Twitter removes China embassy tweet referring to Uyghurs as 'baby-making machines'Twitter has taken down a post from the Chinese embassy in Washington that said Uyghur women in its northwest Xinjiang region had been "emancipated" by the Chinese Communist Party as part of the "process of eradicating extremism".

Having received criticism from tens of thousands of other Twitter users, the company removed the tweet over the weekend saying it had "violated the Twitter rules", but did not provide further details.

"Studies show that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uyghur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent," the tweet read.

The embassy's tweet was paraphrasing an article in the state-run newspaper China Daily, claiming that "decreases in the birth-rate and natural population growth rate" in Xinjiang had come as the result of "the eradication of religious extremism".The article was citing a study conducted by the state-run Xinjiang Development Research Centre.

China's ruling Communist Party has intensified its campaign to "Sinicise Islam" in recent years, including banning headscarfs for women and long beards for men as part of what it claims is a crackdown on Islamic extremism.

An Associated Press investigation released in June 2020 found that Chinese authorities were using forced abortions, insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilisations against Uyghur women as part of what some experts have referred to as "demographic genocide".

The China Daily article said: "[Uyghurs'] personal decisions on whether to use those measures — which include tubal ligation and the insertion of intrauterine devices — are fully respected."

A separate tweet from the embassy, which remains online, linked to a similar article from the state news agency Xinhua.

"In recent years, young people in Xinjiang have discarded backward and outdated thoughts on partner selection and procreation, and an increasing number of youths belonging to ethnic minorities chose to spend more time and energy on personal development," the article read.

Twitter cracks down on content causing 'potential for violence'

As of 2019, it was estimated that more than a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim ethnic minorities were detained in what the Communist Party calls vocational education centres.

The United Nations calls the facilities "re-education camps".

China threatens Australia with a 'counterstrike' after government condemned Beijing's assault on democracy in Hong Kong

• Beijing has threatened a 'counterstrike' against Australia as the spat worsens
• Communist rulers angry Australia condemned China's mass Hong Kong arrests
• China arrested more than 50 activists for holding an independent election China has threatened a 'counterstrike' against Australia after Canberra condemned Beijing's mass arrest of 55 politicians and activists in Hong Kong.

  Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao, who has a fake image of an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to a child's throat pinned to the top of his Twitter account, said anyone who gets in the way of China's affairs would suffer.

  'The Chinese people's resolve to defend our sovereignty and territorial integrity is unshakeable and we will not permit any person or force to stop the process of China's reunification,' he told a press briefing on Monday. 

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  'Any actions which harm China's core interests will be met with a resolute counterstrike and will not succeed.' The threat is the latest in a torrent of abuse calling Australia 'evil' and 'meddling'  as the Chinese Communist Party lashes out against criticism of its authoritarian crackdown.

  The outburst comes after Canberra joined three key allies to condemn China's mass arrests in Hong Kong, accusing it of breaching its international obligation to respect the city's autonomy. 

  Hong Kong is a former British territory whose democratic rules, human rights and economic freedoms were guaranteed by the terms of a 1997 handover treaty as it transitions to become part of China in 2047.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9154059/China-threatens-counterstrike-Australia-condemns-Beijings-assault-Hong-Kong-democracy.html

China bans Clubhouse app as thousands share stories about Xinjiang and Tiananmen Square

It was an incredible moment: a Chinese woman delivering an emotional public apology to a woman from the country's oppressed Uyghur minority. I was one of more than 1,000 people there to witness it.

It was last Sunday morning. I tuned into a chatroom on the new social media app Clubhouse — an invite-only audio-chat platform that can connect up to 5,000 speakers and listeners in a virtual room.

A Uyghur woman told listeners her parents' story of being sent to a re-education camp in western China's Xinjiang region.

Then a young woman, who said she was a teenager living elsewhere in the mainland, broke her silence.

The teenager broke down in tears and couldn't continue. The only word that I could hear her say clearly was "sorry".

She apologised to the Uyghur speaker — not only for what they had experienced, but also for her inability to help.

It was my first time listening to a large-scale public exchange between ordinary mainland Chinese people and Uyghur groups.

What made it more extraordinary was they cried together, and told each other that they should stand in solidarity.

For the next few hours, diverse voices from Xinjiang were heard by thousands of listeners. Han-Chinese residents — the majority ethnic group in China — from the region spoke out about what they knew about the re-education camps.

