A sudden storm in southwestern China’s Ghizhou Province has capsized four boats, killing 10 people and injuring 70.

More than 80 people fell into the water, state media reported on Monday, when the rain and hailstorm struck the vessels on a stretch of the Wu River near Qianxi City on Sunday afternoon.

Rescue operations ran overnight. Initial reports said nine people had died, with one person missing. However, rescue personnel discovered the missing person, who “showed no signs of life”, around noon, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

In one video shared by state media, a man could be seen performing CPR on a person, while one of the vessels drifted upside-down.

Initial reports suggested two tourist vessels had capsized. However, CCTV later confirmed that four boats were involved – two of which were not carrying passengers at the time – in the incident, which occurred on the upper reaches of the waterway, which is a tributary of the Yangtze River, China’s longest.

The seven crew members on board the two vessels, carrying no passengers, managed to swim to safety, the broadcaster said.

A witness interviewed by the state-owned Beijing News said some passengers managed to swim to safety after the storm had descended rapidly, and thick mist obscured visibility on the river.

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Turkish authorities on Tuesday detained six people suspected of spying on behalf of Chinese intelligence in a rare public move against China.

One leader of a Uyghur umbrella group characterized it as a result of rising Chinese espionage activities against members of the oppressed Muslim community who are taking exile in Turkey.

While six have been detained, Turkish authorities are still searching for one more individual, the state-run Anadolu News Agency reported.

The suspects were rounded up in simultaneous raids in Istanbul for allegedly “collecting information” about prominent members of the Uyghur diaspora and their institutions based in Turkey with the intention of passing it on to Chinese intelligence units, according to the report. Authorities did not confirm the nationalities of the detained.

Turkey is home to one of the world’s largest populations of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority of Turkic origin who live primarily in China’s Xinjiang region.

Ties between Ankara and Beijing took a positive turn after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reelection in May last year. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, met with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, as well as Erdogan during a July visit to Turkey aimed at strengthening economic cooperation between their two countries.

Yet, China’s treatment of its Uyghur population, estimated at around 12 million, has long been a contentious issue in Ankara-Beijing ties.

The Turkey-based Uyghur activist Abduresid Eminhaci said Tuesday’s arrests come amid an “intense uptick” in Chinese espionage activities against Uyghur targets in Turkey.

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Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and counterparts in 10 Pacific Island nations failed to reach consensus at talks on a sweeping security and trade deal amid concerns the proposal could “threaten regional stability”.

Following Monday’s virtual talks, Wang, who was in Fiji, sought to reassure the Pacific nations about China’s aims in the region, saying Beijing has also long championed developing nations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
The top diplomat’s visit to Fiji is part of a diplomatic tour aimed at radically increasing China’s involvement in the security, economy and politics of the South Pacific.

A draft communique and five-year action plan that China sent to the invited nations ahead of the meeting showed it was seeking to train local police, become involved in cybersecurity, expand political ties, conduct sensitive marine mapping and gain greater access to natural resources on land and in the water.
The proposed China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision also proposes a free trade area, and support for action on climate change and health.

But the draft communique prompted opposition from at least one of the invited nations, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), according to a letter leaked last week

Source AlJazeera

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Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.

The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

Their publication coincides with the recent arrival in China of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, for a controversial visit to Xinjiang, with critics concerned that her itinerary will be under the tight control of the government.

The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.

The government’s claim that the re-education camps built across Xinjiang since 2017 are nothing more than “schools” is contradicted by internal police instructions, guarding rosters and the never-before-seen images of detainees.

And its widespread use of terrorism charges, under which many thousands more have been swept into formal prisons, is exposed as a pretext for a parallel method of internment, with police spreadsheets full of arbitrary, draconian sentences.

The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith – and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

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A China Eastern Airlines plane carrying 133 people on board has crashed in Guangxi province, Chinese state media is reporting.

The number of casualties is not yet known.

The crash of the Boeing 737 jet, in a mountainous region, led to a fire in the woods, state media is reporting.

Flight MU5735 was scheduled to leave Kunming at 13:15 local time (05:15 GMT) and was en route to Guangzhou.

Rescue crews have been deployed to the area, CCTV reported.

The plane had crashed near Teng county in Wuzhou province. Guangxi is a southern province neighbouring Guangzhou, a major city in the south-east.

Flight trackers like FlightRadar24 show the location of the plane as “unknown”.

