Xinjiang

Below are TFF-related media mentions, comments, videos and social media posts published elsewhere but not on this homepage. We happen to catch and list only a fraction. Regarding video comments and debates, we recommend that you go to the TFF Video Channel on Substack where many of them are reproduced. Jan Oberg is a contributor to China Daily – 52 million daily clicks – and Global Times, CGTN and CCTV (the national television), China Investment, Xinhua News Agency and several others. Articles and videos on these media very often multiply into countless Chinese (and Western media) that re-post them from these main media. Thanks to The China Academy, his analyses, interviews and comments are frequently posted on YouTube channels such as Thinkers Forum and Wave Media. These videos are often re-posted on Bilibili (China’s YouTube), the China Content Center on TikTok, and on the Chinese edition of TikTok, Douyin.com. This means reaching hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide over a year. While there are too many to catch on all these...

Launched on November 17, 2024Updated with new materials regularly TFF Board members Thore Vest. Everywhere, the delegation was met with a sincere wish to develop knowledge, dialogue, cooperative projects, and initiatives based on citizens’ diplomacy – in general, but with the West in particular. For more, see “Report from the Nordic delegation to China’s Xinjiang Province, September 7-15, 2024.” While the delegation was in Xinjiang, various ideas were already being discussed from the local to the top level, i.e., with the governor and party leaders of Xinjiang. The two TFF Associates suggested that TFF set up a special section – in addition to its “China and Silk” – where various quality materials about Xinjiang would regularly be published to promote public education about Xinjiang, particularly its contemporary development – worldwide but in the West in particular. This is now a reality – as can be seen below – but it...

For the last time, I am stating my views on the West’s genocide accusation and why I refuse to let the US/NATO/EU Cold War policy set the agenda and discourse about China in general and Xinjiang in particular. PART I Part II A daring prediction I shall be surprised if, in about 10-15 years, Xinjiang – the North-Western province of China, its largest province three times larger than France – has not become a world-leading cultural and economic hub in humanity’s multipolar/nodal future world. It exhibits a tremendous cultural variety that seems to be moving towards unity in an amazing diversity. It has a vast natural resource potential. It interacts with eight very important neighbouring countries. It’s the crossroads of past, present and future. Xinjiang is the sine qua non of the new Silk Roads, also called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves over 140 countries worldwide and...

Why it is essential to travel and see for yourself and then build networks and promote dialogues in the world’s likely most serious conflict. PART II PART I I recommend you read Part I before reading this second part. A dynamic melting pot You may ask where Xinjiang’s immense cultural diversity comes from. While I have not studied its history, I have learned that it has always been one big meeting place, dating back to the first Silk Roads, where people travelled, traded, explored, and migrated. Crisscrossing also borders with eight neighbours so that over time, it became a melting pot. There is a lot of diversity; each national group or ethnicity seems to have preserved vital elements of its own culture, language, aesthetics, way of living, dancing, etc. and also become part of the unity called Xinjiang and China. A woman I met told me that each nationality’s way of dancing could be...

I. Introduction The initiative for the “Nordic Delegation to China, September 7-15, 2024” was taken from the Norwegian side. Journalist and former editor Arild Vollan wanted to investigate claims in the media about an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in the autonomous region of Xinjiang in western China. Vollan selected an independent, cross-disciplinary and cross-political delegation group consisting of people who have worked with China and who wanted to get personal impressions of the conditions described in the previous section. The delegation consisted of: The delegation itself developed the project’s mandate. Following an excursion to Xinjiang province, the delegation’s mandate was to clarify whether observations made during the trip substantiated claims in the media that there is an ongoing genocide in Xinjiang today. Arild Vollan prepared the excursion program in dialogue with Thore Vestby, who has previously visited the province. The logistics were set up in dialogue with the Chinese Embassy in...

This video was produced by the China Academy in Shanghai and uploaded by Global Times. The original version and comments under it are here. Please also check TFF’s analysis of the accusations made by US/Western media and think tanks concerning Xinjiang here.

