Millions of dollars of assets, mysteriously vanished together with the Uyghurs who owned them, have just as mysteriously reappeared on China’s equivalent of eBay.
by Ruth Ingram
When Bitter Winter interviewed Istanbul-based Omerjan Hamdullah in April 2020, he had recently heard, via the diaspora grapevine, that his property mogul brothers, Rozi Haji, 43, and Memet, 37, co-owners of Xinjiang Ruzi Haji Ltd., a shipment company, and the Korla Chilanbagh Real Estate Development Company, had been sentenced in secret trials to 25 and 15 years for “unspecified crimes,” and their multi million dollar property empire seized by the CCP.
A recent report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Under the Gavel, has unveiled cases involving 55 individuals, including the Hamdullah brothers, and many as yet unreported cases, whose combined assets ranging from home appliances to real estate and company shares, total at least $84.8 million.
The auctioning off of assets on Taobao of people whose sentencing on “extremism” and “terrorism” charges has fallen under the radar of any legal judicial process, points the finger of blame at the feet of the tech and retail giant Alibaba, now irrefutably complicit in activities that break China’s own laws.
“Emerging evidence suggests that numerous Uyghur businesspeople have been swept up in the ongoing crackdown—and that some have been placed in the formal prison system on spurious charges of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism,’” claims the UHRP report. The aim of this, suggest the findings, is to target businesspeople as members of the social elite, which also includes intellectuals and religious leaders, many of whom have been victims of the purge. “The government perceives these groups as a threat to Party and state authority due to their status outside of official institutions and their role in maintaining Uyghur culture,” it claims, adding that all cases have been shrouded in secrecy, lacking in transparent judicial record-keeping.
Evidence has been shared with the Wall Street Journal, which reviewed court documents and corporate records. To date there has been no response from the Xinjiang government.
Recent Uyghur history has been peppered with entrepreneurs who have shared their success and business acumen with poorer segments of society and eventually fallen foul of the state apparatus. One example is Rabiya Kadeer, whose humble beginnings selling eggs were an inspiration to her people after she rose to become one of the seven richest people in the PRC. She achieved hero status after ploughing her profits into schools and business start ups for her poorest compatriots. Beijing took note, and made her a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for her efforts.
But as with many Uyghur entrepreneurs whose philanthropic largesse earned them fame and status within the Uyghur community, she eventually fell out of favor, was arrested in 1999 on allegations of “leaking state secrets,” sentenced to eight years imprisonment, and later released to the United States on medical parole in 2005.
Whereas the majority of Taobao judicial auctions concern loan defaults or civil disputes and a smaller number of property seized in criminal cases, very few properties auctioned by Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) courts include official documentation revealing the nature of the property owners’ alleged crime
The UHRP investigation found twelve cases, often involving multiple individuals, ranging from 2018 to 2021 in which property auctions followed their imprisonment on charges such as “aiding terrorist activities” and “extremism.” “Terrorism” and “extremism” charges could be for “crimes” such as growing a beard, wearing a long skirt, giving children Islamic names, or having a government-approved Koran in the home. “For these reasons, we believe these charges are spurious,” states the report.
Companies once lauded by the government for their “great contributions” to the city’s economic and social development and their “efforts to ‘give back to society,’” their “promotion of commerce, logistics, tourism, and cultural exchanges in Kashgar and southern Xinjiang,” and their efforts to promote Belt and Road initiatives and “bolster connections with business in Pakistan,” became Beijing’s bête noir, the bosses rounded up, and their draconian sentences justified on the grounds of China’s own “War on Terror.”
Abdujelil Helil, one of the wealthiest men in Kashgar and a member of the CPPCC, was head of the Kashgar Trade Association, a group of nearly 200 mostly non-Han member enterprises. His arrest in May 2017 and imprisonment for 14 years on charges of “financing terrorist activities,” included large fines and the confiscation of US$11 million of his property which was later auctioned off on Taobao with no documentation of his alleged crime or a case number. One of his prominent buildings in the iconic Id Kah Square was bought by a Chinese businessman for $8.2 million.
Gene Bunin, founder of the Xinjiang Victims Database, that contains entries for nearly 25,000 incarcerated, detained, or unaccounted for Uyghurs, discovered that of the 74,348 criminal cases concluded by XUAR courts in 2018, only 7,714 verdicts were available in China Judgements Online, the Supreme People’s Court database of criminal, civil, and administrative judgments and enforcement rulings set up in 2014. “Courts do not always comply with the disclosure requirements, and records are sometimes removed from the database,” said Bunin, pointing out that in July 2021, all cases involving “endangering state security” were purged from the database.
The small but significant number of entrepreneurs studied by the UHRP project, was the tip of the iceberg, said the report. “The large numbers of Uyghurs who appear to have been transferred into the prison system from extrajudicial detention give us reason to believe that there are many more such cases,” it said.
Cases of Uyghurs known to have been sentenced on terrorism charges through information obtained by their relatives, as well as the terrorism cases presented in this report, are all missing from the database.
Omerjan Hamdullah, now 32, and no longer privy to the family fortune runs a small bookshop in Istanbul. He worries about his disabled mother and the fate of his father who was sentenced to 15 years for being the imam of the Korla mosque. Pro bono UK human rights lawyers have taken on the family case which they hope to present to the international courts, but the wheels are grinding slowly.
“The crackdown on Uyghur businesspeople represents yet another facet of the broad attacks on the Uyghur elite and their role as leaders in their communities, serving to further disempower Uyghur society,” concludes the report, adding that the full scale of property confiscations has yet to be uncovered.
The CCP counter propaganda machine continues apace, blackening the names of those whose assets have been stripped and justifying its actions in the name of the War on Terror. Wherever it can, it will set the minds of its citizens and the world at rest that by reining in these individuals, it is making Xinjiang, and by implication the world, a safer place.
The report points out that since Xi Jinping assumed the reins of China in 2012–13, a concerted effort has been made to eliminate potential rival power centres. Crackdowns on religious groups have been particularly heavy throughout the entire country, and Xinjiang has recently born the brunt with mass incarcerations, sterilizations of the majority Turkic population, abductions of children by the state and the abolition of education in the Uyghur national language.
There is mounting evidence that the CCP appears bent on destroying the Uyghur people as a national group, and that a genocide is underway.
“The crackdown on Uyghur businesspeople represents yet another facet of the broad attacks on the Uyghur elite and their role as leaders in their communities, serving to further disempower Uyghur society,” stated the report. “Evidence of what appears to be a pattern of systematic dispossession of Uyghurs should be looked at in this light, as a potential feature on an ongoing genocide.” The role of the Alibaba Group should also sound warning bells with those who deal with Chinese corporations, it concluded. “Taobao is providing a platform which allows the Chinese government to dispose of Uyghur property obtained through politicized arrests in an ongoing campaign of persecution of an ethnic group. Although Chinese corporations have little ability to defy the government, their complicity must be taken into consideration by institutional and individual investors, international corporations considering partnerships, and consumers,” it concluded.