Category Archives: Ethnicity

Block China With An Independent East Turkistan

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019 

A Uyghur protest in Berlin. Protestors are photographed waving blue and white flags against the background of an old building.

Uyghur protest Berlin, July 2009. Source: Claudia Himmelreich via Wikimedia Commons.

Rukiye Turdush
Uyghur Research Institute

People of East Turkistan, called Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party, have endured the long and oppressive colonisation of China for many years. Although China did not round up people of East Turkistan and shoot them with machine guns in front of the world, they have locked them up and are eliminating them one by one in concentration camps. [1]

Every Uyghur living outside China is searching and asking for the location of their disappeared family members.  Uyghur girls are forced to marry Han Chinese as a part of their gene washing policy. Uyghur children are forcibly removed from their families as Chinese officials with genocidal intention proclaim, “cut the lineage, cut the roots, cut the connection.” [2]

Around three million Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims are currently locked up in concentration camps and are being subjected to torture and death.[3] The religion, culture and identity of Muslims in East Turkistan are now entirely banned. The world has remained silent in its moral obligation to do something about this tragedy.

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Ukraine’s Election Indicates A Strengthening Democracy

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019

Robert T. Person
United States Military Academy

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's president, left, speaks as Volodymyr Zelenskiy, comic and presidential candidate, listens during a debate at the Kiev Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 19, 2019. The two candidates for Ukraine's presidency squared off in a long-awaited and often bad-tempered debate, their last chance to sway opinion before the April 21 runoff, which Zelenskiy won.

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, left, speaks as Volodymyr Zelenskiy, comic and presidential candidate, listens during a debate at the Kiev Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 19, 2019. The two candidates for Ukraine’s presidency squared off in a long-awaited and often bad-tempered debate, their last chance to sway opinion before the April 21 runoff, which Zelenskiy won. Source: Presidential Administration of Ukraine.

With Ukraine’s 2019 presidential campaign now complete, the country finds itself – as it has on numerous occasions in the last 15 years – at a historic crossroads.  Actor-comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s stunning landslide victory over incumbent president Petro Poroshenko by a margin of 73.2 percent to 24.4 percent presents challenges and opportunities with far-reaching implications for Ukraine, Russia, the European Union, and the United States.  On the domestic front, another peaceful transition of power through democratic elections indicates that Ukrainian democracy – though far from perfect – is alive and gaining strength.  In public comments Zelenskiy has reaffirmed Ukraine’s commitment to democratic rule, drawing a sharp contrast with Russia’s authoritarian politics.  On the foreign policy front, he has pledged to stand up to Russia and continue Ukraine’s path to NATO membership, even while expressing a willingness to “negotiate with the devil” to bring the war in Eastern Ukraine to an end.   This is something the prior president, Petro Poroshenko, refused to do, though Zelenskiy’s chances of breaking the stalemate in the Donbas remain slim.  Though it is too early to tell what the future holds for the new Ukrainian president and the country he leads, there can be little doubt that Ukraine will continue to be a key zone of strategic competition – and likely conflict – in Eastern Europe, much as it has been for the last five years.

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State Sponsorship of Uyghur Separatists: the History and Current Policy Options for East Turkestan (Xinjiang, China)

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

The map depicts China highlighting the different provinces of the country. It appears to be an old map.

A 1922 map of China. Source: John Bartholomew, The Times Atlas, London, 1922.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 25, 2019, in Oxford, England. The associated university is not named at the request of the host organization’s president, who was concerned about possible repercussions.

I would like to thank the Terrorism Research Society (TRS) for kindly hosting this event. 

The historical map shown here is from 1922, and shows what China looked like when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 in Shanghai. It shows East Turkestan and Tibet in the west as autonomous regions — much more autonomous than they are today.

East Turkestan is now occupied militarily by China and officially called the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. In Chinese, “Xinjiang” means “new frontier”. But Xinjiang has an ancient history as a culturally diverse crossroads of trading on what the Chinese call “the silk road”, but which was actually more Iranian than Chinese. It was central to the ancient Persian trading areas called the Sogdian network by historians. It has been home to Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, to Mongolians, Indians, Greeks, Koreans, Buddhists, and Christians. Since at least the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933 is has been called East Turkestan by Turkic Muslim residents. The Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has indiscriminately labeled Uyghurs who support an independent East Turkestan today, as separatist and terrorist in their goals and means. The acronym of the Chinese Communist Party is the “CCP”. The CCP seeks to colonize and extinguish all linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity in Xinjiang today, in order to assimilate the territory under its own preferred Han Chinese race, and their own atheist communist ideology.

In the face of such extreme repression, some Uyghurs have indeed advocated separatism and utilized terrorism and violence, including street riots, as a means.

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Is The U.S. Doing Enough To Advance Religious Freedom Globally?

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 8, August 2018 

Two police officers wearing helmets are photographed standing on a street corner. The road is completely empty. There is a very large poster in the background with a photograph with a crowd of supporters on the poster.

Photo taken in September 2017 shows a police officer patrolling against the backdrop of a billboard of President Xi Jinping. Source: Carsten ten Brink via Flickr.

Terri Marsh, Ph.D., Esq.

Executive Director and Senior Litigation partner of the Human Rights Law Foundation

We are facing a crisis as regards U.S. corporations profiting from the sale of technology indispensable to the perpetration of egregious human rights violations in the People’s Republic of China. In 2007 Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo! was criticized by U.S. Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, for Yahoo’s role in the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese journalist and democracy advocate Shi Tao. The case describes the actions that Yahoo! had taken to grow its business in China, complying with a government request for the identity of a Yahoo! user, which subsequently resulted in Shi Tao’s detention and torture. Cisco Systems Inc. arguably facilitated the development of the Golden Shield apparatus in China that has caught Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhist and Uyghur dissidents in its torture/persecution network. See “Index of Relevant Allegations,” available upon request. These are but a few of the most salient examples.

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China’s Targeting of Overseas Chinese for Intelligence, Influence and Drug Trafficking

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 7, July 2018 

Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte (L), son of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the president's son-in-law, Manases Carpio (R), are photographed taking an oath as they attend a senate hearing. Both are raising their right hands.

Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte (L), son of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the president’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio (R), take an oath as they attend a senate hearing in Manila on September 7, 2017.
Paolo Duterte and the president’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio, appeared before the inquiry to deny as “baseless” and “hearsay” allegations linking them to large-scale illegal drugs smuggling. Source: Flickr.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.

Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

On June 12, Philippine protesters staged coordinated protests against China in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Protest organizer Ago Pedalizo said, “Duterte’s government pursues the ‘sell, sell, sell’ approach to sovereignty as a trade-off to all kickbacks he’ll get from the ‘build, build, build’ economic push of China.” His protest group, Filipino American Human Rights Advocates (FAHRA), charged that “Duterte is beholden to the $15-billion loan with monstrous interest rate and China’s investments in Boracay and Marawi, at the expense of Philippine sovereignty. This is not to mention that China remains to be the premier supplier of illegal drugs to the country through traders that include the son, Paolo Duterte, with his P6 billion shabu [methamphetamine] shipment to Davao.” 

Paolo Duterte has denied the allegations. Philippine and Chinese government offices did not reply to requests for comment.

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