procedures, explained that "Interpol is a tool. So is sending text messages to people. So is stalking them physically. So is revoking their passports. (…) By itself, it’s not generally particularly effective with China. But the way I like to put it with the Chinese is that Interpol is like a pin through a butterfly in an insect collection. It holds someone down, locks them in place so they can’t get away. And then it’s much easier to apply all of these other tools because you’ve got someone located." [Source]

Responding to the ICIJ investigation on Bluesky, Jeremy Daum at China Law Translate shared a thread urging caution with the terminology and framing of the term “transnational repression” when contemplating appropriate responses to the phenomenon:

🧵Happy to see continued attention on the ways that China harasses and surveils abroad– hard to find the bandwidth today, but it remains a real issue that impacts people's lives.A few thoughts that I've raised elsewhere on how best to think about it and address it: www.icij.org/investigatio…

— China Law Translate / Jeremy Daum (@chinalawtranslate.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T14:53:30.795Z

Recent procurement documents reveal that Meiya Pico, a Chinese state-owned digital forensics firm, will provide an offensive cyber operations training environment and digital forensic laboratory to the Tibet Police College in Lhasa. This development underscores the Chinese government’s strategic investment in advanced Public Security Bureau (PSB) training infrastructure in Tibet and highlights Meiya Pico’s integral role in meeting these specialized requirements.

[...] Over the past decade, Meiya Pico has become a cornerstone of China’s digital surveillance complex. From developing covert phone spyware apps and forensic hacking devices for police, to building big-data platforms that mine email communications, Meiya Pico’s technology has been deployed at the front lines of repression in Xinjiang and Tibet. The company was identified as presenting a significant risk to the national security of the U.S. in 2019 and placed on its Entity List alongside companies like iFlytek and SenseTime – citing involvement in human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

[...] Meiya Pico is typical of this ecosystem in that it serves a dual role: enabling police surveillance on the home front in the PRC’s frontier regions, and the export of China’s digital repression model abroad. Whether through equipping PRC police in Tibet’s historic and cultural capital, Lhasa, with remote intrusion techniques or training foreign police forces, Meiya Pico exemplifies the global ambitions of China’s surveillance and security industry. [Source]

The digital realm has long been a target and instrument of state surveillance in Tibet. In CDT’s 2023 Cloud Cover report, we found that local and provincial Tibetan governments have spent over 55 million yuan on Police Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) technology over the past two decades. Other reports have covered how the Chinese government has expanded digital surveillance and DNA collection in Tibet. On Sunday, Human Rights Watch published a report about the increasing number of arrests of Tibetans for their internet and phone use. It described how this phenomenon has grown in tandem with police offering cash rewards for informing on fellow citizens, expanding manual phone searches on a mass scale, forcing Tibetans to download a government “anti-fraud” app that allows for backdoor government surveillance, and imposing restrictions on religious practice:

The full scale of such arrests and prosecutions is unknown, as Chinese authorities do not disclose official data for political offenses. The more than 60 reported cases appear related to an increase in government surveillance during this period, including through mass phone searches and the use of mandatory phone apps with built-in government surveillance, as well as a tightened regulatory regime on data and religion.

“For Tibetans, simply using a cellphone has become dangerous, and everyday activities like posting a humorous video or contacting loved ones abroad can bring arrest, detention, and torture,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Tibetans, particularly those living in remote areas, once celebrated the arrival of cellphones so they could stay in touch with friends and family, but their phones have effectively become government tracking devices.”

[...] In many cases, those arrested were accused of keeping “banned content” on their phones or sharing it online. Such “banned content” typically includes references to Tibetan religious figures, particularly the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and expressions of pro-Tibetan sentiment. Chinese authorities have applied the ambiguous language of the law broadly: in one case, a man was arrested for setting up a WeChat group celebrating the birthdays of 80-year-old Buddhist monks. The police said it was “illegal” to form such a chat group “without permission.” [Source]

A prime example of this sort of government repression took place earlier this month following the death of influential Tibetan Buddhist leader Tulku Hungkar Dorje. After Chinese authorities announced his death on April 2, they interrogated and detained local Tibetans who posted photos and messages online mourning his death, placed his monastery in Golog prefecture of Qinghai Province under round-the-clock police surveillance, and conducted random inspections of locals’ phones. Tulku Hungkar Dorje went missing in August 2024 after being harassed by Chinese authorities for his work on the preservation of Tibetan language and culture, and for allegedly snubbing the Chinese government-installed 11th Panchen Lama during the latter’s visit to his monastery. He was detained in Vietnam last month and reportedly died the day he was handed over to a visiting Chinese police squad. Five Tibetan monks, accompanied by Chinese embassy officials, were shown his face for two minutes but not allowed to see other parts of his body.

The Chinese government’s efforts to suppress Tibetan language and culture, particularly via Chinese schooling, have attracted growing media attention. Harold Thibault from Le Monde recently traveled to Golog prefecture, the location of Tulku Hungkar Dorje’s monastery, and reported how state boarding schools “sever [the] roots” of Tibetan children. He described the story of a 14-year-old girl named Dolma, who at age seven was sent to one such boarding school located more than 12 hours from her home in Sichuan:

[E]verything suggests that the project is at least as political as it is educational. It aims to integrate these students into Chinese society to assimilate them further, to the detriment of their mother tongue and local culture. In these high schools, located in cities with a predominantly Han Chinese population, most classes are taught in Chinese, and patriotic education permeates everyday life.

[...] Given Dolma’s young age, her mother had asked an older girl sent to the same boarding school to look after her before her departure. But they were not placed in the same dormitory and rarely saw each other. Dolma felt very lonely. At such a distance, it was unthinkable to return home on weekends, so she spent eight months a year away from her family. She could only make the journey for the nearly two months of winter vacation (between the Gregorian New Year and the Tibetan New Year) and the two months of summer vacation. "When I returned, the first weeks, I no longer understood the dialect spoken by my family; I had to re-learn it in a way. A distance was created, and we lost our closeness," she recounted from another country where she now lived.

At school, Chinese was the main language. There was indeed a Tibetan class, but the teacher seemed to come from a region so far from hers that she could not understand him. Political education, however, was central. "We were taught to love China, that China protects the Tibetans, that China is the best country," the teenager recounted.

[...] The subject is a sensitive one for China. Upon leaving the regional airport, Le Monde’s reporter was followed by at least three cars and five individuals, plainclothes agents sharing the same hotel in the evening, the same breakfast, and then ensuring at the terminal that he took a return flight. [Source]

The [China Daily] report cited prosecutors as saying Wu had accepted bribes worth more than 343 million yuan ($47.37 million) between Jun 2006 and Feb 2021 during his years of working in senior positions in TAR, including as the regional party secretary, vice-chairman of the regional government and head of the regional publicity department.

Prosecutors have told the court that Wu had used his positions to secure benefits for others in project contracting and business operations.

[…] China’s party and government anti-corruption watchdogs have said Wu had violated Party disciplines and national laws, harming the region’s development. They have also accused him of failing to implement the Party’s strategy for governing Xizang and interfering with engineering projects for personal gain, the report said, using China’s Sinicized name for Tibet (or TAR).