Source BBc

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The military biological activity of the US and its allies poses a serious threat for the national security of Russia and China, Moscow and Beijing said in a joint statement adopted Friday.

“The sides emphasize that domestic and foreign bioweapons activities by the United States and its allies raise serious concerns and questions for the international community regarding their compliance with the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention – TASS],” the statement reads.

“The sides share the view that such activities pose a serious threat to the national security of the Russian Federation and China and are detrimental to the security of the respective regions,” the document underscores.

In this regard, Moscow and Beijing urged the US and its allies “to act in an open, transparent, and responsible manner by properly reporting on their military biological activities conducted overseas and on their national territory, and by supporting the resumption of negotiations on a legally binding BWC Protocol with an effective verification mechanism.”

Source Tass

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At some of the world’s most sensitive spots, authorities have installed security screening devices made by a single Chinese company with deep ties to China’s military and the highest levels of the ruling Communist Party.

The World Economic Forum in Davos. Europe’s largest ports. Airports from Amsterdam to Athens. NATO’s borders with Russia. All depend on equipment manufactured by Nuctech, which has quickly become the world’s leading company, by revenue, for cargo and vehicle scanners.

Nuctech has been frozen out of the U.S. for years due to national security concerns, but it has made deep inroads across Europe, installing its devices in 26 of 27 EU member states, according to public procurement, government and corporate records reviewed by The Associated Press.

A growing number of Western security officials and policymakers fear that China could exploit Nuctech equipment to sabotage key transit points or get illicit access to government, industrial or personal data from the items that pass through its devices.

Source AP

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India and China are to pull back troops from part of their disputed Himalayan border in what’s seen as a breakthrough following a deadly clash in June.

India’s defence minister said the move to withdraw troops in Ladakh was the result of “sustained talks” between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

His remarks came a day after a similar announcement from China.

Tensions have been high since the clash that left 20 Indian soldiers dead and a number of reported Chinese fatalities. Indian and Chinese troops have been facing off on the north and south shores of the glacial lake that lies in territory claimed by both sides.

The disputed 3,440km long de facto border – called the Line of Actual Control, or LAC – is poorly demarcated. The presence of rivers, lakes and snowcaps means the line can shift. The soldiers on either side – representing two of the world’s largest armies – come face to face at many points.

Adapted from original source: BBCnews

LT

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Zimbabwe has purchased 600 000 COVID-19 vaccine doses from China’s Sinopharm, in addition to the 200 000 China has donated.

According to the country’s Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa, the vaccines are due to arrive in Zimbabwe by the start of March.

Mutsvangwa also said Zimbabwe negotiating with Russia over the procurement of its Sputnik vaccines and was expecting more doses from India and COVAX.

Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said his country is also ready to provide vaccines for Ethiopia and Algeria to support their fight against COVID-19.

Adapted from original source:SABCNews

LT

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The Chinese city of Wuhan – the center of a viral outbreak that has killed at least 17 people and infected 571 – has been locked down.

As of 10 a.m. Thursday morning local time, public transport had been totally shut off.

Buses, planes, subways, and ferries had been shut down in the city of some 11 million people, a measure without precedent in its sweeping scale.

Residents in the city were told not to enter or leave, even using their own transportation, without an overwhelmingly good reason to do so. All organised public gatherings have been canceled.

Foreign news correspondents described driving out of the city before the deadline hit.

It came as new officials figures showed the scale of the disease, a coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV, had continued to spread.

The latest update, accurate to midnight Wednesday, said that 571 cases had been recorded in China, 17 of which have proven fatal.

On the Chinese social network Weibo, the top trending topic was #WuhanLockdown, according to The New York Times.

Footage of the city just after the lockdown was published on Twitter by The Paper, a Chinese-language digital news outlet.

It shows rows of Chinese soldiers outside Hankou Railway Station, a central transit hub in Wuhan. Many people were gathered outside to watch, including one who took a selfie in front of the barriers.

Inside a ticket hall, a departure board showed a sea of red with blanked-out destinations. Ticket booths were shuttered and automated machines seemed not to work.

Inside the city, officials insisted on mandatory face masks in public places, and encouraged people to report anyone not using a mask to the authorities, according to the outlet Sixth Tone.

According to the Reuters news agency, people left in Wuhan rushed to grocery stores to stockpile supplies, but found many shelves empty of staples like meat, vegetables, and instant noodles. Some stores raised prices to capitalise on the extra demand.

