    [Joint House and Senate Hearing, 115 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

    SURVEILLANCE, SUPPRESSION, AND MASS DETENTION: XINJIANG'S HUMAN RIGHTS
                                     CRISIS
    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                  CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

                         ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                 JULY 26, 2018

                                   __________

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                  CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

                        LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

     Senate                                    House

    MARCO RUBIO, Florida, Chairman       CHRIS SMITH, New Jersey,
    TOM COTTON, Arkansas                 Cochairman
    STEVE DAINES, Montana                ROBERT PITTENGER, North Carolina
    JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma             RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois
    TODD YOUNG, Indiana                  MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
    DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California         TIM WALZ, Minnesota
    JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon                 TED LIEU, California
    GARY PETERS, Michigan
    ANGUS KING, Maine

                         EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

                               Not yet appointed

                       Elyse B. Anderson, Staff Director

                     Paul B. Protic, Deputy Staff Director

                                      (ii)

                                 C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------

                                   Statements

                                                                       Page
    Opening Statement of Hon. Marco Rubio, a U.S. Senator from
      Florida; Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China.     1
    Christino III, Anthony, Director of the Foreign Policy Division,
      Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance, Bureau of
      Industry and Security, U.S. Department of Commerce.............     4
    Currie, Ambassador Kelley E., Representative of the United States
      on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations,
      United States Mission to the United Nations....................     6
    Smith, Hon. Christopher, a U.S. Representative from New Jersey;
      Cochairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China........    11
    Hoja, Gulchehra, Uyghur Service journalist, Radio Free Asia......    25
    Thum, Rian, Associate Professor, Loyola University New Orleans...    26
    Batke, Jessica, Senior Editor, ChinaFile and former research
      analyst at the Department of State.............................    27

                                    APPENDIX
                              Prepared Statements

    Christino III, Anthony...........................................    43
    Currie, Kelley E.................................................    44
    Hoja, Gulchehra..................................................    48
    Thum, Rian.......................................................    50
    Batke, Jessica...................................................    56

    Rubio, Hon. Marco................................................    64
    Smith, Hon. Christopher..........................................    65

                           Submissions for the Record

    Article entitled ``New Evidence for China's Political Re-
      education Campaign in Xinjiang,'' submitted by Senator Rubio...    68
    Article entitled ``Apartheid with Chinese Characteristics,''
      submitted by Senator King......................................    74
    Article entitled ``What Really Happens in China's Re-education
      Camps,'' submitted by Rian Thum................................    80
    Letter to Secretary Pompeo, submitted by Senator Rubio...........    82

    Witness Biographies..............................................    84

                                     (iii)

    SURVEILLANCE, SUPPRESSION, AND MASS DETENTION: XINJIANG'S HUMAN RIGHTS
                                     CRISIS

                                  ----------

                            THURSDAY, JULY 26, 2018

                   Congressional-Executive Commission on China,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:07
    a.m., in room 124, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator
    Marco Rubio, Chairman, presiding.
        Present: Representative Smith, Cochairman, Senator King,
    Representative Lieu, Senator Cotton, and Senator Daines.
        Also Present: Ambassador Kelley E. Currie, Representative
    of the United States on the Economic and Social Council of the
    United Nations, United States Mission to the United Nations;
    Anthony Christino III, Director of the Foreign Policy Division,
    Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance, Bureau of
    Industry and Security, United States Department of Commerce;
    Gulchehra Hoja, Uyghur Service journalist, Radio Free Asia;
    Rian Thum, Associate Professor, Loyola University New Orleans;
    and Jessica Batke, Senior Editor, ChinaFile and former research
    analyst at the Department of State.

      OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARCO RUBIO, A U.S. SENATOR FROM
     FLORIDA; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

        Chairman Rubio. Good morning. This hearing of the
    Congressional-Executive Commission on China will come to order.
    The title of this hearing is ``Surveillance, Suppression, and
    Mass Detention: Xinjiang's Human Rights Crisis.''
        We have two panels testifying today. The first panel will
    feature Ambassador Kelley Currie, the Representative of the
    United States on the Economic and Social Council of the United
    Nations, United States Mission to the United Nations; and
    Anthony Christino III who is the Director of the Foreign Policy
    Division, Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance,
    Bureau of Industry and Security at the U.S. Department of
    Commerce.
        We'll have a second panel--Gulchehra Hoja, Uyghur Service
    journalist, Radio Free Asia; Rian Thum, an associate professor
    at Loyola University New Orleans; and Jessica Batke, Senior
    Editor at ChinaFile and a former research analyst at the U.S.
    Department of State.
        I want to thank you for being here. I know one of our
    initial panel witnesses is delayed, as happens in this great
    city that we call our nation's capital. But we are going to
    begin, and we will accommodate that accordingly.
        I want to begin by noting that this hearing is set against
    the backdrop this week of Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador for
    International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback convening the
    first-ever State Department Ministerial to Advance
    International Religious Freedom, an event which has brought
    together senior representatives from more than 70 governments
    around the world to discuss areas of collaboration and
    partnership in the cause of religious freedom globally.
        Secretary Pompeo penned an opinion piece in USA Today
    earlier this week highlighting the Ministerial and the
    importance of advancing religious freedom globally. Of note, he
    specifically mentioned Ms. Gulchehra and family.
        While the Chinese government and the Communist Party are
    equal opportunity oppressors targeting unregistered and
    registered Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong
    practitioners, and others with harassment, detention,
    imprisonment and more, the current human rights crisis
    unfolding in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region targeting
    Muslim minority groups is arguably among the worst, if not the
    most severe, instances in the world today of an authoritarian
    government brutally and systematically targeting a minority
    faith community. This is an issue that the Commission has been
    dealing with for some time.
        In April, we wrote U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad
    urging him to prioritize this crackdown in his interactions
    with the Chinese government and to begin collecting information
    to make the case for possible application of Global Magnitsky
    sanctions against senior government and Party officials in the
    region, including Chen Quanguo, the current Xinjiang Communist
    Party Secretary.
        The Commission's forthcoming Annual Report, set to be
    released this October, will prominently feature the grave and
    deteriorating situation we will cover here today.
        While our expert witnesses will discuss the situation in
    greater detail, I want to take a few minutes to paint a picture
    of life in Xinjiang.
        For months now, there have been credible estimates of
    between 800,000 and 1 million people from this region being
    held at political reeducation centers or camps which are
    fortified with barbed wire, bombproof surfaces, reinforced
    doors, and guard rooms. Security personnel at these facilities,
    at these camps, have subjected detainees to torture, to medical
    neglect and maltreatment, to solitary confinement, to sleep
    deprivation, to lack of adequate clothing in cold temperatures,
    and other forms of abuse resulting in the death of some of
    these detainees.
        According to one news source, ``The internment program aims
    to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their
    Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps
    have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no
    judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most
    vigorously criticize the people and things they love are
    rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with
    solitary confinement, with beatings and food deprivation.''
    That was a quote from the media coverage of this.
        Some local officials in the region have used chilling
    political rhetoric to describe the very purpose of the
    arbitrary detentions of Uyghur Muslims and members of other
    Muslim ethnic minority groups. These are the terms they've
    used: ``eradicating tumors'' or spraying chemicals on crops to
    ``kill the weeds.'' One expert who is testifying today
    described Uyghur Xinjiang as ``a police state to rival North
    Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African
    apartheid.''
        While the Chinese government has repeatedly denied
    knowledge of the camps, a groundbreaking report by Adrian Zenz,
    a scholar at the European School of Culture and Theology,
    published through the Jamestown Foundation in May, found that
    Chinese authorities were soliciting public bids for the
    construction of additional camps and the addition of security
    elements to existing facilities.
        I would submit this report for the record and would also
    note the Google Earth footage behind me, which clearly shows
    the construction of these camps over the span of several
    months.
        [The submitted document appears in the Appendix.]
        Those not subject to ``transformation through education''--
    as they call it--in these detention facilities still face daily
    intrusions in their home life. This includes compulsory ``home
    stays,'' wherein Communist Party officials and government
    workers are sent to live with local Uyghur and Kazakh families.
        The data-driven surveillance in Xinjiang is assisted by
    iris and body scanners, voice pattern analyzers, DNA
    sequencers, and facial recognition cameras in neighborhoods, on
    roads, or in train stations. Two large Chinese firms, Hikvision
    and Dahua Technology, have profited greatly from the surge in
    security spending, reportedly winning upwards of $1.2 billion
    in Chinese government contracts for large-scale surveillance
    projects.
        Authorities employ hand-held devices to search smartphones
    for encrypted chat apps and require residents to install
    monitoring applications on their cell phones. More traditional
    security measures are also employed. That includes extensive
    police checkpoints.
        The rise in security personnel is also accompanied by the
    proliferation of ``convenience police stations,'' a dense
    network of street corner, village, or neighborhood police
    stations that enhances authorities' ability to closely surveil
    and police local communities.
        Just this month, reports emerged of officials, in a
    humiliating public act, cutting the skirts and even long shirts
    of Uyghur women on the spot, as they walked through local
    streets. They did so as a means of enforcing a ban on ethnic
    minorities wearing long skirts.
        And yesterday there was an analysis released by the NGO
    Chinese Human Rights Defenders indicating that 21 percent of
    arrests in China last year were in Xinjiang, which has only 1.5
    percent of the population--21 percent of the arrests last year
    in all of China concentrated in an area with 1.5 percent of the
    population. The number of arrests increased 731 percent over
    the previous year and that does not include the detentions of
    those in the ``political re-education centers,'' which are
    carried out extralegally.
        Radio Free Asia has led the way in reporting on this
    crisis. And that has not come without a cost. Developments in
    Xinjiang have had a direct impact on U.S. interests, most
    notably the detention of dozens of family members of U.S.-based
    Uyghur journalists employed by Radio Free Asia, as well as the
    detention of dozens of family members of prominent Uyghur
    rights activist Rebiya Kadeer, in an apparent attempt by the
    Chinese government to silence effective reporting and rights
    advocacy. We are delighted that RFA journalist Gulchehra Hoja
    can join us today to speak to her personal experience in this
    regard.
        The Commission has convened a series of hearings focused on
    the ``long arm'' of China, and that dimension certainly exists
    as it relates to the Uyghur diaspora community, including right
    here in the United States.
        With that, I want to welcome our witnesses. Why don't I
    start with you, Mr. Christino, since Ambassador Currie----
        Staffer. She's here.
        Senator Rubio. I know. But I want to give her a second to
    catch up. I saw her walk in.
        Why don't we start with you. I was late a few minutes as
    well. I know it takes time to put it all together.
        So, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

      STATEMENT OF ANTHONY CHRISTINO III, DIRECTOR OF THE FOREIGN
        POLICY DIVISION, OFFICE OF NONPROLIFERATION AND TREATY
    COMPLIANCE, BUREAU OF INDUSTRY AND SECURITY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
                                COMMERCE

        Mr. Christino. Thank you, Chairman Rubio, Chairman Smith,
    and other Members of the Commission on China for convening this
    hearing today on this important topic. Today I will discuss the
    role of the Bureau of Industry and Security regarding export
    license requirements for China.
        Under the Export Administration Regulations, known as the
    EAR, a Bureau of Industry and Security license is required for
    the export or reexport of most items on the Commerce Control
    List to China. Items on the CCL are identified by their
    individually assigned Export Control Classification Numbers
    according to the reasons for control, such as crime control and
    detection, known as Crime Control.
        The Commerce Control List is also comprised of items
    controlled by the multilateral export control regimes such as
    the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Missile Technology Control
    Regime, the Australia Group, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group,
    as well as items controlled unilaterally for foreign policy
    reasons. And here I would draw the distinction with the crime
    controls--they are in fact unilateral, unlike controls over
    nuclear items and other items that would be of concern for
    security reasons to our international partners, and therefore
    controlled on one of the regimes.
        In support of U.S. foreign policy specifically to promote
    the observance of human rights throughout the world, the United
    States controls items on the Commerce Control List as required
    by Section 6(n) of the Export Administration Act, as amended.
    As set forth in the Export Administration Regulations, the U.S.
    Government requires a license to export most crime control and
    detection instruments, equipment, related technology, and
    software to all destinations other than our closest allies such
    as NATO members Australia, Japan, etc. Additionally, a license
    is required to export certain crime-control items, including
    restraint-type devices such as handcuffs and discharge-type
    arms such as stun guns, to all destinations with the single
    exception of Canada.
        The Export Administration Regulations impose limited
    controls on some items not on the Commerce Control List. Items
    subject to Commerce licensing jurisdiction under our
    regulations, but not specifically identified on the Control
    List, are designated as EAR99. Such items generally do not
    require a license for export or reexport to China unless
    destined to weapons of mass destruction-related end uses or end
    users, or unless the items are part of a transaction involving
    a restricted party identified on one of several lists
    maintained by agencies of the U.S. Government, including the
    Bureau of Industry and Security's entity list, the Department
    of State's restricted list, and the Department of the
    Treasury's specially designated nationals list.
        Items controlled for crime-control reasons are added to or
    removed from the CCL based on continuous review of the merits
    of maintaining the controls and the effectiveness of the
    controls. Section 6 of the EAR prohibits the imposition of
    foreign policy controls including crime-control items unless
    certain determinations are made and certain factors reported to
    Congress, such as the determination that the controls are
    likely to achieve the intended foreign policy objective, a
    description of consultative efforts with industry and other
    supplier countries, and determinations related to the economic
    impact on U.S. business and industry.
        There is a specific crime control licensing review policy
    related to China. The U.S. Government considers applications to
    export or reexport most crime-control items favorably on a
    case-by-case basis unless there is civil disorder in a country
    or the sale involves a region of concern or there is evidence
    that the government may have violated human rights.
        The purpose of the controls is to deter the development of
    a consistent pattern of human rights abuses, distance the
    United States from such abuses, and avoid contributing to
    disorder in a country or region. Now we maintain a general
    policy of denial for certain items: Applications to export
    crime-control items to countries that are not otherwise subject
    to sanctions or comprehensive embargoes but are identified by
    the Department of State as human rights violators, receive
    additional scrutiny and are generally denied. There are
    specific controls related to legislation popularly referred to
    as Tiananmen Square sanctions.
        I'd like to conclude by just noting that we do not receive
    very many applications for exports to China. We did receive 25
    last calendar year--21 were for the return of defective items
    manufactured in China. They were returned to the original
    Chinese manufacturers. There were nine denials, including
    applications for stun guns, optical sighting devices, pepper
    spray, etc., and voiceprint software, which I know was of
    interest.
        I am happy to answer any questions you have on my testimony
    or anything relevant to the Export Administration Regulations
    and the controls we maintain specific to China and crime-
    control items. Thank you.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Christino appears in the
    Appendix.]
        Chairman Rubio. Ambassador Currie.

    STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR KELLEY E. CURRIE, REPRESENTATIVE OF THE
    UNITED STATES ON THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL OF THE UNITED
          NATIONS, UNITED STATES MISSION TO THE UNITED NATIONS