Wu, who worked as the Party Secretary of TAR from 2016 to 2021, maintained a hardline approach toward Tibetan affairs, aligning closely with Beijing’s policies. His tenure was marked by a strong emphasis on Sinicization, ideological control, and stringent security measures. He prioritized political stability and Sinicization over Tibetan autonomy and cultural preservation. While occasionally speaking of respecting Tibetan customs, his actions were directed at the erosion of Tibetan identity under the guise of integration. [Source]

The U.S. government had imposed sanctions on Wu in 2022 for his policies that “involved serious human rights abuse, including extrajudicial killings, physical abuse, arbitrary arrests, and mass detentions in the TAR. Additional abuses … include forced sterilization, coerced abortion, restrictions on religious and political freedoms, and the torture of prisoners.” Pelbar from RFA Tibetan described how Tibetans reacted to the news of the investigation against Wu when it was announced last June:

The move was praised by Tibetans on Chinese social media in a rare display of public opinion about such measures in China.

“It is very good that this man has been arrested,” said one person. “This is good news for Tibetans,” said another.

“This enemy of the Tibetans has been captured and it will eliminate harm from the Tibetan people,” said a third.

[…] More than 760 comments appeared on a WeChat channel in response to a story about Wu’s investigation, all expressing support for the probe.

But at least one activist predicted the investigation would do nothing to change the plight of Tibetans.

“Despite Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s investigation of Wu Yingjie and other officials as part of the nation’s anti-corruption campaign, there will be no positive impact on Tibet and its related issues,” said Sangay Kyap, a Tibetan rights analyst. [Source]

Other Tibetan officials have also been targeted by anti-corruption probes. In January, the South China Morning Post reported that the the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) placed former Tibet chairman Che Dalha (Qizhala) under investigation for “severe violations of law and Communist Party discipline.” In February, the CCDI announced that it had expelled two Tibetan officials—Qi Jianxin, a former governor, and Jangchup (Jiang Chu), former vice governor, of Dechen (Diqing) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan—for having “seriously violated the Party’s political discipline,” being “disloyal and dishonest to the Party,” and making “illegal gains.”

Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has extended to a wide swath of government and society. In November, Admiral Miao Hua was suspended and placed under investigation, and recently General He Weidong of the Central Military Commission was reportedly detained for unspecified crimes. In February, Minister of Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong was removed from office in what many believe was a graft-related probe. On Tuesday, the Chinese government announced the launch of “Sky Net 2025,” an operation to “hunt down fugitives, recover illegal proceeds and combat cross-border corruption.” Beyond high-level officials and overseas criminals, petty corruption is another massive target of Xi’s campaign, as Chun Han Wong reported last week for The Wall Street Journal:

Communist Party enforcers are targeting grassroots graft from kickbacks for public contracts to bribes for medical treatment in a renewal of Xi’s popular assault on corrupt “flies” and “ants”—low-level bureaucrats and state workers—whose misconduct affects ordinary citizens.

[…] Party inspectors proceeded to root out what they call “unhealthy tendencies and corruption issues that occur close to the masses.” Authorities punished 530,000 people and sent 16,000 of them to prosecutors for criminal proceedings in 2024. These probes drove up overall disciplinary cases to record levels last year, when the party penalized 889,000 people.

The offenses have included bribery, abuse of power and the misuse of public funds meant for school meals, pensions, medical insurance and rural development. The party also ramped up pressure on bribe-givers, opening investigations against 26,000 people last year for offering payoffs and inducing graft, a 53% increase from the year before. [Source]

Last week at the U.N. Human Rights Council, 28 European states expressed concern about the “dire” human rights situation in Tibet and Xinjiang. Regarding Tibet, this includes “obligatory boarding schooling and the suppression of protests against hydropower projects. We are deeply concerned over reports that Tibetan schools teaching Tibetan language and culture have been shut down and that Chinese authorities have insisted that all students attend state schools where Tibetan is only taught as a stand-alone subject.” The research network Turquoise Roof recently published a report outlining the Chinese government’s strategic plans for Tibet from 2025 to 2049, which reveals a switch in approach from a framework of nominal autonomy to complete assimilation. The following is an excerpt from the report’s executive summary:

• Dismantling cultural transmission to the next generation through boarding schools that split families, centralised to require family separation.
• Economic integration into China’s national infrastructure networks, as [an] essential supplier of industrial raw materials from lithium to water.
• Policies grounded in the Party state narrative that traditional Tibetan lifestyles are ‘backward’ and ‘unproductive’.
• Systematic disempowerment, surveillance, relocation, and control. [Source]

Zhenhao Zou, 28, was convicted of the attacks between 2019 and 2023 following a monthlong trial at the Inner London Crown Court. He was convicted of 11 counts of rape, with two of the offenses relating to one victim.

After more than 19 hours of deliberations, jurors concluded Zou raped three of the women in London and seven in China.

Police have only been able to identify two of the victims and said after the verdict that more than 50 other women may have fallen victim to Zou, which would make him one of the worst sex offenders in U.K. history.

Using hidden or handheld cameras to record the attacks, Zou filmed nine of the attacks as “souvenirs” and often kept a trophy box of women’s belongings.

[…] Zou, who also used the name Pakho online, befriended fellow students of Chinese heritage on WeChat and dating apps, before inviting them for drinks and drugging them at his apartments in London or an unknown location in China. [Source]

The London Metropolitan Police stated that after a woman came forward to report Zou, authorities searched his London flat and found evidence of the crimes on “hundreds of videos stored on his devices.” While British police said that China’s Ministry of Public Security “helped to facilitate one of the brave victim-survivors giving evidence against Zou,” Mary O’Connor and Kris Cheng at the Daily Mail reported that no charges have been brought in China, even though the court determined Zou had raped seven women there. O’Connor and Cheng also wrote that Zou’s father is a wealthy CCP member and director of a state-owned business who owns several homes.

A WeChat public account posted an article about Zou’s conviction just before International Women’s Day, but the article was later censored. On Weibo, users also noted that the news was censored on that platform, as well as to some extent on Xiaohongshu. (By contrast, as another WeChat article highlighted last week, platforms such as Tieba and Weibo appear relatively tolerant of content idolizing Dong Zhimin, the man who was sentenced to nine years in prison for torturing and imprisoning the shackled woman known as Xiaohuamei. Even the Douyin and Bilibili accounts of the All-China Women’s Federation have been targeted with verbal abuse and attacks from extreme misogynists.) One commenter lamented: “I still don’t get how this kind of TV news involved sensitive content. After reading the comments, it looks like his family shelled out big bucks to have it deleted. […] But I like the reporting style in the U.K. The criminal is shown in HD on the big screen, while the victims’ information is extremely protected. Let’s hope they do the same in China one day.”

Censorship surrounding Zou’s conviction echoed the case of Liu Qiangdong, the billionaire founder of JD.com who was accused by Liu Jingyao of raping her when she was a college student in the U.S. in 2018. The civil trial in the American court system ended in 2022 with a settlement, which many viewed as a major step forward in the history of Chinese #MeToo cases. Liu Jingyao’s supporters reported that many of her Chinese social media accounts and posts linked to her case were deleted by censors, while JD.com mounted powerful PR campaigns against her.