Experts cited by The New York Times said that cutting off an entire city the size of Wuhan has never been attempted before.

Wuhan has a similar population to New York City, but is an even more significant transit hub given its central location in China.

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The women have found refuge from Chinese authorities across the border in Kazakhstan, their ancestral homeland. But they remain haunted by the stories of abuse they carry with them.

Some said they were forced to undergo abortions in China’s Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, others that they had contraceptive devices implanted against their will while in detention.

One reported being raped. Many said they were subjected to sexual humiliation, from being filmed in the shower to having their intimate parts rubbed with chili paste.

The allegations come as China expands a years-long crackdown on its Muslim minority, which includes not only Uighurs but also Kazakhs and other ethnic groups.

While the experiences described could not be independently verified, local rights groups and lawyers say they are common and reveal a wider pattern of abuse directed specifically against women, aimed at curbing their ability to reproduce.

In December 2017, Gulzira Mogdyn, a 38-year-old ethnic Kazakh and Chinese citizen, was detained in Xinjiang after a visit to Kazakhstan because WhatsApp was found on her phone.

She was placed under house arrest and examined by doctors at a nearby clinic, who discovered she was 10 weeks pregnant.

Officials told her she was not allowed to have what would be her fourth child. The following month, Ms Mogdyn said, doctors “cut my foetus out” without using anaesthesia. She still suffers from complications.

“Two humans were lost in this tragedy – my baby and me,” Ms Mogdyn said during an interview on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city.

She received her Kazakh citizenship in July and says that has emboldened her to speak out. She is also pressing Beijing for a response: either financial compensation or, at least, an apology.

Others are still constrained. A Kazakh woman with close relatives remaining in China was forced to undergo two abortions, in 2016 and 2017, while living in Xinjiang, her lawyer said.

Aiman Umarova, a Kazakh human rights advocate and US State Department honouree, said her client is seeking refuge in a Kazakh city and does not wish to be identified for fear of retribution.

Ms Umarova sees the women’s stories as forming a pattern.

“Sexually violating women, including stopping them from reproducing, has become a weapon for China against its Muslim population,” she said.

The US government and human rights groups estimate that between one million and three million Muslims have been detained in Chinese “re-education camps” since 2017, most of them Uighurs.

The Washington Post spoke with two men, including an Australian citizen named Almas Nizamidin, who suspect that their wives, both Uighurs still in detention in Xinjiang, were forced to terminate their pregnancies at a camp in 2017.

Under China’s one-child policy, abortions and contraceptives were encouraged – and often enforced – by officials tasked with keeping the population down. Exceptions were granted for ethnic minorities, who were allowed one more child than Han Chinese.

The policy was abandoned three years ago, but that has not prevented the recent move to curb ethnic populations, said Leta Hong Fincher, a scholar and expert on gender equality in China. “There is a clear tightening of control over the reproductive rights of ethnic minorities,” she said.

In addition to mistreating detained women, rights groups and experts say Beijing has pursued a campaign to erase Muslim culture in Xinjiang, by pushing interethnic marriages and sending Chinese officials for “home stays” with Muslim families, part of efforts by president Xi Jinping’s government to assimilate ethnic minorities.

All of this amounts to genocide as laid out by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, said Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of the Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs.

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Authorities in the Chinese capital ordered halal restaurants and food stalls to remove Arabic script and symbols associated with Islam from their signs, part of an expanding national effort to “Sinicize” its Muslim population.

Employees at 11 restaurants and shops in Beijing selling halal products said officials told them to remove images associated with Islam, such as the crescent moon and the word “halal” written in Arabic, from their signs.

Government workers from various offices told one manager of a Beijing noodle shop to cover up the “halal” in Arabic on his shop’s sign and then watched him do it.

“They said this is foreign culture and you should use more Chinese culture,” said the manager, who, like all restaurant owners and employees, declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The campaign against Arabic script and Islamic images marks a new phase of a drive that has gained momentum since 2016, aimed at ensuring religions conform to mainstream Chinese culture.

The campaign has included the removal of Middle Eastern-style domes on many mosques around the country in favour of Chinese-style pagodas.

Ethnic violence

China, home to 20 million Muslims, officially guarantees freedom of religion, but the government has campaigned to bring the faithful in line with Communist Party ideology.

It is not just Muslims who have come under scrutiny. Authorities have shut down many underground Christian churches, and torn down crosses of some deemed illegal by the government.