        Ambassador Currie. Thank you so much, Senator Rubio. I
    apologize. I think you know we have the IRF (International
    Religious Freedom) Ministerial going on this week and between
    that and trying to get down here from New York this morning, it
    was a little bit difficult. But I do want to express our
    appreciation for you and the Commission holding this very
    important hearing today.
        I am pleased to be able to appear before the Commission on
    behalf of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and discuss
    our concerns regarding the growing human rights crisis in
    Xinjiang, with a particular focus on how this crisis is being
    addressed--or not--at the United Nations. I would like to
    submit my full remarks for the record and just give a brief
    summary of them.
        The United States is deeply troubled by the Chinese
    government's worsening crackdown on Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other
    Muslims in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Since
    April 2017, the Xi Jinping leadership, under the guise of
    fighting ``terrorism,'' ``secession,'' and ``religious
    extremism,'' has greatly intensified the Chinese Communist
    Party's long-standing repressive policies against mainstream
    nonviolent Muslim cultural and religious practices in Xinjiang.
        The stated goal of the current campaign is to ``sinicize
    religion'' and ``adapt religion to a socialist society,''
    suggesting that Beijing believes it now possesses the
    political, diplomatic, and technological capabilities to
    transform religion and ethnicity in Chinese society in a way
    that its predecessors never could, even during the peak horrors
    of the Cultural Revolution and other heinous Maoist campaigns
    intended to remake Chinese society.
        The scope of this campaign is truly breathtaking.
    Authorities now prohibit ``abnormal'' beards, the wearing of
    veils in public, and classify refusal to watch state television
    as a crime, refusal to wear shorts, abstention from alcohol and
    tobacco, refusal to eat pork, fasting during the holy month of
    Ramadan, and practicing traditional funeral rituals as
    potential signs that individuals harbor extreme religious
    views.
        Chinese authorities have banned parents from giving their
    children a number of traditional Islamic names, including
    Muhammad, Islam, Fatima, and Aisha, and have reportedly
    required children under age 16 who have Islamic names to change
    them. Of particular concern, since 2015 Chinese authorities
    have increasingly criminalized or punished the teaching of
    Islam to young people, even by their parents, adopting at least
    six new laws or regulations to put parents and religious
    leaders at legal risk if they promote nonviolent Muslim
    scripture, rituals, and clothing to children.
        Chinese authorities also continue to crack down in
    particular on the use of Uyghur and other minority languages at
    universities and in classroom instruction.
        As you noted, we now believe, based on a wide array of
    evidence, that the number of individuals detained in re-
    education centers for violating these strictures since April
    2017 numbers in at least the hundreds of thousands, possibly
    millions. There are even disturbing reports that young children
    have been sent to state-run orphanages if only one of their
    parents is detained in internment camps. We call on China to
    end these counterproductive policies and free all those
    arbitrarily detained.
        As you noted, with many things related to China's human
    rights abuses, the repression does not stop at the Chinese
    border. The detention and persecution of Uyghur and other
    Muslim minorities in Xinjiang has compelled them to stop
    communicating with their family and friends abroad. We also are
    concerned by reports of Chinese authorities harassing Uyghurs
    abroad to compel them to act as informants, return to Xinjiang,
    or remain silent about the situation.
        Chinese authorities appear to be targeting law-abiding
    Uyghurs--including nonviolent activists and advocates for human
    rights at home and abroad--as terrorist threats based solely on
    the basis of their political, cultural, and religious beliefs
    and practices.
        Given the disturbing and severe nature of this crisis, it's
    worth asking why the pre-eminent human rights bodies of the
    United Nations haven't taken up this issue, exposed it, and
    demanded changes in China's policies. Part of the answer
    certainly lies in China's membership on the Human Rights
    Council and as a permanent member of the Security Council, as
    well as in its ability to portray itself as a member of the
    ``Global South'' in the Group of 77.
        During the question and answer period I would be happy to
    give more examples of how this is working at the UN and share
    with you some of the particular experiences we've had,
    including with the attempts by the Chinese to silence Uyghur
    activists who wish to speak in UN forums, such as Dolkan Isa,
    during the recent forum on indigenous peoples, and even shut
    down human rights organizations and civil society organizations
    that sponsor individuals such as Mr. Isa and their attempt to
    speak.
        I know I have run out of time, and I will leave that to the
    Q & A.
        Thank you, again, for the opportunity to talk about these
    important issues.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you for making the trip down here.
        [The prepared statement of Ambassador Currie appears in the
    Appendix.]
        Chairman Rubio. I want to start with just an editorial
    statement and then go into a couple of questions. And I don't
    even know how to do this while still containing my anger.
        We are a free society--let me just start there--in the
    United States. As just an example, what you have just described
    here, what we are going to hear today is stuff from--like a
    horrible movie. These are crazy things--things that we've read
    about that used to happen thousands of years ago or things that
    happened under these regimes in a science fiction novel.
        I mean, talking about forcing people to eat certain foods
    that violate the dietary laws of their religion, controlling
    what people name their children, trying to strip their identity
    from them, both religious and ethnic. The list goes on. These
    are some of the most horrifying things that are happening in
    the world today. That it doesn't lead newscasts in the country
    and around the world in and of itself is problematic.
        And then in this free country that we have--this is what I
    was alluding to at the beginning--we have multinational
    corporations who have every right--and I do not criticize them
    for this. They have every right to be involved civically in our
    country. When things happen in America and they don't like it,
    they stop selling products, they boycott cities and towns.
    They've done all sorts of things and it's their right to do so.
        These are the same companies that are up here every day in
    Washington, D.C. lobbying for us not to raise these issues so
    they can have access to China's 1.4/1.3 billion-person
    marketplace. And I just think it's hypocritical for American
    corporations and multinationals doing business in China who are
    fully prepared to boycott American cities and American
    communities because they don't like things that are happening
    here to be okay, to turn a blind eye to what is happening and
    not criticize the government of China and the Communist Party
    because they don't want to jeopardize their ability to sell
    products in that country.
        It's an outrage. It's an embarrassment. And I hope--again,
    I doubt this is going to make it onto the CBS evening news or
    any of the cable news shows tonight, but this is outrageous and
    it's hypocritical. And the international organizations that
    stand by and say nothing--why? Because China went into
    somebody's country and built a road or a bridge or maybe bribed
    them and gave them a billion dollars to be quiet and go along.
        This is sick. And I just don't understand why there isn't
    more coverage of this and why there isn't more understanding of
    who we're dealing with here and what they're up to and what
    they do. And the next time someone comes to me and says, Well,
    you don't understand China, their peaceful rise, and this,
    that, and the other--I have no problem. I have tremendous
    admiration for the ancient culture and history of China and of
    its people. And I want China to be a key player in the world.
    We would love to have some help in dealing with all of the
    challenges on this planet. It would be great to have another
    superpower to partner with.
        But this is what these people do with the power they have
    now. Imagine what they will do when that power grows
    militarily, economically, and geopolitically. Because if this
    is how you treat your own people, how do you expect them to
    treat people in some other part of the world? And I hope people
    wake up and understand what we're confronting here and the
    grave crisis that it presents.
        In that vein, Mr. Christino, as you know, Representative
    Smith and I wrote a letter. I have the letter here. It is dated
    May 9, 2018--to Secretary Ross. We were asking for answers
    about the sale by U.S. companies, American companies selling
    surveillance and crime-control technology that is being used by
    Chinese security forces and by their police. We specifically
    raised concerns about a company named Thermo Fisher Scientific
    which is a company in Massachusetts which reportedly is selling
    DNA sequencers with advanced microprocessors to the Chinese
    Ministry of Public Security and its Public Security Bureaus
    across China.
        The reply we got from Commerce noted that these DNA
    sequencers have a legitimate end use, and I am sure they have a
    legitimate end use. But they also have an illegitimate end use.
    So what other recourse do we have if we know that this material
    is being used in this manner--what other recourse do we have
    other than to restrict their sale? Despite the fact that they
    may have some legitimate use--theoretically, there is a
    legitimate use for any product that is sold abroad. But we
    don't sell these products because they are misused by the
    people who are buying them. Why do we continue to allow the
    sale of American technology to be used to commit this level of
    atrocities?
        Mr. Christino. Sir, I can point out to you that we have two
    types of controls relative to the Export Administration
    Regulations: controls over items, such as the DNA sequencer
    itself. And as you correctly pointed out, due to the multiple
    uses of it and the fact that it's not used solely or primarily
    as a crime detection instrument, we do not control the
    sequencer itself. There are certainly numerous uses in basic
    science and medicine, including in China. So to try to control
    the export of the item to China would be problematic at best.
        The other type of control we have under the Export
    Administration Regulations is a control over the activities of
    entities that act in a manner that's inconsistent with U.S.
    national security or foreign policy. Certainly human rights
    violations are a concern with regard to U.S. foreign policy.
    And we do have a process related to end-user review. You
    mentioned the public security bureaus. We do have the
    opportunity to review; we are reviewing as a result of the
    information raised to us by this commission.
        We are reviewing whether or not the evidentiary basis is
    there, we're relying on interagency partners to look at whether
    it is appropriate, through the end-user review committee, to
    place these entities on the entity list.
        Senator Rubio. Well, just on the issue of whether or not
    the end user is using it this way, the Department of State is
    seated right next to you, and they just testified publicly how
    this information is being used. So I think we have an
    interagency process right here in this committee. And I hope it
    is taken seriously.
        On the issue of the product itself, virtually any product
    that is sold abroad has a legitimate use. Guns have legitimate
    uses, rockets, and we restrict the sale of those to certain
    people. We don't sell rockets, guns, tear gas, and crowd
    suppressant to a certain group because they have a history of
    oppressing people.
        Is your testimony that you don't have the statutory
    authority to restrict these products based on the way the law
    is written today? Do you need a change in the law to be able to
    restrict that or is it sort of internally a policy
    determination at this time that it isn't wise to restrict the
    sale of these items because they have a broader legitimate use
    in China?
        Mr. Christino. We have the appropriate authority both over
    items and over the activities of entities that receive U.S.
    items. The problematic nature of this challenge is that if you
    were to try and control DNA sequencers exported to China, you
    would have to be able to make a determination--rather, the
    bureau and the department would need to be able to make a
    determination that such controls would be effective and would
    not adversely affect legitimate U.S. business interests in
    terms of selling these for the numerous uses in basic science
    or in medicine. And then you would also have to deal with
    potential diversion concerns over legitimate sales.
        We're looking at controls not just over the DNA sequencers
    but over other items that may be used, to determine if there is
    sufficient information to warrant a control over the item. But
    the interagency discussion which includes various bureaus at
    the State Department is at this point more focused on the
    entities.
        Chairman Rubio. Well, I don't have a problem with
    restricting the entities, but those are easy to evade. In
    China, the Communist Party controls anything. So whoever you
    sell it to can easily transfer it for that use. I know you
    don't make this decision. Therefore, I'm not trying to beat up
    on you personally because you're here to represent the policy
    of the Commerce Department.
        But I do want to say this . . . it sounds like your answer
    was, These companies have legitimate business interests and
    make money in China selling these DNA sequencers in the whole
    country, and most of the things they sell in the country are
    used legitimately. And we don't want to unnecessarily burden
    their ability to make a profit just because a small but
    significant percentage of their sales might be being used in
    this way.
        If that is the direction we're going, I just find that to
    be unacceptable. It's true--they can buy this from other
    countries, and other companies want to sell it to them. I think
    for us it comes down to the purpose of whether or not we want
    companies housed in the United States benefiting from American
    research, from our laws, from our freedom, from the protection
    of our rule of law in this country, to somehow be complicit in
    what is happening here, and in how their technology is being
    used. And the fact that they are making some money in China is
    to my mind not something that should counterbalance that
    concern. Again, I know you don't make the decision, but I hope
    you report it back.
        Ambassador Currie, you're sitting here today. Does the
    State Department believe that DNA sequencers and other
    materials are being used in ways that we find to be a grotesque
    violation of human rights?
        Ambassador Currie. Thank you, Senator Rubio.
        We do believe that the security state in Xinjiang is
    excessive and is perhaps one of the most repressive in the
    world at this time. We acknowledge that the system does include
    thousands of security cameras, including in mosques, facial
    recognition software, obligatory content monitoring apps on
    smartphones, and GPS devices in cars, widespread new police
    outposts, as you noted, and the embedding of Party personnel in
    homes, and the compulsory collection of vast biometric datasets
    on ethnic and religious minorities throughout the region,
    including DNA and blood samples, 3D photos, iris scans, and
    voiceprints.
        We note that Human Rights Watch has documented that many of
    these DNA samples were collected deceptively as part of what
    regional officials called a ``health campaign.'' That is a
    report by Human Rights Watch, not the U.S. Government, but it's
    in my testimony, so I believe that we must find it somewhat
    credible.
        And the surveillance system has spurred experts in general
    security and experts in Xinjiang to label it as one of the most
    intrusive security police states in the world. There are also
    grave concerns that there's an intention to migrate this system
    from Xinjiang out more broadly into the rest of China, as this
    system, the grid system that's in place in Xinjiang, migrated
    first from Tibet into Xinjiang. It started out in Tibet and was
    kind of rolled out as a pilot there, and then built on, scaled
    up, in Xinjiang.
        Chairman Rubio. Okay. My question was whether using DNA
    sequencers in a way that violates human rights--my take on what
    you just answered--and I know it's the--you need to recite the
    policy of the administration. I think your answer was yes. And
    all I ask is, Can the State Department please tell that to the
    Commerce Department so that they----
        Ambassador Currie. We will absolutely engage in interagency
    discussions with the Commerce Department about appropriate uses
    of technology, and----
        Chairman Rubio. Just tell Commerce that DNA sequencers are
    being used to violate human rights in a grotesque way so
    hopefully they can get moving on denying this. I don't care how
    much money Thermo--whatever their name is--Fisher--that
    company, Thermo Fisher Scientific.
        Are you ready?

    STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER SMITH, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
     NEW JERSEY; COCHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON
                                 CHINA

