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xtruss · 2 years

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Program Helps Congo Families Protect Endangered Gorillas

— The Associated Press | Friday April 22, 2022

This photo provided by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund shows a Silverback and infant Grauer’s gorillas in Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo on April 17, 2014. On Friday, April 22, 2022, the nonprofit fund announced that more land in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where Grauer's gorillas live will fall under a community-protection initiative. (Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund via AP)

Washington (AP) — Decades of conservation efforts have stabilized the population of endangered mountain gorillas in eastern Africa. But the number of Grauer’s gorillas — a less furry, lower elevation-dwelling animal — has declined, largely due to habitat loss and hunting.

On Friday, the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund announced that more land in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where Grauer’s gorillas live will fall under a community-protection initiative.

The critically endangered species has lost an estimated 60% of its population in the past two decades, and an estimated 3,800 to 6,800 individuals remain.

Most Grauer’s gorillas now live outside national parks, and protecting them will be difficult in a region facing sustained human conflicts. Their rainforest homes are being cleared for agriculture and mining, and the gorillas are sometimes hunted for food or trapped by snares intended to catch other animals.

A 2016 law allows communities in Congo to apply for rights to manage their traditional lands. The Fossey Fund has helped communities in eastern Congo complete that paperwork and entered into agreements with families to provide assistance and training for the sustainable management of their lands.

On Friday, it announced that 307 square miles (796 square kilometers) had been added to the program. The addition means 919 square miles (2,379 square kilometers) are now being watched over by about 20 families.

The community can decide what activities should be allowed on their lands, and to try to enforce those choices. The Fossey Fund provides education and funding.

Community members are trained and then hired “to conduct the science needed to monitor the biodiversity of the forest — biological inventories, gorilla tracking, plant biomass for estimating carbon capture,” said Urbain Ngobobo, director of the nonprofit’s Congo programs.

This model differs from the approach used to protect the mountain gorillas. They live almost exclusively within the boundaries of national parks in Rwanda, Uganda and Congo, allowing researchers to cooperate with park managers to protect the species.

Most Grauer’s gorillas don’t live inside national parks — and it’s not feasible to expand the parks to fully cover their habitats.

“Grauer’s gorillas exist exclusively in a country that has suffered really extreme degrees of instability for decades,” said Richard Bergl, a primatologist and director of conservation at the North Carolina Zoo.

“When there is violence happening, it’s very challenging to maintain the infrastructure of a national park,” he said. “But the communities will be there regardless of political instability. If you have their support, you have a chance.”

Community interests vary, but in general there is an incentive to protect their lands from being pillaged by outsiders, whether they’re illegal mining operators or commercial hunters, said Dirck Byler, vice chair of the great apes specialist group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the scientific body that designates species as endangered.

“Most of these communities want to maintain their forests as they’ve been in the past,” used for subsistence hunting and plant harvesting, said Byler, who has worked extensively in Congo.

Community-based conservation schemes have been effective in slowing or reversing the decline of endangered species in other regions, such as the Nigerian mountains where cross river gorillas live and the savannah of northwestern Namibia where endangered rhinos live, Bergl said.

“The wildlife there would be gone if it weren’t for community involvement and management,” he said. “If we’re going to be successful, it’s going to be because of efforts to support the communities to manage their forests.”

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared https://nyti.ms/37hWRCU

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared

In Xinjiang the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.

By Amy Qin | Published Dec. 28, 2019 Updated 12:37 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 28, 2019 |

HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.

“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”

The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.

Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of Xinjiang’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.

The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.

But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.

The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in Xinjiang without putting them at risk of arrest. But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.

State media and official documents describe education as a key component of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in Xinjiang, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures. The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.

“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.

To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in Xinjiang have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group. At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.

Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.

The campaign echoes past policies in Canada, the United States and Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.

“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.

Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare. References on social media are usually quickly censored. Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.

Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in Xinjiang, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”

INDOCTRINATION CHILDREN

Abdurahman Tohti left Xinjiang and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul. But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.

He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China. His parents were detained too. The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.

Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher. The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.

Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.

“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.

Then, after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Mr. Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in Xinjiang, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.

In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase. Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in Xinjiang, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.

In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry’s website, officials from Xinjiang outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.

Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”

By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in Xinjiang — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools. At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.

Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in Xinjiang. Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38 percent three years ago. And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.

The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree. But Uighur activists say the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of their culture.

Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.

Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.

Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them. Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.

“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said. “But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”

‘KINDNESS STUDENTS’

In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.

It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top. Cameras were mounted on every corner. And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.

It wasn’t always like this. Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.

Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred. Classrooms were rearranged. Bunk beds were set up. Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.

Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.

The government says children in Xinjiang’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.

“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report. He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”

But Mr. Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children. Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left. And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.

“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.

“It’s not just the children,” he added. “The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”

The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders. Before the conversion of the school, Mr. Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.

“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl. “Daddy, why don’t you come back?”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued. “You must study hard too.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Kang was generally supportive of the schools. On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”

“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students. Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.

Learning Chinese was the priority, Mr. Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.

On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.” At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.

Tighter security has become the norm at schools in Xinjiang. In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records. At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.

Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern Xinjiang. Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed. But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.

“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.

‘ENGINEERS OF THE HUMAN SOUL’

To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline. Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.

“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.

The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for Xinjiang from across China. Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year. The influx amounted to about a fifth of Xinjiang’s teachers last year, according to government data.

The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line. Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.

The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as “scum of the Chinese people” and accused them of being “bewitched by extremist religious ideology.”

Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them. A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.

Officials in Xinjiang also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.

Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.

Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun. Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.

“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.

There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.

Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left Xinjiang to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.

Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media. It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.

“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them. “I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”

______

Fatima Er contributed reporting from Istanbul

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opedguy · 2 years

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Biden Declares Economic War on China

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 17, 2021.--Signing the Forced Labor Prevention Act today, 79-year-old President Joe Biden declared economic war against China, restricting goods and service from Xinjiang, China where the U.S. alleges that China engages in genocide against the Muslim Uyghur population. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said Biden’s act “indicates that the U.S. has no scruples about smearing China by every means,” referring to U.S. allegations of genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs. Wang blasted the U.S. government for interfering with global commerce, something bound to create a trade war far worse than anything under former President Donald Trump. “The relevant actions seriously undermine the principles of market economy and international economic and trade rules, and serious damage the interests of Chinese institutions and enterprises,” said Wang, promising retaliation.

Since the March 18 Anchorage, Alaska summit, the Biden White House has been at odds with China about its treatment of Muslim Uyghurs. China insists that there’s no genocide of Muslim Uyghurs, saying that re-education camps are designed to help train otherwise unskilled workers to fit into China’s industrial economy. U.S. officials accuse Beijing of mounting a brutal campaign of forced labor, using Uyghurs as slaves for China’s public and private industries. “China strongly deplores and rejects that and urges the U.S. to immediately correct its mistake. China will take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese institutions and enterprises,” Wang said in an ominous statement. At the rate things are going, China could withdraw the U.S. ambassador, take other measures to punish the U.S. for applying economic sanctions against Beijing.

Under the Forced Labor Prevention Act, the U.S. government bans all goods and service presumed to occur with forced labor, something China denies in the strongest possible terms. Darren Byler, assistant professor in international studies at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, says that factory work has been associated with forced labor camps in Xinjiang province. “They’re living in reality un-free conditions,” Byler said, insisting Xyghurs work against their will, often separated from their families and not allowed to freely practice their Muslim faith. Announcing new sanctions on China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Commerce Department hopes to crack down on Beijing. But in taking such aggressive actions, the Biden White House takes a huge risk of destabilizing the world order. China’s politburo could concoct retaliatory sanctions on U.S. companies doing business in China.

Biden’s crusade against Russia and China has already backfired, alienating the European Union [EU] where the 27-nation economic bloc wants no part of the boycott on the Chinese Winter Games and new economic sanctions. Joining the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department announced boycotts on DJI, the world’s largest drone manufacturer, and seven other countries involved in biometric surveillance used against Muslim Uyghurs and other groups. Biden’s economic assault in Beijing runs the very real risk of retaliatory sanctions on U.S. companies, creating more problems in world supply chains, already impacting supply-and-demand, fueling the worst inflation in 39 years. Making spectacle out of China comes with a cost to large numbers of U.S. business wholly dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Biden hasn’t considered the consequences to his actions.

