Financial repression: Taking away "the Uyghurs’ economic financial backbone.”
One woman’s fight to expose how the Chinese regime uses money as a weapon to erase her people.
Hello friends,
It has been a while! So here’s a quick update.
This past year, I’ve been working at the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) as the content lead for our Financial Freedom program. It’s been an incredible experience, full of challenges and moments of deep inspiration.
Together with the team we’ve accomplished so much.
I helped launch our weekly newsletter called The Financial Freedom Report (check out the archive of newsletters here), worked on some amazing videos (like this one), co-emceed at the Oslo Freedom Forum’s Financial Freedom Track (watch here), and connected with an inspiring group of people—activists, developers, educators, community leaders, and freedom fighters—each contributing in their own way to advance financial freedom for the billions who lack it today.
In one of those serendipitous moments that work brings, I met Rushan Abbas, an Uyghur activist advocating for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Our conversation left a deep impression on me. I recently wrote a piece for HRF that explores her insights on how China uses financial repression to erase the Uyghurs.
Rushan Abbas & and the financial repression facing the Uyghur people.
The Uyghurs are a Muslim-minority group from the Uyghur Region in Northwest China. Rushan explained how over the past decades being Uyghur has become “a crime.”
Since 2014, the Chinese regime has built concentration camps to detain Uyghur people. Today, it’s the largest concentration camp and incarceration of an ethnic group since the Holocaust—and it’s ongoing.
“The government is forced steralizing [women], giving them forced abortions. About a million Uyghur children are taken from their families. Millions of people are in detention. And millions more are sent to forced labour facilities as modern slaves.” — Rushan told me.
The Chinese regime claims these camps are meant to fight terrorism and provide vocational training, but various scholars, human rights organizations and governments consider these abuses to be crimes against humanity, and even genocide.
Rushan’s advocacy has come at a personal cost. In 2017, 24 members of her husband’s family disappeared. Shortly after she spoke about the Uyghur crisis at the Hudson Institute, the Chinese regime retaliated by detaining her sister, Gulshan Abbas, a retired medical doctor. Rushan described her sister as “completely innocent, very kind, very apolitical” who was now sentenced to 20 years in prison on sham charges (an obvious attempt to silence Rushan’s activism).
Despite this heartbreaking personal loss, Rushan keeps fighting for the freedom, rights, and dignity of her people.
At one point during our conversation, she paused to ask me about my work. I explained how I write about financial repression under authoritarian regimes as part of HRF’s Financial Freedom team. Before I could finish, she jumps in to say how she knows all too well about financial repression because the Chinese regime uses money as a weapon “to take away the Uyghurs’ economic financial backbone.”
Below, Rushan shares key insights on how the Chinese regime uses financial repression to target the Uyghur people. If you find it valuable, I invite you to subscribe to the Financial Freedom Report. You’ll get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.
On financial surveillance
“The entire Uyghur Region is a police state. Every space, every property, any amount of money in the bank, everything is being surveilled. They know everything. Every Uyghur person has a mandatory spyware app installed on their phone. If you have any kind of communication with your bank on banking apps, they see how much money is coming in and out, which businessman has how much money… The government knows everything,” Abbas told me.
“If [the] government goes to the bank with a list of 100 Uyghur names and says, you know, ‘give me the bank balance for these people [and] how much money they have,’ the bank will print it out and hand it over to the CCP. Then, they shut down the bank accounts, freeze their assets, and they take their properties,” she said.
On confiscation
“After they detained all the Uyghur thought leaders, business owners, Uyghur intellectuals, elites, they started to re-register [their] properties. They only give them like 12 months…
“Well, the owners are in the [detention] camps. How do you re-register your house, your land, your business, your properties? Anybody who did not re-register their properties or re-reclaim their own properties, was taken over by the government,” Abbas said. “There were so many videos of Han Chinese settlers moving into Uyghur homes. So, in the rural area, where the Uyghurs have a home, the home comes with land. Most Uyghurs in the southern region are farmers and have farmland. All of these farmlands and homes were claimed by Han Chinese settlers.”
On financial slavery
“The Poverty Alleviation program is designed to reduce the Uyghur demographic in the region and [increase] control over their livelihood — their traditional livelihood, their homes, their way of living — and ship them into wage labour, often in industries that benefit Han Chinese settlers or state enterprises or the factories. And if they refuse any kind of those transfers, they will be punished.”
“So, what do you call that? If you have no choice and they just ship you off and you have no contact with your family members. You cannot leave the factory and go visit your families. What do you call that? That is modern slavery.”
Is there a way to get justice for the Uyghur people?
"The legal help is the government. You know, how do you get legal help when the government is the judge, government is the attorney, government is the prosecutor? The government is everything.”
Rushan’s story reminds me that while we enjoy freedoms like the rule of law, free speech, and some measure of financial security here in North America, billions of people around the world live without any of these protections. This is why I’m so passionate about financial technologies that help people fight against financial repression.
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(One of the things I value most about my work with HRF is the opportunity to highlight the efforts of activists, organizations, and movements pushing for financial freedom. While my work with HRF allows me to highlight their amazing work, I'm hoping to use this newsletter to write different, longer content on the marginalized communities in search of freedom. At times, I’ll share updates on my work, especially when these topics overlap. Of course, I still encourage you all to subscribe to HRF’s newsletter as it’s an invaluable resource into the global state of financial repression and how ordinary citizens are fighting back with open-source money. Subscribe to the Financial Freedom Report here.)
So excited to see this in my inbox! This is very important work and we all need to be better informed and educated.