        Cochairman Smith. First of all, thank you, Chairman Rubio,
    for pulling together this extremely important hearing.
        What's happening against the Muslim Uyghurs--we know that
    Rebiya Kadeer's entire family is incarcerated. When she got
    out, came here--she came and testified at one of my hearings,
    and just bowled us all over with her courage, her willingness
    to sacrifice. At that time, at least two of her family were
    incarcerated as a hedge by the Chinese dictatorship to say, You
    say anything, we will hold it against them.
        And now it is--as we all know--as bad as it was during
    World War II, where the Muslim Uyghurs are being discriminated
    against, thrown into prison, tortured and killed in a massive
    way.
        Back in 2006, I chaired a hearing to which I invited
    Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo about their surveillance.
    But in the case of Cisco, their sale of PoliceNet and other
    means by which the Communist dictatorship could surveil, and
    then apprehend, and then of course what follows then is torture
    and long prison sentences.
        One of the men that Yahoo coughed up was Shi Tao, who you
    all recall--I know you recall it--you're shaking your head. I
    know you recall it well--a wonderful guy, a journalist who
    contacted a New York NGO and said, This is what we're told we
    cannot do when Tiananmen Square's anniversary comes around.
        And for that, he got 10 years. And who gave them that
    information? Yahoo--they gave personally identifiable
    information, which then was used as actionable police state
    information, to not only get him, but then they collect other
    people--or arrest them, I should say. Then they interrogate
    them with torture, and then they cough up other names.
        So we're bearing terrible fruit of inaction for years. And
    as the Chairman said, it's gone far beyond PoliceNet--I am
    saying that, but it has gone far beyond the original tools of
    repression that a legitimate police force can and should use.
    And now it's so far beyond that.
        I introduced a bill called the Global Online Freedom Act.
    One of the titles in that had to do with--just like we do with
    South Africa, prohibiting, proscribing certain police useable
    items that a repressive police state can use to gather up
    religious freedom activists, human rights activists, as in the
    case of the Uyghurs because of their ethnicity, and their
    religion, the Muslim Uyghurs.
        I couldn't get the bill passed. The K Street lobbyists
    came, and they descended upon the Foreign Affairs Committee.
    When we had the markup, I had people on the Democrat side and
    some on the Republican side saying that I can't--I couldn't get
    the bill out of committee.
        Now we've got John Boehner, our former Speaker, joining in
    the chorus of lobbyists for a dictatorship. If he speaks truth
    to power behind closed doors, and more than that, that would be
    great. But if he then comes up here and just promotes the
    bottom line of Beijing, of Xi Jinping, who is now one of the
    rivals for Mao Zedong when it comes to human rights abuse, we
    have a problem.
        So, again, I would ask you again and plead with you, we've
    got to make sure, like we did with South Africa and others in
    the past, make sure all of these items--and when there's a
    dual-use capability that seemingly is benign for a commercial
    use but also has a political or a police application, that we
    go all out to make sure that that is on an export control
    regime.
        So if you could speak to that, because I think we have been
    asleep at the switch. The Obama Administration, now Trump,
    during the Bush Administration, we could not get any traction.
    China has always been treated in a way that I have found
    baffling.
        The people of China are great people. They don't have the
    government they deserve. They have a dictatorship that
    represses them. Why do we enable dictatorship by giving them
    these tools of repression? So if you'd like to respond to that?
    This is the consequence, I think, of gross inaction over the
    course of many years.
        Mr. Christino. Sir, we do control quite a bit of items that
    are used in the way you describe. We control fingerprint
    analyzers, automated fingerprint retrieval systems, voiceprint
    identification, along with the more traditional law enforcement
    items normally used by a police force.
        We also look very carefully at information technology
    items, including computer penetration forensics tools to try to
    ensure that we are appropriately controlling these items so
    they are not used--I should say misused--in the manner that you
    have described.
        We continue to work with our interagency partners,
    primarily the Department of State, specifically the Bureau of
    Human Rights and Labor, the East Asia Pacific Bureau, etc., to
    ensure that we are capturing the right items. And if we cannot
    capture the item, that we are capturing the end use or the
    entities. So we'll continue to do that.
        Ambassador Currie. Thank you, Chairman Smith. And thank you
    again for hosting this, for convening this important and very
    timely hearing today.
        At USUN, we're focused on what we're seeing as the end
    result of the--I think--the policy approach that you outlined
    of believing that China was going to rise peacefully and was
    going to engage in political reform as it opened up
    economically. That clearly has not happened. I think that
    that's not a secret to anyone at this point, that that has not
    been the outcome that those who supported and advocated that
    policy desired.
        So now we are dealing with the consequences of a China that
    has grown rich and powerful and is increasingly authoritarian
    in its behavior both at home and abroad. What we're seeing,
    which is incredibly disturbing for us and which we are trying
    to find ways to combat every day at USUN, goes beyond what we,
    I think, had become accustomed to in terms of defensive
    strategies where China would use its position and various
    bodies to block criticism of it in the Human Rights Council or
    in other places. What we're now seeing is an effort by China to
    actually try to transform the entire normative framework of
    human rights.
        And when I say that, what I'm talking about is substituting
    what we all think of as the normative framework of human
    rights, of rights that attach at the individual level, basic
    God-given human rights--in the parlance of the American way of
    thinking about this, freedom of expression, freedom of
    religion, freedom of thought, freedom of association--to
    transform the whole human rights system into what the Chinese
    characterize as one based on ``win-win'' cooperation or
    mutually beneficial cooperation between states and a system
    that prioritizes the concerns of governments, rather than
    prioritizing their responsibility to respect the human rights
    of their citizens. And what we're seeing at the UN, both in New
    York and across the UN system, is deeply concerning in this
    regard. The Chinese are using all of the tools of state power,
    all of their capabilities, to try to undermine the normative
    framework of human rights. And they're doing it in a way that
    is both blatant, as well as under the radar.
        So we are fighting back against it whenever we can. We are
    trying to block them from putting the language of ``win-win''
    and mutually beneficial cooperation into resolutions at the UN,
    which they are doing across the board. We are trying to block
    them from using the development system of the UN to undermine
    efforts to promote good governance, anti-corruption, and human
    rights as part of the package of responsible development
    behavior, something that they are doing through a variety of
    means. And we are also fighting to make sure that voices of
    civil society can be heard at the UN, including people like
    Uyghur activist Dolkan Isa, who the Chinese have tried to block
    from participating in UN fora.
        So at USUN, we are, I think, very cognizant of the threat
    that the situation poses and are working very hard on a daily
    basis. Our biggest challenge right now is that we are
    relatively alone in this. And in a situation where you have got
    193 member states, many of whom can be persuaded by some of the
    tools that Senator Rubio mentioned, about the Belt and Road
    Initiative, about the amount, about the kind of relationships
    that the Chinese are building across the developing world, in
    particular, but not just the developing world.
        We are really struggling to gain traction in terms of
    getting other member states to join us in this effort to push
    back on even things as simple as the debt that the Chinese
    system is building, the unsustainable debt levels in
    development that the Chinese are creating with developing
    countries.
        So it is a massive struggle. This administration takes it
    very seriously, and everything from where you heard the White
    House push back on the Chinese political correctness with
    trying to force U.S. businesses to change their websites on
    Taiwan, to what we are doing every day at USUN. We are taking
    these threats seriously. We are looking for every opportunity
    to try to push back on them. And we are very serious about
    standing up for the human rights of the Chinese people, in
    particular, calling more attention to the situation in Xinjiang
    because it is deeply underreported, as Senator Rubio noted.
        Cochairman Smith. I will be very brief because I know my
    time is running out or has run out.
        Ambassador Currie, thank you for your leadership. And Nikki
    Haley, please convey to her that I stand in great respect--I
    think we all do--for all of the work that she has done. She is
    often a lone voice, as our delegation and you have been
    tenacious.
        The redefinition of human rights is exactly what the Soviet
    Union tried to do in the 80s and 90s. They used to say, Oh,
    look America, you have a terrible problem of homelessness.
    Therefore, we have a better situation than you do because
    nobody's on the street. Yeah, they're all in the gulag or in
    the psychiatric hospital.
        But that said, we address our humanitarian needs, but as
    you pointed out, they're not fundamental human rights--and they
    are seeking redefinition.
        Mr. Chairman, I held a series of hearings in my
    subcommittee--that's the Africa, Global Health, Global Human
    Rights Committee--on the influence of Chinese soft power,
    particularly this indebtedness issue, which is putting the
    African countries in huge debt where even more power can be
    exerted by the Chinese. And then they call in those chits in
    the UN, with just what you are finding--us standing alone on
    this.
        But hopefully for the Uyghurs and for the people suffering
    in the autonomous region, they will join us in that. They are
    even trying to influence Europe, amazingly. And they're having
    an impact.
        So thank you for your leadership.
        Chairman Rubio. Senator King.
        Senator King. Well, first I want to thank both Chairman
    Smith and Chairman Rubio for their passion and attention to
    this issue. It's troubling to say the least.
        The first thing I would do, Mr. Chairman, is submit for the
    record a long story that appeared in The Economist on May 31,
    that outlines this problem. I think this is a dramatic
    statement of exactly what we're talking about and the horror of
    it. As I read it, all I could think of was my youthful reading
    of ``1984'' and ``Brave New World.'' It is technology turned on
    its head to enslave people instead of to liberate them.
        I was also recently reading about the period of the 1930s
    and the reluctance of America principally, but other countries,
    to recognize what was going on in Germany. There was an almost
    deliberate blind eye turned to what was being done. And of
    course, it wasn't until a decade later that we realized the
    full horror of the Holocaust. I've often thought of the
    difficulty that that question presents; What if we had known in
    detail, specifically in the 30s, what was going on in Germany?
    What then would our obligations have been?
        It seems to me that we are at a similar moment, only we
    have more information. We know what's going on. We don't know
    the exact details, but we know about reeducation camps, we know
    about--as the Chairman recited--people being forced to change
    their names, violate religious practices, modern-day apartheid.
    We do know about it. So what do we do?
        So, Ambassador, I appreciate your coming, number one, and I
    appreciate the statements that you've made. But it seems to me
    that what we really need is a--it's not as if we have no
    relations with China. We have detailed interconnections, trade,
    culture, many exchanges, ambassadors, the whole deal. What can
    we do? What are the levers that we have? Because I don't want
    somebody reading the history of this period and looking back 30
    years from now or 50 years from now and saying, America
    tolerated a holocaust or something similar. What are the levers
    of power that we have that we can exert in this situation in
    order to try to bring this country, this wonderful country to
    its senses in terms of what they are doing to these people?
        Ambassador, give me a laundry list.
        Ambassador Currie. I wish I had a laundry list. Right now
    what we can do at USUN is help to shine a light on the
    situation. I think that the severity, the scope, and the
    magnitude of this situation have really only become clear--I
    would say--in the past few months. We had been hearing stories
    more or less sporadically that this was happening, but some of
    the research that Senator Rubio cited, the looking at the
    tender offers, and understanding, being able to map those
    things, and then as the stories--the Chinese have done an
    excellent job of attempting to keep this under wraps, of not
    allowing reporters to go into Xinjiang and actually report
    directly on what is happening, including our diplomats. So it
    has been a serious challenge to really get a handle on the
    scope and severity of this.
        So I am not saying that as an excuse that--we are just now
    really starting to understand the scope of it. So we are
    starting to shine a light on it and looking for more
    opportunities to do that. And this hearing is an important one
    today.
        Senator King. But I think developing a laundry list is
    important.
        Ambassador Currie. And we have the tools. The tools are the
    tools in the human rights world. They exist. It's always a
    matter of political will for us about where we choose to use
    them.
        I think today's Ministerial on International Religious
    Freedom where this topic will be discussed--it was mentioned in
    Secretary Pompeo's op-ed yesterday. It was mentioned, and it
    will be mentioned this week during the Ministerial. And I think
    that, for us, part of it at this point is educating, frankly
    speaking, a number of countries that are not as aware as we are
    at this point of what is going on, because when I raised it
    with colleagues at the UN, many of my colleagues, including in
    the Muslim world, have no idea this is even happening.
        Senator King. I think that is an important point because if
    there is anything we have learned in the last 20 years about
    sanctions, for example, they are much more effective if they
    are multilateral, much more effective. And I think a very
    important point is to talk to the rest of the world and say,
    it's nice that they are offering to build you a bridge, but
    understand that it comes with a price and the price may be paid
    by innocent people in this province of China.
        So I think that's an important part, but I hope that you
    will--that the administration will develop a set of options,
    policy options that can begin to not only express disapproval
    or shine a light on the problem, but really have some direct
    impact because this doesn't reflect well on the Chinese people.
        It mars what would otherwise be something that might be
    positive in terms of assisting undeveloped parts of the world.
    But if it's done at the price of having to tolerate this, it's
    certainly not in the interests of the people of China or the
    people of the world.
        Mr. Christino, I think if anything has come through, I
    hope, this morning, it's that we feel very strongly that, to
    the extent of your authority, we have really got to have
    renewed attention to the export of technology that is being
    used to develop what appears now to be the world's most
    advanced police state. I mean, the idea of having people that
    move in, that adopt a family, police stations 200 meters apart,
    thousands if not millions of surveillance cameras, iris scans,
    blood samples taken under false pretenses. I mean, this is
    really the stuff of science fiction, and horrible science
    fiction at that.
        So I don't want it to be business as usual at your office.
    This is a new challenge, as the Ambassador said. It has come
    into focus in the last several months, the last year. So I hope
    your office will renew its attention to this and be much more
    alert to the potential use of this technology. And my view is,
    even if there is a legitimate use for it, if it can be used for
    this purpose, it should be under additional scrutiny if not
    outright sanction by your office.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Rubio. Senator Cotton.
        Senator Cotton. I'll just continue where Senator King left
    off. Even if there is a legitimate use to it, why would we sell
    it to China? Why would we authorize it to be sold to China? I
    mean, they're not France. They're not Sweden. So I don't think
    we should sell it to China regardless, even if there is a
    legitimate use. And if the administration can't do it with
    existing authorities, then perhaps Congress should explore
    giving you more authorities to do so.
        Mr. Christino, I know you have a lot of experience in this
    field. Did we sell crowd control and policing equipment and
    technology to the Soviet Union when it existed?
        Mr. Christino. No, sir.
        Senator Cotton. Why would we sell it to China now since
    China is our number one geopolitical rival going forward in the
    coming decades. They're plainly using this kind of technology
    in Xinjiang to oppress their own people and to build their
    national power in a way to challenge us. I mean, one of the
    reasons China has been able to turn its focus outward onto the
    blue seas and challenge us inside the first island chain and in
    the South China Sea is that they've gained greater control of
    their internal borders, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet.
        I turn now, Ambassador Currie, to you, and something you
    said earlier--I want to just explore a little bit further and
    ask if you could elaborate and talk about the concept of a
    pilot program. Some of these techniques were first piloted in
    Tibet. Now they've been rolled out on a greater and more
    advanced scale in Xinjiang, potentially going to the rest of
    China.
        Could you elaborate, please, on that?
        Ambassador Currie. Certainly, Senator Cotton.
        I think our understanding is that after the 2008 events in
    Lhasa and the protests that took place then across the Tibetan
    Plateau, the Chinese authorities came in with a much more
    aggressive approach to policing and social control in Tibet.
    And they began both with policing, with the closely spaced
    police stations, the intense surveillance, and the control over
    religious institutions and cultural institutions, the massive
    political education, the pressure on state employees from
    teachers to policemen to doctors of Tibetan extraction who were
    forced to take political education classes, much more intensive
    management of monasteries in Tibet.
        They fused that approach with what we might call community-
    based policing if it were being done for a proper purpose, but
    which in this case is really just community-based oppression--
    they fused that with a technological edge in Xinjiang and
    doubled down on it. And they added some very particular aspects
    to it in terms of the legal restrictions that they've passed
    into regulations and have made more of a--put it under law,
    which is something that the Chinese like to do to kind of
    create a thin veneer of legality over the forms of oppression
    that they're using against these minority communities.
        Senator Cotton. Thank you for that. I suspect that is what
    is going to happen. It will be rolled out substantially
    throughout the country.
        Also another issue that was touched upon briefly earlier,
    the Belt and Road Initiative--pretty tall mountains down there
    in Tibet. It is hard to get a road through there. So the road
    in the Belt and Road Initiative, presumably is going primarily
    through Xinjiang province into Central Asia and then perhaps
    all the way into Europe. How closely connected is the
    oppression that we see in Xinjiang province to that Belt and
    Road Initiative, which of course is a direct challenge to the
    United States' position as the world's leading economy and the
    global military superpower?
        Ambassador Currie. Security along the belt and road is a
    major human rights challenge, not just inside China's borders
    but across them. They definitely are insistent on having a high
    degree of security through key corridors, and Xinjiang is one
    of those key corridors.
        Part of it--it goes beyond, also, the repression directed
    at the Muslim minority communities in Xinjiang. And what we're
    seeing in addition to the repression directed at those
    communities is the continued incentivization of in-migration
    and other activities to encourage the growth of the non-Uyghur,
    non-Kazakh, non-Muslim population.
        Senator Cotton. By in-migration--to call a spade a spade--
    you mean, essentially, colonization, right?
        Ambassador Currie. That is--it could be characterized----
        Senator Cotton. The data I have here in front of me says
    that in 1949, Xinjiang had 7 percent Han Chinese. Today it's up
    to 40 percent.
        Ambassador Currie. Some experts have characterized it as
    colonization, yes. What we've seen there is also that the
    Chinese residents of Xinjiang tend to dominate the businesses.
    They get the state contracts, and they are involved in the
    actual infrastructure development that is linked to the Belt
    and Road.
        Senator Cotton. Again, to call a spade a spade, the Chinese
    there are dominating the businesses. They are dominating the
    businesses because the Chinese Communist Party is empowering
    them to have those businesses and disempowering all the native-
    born Muslim Uyghurs or Kazakhs, or other minorities in
    Xinjiang?
        Ambassador Currie. Yes.
        Senator Cotton. One final question. We talked earlier about
    the loss of a market for American companies and things like
    crowd control or policing technique, or more cutting-edge
    technology that can be used for those things like DNA mapping
    and facial recognition technology. One common argument you hear
    from American companies is, Well, if we do not sell it to them,
    someone is going to sell it to them, right? It reminds me of
    the old line that a communist's definition of a capitalist is a
    man who will sell us the rope with which we hang him.
        But I just want to ask you, who are the countries whose
    companies could pick up that business? And maybe, Mr.
    Christino, this is better directed to you as well. If we stop
    selling this kind of technology to China, in which countries
    around the world are the companies located that would pick up
    that business from American companies?
        Mr. Christino. Well, with regard specifically to the DNA
    sequencers that were mentioned prominently earlier during the
    hearing, they're made essentially all over the world. It's
    relatively simple technology. It's not very cutting-edge
    technology. It has been around for at least 30 years. Some of
    the main manufacturers are actually in China itself. And you
    don't even need the item, the sequencer, in many cases. As we
    see on TV all the time, there's a great deal of advertising for
    DNA analysis. It's simply a swab and send. So there's plenty of
    opportunity for the Chinese security services to continue to do
    what they're doing without U.S. items.
        Senator Cotton. Ambassador Currie, do you have any response
    to that one?
        Ambassador Currie. I would agree with my colleague that the
    Chinese, not just in this area of technology, but they, as part
    of the Made in China 2025 Drive and 2050 Drive, they have
    definitely--the goal there is to make China technologically
    self-sufficient so that even if we do put export controls on
    all manner of things, then they would be able to produce them
    domestically without having to rely on external sources for
    items such as this.
        Senator Cotton. OK. Thank you both.
        Chairman Rubio. I have just two quick comments and a quick
    question. Then I know Congressman Smith does as well before we
    turn to our second panel. We want to thank you both for being
    here.
        Your answer to Senator Cotton's last question almost sounds
    like, They're going to do it anyway, so we might as well allow
    our companies to make some money on it. And I'm not saying
    that's what your intention is in representing it that way, but
    that's sort of the logical conclusion of it. This technology is
    widely available. This is not going to be able to stop them
    from doing it. And what I hope you'll take back to Commerce is,
    I don't believe that any of us who are calling for this
    technology, like the DNA sequencer, to be prohibited believe
    that doing so will prohibit them--or stop them from doing this.
    We just don't want American companies to be participants in it.
        And I think that's the bigger point for us as a nation. You
    can buy crowd control equipment. China will sell you crowd
    control equipment. They'll sell you anything. They don't care
    about your human rights record, democracy, anything like that.
    If you have the cash, they'll sell it to you. That does not
    mean that we go--we still deny the sale of certain equipment.
    And it brings to light another point, and that is our laws have
    to keep pace with our technology. What is used to control
    crowds today is different from what it may have been 10, 15, 20
    years ago. And that includes technological advances.
        To that point--did you want to add something on that point?
        Senator King. Well I just wanted to point out that this is
    exactly the argument that was made in Britain to justify the
    sale of Rolls Royce engines to the Luftwaffe in 1935. It was a
    bad argument then, and it's a bad argument now because the
    issue you are talking about is complicity. I don't want to be
    complicit in this.
        Chairman Rubio. Agreed.
        And talking about the other thing that I think this brings
    to light is, if you read through the regs and how they describe
    crowd control and suppression, it's all 20th century technology
    and it's still used. But in the 21st century, technology
    increasingly plays a role.
        I'll give you one example; the use of intense security
    measures to surveillance technology. We know, for example, the
    Chinese are now using in a particular region, in specific,
    facial recognition cameras in neighborhoods, on roads, and in
    train stations.
        It appears focused on using much of the surveillance and
    data collected to monitor and repress Uyghurs. In fact, the
    authorities reportedly integrate a lot of this surveillance. So
    they're taking data from all sorts of things--the computer,
    smartphones, closed circuit cameras, license plates, ID cards,
    individual family planning and banking records, information on
    their international travel--they're taking all of this
    information and they're running it through something that's
    called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. And they're
    using that data--all of that data--to identify people that they
    think should be subject to investigation and potential
    detention.
        In essence, how they're defining who to put in these camps
    is the process of an algorithm that's looking at all of this
    data they're collecting on people and deciding from it who they
    should be detaining. And here's why I point that out. A key
    component of that in the 21st century is going to be artificial
    intelligence, the ability to learn from the gathering of data
    the way a human would and improve it each and every time. And I
    raise that only because there's a tremendous irony in this room
    here today. That picture that we have of a camp and how it grew
    comes from Google Earth.
        Google recently dropped out of a contract with the
    Department of Defense, on Project Maven, artificial
    intelligence--because its employees do not want to be involved
    with the American Government and the DoD working on the use of
    artificial intelligence to potentially harm people.
        At the same time, Google has opened up an AI China Center.
    And basically anything you do in China that's technological, if
    you think you're going to constrain it to just the private
    sector, you're crazy. All of it will be shared with the
    military and with the repressive forces that are doing this.
    And Google has no excuse. They know that this is happening
    because they've got pictures of it. That's Google Earth.
        So that's just one more example of the hypocrisy of an
    American company that knows this is happening, doesn't want to
    give AI technology to the military because God forbid we may
    use it one day to target a terrorist or someone who wants to
    harm America, but has no problem opening up a center of AI in
    China knowing full well that anything you do in China--if it's
    a benefit to the military, they're going to use it. If it's a
    benefit to their security services, they're going to use it.
        And my last question--this is a question. We've raised the
    issue of Global Magnitsky sanctions; the purpose of Global
    Magnitsky sanctions was to be able to identify an individual
    doing horrible things and be able to impose sanctions upon
    them. We clearly know horrible things are happening here to the
    Uyghurs in their area. And we know that there are individuals
    who are at least making the decision, and most certainly
    individuals that are applying those decisions.
        What is happening within State now? Is there consideration
    being made? Is there deliberation? Is there talk? What are the
    chances of being able to apply Global Magnitsky sanctions to
    individuals that we know are in charge of these regions and, at
    the highest levels, have to be held responsible for what's
    happening?
        Ambassador Currie. Well as you know, Global Magnitsky is a
    rolling determination dataset where we are constantly looking
    at individuals who are involved with either serious corruption
    issues or gross human rights abuses. It's an interagency
    process. It's not the State Department alone that manages that
    process. In fact, the final determination and the final check
    on that is actually with the Treasury Department. But it is an
    interagency process, and the State Department does play an
    important role in identifying targets and helping to move them
    through the process, build the data packages around Global
    Magnitsky.
        I cannot speak to specific individuals that may be being
    chosen or being looked at for sanctions, but what I can say is
    that we do see the Global Magnitsky sanctions as an important
    tool to help identify abusers and bring them--and use the
    ability of the United States to sanction those individuals,
    limit their access to the U.S. financial system and block them
    from being able to--in some cases, even seize assets that they
    may have in the U.S. financial system.
        If there are suggestions that the Commission has for
    individuals that the Department should be looking at, I would
    encourage you to forward those to the Bureau of Democracy,
    Human Rights, and Labor, because they generally start the
    process rolling with determinations, and I'd be happy to take
    anything back that you have.
        Chairman Rubio. Well, you can count on--we most certainly
    have ideas about individuals and it's probably not a complete
    list. We're open to adding more people as this continues. My
    only takeaway is, as you go back, and however this form reaches
    the decision-makers in the interagency, to the extent that the
    Department of State is involved in the interagency, we just--I
    can't speak for everyone else, but I think there'd be a
    consensus on the Commission and across Congress that if ever
    there was a model case for how we intended Global Magnitsky to
    be used as a tool, this would be it . . . because there is most
    clearly abuse happening.
        Wherever there is abuse, there are abusers. And in the case
    of China, those abusers--if they're high enough in government--
    are almost guaranteed to not just have U.S. visas, but either
    they or their families have some access to either the U.S.
    financial system, our universities, and are enjoying--that's
    just the way it works for high-ranking individuals. They like
    to travel the world, and they like to spend money in the U.S.
    So if ever there was an example of where Magnitsky could be
    powerful in making a statement about where we stand on this
    issue, we believe this is one of them, and we will most
    certainly continue to push for it and offer suggestions about
    individuals.
        Congressman Smith, you have the final questions.
        Cochairman Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
        Just let me add my strong endorsement to what you just said
    about Global Magnitsky. I am the author of the Belarus
    Democracy Act of 2004--great pushback when we did it.
    Lukashenko, the dictator in Belarus, was sanctioned along with
    about 200 other people. I went there twice, went to Minsk. The
    first time he called me ``public enemy number one,'' but one by
    one every political prisoner got out of prison. And it applied
    not just to him, but to his family and to other families of his
    group that were committing gross human rights violations.
        So it does work. The Global Magnitsky Act, and the
    Magnitsky Act itself, targeted toward Russia, is a tool of
    surpassing capability.
        I hope we would do a data call to our embassy in Beijing,
    to our Ambassador Branstad and say, Give us the names--it's got
    to really come--if they're not going to initiate it, and they
    probably won't, it will come from Washington, I would hope, and
    say, Who is responsible for this horrific carnage being imposed
    upon the Muslim Uyghurs?
        Rebiya Kadeer, who is here, her courage is--she should win
    the Nobel Peace Prize for her courage. As a matter of fact, in
    the past, many of us have asked that that happen, and she
    should be present as well.
        I cannot tell you how concerned all of us are. We've got
    six Radio Free Asia families who are missing or are
    incarcerated as part of this massive World War II-type roundup.
    This is now similar to what the Nazis did in terms of the
    massiveness of gathering people for torture and the like.
        So the Magnitsky Act is just sitting there like low-hanging
    fruit, tools that absolutely have to be deployed. And make up a
    list, like I said--the second time I met with Lukashenko, he
    was all sweetness and light. He's still a dictator. But all the
    political prisoners have been released, to the best of our
    knowledge.
        On another related issue--in 2000, I wrote the Admiral
    Nance/Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Act. One of the provisions
    we put in there said that anyone who is complicit with forced
    abortion or forced sterilization, which during the Nuremburg
    War Crimes Tribunal was properly construed to be a crime
    against humanity for its Nazi usage against Poles and others;
    it is just as much a crime against humanity today.
        We know that China itself is missing 62 million women,
    girls, who have been eviscerated from their population by sex
    selection abortion. We know that it's been used as a genocidal
    tool against the Tibetans and against the Uyghurs. Nobody ever
    seems to talk about it except the Chairman and me, perhaps a
    small number of others. It is like the topic that you don't
    bring up because the choice community will look askance at
    this. These women are being horribly and forcibly aborted.
    Sometimes they bring--and it is being used as a tool of
    genocide to eliminate the Muslim Uyghurs in that country.
        You have an additional tool sitting there since 2000. It
    was not used by the Obama administration. I brought it up over
    and over again in hearings. I said you may disagree with me on
    the right to life and the fact that unborn children ought to be
    protected from the violence of abortion, but here we are
    talking about forced abortion. Can we not even have agreement
    there to try to protect people from this violence that is being
    imposed upon them?
        So you have another tool I would ask you to revisit,
    especially as it relates to the Muslim Uyghurs--because they
    are using it. I intervened in one case, brought to us by some
    good friends of a woman who had been brought in with about 25
    to 30 cadres, family planning cadres, police escorts, to have
    her Muslim child aborted. I talked to the ambassador here--to
    China--talked to our ambassador, our U.S. Ambassador, and that
    one child got a reprieve and was saved. But one among millions
    being slaughtered.
        So please look at the Admiral Nance/Meg Donovan provision
    to see if that could be brought out and used, get the dust off
    of it because I think it'll make a difference. And, again, like
    the Chairman said, the Magnitsky Act . . . you get a list of a
    couple of hundred--to start off with--names, and then they
    cannot come here. They cannot send their kids to NYU, which has
    a--I spoke at NYU a couple of years ago on human rights in
    Shanghai. Let's get it all out there. Okay, you're done. Your
    families don't come here because of your egregious violations
    of human rights.
        So please, Magnitsky--this is a textbook case of where it
    should be utilized. And I implore you, and again, the Chairman,
    I thank you for again pulling together this extremely important
    hearing.
        And, again, I do thank you, Ambassador, both of you, for
    your leadership at the UN. You've been extraordinary despite
    what the Human Rights Council does, which unfortunately majors
    in hypocrisy, focuses on Israel to the exclusion of the real
    human rights abuses, and Nikki Haley has called that out so
    courageously. And we thank her for that.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you.
        And we have a second panel we want to get to as quickly as
    possible because I know Senator King needs to go. I know
    Congressman Smith has votes. But Senator Daines is here and I
    know he had a few questions for this panel before we turn it
    over.
        Would our next panelists start getting ready because we are
    going to jump into it pretty quick?
        Senator Daines. Thank you, Chairman Rubio and Chairman
    Smith. I thank you for holding this hearing, and I want to
    thank the witnesses for coming here today.
        I spent more than half a decade in China in the private
    sector. In fact, I had two children born in Hong Kong. I lived
    in Guangzhou. I've led congressional visits to China every year
    since I've been in the United States Senate. I have had the
    opportunity to travel across the country in Xinjiang. I have
    been in Urumqi as well. I've seen the prominent Uyghur Muslim
    populations. I have been in Tibet and seen the Buddhist monks.
    I just recently was in Dandong along the North Korean border.
    This has allowed me to see firsthand the pervasive censorship
    and the challenges the Chinese people face, as well as the
    efforts made by the Chinese government to extend their
    influence beyond their borders.
        As your testimonies suggest, the State Department Human
    Rights Report and numerous others indicate the situation in
    Xinjiang is dire for its Uyghur population. Whether it's
    pervasive surveillance, the destruction of thousands of
    mosques, or the detention of hundreds of thousands in so-called
    ``reeducation camps,'' as well as indefinite detentions, it's
    critically important that we, as a nation founded on freedom
    and the rule of law, bring our influence to bear to advance
    human rights in China and around the world.
        Ambassador Currie, what do you see as China's endgame as it
    relates to the persecution and the repression of its Uyghur
    population? Is this cultural, economic, religious, or some
    other combination?
        Ambassador Currie. Thank you for that question.
        We would say that it's all of those things. It is a
    combination of those elements with an additional aspect of
    political control. What we see is an effort to sinicize
    religion and to bring--the Chinese Communist Party feels the
    need to control anything that is not under its immediate
    control. So it does put a lot of constraints on all religious
    activity in China. And because of the global nature, in
    particular of Islam and Christianity as well, those two
    religions tend to come in for particular scrutiny and
    particular suspicion from the authorities, and for a much more
    coercive and much more restrictive approach.
        So I believe that in Xinjiang and in the case of the Uyghur
    population, in particular, there is an absolute--the State
    Department sees an effort to sinicize religion and to bring the
    practices of Uyghur Muslims into line with a level of
    religiosity that the Party finds acceptable. And bearing in
    mind that the Party is itself an atheist entity, we can surmise
    that that is a very low level of religiosity, and one that is
    very limited in terms of being--limited in terms of its
    international relations and connections outside of China.
        Senator Daines. Ambassador Currie, are there any particular
    tools or technologies that would be helpful for the U.S.
    Government or NGOs to support to assist those persecuted
    populations?
        Ambassador Currie. The tools that the United States is
    using in terms of Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America,
    getting the truth in to people, giving--and then making sure
    that we are also reporting on the situation there, are
    particularly important. Information is obviously critical here.
        Our ability to understand what is going on in Xinjiang is
    limited by the efforts of the Chinese government to cover up
    and mask what they're doing. So the more that we can use
    information technology, both to inform our own population and
    our allies and other countries about what's happening as well
    as to make the people of China aware of what is happening in
    other parts of the country as well as the concerns that are
    taking place outside of China regarding the treatment of ethnic
    minorities and that these practices are not consistent with
    respect for international human rights.
        I believe that those are the things that the U.S.
    Government can use to try to address the problem in terms of
    technology. Beyond that, I think that we are--a lot of it is
    about old-fashioned diplomacy and doing our jobs better of
    educating our colleagues at the UN, for instance, about the
    scope of what's going on and just trying to work and grow the
    coalition of countries that are concerned around this issue.
        Senator Daines. Yes, I remain very concerned since my
    visits out to western China a couple of years ago, the
    thousands of mosques that have been demolished. And whether
    it's the Muslim people, Christian people, the level of
    persecution--by all accounts, all reports we're receiving
    here--is reaching levels that are virtually unprecedented in
    modern history in China.
        It is extending here to the United States, hearing reports
    from Chinese students who are being called by professors back
    in China saying, Do not associate and go to faith-based
    activities. This is something that we haven't seen, and I
    remain very, very concerned.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you.
        Thank you both for being here. Ambassador Currie, thank you
    for making the trip. Thank you, Mr. Christino as well. We
    appreciate it. We are grateful. This was very insightful. Thank
    you.
        Our next panel will come forward. And as you guys get
    positioned, Members will fluctuate in and out. Congressman
    Smith had to leave. The House has votes. Members here have
    meetings and different activities.
        We certainly don't want to curtail your testimony. It is
    important to hear your stories. Know that your full testimony
    is going to be in the record.
        We are probably going to have a hard stop in this meeting
    at 12:10 or 12:15. So the less--the shorter you can get those
    statements, the more time we can have to engage with you on
    some details that I think will be enlightening for the
    Commission and for our record.
        [Pause.]
        Chairman Rubio. All right. Okay.
        Thank you all for being here. Ms. Hoja, we will begin with
    you and your testimony. Thank you for being here. I have read
    your full statement. It is very compelling. We want to hear
    more from you today and I look forward to engaging with you.
    Thank you for being here.

