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Last month I published a piece titled, “Uyghur Muslims: Victims of the World’s Largest Ethnic Cleansing,” which exposed China’s coordinated and sustained effort to ethnically cleanse East Turkistan’s 15 million Uyghur Muslims via an array of unconscionable measures, including murder, including imprisonment, forced disappearances, and “reeducation camps” that offer a Faustian bargain between accepting the Communist Party’s ideology or Islam.

Noting that imprisonment or worse awaits those who defiantly choose the latter.

Islam has been banned in the region, as have Islamic books, mosques, and beards that appear too “Muslim-y” in the eyes of Chinese authorities, but these are just a sample of a new tranche of restrictive and discriminatory measures that have come into force for those living in the region, noting that Uyghur Muslims are now even required by the government to have tracking devices installed on their cars and mobile phones.

In short, China is sparing no effort to eradicate any memory or proof of Uyghur Muslim life.

Shortly after the piece was published, Steven Zhang, a Hui Muslim who now resides in the United States, reached out to me with what I can only describe as a sobering warning.

“I assume your laptop and Smartphone would probably be hacked soon by Shanghai,” read Zhang’s introductory note to me. “If you’re determined to disclose the big picture of Chinese Communist Party’s crimes against Uyghur Muslims, you need to take precautions against potential female entrapment [honey trap], cash bribery, probably followed by traffic accident manipulation.”

Needless to say, Zhang now had my full and immediate attention.

When I asked what he meant by “traffic accident manipulation,” he told me a usual method deployed by Chinese authorities to silence critics is to dress up an assassination to look like nothing more than a freak car accident. He said the Chinese government had tried to kill him this way.

Naturally I asked why he believed the Chinese government had attempted to assassinate him, and he explained he believed it was because he was making noise, or rather investigating the alleged murder of his wife, a Uyghur Muslim from Xinjiang, at the hands of Chinese authorities.

Zhang explained that shortly after he filed a lawsuit against The People’s Republic of China for the murder of his wife, he visited the FBI Houston Division “two times, once in March and the other in August” to report what he described as “espionage” against him, including the break and enter into his apartment.

But first I needed to know more about the guy I was now communicating with.

AICHE, a professional membership website for chemical engineers, lists Zhang as a graduate of Harbin University of Science & Technology, member of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS), and author of an industry paper titled “Redesigning Architecture of Risk Based Process Safety in Context of Emerging Ethical Dimension of Vision 20/20.”

A few weeks after his initial contact, Zhang emailed me several documents, including his charge against the Chinese government for the attempted murder of him at the hands of the Tianjin police department, and the death of his Uyghur Muslim wife — Hariguli Aimaier, who, according to the documents, was subjected to cold-water torture techniques, and deprived of food, medicine, and warm clothing.

Zhang told me his wife was arrested and falsely accused for crossing the border illegally on January 18th, 2016, and taken to Jinwuhzen Police Department. Zhang was notified of his wife’s detainment the following morning, and, in turn, brought critically needed medicine, knowing his wife was suffering from stomach bleeding as a result of her “terminal cancer.”

On January 19th, Zhang’s wife was forced to take a cold shower while threatened with violence from a fellow detainee. “After the cold water shower, my wife was permitted to dry neither her hair nor her body and the window [to her cell] was left open. I checked later that the temperature that night was -8 degrees,” Zhang writes in his statement of claim against the Chinese government.

The following evening, Zhang’s wife was forced to have another cold shower while the air temperature was minus 6 degrees. On the 22nd, she was transferred from the detention center to a prison in Urumqi, but in transit was forced to march in the open air, wearing only “thin clothes and slippers” while it was minus 14 degrees outside.

Moreover, the health condition of his wife hadn’t been communicated by the staff at the detention center in Jinwuhzen to those in Urumqi.

“My wife’s stomach sickness and condition had deteriorated manifestly…she was so extremely weak that she had to rest on a bed…but was beaten [by the officers] as punishment for earlier bed rest by police officer Mr. Shui,” reads the statement of claim made by Zhang.

On February 16, 2016, a full month after her release, Zhang’s wife was released on bail but admitted immediately to hospital but the “opportunity for a timely surgery had been missed” as a result of her detainment, and by now was totally “incapacitated” and “at death’s door.”

The following morning Hariguli Aimaier, Zhang’s wife, fell into a coma, and shortly thereafter passed away.

In the weeks and months that followed, Zhang demanded justice from his government, but instead of compensation or even a fair hearing, Zhang alleges they tried to kill him in what he describes only as a “motorcycle accident manipulation.” Fearing for his life, Zhang fled China for the United States, where he lives today but under constant fear his home country will seek its vengeance here, like so many Uyghur Muslims fear for their own future there.

An article published by the Washington Post this week speaks to Zhang’s story, detailing the lengths Chinese authorities go to when attempting to silence those who expose its efforts to ethnically cleanse the Uyghur Muslim population.

“China’s security services have detained several close relatives of four U.S.-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia in an apparent attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region,” writes the Washington Post.”

One of the relatives of those arrested said, “Chinese authorities have contacted family members living in Xinjiang, urging them to ask him to stop calling and reporting on events in the region.”

Over the course of the past decade, China has stepped up its efforts to both colonize East Turkistan, and eradicate any memory or legacy of the indigenous population, with more nearly one million Uyghur Muslims detained in “re-education camps,” although Zhang estimates the number to be closer to 5 million, which would represent a third of the Uyghur population.

“You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them [Uyghur Muslims] all,” one Chinese government official was recorded saying.

A Uyghur Muslim man said in an interview with Foreign Policy this week that he was arrested when he returned to China for a visit after completing his university degree in the United States. In fact, he was detained mid-flight by undercover Chinese government officials, and escorted from the aircraft by 3 border patrol officers who took him in for questioning, asking him, “What do you do in North America? Where do you study? We found business cards of Chinese professors. You know a lot of important people, don’t you?”

After being stripped search and subjected to a cavity search, the Uyghur Muslim man was held in a prison for 17 days, interrogated dozens of times and forced to watch Chinese state propaganda videos that likens Islam to an “illegal religious activity.”

“In one skit, a young man was apprehended for studying the Quran at an underground school, a practice authorities are trying to eliminate,” notes the report.

As stated earlier, and as I documented in my earlier piece on East Turkistan, China is not only carrying out the world’s largest campaign of ethnic cleansing, but also it’s taking place in near total silence, and China is doing everything it can to keep it that way, including the violent targeting of those who seek to change that.

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