Of all Labour’s U-turns, none is perhaps more egregious than their stance on China. In opposition, they were happy to claim credit as a champion of the Uyghur Muslims, pushing in parliament for Beijing’s treatment of Xinjiang to be recognised as a genocide. But in office, a succession of ministers have traipsed out to the Far East, conveniently turning a blind eye to China’s treatment of minorities in the hope of gaining a few extra million here and there in trade deals.
But now new evidence has emerged which suggests that, far from ending their persecution in Xinjiang, the Chinese authorities simply have got better at hiding it. Zhang Yabo, a former police officer, has fled the region and is now giving testimony on what he saw in the torture prisons. In a rare insight into China’s repressive apparatus, Zhang reveals that under Ma Xingrui, Xinjiang’s Communist Party Secretary from 2021 to 2025, the previous approach of highly visible mass internment was dropped in favour of highly concealed coercion. Easier to get away it in private…
Zhang has told German anthropologist Adrian Zenz that around 25 per cent of the adult population in Hotan – the village where he was stationed – was interned in 2023 in re-education camps, excluding those separately transferred to formal prisons. Zenz writes that to ‘conceal the campaign from the outside world, the authorities issued strict orders to all local security forces to destroy every single file related to the re-education camps.’...
QUEENSLAND— A nurse in Australia has been formally reprimanded after admitting he submitted forged documents to Qantas (QF) in an attempt to secure a refund for a non-refundable airline ticket. Th...