The EconomistOctober 26th 2019 China 412 Xinjiang. rfa’s stories have helped bring
global attention to the new detention cen-
tres, details of which have been difficult for
journalists to uncover because of an in-
tense security clampdown in Xinjiang. The
publicity has aggravated tensions between
China and America. The Trump adminis-
tration this month declared sanctions
against Chinese officials and businesses
implicated in repressing Uighurs.
It was more than a year after rfafirst re-
ported on the facilities that the govern-
ment finally acknowledged their existence
in October 2018. It continued to deny that
Uighurs were being forced into them to un-
dergo weeks, months or even longer peri-
ods of indoctrination in the party’s virtues
and the dangers of “extremism” (a term ap-
plied even to the wearing of Islamic dress).
Since then officials have arranged Potem-
kin tours for some foreign media and dip-
lomats. The visits have fooled few. In Au-
gust Olsi Jazexhi, an Albanian scholar who
had previously been sceptical of reports
such as rfa’s, emerged from a detention-
camp tour to attest (to rfa) that, from what
he saw, people were being imprisoned for
the crime of being Muslim and Uighur.
Adrian Zenz, a German scholar, notes that
even the government’s own literature says
the centres are meant to “wash clean the
brains” of the people they house.
It is not only China’s government that
criticises rfa’s reporting on Xinjiang.
Some people who sympathise with the Ui-
ghur cause say its stories are sometimes
thinly sourced and melodramatic. Others
say the station’s support from the Ameri-
can government, to the tune of $44m a
year, including $2m for the Uighur-lan-
guage service, suggests that rfais a propa-
ganda tool. The broadcaster, founded in the
1990s, says it has editorial independence.
But it belongs to a constellation of govern-
ment-sponsored stations, other members
of which had their heyday in the cold war,
including Voice of America and Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.
There is certainly a cold-war feel to
working for rfa’s Uighur service. Many of
the people the journalists try to speak to in
Xinjiang are too afraid to answer. Staff sus-
pect the Chinese authorities use voice-rec-
ognition technology to identify them and
block their phone conversations—lines to
Xinjiang often drop after a minute of con-
versation. “The intimidation, the incarcer-
ation of our loved ones is very constant,”
says Mamatjan Juma, the service’s deputy
director. His three brothers are all in custo-
dy, two of them since May 2017. Sometimes
the pressure is too much—just hearing a
song that he used to listen to with his
brothers can cause floods of tears. “It af-
fects you, but you have to get up every day
and come to work, because if you don’t
write, if you don’t report on these issues,
nobody would. We don’t have a choice.” 7
B
y day edmund yangis an accountant at
a multinational firm. At night he can
sometimes be found quietly sipping a
cocktail at Destination, his club-cum-cul-
tural centre. On China’s most popular navi-
gation app, Baidu Maps, the venue is listed
as a “comrade bar”. That does not mean it is
a watering hole for Marxists. Comrade is
Chinese slang for gay.
Since Mr Yang opened the club in 2004,
just three years after China ceased to classi-
fy homosexuality as a mental disorder, the
venue has become a beacon for gay Chinese
across the country. Destination was one of
the first places to aim explicitly to attract
gay customers. Today there are several
such venues in Beijing as well as in other
big cities. But Destination is unusual for
being open every day. It also stands out for
its longevity and enormous size. Time Out
Beijing, a listings magazine, calls it the
“granddaddy of Beijing’s gay clubs”.
Entertainment businesses in Beijing
are often ephemeral, so it is all the more
surprising that one catering for such a mar-
ginalised clientele has lasted this long. Ho-
mosexuality is still viewed with suspicion,
or even contempt, by many Chinese. Even
in relatively cosmopolitan Beijing, gay
people rarely come out to family, friends or
colleagues. On a recent weekday one of
Destination’s customers is a doctor from
coastal Shandong province who says his
family does not know he is gay. He says he
is looking for a handsome young partner.
Originally the club was a ground-floorroom with a disc-jockey’s booth in a build-
ing near the Worker’s Stadium in north-
eastern Beijing, a once-quiet residential
area that is now full of bars with exotic
names such as Golden Age, Heaven’s Super-
market and Superlife Lounge. Destination
has since taken over the three storeys
above. On the first is a hallway with several
adjoining rooms, each of which can fit 30
people. Customers chat on their plush
couches. The second has an art gallery with
rotating exhibits, curated by a French expa-
triate. A recent show, of works by gay Chi-
nese artists, was called “Love is Blue.” The
colour has gay associations in China—the
world’s largest gay networking app, found-
ed by a Chinese former policeman, with its
headquarters in Beijing, is called Blued. On
the top floor are rooms for yoga, piano and
choir practice; and a small one offering
free, anonymous tests for hiv.
It may be that the authorities see a pro-
paganda use for the club. In 2008, when
China was trying to show off the capital’s
attractions in the build-up to its hosting of
the Olympic games that year, Xinhua, a
state-run news agency, published an ap-
proving report on Destination. “I think our
club will showcase Beijing as an open city,”
it quoted Mr Yang as saying. Tellingly, how-
ever, Xinhua did not issue the report in
Chinese. During the games the authorities
banned dancing at Destination.
Originally Mr Yang, a native of Hong
Kong, saw the club as a place to indulge his
love of pop music. As the only foreign pupil
at boarding school in England, he had been
“picked on, 24/7”. Such music was an es-
cape. He has since amassed thousands of
records and cds. His partner jokes about
coping with this “trash collection” when
Mr Yang dies. But Mr Yang envisages a big-
ger legacy, that “some day we can look back,
when gay marriage is legalised and society
more accepting, and realise that Destina-
tion made its own small contribution.” 7BEIJING
A nightclub is remarkably candid
about its target clienteleGay nightlifeDestination’s
journey
Out and proud in Beijing