When it comes to alienating Russia and China, Biden deserves a medal, pushing the world closer to the brink. Whether he knows it or not, the EU wants no part of following Biden’s lead, knowing the consequences of punishing China economically. When you consider the big picture, something Biden has a hard time doing, China is a far more valuable trading partner than the Muslim Uyghur population, a group that has morbid curiosity to the Western world, realizing that the ancient Turkic tribe falls today within China’s sovereignty. Whatever problems China has with Muslim ethnic minorities in Western China, Biden isn’t about to change how Beijing cracks down on rebellious groups inside their borders. China vowed “resolute countermeasures” to respond to Biden’s latest economic assault on China, but, more importantly, the global hazing from unsightly accusations.

Biden has done a masterful job of destroying U.S.-China and U.S.-Russian relations, all because his administration thinks the EU or ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Countries], backs the insanity of provoking China into a trade war or worse yet, a shooting war. Whatever China does to contain uncooperative groups inside its borders, where does the U.S. think it has a right to humiliate a superpower with growing clout around the world? Biden’s sanctions against China have no real backing in the EU or ASEAN countries, unwilling to rock the boat with the world’s most prolific manufacturing power. Since taking office, Biden has pushed the world closer to the brink, launching a fake human rights crusade that panders to the liberal press and woke crowd looking to pick a fight with Russia and China. Embarrassing China publicly won’t help Muslim Uyghur in Xinjiang Province.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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hf-rels390b · 4 years

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Amid growing concerns and the seriousness of the current COVID-19 pandemic, people in various communities across the country are adjusting to daily life as the reality of the new “normal” sets in. This article from NPR details how Amish farmers like Daniel Byler are adjusting their business and livelihood to the rapidly changing economic and political climate in the United States.

Amish communities practice religion and work and live according to traditional Amish beliefs. The Amish are considered Anabaptists and identify with many Christian beliefs. They live their life according to the Ordnung, an unwritten belief system that focuses on simplicity and humility within the tight-knit Amish community.

Prior to COVID-19, many Amish in the farming industry produced and sold their products to other Amish individuals within their communities. It is not uncommon for the Amish to focus the buying and selling of goods and services within their community, rather than supporting large businesses elsewhere. Although there is a considerable population of Amish who identify as liberal and non-traditional, the majority of Amish in the United States are very conservative – living their lives according to traditional beliefs. Is it possible that the current pandemic will impact groups like these and cause a shift in traditional practice and belief systems?

Due to the current pandemic, it is becoming more and more difficult for individuals across the country (and in other parts of the world) to support their families financially. While many Americans are out of work, or are able to work remotely entirely online, this is not the case for Amish communities. The rising demand for essential goods and services while businesses are forced to lose their doors has pushed many retailers to move business online or contactless to avoid spread of the virus. Churches and religious groups have been forced to cease meetings and congregations, while many groups also move services to an online or virtual format.

With the implementation of these changes becoming more commonplace in our country, what do people do when conforming to societal norms and practices does not agree with a belief system and way of life? This is the case for Amish communities today, whose business and way of life rely entirely on face-to-face human interaction. Is it possible that a crisis like Coronavirus could force some religious groups to re-evaluate age old practices and consider new ways of thinking and living? Like Daniel Byler, an Amish farmer in New York, many individuals are being forced to change their business model to adapt to the current state of our nation. For him, this means utilizing the internet and selling his products to non-Amish customers.

Although I am not a religious person, the Amish belief system and way of life is very admirable, albeit unique. When considering their religious beliefs, they align similarly to other Christian groups in the way of treating others with humility and respect and valuing community and helping your “neighbor.” I believe this pandemic will have an influence or hand in contributing to the positive change in the way we go about daily life. For religious groups this may mean implementing new age practices to benefit the greater good, for large businesses and the farming industry, it may bring new opportunity to light as society shifts its values in a new direction.

#rels390b

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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(BEIJING) – When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention center.

There, she said, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous, guards watching as she gulped. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant “like firemen,” she said.