     STATEMENT OF GULCHEHRA HOJA, UYGHUR SERVICE JOURNALIST, RADIO
                               FREE ASIA

        Ms. Hoja. Thank you. As-Salaam-Alaikum. Mr. Chairman, Mr.
    Cochairman, and Members of the Commission, it's my privilege to
    participate in today's hearing on a topic that deeply affects
    me personally and professionally.
        My name is Gulchehra Hoja. I am a journalist with Radio
    Free Asia's Uyghur Language Service, and I am a U.S. citizen.
    Given the time, I will not read my full statement, but share my
    story.
        I grew up in Urumqi, the capital of the Uyghur region in
    China, where I began my career in broadcast journalism before
    coming to the United States in 2001 to work for Radio Free
    Asia. It was a great sacrifice to leave my homeland. I left
    behind a successful career as a television journalist. I also
    left my home, my parents, my family, and my friends. But coming
    here guaranteed me freedom--something that could never be
    realized in China. Being part of Radio Free Asia--which reports
    on the true daily news happening in the Uyghur region--was the
    dream of a lifetime.
        As I testify before you today, it grieves me no end to say
    that my parents remain under threat, and more than two dozen of
    my relatives in China are missing--almost certainly held in
    what are called reeducation camps run by the Chinese
    government.
        I first heard that my brother Kaisar Keyum was detained at
    the end of September last year. Police had taken him when he
    was driving my mother to a doctor's appointment, leaving her
    alone in the car without any explanation. She waited for her
    son who would never return. Kaisar was being held in one of the
    so-called reeducation centers in Urumqi. We have not seen him
    since.
        In February, my parents, both elderly and suffering from
    life-threatening ailments, went missing. Not being able to talk
    with my mother and father, or to learn how they were doing, was
    almost too much to bear. I tried contacting other family but
    could not reach them. And I learned in February that my aunts,
    cousins, their children--more than 20 people had been swept up
    by authorities on the same day. No one has confirmed where they
    are being held, but I strongly suspect they are in the camps,
    which sources say hold more than 1 million Uyghurs in extremely
    poor conditions.
        My parents were held in a medical facility in the detention
    camps. They were allowed to leave in March--maybe because of
    their poor health. Authorities have questioned my parents about
    me, where I am, and my work for an organization they claim is
    ``anti-China.''
        Many of my Uyghur colleagues at the RFA share the same
    situation. Their families are also missing, detained and jailed
    after receiving threats about their work at RFA. I hope and
    pray for my family to be let go and released, but I know even
    if that happens, they will still live under constant threat.
    Despite these threats, I know, and my colleagues know, that we
    must continue because of the important role we have as a source
    of truth for Uyghur people.
        I came to the United States to realize a dream, a dream of
    being able to tell the truth without fear. It may be difficult,
    but I will keep trying and I will never give up.
        Thank you so much.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you for your testimony.
        [The prepared statement of Gulchehra Hoja appears in the
    Appendix.]
        Chairman Rubio. Professor Thum.
        Mr. Thum. Thank you to the Chairs and to the committee for
    organizing this incredibly important hearing.

    STATEMENT OF RIAN THUM, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
                              NEW ORLEANS

        I would like to submit my written testimony for the record
    and just emphasize a few interpretive points here because we
    have a lot of the data on the table already.
        The first point I'd like to make is that this is an
    emergency that is developing as we speak. Those numbers of
    several hundred thousand to over a million Uyghurs, 5 to 10
    percent of the Uyghur population disappearing into these
    internment camps, are based on estimates from January, data
    that came out in January about what happened in the previous
    year. We have had another six months. People have continued to
    disappear and very few people, usually sick people, have been
    released.
        We see new camps being built in the satellite imagery and
    we have new advertisements from the Xinjiang authorities asking
    for construction companies to build additional camps. The last
    one to appear is about a 400,000-square-foot facility that will
    probably come on line sometime between September and December.
        This enormous and growing scale is important not just in an
    absolute sense, where we have the feeling that maybe if it
    crosses a big enough number the world will care, but also as a
    proportion of the number of community members who disappear.
    This is something you can see on the streets in southern
    Xinjiang, in the closed buildings, the closed shops, the closed
    houses, people who've disappeared. You can see it in one county
    in Kashgar where 18 orphanages have been built--according to a
    Financial Times report--in the last year alone to house the
    children of those who have been sent to the detention camps.
        My second point that I want to make is about the goals of
    these camps, which is something that was asked about earlier.
    These camps serve multiple goals. They serve the explicit
    goal--which many Chinese officials seem to really believe in--
    of changing the way people think through force, of purifying
    them of supposedly bad ideas and inculcating love for the Party
    and for Xi Jinping. They also serve to remove certain
    demographics from the population, especially 20- to 40-year-
    olds, which police have explicitly targeted. And, of course,
    they serve as the background disciplinary threat that upholds
    the totalitarian micromanagement of Uyghurs' everyday
    activities and cultural expression.
        But the frightening thing is that what we know from history
    is that when you get large detention systems that are operating
    in legal gray zones, or in this case perhaps even an entirely
    extra-legal zone, there is a lot of room for improvisation on
    the part of those who are running those camps. So the most
    frightening purpose is the one that hasn't occurred yet. And
    while right now torture and deaths in the camp seem to be
    happening at pretty low levels, that can change. In fact, I
    don't think we can rule out the possibility of mass murder.
        The third point I want to make--and I will do it briefly--
    is that the camps are not the only problem. Although I have
    emphasized it here because they are easy to summarize, if you
    take them out of the picture, we're still looking at one of the
    most oppressive police states in the world with--as Senator
    Rubio mentioned--a system of racism very similar to apartheid.
        My last major point I want to make is about the deeper
    causes of this. This is a colonial settler operation. And it
    is--contrary to some opinions--not explicitly about religion
    per se.
        The Chinese Communist Party, despite being avowedly
    atheist, has a great deal of tolerance for what they see as
    Chinese religions being practiced by ethnic Chinese. When it
    comes to a foreign religion or a religion seen as Chinese, like
    Buddhism, practiced by non-Chinese, like Tibetans, that story
    changes. And it becomes even more intense when it's Islam
    because the Chinese Communist Party over the last 20 years or
    so has adopted American and European discourses of Islamophobia
    which they picked up largely through cooperation with the U.S.
    global war on terror.
        Because of that, this is a deeply entrenched worldview of
    Chinese officials behind this, and I do not think, for that
    reason, that we can convince Chinese officials to change their
    path based on data about how it will improve the internal
    situation. I think instead--they think this is working. So we
    need to make this not a domestic issue, but a global issue.
        And I see that I am out of time, so I will end there.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Professor Rian Thum appears in
    the Appendix.]
        Chairman Rubio. Ms. Batke.

       STATEMENT OF JESSICA BATKE, SENIOR EDITOR, CHINAFILE, AND
           FORMER RESEARCH ANALYST AT THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE

        Ms. Batke. Chairman Rubio, Chairman Smith, and
    distinguished Members of the Commission, thank you for inviting
    me to speak today.
        I am here in a personal capacity, so I am only representing
    myself. Others have very ably already discussed what is
    happening in Xinjiang, so I won't use my time on that. Instead,
    first I'd like to talk a little bit about terminology. I
    believe that if we are to treat what is happening in Xinjiang
    with the seriousness and alarm that it merits, we first need to
    accurately label what it is we are witnessing.
        Official Chinese sources refer to these as ``transformation
    through education centers'' or ``counter-extremism centers.''
    And outside China, they are frequently called ``reeducation
    camps.''
        But from what we've heard today, we know these are somewhat
    euphemistic characterizations and they do not clearly and
    precisely define what it is we are witnessing. Some observers
    have called them concentration camps based on a definition of
    the state--for reasons of state security, targeting particular
    ethnic and religious minorities and confining them into certain
    spaces. Other people have wondered whether these camps--because
    they are interning religious and ethnic minorities--could
    presage something much worse, like ethnic cleansing.
        And while I am not an expert in international law and I
    don't feel I have standing to offer the legal term of art which
    most accurately defines what we're seeing, I think the U.S.
    Government and the international community, in general, needs
    to think very hard about what is happening in these camps and
    what we should call them, and whether they are an early warning
    sign of something much worse to come.
        Turning to the Chinese leadership--despite a general lack
    of insight into Chinese leadership politics, Xinjiang Party
    Secretary Chen Quanguo's role in this is unusually clear. His
    tenure coincides not only with the large-scale use of these
    camps, but as you noted, with the building of thousands of
    convenience police stations, with a massive increase in
    security personnel hiring and overall security spending, and as
    we know now, a massive increase in arrests as well.
        And this pattern of securitization, as was previously
    mentioned, echoes very clearly Chen Quanguo's security policies
    in another ethnic minority region in China--Tibet--when he was
    Party Secretary there from 2011 to 2016. But though Chen has
    been directly responsible for overseeing these policies,
    neither Chen nor the policies themselves are sui generis. They
    clearly fit into a larger policy trend of criminalization of
    ethnic and religious identity, and that traces from central-
    level guidance, at least from 2014 if not earlier, down through
    regional regulations and local implementation.
        So what is the impact beyond Xinjiang? Domestically,
    surveillance capabilities and restrictive measures could be
    employed, and indeed, by some accounts they are already being
    employed, against other ethnic or religious minorities in
    China.
        Internationally, as we've discussed, Uyghurs in exile are
    not only surveilled, but they can be coerced into reporting on
    fellow Uyghurs back to Chinese state security authorities.
    Other governments have assisted China in forcibly repatriating
    ethnic minorities back to Xinjiang.
        And finally, there is the issue of Chinese government
    pressure, even indirectly, often encouraging self-censorship
    among those of us who are here working and writing on China.
        So I am going to make a few policy recommendations. It is a
    mistake to think that staying silent on human rights in China
    is a neutral act. Instead, every instance of silence just
    resets Beijing's expectations and it raises the psychic cost of
    reinjecting human rights back into the conversation later.
    Beijing still does care about its international reputation,
    meaning that both public and diplomatic pressure can be
    effective tools in encouraging change.
        My full recommendations are in my written statement, but
    I'll just highlight a few of them here:

         First, to maintain a clear, consistent, and full-throated
    public defense of human rights and religious freedom in
    Xinjiang in addition to direct diplomatic engagement.
         To work with like-minded countries, particularly Muslim-
    majority countries, to coordinate an international response to
    the situation in Xinjiang and offer support to PRC citizens who
    have fled Xinjiang, whether here in the United States or
    elsewhere around the globe.
         To limit private companies' ability to provide training
    or equipment to Chinese state security agencies, and the
    Chair's recent letter to Secretary Ross is very helpful in this
    regard.
         And finally, to sanction relevant Chinese officials under
    the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. Any
    sanctions package should include Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen
    Quanguo. Sanctioning a sitting Politburo member who is one of
    the top 25 leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in China
    would clearly convey the United States' unequivocal
    condemnation of these camps. There is a list of additional
    leaders for your consideration in my written statement.
        Thank you for your time. I welcome your questions.
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Jessica Batke appears in the
    Appendix.]
        Chairman Rubio. Thank you all. Your testimony, while brief,
    has really gotten to the point.
        I want to start with the first one. You know, let me just
    make sort of an editorial comment at the front end. I know
    there's a lot going on up here. Every morning brings news,
    depending on what's going on on Twitter--statements, press,
    whatever it might be, but--and there is coverage here. There
    are people. There are some cameras and some journalists and
    others who might watch later.
        What we've heard described here today has both deep
    domestic and international implications of epic proportions. I
    know of few, if any, humanitarian outrages in the world that
    reach the level of what we've heard here described, and few in
    modern history that reach this level. And I daresay if this was
    happening in virtually any other part of the world, there'd be
    an incredible amount of outrage and coverage. And while I'm
    grateful to the journalists who are covering this today and
    those that may write about it, I am disappointed. Frankly, I am
    disappointed that there isn't more interest, that there isn't
    more coverage. This is horrifying. It certainly is
    significantly more important for the future of the world and
    the 21st century.
        You have a country that is in a full-scale effort to not
    just catch the United States but supplant us as the world's
    premier economic, military, geopolitical, and technological
    power. And history has taught us that the most powerful country
    in the world in any given era shapes that era, shapes the
    global norms. It shapes the way the world looks, feels, and
    acts.
        I deeply believe that America's rise, and particularly
    since the end of the Second World War, has led to the spread of
    concepts about liberty, freedom, democracy, human rights, and
    economic opportunity, and helped shape the post-World War II
    era. And so we have to fear that in a world that is shaped by a
    country--if that is what it reaches--that does this to their
    own people, you can only imagine what they would be willing to
    support, tolerate, and/or promote if they ever reach the same
    status.
        So I think this should inform our relationship and the
    urgency of all of our tasks with regard to our relationship
    with China. But focusing on this one in particular for a
    moment, let me first address those--and this is going to deal
    with your story, Ms. Hoja--of those who say to us--and I've had
    people tell me this--Human rights is important, but we have to
    be pragmatic and we can't raise it in every forum, can't talk
    about it all the time, and at the end of the day there are
    horrible things happening all over the world. We cannot tell
    other countries what to do all the time. We need to be focused
    on America and Americans.
        Your story is about America and Americans. You are a United
    States citizen. You work for Radio Free Asia. And you have
    testified here today that your brother, your elderly and infirm
    parents have been detained, that over 20 of your relatives,
    including aunts, cousins, children, have been detained.
        You have also testified here today, I believe in your
    written testimony--you may have said it verbally as well--that
    you know of other colleagues that have experienced the same. So
    here we have the testimony of a United States citizen working
    in a journalistic capacity whose family in another country has
    been harassed, detained, in some cases without any contact with
    their families, not knowing exactly what's going on, because
    they don't like what you're saying in the United States--in the
    United States. A United States citizen's family is being
    detained, harassed, and harmed in another country as an effort
    to silence you.
        And it is a testament to your bravery and courage that you
    have not been silenced and that you appear here today. I wonder
    how many have been silenced, and how many have chosen not to
    speak. And who can blame them? Who wants to put their family
    through this?
        You don't have to name names, but I'm interested in you
    sharing with us for the record whether, in fact, your story is
    an isolated one, or are there, in fact, more people who find
    themselves in the circumstances you are in. Again, I will leave
    it up to them to identify who they are and so forth, but is
    yours the only story, or are other people going through the
    exact same thing you are facing right now, other U.S. citizens?
        Ms. Hoja. Of course, there are--the Chinese government
    right now puts people in reeducation camps who have a friend or
    family members outside of China. They feel they will influence
    them. That is why. I don't know the number, but I believe
    everyone, every Uyghur has somebody in the family or friends in
    the camps right now. You can ask any Uyghur, any, including my
    five other colleagues in our office.
        And Rebiya Kadeer is here. Her sons, daughters, even
    grandchildren are locked up. She doesn't know where they are,
    how they are. And we recently confirmed Dolkan Isa's mother
    passed away in the reeducation camps.
        So I wonder what evidence we have to prove again and again.
    So we've been trying to cover this darkness, the issues, for
    more than one year because the Chinese government, this Chen
    Quanguo, is using this policy harshly from the beginning of
    last year. But we have been--for example, for 17 years, I've
    been releasing every day, similar situations, similar human
    rights issues, abuses by the Chinese, but unfortunately, we are
    the only source. Radio Free Asia is the only voice to talk
    about ourselves. So is that enough? We don't know--because I'm
    still here. I'm raising my voice because we don't have a
    choice. We don't have any other people to talk. So we are the
    hope. So I have to stand up. I cannot give up.
        Thank you, Chairman.
        Chairman Rubio. I ask you this, and I don't know if you
    even know the answer. You may not, and it does not mean there
    are not any people in these circumstances, but putting
    ourselves in that position, I think few people would have the
    courage that you have exhibited and the willingness to continue
    to speak, knowing the consequences of it.
        Are you aware of or do you fear, do you have any sense or
    any reason to believe that there are those who have chosen--no
    one blames them for it--who have chosen to stop speaking up for
    purposes of avoiding what's happening to you?
        Ms. Hoja. Of course, like when I heard my brother was
    detained, I chose to not speak up, too, because my mother asked
    me--she said, Please, I already lost you. I do not want to lose
    my son, too. Because I have been, and we have been, my family
    could not unite in 17 years. I believe other Uyghurs have
    similar situations--somebody is locked up in the jail, or
    detained, or in reeducation camps. We don't want to put them in
    further danger because of our acts or any word against China.
        Chairman Rubio. In your time talking about these issues,
    highlighting them globally here in the United States, have you
    ever felt like media outlets, individuals, companies, whoever,
    have chosen to not speak about your cause for fear of the
    impact it might have on their ability to cover events in China
    or their ability to do business in China? In essence, they may
    not have relatives, but they may have other interests in China
    that they are afraid there will be retribution against them as
    a result, and therefore, they do not really want to get
    involved in your case.
        And listen, this could extend from a political figure who
    doesn't want to touch it because they have a company in their
    home state who does a lot of business. It could be businesses.
    It could be media outlets who have a bureau and don't want to
    lose access to a fast-growing and important country. I don't
    know if at any point you've felt that there are those who have
    been complicit because of their own interests separate from
    having family.
        You don't have to tell us who they are unless you want to.
    But I'm just curious whether that extends beyond simply those
    who have family members.
        Ms. Hoja. Yes, I know. If you want to interview someone who
    is involved in human rights issues, or other issues they are
    doing there, like investigations--some of them will say, Excuse
    me, right now I cannot speak. Those kinds of reactions we are
    facing all of the time. But I do not know the exact company or
    the person. Maybe our colleagues can follow up that question.
        Chairman Rubio. And again, we would be interested in that.
    It can be done confidentially if you choose for us not to share
    it. But I think it's part of the broader long arm of China,
    which I think goes well beyond--I mean, we have seen it at
    universities. There are universities in this country that will
    not provide you, sadly, a forum to say what you've just said
    because they're going to lose their Confucius Institute
    funding, or they're going to lose their campus in mainland
    China. And so they decide----
        Ms. Hoja. Even some Uyghur researchers in other countries,
    they have an opportunity to speak. They have freedom, but they
    are afraid, too.
        Chairman Rubio. All right.
        Ms. Batke and Professor Thum, I wanted to focus on two
    things. On our relationship with China, a lot has been said
    about what we can do. How can we influence behavior?
        It has been my experience that there are two things they
    seem to respond to and only two things. Number one is sort of
    sustained and committed pressure across the entire
    relationship, meaning the entire--you cannot just carve out
    pieces of it and say we're going to deal with trade here but
    human rights over here. We're going to deal with military
    affairs here but economics over here.
        They most certainly pressure--the strategy China seems to
    follow is not one of sweeping change, although when they see an
    opportunity, they seize it. It seems to be one of slow, steady,
    but consistent escalation. The South China Sea is an example.
    Every time, they push a little bit further, creating a new
    normal every step of the way. And they pressure across the
    board--so today is very enlightening.
        The administration had an opportunity to sanction ZTE. They
    did, basically issuing a death penalty--allowed them to come
    back into business by allowing them to buy chips from Qualcomm.
    Qualcomm had a pending deal in China, and the response of the
    Chinese after the ZTE thing got finalized is to continue to
    slow-dance Qualcomm, an American company, until the point where
    they've abandoned their hopes of doing business in China.
    Basically, they continue to sustain their pressure while we
    have given concessions on some things. I hope that was
    enlightening for the administration. I know it's unrelated
    directly to this topic.
        But the first is sustained and committed pressure across
    the relationship, and the second is something that Ms. Batke
    pointed out, and that is invoking international partners. They
    want to be--one of the goals of the Chinese Communist Party in
    the 21st century is to remake the global order to benefit them,
    to replace the Western global order that was established after
    the Second World War, with one that has their imprint. And part
    of that is the perception and the receptivity that people may
    have to that, based on their perceptions of China.
        And so if their perception of the Chinese Communist Party
    is that it's a country with a lot of money, a non-interference
    policy, that is there to help you build things and move ahead
    without having to put up with some of the restrictions that
    American aid or Western aid comes with . . . that makes them
    appear benevolent and peaceful and in many cases continues the
    whole ``bide your time and hide your power'' strategy that they
    followed for a very long time.
        If the perception of them is that they do bad deals, they
    take advantage of their partners and they violate people's
    rights . . . if it's a negative perception about the things
    they do, they're very sensitive to that because it goes right
    to the heart of their ability to remake the geopolitical
    system. And that's why they are so fearful of sustained--of our
    ability to invoke global partnerships to confront them and why
    it's important that we continue to do so. It's a little hard to
    do when you are fighting with some of the people that might
    join us in that, on trade, but hopefully that will be resolved
    so that we can do that.
        So here are my two questions. The first is, Why is it so
    important? I know why it was important in the context of the
    Cold War and the Soviet Union--that in every instance virtually
    every American President, in addition to raising Soviet
    expansionism and nuclear weapons threats, always raised the
    cause of human rights.
        If I were standing here today and said, Look, China is too
    powerful . . . they're too rich. We've got to do business with
    them. We can't afford to mess all of that up by raising these
    human rights issues--I've already outlined why I think it's
    important, and that is to sustain pressure across the
    relationship. But in your view, beyond the moralistic and
    humanitarian rationale, from a geopolitical rationale, why is
    it important that the United States, in every instance, raise
    these issues in every forum in which we engage them and--that's
    question 1. 1(A) is, Why is it important that it be public?
    Because the other thing we get is, We're going to raise it with
    them, but in private, because they don't like to lose face.
    They don't want to be embarrassed. So why is it important that
    we raise it geopolitically, just from sheer national interest,
    and why is it important that some of that or a lot of it be
    done publicly as opposed to in private one-on-one meetings? If
    you could both comment on that.
        Mr. Thum. I think, as Jessica Batke pointed out, when
    things are not raised repeatedly, there is a reset of the norm.
    And you have to claw back that little part of the discourse to
    get it back on the table. And then that comes at a cost.
        So I agree that it's important to raise this at every
    moment. And there actually is a legislative opportunity here.
    There's a law on the books from the late 90s that says that
    Tibet has to be raised in certain circumstances, and it would
    be very valuable, I think, to add the Xinjiang issue to that
    piece of legislation. I would add, though, that it's quite
    dangerous to link this Uyghur and Xinjiang issue to
    geopolitics. I heard the words ``blue seas'' earlier, which
    invokes this kind of balance where if we intervene in Xinjiang,
    then that affects this global military strategic situation.
    That plays in very neatly to the Chinese Communist Party's
    story about why they are engaged in this kind of activity and
    why they don't have to listen when people in the rest of the
    world say that this violates international norms.
        So I would hope we----
        Chairman Rubio. ``Story'' meaning that the West is trying
    to constrain and contain them from their rise?
        Mr. Thum. The West is trying to constrain and contain, and
    even that the West might have some sort of secret joy when
    there's unrest or trouble in Xinjiang and that this can be used
    as a pressure point on China in our geopolitical rivalry. So if
    we don't separate those concerns, we're going to have a great
    deal of trouble getting all of our international partners on
    board in undermining the CCP's narrative on why this is
    happening. And I'll also say just briefly----
        Chairman Rubio. I don't think you are saying it shouldn't
    be raised in every forum, but I take what you're saying as, it
    should be its own separate category within the broader
    engagement, meaning you don't trade human rights for a better
    trade deal.
        Mr. Thum. That's--yes, sure. I would accept that. I would
    also say that we are thinking somewhat small here. Senator King
    raised the long-standing criticism of America's activities in
    regard to 1930s Germany. I would remind everyone that that
    supposedly insufficient reaction included Roosevelt recalling
    our Ambassador from Berlin. We are behind the curve on that
    reaction which is considered historically now to be
    insufficient.
        Dr. Batke raised the issue of terminology and pointed out
    that these nightmare words of the 20th century--concentration
    camp, apartheid, gulag, all started out their careers as
    euphemisms that were designed to hide the terrors. That's the
    point we are at now. But one day Xinjiang's reeducation camps,
    under one name or another, are going to join that list of
    widely recognized atrocities. And I think we have a
    responsibility to act boldly to address that issue.
        Ms. Batke. I would second everything Dr. Thum just said. In
    terms of why it is important to keep bringing it up all the
    time, beyond what he just said, there's this issue of the
    exporting of Chinese norms--as you were talking about--across
    the world. And I think that one thing that is important to
    remind other people is China touts itself as this country that
    does not interfere in the internal affairs of another.
        But beyond the moral imperative of bringing this up, it's
    important to remember that when we don't, we are allowing them
    to interfere in our internal affairs and decide how we decide
    to bring up and frame things. And that's a point that I think
    can be brought up again to other countries in terms of why they
    should also be speaking up, because those norms are also being
    reset and exported to those countries.
        In terms of why it's important to keep these things public,
    cordoning off these conversations into only private discussions
    allows them to confine that discussion and allows them to walk
    away from things without any sense of shame or embarrassment.
    International pressure is effective. And I would point to the
    case of Liu Xia who was just recently released from house
    detention in Beijing and allowed to go to Germany. And that was
    a two-pronged effort. That was a lot of quiet diplomacy behind
    the scenes but also a sustained and public campaign keeping her
    case in the public eye.
        Chairman Rubio. And just on the public front versus
    private, on an individual basis, if there is an individual case
    somewhere in the world and progress can be made because there's
    some internal political reason why they've got to be able to
    save face--that's one thing. But we are talking about
    detention, and frankly in my view, the torture, humiliation,
    and abuse of hundreds of thousands of people--more, actually.
        And that's why--there is not one individual that they could
    somehow just--this is one person. And I am not downplaying that
    one particular case, but that's what we do on this Commission.
    It's overwhelming. We could--volumes of names if that's what we
    choose to do in that regard.
        I do want to ask both of you_the second part about invoking
    international partners to confront it. It is my view that if
    something even a quarter as bad as this were occurring in
    virtually any Western democracy now or various other countries
    around the planet, it would not just get more media coverage,
    but it would be widely condemned in every international forum.
    There would be widespread action against it. I mean, it would
    be intolerable.
        Why isn't this occurring in the same way? What have they
    done or what is happening that has prevented this from reaching
    that level of international attention? I suspect I know the
    answer, but I would love to see if you agree. So I'm not going
    to tell you my answer until you tell me yours.
        Ms. Batke. Sure. I would say, quite baldly, money talks.
    China is very effective at going to countries one-on-one and
    making clear that they are happy to use their economic leverage
    as necessary to get their silence. I think this is really clear
    in the case of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. They've
    only issued two statements about what's happening in Xinjiang:
    one right after the Urumqi riots in 2009, and one in 2015. But
    they said nothing since all of this has been happening in the
    last year. I strongly suspect that that has to do with economic
    concerns on their part.
        Mr. Thum. Yes, I don't have much to add to that. I think
    you're right. This would be roundly condemned if it happened
    virtually anywhere else. It would be a major news item. And I
    agree that this is about money and China's economic clout. It's
    not helped by major powers like the U.S. retreating from human
    rights concerns and putting economic concerns first. But yes,
    that's absolutely what it is.
        Chairman Rubio. It strikes me--and that's my assessment as
    well. I mean, that is how I feel as well, and it is not--
    obviously, money does talk, and Chinese investment abroad isn't
    simply into roads and bridges. I mean, they fund political
    parties. They fund individuals. There are all sorts of things
    that come about as a result of this, and that leverage is one
    they made very clear.
        We've also seen them, for example, cut off tourism to South
    Korea, allow agricultural products from the Philippines to rot
    at the port, deny rare earth minerals to Japan--all in
    retribution for decisions that were made in those countries.
        So taking that as a factor, you basically testified here
    today that the reason why certain countries cannot internally
    make a political decision to confront this in international
    forums is because the Chinese are using leverage. We've heard
    how they go after the family members of United States citizens
    as leverage to try to silence criticism of their practices.
        And I think that's a pretty stark example of how
    hypocritical they are when they talk about their policy of
    noninterference when they are directly interfering in the
    affairs of other countries, because they are interfering with
    citizens of other countries by going after their families. They
    are interfering with their political leaders by threatening to
    cut them off from essential aid and help. They are shaping and
    interfering quite directly. So the hypocrisy of that is
    extraordinary.
        I have one more question. We do need to wrap up.
        Dr. Batke, I wanted to ask you about the testimony that you
    gave regarding the Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo and
    his role within the leadership and the role that he plays in
    the repressive measures. You pointed to him as sort of the one
    individual that we should be looking at and--in your view, what
    would be the psychological--we would have to view what the
    economic impact of it is and the like. But you have talked
    about it and you have described it as a pretty significant
    escalatory measure, one that would get attention because for
    the first time you are not going after a country or even a
    party, but a specific individual.
        I know I am asking you to speculate, but what impact do you
    think that would have internally among them, knowing now that,
    if they are participants in this sort of activity, they are now
    individually going to be named internationally as complicit in
    these activities?
        Ms. Batke. You're right. I cannot speculate about what's
    going on in their heads directly. I don't think that it would
    necessarily stop people from choosing to participate. And as
    much as we talk about repression, I think also there's a lot to
    be said about the choices of people in government in terms of
    whether they feel like they can completely step back from what
    they've been asked to do. So I don't know that it would prevent
    other young people from joining the government and choosing to
    do this. But I do think it would be an incredibly powerful
    symbolic step, particularly because Chen Quanguo is so high up
    in the Chinese Communist Party, rather than going after someone
    who is very low level, running maybe a camp or something.
    Although I think we should name and shame those people as well.
    This actually would show that the U.S. Government is
    unequivocally condemning these camps and is willing to raise it
    to a very high political level to do it.
        Chairman Rubio. My last two questions, and I'll be brief.
        On the first--you were here for the first panel. You saw
    the back and forth with the Commerce Department--and again, I'm
    paraphrasing. But what I took from it is two things. Number one
    is our laws may potentially need to be updated to include new
    things, such as these repressive tools. I mean these tools that
    did not exist before.
        But the other thing I took from it is we have to make--I am
    paraphrasing, but the way I took it was, we look at this
    product, the DNA sequencer. They're easy to do. They're not
    really that complex, although if there was not something unique
    about them, they wouldn't have to buy them from this company in
    Massachusetts. But nonetheless, they're not that advanced.
    China makes them. Plenty of other countries make them. They can
    find them anywhere in the world anyway. And they have a
    legitimate purpose.
        If we deny it, they're still going to keep doing what
    they're doing. The only consequence will be that some American
    company will not be able to make money off of it. So since
    they're going to do it anyway, we might as well continue to
    make a profit.
        In addition to the immorality of that and the notion about
    whether we want to be complicit in it, isn't that exactly what
    they're counting on, the idea that they know that one of the
    most powerful constituencies in America is business interests
    who, frankly, don't feel like they have a human rights
    obligation. They feel like they have a fiduciary obligation to
    their owners or shareholders to return a profit. And as a
    result, for them, they bring pressure to bear on the United
    States.
        I see this in multiple realms, by the way, not just with
    regard to China. But one of the most consistent arguments you
    always get is of the business community coming back and saying,
    you're hurting us. We have a good thing going, and this huge
    market, and if you do this, you are going to hurt an American
    company. The Chinese government clearly understands that
    leverage point and they use it. Do they not?
        Ms. Batke. Yes.
        Chairman Rubio. Does anyone disagree with that?
        Mr. Thum. I agree with that, and the conclusion that leads
    me to is that whatever action the U.S. Government takes is
    going to come at a cost. It's going to come at a cost to
    American citizens, and it's going to come at a cost to the
    options on the table for the U.S. Government. This is about
    political will.
        Chairman Rubio. All right. My final question is, if you're
    sitting in the Chinese Communist Party headquarters today and
    you're reviewing this policy, you probably aren't even aware
    that we are having this hearing, but the people who are in the
    embassy here are, and they are annoyed by it. They don't like
    this commission. They most certainly don't like me, and they
    get irritated when these things come up. But by and large, the
    world will go on, and tomorrow morning this is not going to
    lead headlines here, or anywhere, for that matter. The work
    continues. There are people that are certainly being
    intimidated by it.
        In essence, they're sitting there thinking to themselves,
    this stuff is working. No one's condemning us internationally.
    We're continuing to do what we're doing. We're getting better
    at it every single day. As time goes on, it'll get easier as
    young people get disconnected from their heritage and their
    families.
        Yes, they will have some commission hearings and a couple
    of senators and congressmen will write letters. And maybe they
    will cut us off from a DNA sequencer one day, and maybe a
    couple of our individuals might get sanctioned, but that's a
    small price to pay for the big picture.
        It's working. That's the saddest part of all. This strategy
    they are carrying out is working. That would be their view. And
    unless we change that dynamic or at least raise the price for
    it, this will continue. It will grow. It will become more
    widespread. In essence, it'll become the new normal. It will
    become baked in to the reality.
        Am I wrong in that horrible assessment?
        Mr. Thum. I think you're right about the attitude that they
    have toward this. And you're right about the threat that this
    becomes baked in to a larger order. We see, for example, some
    of these technologies used in Xinjiang being exported to South
    America. But I don't think this is a hopeless cause because
    China's expanding influence around the world depends a great
    deal on its reputation. For that reason, its leaders are very
    sensitive about its global reputation.
        So the more that we can do publicly, and in particular, in
    partnership with other countries around the world, to expose
    what's going on and to shame the Chinese state for engaging in
    this kind of behavior, the greater the cost will be. I think
    it's a mistake to consider decision making at that level as
    something where they're certain about what they are doing. They
    see this as a balance of costs and benefits. And if we can add
    to the cost side, we may very well be able to shape the
    situation.
        Chairman Rubio. And I don't disagree with your assessment
    that this is not a hopeless cause. In fact, I only think it
    becomes a hopeless cause if we accept it as a fact that we have
    to deal with.
        I raise the fact that it is working for the following
    reason, and that is, we can have a lot of commission meetings.
    We're going to issue our report, we're going to file bills,
    we're going to write letters, we're going to give speeches, and
    we are going to highlight this as much as we can. But this
    needs to be prioritized at the highest levels of our engagement
    both with China and the international community.
        Congress is an important part of it, and we can even be the
    catalyst for it. But there is no replacing executive-level
    attention to this as part of the overall framework of our
    interaction with the international community and with China.
    And that is the only way that ultimately, we are going to see
    that cost-benefit analysis adjusted.
        Congress can be a catalyst for it. Individual senators and
    congressmen can be a catalyst for it, but the execution of it
    will require us to have sustained--across both parties, across
    a sustained period of time, across multiple presidential
    administrations--attention to this. This cannot be a one-off
    issue. And that's the only way to keep it from becoming
    hopeless. That's why I asked that, because if we want some
    sense of urgency, we shouldn't think that simply shining a
    light on it alone is going to change that dynamic.
        We need the top people in our government not just to be
    aware of this but to be outraged by it, and to embrace it as
    part of our overall narrative. That's what we're hoping to do.
    And that's what I hope the first panel took back.
        So I want to thank you all for being here, particularly
    you, Ms. Hoja. Thank you for being a part of this. I know this
    is an ongoing issue for you. After we leave this hearing here
    today, you live with this reality. But I thank you for your
    courage, your bravery, and your willingness to stand here today
    and provide that testimony. Thank you all for being a part of
    it. I know it takes time away from your other endeavors to be a
    part of this.
        The record on this hearing will remain open for 48 hours in
    case some of you would like to submit additional information
    for the record so it can be a part of our record and maybe even
    make it into our report before we issue it in October. And
    there may be some follow-up questions from Members. If you have
    time to answer, we'd love to have that.
        With that, the hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:15 p.m. the hearing was concluded.]

    =======================================================================

                                A P P E N D I X

    =======================================================================

                              Prepared Statements

                                  ----------

                  Prepared Statement of Anthony Christino III

        Thank you Chairman Rubio, Chairman Smith, and Members of the
    Congressional-Executive Commission on China for convening this hearing
    today on this important topic. Today I will be discussing the role of
    the Bureau of Industry and Security in regard to export license
    requirements for China.
        Under the Export Administration Regulations (the EAR), a Bureau of
    Industry and Security (BIS) license is required for the export or
    reexport of most items on the Commerce Control List (CCL) to China.
    Items on the CCL are identified by their individually assigned Export
    Control Classification Number according to their reasons for control.
    The CCL is comprised of items controlled by the multilateral export
    control regimes (Wassenaar Arrangement, Missile Technology Control
    Regime, Australia Group, and Nuclear Suppliers Group) as well as items
    controlled unilaterally for foreign policy reasons.
        In support of U.S. foreign policy to promote the observance of
    human rights throughout the world, the United States unilaterally
    controls items on the CCL for crime-control reasons, as required by
    Section 6(n) of the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended \1\
    (the EAA). As set forth in the EAR, the U.S. Government requires a
    license to export most crime-control and detection instruments,
    equipment, related technology, and software to all destinations other
    than Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, and members of the North
    Atlantic Treaty Organization. Additionally, a license is required to
    export certain crime-control items, including restraint-type devices
    (such as handcuffs) and discharge-type arms (such as stun guns), to all
    destinations except Canada.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ 50 U.S.C. Sec. Sec.  4601-4623 (Supp. III 2015).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The EAR imposes some limited controls on items not on the CCL.
    Items subject to Commerce licensing jurisdiction under the EAR but not
    specifically identified on the CCL are designated EAR99. Such items
    generally do not require a license for export or reexport to China
    unless destined for certain WMD-related end uses or end users, or
    unless the items are part of a transaction involving a restricted party
    identified on one of several lists of sanctioned or restricted entities
    maintained by agencies of the U.S. Government, including BIS, the
    Department of State, and the Department of the Treasury.
        Items controlled for crime-control reasons are added to or removed
    from the CCL based upon continuous review of the merits of maintaining
    the controls and the effectiveness of the controls. Section 6 of the
    EAA prohibits the imposition of foreign policy controls, including on
    crime-control items, unless certain determinations are made and certain
    factors reported to Congress, such as determinations that the controls
    are likely to achieve the intended foreign policy objective,
    descriptions of consultation efforts with industry and other supplier
    countries, determinations related to the economic impact on U.S.
    industry and efforts to achieve the purpose of the controls through
    alternative means, descriptions of foreign availability, and
    determinations regarding the ability to effectively enforce the
    controls.
                     crime control licensing review policy
        The U.S. Government considers applications to export or reexport
    most crime-control items favorably, on a case-by-case basis, unless
    there is civil disorder in the country or the sale involves a region of
    concern, or there is evidence that the government may have violated
    human rights. The purpose of these controls is to deter the development
    of a consistent pattern of human rights abuse, distance the United
    States from such abuse, and avoid contributing to civil disorder in a
    country or region. The U.S. Government maintains a general policy of
    denial for specially designed implements of torture, regardless of the
    intended destination.
        Applications to export crime-control items to countries that are
    not otherwise subject to sanctions or comprehensive embargoes, but that
    are identified by the Department of State as human rights violators,
    receive additional scrutiny in the license review process. The
    Department of State reviews all license applications for these
    countries on a case-by-case basis and makes recommendations to
    Commerce.
       specific licensing review policy for china for crime-control items
        Following the 1989 military assault on demonstrators by the Chinese
    government in Tiananmen Square, the U.S. Government imposed constraints
    on the export to China of crime-control and detection instruments and
    equipment on the CCL under Section 902(a)(4) of the Foreign Relations
    Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1990 and 1991, Public Law 101-246.
        In fiscal year 2017, the Department of Commerce approved 25
    licenses to China of crime-control items, 21 of which were for the
    return of defective rifle scopes and one license for the return of
    defective shotguns to their original Chinese manufacturers for refund
    or replacement, and three were for biometric identification equipment
    for a third country's visa system operating at its own diplomatic
    facilities in China. There were nine denials, including applications
    for cattle prods and stun guns, optical sighting devices, pepper spray,
    fingerprint powder, dyes and inks, and voiceprint software, to Chinese
    security agencies, manufacturing and development firms, and resellers.
        Thank you again for the opportunity to testify here today. I will
    be happy to take your questions.

