We are 20 million Muslim people. The Chinese burn our Qur’ans, do not allow us to fast during Ramadan, try to put alcohol and pork next to the offices and doors of those Muslims who are employed. And if they do not drink or eat pork, they say that they are not Communists and fire them from their jobs. They are restricting people under 18 years old to attend the mosques.
The ones who are educating the children with religious classes, the ones who are forming religious schools are being arrested, and some of them are even being executed by the Chinese government. Thousands of religious scholars were sent to Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia originally by the Chinese government. And when they returned, the government arrested them all.
Thousands of religious scholars are in the jails currently. Some of them are facing executions. There are over 2,000 mosques in our homeland today, but the religious people who are serving there are all being hired by the Communist government. The Islamic world and the Western world are helping us. The Islamic world believes the Chinese lies and propaganda. Therefore, I would like the Islamic world to know that the Chinese government is labeling us as terrorists and restricting our faith, arresting us and killing us because of our faith, and to understand our current situation.
We have not been able to explain our situation to them until today because their relationships are very close with the Chinese government. Therefore I would like the Islamic world to also support us, as do the Western world and Turkey.
Rebiya Kadeer is a human rights defender, a former prisoner of conscience, and a leader of the Uyghur people. The Uyghurs are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which most Uyghurs call by its former name, East Turkistan.
Born into a poor family, Kadeer became the owner of a small business and eventually one of the richest people in China. She was appointed to a number of prominent positions by the Beijing government and thought that as an insider she could safely call the government’s attention to human rights violations against her fellow Uyghurs. But she was soon removed from these positions and was arrested and imprisoned in 1999 after attempting to meet with a visiting U.S. delegation from the Library of Congress.
When she refused to renounce her human rights advocacy, the government began arresting her children, several of whom are still in detention.
Released in 2005 on the eve of a visit to China by then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Kadeer now lives in the United States. She serves as president of the Uyghur-American Association and the World Uyghur Congress and continues to speak out for freedom and democracy.
The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, after a decades-long civil war between communist and nationalist forces. The communist victory drove the nationalist government to the island of Taiwan. While tensions have eased in recent years, both the nationalist and communist forces still claim to rule all of China. China ranks as the world’s third largest country by area, and the largest by population, with over 1.3 billion people.
Since 1949, China has been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong led the country until his death in 1976. Mao’s era was marked by dramatic swings in policy, massive crackdowns on perceived opponents of the regime, and harsh repression. Since 1976, the Chinese government has broken with Marxist economic orthodoxy by instituting limited market-based reforms, but the party has retained its monopoly on political power.
Freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and religion are severely restricted, and the people of China are denied the right to change their government. The courts are controlled by the Communist Party and do not provide due process of law. Government control extends into every aspect of people’s lives, most notably in the one-child policy in which unauthorized pregnancies often result in forced abortion and sterilization. While technology has spread quickly in recent years, Freedom House ranks China as one of the three most repressive governments in the world in terms of Internet freedom.
While the rapid expansion of the private sector has dramatically changed the Chinese economy, fundamental principles of free market systems are lacking, including property rights and independent labor unions. Official corruption remains a major obstacle to developing a fully free economy.
In 1989, 100,000 people gathered in a peaceful demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to protest human rights violations and demand democratic reforms. The protest lasted several weeks and inspired similar nonviolent demonstrations in other cities throughout China. On June 4, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army converged on the area with troops, tanks, and other advanced military weapons. Estimates of the death toll ranged from several hundred to several thousand. The army used similar tactics to suppress demonstrations in other cities and subsequently rounded up and imprisoned many thousands of protestors. The government vigorously defended these actions and instituted a campaign to purge those who had sympathized with protestors from the party and the government.
Although the Tiananmen Square massacre put an end to hopes for a speedy transition to democracy, courageous Chinese citizens have continued to risk imprisonment and worse to demand freedom. These human rights activists have included students, workers, lawyers, artists, and writers; Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims who demand respect for their cultures, traditions, and religious practices; members of the spiritual discipline known as Falun Gong; Catholics who insist that their church is headed by the Pope rather than by government-appointed religious officials; and members of the “house church” movement, representing millions of Protestant Christians who are forced to worship in secret because their churches are not authorized by the government. China’s many prisoners of conscience include members of each of these groups.
In 2010, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo. His wife was arrested in order to prevent her from attending the award ceremony, and the government employed a range of coercive techniques to prevent other human rights activists from attending. China’s leading human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, disappeared in early 2009 and is presumed to be in government custody.
The most recent Freedom in the World report from Freedom House gave China scores of 6 for civil liberties and 7 for political rights, where 1 is the highest and 7 the lowest possible score. Freedom House categorizes China as a “Not Free” country.
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