Toxic environments both on- and offline underscore the lack of safety for Chinese women in China and the U.K. Some have come together in response, such as the London-based Chinese feminist activist group with the Instagram handle @weareallchainedwomen, which organized a special exhibition for International Women’s Day aimed at fostering transnational solidarity in the face of patriarchal violence. Regarding Zou’s sexual crimes, Aamna Mohdin from The Guardian also described how societal neglect has made it harder for Chinese victims to find justice in the U.K. and elsewhere:

“There is a huge enormous cost to study as a student from China, it’s such an investment. Lots of Chinese families and Asian families put so much into it, so if that is tainted, I can imagine that there’s a lot of shame, not just for yourself but to your wider family and community.”

Sarah Yeh, the chair of SEEAWA, said: “Rape is stigmatised in all east and south-east Asian cultures. It’s often a case of victim-blaming, as it is in the wider UK community as well. Often women don’t really know their rights, especially if they’re coming to a foreign country. So it’s about building awareness and a greater understanding that there is help out there that they can tap into.”

[…] Yeh described this as a wider problem of societal neglect. “I understand that one of the women reported to the police and she didn’t have a good experience because the translator wasn’t good so they brushed off her initial complaint,” she said. “It’s stuff like this we really need to work on at a societal level to make sure that people are included, especially people that are coming into our country that haven’t got the experience and culture and understanding of how our legal system works or what protective systems there are in place for us.” [Source]

The sense that Beijing was transformative, personally and politically, is echoed by countless women, many of whom went on to become leaders in the women’s movement. “The atmosphere was incredible. I’d never sat with someone from Tibet or the Middle East – there was excitement and a feeling that we could achieve a lot,” says Lydia Alpízar Durán, co-executive director of IM-Defensoras, a Latin American network of female defenders. “We got a lot done in Beijing. Beyond the government agreement we built a global women’s movement. Beijing catalysed so many processes.”

[…] But if the contemporary political landscape is very different from the 1990s “golden era” of trust in democracy, multilateralism and institutions, the lessons learned from Beijing are still relevant, say the women who were there.

“We can’t forget we were the people who pushed back an unequal world – we were pushing back and transforming. We spent years explaining and showing the world there were inequalities and that we wanted to be better. We are fighting for democracies, so we can not think only ‘how are we going to react?’ but ‘what are we going to continue doing?’” says [Ana Cristina González], who [was part of the Latin American delegation to the conference and] now heads Causa Justa, the group that spearheaded the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Colombia – a fight it won in 2022. [Source]

In China, the state of gender equality and women’s rights has deteriorated under Xi Jinping. Highlighting specific challenges in this respect, Lee Chung Lun at the International Service for Human Rights published a statement, delivered during the 58th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, on behalf of Chinese feminist activists commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action:

Feminist activists and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) face increasing State repression, including censorship, surveillance, arbitrary detention, harassment, and politically motivated charges. Broader movements such as the #MeToo movement, which was inspired by global efforts to expose sexual harassment and gender-based violence, have been targeted by a government that refuses to yield space for any form of organising or an independent civil society. While enjoying support from younger generations, China’s #MeToo movement has been confronted by a still predominantly patriarchal society, and conservative courts dismissing the rare cases brought by survivors.

[…] In partnership with Chinese feminist activists who cannot address the HRC out of fear of reprisals, ISHR’s statement highlights the resilience and determination of feminist activists in China as they continue their struggle despite mounting challenges. [Source]

Despite its current setbacks, the gender-equality movement in China has made some lasting progress in certain domains over the past few decades. Li Jun at the Made in China Journal recently published an article outlining some of the ways that the feminist movement has influenced journalism and the media in China:

Twenty years ago, few journalists or readers could have anticipated the seismic shifts in Chinese journalism we see today. The once-dominant high-profile male journalists and opinion leaders have largely faded from the scene, while women now make up more than half of the journalistic workforce in China. Reporting on gender-based violence has become mainstream, and young women have emerged as the benchmark for journalism’s public role measured in terms of serving both ‘the public interest’ and ‘the interest of the public’. Meanwhile, media outlets frequently find themselves at the centre of public controversies over their stance on gender equality and women’s rights. The evolving relationship between feminism and the media stems not only from generational differences in feminist movements and their interactions with the state, but also from the profound influence of feminist movements on audiences and the journalistic community. [Source]

The arc of these movements in China can be seen through the life of certain individuals. Last month, Li Xiaojiang (李小江), a pioneer of women’s studies in China, passed away from breast cancer. CDT Chinese highlighted a recent issue of Diyin (低音) about Li’s life, noting her contributions to gender-related theory and movements in post-Mao China. Li was reportedly invited by the Women’s Federation to participate in the NGO Forum on the side of the Beijing conference, but she declined (perhaps due to her skeptical attitude towards power). Commenting on the role of the conference at that period in China’s history, Li said, “Given the unfavorable political and economic conditions at the time, women’s liberation was the only positive card left for China to play, one that would meet with global approval and recognition. For this reason, women’s issues very quickly became a topic of national importance.”

CDT Chinese also featured a recent WeChat article about Taiwanese scholar Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu’s (许慧琦) book “Nora in China: The Shaping and Evolution of New Female Images, 1900-1930s.” Nora is the main character in Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen’s influential feminist play, “A Doll’s House,” about a married woman’s pursuit of self-fulfillment in a stereotypically gendered world. The play was first translated into Chinese in 1918, on the cusp of the May Fourth Movement, and its dissemination in China over the subsequent decades was part of a process of repeated reinterpretation and reconstruction. Hsu traces the evolution of Nora’s image and shows how it was frequently dominated and distorted to serve certain patriarchal political agendas.

Muhammed said she and her then husband, Polat, 39, left Korla, the second-largest city in Xinjiang after she was arrested and forced by police to remove her hijab and Polat was banned from attending prayers at a mosque.

While Muhammed, who was pregnant with their second child, and their son made it to Turkey, Polat was arrested and has been detained in Thailand ever since.

“We just wanted a peaceful life where we could raise our children and not be seen as a criminal,” said Muhammed, who shared one of the final exchanges of messages between her now 10-year-old daughter and Polat. Her daughter has never met her father.

[…] “There is no way Polat or his family still living in China would have wanted him to return there. He just wanted to see his children again,” said Muhammed.

[…] “It’s shameful for Thailand to send these people to China, even though the family and whole world knows it is an unsafe place for Uyghurs,” she said. [Source]

The 40 Uyghurs who were deported were among a larger group of hundreds of Uyghurs detained in Thailand in the early 2010s while attempting to flee persecution in Xinjiang. The Thai government deported 109 of them to China in 2015, but 48 remained in Bangkok. This January, the Thai government attempted to deport them to China but appeared to have paused the operation after the asylum seekers went on a hunger strike and drew widespread international concern.

Regarding the timing of last week’s deportation, Eric Olander argued in Monday’s newsletter of the China-Global South Project that “with Washington consumed by Russia, Ukraine, and the situation in the Mideast, [Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn] Shinawatra might have calculated that this was the perfect moment to get rid of a long-running problem in its relationship with China, with only minimal blowback. And if it helps score some easy points with Beijing — now a more important partner than ever, given mounting concerns about U.S. dependability — then that’s even better.” Shinawatra also pledged to deepen ties with China during a meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing in early February, and the Thai government has recently increased cooperation with China in its crackdown on scam centers near the Thailand-Myanmar border. Many comments under a Weibo video showing the Uyghurs escorted off the plane in handcuffs upon their arrival in Kashgar falsely suggested that the Uyghurs had participated in the illegal scam-center operations.