But Muslims have come in for particular attention since a riot in 2009 between mostly Muslim Uighur people and majority Han Chinese in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to the Uighur minority.

Spasms of ethnic violence followed, and some Uighurs, chafing at government controls, carried out knife and crude bomb attacks in public areas and against the police and other authorities.

In response, China launched what it described as a crackdown on “terrorism” in Xinjiang.

Now, it is facing intense criticism from Western nations and rights groups over its policies, in particular, mass detentions and surveillance of Uighurs and other Muslims there.

The government says its actions in Xinjiang are necessary to stamp out religious “extremism”. Officials have warned about creeping Islamisation, and have extended tighter controls over other Muslim minorities.

‘New normal’

Analysts say the ruling Communist Party is concerned that foreign influences can make religious groups difficult to control.

“Arabic is seen as a foreign language and knowledge of it is now seen as something outside of the control of the state,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies Xinjiang.

“It is also seen as connected to international forms of piety, or in the eyes of state authorities, religious extremism. They want Islam in China to operate primarily through Chinese language,” he said.

Kelly Hammond, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas who studies Muslims of the Hui minority in China, said the measures were part of a “drive to create a new normal”.

Beijing is home to at least 1,000 halal shops and restaurants, according to the Meituan Dianping food delivery app, spread across the city’s historic Muslim quarter as well as in other neighbourhoods.

It was not clear if every such restaurant in Beijing has been told to cover Arabic script and Muslim symbols. One manager at a restaurant still displaying Arabic writing said he had been ordered to remove it but was waiting for his new signs.

Several bigger shops visited by Reuters replaced their signs with the Chinese term for halal – “qing zhen” – while others merely covered up the Arabic and Islamic imagery with tape or stickers.

The Beijing government’s Committee on Ethnicity and Religious affairs declined to comment, saying the order regarding halal restaurants was a national directive.

While most shopkeepers interviewed by Reuters said they did not mind replacing their signs, some said it confused their customers and an employee at a halal butcher shop accused authorities of “erasing” Muslim culture.

“They are always talking about national unity, they’re always talking about China being international. Is this national unity?”

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Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi warned on Tuesday the United States against “opening Pandora’s box” in the Middle East.

“We call on all sides to remain rational and exercise restraint, and not take any actions that irritate regional tensions, and not open a Pandora’s box,” Yi told reporters in Beijing.

Earlier in the day, the United States published new images it said proved Iran’s involvement in the two attacks on oil tankers in the Sea of ​​Oman last week.

Washington made the announcement in parallel with a decision to send additional 1,000 troops to the region.

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China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday a US State Department report critical of its human rights record was filled with “ideological prejudice and groundless accusations”.

The US report slammed human rights violations in China, saying the sort of abuses it had inflicted on its Muslim minorities had not been seen “since the 1930s”.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in the department’s annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” but told reporters that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”

“Today, more than one million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interned in re-education camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities,” he said.

Michael Kozak, the head of the State Department’s human rights and democracy bureau described abuses of China’s Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region.

“Rounding up, in some estimations … in the millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. It’s just remarkably awful.”

“It is one of the most serious human rights violations in the world today,” he said.

“For me, you haven’t seen things like this since the 1930s,” he said, apparently referring to the policies of persecution of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

International scrutiny
China had initially denied there even were camps, Kozak said, adding its explanation now that they were for voluntary labor training “does not match the facts.”

“But at least we’re starting to make them realize there is a lot of international scrutiny on this,” he said.

Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said on Tuesday that China was running boarding schools, not concentration camps, in the country’s far western region as the US ambassador for religious freedom called the situation there “completely unacceptable,” and said sanctions against Chinese officials under the Global Magnitsky Act remained a “possibility”.

The administration of President Donald Trump has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including the Communist Party boss there, Chen Quanguo, who as a member of the powerful politburo is in the upper echelons of China’s leadership.

Beijing has warned of retaliation if Washington were to target Chen and the administration has yet to act despite complaints from US lawmakers.

The State Department report said Chen had replicated in Xinjiang policies similar to those credited with reducing opposition to Communist Party rule in Tibet, where he was previously stationed.

The report said that in the past year, China had significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.

It said authorities there were reported to have arbitrarily detained from 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims in camps with the aim of erasing religious and ethnic identities.