                                     ______

                     Prepared Statement of Kelley E. Currie

        Thank you, Chairman Rubio, Chairman Smith and other members of the
    Commission for convening this important hearing today. I am pleased to
    be able to appear before the Commission on behalf of the U.S. Mission
    to the United Nations and discuss our concerns regarding the growing
    human rights crisis in Xinjiang, with a particular focus on how this
    crisis is being addressed--or not--at the United Nations, including
    through its various human rights mechanisms and deliberative bodies. I
    would like to submit my full remarks for the record.
        As Secretary Pompeo noted yesterday in his op-ed welcoming the
    first ever U.S.-sponsored Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, the
    State Department recently hosted six journalists from Radio Free Asia's
    Uyghur Service to hear directly from them about the situation on the
    ground in Xinjiang. What RFA, as well as the Uyghur Service at VOA,
    have documented over the past year is truly disturbing. Their reporting
    indicates that Chinese authorities are likely detaining hundreds of
    thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in what can only be
    described as internment camps across Xinjiang. There, they are
    subjected to ``political reeducation'' designed to undermine their
    distinct Uyghur identity. One of these journalists, Gulchehra Hoja,
    will testify in the next panel, and will undoubtedly tell you about how
    23 of her family members--twenty-three--have been detained and how,
    since their detention, the authorities have provided little to no
    information about her family's well-being.
        According to a growing number of credible reports by media and
    human rights organizations, a version of Gulchehra's story is becoming
    the norm for nearly every Uyghur living outside China who has family
    still in Xinjiang. In fact, having a family member overseas appears to
    be a key trigger for increased scrutiny for Uyghurs living in Xinjiang.
    Likewise, having studied, traveled or worked overseas, appearing to be
    an observant Muslim, and having an above average education also seem to
    be among the reasons that certain individuals are subject to intensive
    scrutiny by the authorities, including detention in the camps. Think
    about that: over the past year, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding
    Uyghur citizens of China--men, women, and even children--have
    disappeared into state custody, with barely any notice from the
    international community. That is why this hearing is so timely and
    important.
        The United States is deeply troubled by the Chinese government's
    worsening crackdown on Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims in China's
    Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Since April 2017 the Xi Jinping
    leadership, under the guise of fighting ``terrorism,'' ``secession,''
    and ``religious extremism,'' has greatly intensified the Chinese
    Communist Party's long-standing repressive policies against mainstream,
    non-violent Muslim cultural and religious practices in Xinjiang. The
    stated goal of the current campaign is to ``sinicize religion'' and
    ``adapt religion to a socialist society,'' suggesting that Beijing
    wagers that it now possesses the political, diplomatic, and
    technological capabilities to transform religion and ethnicity in
    Chinese society in a way that its predecessors never could, even during
    the peak horrors of the Cultural Revolution and other heinous Maoist
    campaigns intended to remake Chinese society.
        The scope of this campaign is truly breathtaking: authorities now
    prohibit ``abnormal'' beards and the wearing of veils in public, and
    classify refusal to watch state television, refusal to wear shorts,
    abstention from alcohol and tobacco, refusal to eat pork, fasting
    during the holy month of Ramadan, or practicing traditional funeral
    rituals, as potential signs that individuals harbor extreme religious
    views. Chinese authorities have banned parents from giving their
    children a number of traditional Islamic names, including ``Muhammad,''
    ``Islam,'' ``Fatima,'' and ``Aisha,'' and have reportedly required
    children under age 16 who have Islamic names to change them. Of
    particular concern, since 2015 Chinese authorities have increasingly
    criminalized or punished the teaching of Islam to young people--even by
    their parents--adopting at least six laws or regulations which put
    parents and religious educators at legal risk for promoting non-violent
    Muslim scripture, rituals, and clothing to children. Chinese
    authorities also continue to crack down in particular on the use of
    Uyghur and other minority languages at universities and in classroom
    instruction.
        Failing to comply with these restrictions, or activities such as
    communicating with relatives abroad and studying in foreign countries,
    has reportedly led to the detention of a large number of Uyghurs and
    other Muslims, including families and children, in facilities for
    purported ``patriotic reeducation.'' Detainees are required to learn
    the Chinese language, recite Chinese and Xinjiang laws and policies,
    watch pro-government propaganda videos, express their gratitude to the
    Communist Party and General Secretary Xi Jinping, and renounce their
    ethnic identities, religious beliefs, and mainstream cultural and
    religious practices. Detainees are granted no due process or contact
    with their families, and periods of detention have ranged from several
    months to indefinite detention in many cases. A wide array of evidence
    indicates that the number of individuals detained in such reeducation
    centers since April 2017 numbers at least in the hundreds of thousands,
    and possibly millions. There are even disturbing reports that young
    children have been sent to state-run orphanages if even one of their
    parents is detained in the internment camps. Notable detainees
    reportedly include well-known Uyghur athletes, prominent
    businesspersons, scholars, and students. There have been credible
    reports of at least two dozen deaths in these camps, including senior
    citizens who were incarcerated, including the widely revered 82-year-
    old Uyghur religious scholar Muhammed Salih Hajim. We call on China to
    end these counterproductive policies and free all those arbitrarily
    detained.
        To guarantee that this suppression continues beyond the internment
    camps into the daily lives of all Uyghurs, Chinese authorities have
    constructed a highly intrusive, high-tech surveillance system in
    Xinjiang, which many experts fear will be extended throughout China.
    This system includes thousands of surveillance cameras, including in
    mosques; facial recognition software; obligatory content-monitoring
    apps on smartphones and GPS devices on cars; widespread new police
    outposts with tens of thousands of newly hired police, and even Party
    personnel embedded in people's homes; and compulsory collection of vast
    biometric datasets on ethnic and religious minorities throughout the
    region, including DNA and blood samples, 3D photos, iris scans, and
    voiceprints. Human Rights Watch has documented that many of these DNA
    samples were collected deceptively as part of what regional officials
    called a Xinjiang-wide ``health'' campaign. This surveillance system
    has spurred security experts and Xinjiang specialists to label it one
    of the world's most intrusive police states.
        As with many things related to China's human rights abuses, the
    repression does not stop at the Chinese border. The detention and
    persecution of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang has
    compelled them to stop communicating with their family and friends
    based abroad, including in the United States, for fear of retribution
    by authorities. We have received reports that U.S. lawful permanent
    residents and family members of U.S. citizens have been detained in
    these detention centers for indefinite periods. We have also received
    reports that U.S. citizens have been detained and interrogated while
    visiting Xinjiang. In addition to the cases of the RFA journalists
    mentioned earlier, we note that more than thirty relatives of Ms.
    Rebiya Kadeer have been disappeared or detained. This treatment of U.S.
    citizens, U.S. LPRs, and their family members is unacceptable, and we
    unequivocally condemn these actions by the Chinese government. China
    must provide information about the locations and medical condition of
    those detained and immediately release them if there is no evidence of
    actual criminal activity. We also have demanded that, at a minimum,
    China should meet its obligations under international law to provide
    consular access, not to mention minimum standards of due process, to
    those it has detained.
        We also are concerned by reports of Chinese authorities harassing
    Uyghurs abroad in order to compel them to act as informants against
    other Uyghurs, return to Xinjiang or remain silent about the situation
    there, sometimes by detaining their family members. This includes
    harassment of American citizens, LPRs, and individuals legally residing
    in the United States. China has applied similar pressure to dual
    nationals or family members of citizens in other countries. Dating back
    to at least 2003, China has pressured other countries to forcibly
    return Uyghurs, at times claiming that individuals are members of
    ``extremist groups'' without credible evidence. China has also abused
    the INTERPOL Red Notice system, inappropriately placing international
    security travel notices on religious and political dissidents. We
    applaud governments that have resisted Chinese pressure and upheld
    their commitments to international human rights.
        What is happening in Xinjiang is not just a human rights matter; it
    is also a security issue. China, like every other country, has the
    right to protect its security. But for these measures against violent
    extremism to be effective, they must promote good governance,
    inclusion, and respect for the rights of its minority citizens.
    However, draconian, indiscriminate, and disproportionate controls on
    ethnic minorities' expressions of their cultural and religious
    identities have the potential to incite radicalization and violence.
    Chinese authorities appear to be targeting law-abiding Uyghurs--
    including non-violent activists and advocates for human rights--as
    terrorist threats on the basis of their political, cultural, and
    religious beliefs and practices, even if they do not advocate violence.
        Given the severity of this crisis, it is worth asking: why haven't
    the pre-eminent human rights bodies of the United Nations taken up this
    issue, exposed it, and demanded changes in China's policies? Part of
    the answer certainly lies with China's membership on the UN's Human
    Rights Council, its role as a permanent member of the Security Council,
    and its ability to continue to portray itself as a developing country
    from the ``Global South'' in alignment with the Group of 77. From its
    perch on the HRC, China is able to effectively block any action on its
    appalling human rights record in Xinjiang, as well as scrutiny of the
    broader human rights crackdown under way in China. Likewise, by
    severely limiting access for special rapporteurs, human rights experts
    and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Chinese
    limit the discourse around these abuses. As a veto-wielding member of
    the Security Council, China effectively shuts down not only any
    discussion of its human rights abuses, but uses its position to shield
    other bad actors from criticism and generally block efforts to raise
    human rights issues in the Council. In doing so, China gains favor with
    other countries that have poor human rights records--of which there
    remain far too many in the UN--and these help block criticism of China
    in the General Assembly and other forums.
        Perhaps more disturbing than these defensive strategies, however,
    is China's ongoing, comprehensive effort to re-write the entire
    normative framework of international human rights in a manner that is
    more aligned with its authoritarian political system and the interests
    of the Chinese Communist Party. This effort includes an emphasis on the
    ``right to development'' versus fundamental civil and political rights,
    and the promotion of ``win-win'' cooperation on human rights that
    privileges the interests of governments over their basic obligation to
    respect inherent human rights that attach at the individual level. A
    key aspect of this effort is China's ability to obfuscate its
    intentions behind talk of ``mutually beneficial cooperation'' and a
    ``shared future of all humanity'' that appeals to other governments who
    dislike being criticized for human rights violations. The Chinese took
    a major step forward at the March 2018 session of the UN Human Rights
    Council, when the Council passed a Chinese resolution promoting ``win-
    win cooperation'' on human rights. The United States was the only vote
    against the resolution. At the same session, I listened in horror as
    the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights praised the good intentions
    he saw behind Xi Jinping's ``win-win'' slogans, seemingly oblivious to
    the threat they pose to the very notion of respect for individual human
    rights. Instead, he offered only a wan concern about the ``mismatch''
    between the aspirations of ``win-win'' and its implementation on the
    ground--as if they were not fruit of the same poisonous tree. In the
    same speech, Prince Zeid expressed strong concerns about ``hate
    speech'' and other perceived human rights abuses in the U.S. It was
    nothing short of surreal.
        In April, I had the opportunity to hear directly about the
    situation in Xinjiang from Mr. Dolkan Isa, who is the president of the
    World Uyghur Congress. He was in New York to attend the annual meeting
    of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples. Mr. Isa is a quiet and
    diligent person, now a naturalized German citizen, who carefully and
    deliberately explains the repression that his community in Xinjiang is
    experiencing--despite the fact that his own family has been targeted by
    the authorities and he has essentially lost communication with them. We
    had our discussion about this situation while we sat in a small lounge
    outside the UN Security Council. The fact that Mr. Isa was even able to
    sit in that lounge, inside the walls of the UN, was a minor miracle
    given the extent to which Chinese authorities have gone to block him
    from entering the premises over the years. In April 2017, while
    attempting to attend the same Forum as a member of the Unrepresented
    Nations and Peoples Organization delegation, Mr. Isa was forcibly
    removed from the UN premises after representatives of the Chinese
    mission to the UN alleged he was a security threat. The Chinese
    authorities provided no evidence to back up their claims but UN
    security removed Mr. Isa nonetheless. This shocking behavior was
    subsequently documented in a report on reprisals against human rights
    activists by the UN Secretary General. This report, which criticized
    the manner in which UN security responded and called for changes to the
    way the UN handled such allegations, was released one month before the
    2018 Indigenous Peoples Forum. Yet the Chinese mission in New York
    attempted again this year to block Mr. Isa from participating as an NGO
    delegate, accusing him of involvement in terrorist financing and
    recruitment, while again providing no evidence. After a lengthy delay
    and several interventions from the U.S. and German missions on Mr.
    Isa's behalf, he was finally allowed to participate on the final day of
    the Forum.
        Having been thwarted in their efforts to block Mr. Isa's
    participation, the Chinese delegation then went after the German NGO
    that had sponsored his participation--the Society for Threatened
    Peoples. They used their position as a member of the UN committee that
    accredits civil society participation to attempt to revoke the
    Society's consultative status. In their remarks to the Committee, the
    Chinese referred to Mr. Isa as a terrorist and a separatist who
    threatened Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. Let that sink
    in for a moment--China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council,
    a nuclear power with one of the biggest armies in the world--is
    threatened by a mild-mannered German citizen who talks about China's
    treatment of the Uyghur people.
        Once again, the U.S. and German missions pushed back and we
    ultimately overcame Chinese efforts to intimidate the NGO. Afterwards,
    several NY-based colleagues expressed surprise that the normally
    careful and disciplined Chinese delegation would go to such extreme
    lengths--including a highly public fight with the United States in the
    NGO Committee--to block the participation of a previously little-known
    activist in a relatively obscure UN event. But those who follow human
    rights issues in China were not the least bit surprised to see the
    Chinese attempt to use the NGO Committee or any other part of the UN as
    a tool to carry out reprisals against an individual who has spoken out
    about China's human rights record, in particular China's treatment of
    Uyghur Muslims.
        With China facing both its Universal Periodic Review and a period
    review in the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
    Discrimination later this year, there will be more opportunities to
    call attention to the situation in Xinjiang, as well as the ongoing
    abuses in Tibet and Inner Mongolia and the general crackdown under way
    against human rights defenders, lawyers and other dissidents across
    China. The question is: Will others join us? So far the silence has
    mostly been deafening.
        I want to conclude my remarks by talking about a case that is close
    to my heart: the Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti. Ilham was an economics
    professor at Minzu University who wrote blog posts and articles
    asserting Uyghurs' rights to genuine autonomy under Chinese law, which
    resulted in his arrest and a life sentence in prison in 2014 on charges
    of separatism. He was the kind of moderate voice who advocated for
    improved understanding between Han Chinese and Uyghurs while also
    encouraging the Chinese authorities to respect Uyghurs' linguistic,
    cultural, and religious rights. He was a friend to Chinese human rights
    lawyers, Tibetan writers, and American scholars. His lovely daughter
    Jewher is today a student at Indiana University. He was supposed to
    travel with her and take up a teaching post there, but instead Chinese
    authorities pulled him off a plane and took him to prison. Today, he is
    serving a life sentence for separatism. We remain deeply concerned
    about the ongoing detention of Ilham Tohti, not just because of the
    issues around his arbitrary detention and unfair trial, as well as his
    worsening medical condition as he serves his absurd sentence, but
    because of the broader implications of China's targeting of him and
    moderate voices like him--the very people who could help to build a
    truly multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, stable and prosperous society
    in Xinjiang and throughout China.
        As a small tribute to Ilham and those like him who are suffering
    for trying to improve human rights in Xinjiang and China, I would like
    to read a Chinese poem written in the aftermath of Nobel Peace Prize
    winner Liu Xiaobo's death a little more than one year ago. This poem
    could just as easily apply to Ilham Tohti and the other voices calling
    for moderation, peaceful coexistence and respect for human rights that
    the Chinese government is attempting to silence in Xinjiang:

    [GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T0993.007

        The world should know what is happening in Xinjiang, and USUN is
    committed to working toward that end--to watering the seeds, wherever
    they are. We face an uphill climb to do so at the United Nations, but
    we look forward to working with Congress, our colleagues in the
    administration, and with other countries who are committed to human
    rights, to ensure that China is not able to bury these abuses in the
    ground.

                                     ______

                      Prepared Statement of Gulchehra Hoja

        Mr. Chairman, Mr. Cochairman, and distinguished members of the
    Commission, it's my privilege to participate in today's hearing on a
    topic that deeply affects me personally and professionally as a
    reporter working for an organization with a congressional mission of
    bringing reliable news and information to people in China.
        My name is Gulchehra Hoja, I'm a journalist with Radio Free Asia's
    Uyghur language service, and I'm a U.S. citizen. I grew up in Urumqi,
    the capital of the Uyghur region in China, where I began my career in
    broadcast journalism before coming to the United States in 2001 to work
    for Radio Free Asia (RFA). It was a great sacrifice to leave my
    homeland, where I had enjoyed success as a television journalist and
    where my parents, family and friends would remain. But coming here
    guaranteed me freedom--something that could never be realized in China.
    There, censorship and the pressure to toe the official line make
    truthful, objective journalism impossible. Being part of RFA, which
    broadcasts trustworthy news daily into Xinjiang, was for me the dream
    of a lifetime. Through this outlet, I could share this newfound freedom
    with those loved ones left behind. What I didn't know then was the
    price for making this dream a reality. Nor did I know that it would be
    my family who would be forced to pay dearly for my freedom to live and
    work as a journalist in the United States.
        As I testify before you here today, it grieves me no end to say
    that my parents remain under threat, and more than two dozen of my
    relatives in China are missing--almost certainly held in reeducation
    camps run by authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
    (XUAR).
        I last saw my mother when she visited me here in the United States
    in 2005. Only one of my three children has ever met my parents--my
    oldest daughter, when she visited them with my husband in 2008. I had
    no choice but to miss that family trip. Because of my work, it's too
    dangerous for me to go back to China.
        For the 17 years since I've worked for RFA, local police and
    authorities have harassed my family. They've watched their every step,
    monitored their movements, and constantly questioned them about my
    whereabouts and whether I plan to return. The treatment my family has
    had to endure is because of my decision to come to America. Authorities
    considered it a betrayal. When I left the XUAR I had established myself
    by launching and hosting the first children's program in the Uyghur
    Region for Xinjiang TV. (To this day, I hear from Uyghurs living in
    China that they saw me on television when they were children.) Chinese
    state media officials recognized my appeal with Uyghur audiences and
    rewarded me with national recognition and elevated status. But I always
    knew in my heart, as someone who witnessed repression in daily life for
    Uyghurs, that this success was not enough. I wanted to use my voice to
    bring issues into the light. Without even knowing it then, I wanted to
    be a real journalist--one who is unafraid to ask questions and unafraid
    to seek answers.
        I was raised by educated parents who taught me to value culture,
    history, and most of all, open and free dialogue. It troubled me to
    witness how Chinese authorities not only downplayed these aspects of
    Uyghur identity--including religion and language--on state media, but
    also sought to erase them entirely. When I first heard Radio Free Asia
    during a trip to Europe, I knew right away that I had found my calling.
    To hear a report about a protest by Uyghurs in Germany against
    Beijing's restrictive policies in the XUAR that would otherwise never
    be reported on, let alone known inside China, was amazing. Shortly
    after, I contacted the director of RFA Uyghur and asked about working
    for the broadcaster. He warned that I would have to give up everything
    if I were to leave China and work for the organization. It was a
    difficult choice, I told him, but it would be hard to live with myself
    if I didn't make it.
        Since coming to RFA, I have felt fortunate to continue my work as a
    member of the world's only Uyghur language news service outside of
    China. For the roughly 12 million Uyghurs living in China's Northwest,
    one of the world's most restricted media environments, my colleagues
    and I are the only credible source for in-depth news and information of
    what's happening in their towns, cities, and villages. RFA first
    reported on the July 2009 unrest in Urumqi, the following 10-month
    communication blackout in the region, the harsh restrictions preventing
    Uyghurs from observing the holy month of Ramadan and practicing their
    faith, the banning of the Uyghur language being taught in many schools,
    and the mass arrests and disappearances of men suspected of
    participating in protests and unrest. I have followed these stories
    with concern for my loved ones back home.
        But early last year, my worries grew as my colleagues and I
    uncovered even more disturbing evidence that China was building a
    security state of vast reach and scope. We reported on the wide-
    sweeping use of technology to track Uyghurs, the building of
    convenience police stations that dot the streets of Kashgar and Urumqi,
    even in mosques and elementary schools, and the confiscation of
    passports to bar any travel or movement out of the region for most
    Uyghurs. Chinese authorities showed barely any restraint in rounding up
    people, taking their smartphones, and contacting and detaining their
    family members. Authorities even began recalling hundreds of Uyghurs
    studying abroad in Egypt and detaining them upon their return. These
    individuals were being held in ``reeducation centers''--mostly in
    Kashgar, where thousands of people would be held at a time, with little
    if any contact with friends and family outside.
        My worries proved true when I first heard that my brother Kaisar
    Keyum was detained at the end of September last year. Police had taken
    him when he was driving my mother to a doctor's appointment, leaving
    her alone in a car without explanation as she waited for her son who'd
    never return. Other family had to come get her. Kaisar was being held,
    my family learned later, in one of the so-called reeducation
    facilities. We have not seen him since.
        In February, my parents, both elderly and suffering from life-
    threatening ailments, went missing. Not being able to talk with my
    mother and father or to learn how they were doing was almost too much
    to bear. Being almost 7,000 miles away, I felt helpless--even more than
    when my brother was taken. I tried contacting other family but could
    not reach them. I learned in February that my aunts, cousins, their
    children--more than 20 people--had been swept up by authorities. I
    found out later that all had been detained on the same day. No one has
    confirmed their whereabouts. But I strongly suspect they are being held
    in these camps, which sources say hold over 1 million Uyghurs--men and
    women, youngsters and the elderly--in cramped and squalid conditions.
    My parents, whom I later discovered were held in medical facilities in
    detention camps, were allowed to leave in March--probably because of
    their poor health. Authorities had questioned my parents about me, my
    whereabouts, and my working for an organization they allege is ``anti-
    China.''
        Nobody should suffer such treatment. But at least five of my
    colleagues at Radio Free Asia have also faced similar situations where
    family members in China have been detained. Often they too have heard
    reports of authorities questioning family and friends about their work
    for an ``anti-Chinese'' organization. Like me, they know little if
    anything about their relatives--whether they are well or even alive.
    It's a cruel irony that we as journalists can find out so much about
    what's happening inside China's Northwest, yet so little about our own
    families and loved ones. We are afraid to ask our friends and others
    there because any contact and communication could endanger them as
    well.
        Despite these threats, I know--and my colleagues know--that we must
    continue for the sake of not letting a light be swallowed in the
    darkness, extinguished forever. We ask only that the United States and
    the international community make clear in their dealings with China
    that this treatment of our families in our former homeland is
    unacceptable. I hope and pray for my family to be let go and released,
    but I know even if that happens, they will still live under constant
    threat. I came to the United States to realize a dream--a dream of
    being able to tell the truth without fear. And it may be difficult, but
    I'll keep trying and I'll keep working.
                                     ______

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                                     ______

                     Prepared Statement of Hon. Marco Rubio

        Good morning. This is a hearing of the Congressional-Executive
    Commission on China. The title of this hearing is ``Surveillance,
    Suppression, and Mass Detention: Xinjiang's Human Rights Crisis.''