Domestic and global criticism of Thailand was swift. Al Jazeera reported that the Thai human rights group Cross Cultural Foundation said it would pursue legal action to compel officials to testify on the status of the Uyghurs. Phil Robertson, director of the Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates (AHRLA) group, said that the deportations “totally destroyed” the “charade” that the current Thai government was different to the previous one “when it comes to transnational repression and cooperating with authoritarian neighbours.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the deportation “in the strongest possible terms” and issued a security alert for American citizens in Thailand. Amnesty International’s China Director Sarah Brooks called the deportation “unimaginably cruel” and added, “The Thai government should have protected these men, but instead it has wilfully exposed them to these grave risks.” Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said, “Thailand blatantly disregarded domestic law and its international obligations by forcibly sending these Uyghurs to China to face persecution. After 11 years of inhumane detention in Thailand’s immigration lockup, these men are now at grave risk of being tortured, forcibly disappeared, and detained for long periods by the Chinese government.” Lee Chung Lun at the International Service for Human Rights described how the move “raised concerns over Thailand’s credibility as a UN Human Rights Council member”:

The latest deportation followed the same troubling pattern and demonstrated Thailand’s continued disregard for its obligations under international law, particularly the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning individuals to countries where they face a credible risk of persecution, torture, or enforced disappearance. As a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), Thailand is legally bound to prevent such returns. The deportation also contradicts Thailand’s own Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearances, which codifies non-refoulement into national law, and reflects a worsening trend of transnational repression against dissidents and diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.

[…] It is ludicrous that on the heels of taking its seat as a Human Rights Council member, Thailand chose to ignore compelling UN evidence and instead pointed to Beijing ‘reassurances’ that no harm would be done to the deported Uyghurs. This casts serious doubt at Thailand’s own commitments as a Council member to uphold the ‘highest human rights standards, and its credibility to serve on the Council. [Source]

The U.N.’s role in the affair has been controversial. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk stated on Thursday, “This violates the principle of non-refoulement for which there is a complete prohibition in cases where there is a real risk of torture, ill-treatment, or other irreparable harm upon their return.” The U.N. Refugee Agency claimed after the deportation that it had “repeatedly sought access to the group and assurances from Thai authorities that these individuals, who had expressed a fear of return, would not be deported. No such access was granted, and when contacted for clarification, the Royal Thai Government authorities stated that no decision had been made to deport the group.” However, several activists and researchers criticized the U.N. response, saying that the Refugee Agency acted too late and refused to engage with their concerns. Last year, The New Humanitarian reported on internal documents from the U.N. Refugee Agency which revealed that it rebuffed requests from the Thai government to assist 48 Uyghur asylum seekers held in Thai detention centers. Nyrola Elimä was one of the first researchers to publicly draw attention to this threat of deportation, and she criticized the lack of response to her warnings.

In other news related to Chinese transnational repression, Simon Leplâtre at Le Monde reported that UNESCO, under pressure from its Chinese sponsors, censored Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup, who was invited to talk at an event titled “Language Technologies for All” in Paris last week:

[T]he day before his scheduled speech on Tuesday the 24th on the sidelines of the event, the linguist received an email informing him that it had been cancelled. “I asked for an explanation, but they didn’t give me any,” the researcher said. The next day, UNESCO officials claimed there was a “misunderstanding.” According to information from Le Monde, UNESCO officials pressured the organisers to cancel Mr. Ayup’s speech.

[…] According to sources within the organizing committee, the order did indeed come from UNESCO officials, apparently under pressure from China. “They told us that the Chinese were unhappy, especially the private donors, and that as a result it was not possible to hold the presentation that was planned for the next day," said a researcher who was a member of the committee. This was confirmed by a second source within the committee.

Two Chinese companies were among the event’s sponsors, including iFlytek, which specializes in voice recognition. The company, a jewel of artificial intelligence, offers both transcription services to the general public and voice identification to police forces, including in Xinjiang. “I’ve been working on this presentation for two months. [Its cancellation by the organizers] is a deep lack of respect. I don’t understand why China can control an event like this, in France,” said Mr. Ayup. [French]

“China is actively carrying out bilateral and multilateral cooperation with Thailand, Myanmar and other countries to severely crack down on cross-border online gambling and fraud crimes,” the spokesperson’s office of the Chinese foreign ministry told The New York Times in a statement Thursday. “At present, many online gambling and fraud dens have been eradicated overseas, and a large number of suspects have been arrested.”

But such self-congratulation is premature, according to interviews with about two dozen people, some who have worked or are currently working in the scam centers and others who serve in national and militia bureaucracies that aid or profit from the cyberfraud industry.

Thousands of individuals who were supposedly rescued from the scam warehouses this month are still stranded between the hell of forced labor in Myanmar and the promise of freedom in Thailand. Tens of thousands more remain imprisoned in the fraud factories.

[…] And none of the major players orchestrating this international criminal network, which spans dozens of countries and operates with a Chinese nerve center, have been taken down in the current campaign. The arrest in 2022 of a Chinese-born kingpin, who is now in a Thai prison fighting extradition to China, did not slow construction in the scam towns he is accused of having run. [Source]

The Chinese government has scheduled over a dozen airlifts to ferry home over 1,000 Chinese citizens who worked in Burmese scam centers. These expedited repatriation efforts have created friction with Thailand, as China’s assistant minister for public security Liu Zhongyi “apologised for causing any misunderstanding among Thais that he might seem like he has intruded on Thai sovereignty.” However, overall rescue and repatriation efforts have been slow. The Thai government fears that without more resources to properly differentiate victims from criminals, it may be forced to house thousands of scam workers from Myanmar indefinitely. Some African countries also refuse to fly their citizens home unless someone else pays. And coordination between various government agencies has proven difficult, particularly since some senior police and immigration officers have allegedly been involved in the scam operations, as the BBC reported. Some Chinese officials are also alleged to have played a significant role in secretly supporting the criminal networks that run scam operations in Myanmar.

The recent crackdown may signal a change in China’s approach to these regional security issues. Earlier this month, Liu Zhongyi traveled to Myawaddy to meet with rescued scam workers ahead of their repatriation. Jason Tower, the Myanmar country director at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said last week, “I think we are seeing some pretty big shifts. For a Chinese police official to be down in the Thai-Myanmar border area, actually walking across the border and going in to assess the scam centers is something that’s unprecedented. […] This high-level of action is quite new.” CGTN quoted Liu Ningning from China’s Ministry of Public Security asserting that the Chinese-led multilateral mechanism will “spare no effort to rescue trapped people, arrest the financial backbone of the telecom fraud group, and resolutely eliminate the Myawaddy scam centers." Laura Zhou from the South China Morning Post framed these efforts as part of China’s growing focus on “police diplomacy” to protect its citizens overseas and expand its influence:

Li Zhiyong, an international relations professor with the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, said: “As China’s overseas economic influence expands around the world, there is a stronger need to project China’s overseas interest, as well as the safety of Chinese nationals abroad.

“In cases such as the telecoms scams, it usually involves not just technical cooperation between the police forces but also coordination at foreign policy levels because of the complexity and the huge interest behind [it], so I think this is a trend.”

Considered a niche area of traditional foreign policy, policing diplomacy empowers law enforcement representatives with diplomatic functions. They work to share intelligence, resolve conflicts and foster security and stability.