Citizens dancing on a Friday afternoon at the Grand Bazaar Square in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China – Photo Jan Oberg 2024 This is just a brief reflection on my second visit to China. Still tired from the long journey, I’m slowly adjusting to our time zone and trying to focus on the tasks waiting for me. But a flood of impressions keeps swirling in my mind, making it impossible to rest—especially after realizing how much Western propaganda had shaped my expectations. I thought I was heading to a brutal and backward corner of China, only to find myself utterly enchanted by what I encountered. What intrigued me the most was the fact that I was about to visit what is often portrayed as China’s “most notorious” region. This is the province at the centre of ongoing accusations against China—claims of massive human rights abuses and even genocide, particularly targeting the Uyghur...

Thore Vestby & Arild Vollan Visiting today’s China is like travelling into the future. So much has happened in the last 20-30 years that we should travel to China to learn and see what is happening. It’s incredible what the country has achieved in just a few years. Soon, China will have built 50,000 kilometres of high-speed train lines. Just travelling by train in China is such a great experience that it’s worth the visit. These trains are completely silent and offer a level of comfort you’ll find in first-class aeroplanes—an enchanting and must-experience travel experience. Strangely, we in Norway can’t make “pirate copies” of Chinese trains. We are told that Chinese companies are happy to build new high-speed train lines in Norway. But we ran into problems when we tried to explain to the Chinese that we in Norway have introduced “Bus for Train”. It’s a term that doesn’t...

Ethnic minorities expert Barry Sautman gives his take on education, the next Dalai Lama, Han chauvinism and Beijing’s treatment of Uygurs September 24, 2024 Barry Sautman is a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Division of Social Science and visiting professor at Tsinghua University. An expert on China’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Tibetan and Uygur communities, his research focuses on minority rights, cultural preservation and social change. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus.For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. This article/interview was first published by the South China Morning Post on September 23, 2024 What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China? I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet,...

It was the first visit to China by a UN human rights chief in 17 years. For years, governments and human rights organisations have accused China of many kinds of human rights violations – and a series of them calls what has happened in Xinjiang “genocide” in line, one could add, with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “determination” that that was the correct label to put on it while not publishing one word of documentation to back up that grave accusation against China and its president. After years of meticulous preparations, Mme Michelle Bachelet – a former President of Chile, a physician who has studied military strategy and who has served as both Health Minister and Defense Minister and has a significant personal experience with Pinochet’s reign of terror – sent an advance team, then went to China herself, had a zoom conversation with President Xi Jinping and...

Introduction Here we go again. On the same day, leading Western mainstream media – such as BBC, Politiken, Dagens Nyheter, Le Monde, etc – 14 media from 11 countries – publish a new accusation against China, ‘Xinjiang Police Files’: Exclusive documents reveal China’s machine of repression against the Uyghurs. They are produced by the extreme right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the United States. It appeared the day after President Biden had stated, in Tokyo, that the US would come to the rescue of Taiwan if China should attack it. And it coincided also with the UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, started her fact-finding mission in Xinjiang. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Perhaps the material was put together and made ready by the foundation so it could be published at the right moment? Clearly, the untold purpose has been to undermine Mme Bachelet’s mission and support the...

By Xinhua writers Tao Fangwei and Gu Yu July 20, 2021 — Despite the Xinjiang cotton boycott instigated by some Western politicians under the pretext of “forced labor,” the region’s cotton and textile industry has shown resilience by further tapping markets and winning over more customers with its superior quality. — In the first four months of this year, China’s export volume of cotton textiles and garments hit 19.7 billion U.S. dollars, up 44 percent year on year. — “China’s cotton has contributed a lot to the global cotton industry and we deserve fair treatment and due respect,” said Gao Fang, director of the China Cotton Association. Originally posted on CCTV’s English website on July 9th, 2021 URUMQI, July 8 (Xinhua) — In a textile plant in the city of Shihezi, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, machines with 100,000 spindles rumbled to spin cotton into yarn. “We are producing...