cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35815351
Xi Jinping’s appointment as president [of China] in March 2013 filled [Uygur human rights activist Serikzhan] Bilash with vague dread. He periodically wrote social media posts about Kazakh identity and his foreign travels for a modest online following, and he began using those to call on Chinese Kazakhs to come to Kazakhstan and offer advice on how to find work and apartments and residence papers once they did.
Three years later, he heard that Chen Quanguo was to be the new Party secretary of Xinjiang and that dread hardened into something more definite. He opened some of the messaging groups that Chinese Kazakhs used to forward and share news and he began recording voice notes with anxious urgency. “A storm is coming, Chen Quanguo is coming,” he said. “He made a genocide in Tibet and now he will make a genocide in Xinjiang. Only one thing can be done. Run, just run and run now because if you delay by even a second it might be too late.”
Chen had also been Party secretary in Tibet and had enacted a brutal and insidious extension of the state apparatus there aimed at stamping out any signs of what the government called separatist thought. Surveillance, oppression, control. There were mass arrests, re-education centers and unsparing responses to the slightest protest. People talked of the many disappeared, the unexplained dead. It was all hidden from the rest of China by censors and firewalls, but Bilash spoke good English and he read the reports by international newspapers and human rights organizations. He saw everything wrought by Chen Quanguo and knew it would come to Xinjiang.