The Wall Street Journal - 23.08.2019

Ayup. “They say, ‘If they are

90%, then where are my broth-

ers and sisters and relatives?’”

Much about conditions in

Xinjiang remains unknown be-

cause of an official clampdown

on information and restric-

tions on travel to the region.

While some overseas Uighurs

say family members have been

released this year, others can’t

confirm whether loved ones

are alive or dead.

Chinese Foreign Ministry

spokesman Geng Shuang said

Thursday that he hadn’t seen

the Douyin videos but added

that China sought to meet any

reasonable demands from Chi-

nese people living overseas.

Xinjiang’s government didn’t

immediately reply to a faxed

request for comment.

Arslan Hidayat, a Uighur-

Australian activist based in

Turkey, is among a number of

activists who have broadened

the reach of the videos by

sharing dozens on Facebook

and Twitter. He said the si-

lence in the videos and cir-

cumspect responses to ques-

tions in the comments sections

reinforced the likelihood that

those loved ones weren’t free.

“One posts, ‘When are we

going to see our brothers?’

and another says, ‘Oh, stay

strong, they’ll come out

soon,’ ” Mr. Hidayat said.

In recent months, Beijing

has intensified efforts to coun-

ter Western condemnation of

the Xinjiang detentions, which

U.S. Secretary of State Mike

Pompeo has called “the stain of

the century.” Beijing rallied 37

allies in July to sign a letter in

support of China’s Xinjiang

policies after the U.K., Japan

and 20 other countries signed

one calling on Beijing to end its

repressive policies on Uighurs.

Halmurat Harri Uyghur, a

Finland-based activist, said

Xinjiang residents would have

known they were risking gov-

ernment punishment by post-

ing the videos to Douyin.

“If they are in the Uighur re-

gion, they are risking their lives

to give testimonies,” he said.

—Shan Li

contributed to this article.

BEIJING—TikTok has be-

come one of China’s most

globally successful mobile

apps by embracing silly, come-

dic short video clips.

Now, Uighur Muslims from

China’s northwestern Xinjiang

region are using a domestic ver-

sion of the app to post haunting

videos that appear to memorial-

ize missing family members and

draw attention to Beijing’s

mass-internment campaign.

In recent days, China’s Ui-

ghurs have posted dozens of

videos that show them crying

silently in front of family por-

traits. Such public expressions

of grief have been rare in Xinji-

ang, where censorship has pre-

vented little aside from official

propaganda from trickling out.

Posted on Douyin, the do-

mestic Chinese version of Tik-

Tok, the videos’ ambiguity ap-

pears to have helped them slip

past censors at first, but many

have since been deleted,

though activists elsewhere

have spread them by sharing

them on other media. There is

no indication of what hap-

pened to the people pictured

in the family portraits.

The parent company of

Douyin and TikTok, Beijing-

basedBytedanceInc., didn’t

respond to a request for com-

ment. Bytedance is now one of

the world’s most valuable

startups, with an estimated

$75 billion valuation.

Many of the accounts that

had uploaded the videos listed

Xinjiang as their location, in-

cluding from the prefectures

of Kashgar, Aksu and Kizilsu.

While some of the accounts

remained active on Wednes-

day, the vast majority had

been deleted or disabled by

Thursday. Of the accounts that

remained active, other videos

of their daily lives remain, but

BYEVADOU

ANDPHILIPWEN

Membersof Muslim

minority post videos

to draw attention to

Chinese clampdown

thevideos with the pictures of

family members in the back-

ground are no longer there.

Like other social-media

platforms operating in China,

Douyin is required by law to

delete any content that ex-

presses political dissent. On-

line users have become skilled

at developing new methods to

circumvent censorship—em-

ploying puns, symbols and, in

this case, silent clips on social-

media apps. Even so, censors

are usually close behind.

Chinese social-media plat-

forms that don’t meet censor-

ship requirements risk finan-

cial penalties and shutdown.

Beijing in recent years has

slapped fines on juggernauts

like Tencent Holdings Ltd.,

Baidu Inc. and Weibo Corp.

Chinese authorities haven’t

raised an issue with Byte-

dance’s handling of the recent

Xinjiang videos, but the com-

pany will face growing content-

filtering expenses as growing

scale draws it under heavier

regulatory scrutiny. Histori-

cally, few social-media provid-

ers have managed to succeed

in both the U.S. market, where

consumers value free speech,

and in China, where strict po-

litical censorship is mandatory.

To accommodate the differ-

ent audiences, Bytedance op-

erates Douyin and TikTok sep-

arately. Unlike the heavily

censored Douyin, users of the

global app TikTok aren’t sub-

ject to Chinese censorship,

though TikTok has come under

attack in various countries for

allowing sexually suggestive

clips and videos promoting

suicide to circulate widely.

The tearful videos challenge

Beijing’s claims about Xinji-

ang. Western scholars esti-

mate more than one million

Turkic Uighurs and other Mus-

lim minorities have been arbi-

trarily detained in Xinjiang in

the past few years. Xinjiang

officials say they aren’t kept in

detention camps but in voca-

tional schools, which rehabili-

tate extremists and petty

criminals, and that students

attend voluntarily.

Authorities said in July that

a majority of those in the cen-

ters had returned home—a

claim that hasn’t been indepen-

dently verified. Shohrat Zakir,

Xinjiang’s governor and No. 2

official, said at the time that

more than 90% of those re-

leased had found jobs that they

like, but he provided no evi-

dence. Abduweli Ayup, a Nor-

way-based linguist originally

from Xinjiang, said the videos

appear to be an effort by some

Uighurs to refute the claims.

“I think this is the answer

from the people,” said Mr.

Still images from videos shared on Twitter by Arslan Hidayat, a Uighur-Australian activist, purport to show members of China’s

Muslim minority in front of family portraits. Mr. Hidayat says the silence in the videos and the responses to questions in the

comments sections suggest it is likely these loved ones had been detained.

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