Beijing has repeatedly said the facilities are vocational centres or "boarding schools" that are necessary to prevent "extremism" and "terrorism".

People who spoke in the chatroom said they were students, architects, lawyers, and even more surprisingly — one person claimed to be a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member who had visited a camp in the past.

As they were discussing the same topics from different perspectives, I shed tears of my own.

Of course, there were confrontations about the controversial topic but, for nearly 12 hours, one speaker after another, there was a strong sense of reconciliation between the two ethnic groups in the room.

It was the first time I've witnessed a discussion from China uncensored by Beijing.

The app soon attracted tens of thousands of tech-savvy netizens from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China.

However, on Monday the inevitable happened. The Chinese censors acted and soon many mainland China users were logged out of the app and couldn't log back on.

Uyghurs feeling 'reconciliation'

Halmurat Harri is a doctor in Finland who has helped compile testimonies from other Uyghurs in exile about loved ones thought to be in China's internment camps.

He was one of the moderators of the group, but also shared his own experiences and answered questions for people who heard about the situation in Xinjiang for the first time.

Mr Harri said his parents were detained from 2017 to late 2018. He said conversations held in the room were "emotional" and "shocking".

"I never thought this could happen so fast … despite the risk," Mr Harri told the ABC.

"I was shocked, in a very good way… I heard that [over] an hour, over and over again from so many Chinese people from all over the world."

Mr Harri started his campaign on social media when his parents went missing. He has been trying to collect testimonies and maintain a list of detainees, in order to demand answers from Beijing.

After he told the harrowing story of looking for his parents, he received dozens of messages via Instagram and Twitter, showing support for his activism.

"This will be remembered."

A space for freedom of speech

Launched in April last year, Clubhouse is currently only available on Apple's iOS system and has grown slowly through its invite-only mechanism.

Every user is allowed to invite two other people when they successfully sign up for an account. The app has gained a large number of users in recent weeks, after the appearance of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg on the platform.

Users can listen and speak to others in a live chat room, but cannot send or receive messages.

The platform, which has reportedly been downloaded at least 2 million times, has rapidly gained popularity in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

While the app appears to have given some a taste of their long-lost freedom of speech, nationalistic state-owned tabloid Global Times on Monday published a story alleging the app was not a "free speech heaven".

It said Chinese mainland users found political discussions on the app to "often be one-sided and pro-China voices can be easily suppressed".

The state media outlet cited one man's experience of joining a Taiwan discussion only to find that people "simply repeated their own opinions, rather than discuss or debate them critically."

It wasn't only about politics. They had open talks about gender and sexuality, while sharing reflections on China's suppression on press freedom and internet censorship.

While some expressed how they cherished every moment of listening and speaking in different rooms, others were worried that the app would be censored.

Some said they didn't want to sleep because they were worried the app would be banned the next day, while others said their belief in the Government had "collapsed".

'The excitement of expressing freely'

Taiwanese blogger and citizen journalist Zhou Shuguang, known as Zuola, has been moderating his chat room with help from volunteers around the world.

A decade ago, Mr Zhou moved from mainland China to Taiwan and gained his citizenship last year. While China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province, Taipei considers itself independent.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr Zhou was hosting a public interview with a representative from Amnesty International on the app.

"I can tell the excitement of expressing freely after living under suppression and censorship," Mr Zhou told the ABC.

In one popular chatroom, Beijing residents shared their experiences during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.

In another, people who said they were students and activists described their experiences of being monitored and visited by police.

I was one of the listeners in the Tiananmen chatroom when China's censorship apparatus went into action.

Hundreds of users dropped off, and they all appeared to be from chatrooms discussing China-related issues.

While some initially thought it was due to bugs on the platform, some users who returned to the room said they were able to log on by using their Virtual Private Network (VPN).

"Without the Great Firewall, people who understand the same language talk freely and [virtually] hugged each other," Mr Zhou told the ABC after the app was censored by Beijing.

"But in an instant, the firewall was back in their way."

The ABC has approached China's Foreign Ministry and Clubhouse for comment.

Coronavirus origin Wuhan: Grim fate of China’s COVID-19 whistleblowers

The people who defied China to let the world know about a virus that has killed 2.5 million people have paid a cruel price for their bravery.

The devastating impact of China’s crackdown on anybody who dared speak the truth about what was happening at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic has been laid bare by heartbroken family members – who in some cases haven’t seen their loved ones since they were taken away by authorities many months ago.