“It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”

The government in China’s far northwest Xinjiang region is resorting to draconian measures to combat the coronavirus, including physically locking residents in homes, imposing quarantines of more than 40 days and arresting those who do not comply. Furthermore, in what experts call a breach of medical ethics, some residents are being coerced into swallowing traditional Chinese medicine, according to government notices, social media posts and interviews with three people in quarantine in Xinjiang.

There is a lack of rigorous clinical data showing traditional Chinese medicine works against the virus, and one of the herbal remedies used in Xinjiang, Qingfei Paidu, includes ingredients banned in Germany, Switzerland, the U.S. and other countries for high levels of toxins and carcinogens.

The latest grueling lockdown, now in its 45th day, comes in response to 826 cases reported in Xinjiang since mid-July, China’s largest caseload since the initial outbreak. But the Xinjiang lockdown is especially striking because of its severity, and because there hasn’t been a single new case of local transmission in over a week.

Harsh lockdowns have been imposed elsewhere in China, most notably in Wuhan in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected. But though Wuhan grappled with over 50,000 cases and Hubei with 68,000 in all, many more than in Xinjiang, residents there weren’t forced to take traditional medicine and were generally allowed outdoors within their compounds for exercise or grocery deliveries.

The response to an outbreak of more than 300 cases in Beijing in early June was milder still, with a few select neighborhoods locked down for a few weeks. In contrast, more than half of Xinjiang’s 25 million people are under a lockdown that extends hundreds of miles from the center of the outbreak in the capital, Urumqi, according to an AP review of government notices and state media reports.

Even as Wuhan and the rest of China has mostly returned to ordinary life, Xinjiang’s lockdown is backed by a vast surveillance apparatus that has turned the region into a digital police state. Over the past three years, Xinjiang authorities have swept a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into various forms of detention, including extrajudicial internment camps, under a widespread security crackdown.

After being detained for over a month, the Uighur woman was released and locked into her home. Conditions are now better, she told the AP, but she is still under lockdown, despite regular tests showing she is free of the virus.

Once a day, she says, community workers force traditional medicine in white unmarked bottles on her, saying she’ll be detained if she doesn’t drink them. The AP saw photos of the bottles, which match those in images from another Xinjiang resident and others circulating on Chinese social media.

Authorities say the measures taken are for the well-being of all residents, though they haven’t commented on why they are harsher than those taken elsewhere. The Chinese government has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, at times clashing violently with many of the region’s native Uighurs, who resent Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.

“The Xinjiang Autonomous Region upheld the principle of people and life first….and guaranteed the safety and health of local people of all ethnic groups,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a press briefing Friday.

Xinjiang authorities can carry out the harsh measures, experts say, because of its lavishly funded security apparatus, which by some estimates deploys the most police per capita of anywhere on the planet.

“Xinjiang is a police state, so it’s basically martial law,” says Darren Byler, a researcher on the Uighurs at the University of Colorado. “They think Uighurs can’t really police themselves, they have to be forced to comply in order for a quarantine to be effective.”

Not all the recent outbreak measures in Xinjiang are targeted at the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Some are being enforced on China’s majority Han residents in Xinjiang as well, though they are generally spared the extrajudicial detention used against minorities. This month, thousands of Xinjiang residents took to social media to complain about what they called excessive measures against the virus in posts that are often censored, some with images of residents handcuffed to railings and front doors sealed with metal bars.

One Han Chinese woman with the last name of Wang posted photos of herself drinking traditional Chinese medicine in front of a medical worker in full protective gear.

“Why are you forcing us to drink medicine when we’re not sick!” she asked in a Aug. 18 post that was swiftly deleted. “Who will take responsibility if there’s problems after drinking so much medicine? Why don’t we even have the right to protect our own health?”

A few days later she simply wrote: “I’ve lost all hope. I cry when I think about it.”

After the heavy criticism, the authorities eased some restrictions last week, now allowing some residents to walk in their compounds, and a limited few to leave the region after a bureaucratic approval process.

Wang did not respond to a request for interviews. But her account is in line with many others posted on social media, as well as those interviewed by the AP.

One Han businessman working between Urumqi and Beijing told the AP he was put in quarantine in mid-July. Despite having taken coronavirus tests five times and testing negative each time, he said, the authorities still haven’t let him out – not for so much as a walk. When he’s complained about his condition online, he said, he’s had his posts deleted and been told to stay silent.