[…] Meanwhile, Chinese police officers have been deployed to [Chinese] embassies in at least 48 countries, where they work with local law enforcement authorities in tackling crimes involving or targeted at Chinese nationals “to better protect the personal safety and rightful interest of the Chinese citizens and companies”, according to China’s public security ministry in 2023.

[…] Chinese police forces have also carried out joint patrols with their counterparts from Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. [Source]

The Chinese government’s evolving stance can also be gleaned from its judicial treatment of repatriated scam workers. Their arrival in China appeared choreographed dramatically for state media: each returnee was handcuffed, dressed in numbered jumpsuits, flanked by two police officers, and lined up for a photo op. AFP noted that the Chinese government and state media described them all as “suspects,” even though many workers say they were tricked into traveling to Thailand or Myanmar and later forced to work against their will. One report from Beijing Youth Daily profiled a now-repatriated middle-aged Chinese man who was tortured in the scam centers and said he is collecting evidence online in order to sue those responsible for imprisoning and torturing him. Last week, a court in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province concluded a six-day trial against 23 members of a Chinese crime family accused of colluding with scammers in Myanmar and charged with murder, fraud, and extortion. Ding Rui from Sixth Tone reported that on Monday China’s top court highlighted several cases in which it chose severe punishments for leaders of cross-border scam operations:

One of the most significant cases the court highlighted involved three defendants, surnamed Huang, Li, and Zhou, who ran a telecom fraud ring in Cambodia. Between September 2020 and late 2021, they swindled over 100 people out of more than 100 million yuan ($14 million).

t[…] Given the significant financial and emotional harm caused, a local court sentenced the three key defendants to life in prison, confiscated their assets, and stripped them of all political rights.

[…] In a far larger operation, the court detailed a transnational case involving a defendant surnamed Yu, who led a fraud network of over 300 people operating in Cambodia and the Philippines since 2018. His group ran online lottery scams that defrauded 111 individuals of nearly 60 million yuan by March 2020.

The scheme also relied on deceptive job postings and other methods to recruit 106 Chinese nationals into conducting fraud. Given Yu’s central role in the crimes, as well as his targeting of vulnerable groups such as the elderly and students, he was sentenced to life in prison. [Source]

Earlier this month, Sue-Lin Wong released a new podcast series for The Economist called “Scam Inc,” which investigates the global scam industry. Episode Four focuses on the role of Chinese syndicates in Asia’s scam centers. Expanding on this topic in a recent interview with The Wire China, Wong described how political-economic dynamics in China played an important role in the evolution of the global scam industry:

I guess there’s always been a lot of scams in China. But there are a couple of important factors in why China became such fertile ground. One was that online payments took off much more quickly in China than they did in the rest of the world.

There was also a class of criminals who originally were mostly focused on helping wealthy Chinese people launder their money through Macau’s casinos, the so-called junket business. Macau, which is five times the size of Las Vegas in terms of its gambling industry, was a hotbed of all kinds of criminal activity — until Xi Jinping came to power and launched his signature anti-corruption campaign across the country, including in Macau.

At that point these criminals had to pivot. They first went to the Philippines, and then to Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, and other parts of Southeast Asia. There they set up online casinos to target the mainland Chinese market. But they realized that the backend technology for running an online casino isn’t that different from what’s needed for committing online fraud. And so they diversified. Groups that would previously have been in businesses such as drugs, prostitution, and gambling realized there was a fourth potential business line, and that they could pivot to online fraud.

That business was mostly focused on Chinese victims until Covid. That was really a turning point because it became harder for Chinese low-level scammers, or mid-level bosses, to get to places in Southeast Asia once China shut its borders. And so the criminal syndicates started kidnapping English speakers and trying to scam people around the world. That period was also when the Chinese Communist Party had really begun its crackdown on online scams inside China — there’s a whole genre of movies and TV shows and songs that became part of this anti-fraud push in China. It became harder to scam mainland Chinese, and it became harder for the criminal syndicates to lure Chinese workers to Southeast Asia. [Source]

Tibetan minority languages suffer particularly from the latter. Gerald Roche, an anthropologist who studies these languages, recently spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the disappearing languages of Tibet. He noted that in acknowledging only a single Tibetan language, the Chinese state has used it “as a tool of domination over other minority languages,” many of which are at risk of extinction. Roche described the process of languages dying—be they state-recognized standard Tibetan or Tibetan minority languages—as the result of “an unequal hierarchical relationship of domination that forces bad choices on a particular group of people,” who then “lose a way of relating to each other and the world around them.” (CDT interviewed Roche on this topic last December.) In Global China Pulse on Monday, Dak (Lajadou) Lhagyal wrote about the difficulty of navigating different linguistic hierarchies in Tibet, as the push for linguistic purity can not only defend against the encroachment of Mandarin but also repress minority languages:

These judgements [against those who do not speak pure Tibetan] have sparked debates within Tibetan society about the need to standardise the language and establish a version of Tibetan that is mutually intelligible across its diverse, often mutually unintelligible regional varieties (Roche and Suzuki 2018). While Tibetan remains a critical aspect of cultural preservation, internal policing of linguistic norms has become more widespread, with expectations around pure Tibetan growing stronger (Thurston 2018). This policing often operates through naming and shaming those who speak Chinese or mix Tibetan with Chinese, while praising those who consistently use pure Tibetan, and is enforced both through peer pressure in daily interactions and on social media among Tibetans (Lhagyal 2021).

However, this internal policing can also create unintended consequences. Efforts to standardise Tibetan may marginalise speakers of non-standard varieties or those who regularly code-switch between Tibetan and Chinese. Roche and Suzuki (2018) caution that such movements could limit linguistic diversity within the broader Tibetan community. While the movement for language purism is driven by a genuine concern for cultural survival, it also reinforces linguistic hierarchies that may divide Tibetans rather than unite them.

The tension between preserving linguistic purity and navigating the pressures of everyday life in a Mandarin-dominated world reflects a deeper struggle within Tibetan society. As Mandarin continues to grow in influence, the desire to maintain Tibetan as a vibrant, living language persists, but this goal is complicated by the realities of cultural adaptation and the practical need to engage with Mandarin in public life. [Source]

More detrimentally, Chinese government policies have forced Mandarin education upon Tibetan children, contributing to the erasure of Tibetan languages. A dispatch from Human Rights Watch this month described how Chinese authorities have arbitrarily shuttered at least six vocational schools in Tibet since 2021 and forcibly disappeared prominent Tibetan educators. Last week, PBS and ITV released a FRONTLINE documentary titled “Battle for Tibet,” which showcases the struggle for the survival of language and culture in Tibet. One Tibetan mother interviewed says that her children who were forced to attend boarding schools “don’t speak our language. We can’t teach the kids Tibetan. They don’t listen to us.” Describing this aspect of the documentary, Sunny Nagpaul at PBS highlighted the risk of language loss and cultural erasure:

The children had “forgotten the Tibetan they knew and could no longer speak it properly,” says Gyal Lo, who lived in a Chinese province at the time, and now lives in exile in Canada. “The parents and the children couldn’t have a proper conversation with each other in Tibetan.”

The video above, drawn from the new FRONTLINE documentary Battle for Tibet, chronicles Gyal Lo’s next moves. Deciding to investigate what was happening at schools across Tibet, Gyal Lo visited over 50 kindergarten boarding schools for Tibetan children between 2017 and 2020. He says he found little teaching of Tibetan language and culture contrary to official claims.

