Targets of crackdown in China fear government’s reach in U.S.
WASHINGTON — The photo of his father was barely recognizable. The old man looked unusually pale and tired, and his customary beard was shaved off. The son who received the photo over WhatsApp was immediately suspicious.
He hadn’t heard from his family in western China for two years while he studied at a U.S. university.
His family are Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that has become the target of a massive crackdown in China. Since 2017, more than 1 million people have been confined to internment camps and many more are monitored in their own homes.
Why would he get this message now? And why would it come over WhatsApp? The messaging platform is censored for ordinary people in China but often is used by authorities.
No words accompanied the photo, but he interpreted it as a kind of warning.
“I feel like I’m being watched even in the United States,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he fears reprisals from the Chinese government. “They have all of our information. They know where we live.”
Such fear of surveillance has become a fact of life for thousands of Uighurs living outside China and struggling to rebuild lives abroad, while family and friends go missing in China’s western Xinjiang region. Within China, the State Department says, many Uighurs have been subjected to torture and other abuse.
Even Uighurs who now live in the relative safety of the United States, where their situation has sparked bipartisan concern in Congress, say they still fear being monitored and worry that speaking freely may spur reprisals against family members in Xinjiang.
“I hear these stories all the time,” said Kuzzat Altay, president of the Uighur American Association, whose own father renounced him in a video released by Chinese authorities on social media. “People come to me crying.”
Altay, who came to the U.S. as a refugee and has become a citizen, started a Uighur entrepreneurship network outside Washington. But most of the 25 members dropped out at the urging of family members in Xinjiang who had been visited by local authorities.
Altay said he thinks Chinese authorities worried that his entrepreneurship group would have discussed the crackdown back home.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.