(BEIJING) – When police arrested middle-aged Uighur women at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in China, they huddled on a mobile phone with dozens of other women in a detention center.
There, she said, she was forced to drink a drug that made her feel weak and nauseous, and the guards chased her as she swallowed. She and the others also had to undress once a week and cover their faces while the guards gave water to them and their cells with a disinfectant “like firefighters,” he said.
“It’s hot,” Xinjiang’s wife said, refusing to be identified for fear of reprisals. “My hands were damaged, my skin was peeled.”
The government of the Xinjiang region in the far northwest of China is resorting to draconian measures to combat the coronavirus, adding physically locking citizens into their homes, imposing quarantines of more than 40 days, and arresting those who do not. In addition, in what experts call a violation of medical ethics, some citizens are forced to swallow classical Chinese medicine, according to government opinions, social media posts, and interviews with three other quarantined people in Xinjiang.
There is a lack of rigorous clinical knowledge that seems to indicate that classical Chinese medicine works against the virus, and one of the herbal remedies used in Xinjiang, Qingfei Paidu, includes banned ingredients in Germany, Switzerland, the United States and other countries for the higher grades of toxins and carcinogens.
The most recent protest blockade, now on its 45th, occurs in reaction to the 826 cases reported in Xinjiang since mid-July, the number of cases in China since the initial outbreak. But Xinjiang’s closure is striking due to its severity and the fact that there has not been a new case of local broadcast in singles for more than a week.
Severe restrictions have been imposed in other parts of China, adding Wuhan, Hubei Province, where the virus was first detected. But Wuhan was dealing with more than 50,000 cases and Hubei with 68,000 in total, much more than in Xinjiang, the citizens of that country were not required to take classic drugs and were sometimes allowed to go outside in their enclosures to exercise or deliver groceries.
The reaction to an outbreak of more than three hundred cases in Beijing in early June was even milder, with some helping to close the neighborhoods for a few weeks. By contrast, more than a portion of Xinjiang’s other 25 million people are under a blockade that stretches many miles from the center of the epidemic in the capital, Urumqi, according to an AP review of government warnings and state media reports.
Even when Wuhan and the rest of China have returned to everyday life more frequently, Xinjiang’s blockade is subsidized through a vast surveillance apparatus that has reshaped the region into a virtual police state. Over the more than 3 years, the Xinjiang government has trained one million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities in the detention bureaucracy, adding extrajudicial detention camps, under widespread security repression.
After being detained for more than a month, the Uighur woman was released and locked up in her home. The conditions are now better, she told the AP, but she is still locked up, even though normal tests seem to have lost the virus.
Once a day, she says, network staff imposes classic drugs on unmarked white bottles, saying they’ll stop her if she doesn’t drink them. AP saw photos of the bottles, which fit those of Xinjiang residents and others circulating on Chinese social media.
The government says the measures taken are aimed at the well-being of all residents, but not why they are more serious than those taken elsewhere. The Chinese government has fought for decades to control Xinjiang, and rarely clashes violently with many indigenous Uighurs in the region, who resent Beijing’s authoritarian regime.
“The Xinjiang Autonomous Region has defended the precept of others and, above all, life … and ensured the protection and suitability of other locals of all ethnic groups,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Friday at a press conference.
According to constantly, the Xinjiang government can take action because of its generously funded security apparatus, which is estimated to deploy the maximum number of police officers according to the planet’s capital.
“Xinjiang is a police state, so it’s essentially a martial law,” says Darren Byler, uighur researcher at the University of Colorado. “They believe that Uighurs cannot be controlled, they must be forced to comply for quarantine to be effective.”
The recent epidemic measures in Xinjiang are not aimed at all Uighurs or other largely Muslim minorities. Some also apply to Chinese citizens of Xinjiang, a Han majority, although they are sometimes avoided by extrajudicial detention used in opposition to minorities. This month, thousands of Xinjiang citizens turned to social media to complain about what they called exaggerated measures against the virus in censored messages, some with photographs of citizens handcuffed to bars and gates sealed with steel bars.
A Chinese Han woman with Wang’s surname posted photos of her drinking classical Chinese medicine in front of a doctor in full protective clothing.
“Why do they force us to take medicine when we’re not sick?” asked in a message on 18 August that he temporarily deleted. “Who will assume duty if there are disorders after drinking so many drugs? Why don’t we even have the right to protect our own health?”
A few days later, she simply wrote, “I have lost all hope. I cry when I do.