[…] “These boarding pre-schools erase the fundamental mindset of Tibetan children from the age of four and replace it with a new Chinese mindset,” Gyal Lo says. “Over the next 15 to 20 years, if boarding schools continue, Tibetan national culture and identity will be completely destroyed.” [Source]

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy also released a report earlier this month titled “Dissenting Voices: The State of Expression in Tibet.” One section of the report discusses the crackdown on Tibetan language and culture via digital platforms. (CDT previously covered the removal of Tibetan and other minority languages from the language-learning app Talkmate and the video-sharing platform Bilibili in 2021.)

The suppression of Tibetan language platforms is part of a broader policy to prioritize Mandarin and restrict ethnic minority languages in China. Tibetan users of popular Chinese apps like Douyin and Kuaishou frequently report discriminatory practices, such as account shutdowns or reduced visibility for content created in Tibetan.

In June 2023, Rinchen and Sonam from Kham protested these practices through video messages. They highlighted the disparity between how Tibetan cultural content is censored while harmful content from other groups often remains unrestricted. Although their campaign gained significant support within Tibetan communities, Rinchen’s account was eventually blocked, and Sonam’s video was removed. Their pleas to platforms like Kuaishou to address this discrimination went unanswered.

Douyin’s parent company, ByteDance, has drawn similar criticism for censoring Tibetan-language content. In July 2024, Tibetan netizens such as Youga Ga and several others publicly criticised the platform for banning Tibetan language usage in videos, sparking widespread concern. [Source]

This report provides detailed analysis of key policy documents undergirding Sinicisation policy to reveal the framework, ambitions and proposed measures of Sinicisation policy. The General Office of the State Council’s “Opinions on Suggestions for Strengthening and Improving Islamic Work Under the New Situation”, more commonly known as Document No. 10 of the Xinjiang Papers, and the China Islamic Association’s (2018) “Five Year Plan for Maintaining Progress Toward the Sinicisation of Islam in Our Nation (2018-2022)” together provide a blueprint for radical transformation of Islamic communities and social organisation, alongside further measures for reducing the numbers of mosques and additional surveillance of Muslim migrants within China. The rhetoric of this campaign established clear norms of appropriateness for Islamic religious belief and practice in accordance with standards set by the party-state.

[…] The party-state applies significant pressure to Islamic communities to ensure compliance with Sinicisation policy. These measures have included targeted arrests of key individuals, including imams, dissidents and mosque management committee members, interventions into mosque management committees and imam selection processes, ‘study visits’ for key local religious professionals and officials, and Public Security Bureau (PSB) deployment around forced mosque renovations considered to be of high sensitivity. Other coercive tactics have included leverage of health and safety regulations and other bureaucratic processes to enforce closures, and outright threats of demolition made against targeted mosques and religious institutions. Such processes of quiet coercion have similarly served to dilute public opposition and obscure the true impact of Sinicisation measures.

[…] We estimate that all mosques with ‘Arabic’ features have either been subject to architectural Sinicisation or will be targeted in further policy cycles. [Source]

This theme was also discussed on a recent episode of the Remote Chay Podcast, published last week, titled “Studying Mosque Destructions in China From Afar.” The podcast is part of a project called Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In the episode, Ruslan Yusupov, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, described the process and historical references that underlie de-Arabization and Sinicization of mosques in China, focusing on Hui communities:

There are several stages to this campaign. The interplay between various forces and the way the campaign takes hold on the ground is varied. Most of the time, the government targets what it sees as obvious signs of Saudization and Arabization of Islamic architecture. Those are minarets that are thin, and they have finials, which are usually crescent moons, and then also all sorts of different round-shaped domes. So those are typically targeted. And if you look at the [classified government] report [on mosque rectification] from Xining, which includes lots of different pictures, you will see that, at first, when the on-the-ground grassroots remodification committee proposed those changes in the design, none of them included any pagodas or pavilions on top of mosques. […] They provided before- and after-photos. What you see them imagining sinicization to be like is that it’s actually shapeless, because it can’t escape its Arab style reference. So [in] the after-pictures of mosques, which are doctored, obviously, photoshopped in order to visualize sinicization, these mosques have nothing. They have just flat roofs. Nothing replaces minarets and domes.

Then, when actual demolitions took place, you see that so-called elements of Chinese culture [were] added, not only Sinicizing [by] just maiming the mosques, but [also] replacing the Arab structures with Sinicized structures. That itself is very interesting because the dominant way this is imagined is that the reference is taken from […] the architecture of Ming-era mosques that have really elaborate structures. The Niujie mosque in Beijing, for instance, is a good example of that. But the reference to history is misleading, because many Ming era mosques did not survive the destructive forces of 20th century China, even if they had a Sinicized look. So that is also very interesting, the way […] a particular version, rather diluted version of history, is used to justify why these mosques have to […] have these pagodas and pavilions if they are allowed to remain in China. [Source]

While these Sinicization campaigns have remodeled mosques without the full consent of many communities, few Western commentators have acknowledged the relatively recent origin of the ostensibly non-Chinese, Arabic style of some mosques targeted in these campaigns. Indeed, Mohammed Turki A Al-Sudairi has written about how “imaginaries of Saudi culture—in terms of mosque architectural styles […]—had become far more common within Hui cultural contexts” during the 1980s and 1990s due to an influx of funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Writing about Chinese madrasas’ links to Islamic schools abroad, Jackie Armijo has also written that “mosques dating back to the Ming and Qing periods [such as Kunming’s South City Mosque] have been torn down and replaced with what can best be described as ‘neo-pseudo-Middle Eastern’ style mosques. […] In at least some instances, students returning from their studies overseas played a role in the community’s decision to tear down and rebuild a mosque.”

In order to justify its Sinicization policies, the Chinese government has often invoked the threat of “foreign forces” that allegedly compel Chinese ethnic minorities to convert to Islam and push them towards the “three evils” of ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism. These claims are largely overblown and inflated with propaganda, and they have led to severe human rights abuses for even the most banal forms of religious observance. At the same time, Chinese Muslims’ historical resistance against government repression has been anchored in certain prominent mosques that they call “Little Meccas” (alluding to Islam’s holiest city, located in Saudi Arabia). Jianping Wang published an article in the Journal of Contemporary East Asian Studies last week on this subject:

[Chinese Muslims] needed strong community structures of their own to counter and resist the injustices and discrimination that might come from the totalitarian imperial polity. For [the] purpose of competition and safeguarding communal autonomy, particularly with respect to maintaining normal religious life and upholding cultural customs, the Chinese Muslims constructed Little Meccas as regional religious centers that brought together their dispersed enclaves for the purposes of survival.

[…] In the People’s Republic, Shadian Mosque was led by Ma Bohua, a Hui young teacher, to resist the People’s Liberation Army in their struggle against religious persecution and repression during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Even in contemporary China, many big mosques became centers of resistance against the Anti-three tides in the Campaign of Sinicization of Islam. In these movements, the governments wanted to change the Arabic architectural style of the mosques into a Chinese one. However, they were blocked from doing so by the Muslims in Weizhou in Ningxia, Xining in Qinghai and Zhaotong and many other places including Najiaying and Daying in Yunnan. All these locations have large mosques led by famous clerics, have well-developed Madrasas, and are regarded as regional centers of Islam who have had a history of resistance to the imperial forces.