“The most terrible thing is silence,” he wrote on Chinese social media site Weibo in mid-August. “After a long silence, you will fall into the abyss of hopelessness.”

“I’ve been in this room for so long, I don’t remember how long. I just want to forget,” he wrote again, days later. “I’m writing out my feelings to reassure myself I still exist. I fear I’ll be forgotten by the world.”

“I’m falling apart,” he told the AP more recently, declining to be named out of fear of retribution.

He, too, is being forced to take Chinese traditional medicine, he said, including liquid from the same unmarked white bottles as the Uighur woman. He is also forced to take Lianhua Qingwen, a herbal remedy seized regularly by U.S. Customs and Border patrol for violating FDA laws by falsely claiming to be effective against COVID-19.

Since the start of the outbreak, the Chinese government has pushed traditional medicine on its population. The remedies are touted by President Xi Jinping, China’s nationalist, authoritarian leader, who has advocated a revival of traditional Chinese culture. Although some state-backed doctors say they have conducted trials showing the medicine works against the virus, no rigorous clinical data supporting that claim has been published in international scientific journals.

“None of these medicines have been scientifically proven to be effective and safe,” said Fang Shimin, a former biochemist and writer known for his investigations of scientific fraud in China who now lives in the United States. “It’s unethical to force people, sick or healthy, to take unproven medicines.”

When the virus first started spreading, thousands flooded pharmacies in Hubei province searching for traditional remedies after state media promoted their effectiveness against the virus. Packs of pills were tucked into care packages sent to Chinese workers and students overseas, some emblazoned with the Chinese flag, others reading: “The motherland will forever firmly back you up”.

But the new measures in Xinjiang forcing some residents to take the medicine is unprecedented, experts say. The government says that the participation rate in traditional Chinese medicine treatment in the region has “reached 100%”, according to a state media report. When asked about resident complaints that they were being forced to take Chinese medicine, one local official said it was being done “according to expert opinion.”

“We’re helping resolve the problems of ordinary people,” said Liu Haijiang, the head of Dabancheng district in Urumqi, “like getting their children to school, delivering them medicine or getting them a doctor.”

With Xi’s ascent, critics of Chinese traditional medicine have fallen silent. In April, an influential Hubei doctor, Yu Xiangdong, was removed from a hospital management position for questioning the efficacy of the remedies, an acquittance confirmed. A government notice online said Yu “openly published inappropriate remarks slandering the nation’s epidemic prevention policy and traditional Chinese medicine.”

In March, the World Health Organization removed guidance on its site saying that herbal remedies were not effective against the virus and could be harmful, saying it was “too broad”. And in May, the Beijing city government announced a draft law that would criminalize speech “defaming or slandering” traditional Chinese medicine. Now, the government is pushing traditional Chinese remedies as a treatment for COVID-19 overseas, sending pills and specialists to countries such as Iran, Italy, and the Philippines.

Other leaders have also spearheaded unproven and potentially risky remedies – notably U.S. President Donald Trump, who stumped for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which can cause heart rhythm problems, despite no evidence that it’s effective against COVID-19. But China appears to be the first to force citizens – at least in Xinjiang – to take them.

The Chinese government’s push for traditional medicine is bolstering the fortunes of billionaires and padding state coffers. The family of Wu Yiling, the founder of the company that makes Lianhua Qingwen, has seen the value of their stake more than double in the past six months, netting them over a billion dollars. Also profiting: the Guangdong government, which owns a stake in Wu’s company.

“It’s a huge waste of money, these companies are making millions,” said a public health expert who works closely with the Chinese government, declining to be identified out of fear of retribution. “But then again – why not take it? There’s a placebo effect, it’s not that harmful. Why bother? There’s no point in fighting on this.”

Measures vary widely by city and neighborhood, and not all residents are taking the medication. The Uighur woman says that despite the threats against her, she’s flushing the liquid and pills down the toilet. A Han man whose parents are in Xinjiang told the AP that for them, the remedies are voluntary.

Though the measures are “extreme,” he says, they’re understandable.

“There’s no other way if the government wants to control this epidemic,” he said, declining to be named to avoid retribution. “We don’t want our outbreak to become like Europe or America.”

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