Why Is China’s Genocide Ignored? Especially by U.S. Faculty & Students?

Over more than a decade, the Chinese government has been grossly persecuting Muslims in the western region of Xianjiang. An officially-recognized ethnic minority of between 11-13 million people, the Uyghurs speak a Turkic language. As second-class citizens, they have seen their lives grow more tenuous, constricted, desolate and desperate as the Chinese have spun ugly new twists on the Nazi persecution of Jews and Soviet-style surveillance.

Supposedly protecting China from terrorists, Chinese persecution has involved demeaning the Uyghurs as less than human; endless interrogations over things as minor as speaking to someone abroad on the phone–and even arresting those people; denying them passports; arresting and “disappearing” people who have passports; seizing anything related to Islam like Korans, Islamic books, and prayer rugs; forcing people to change their Muslim names and expensively register the change in newspapers; arbitrarily arresting and detaining a million people in slave labor camps. Uyghurs have even been forced to renounce Islam and praise Communism in word and song. And they have to pay for the installation of state surveillance cameras on their apartment buildings.

People just disappear, and family and friends don’t know where they are or if they’re even alive. Torture has been employed against Uyghurs in prisons and camps, and so is forced sterilization of some women. The aim is to terrorize this population and destroy their culture. The oppression extends beyond their region: Uyghurs who have come to Beijing for any number of reasons cannot stay in ordinary Chinese hotels but are ghettoized in Uyghur hotels.

Much of this is detailed soberly but powerfully by renowned Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil in his memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night.  In his devastating short book he details his three-year imprisonment after trying to travel outside of China, along with endless interviews and bureaucracy that go beyond Kafkaesque. Chinese surveillance of its people who all have ID cards is highly sophisticated, strict, far-reaching, and inexorable. And the Uyghurs aren’t just spied on, they’re fingerprinted, forced to give blood samples, and photographed extensively via computers for facial advanced recognition.

The author tells the stories of friends who almost died trying to get to freedom in the West and his own attempts to escape China with his family are heartbreaking, the stuff of a thriller. Luckily, he made it out.

In one of the most haunting passages, he and his wife are interrogated in a basement office where they pass by prison cells, bloodstained floors, and a chair with straps meant to immobilize people being tortured. Waiting anxiously to be summoned downstairs, they had heard a man crying out in pain–until a steel door to the stairs was shut by police.

Many colleges and universities around the U.S. seem to think that they should be making foreign policy declarations even though their central mission is education. Given that drive and the uproar about the war in Gaza, it’s shocking that when it comes to China, Muslims there do not seem to count despite their horrendous suffering–and the fact that the U.S. has declared what is happened in China to be genocide.

Michigan State University is a sad example with its furious meetings about the war in Gaza. Whatever lies behind student and faculty silence about the Uyghurs, the institutional silence could be due to the fact that MSU has long-standing and apparently remunerative ties with China. You have to wonder if other universities have similar reasons for shamefully ignoring the truth. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael is a former book reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

A Death in Denmark

Danish Gabriel Præst is not your typical PI.  He’s intellectual, dandyish, and upscale.  He quotes Kierkegaard and Sartre, wears designer clothes, loves fine wine and good whiskey (though he’s also a beer aficionado).  His high-end coffee maker likely costs several thousand dollars and he’s fastidious in other ways, too: he’s been working for a decade on remodeling a townhouse he inherited.  Latest DIY problem? Locating more hard-to-find 17th-century Spanish tiles to finish the bathroom that already has a wildly expensive antique French claw-foot tub.

Præst’s main clients are corporate law firms in Copenhagen, and his brief is corporate theft, embezzlement, industrial espionage, corporate corruption, insurance fraud and that old PI standby, adultery.  The man’s personal life is intriguing.  He has a woman journalist friend-with-benefits, gets along amicably with the mother of his daughter, really likes her new husband, and even rents space in the husband’s law firm building.

Unlike most crime fiction–whether screen or book–his daughter in this book is not troubled, difficult or any other cliché of the genre.  In fact, she’s “morally sound, smart, self-aware and courageous.”

The story begins when Præst has been asked by an ex-lover to investigate the case of a Muslim Dane convicted of killing a right-wing politician.  He accepts the case because he’s still under the spell of this ex-.  She’s “the one who got away.”

In a classic genre scene, he’s warned off the investigation by a tough advisor to the Danish prime minister himself.  Of course nothing will stop Præst and every step of his investigation seems to expose right-wing bigotry against Muslims living in Denmark even if they were born there.  As the investigation unfolds, we learn that the victim was secretly working on a book about Denmark’s time under German occupation that might reveal a less-than-heroic role for some important Danes.

The characters are vividly described, the translation from Danish feels smooth and the story is compelling, though readers might feel the author overdoes Præst’s foodie lifestyle since it feels like he’s eating or drinking on almost every page.  And  awareness of his “white privilege” is practically a flag he waves as if he has to prove some kind of point.  A careful editor might have suggested a lighter touch, and did he need to be beaten up so often–and shot too?

However, the author does a good job of leavening this mystery with humor. There’s a constant joke that everyone refers to the mother of Præst’s child as his “ex-wife” when they were never married and it frustrates them.  And some of the best parts of the book are Præst’s sarcastic observations about the difficult weather in Denmark and complaints about people lacking style.  Readers who don’t find the food references overdone may feel like they’ve been given a welcome tour of cool places to eat and drink in Copenhagen.  As well as a style guide for men who want to look like what one character calls “a southern Swedish metrosexual.”

Lev Raphael has reviewed crime fiction for The Detroit Free Press and is the author of the Nick Hoffman mystery series.