[…] Little Meccas can be considered a method used by Muslims at the grass-root level or as a historical solution aimed at protecting Chinese Muslims from being assimilated into the Han Chinese cultural environment, and shielding them from the arbitrary politics of the imperial government. [Source]

The struggle for Hui Chinese religious freedom can be observed through other angles, as well. With a gendered lens, the Oxford China Centre’s newsletter last month highlighted a new book by Maria Jaschok titled, “Inside the Expressive Culture of Chinese Women’s Mosques,” which describes “the history and significance of current contestations over the increasing prominence of expressive piety in Hui Muslim women’s mosques in central China.” With an international lens, The New York Times published an article in December on the emigration to the U.S. of Hui Muslims fleeing persecution in China. And with an advocacy lens, former U.S. State Department advisor Todd Stein highlighted Congress’ selective outrage at the destruction of mosques in China and those in Gaza, arguing that this undermines U.S. criticism of the former.

We are meeting in the summer of 2024 during a hidden-camera visit to the premises of Yanggu Jifa, the main employer in Sanzhiwang, a village in Shandong province, eastern China. The factory is the property of the Jifa group. Most people have not heard of it, yet it is Decathlon’s second largest textile manufacturer in China. A fact that the French sports multinational kept secret until an internal source at Decathlon shared a sensitive business file with Disclose: the list of its subcontractors around the world. In the document, Jifa is referenced as one of the French brand’s “key account suppliers”: Decathlon bought 43 millions euros’ worth of clothes from Jifa in 2022 alone.

[…] Decathlon’s supplier is in fact directly involved in a system of modern slavery in China, as revealed by Disclose in partnership with Cash Investigation, after a year-long investigation into the brand’s supply chain. Uyghur women are the main victims of this traffic in human beings. They are members of a predominantly Muslim ethnic group violently suppressed by Beijing. The workers are forcibly enrolled to make t-shirts, shorts and other items of clothing likely to end up in Decathlon’s 1 700 or so shops around the world. [Source]

“Decathlon couldn’t have not known,” wrote Libération, adding that a French Uyghur wrote for the newspaper in 2017 about how one of her friends who worked for Decathlon was arrested while on a work trip to Shanghai, sent to a detention center in Urumqi, and after Decathlon became involved, he was somehow rescued and allowed to return to Paris. Le Monde noted that Decathlon also made the official uniforms for 45,000 volunteers at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In response to the investigation, Decathlon said that the cotton it uses was being supplied by sources “committed to the most responsible practices, which guarantees the absence of all forms of forced labour.”

Last month, the Rand Corporation published a 197-page report on the impacts of and opportunities for enforcing U.S. laws on forced labor in global supply chains. The report found that businesses and consumers “remain exposed to goods made with forced labor through indirect supply chain linkages with limited visibility.” John Foote provided extensive commentary on the Rand report in his latest Forced Labor & Trade Substack. Later in the month, the U.S. government began to block imports from 37 additional Chinese companies in conjunction with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The Chinese Foreign Ministry called the move “completely unfounded.” Ana Swanson at The New York Times reported on the companies that were targeted:

The administration’s move is the single largest batch of additions to a list of companies that are barred from bringing products into the United States because of concerns about human rights violations.

[…] The 37 entities that were added on Tuesday to a special list created by the law include subsidiaries of a major supplier of critical minerals, Zijin Mining. The New York Times reported in 2022 that Zijin Mining had links with labor transfer programs in Xinjiang.

The additions also include one of the world’s largest textile manufacturers, Huafu Fashion, and 25 of its subsidiaries. It’s not clear which retailers Huafu currently supplies, but H\&M previously said that it had an indirect relationship with a mill belonging to Huafu Fashion and that it would cut those ties.

Companies in real estate, mining, solar and cotton production were also added to the list. Altogether, they bring the list to 144 entities. [Source]

The Trump administration was reported this week to be discussing whether to add Chinese e-commerce fast-fashion giants Shein and Temu to the U.S. forced-labor blacklist. Last month, representatives from the two companies were summoned to a British parliamentary hearing where lawmakers grilled them for evading questions about their companies’ links to Uyghur forced labor. (“You’ve given us almost zero confidence in the integrity of your supply chains,” one lawmaker concluded.) British activist group Stop Uyghur Genocide stated it will lodge a judicial review if Shein’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange is approved. Separately, an investigation by the head of the British parliament’s cross-party human rights committee found that three new cargo flight routes directly from Xinjiang to Britain may be trafficking goods made with forced labor. And as Christopher Knaus and Helen Davidson recently reported for The Guardian, Australia has become a destination for thousands of imports from Chinese companies blacklisted by the U.S. over links to Uyghur forced labor:

Using freedom of information laws, the Guardian obtained details of 3,347 import declarations that name eight US-blacklisted companies as suppliers of materials to Australian importers since 2020. The companies ship a range of products, including parts for car batteries and trains used by state governments; safety gear for tradespeople; spices and food additives; and laser printers.

The documents show Australia’s imports from the eight companies actually increased after the US introduced its ban, peaking in 2023.

Separate records obtained from the fisheries department show Australian seafood importers are receiving hundreds of shipments from Chinese-based processors publicly linked to the use of Uyghur labour during an exhaustive investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project, a not-for-profit investigative reporting group based in Washington DC. [Source]

Across China’s west, the party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the Communist Party.

Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the party is systematically separating Tibetan children from their families to erase Tibetan identity and to deepen China’s control of a people who historically resisted Beijing’s rule. They have estimated that around three-quarters of Tibetan students age 6 and older — and others even younger — are in residential schools that teach largely in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, culture and Buddhist beliefs that the children once absorbed at home and in village schools.

[…E]xtensive interviews and research by The New York Times show that Tibetan children appear to be singled out by the Chinese authorities for enrollment in residential schools. Their parents often have little or no choice but to send them, experts, parents, lawyers and human rights investigators said in interviews. Many parents do not see their children for long stretches.

[…] The Chinese government does not say how many Tibetan children are in boarding schools. The Tibet Action Institute, an international group that has campaigned to close the schools, estimates that among children aged 6 to 18, the figure is at least 800,000 — or three in every four Tibetan children. [Source]

Last week, the government of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) decided to incorporate about 400,000 square kilometers, or nearly a third of the TAR’s total land area, into a national park plan. Reporting on the decision, the Tibetan Review noted, “Such plans have led to large-scale forced relocation of Tibetan farmers and nomads who lost their traditional habitats and ways of life, greatly impoverishing them.” These plans also align with broader goals to market Tibet’s natural beauty to Han Chinese and develop the region’s tourism sector. For Foreign Policy this week, Judith Hertog described how the Chinese government’s success in turning Tibet into a tourist destination has allowed it to propagate nationalist narratives about the region’s historical and contemporary relationship to Beijing that displace Tibetan autonomy, both metaphorically and literally:

[The commodification of Gyalthang into “Shangri-La City”] was so successful, in fact, that Beijing exported this model throughout Tibet, turning the region into something of a theme park for the Chinese nation.