The report says children of the detained have been placed in “orphanages or boarding schools, or “child welfare guidance centres”, where they were forced to shout patriotic slogans, learn Mandarin Chinese, and answer questions about their parents’ religious beliefs and practices.” It said it did not know how many children were affected.

Other countries rebuked
Iran also came in for harsh criticism while rival Saudi Arabia, cited for many identical domestic rights abuses as well as the murder of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was given easier treatment.

Pompeo said the Iranian government had killed more than 20 people and arrested thousands without due process for protesting for their rights “continuing a pattern of cruelty the regime has inflicted on the Iranian people for the last four decades”.

Tehran was also cited for contributing to rights abuses in Syria through its support for President Bashar al-Assad, and in Yemen for backing the Houthi rebels battling for control of the country.

In the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela and Nicaragua came in for strong criticism for extrajudicial murders, disappearances, torture by security forces and denial of basic freedoms.

Pompeo assailed Nicaragua for the government’s use of snipers and live ammunition to repress protests that the report says left “at least 325 persons dead and more than 2,000 injured” last year.

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Describing China’s internment of an estimated 1 million Muslims as a “horrific situation,” a US envoy on religion called Tuesday for an independent investigation into the detentions and for the release of those being held.

Sam Brownback, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said China has done nothing to assuage concerns from the US and others over the detention of Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other Muslim minority groups.

“We’ve been putting out very clearly that this is a horrific situation that’s taking place in Xinjiang,” Brownback said in a telephone news conference with reporters, referring to the northwestern region that is home to most Chinese Muslims.

“It is just a very tragic and I think a horrific situation there,” he said.

China has already angrily protested Brownback’s earlier remarks last week in Hong Kong criticizing Beijing’s polices toward religious minorities and accusing the country of being “at war with faith.”

China’s officially atheist Communist government at first denied the existence of the internment camps in Xinjiang, but now says they are vocational training facilities aimed at countering Muslim radicalism and separatist tendencies.

China says Xinjiang has long been its territory and claims it is bringing prosperity and development to the vast, resource-rich region. Many among Xinjiang’s native ethnic groups say they are being denied economic options in favor of migrants from elsewhere in China and that their Muslim faith and unique culture and language are being gradually eradicated.

The camps sprang up over the past two years at extraordinary speed and on a massive scale, as monitored by satellite imagery. China maintains a massive security presence in Xinjiang and efforts to independently verify claims by Uighur activists are routinely blocked.

Brownback appeared undeterred by Beijing’s complaints over his earlier comments, describing China’s explanation of the reasons behind the camps as “completely unsatisfactory answers.”

China is already listed by the US among the worst violators of religious freedom, and Brownback held open the possibility of sanctions and other punitive measures “if corrective actions aren’t taken.”

While making no commitments, Brownback held open the possibility of action toward individuals involved in the internments under The Global Magnitsky Act of 2016.

The act makes it possible to impose entry bans and targeted sanctions on individuals for committing human rights violations or acts of significant corruption.

Brownback also contrasted Beijing’s attacks on religion with the tolerant approach of governments such as that of Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that China claims as its own territory.

He said Washington would continue to push for dialogue among all faiths to promote religious freedom worldwide.

“The administration is serious about religious freedom matters and deeply concerned about what’s taking place in China,” Brownback said.

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History will judge Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) for staying silent in the face of China’s harsh treatment of millions of Uighur Muslims in the country’s Xinjiang province.

That’s the message Omer Kanat, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a leading Uighur rights organisation in the United States, wants to send to MBS as the de facto Saudi leader embarks on a two-day visit to Beijing this week.

“As the Communist Party bulldozes mosques and removes the crescent and star from the mosques left standing, all Muslim leaders need to ask hard questions,” Kanat told Middle East Eye on Thursday.

“Further silence from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and Muslim-majority states will invite allegations of acquiescence with Chinese rights violations against the Uighurs and history will judge these actions.”

Following trips to Pakistan and India over the past week, MBS is currently in Beijing for talks that are likely to focus on energy as trade relations between Saudi Arabia and China expand.

China is the Gulf kingdom’s biggest trading partner, with Saudi imports from China totalling about $46bn last year.

Still, the Uighur issue is unlikely to feature on the agenda.

Peter Irwin, programme manager for the Uyghur World Congress, based in Munich, Germany, said that while members of the Uighur diaspora don’t think MBS will raise the issue with Chinese President Xi Jinping, failing to do so would be an insult to Muslims around the world.