        We will have two panels testifying today. The first panel will
    feature:

       Ambassador Kelley E. Currie, Representative of the United States
    on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, United States
    Mission to the United Nations, and

       Anthony Christino III, Director of the Foreign Policy Division,
    Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance, Bureau of Industry and
    Security, U.S. Department of Commerce.

        The second panel will include:

       Gulchehra Hoja, Uyghur Service journalist, Radio Free Asia,

       Rian Thum, Associate Professor at Loyola University New Orleans,
    and

       Jessica Batke, Senior Editor at ChinaFile and former research
    analyst at the U.S. Department of State.

        Thank you all for being here.
        I want to begin by noting that this hearing is set against the
    backdrop this week of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador for
    International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback convening the first ever
    State Department Ministerial to Advance International Religious
    Freedom, which has brought together senior representatives from more
    than 70 governments around the world to discuss areas of collaboration
    and partnership in the cause of religious freedom globally.
        Secretary Pompeo penned an op-ed in USA Today earlier this week
    highlighting the Ministerial and the importance of advancing religious
    freedom globally. He specifically mentioned Ms. Gulchehra's family.
        The Chinese government and Communist Party are equal opportunity
    oppressors--targeting unregistered and registered Christians, Tibetan
    Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners, and others with harassment,
    detention, imprisonment, and more.
        The current human rights crisis unfolding in the Xinjiang Uyghur
    Autonomous Region targeting Muslim minority groups is arguably among
    the worst, if not the most severe, instances in the world today of an
    authoritarian government brutally and systematically targeting a
    minority faith community. This is an issue which the Commission has
    been seized with for some time.
        In April, we wrote U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad urging
    him to prioritize this crackdown in his dealings with the Chinese
    government and to begin collecting information to make the case for
    possible application of Global Magnitsky sanctions against senior
    government and Party officials in the region including Chen Quanguo,
    the current Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary.
        The Commission's forthcoming Annual Report, set to be released in
    October, will prominently feature the grave and deteriorating situation
    in Xinjiang.
        While our expert witnesses will discuss the situation in greater
    detail, I want to take a few minutes to paint a picture of life in
    Xinjiang.
        For months now, there have been credible estimates of between
    800,000 and 1 million people from Xinjiang being held at ``political
    reeducation'' centers or camps which are fortified with barbed wire,
    bombproof surfaces, reinforced doors, and guard rooms.
        Security personnel have subjected detainees to torture, medical
    neglect and maltreatment, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, lack
    of adequate clothing in cold temperatures, and other forms of abuse,
    resulting in the death of some detainees.
        According to one news source, ``The internment program aims to
    rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs
    and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over
    the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.
    Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love
    are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary
    confinement, beatings and food deprivation.'' \1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-life-like-in-xinjiang-
    reeducation-camps-china-2018-5
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Some local officials in the region have used chilling political
    rhetoric to describe the purpose of the arbitrary detentions of Uyghur
    Muslims and members of other Muslim ethnic minority groups, such as
    ``eradicating tumors'' or spraying chemicals on crops to kill the
    ``weeds.'' One expert who is testifying today described Xinjiang Uyghur
    as ``a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on
    the order of South African apartheid.''
        While the Chinese government has repeatedly denied knowledge of the
    camps, a groundbreaking report by Adrian Zenz, a scholar at the
    European School of Culture and Theology, published through the
    Jamestown Foundation in May, found that Chinese authorities were
    soliciting public bids for the construction of additional camps and the
    addition of security elements to existing facilities. I submit this
    report for the record and would also note the Google Earth footage
    behind me, which clearly shows the construction of these camps over the
    span of several months.
        [The report appears in the Appendix.]
        Those not subject to ``transformation through education'' in
    detention still face daily intrusions in their home life, including
    compulsory ``home stays,'' wherein Communist Party officials and
    government workers are sent to live with local Uyghur and Kazakh
    families.
        The data-driven surveillance in Xinjiang is assisted by iris and
    body scanners, voice pattern analyzers, DNA sequencers, and facial
    recognition cameras in neighborhoods, on roads, and in train stations.
    Two large Chinese firms, Hikvision and Dahua Technology, have profited
    greatly from the surge in security spending, reportedly winning upwards
    of $1.2 billion in government contracts for large-scale surveillance
    projects. Authorities employ hand-held devices to search smart phones
    for encrypted chat apps and require residents to install monitoring
    applications on their cell phones.\2\ More traditional security
    measures are also employed, including extensive police checkpoints.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \2\ https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-
    chinas-surveillance-state-
    overwhelms-daily-life-1513700355
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        The rise in security personnel is also accompanied by the
    proliferation of ``convenience police stations,'' a dense network of
    street corner, village, or neighborhood police stations that enhance
    authorities' ability to closely surveil and police local communities.
        Just this month, reports emerged of officials, in a humiliating
    public act, cutting the skirts and even long shirts of Uyghur women on
    the spot as they walked through local streets, as a means of enforcing
    a ban on ethnic minorities wearing long skirts.
        And yesterday there was an analysis released by the NGO Chinese
    Human Rights Defenders indicating that 21% of arrests in China last
    year were in Xinjiang, which has only 1.5% of the population. The
    number of arrests increased 731% over the previous year and does not
    include the detentions of those in the ``political reeducation''
    centers which are carried out extralegally.
        Radio Free Asia has led the way in reporting on this crisis. And it
    has not come without a cost. Developments in Xinjiang have had a direct
    impact on U.S. interests, most notably the detention of dozens of
    family members of U.S.-based Uyghur journalists employed by Radio Free
    Asia, as well as the detention of dozens of family members of prominent
    Uyghur rights activist Rebiya Kadeer, in an apparent attempt by the
    Chinese government to silence effective reporting and rights advocacy.
    We are delighted that RFA journalist Gulchehra Hoja is able to join us
    today to speak to her personal experience in this regard.
        The Commission has convened a series of hearings focused on the
    ``long arm'' of China, and that dimension certainly exists as it
    relates to the Uyghur diaspora community, including in the United
    States.
        Without objection, we'll keep the hearing record open for 48 hours
    to submit additional relevant materials including a bipartisan letter
    to Secretary Pompeo that Senators Warner and Gardner are spearheading
    this week--which I am pleased to sign--regarding the cases of the RFA
    journalists' family members.
        [The letter appears in the Appendix.]
                                     ______

                  Prepared Statement of Hon. Christopher Smith

        I commend Senator Rubio for holding this hearing. There is a dire
    need to shine a light on the stunning and outrageous detention of
    nearly one million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in
    Xinjiang.
        What is clear from news reports is that Uyghurs are being detained
    in ``reeducation centers'' throughout Xinjiang. Those interned are
    being asked to renounce Islam, inform on their families for
    ``extremism,'' and parrot their love for Xi Jinping and the Communist
    Party.
        Whole families disappear, children are detained, students studying
    abroad and soccer players are detained because of their ``foreign''
    contacts. There are reports of suicides and deaths and mistreatment in
    these detention centers.
        Human rights champion Rebiya Kadeer's whole family--sons,
    daughters-in-law, grandchildren have disappeared. The disappearance of
    the families of other Uyghurs has also happened--like Radio Free Asia's
    heroic journalists.
        It is mind-boggling. The Chinese government is constructing a high-
    tech police state in Xinjiang whose goal is the forcible assimilation
    and ``transformation'' of entire ethnic minority populations and the
    ``sinicization'' of their religious beliefs and practices. In fact,
    retaining religious beliefs or attachment to culture and language makes
    one a suspect in Xinjiang.
        All this is being done in the name of counterterrorism and
    counterextremism. But China's repression may just create the extremism
    that they fear. Over the past year, the world has started to see too
    many comparisons between the Nazis and the current Chinese government.
    First there was the death of Liu Xiaobo, the first Nobel Peace Prize
    laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky died in Nazi
    internment.
        Now nearly one million are detained in what should be called
    concentration camps--the largest jailing of an ethnic and religious
    minority maybe since the Holocaust, certainly since the apartheid days
    in South Africa. ``Reeducation'' is not a new tactic in China.
    Tibetans, Falun Gong and other dissidents have experienced
    ``reeducation through labor''--but the size and scale of what is
    happening to the Uyghurs is audaciously repressive, even by China's low
    standards.
        Where is the outrage? Where is the anger? I commend the State
    Department and Secretary Pompeo for their public statements. But why
    has the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation been silent? What have
    Turkey and other Turkic nations been doing to address this issue?
        We are at a critical point. Governments and parliamentarians need
    to condemn what is happening in Xinjiang. The UN must investigate and
    seek answers to what may be massive human rights abuses or worse.
    Businesses, non-governmental organizations, and academics that remain
    silent--because they want to remain in favor with the Chinese
    government and Communist Party--risk losing their integrity by doing
    so.
        The International Olympic Committee should be asked to reassess
    China's hosting of the 2022 games if they maintain an apartheid-like
    police state targeting Muslim minorities. How can any law firm or lobby
    shop shill for the government of China while Uyghurs are so brutally
    and forcefully assimilated? Or when Tibetans, Christians, human rights
    lawyers, and Falun Gong are systematically repressed?
        I heard former Congressman Frank Wolf say recently that in the
    1980s, no firm would have dared to work for the Soviet Union--but now
    China's cash is too tempting to turn down even for some of my former
    House colleagues. Shame. Shame. It is really a shame.
        I wonder if the Congress should consider limiting U.S. Government
    contracts by the exact amount lobby firms receive from China, Russia,
    or some other authoritarian government. That would make for some
    interesting business choices. Either make no profit from your dealings
    with China or choose to represent an increasingly repressive and
    authoritarian Chinese government.
        No one should profit from representing authoritarian countries,
    particularly when they constantly seek to undermine U.S. values and
    interests. Chinese officials also should not profit from their
    complicity in torture and arbitrary detention. This is the exact reason
    the Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act.
        The Senator and I have urged the State Department to consider
    levying Magnitsky sanctions on officials in Xinjiang. We will continue
    to do so and press for the use of this important tool to hold officials
    accountable. We urge anyone with specific and credible information
    about the complicity of Chinese government officials in human rights
    abuses in Xinjiang to send that information to us. We will make sure it
    gets to the State and Treasury Departments.
        I also think the sanctions available in the International Religious
    Freedom Act of 1998 should be considered, particularly broad economic
    sanctions targeting industries in Xinjiang that benefit China's
    political leaders or other ``state-owned entities.'' We want to make
    sure that Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities do not suffer from
    such sanctions, but they do not much share in the wealth generated by
    Chinese populations right now.
        China has been designated as a ``Country of Particular Concern''
    since 1999. That designation carries with it the possibility of
    economic sanctions. This lever should be used now because, in my
    opinion, what is happening in Xinjiang is currently the world's worst
    religious freedom situation--the forced ``sinicization'' of Islam
    through detention and severe restrictions on religious belief and
    practice. Targeted and tough economic sanctions are the only way to
    convince China's leaders that they have a clear interest in ending the
    repression of China's Muslim minorities.
        There is also an important role for the UN here. I am glad that
    Ambassador Currie is here with us today. What is happening in Xinjiang
    are clear violations of many international treaties and covenants to
    which China is a party. I realize that China's veto on the UN Security
    Council will create obstacles to many UN investigations, as will their
    presence on the UN Human Rights Council, but we should be making them
    use their veto, we should consider requesting a briefing on the
    situation at the Security Council and work together with the OIC and
    other Muslim-majority countries to raise the issue within the UN
    system. At a time when the Chinese government is seeking to gain allies
    through its Belt and Road Initiative, particularly in Central Asia and
    Africa, it would seem the last thing they want is an international
    debate about their poor and abusive treatment of ethnic and religious
    minorities.
        Finally, I want to commend the exemplary work of Radio Free Asia's
    Uyghur Service reporters. Despite unacceptable threats to their
    families, they have kept working and have provided us with an
    extraordinary record of events. Your courage and professionalism are
    admirable. Thank you.
        Senator, I commend you again for holding this important hearing to
    shine a light on an outrageous and horrible situation. We all need to
    believe in the power of light and sunshine because evil flourishes only
    in the dark.
                                     ______

                           Submissions for the Record

                                  ----------

                       Article Submitted by Senator Rubio
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

              2018 The Jamestown Foundation. All rights reserved.
                       Article Submitted by Senator King

                                     ______

                     Apartheid with Chinese Characteristics

          china has turned xinjiang into a police state like no other

       Totalitarian Determination and Modern Technology Have Produced a
                         Massive Abuse of Human Rights

                       [From The Economist, May 31, 2018]
    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

