Local officials in China’s Xinjiang province announced that a prominent Uyghur real estate businessman and philanthropist, Yaqub Haji, died in prison. Investigating the social media of Haji’s families and friends, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that his body was handed over to his family on September 6, 2021. There is no available information as to when and how Haji died.
From September 1 to 3, the biggest gathering of politicians, legal and academic experts on Xianjing has gathered in the Boiler House at Newcastle University in UK. The Xinjiang Crisis: Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Justice is organized by a Xianjing-specialist academic, Dr. Jo Smith Finley.
The Beijing Olympics, to be held on February 4th, 2022, has been called to be boycotted by human rights groups across China. In light of the leak of Xinjiang Papers in 2019, the Uyghur genocide, Hong Kong and Tibet protests, China has been under constant scrutiny by the world for its’ questionable stand against human rights abuse reports from across the country.
In a July 2020 interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Adrian Zenz, a German academic, explained how his opinion of the Communist Party of China’s actions in the Xinjiang region of Western China have changed. He once argued that China's actions are a "cultural genocide" as opposed to a literal one. But since recent developments regarding the suppression of birth rates among minorities of Xinjiang, Zenz now says that "we do need to probably call it genocide."
Uighur people live in northwestern China's Xinjiang province and are mostly a Muslim minority group. In June, the Associated Press (AP) found that the Chinese government mandates inhumane birth control measures on ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
According to the scholar Adrian Zenz, population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically in recent years. Growth rates in the two largest Uighur prefectures have fallen by 84% between 2015 and 2018 and continued further decline in 2019.