Large swaths of the Tibetan plateau—once grazing grounds to sheep and yak herders—were fenced off as “nature reserves” from which the original inhabitants have been removed. Formerly impassible mountain ranges were cut through with tunnels and highways promoted as “scenic routes” that now attract millions of Chinese motorists each year. Along these routes, “scenic towns” were developed from scratch to showcase “traditional” Tibetan culture and crafts. Monasteries were renovated as tourist attractions, and, along highways, fake nomad encampments were set up as photo ops.

[…] “Tibetan culture is being romanticized as pure, spiritual, and attuned to nature,” said [Researcher Emily Yeh from the University of Colorado Boulder]. “But at the same time, Tibetan people are being removed from the landscape because the Tibetan Plateau is expected to serve as an ecological resource that provides clean water and air to the Chinese nation.”

[…] One of the most heavily promoted tourist attractions in Lhasa, advertised as a “must-see” for anyone visiting the city, is a government-subsidized musical spectacle that tells the story of Chinese Princess Wencheng, who married a powerful Tibetan king in the seventh century. In reality, she was a minor character in Tibetan history, only one of the king’s diplomatic marriages at a time when the Tibetan Empire was so powerful that it briefly conquered parts of China. But Chinese propaganda has turned history on its head and seized upon Princess Wencheng’s story to argue, without evidence, that she introduced agriculture, Buddhism, and civilization to Tibet and that, therefore, China’s annexation of the region is justified. According to state media, more than 3 million tourists have attended this show since it premiered in 2013. [Source]

Another domain where these narrative struggles intersect is that of language, specifically debates over what to call the Tibetan territory. The Chinese government has increasingly pushed for Sinicizing the traditional name, “Tibet,” by replacing it with the Mandarin pinyin, “Xizang.” Various European museums have decided to employ the new terminology in recent exhibits, drawing fierce criticism from the Tibetan diaspora. At Inkstick last week, Victoria Jones described the political roles of museums in guarding historical narratives and shaping perceptions, in the words of Tibetan activists:

At the British Museum, both words were used alongside each other. Yet, Tibetan activists in London, like Tsering Passang, argue that the move is not objective. “The choice of terminology here is far from neutral; it is a political stance that dismisses the unique identity of Tibet and subtly reinforces China’s contested claim to Tibet as an inherent part of its territory.” Pointing to the efforts of initiatives like the Xizang International Communication Centre, he is concerned about how far Europe’s cultural institutions “are willing to bend to political pressure.”

[…] As Phuntsok Norbu, chairman of the Tibetan Community in Britain, explains, the [British Museum’s “Silk Roads” exhibit] example concerns “the museum’s role in shaping global understanding of a culture that is actively being suppressed.”

The word “Xizang” is largely unrecognized by international audiences, which is precisely to China’s benefit. Tibet carries with it a level of familiarity in popular culture and international discourse, drawing associations to the Dalai Lama and the struggle for autonomy and human rights — exactly what Beijing wants to avoid. By pushing Xizang into global discourse, the CCP aims to redefine Tibet’s identity as distinctly Chinese, erasing its unique history — and it will be up to foreign cultural institutions whether or not they are willing to accept this revisionism. [Source]

The erasure of Tibet can also be seen in the recent rollout of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot, which visibly “thinks” through its deliberative process before censoring answers deemed to contradict the Chinese government’s position. This is the case in questions about whether Tibet has a right to independence, or about the history of Tibetan self-immolation protests. On another note, the Dalai Lama is releasing a new book in March titled, “Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle With China for My Land and My People,” which unlike his previous books delves extensively into politics and his efforts to preserve Tibet’s culture, religion, and language in the face of Chinese pressure.

The men, who have been in Thai detention centers for more than a decade, started their hunger strike on Jan. 10, two days after they were given “voluntary return” forms to sign, according to accounts from two of the detainees.

All refused to sign the forms, but they were then required to pose for photographs. These instructions set off panic among the detainees because the same series of events in 2015 preceded Thailand’s abrupt deportation of 109 other Uyghurs to China.

[…] In a separate message on Jan. 13, [one] detainee said: “We are desperately seeking help from those living in the free world. You all know what will happen to us if we are sent back to China.” [Source]

The Bangkok Post reported on Wednesday that the Royal Thai Police (RTP) has denied trying to deport the Uyghurs to China: “National Police Chief Pol Gen Kittharath Punpetch said the RTP has not received any report of a plan to deport the Uyghurs, adding the issue needs to be discussed with the National Security Council (NSC).” As Jonathan Head of the BBC reported, “Unlike other inmates in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not handled by the Immigration Department but instead by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the prime minister in which the military has significant influence.” Head elaborated on the Uyghurs’ “appalling” conditions in the detention center:

Their living conditions have been described by one human rights defender as "a hell on earth".

[…] They are kept in isolation from other inmates and are rarely allowed visits by outsiders or lawyers. They get few opportunities to exercise, or even to see daylight. They have been charged with no crime, apart from entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uyghurs have died in custody.

"The conditions there are appalling," says Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs.

"There is not enough food – it is mostly just soup made with cucumber and chicken bones. It is crammed in there. The water they get, both for drinking and washing, is dirty. Only basic medicines are provided and these are inadequate. If someone falls ill, it takes a long time to get an appointment with the doctor. And because of the dirty water, the hot weather and bad ventilation, a lot of the Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems." [Source]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Thailand and China establishing diplomatic relations, and China’s important economic leverage might influence the Thai government’s willingness to cooperate with Chinese authorities. This month also marks the beginning of Thailand’s three-year membership on the UN Human Rights Council and latest attempts to showcase its image as a responsible actor vis-a-vis international law. Naturally, this month’s incident has drawn fierce criticism from human rights figures. Sarah Teich of the Human Rights Action Group wrote that “deporting these Uyghurs to the hands of a regime that is inflicting genocide on their people is tantamount to signing their death certificates,” adding, “Just because the Uyghurs won’t be harmed within Thailand’s borders won’t make Thailand any less guilty in the crime against these men.” Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, stated, “The Thai government should be helping people fleeing persecution, not jailing them, and certainly should not be violating international law and sending them into harm’s way.” On Tuesday, eight U.N. experts added their voices in condemning the potential deportation:

The Government of Thailand must immediately halt the possible transfer of 48 Uyghurs to the People’s Republic of China, UN experts said today, warning that the group was at real risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment if they are returned.

“The treatment of the Uyghur minority in China is well-documented,” the experts said. “We are concerned they are at risk of suffering irreparable harm, in violation of the international prohibition on refoulement to torture.”

“The prohibition on refoulement prohibits the return or transfer in any manner whatsoever to a country where there is real risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” they recalled.

[…] The experts urged Thailand to provide adequate and comprehensive medical care to the group of Uyghurs without delay. [Source]

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand scheduled an event on Wednesday titled “Forever stuck in limbo: Uyghurs in Thai immigration detention,” with a panel of experts to draw attention to the issue. Over 130 researchers and 4,100 members of the public have also signed an urgent appeal to the Thai government to immediately stop any forced deportation of Uyghur detainees and support U.N. actors in facilitating their humane treatment and safe refuge.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed to oppose Thailand’s deportation of Uyghurs, and the House Select Committee on the CCP penned a letter to the Thai government echoing Rubio’s statement. In response, some activists accused the the U.S. government of hypocrisy in condemning Thailand’s deportation of Uyghurs while refusing to admit Uyghur refugees to the U.S. and launching its own campaign of mass deportations at home.