“It would be quite an affront to the dignity of Muslims if the leader of the country tasked with the custodianship of the holiest site in Islam would remain silent on the arbitrary detention of at least one million Muslims targeted for their adherence to Islam,” he said.

Irwin said it’s also important to note that Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province, an area they refer to as occupied East Turkistan, “have been jailed in China for years simply for travelling to Saudi Arabia to complete the Hajj without expressed authority from the Chinese government”.

Internment camps

Since 2014, the Chinese government has embarked on a campaign against the Muslim minority group in the country’s northwestern province. The region borders Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and it has been under Chinese control since 1949.

The Chinese government’s programme against the Uighurs accelerated in 2017, when it was mandated that any public or private display of religious affiliation could warrant arrest.

The Uighurs, who total about 10 million people in their home province, have been systematically rounded up by the state.

About one million Uighurs are said to be held in internment camps where they are undergoing political “re-education”. The region is also under intense and intrusive surveillance.

Salih Hudayar, the international and political officer of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, a Uighur advocacy group in the US, told MEE that Islam as a religion is now banned in the region.

“We are being forced to eat pork. They collect our Qurans and desecrate them,” he said.

China has consistently denied allegations that it is persecuting the minority group. Instead, it has accused human rights groups of interfering in China’s internal affairs.

The Saudi embassy in Washington, DC has not responded to MEE’s request for comment about MBS’s trip to China.

MBS ‘weak in the eyes of Muslims’

Irwin said there was a possibility that the Saudi government delegation to China may raise the Uighur issue privately.

He said if that’s the case, then “no progress will be made to close the [internment] camps”.

“Chinese authorities will undoubtedly provide the same lame response to the mountains of reports on horrendous rights violations of Uighurs, including torture and numerous deaths in detention – that they are simply benign facilities set up to facilitate job-skills training,” Irwin said.

Hudayar, of the Uighur advocacy group in the US, said that if MBS did not raise the issue, “it would make him appear weak in the eyes of Muslims”.

“He has a duty. We are surprised he hasn’t said anything, given the talk that he cares about human rights. I hope he changes his mind.”

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China sees “enormous potential” in Saudi Arabia’s economy and wants more high-tech cooperation, the Chinese government’s top diplomat said, as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began a two-day trip to Beijing, Reuters reports.

The Saudi delegation, including top executives from Aramco, arrived on Thursday on an Asia tour that has already seen the kingdom pledged investment of $20 billion in Pakistan and seek additional investment in India’s refining industry.

The crown prince will meet President Xi Jinping, who has made stepping up China’s presence in the Middle East a key foreign policy objective, despite its traditional low-key role there.

Meeting Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, State Councillor Wang Yi said the main features of their ties were respect, understanding and support for each other, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement late on Thursday.

“All countries in the world have the right to develop, and Saudi Arabia is an emerging market country with enormous potential,” the ministry paraphrased Wang as saying.

China supports Saudi’s efforts to diversify its economy and is willing to strengthen high-tech cooperation, Wang added.

Saudi Aramco, the world’s top oil exporter, will sign a pact to build a refinery and petrochemical project in northeastern Liaoning province in a joint venture with China’s defence conglomerate Norinco, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

The investments could help Saudi Arabia regain its place as the top oil exporter to China, a position Russia has held for the last three years. Saudi Aramco is set to boost market share by signing supply deals with non-state Chinese refiners.

China has had to step carefully in relations with Riyadh since Beijing also has close ties with Saudi regional foe Iran.

On Wednesday, Xi told the speaker of Iran’s parliament that China’s desire to develop close ties with Iran would stay unaltered, regardless of the global situation.

China is also wary of criticism from Muslim countries about its camps in the heavily-Muslim far western region of Xinjiang, which the government says are for de-radicalisation purposes and rights groups call internment camps.

Wang said both countries face the threats of terrorism and extremism and should strengthen cooperation to safeguard security and stability.

China was not seeking to play politics in the Middle East, the widely-read state-run tabloid, the Global Times, said in an editorial on Friday.

“China won’t be a geopolitical player in the Middle East. It has no enemies and can cooperate with all countries in the region,” said the paper, published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily.

“China’s increasing influence in the Middle East comes from pure friendly cooperation. Such a partnership will be welcomed by more countries in the Middle East.”

