Officials in charge of Uyghur camps attended Harvard programme
TWO senior Chinese officials involved in allegedly overseeing Muslim internment camps in Xinjiang were former visiting fellows at Harvard University, an Australian think tank has found.
Yao Ning, a local Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, was an Asia fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation between 2010 and 2011.
He now allegedly oversees nine detention facilities in a county of Xinjiang,
home to the Uyghur population and other majority-muslim ethnic groups, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s report.
He is accused of having shared responsibility for the Chinese state’s alleged forced “re-education camps” for Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Maralbeshi county. The report describes Yao as one of Beijing’s most “celebrated” officials in Xinjiang and “a darling of the Chinese media for his elite academic background” at Harvard and Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. Yao, 36, studied at Harvard as part of his PHD in public policy. In 2014, he began working in Xinjiang, first in the Uyghur Yengisheher County, and then in Maralbeshi County, the ASPI report said.
It also reveals that Erken Tuniyaz, the acting governor of Xinjiang, spent four months at Harvard’s Ash Centre as a “New World fellow” in 2012.
Earlier this year, Tuniyaz defended Xinjiang’s internment camps as “counter-terrorism and deradicalisation measures”. The US and other countries have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur and other indigenous groups in Xinjiang.
The Biden administration has cited Beijing’s internment of Uyghurs and evidence of forced sterilisation, rape, torture and forced labour and threatened to ban imports from Xinjiang.
Daniel Harsha, a spokesman for the Ash Centre, told the Financial Times the school has administered a number of training and fellowship programmes with participants from China. “Candidates for this programme were only accepted upon the successful completion of the vetting process by the US embassy in Beijing,” Mr Harsha told the newspaper.
The ASPI report also found the Chinese authorities are using a “predictive policing” system and human surveillance to gather information about Uyghurs, such as having unexpected visitors at home, or receiving overseas phone calls. The innocuous acts are described as “enemy movements” in police reports. “Xinjiang’s bureaucratic inner workings in the last seven years fit a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in China,” said Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, the report’s lead author, who noted some tactics used in Xinjiang were also being deployed in regions such as Hong Kong.
Responding to the report, China’s embassy in London denied the allegations and accused the ASPI of being an “anti-china rumour-maker”. The embassy said Xinjiang’s “re-education” centres were vocational training schools operating as part of its anti-terror effforts. The Telegraph has approached China’s foreign ministry for comment.