Home United States USA — China The ‘banshee’ threatened and harassed by China for telling the truth about...

The ‘banshee’ threatened and harassed by China for telling the truth about Xinjiang

262
0
SHARE

« Xu…was a traitor, a pawn controlled by the West, or a ‘female demon.’”
Vicky Xiuzhong Xu is a 26-year-old reporter and researcher living in Australia. She was born in China and came to Australia to study abroad. While there she came across a documentary about Tiananmen Square, something she’d never heard about at school in China. She applied to transfer her studies to an Australian university. At first, Xu believed some of the negative things she was encountering about China must be part of an anti-China PR campaign. She defended China in her classes and even had the symbols from the Chinese flag tattooed on her ankle as a sign of her commitment to her home country (visible in the image above). But eventually, for a journalism class, she decided to interview a dissident who had escaped China. She went into the interview expecting to be able to prove the subject was a liar, but after talking to him she realized what he was saying about being arrested and pushed into forced labor for criticizing the CCP was true. After that she began reporting critically on China and eventually focused on the detention, reeducation and forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Because of the success of her work, some of which was published by the NY Times, she has become a target of unhinged attacks on Chinese social media site and in state media. The flood of attacks posted and re-posted by state-media outlets and nationalist bloggers followed similar themes. Xu, part of a team documenting abuses of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region last year, was a traitor, a pawn controlled by the West, or a “female demon.” Queries for her name turn up thousands of results, including videos claiming to reveal details of her dating life, calling her “promiscuous” and “drug infested.” On Weibo, people have called for her family to be tracked down and ordered to apologize for raising such a daughter. Others said Xu should never be allowed back into China, issuing not-so-veiled threats. “Meet a traitor, kill a traitor,” one user wrote. Her family asked her to change her name for her own safety. The torrent of abuse targeting Xu, one year after she co-wrote an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report on Uyghur labor in supply chains, is the most extreme example of a growing Chinese campaign to defend its Xinjiang policies and to silence overseas researchers through sanctions and intimidation… The online onslaught against Xu, named in countless headlines as the unexpected “black hand” behind the West’s anti-China campaign, has continued with tacit if not outright support from Chinese state media. “Even as a Chinese person, she insists on going against China; the doxing of Xu Xiuzhong and trashing of her reputation are in no way undeserved,” said an editorial in the state-run China Daily. The Chinese attempts to punish anyone who stands up or speaks out isn’t new. Last month the Post published a story about social media attacks, backed by state media, of Swedish clothing chain H&M after H&M said it would stop buying cotton from the Xinjiang region over concerns forced labor was being used to pick it. While critics are targeted, official Chinese sources put out propaganda messages claiming China has done nothing wrong or, like this one, simply telling people to stay out of it. Mind your own business! HANDS OFF #XINJIANG! Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) March 28, 2021 Last week Xu wrote a thread on Twitter in Chinese about her experiences. Below is the English translation of her tweets. As you’ll see, she says that because state media has decided to attack her as a “slut,” “witch,” “traitor,” and “banshee” she is now going to write about what she’s seen and reported in Chinese and not just in English.

Continue reading...