After criticism, the government eased some restrictions last week, now allowing some citizens to enter their concessions and some to leave the domain after a bureaucratic approval process.
Wang did not respond to an interview request. But your account is online with many others posted on social media as well as those interviewed via AP.
A Han businessman traveling between Urumqi and Beijing told the AP that it had been quarantined in mid-July. Although he has had coronavirus tests five times and negative tests each time, he said, the government has not yet let him out, not just a walk. When he complained about his online condition, he said, his messages were erased and he was told to remain silent.
“The worst thing is silence,” He wrote on the Chinese social network Weibo in mid-August. “After a long silence, you will fall into the abyss of despair.”
“I’ve been in this room for so long, I don’t know how long. I just need to forget,” he wrote a few days later. “I write my emotions to calm down, I still exist. I’m afraid they’ll forget the world.”
“I’m collapsing,” he told the AP more recently, refusing to be identified by retaliation.
He is also forced to take classical Chinese medicines, he said, adding liquid from the same unmarked white bottles as the Uighur woman. He is also forced to take Lianhua Qingwen, an herbal therapy seized by the U.S. Border Patrol and Customs.Hus For violating FDA law, by false claim to be effective as opposed to COVID-19.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, the Chinese government has imposed classical medicine on its people.The remedies are promoted through President Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian and nationalist leader, who has advocated for a revival of classical Chinese culture.Although some state-supported physicians say they have conducted trials in which the drug appears to work against the virus, no rigorous clinical knowledge of this claim has been published in foreign clinical journals.
“None of these drugs have proven to be clinically effective and safe,” said Fang Shimin, a former biochemist and known for his research on clinical fraud in China now living in the United States.”It is unethical to force people, in poor health or healthy health, to take unsafe medications.”
When the virus began to spread, thousands of pharmacies flooded Hubei Province for classic remedies after state media promoted its effectiveness against the virus. Packages of pills were stored in aid packages sent to Chinese staff and academics abroad, some with the Chinese flag, others saying, “The homeland will be forever.”
But new measures in Xinjiang that force some citizens to take the drug are unprecedented, experts say.The government says the share rate of classical Chinese medicine remedies in the region has “reached 100%,” according to a state media report.Court cases in which they were forced to use Chinese drugs, a local official said they did so “in expert opinion.”
“We helped solve people’s disorders,” said Liu Haijiang, director of Dabancheng District in Urumqi, “like taking their children to school, giving them medicine, or locating them with a doctor.”
With Xi’s rise, critics of classical Chinese medicine have been silent.In April, an influential Hubei physician, Yu Xiangdong, was dismissed as hospital director for wondering about the effectiveness of the remedies, an acquittal shown.An online government report stated that Yu had “publicly released comments outside the issue by slandering national epidemic prevention policy and classical Chinese medicine.”
In March, the World Health Organization removed the rules from its online page that indicated that herbal remedies were not effective in opposing the virus and could be harmful, saying it was “too broad.” And in May, the Beijing city government announced a bill that would criminalize the “defamatory or libelous” discourse of classical Chinese medicine. Now the government is pushing classic Chinese remedies as a remedy for COVID-19 abroad, sending pills and specialists to countries like Iran, Italy and the Philippines.
Other leaders have also introduced unproven and potentially dangerous remedies, adding U.S. President Donald Trump, who has hesitated about hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, which can cause problems at the central rate, even though there is no evidence that it is effective against COVID-19.But China turns out to be the first to force citizens, at least in Xinjiang, to take them.
The Chinese government’s efforts in favor of classical medicine fill the fortunes of billionaires and the coffers of the state. The circle of relatives of Wu Yiling, the founder of the company that manufactures Lianhua Qingwen, has noticed that the price of his stake has doubled in the last six months, bringing them to more than $1 billion. It also benefits: the Guangdong government, which has a stake in Wu’s company.
“It’s a huge waste of money, those corporations are making millions,” said a public fitness expert who works hard with the Chinese government, refusing to be known for concern of retaliation. “But then why take it? There’s a placebo effect, it’s so harmful. Why bother? There’s no point fighting for it.”
Measurements vary greatly by city and neighborhood, and not all citizens take the medication. The uighur woguy says that despite the threats that are opposed to it, she throws the liquid and the pills into the bathroom. A Han boy whose parents are in Xinjiang told AP that for them, the remedies are voluntary.
Although the measures are “extreme,” he says, they are understandable.
“There is no other way if the government needs this epidemic,” he said, refusing to be identified to avoid retaliation. “We don’t need our epidemic to be like Europe or America.”