One of those who lost a loved one is Chen Kun – who has been living in self-imposed exile in Paris because he is terrified of what would happen to him if he returned home.

His brother Chen Mei had worked to expose what was happening as the virus began to spread rapidly through China.

In China, information the government doesn’t want its citizens to see is blocked by a “great firewall”, but Mr Chen – along with the help of a group of whistleblowers – found a way around it.

It was called Terminus 2049, a crowdsourced repository for sensitive articles that was founded in 2018, and it archived censored posts on Chinese social media platforms WeChat and Weibo.

Mr Chen’s family and friends warned him he might land himself in trouble with the Chinese government, even though what he was doing was relatively conservative compared to other activists.

However, late in 2019, when a mysterious new virus began circulating in the city of Wuhan, everything changed.

As the virus began to take hold, the Chinese government moved to crack down on “rumours” being spread by doctors and whistleblowers about the virus – detailing deaths and the alarming rate of transmission.

Hearing reports of how the virus was spreading, Mr Chen’s brother Chen Kun fled the country to Indonesia in a bid to avoid the pandemic.

It was while he was living there, several months later in April 2020, that he got a call saying his brother has been detained – along with two others involved in the Terminus 2049 project.

Mr Chen had been charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – and his family have not seen or heard from him ever since.

His brother, who is now exiled in Paris, told CNN he has serious concerns for the rest of his family in China.

“I’m worried, but I don’t have any choice. I just have one option which is to speak out,” Chen Kun said.

He is deeply concerned about the Chinese government’s crackdown – saying it has “whitewashed” what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the world cannot learn from mistakes that were made.

The Chinese government has been heavily-criticised for the way it suppressed information in the early days of the outbreak in December 2019.

According to Caixin, the known coronavirus case was on December 18, when a 65-year-old deliveryman linked to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan who was admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital after developing a fever three days earlier.

Nine days later, staff at the hospital became concerned when a 41-year-old man with similar symptoms was taken in for treatment, as he had never been to Huanan Seafood Market.

Three days later doctor Ai Fen from the hospital circulated a patient’s test result that reads “SARS coronavirus” to her colleagues.

The message was shared online before all evidence of it was soon wiped from the internet.

The following day Dr Ai was reprimanded by his hospital and the local health commission for spreading reports of the virus – as authorities began to crack down on “rumormongers”. She is understood to still be working at the hospital.

The Chinese government didn’t report the first death until January 11. However, the following day, it said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission – a claim repeated shortly after by the World Health Organisation.

By that point, the virus had begun to spread around the nation and later to the rest of the world.

The Chinese government’s propaganda machine has been in full-flow ever since – stating that its authoritarian response to the virus has worked and shows China’s strength.

Officials have scrubbed reports about what happened in Wuhan and created their own alternative timelines that painted China in a more favourable light.

They have promoted baseless arguments that the virus could have started elsewhere, including the theory US army personnel could have brought the virus to China when they came to Wuhan for the Military World Games in October 2019.

Meanwhile, those who tried to warn the world of what was to come are languishing in prison – or dying from the disease they were trying to expose.

Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old Wuhan ophthalmologist at a local hospital, became a poignant symbol of the early days of the outbreak, before it was officially recognised. When he tried to sound the alarm, he was reprimanded by Chinese officials for “spreading rumours”.

The doctor’s death, reportedly from coronavirus, on February 7, 2020, caused both enormous public mourning and a rare outcry of anger online.

A 37-year-old citizen journalist Zhang Zhan is paying the price for her on-the-ground reporting from the central Chinese city of Wuhan in the early days of the disease.

Ms Zhang was sentenced to four years imprisonment in the last week of December for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – accused of “fabricating malicious and false information” after she travelled to Wuhan and reported on what she found there.

For six months, Ms Zhang had refused to plead guilty, beginning a hunger strike soon after her arrest, which continued right up to her brief trial.

ABS-CBN reports she attended court in a wheelchair and in a December visit at Shanghai Pudong detention centre, she told her lawyer: “[I am] mentally and physically exhausted. Every day has been a torture.”

By that stage, Ms Zhang’s hands were restrained to stop her removing a feeding tube in her nose, while her health continued to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus has killed at least 2,527,287 people since it emerged in China in December 2019.

China introduces three-child policy to alleviate problem of ageing population