Reuters could not establish if the place was currently functioning as a mosque.

Within minutes of reporters arriving, four men in plainclothes showed up and took up positions around the site, locking gates to nearby residential buildings.

The men told the reporters it was illegal to take photos and to leave.

"There's no mosque here … there has never been a mosque at this site," said one of the men in response to a question from Reuters if there was a mosque inside. He declined to identify himself.

Minarets on the building's four corners, visible in publicly available satellite images in 2019, have gone.

A large blue metal box stood where the mosque's central dome had once been. It was not clear if it was a place of worship at the time the satellite images were taken.

In recent months, China has stepped up a campaign on state media and with government-arranged tours to counter the criticism of researchers, rights groups and former Xinjiang residents who say thousands of mosques have been targeted in a crackdown on the region's mostly Muslim Uyghur people.

Officials from Xinjiang and Beijing told reporters in Beijing that no religious sites had been forcibly destroyed or restricted and invited them to visit and report.

"Instead, we have taken a series of measures to protect them," Elijan Anayat, a spokesman for the Xinjiang government, said of mosques late last year.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Wednesday some mosques had been demolished, while others had been upgraded and expanded as part of rural revitalization but Muslims could practice their religion openly at home and in mosques.

Asked about restrictions authorities put on journalists visiting the area, Hua said reporters had to try harder to "win the trust of the Chinese people" and report objectively.

Reuters visited more than two dozen mosques across seven counties in southwest and central Xinjiang on a 12-day visit during Ramadan, which ended on Thursday.

There is a contrast between Beijing's campaign to protect mosques and religious freedom and the reality on the ground. Most of the mosques that Reuters visited had been partially or completely demolished.

China has repeatedly said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from separatists and religious extremists who plot attacks and stir up tension between Uyghurs who call the region home and the ethnic Han, China's largest ethnic group.

A mass crackdown that includes a campaign of restrictions on religious practice and what rights groups describe as the forced political indoctrination of more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims began in earnest in 2017.

China initially denied detaining people in detention camps, but has since said they are vocational training centres and that the people have "graduated" from them.

The government says there are more than 20,000 mosques in Xinjiang but no detailed data on their status is available.

Some functioning mosques have signs saying congregants must register while citizens from outside the area, foreigners and anyone under the age of 18 are banned from going in.

Functioning mosques feature surveillance cameras and include Chinese flags and propaganda displays declaring loyalty to the ruling Communist Party.

Visiting reporters were almost always followed by plainclothes personnel and warned not to take photographs.

A Han woman, who said she had moved to the city of Hotan six years ago from central China, said Muslims who wanted to pray could do so at home.

"There are no Muslims like that here anymore," the woman said, referring to those who used to pray at the mosque. She added: "Life in Xinjiang is beautiful." Continue reading

The Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., prepared the 55-page report. It is one of the think tank's first independent reports into the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) actions in Xinjiang province.

The Uyghurs are an ethnic minority. The mostly Muslim group lives alongside other ethnic and religious minorities in the region.

"The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China's Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention," report confirms Chinese authorities have created a massive network of internment camps in Xinjiang.

The camps are purportedly for "re-education" and "terrorism prevention."

The report's claims are unequivocal. It concludes "the People's Republic of China (China) bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs in breach of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) ..."

The authors say they came to this conclusion after an "extensive" review of the available evidence and after applying "international law to the evidence of the facts on the ground."

In 1948, the UN Genocide Convention designated five acts that would constitute "genocide." The report says China has infringed in all five areas, quoting these as being:

killing members of the group

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Committing just one act "with the requisite intent can sustain a finding of genocide," the UN convention says.

Cam survivors report stories of Uyghur women being systematically raped, tortured and sterilised.

Forced birth control through use of intrauterine devices (IUD) has increased dramatically in Xinjiang while being on the decline throughout the rest of China.

Uyghur women's formerly high fertility rates have seen precipitous drops in fertility in recent years.

Leaked manuals from the camps say wearing traditional clothing is among the "crimes" inmates can be detained for.

Chinese government officials have denied accusations of genocide. They insist the camps have helped prevent terrorism in the region.

China's foreign minister, Wang Yi is calling the accusation of genocide "preposterous." He says the report is "rumour fabricated with ulterior motives and a total lie."

On Jan. 19, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Chinese authorities had committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang.

He cited forced labor, torture, forced abortion, sterilisations and birth control as some of the abuses behind his statement.

During his confirmation hearings, current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he agreed with Pompeo's genocide assessment.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Asia News

Eugenics is the study of how to manage reproduction within a human population to increase desirable heritable characteristics.

Among the Chinese Communist Party's goals listed in its policy blueprint for the years 2021-2025 is to "optimize its birth policy" and "improve the quality of the population."

"I am actually very worried," Columbia professor Leta Hong Fincher told a panel of China experts in a virtual event hosted by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) on Nov. 13.

"What caught my eye was that they actually use specific language saying that China needs to 'upgrade population quality,' " she said.

Fincher said that the Chinese government's plans to control reproduction were part of the regime's goals to maintain internal security. They would do this by encouraging growth of the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.

At the same time, the government would systematically limit births of an ethnic minority, the Uyghur Muslims.

"We see it happening in Xinjiang with the forced sterilization of particularly Uyghur Muslim women. And the language in the plan suggests to me that the government is going to continue with that," she said.

"You have seen a huge reduction in birth rates in Xinjiang and, on the flip side, the government is also trying to coopt and persuade Han Chinese women who are college-educated into having more babies."

The government of China's Xinjiang autonomous region has acknowledged that birth rates fell by nearly a third in 2018. Much of the fall was attributed to "better implementation of family planning policy."

In Xinjiang, an estimated one million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps.

Inside the camps, they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The final version of the latest Chinese five-year plan will not be passed until the National People's Congress meets in March 2021.

Sources

Angelus News

La Croix