All Across China

Across China: Nature-imitated fishway to meander through hydro project in Guangxi

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In the vast majority of cases, we did not talk about politics. Even so, almost everyone I talked to was affected by the repression in Xinjiang, and sometimes the only alternative to talking about it would have been not talking at all — and so we talked.

Related cases

In synthesising what I have observed, I realise that I ultimately cannot speak for the Uighurs — that task should of course be left to the Uighurs themselves, in an environment that is free of fear. Still, I hope the image I present will allow the reader a glimpse of how the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the rest of China are reacting to the present situation. O n a certain alley in Xinjiang stands a diner I particularly like, popular for its pigeon shish kebab and milk tea. I would always try to stop there when I was in the neighbourhood. The last time I did, I came with apologies, having not visited for a long time.

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But, far from being angry, the owner was just surprised that I was still in the region. Almost a year had passed since our previous meeting, and a lot had changed. Gone were the shish kebabs and the tea, together with most of the clientele. Uighur kitchen staff were extremely scarce now, the owner said, and it was almost impossible to find substitutes.

‘We’re a people destroyed’: why Uighur Muslims across China are living in fear

I asked him about his nephew — another old friend — but was told that he was in jail for having previously spent a year in a Middle Eastern country. This sense of gloom was also evident in the frank negativity I started to notice in many Uighur business-owners. When I ran into a tour guide acquaintance last year, I remarked to him that he had got really thin since I had last seen him.

Equally pervasive was the constant sense of fear.

On one evening in Kashgar, I watched five or six police snatch a drunken man off the streets just for waving his arms, without asking any questions, and even though he was with his wife and son. In inner China, young restaurant workers could seem relaxed one day and then visibly worried the next: There was also the fear of always being watched. At one point last year, I made an effort to see a friend in Xinjiang who had deleted me, by first getting in touch through a proxy, and then meeting in person.

Our lunch together was silent and awkward. There was so much to say, but everything felt taboo, and there were whole minutes when we just sat there in silence.

W hen talking about the situation in Xinjiang, it is standard to use euphemisms. It has been used to describe the absence of staff, clients and people in general. Despite the euphemisms, there is no getting away from what is actually happening. It hit me just how unavoidable the topic was when, while chatting with an old friend in inner China, I made a genuine effort to avoid politics and talk about more normal or even mundane things. When I asked him what he had done earlier that day, he brought up a political meeting that all the Uighurs in that city had to attend.

When I asked him if he still tried to read books in his spare time, he told me that the police had cracked down on that, too, and that reading any book would invite unwanted attention. When I asked him about his aspirations for the future, he told me that, ideally, he would love to become a chef of Turkish food and open up his own restaurant, but, unfortunately, that act alone would get him jailed in Xinjiang, as the state continues to discourage and destroy all contact between the Uighurs and other Turkic and Muslim peoples abroad. On a few occasions, I encountered people who seemed to have reached a degree of desperation, and just wanted to let everything out.

The first such time was in Kashgar, in autumn last year, when a uniformed public-security worker — the mostly Uighur, lowest-rank uniformed authority in southern Xinjiang — invited me to sit across from him at a table in a teahouse. He was off duty that afternoon, having just returned from a medical checkup. The conversation that followed was tense.

He asked me what I knew of Uighur history, and then asked me what I thought of the Uighurs as a people. Unsure of how to reply, I tried to be noncommittal: His words, I believe, were genuine. The other conversation that will always stay with me took place in inner China, while visiting a restaurant I had been to a few times before.

Lava - Amsterdam/Beijing

With the exception of a single waiter, all of the old staff were gone. As soon as that waiter saw me, he dropped everything to sit down and chat. My telling him that I had been kicked out of Kashgar seemed to trigger him, and he would go on to say many things about the situation there, virtually all of them taboo. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but witness testimonies have confirmed both poor nutrition and violence in the camps. He said that the Uighurs in this inner-China city now had to attend political meetings, and that they might soon have to take a test on political subjects such as the 19th party congress.

I worried about him talking to me so openly, but it seemed he understood the risks, or perhaps had already concluded that he was going to be taken soon anyway. O ccasionally, I did encounter people who had more positive things to say about the situation. At the risk of passing off my subjectivity as fact, the vast majority of these comments struck me as marked by a mix of cognitive dissonance, Stockholm syndrome and self-delusion — often evidenced by self-contradiction and an apparent lack of conviction behind the words.

He, too, had his complaints about the new system, saying how he would be forced to stop and have his ID checked seven times while travelling just km on his electric scooter. Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.

The genetic edit, He said, was meant to make the girls resistant to HIV infection. Scientists within China and across the world responded to the announcement with a mixture of incredulity and alarm. But as a historian of biology who has closely followed biomedicine in China over the past few years, I was less surprised by these developments. But what seems the most surprising outside of China is that He believed — gambled, perhaps — that his announcement would be met with congratulations and acclaim.

Why take such a risk?

Different history frames what’s acceptable

In the West, after-the-fact condemnation of Nazi medical experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and other patient abuses led to the rise of Institutional Review Boards that carefully regulate medical experimentation on humans. After all, he was trained in the U. In the West, the potential benefits of biomedicine and biotechnologies are often weighed against potential harms. In Europe and the U.

Edgy visuals for a festival all across China

China came to biotech late in the game, scraping into the Human Genome Project in the s. Even so, both the Chinese state and Chinese scientists saw the field as an area in which China had a good chance of catching up to the West. As such, it gambled heavily and has invested much in biotech and biomedicine. The upshot of all this is that Chinese view biomedicine in dramatically positive terms. Advances in biomedicine can have an almost heroic status within China.

Moving fast and breaking things

He has represented his use of genetic modification as a bold intervention to save the lives of twin girls and eliminate discrimination against HIV patients. He himself is or at least was somewhat of a heroic figure. He completed his Ph. He was a rising star. In , back from the U. This local setting is important too. Since , Shenzhen has been a zone of experimentation , a place of high risk and high reward.

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