40 The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
1O
n a singleday in January 2018 in the
far-western region of Xinjiang, 25
members of Gulchehra Hoja’s family, in-
cluding her parents in their 70s, received
calls summoning them to police stations
in Urumqi, the provincial capital, and in
Ili, 500km away near China’s western bor-
der. When they arrived they were told they
were being detained because of their kin-
ship with Ms Hoja, a reporter for Radio Free
Asia (rfa), a broadcaster funded by the
American government. rfahad recently
reported on the mass internment of Ui-
ghurs, a Muslim ethnic group that makes
up nearly half of Xinjiang’s 22m people. Ms
Hoja’s father could not answer the sum-
mons because he was in hospital. Instead,
police sent guards to stop him escaping.
The message to rfawas clear, and it was
not the first one. A year earlier—just before
China began rounding up hundreds of
thousands of Uighurs, often for no other
reason than their devotion to Islam—Ms
Hoja’s colleague, Kurban Niyaz, another
Uighur exile in America, received a photo
from his younger sister on WeChat, a Chi-
nese social-media app. It showed two Chi-nese police officers sitting on her sofa (one
of them smiled for the camera). They had
ordered her to send him the photo, Mr Kur-
ban says, to remind him that “the people’s
cops are just next to my family members”.
The Communist Party’s efforts to sup-
press Uighurs have extended far beyond
China’s borders. Uighur exiles and former
detainees in Europe, America and else-
where have been warned, sometimes
through relatives, not to speak about Xin-
jiang’s new gulag. Those who have done so
have faced repercussions. On October 13th
state media in China circulated a video of a
Uighur man rejecting as “an outright lie” an
account by Mike Pompeo, America’s secre-
tary of state, that the man’s sister, Zumrat
Dawut, had been detained, beaten and
forcibly sterilised. In the video Ms Dawut’s
brother appears to be reading a statement.
“I’m making this video clip just to tell thetruth to the world,” he says to the camera.
Few exiles have felt intimidation more
acutely than the 12 Uighurs in America who
produce rfa’s Uighur-language news. That
is because the station is the only one out-
side China that broadcasts in this Turkic
tongue, and it pulls no punches. rfare-
ports relentlessly on Xinjiang’s human-
rights horrors. Uighur staff say their rela-
tives have been interrogated or detained
just for having a family member who works
for rfa. At least six of them have a com-
bined total of more than 40 relatives who
are in the new detention facilities (official-
ly known as vocational-training centres—
one is pictured) or in prison, or have gone
missing. That includes more than 20 of Ms
Hoja’s relatives, who are still being held 21
months after they were taken. The police
have asked them what they told rfa, which
China calls an “enemy radio station”. Her
relatives were not sources for her stories,
she says.
It is easy to see why Chinese officials
would view rfaso darkly, even if it were
not funded by America. Its staff doggedly
pursue sources in Xinjiang, sometimes
making hundreds of calls daily, to glean tit-
bits of information about the regime’s
treatment of Uighurs. The service beams its
Uighur-language reports for two hours
each day via shortwave radio and satellite.
China jams rfa’s transmissions and blocks
its website, but in a survey of Uighurs in
Turkey who had recently left their home-
land, about one-fifth had listened to or
read rfanews at least once a week while inUighurs in exileThrough the fence
WASHINGTON, DC
A government-funded American radio station helps expose Xinjiang’s horrorsChina
41 Gay nightlife in Beijing
42 Chaguan: Zhou Enlai, the operaAlso in this section