         Hotan, Xinjiang Province.--``The prophet Sulayman approached his
    son and said to him, `I have received a message from God. I want you to
    circle the Earth and see if there are more people who are alive in
    spirit or more people who are dead in spirit.' After a period the son
    returned and said, `Father, I went to many places and everywhere I went
    I saw more people who were dead than those who were alive.' ''
        Hasan shared that message on a WeChat social-messaging group in
    2015, when he was 23. Born in Yarkand, a town in southern Xinjiang,
    Hasan had moved to the provincial capital, Urumqi, to sell jade and
    shoes and to learn more about Islam. He described himself to Darren
    Byler, an anthropologist from the University of Washington, as a Sufi
    wanderer, a pious man with a wife and small daughter, who prayed five
    times a day and disapproved of dancing and immodesty.
        But in January 2015 the provincial government was demanding that
    everyone in Urumqi return to their native home to get a new identity
    card. ``I am being forced to go back,'' Hasan complained to Mr. Byler.
    ``The Yarkand police are calling me every day. They are making my
    parents call me and tell me the same thing.'' Eventually, he and his
    family boarded a bus for the 20-hour journey home. It was hit by a
    truck. Hasan's wife and daughter were killed. He was hospitalized. ``It
    was the will of Allah,'' he said.
        Hasan hoped the authorities would allow him to return to Urumqi
    because of his injuries. No chance. Having lost wife, child and
    livelihood, Hasan lost his liberty, too. A fortnight after his
    accident, he was sent to a reeducation camp for an indefinite period.
    There, for all his relatives know, he remains.
        Hasan is one of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-language
    people, who have disappeared in Xinjiang, China's northwestern
    province. It is an empty, far-flung place; Hasan's home town of Yarkand
    is as close to Baghdad as it is to Beijing. It is also a crucial one.
    The region is China's biggest domestic producer of oil and gas, and
    much of the fuel imported from Central Asia and Russia passes through
    on its way to the industries of the east coast. It is now a vital link
    in the Belt and Road Initiative, a foreign policy which aims to bind
    the Middle East and Europe to China with ties of infrastructure,
    investment and trade.
        But on top of that it is the home of the Uighurs, the largest
    Muslim group in the country, and ethnically quite distinct from the Han
    Chinese. A recent history of Uighur unrest_in particular bloody inter-
    ethnic violence in Urumqi in 2009 that followed the murder of Uighurs
    elsewhere in China_and subsequent terrorism have sent the government's
    repressive tendencies into overdrive. Under a new party boss, Chen
    Quanguo, appointed in 2016, the provincial government has vastly
    increased the money and effort it puts into controlling the activities
    and patrolling the beliefs of the Uighur population. Its regime is
    racist, uncaring and totalitarian, in the sense of aiming to affect
    every aspect of people's lives. It has created a full-fledged police
    state. And it is committing some of the most extensive, and neglected,
    human-rights violations in the world.
                        the not-quite-gulag archipelago
        The government is building hundreds or thousands of unacknowledged
    reeducation camps to which Uighurs can be sent for any reason or for
    none. In some of them day-to-day conditions do not appear to be
    physically abusive as much as creepy. One released prisoner has said he
    was not permitted to eat until he had thanked Xi Jinping, the Chinese
    president, and the Communist Party. But there have been reports of
    torture at others. In January, 82-year-old Muhammad Salih Hajim, a
    respected religious scholar, died in detention in Urumqi.
        Kashgar, the largest Uighur city, has four camps, of which the
    largest is in Number 5 Middle School. A local security chief said in
    2017 that ``approximately 120,000'' people were being held in the city.
    In Korla, in the middle of the province, a security official recently
    said the camps are so full that officials in them are begging the
    police to stop bringing people.
        As a result, more and more camps are being built: the reeducation
    archipelago is adding islands even faster than the South China Sea.
    Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Kortal,
    Germany, has looked at procurement contracts for 73 reeducation camps.
    He found their total cost to have been 682m yuan ($108m), almost all
    spent since April 2017. Records from Akto, a county near the border
    with Kyrgyzstan, say it spent 9.6% of its budget on security (including
    camps) in 2017. In 2016 spending on security in the province was five
    times what it had been in 2007. By the end of 2017 it was ten times
    that: 59bn yuan.
    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        For all this activity, the government has not officially confirmed
    that the camps exist. They are not governed by any judicial process;
    detentions are on the orders of the police or party officials, not the
    verdict of a court. A woman working as an undertaker was imprisoned for
    washing bodies according to Islamic custom. Thirty residents of Ili, a
    town near the Kazakh border, were detained ``because they were
    suspected of wanting to travel abroad,'' according to the local
    security chief. Other offences have included holding strong religious
    views, allowing others to preach religion, asking where one's relatives
    are and failing to recite the national anthem in Chinese.
        A significant chunk of the total Uighur population is interned in
    this way. If the rate of detention in Kashgar applied to the province
    as a whole, 5% of the Uighur population of 10m would be detained. Other
    evidence suggests that this is quite possible. In February, Radio Free
    Asia, a broadcaster financed by an independent agency of the American
    government, cold-called 11 families at random in Araltobe, in the north
    of the province, far from the Uighurs' heartland. Six said family
    members had been sent to camps. In a village later visited by Agence
    France Presse in Qaraqash county, near Hotan, a fifth of adults had
    been detained over four months.
        Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, reckons the
    overall number detained may be 800,000. Timothy Grose, a professor at
    Rose-Hulman University in Indiana, puts the total between 500,000 and
    1m, which would imply that something like a sixth to a third of young
    and middle-aged Uighur men are being detained, or have been at some
    point in the past year.
        The Chinese government argues that harsh measures are needed to
    prevent violence associated with Uighur separatism. In 2013 a Uighur
    suicide-driver crashed his car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square in
    Beijing. In 2014 a knife-wielding Uighur gang slaughtered 31 travellers
    at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan province, an incident some in
    China compared to the September 11th 2001 attacks on America. Unrest in
    Yarkand later that year led to a hundred deaths; an attack at a coal
    mine in Aksu killed 50 people. Kyrgyz authorities blamed Uighur
    terrorists for an attempt to blow up the Chinese embassy in Bishkek;
    Uighurs have been blamed for a bombing which killed 20 at a shrine in
    Bangkok popular with Chinese tourists.
        There are worrying links, as the Chinese authorities are keen to
    point out, between Uighur separatism and global jihad, especially in
    the Uighur diaspora, which is based in Turkey. Chinese and Syrian
    officials say 1,500 Uighurs have fought with Islamic State (IS) or
    Jabhat al-Nusra (part of al-Qaeda) in Syria. A group called the
    Turkestan Islamic Party, which demands independence for Xinjiang, is
    banned under anti-terrorist laws in America and Europe. In 2016 a
    defector from IS provided a list of foreign recruits; 114 came from
    Xinjiang.
                                  in the grid
        But the system of repression in the province goes far beyond
    anything that would be justified by such proclivities and affiliations.
    In Hotan there is a new police station every 300 meters or so. They are
    called ``convenience police stations,'' as if they were shops_and in
    fact they do offer some consumer services, such as bottled water and
    phone recharging. The windowless stations, gunmetal gray, with
    forbidding grilles on their doors, are part of a ``grid-management
    system'' like that which Mr. Chen pioneered when he was party boss in
    Tibet from 2011 to 2016. The authorities divide each city into squares,
    with about 500 people. Every square has a police station that keeps
    tabs on the inhabitants. So, in rural areas, does every village.
        At a large checkpoint on the edge of Hotan a policeman orders
    everyone off a bus. The passengers (all Uighur) take turns in a booth.
    Their identity cards are scanned, photographs and fingerprints of them
    are taken, newly installed iris-recognition technology peers into their
    eyes. Women must take off their headscarves. Three young Uighurs are
    told to turn on their smartphones and punch in the passwords. They give
    the phones to a policeman who puts the devices into a cradle that
    downloads their contents for later analysis. One woman shouts at a
    policeman that he is Uighur, why is he looking at her phone?
        There can be four or five checkpoints every kilometer. Uighurs go
    through them many times a day. Shops and restaurants in Hotan have
    panic buttons with which to summon the police. The response time is one
    minute. Apparently because of the Kunming knife attack, knives and
    scissors are as hard to buy as a gun in Japan. In butchers and
    restaurants all over Xinjiang you will see kitchen knives chained to
    the wall, lest they be snatched up and used as weapons. In Aksu, QR
    codes containing the owner's identity-card information have to be
    engraved on every blade.
        Remarkably, all shops and restaurants in Hotan must have a part-
    time policeman on duty. Thousands of shop assistants and waiters have
    been enrolled in the police to this end. Each is issued with a helmet,
    flak jacket and three-foot baton. They train in the afternoon. In the
    textile market these police officers sit in every booth and stall,
    selling things; their helmets and flak jackets, which are
    uncomfortable, are often doffed. A squad of full-time police walks
    through the market making sure security cameras are working and
    ordering shop assistants to put their helmets back on. Asked why they
    wear them, the assistants reply tersely_``security.''
        At the city's railway station, travellers go through three rounds
    of bag checks before buying a ticket. On board, police walk up and down
    ordering Uighurs to open their luggage again. As the train pulls into
    Kashgar, it passes metal goods wagons. A toddler points at them
    shouting excitedly ``Armoured car! Armoured car!'' Paramilitary
    vehicles are more familiar to him than rolling stock.
        Uniformed shop assistants, knife controls and ``convenience police
    stations'' are only the most visible elements of the police state. The
    province has an equally extensive if less visible regime that uses yet
    more manpower and a great deal of technology to create total
    surveillance.
                        improving lives, winning hearts
        Under a system called fanghuiju, teams of half a dozen_composed of
    policemen or local officials and always including one Uighur speaker,
    which almost always means a Uighur_go from house to house compiling
    dossiers of personal information. Fanghuiju is short for ``researching
    people's conditions, improving people's lives, winning people's
    hearts.'' But the party refers to the work as ``eradicating tumors.''
    The teams_over 10,000 in rural areas in 2017_report on ``extremist''
    behavior such as not drinking alcohol, fasting during Ramadan and
    sporting long beards. They report back on the presence of
    ``undesirable'' items, such as Korans, or attitudes_such as an
    ``ideological situation'' that is not in wholehearted support of the
    party.
        Since the spring of 2017, the information has been used to rank
    citizens' ``trustworthiness'' using various criteria. People are deemed
    trustworthy, average or untrustworthy depending on how they fit into
    the following categories: 15 to 55 years old (i.e., of military age);
    Uighur (the catalogue is explicitly racist: people are suspected merely
    on account of their ethnicity); unemployed; have religious knowledge;
    pray five times a day (freedom of worship is guaranteed by China's
    constitution); have a passport; have visited one of 26 countries; have
    ever overstayed a visa; have family members in a foreign country (there
    are at least 10,000 Uighurs in Turkey); and home school their children.
    Being labelled ``untrustworthy'' can lead to a camp. To complete the
    panorama of human surveillance, the government has a programme called
    ``becoming kin'' in which local families (mostly Uighur) ``adopt''
    officials (mostly Han). The official visits his or her adoptive family
    regularly, lives with it for short periods, gives the children presents
    and teaches the household Mandarin. He also verifies information
    collected by fanghuiju teams. The programme appears to be immense.
    According to an official report in 2018, 1.1m officials have been
    paired with 1.6m families. That means roughly half of Uighur households
    have had a Han-Chinese spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.
        Such efforts map the province's ideological territory family by
    family; technology maps the population's activities street by street
    and phone by phone. In Hotan and Kashgar there are poles bearing
    perhaps eight or ten video cameras at intervals of 100-200 meters along
    every street; a far finer-grained surveillance net than in most Chinese
    cities. As well as watching pedestrians the cameras can read car number
    plates and correlate them with the face of the person driving. Only
    registered owners may drive cars; anyone else will be arrested,
    according to a public security official who accompanied this
    correspondent in Hotan. The cameras are equipped to work at night as
    well as by day.
        Because the government sees what it calls ``web cleansing'' as
    necessary to prevent access to terrorist information, everyone in
    Xinjiang is supposed to have a spyware app on their mobile phone.
    Failing to install the app, which can identify people called, track
    online activity and record social-media use, is an offence. ``Wi-Fi
    sniffers'' in public places keep an eye, or nose, on all networked
    devices in range.
        Next, the records associated with identity cards can contain
    biometric data including fingerprints, blood type and DNA information
    as well as the subject's detention record and ``reliability status.''
    The government collects a lot of this biometric material by stealth,
    under the guise of a public-health programme called ``Physicals for
    All,'' which requires people to give blood samples. Local officials
    ``demanded [we] participate in the physicals,'' one resident of Kashgar
    told Human Rights Watch, an NGO. ``Not participating would have been
    seen as a problem . . . .''
        A system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP),
    first revealed by Human Rights Watch, uses machine-learning systems,
    information from cameras, smartphones, financial and family-planning
    records and even unusual electricity use to generate lists of suspects
    for detention. One official WeChat report said that verifying IJOP's
    lists was one of the main responsibilities of the local security
    committee. Even without high-tech surveillance, Xinjiang's police state
    is formidable. With it, it becomes terrifying.
    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        In theory, the security system in Xinjiang applies to everyone
    equally. In practice it is as race-based as apartheid in South Africa
    was. The security apparatus is deployed in greatest force in the
    southwest, where around 80% of Uighurs live. In a city like Shihezi,
    which is 95% Han, there are far fewer street checkpoints, if any, and a
    normal level of policing. Where there are checkpoints, Han Chinese are
    routinely waved through. Uighurs are always stopped.
                             the minarets torn down
        Islam is a special target. In Hotan, the neighbourhood mosques have
    been closed, leaving a handful of large places of worship. Worshippers
    must register with the police before attending. At the entrance to the
    largest mosque in Kashgar, the Idh Kha_a famous place of pilgrimage_two
    policemen sit underneath a banner saying ``Love the party, love the
    country.'' Inside, a member of the mosque's staff holds classes for
    local traders on how to be a good communist. In Urumqi the remaining
    mosques have had their minarets knocked down and their Islamic
    crescents torn off. Some 29 Islamic names may no longer be given to
    children. In schools, Uighur-language instruction is vanishing_another
    of the trends which have markedly accelerated under Mr. Chen. Dancing
    after prayers and specific Uighur wedding ceremonies and funerary rites
    are prohibited.
        Unlike those of South Africa, the two main racial groups are well
    matched in size. According to the 2010 census, Uighurs account for 46%
    of the province's population and Han Chinese 40% (the rest are smaller
    minorities such as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz). But they live apart and see the
    land in distinct ways. Uighurs regard Xinjiang as theirs because they
    have lived in it for thousands of years. The Han Chinese regard it as
    theirs because they have built a modern economy in its deserts and
    mountains. They talk of bringing ``modern culture'' and ``modern
    lifestyle'' to the locals_by which they mean the culture and lifestyle
    of modern Han China.
        So how have the Han and Uighur reacted to the imposition of a
    police state? Yang Jiehun and Xiao Junduo are Han Chinese veterans of
    the trade in Hotan jade (which the Chinese hold to be the best in the
    world, notably in its very pale ``mutton-fat'' form). Asked about
    security, they give big smiles, a thumbs-up and say the past year's
    crackdown has been ``really well received.'' ``In terms of public
    security, Urumqi is the safest it has ever been,'' says Mr. Xiao, whose
    family came to the province in the 1950s, when the People's Liberation
    Army and state-owned enterprises were reinforcing the border with the
    Soviet Union. ``The Uighurs are being helped out of poverty,'' he
    avers. ``They understand and support the policy.''
        Not all Han Chinese in Xinjiang are quite as enthusiastic. Tens of
    thousands came to the province fairly recently, mostly in the 1990s, to
    seek their fortunes as independent traders and business people, rather
    than being transferred there by state-owned companies or the army. They
    approve of better security but dislike the damage being done to the
    economy_for example, the way movement controls make it harder to employ
    Uighurs. So far, this ambivalence is not seriously weakening the
    support among the Han and, for the government in Beijing, that is all
    that matters. It sees Xinjiang mainly as a frontier. The Han are the
    principal guarantors of border security. If they are happy, so is the
    government.
        The Uighur reaction is harder to judge; open criticism or talking
    to outsiders can land you in jail. The crackdown has been effective
    inasmuch as there have been no (known) Uighur protests or attacks since
    early 2017. It seems likely that many people are bowing before the
    storm. As Sultan, a student in Kashgar, says with a shrug: ``There's
    nothing we can do about it.''
        But there are reasons for thinking resentment is building up below
    the surface. According to anthropological work by Mr. Byler and Joanne
    Smith Finley of Newcastle University in Britain, a religious revival
    had been under way before the imposition of today's harsh control.
    Mosques were becoming more crowded, religious schools attracting more
    pupils. Now the schools and mosques are largely empty, even for Friday
    prayers. It is hard to believe that religious feeling has vanished.
    More likely a fair bit has gone underground.
        And the position of Uighurs who cooperate with the Han authorities
    is becoming untenable. The provincial government needs the Uighur elite
    because its members have good relations with both sides. The expansion
    of the police state has added to the number of Uighurs it needs to co-
    opt. According to Mr. Zenz and James Leibold of La Trobe University in
    Melbourne, 90% of the security jobs advertised in 2017 were ``third
    tier'' jobs for low-level police assistants: cheap, informal contracts
    which mainly go to Uighurs. But at the same time as needing more
    Uighurs, the authorities have made it clear that they do not trust
    them. Part of the repression has been aimed at ``two-faced officials''
    who (the party says) are publicly supporting the security system while
    secretly helping victims. Simultaneously recruiting more Uighurs and
    distrusting them more creates an ever larger pool that might one day
    turn against the system from within.
        A Han businessman who travels frequently between Urumqi and Kashgar
    says he used to feel welcome in the south. ``Now it has all changed.
    They are not afraid. But they are resentful. They look at me as if they
    are wondering what I am doing in their country.'' One of the few
    detainees released from the camps, Omurbek Eli, told RFA that the
    authorities ``are planting the seeds of hatred and turning [detainees]
    into enemies. This is not just my view_the majority of people in the
    camp feel the same way.''
                                hasan's warning
        China's Communist rulers believe their police state limits
    separatism and reduces violence. But by separating the Uighur and Han
    further, and by imposing huge costs on one side that the other side,
    for the most part, blithely ignores, they are ratcheting up tension.
    The result is that both groups are drifting towards violence. Before he
    disappeared, Hasan, the self-styled Sufi wanderer, expressed Xinjiang's
    plight. ``To be Uighur is hard,'' he wrote on WeChat in 2015. ``I don't
    even know what I am accused of, but I must accept their judgment. I
    have no choice. Where there is no freedom, there is tension. Where
    there is tension, there are incidents. Where there are incidents, there
    are police. Where there are police, there is no freedom.''
                                     ______

                         Article Submitted by Rian Thum

                                   __________

              What Really Happens in China's `Re-education' Camps

                    [From The New York Times, May 15, 2018]

                             (By Rian Thum) 1

        What does it take to intern half a million members of one
    ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate
    organization, but the Chinese authorities aren't stingy. Vast swathes
    of the Uighur population in China's western region of Xinjiang--as well
    as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities--are being detained to
    undergo what the state calls ``transformation through education.'' Many
    tens of thousands of them have been locked up in new thought-control
    camps with barbed wire, bombproof surfaces, reinforced doors and guard
    rooms.
        The Chinese authorities are cagey and evasive, if not downright
    dismissive, about reports concerning such camps. But now they will have
    to explain away their own eloquent trail of evidence: an online public
    bidding system set up by the government inviting tenders from
    contractors to help build and run the camps.
        Uighurs have more in common, culturally and linguistically, with
    Turks than Han Chinese, and many Uighurs are Muslim. Resentful of
    China's heavy-handed rule in the region, some have resisted it, usually
    through peaceful means, but on occasion violently, by attacking
    government officials and, exceptionally, civilians. The state, for its
    part, fuels Islamophobia by labeling ordinary Muslim traditions as the
    manifestation of religious ``extremism.''
        Over the last decade, the Xinjiang authorities have accelerated
    policies to reshape Uighurs' habits--even, the state says, their
    thoughts. Local governments organize public ceremonies and signings
    asking ethnic minorities to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist
    Party; they hold mandatory reeducation courses and forced dance
    performances, because some forms of Islam forbid dance. In some
    neighborhoods, security organs carry out regular assessments of the
    risk posed by residents: Uighurs get a 10 percent deduction on their
    score for ethnicity alone and lose another 10 percent if they pray
    daily.
        Uighurs had grown accustomed to living under an intrusive state,
    but measures became draconian after the arrival in late 2016 of a new
    regional party chief from Tibet. Since then, some local police officers
    have said that they struggled to meet their new detention quotas--in
    the case of one village, 40 percent of the population.
        A new study by Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of
    Culture and Theology, in Korntal, Germany, analyzed government ads
    inviting tenders for various contracts concerning reeducation
    facilities in more than 40 localities across Xinjiang, offering a
    glimpse of the vast bureaucratic, human and financial resources the
    state dedicates to this detention network. The report reveals the
    state's push to build camps in every corner of the region since 2016,
    at a cost so far of more than 680 million yuan (over $107 million).
        A bid invitation appears to have been posted on April 27--a sign
    that more camps are being built. These calls for tenders refer to
    compounds of up to 880,000 square feet, some with quarters for People's
    Armed Police, a paramilitary security force. Local governments are also
    placing ads to recruit camp staff with expertise in criminal psychology
    or a background in the military or the police force.
        Evidence of these technical details is invaluable, especially
    considering the growing difficulties faced by researchers and reporters
    trying to work in Xinjiang. Several foreign journalists have produced
    important articles, despite police harassment and brief arrests; ethnic
    Uighur reporters, or their families, endure far worse.
        Given the risks, firsthand accounts from former detainees remain
    rare--although a few are starting to emerge.
        In February, a Uighur man studying in the United States gave
    Foreign Policy one of the most detailed descriptions of detention
    conditions published to date. He was arrested upon returning to China
    for a visit last year, and then held for 17 days on no known charge. He
    described long days of marching in a crowded cell, chanting slogans and
    watching propaganda videos about purportedly illegal religious
    activities. As he was being released, a guard warned him, ``Whatever
    you say or do in North America, your family is still here and so are
    we.''

    --------------
        \1\ Rian Thum is an associate professor of history at Loyola
    University New Orleans and the author of ``The Sacred Routes of Uyghur
    History.'' He has been conducting research in Xinjiang, China, for
    nearly two decades. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-
    re-
    education-camps.html
        Last month, an ethnic Kazakh man described to Radio Free Europe/
    Radio Liberty his four-month stint in a camp in northern Xinjiang. He
    met inmates serving terms as long as seven years. He said he had been
    made to study how ``to keep safe the domestic secrets'' of China and
    ``not to be a Muslim.'' In these cases, as in many others, detainees
    were held incommunicado, their families left to wonder what had
    happened to them.
        And now these rare eyewitness accounts are being corroborated, if
    unwittingly, by the Chinese state itself, as it makes public calls for
    contracts to build even more detention camps.
        Many details of this carceral system are hidden, and remain
    unknown--in fact, even the camps' ultimate purpose is not entirely
    clear.
        They serve as grounds for compulsory indoctrination. Some officials
    use them for prevention as well, to lock down people they presumptively
    suspect of opposing Chinese rule: In two localities the authorities
    have targeted people under 40, claiming that this age group is a
    ``violent generation.''
        The camps are also tools of punishment, and of course, a threat.
    Few detainees are formally charged, much less sentenced. Some are told
    how long a term they will serve; others are simply held indefinitely.
    This uncertainty--the arbitrary logic of detention--instills fear in
    the entire population.
        Surveillance was markedly heightened during my last trip to
    Xinjiang in December--so much so that I avoided talking to Uighurs then
    for fear that just being in contact with a foreigner would get them
    sent away for reeducation. Meanwhile, my Uighur contacts outside China
    were pointing to the quota-based purges of the Communists' Anti-
    Rightist campaign of 1957-1959 and ever-shifting rules during the
    Cultural Revolution to explain that even if Uighurs in Xinjiang today
    wanted to submit wholly to the security regime, they no longer knew how
    to. Joining the security services used to be a rare way to ensure one's
    personal safety. Not anymore.
        Tens of thousands of families have been torn apart; an entire
    culture is being criminalized. Some local officials use chilling
    language to describe the purpose of detention, such as ``eradicating
    tumors'' or spraying chemicals on crops to kill the ``weeds.''
        Labeling with a single word the deliberate and large-scale
    mistreatment of an ethnic group is tricky: Old terms often camouflage
    the specifics of new injustices. And drawing comparisons between the
    suffering of different groups is inherently fraught, potentially
    reductionist. But I would venture this statement to describe the plight
    of China's Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz today: Xinjiang has become a
    police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the
    order of South African apartheid.
        There is every reason to fear that the situation will only worsen.
    Several accounts of Uighurs dying in detention have surfaced recently--
    a worrisome echo of the established use of torture in China's
    reeducation camps for followers of the spiritual movement Falun Gong.
    And judging by their camp-building spree in Xinjiang, the Chinese
    authorities don't seem to think they have come close to achieving
    whatever their goal there is.
                                     ______

             Letter to Secretary Pompeo Submitted by Senator Rubio
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                              Witness Biographies

                                  ----------

        Ambassador Kelley E. Currie, Representative of the United States on
    the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, United States
    Mission to the United Nations

        Ambassador Kelley E. Currie currently serves as the Representative
    of the United States on the Economic and Social Council of the United
    Nations, and Alternate Representative of the United States of America
    to the Sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
    Ambassador Currie specializes in political reform, development and
    humanitarian assistance, human rights, and other non-traditional
    security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. She previously was a Senior
    Fellow with the Project 2049 Institute and held senior policy positions
    with the Department of State and several international and non-
    governmental human rights and humanitarian organizations. She also
    served as foreign operations appropriations associate and staff
    director of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus for Congressman John
    Porter of Illinois. She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law
    Center and a B.A. cum laude from the University of Georgia's School of
    Public and International Affairs. She is married to Peter Currie and
    they have two children.

        Anthony Christino III, Director of the Foreign Policy Division,
    Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance, Bureau of Industry
    and Security, U.S. Department of Commerce

        Anthony Christino is the Director of the Foreign Policy Division
    within the Office of Nonproliferation and Treaty Compliance of the
    Export Administration of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at
    the U.S. Department of Commerce. As such, he is responsible for
    licensing and the formulation of export control policy related to
    countries subject to sanctions and special controls. Mr. Christino has
    represented BIS in a wide variety of U.S. Government export control
    fora and numerous industry outreach programs as well as in bilateral
    and multilateral meetings with foreign governments. He holds a
    bachelor's degree in international relations and a master's degree in
    national security studies.

        Gulchehra Hoja, Uyghur Service journalist, Radio Free Asia

        Gulchehra ``Guli'' Hoja is a broadcaster with Radio Free Asia's
    Uyghur Service, where she has worked since 2001. Prior to RFA, Ms. Hoja
    was a successful TV personality and journalist in China's Uyghur
    Region. But after hearing RFA's Uyghur Service, she decided to leave
    China and join the U.S. effort to provide the Uyghur people with
    trustworthy, uncensored journalism. At least two dozen of Ms. Hoja's
    China-based relatives are missing, including her younger brother, who
    was detained last September, all presumed to be held in so-called
    ``reeducation camps.'' Her parents were detained in February but were
    released because of health issues. She has a bachelor's degree in
    Uyghur language and literature from Xinjiang Normal University. Ms.
    Hoja is a U.S. citizen, and lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with her
    husband and three children.

        Rian Thum, Associate Professor, Loyola University New Orleans

        Dr. Thum is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University
    in New Orleans and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned
    Societies. Dr. Thum's research and teaching are generally concerned
    with the overlap of China and the Muslim World. His book, ``The Sacred
    Routes of Uyghur History'' (Harvard University Press, 2014) received
    the American Historical Association's Fairbank Prize and the American
    Anthropological Association's Hsu Prize.

        Jessica Batke, Senior Editor, ChinaFile and former Research Analyst
    at the Department of State

        Jessica Batke is a ChinaFile Senior Editor and runs The China NGO
    Project. She is an expert on China's domestic political and social
    affairs, and served as a Research Analyst at the State Department's
    Bureau of Intelligence and Research for nearly eight years prior to
    joining ChinaFile. In 2016, she was a Visiting Academic Fellow at
    MERICS in Berlin, where she published papers on Chinese leadership
    politics and created databases to catalogue hard-to-find, high-level
    Chinese policy documents and details about policy advisory groups. She
    is proficient in Mandarin.

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