China’s Foreign Ministry held its seventh press conference on Xinjiang-related issues on April 9, rebutting international concerns about the Xinjiang Data Project, the Xinjiang Victims Database and the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database. “These databases use satellite data, interviews with victims, and other information.
These databases reveal, through satellite data, victim interviews, and other means, massive human rights violations against ethnic minorities such as Uighurs in Xinjiang, including 380 facilities suspected of detaining minorities, a large number of demolished mosques, and China’s massive sterilization program in the region, among others.
At the press conference, Xu Guixiang, spokesman for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government, said that the databases were false, deceiving the world and discrediting Xinjiang. It also named the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Research, the organization that produced the Xinjiang Data Project, as an anti-China tool manipulated by the U.S. government rather than an academic institution, funded by the U.S. government and anti-China organizations to vilify China for the benefit of its owners.
However, the results of these databases mentioned by Xu Guisang are largely consistent with the international media reports on human rights persecution against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang in recent years, and these facts of human rights persecution exist in large numbers.
According to publicly available information, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) was established in 2001 at the initiative of then Prime Minister John Howard to provide research and analysis related to Australian government policy-making, and is Australia’s defense and strategic policy think tank, with major funding from the Australian Department of Defense. “The Xinjiang Data Project was launched by the institute in September 2020, with funding for the Victim Database coming from the U.S. Department of State.
During the State Department’s press conference, several videos were released of some of the victims in the database, including the Xinjiang-based relatives of our Uighur-language correspondent, Guli and Kekyum. The video shows Kiyumu’s mother describing how she and Kiyumu’s father both enjoy high retirement salaries and good social benefits. For his part, Kiyumu’s brother comes out accusing his own sister Kiyumu of wrongdoing and testifying that normal religious practices can still take place there.
But international media reported back in 2018 on the persecution of our Uyghur correspondent’s relatives in Xinjiang. According to Amnesty International, which focuses on human rights issues, Kiyumu learned in 2018 from two reliable sources that about 20 of her relatives, including cousins and cousins, had been taken away by the Chinese government and were being held in detention facilities. Kiyumu has also been unable to contact her ailing parents for a long time since early 2018.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and six others wrote a joint letter to then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018, noting that six journalists from our Uyghur team had been persecuted by means of imprisonment or disappearance of their relatives in Xinjiang because of their reporting on human rights events there.
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