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Countries must hit China with sanctions over the mass detention of ethnic Uighurs in its western Xinjiang region, hundreds of scholars said on Monday, warning that a failure to act would signal acceptance of “psychological torture of innocent civilians.”

Beijing has in recent months faced an outcry from activists, academics and foreign governments over mass detentions and strict surveillance of the Muslim Uighur minority and other ethnic groups that live in Xinjiang.

In August, a United Nations human rights panel said it had received many credible reports that a million or more Uighurs and other minorities are being held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy” in the region.

Representatives from a group of 278 scholars in various disciplines from dozens of countries called on China at a news briefing in Washington to end its detention policies, and for sanctions directed at key Chinese leaders and security companies linked to the abuses.

“This situation must be addressed to prevent setting negative future precedents regarding the acceptability of any state’s complete repression of a segment of its population, especially on the basis of ethnicity or religion,” the group said in a statement.

Countries should expedite asylum requests from Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities, as well as “spearhead a movement for UN action aimed at investigating this mass internment system and closing the camps,” it said.

China rejects criticism of its actions in Xinjiang, saying that it protects the religion and culture of minorities, and that its security measures are needed to combat the influence of “extremist” groups that incite violence there.

The country’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said the world should ignore “gossip” about Xinjiang and trust the government.

But after initial denials about the detention camps, Chinese officials have said some people guilty of minor offenses were being sent to “vocational” training centers, where they are taught work skills and legal knowledge aimed at curbing militancy.

Michael Clarke, a Xinjiang expert at Australian National University who signed the statement, told reporters that China sought international respect for its weight in global affairs.

“The international community needs to demonstrate to Beijing that it will not actually get that while it’s doing this to a significant portion of its own citizenry,” Clarke said.

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At a top government-funded research institute, high schoolers are being recruited to develop weaponry operated by AI. The program is China’s latest move in their race against the US to “lead the game of modern wars”.

The Beijing Institute of Technology, a leading government-funded research institute, has selected China’s best and brightest youths to participate in an artificial intelligence based weapon design program which seeks to put China on the cutting-edge of modern warfare.

According to the BIT’s website, 27 boys and 4 girls will be groomed to become the world’s youngest weapons designers. Those chosen were selected from a list of 5,000 candidates, all of whom are under the age of 18 and “patriots,” according to an anonymous professor cited by South China Morning Post.

According to a brochure for the program, each student will be guided by weapons scientists from academic backgrounds and from the defense industry. The students will even get hands-on experience working in actual defense laboratories.

The program lasts four years, at the end of which graduates will be expected to continue in their field of specialization at the Ph.D. level.

Ironically, China was the first superpower to endorse a call for a ban on autonomous lethal weapons at the UN. As of now, automated weapons systems need to employ “meaningful human control”, as required by the Martens Clause, an international law which stipulates that emerging weapons technologies be developed in accordance with the “principles of humanity”.

Both Russia and the US have stated their opposition to the ban on fully automated weaponry.

Eleonore Pauwels of the UN center for policy research in New York expressed her concern over China’s initiative in an interview with Business Insider: “This is the first university programme in the world designed to aggressively and strategically encourage the next generation to think, design and deploy AI for military research and use.”

The program, launched in October of this year, is only the latest in China’s push for “global domination” in the field of AI, which it aims to achieve by the year 2030. Following Xi Jinping’s call last year for a stronger national focus on AI technology, China mobilized resources from the central government as well as its massive tech companies.

China’s boldness in the field of weapons technology has expectedly become a serious concern for the US, inciting President Trump to increasingly confrontational responses. Last September, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its own $2.7 bn initiative in weaponized AI research, assuring that China will have serious competition.

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China is planning to launch its own “artificial moon” by the year 2020, it has been reported.

The city of Chengdu has unveiled plans to replace the city’s streetlights with a satellite that will boost the glow of the real moon.

The artificial moon will be able to light an area with a diameter of 10 to 80 kilometres.

Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu aerospace science and technology microelectronics system research institute, announced the news and said that the artificial moon would be eight times brighter than the real moon, according to the People’s Daily.

He added that the testing of the illumination started years ago and is now ready.

The man made moon will have a coating that can reflect light from the sun with solar panel-like wings.

The angles of these wings can then be adjusted to allow the light to focus on a precise location, Asia Times reported.

The exact details of the spacecraft, the launch date and how the artificial moon would be maintained were not revealed.

Officials from the city of Chengdu said they were hoping to save money on street lighting and also increase tourism.

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