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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2019
GOING PREMIUMTHE PRICE OF ANORDERLY INTERNETPAGE 14 | TECH
TINY TIMDISABLED, ANDIN THE ROLEPAGE 18 | CULTURE
PLANTING THE SEEDSLANDSCAPES THAT INSPIREDNEW YORK’S CENTRAL PARKPAGE 19 | TRAVEL
Muslim ethnic minorities.The authorities in the Xinjiang region
worried that the situation was a powderkeg.
And so they prepared.The leadership distributed a classi-
fied directive advising local officials tocorner returning students as soon asthey arrived and keep them quiet. It in-cluded a guide for how to handle theirquestions, beginning with the most ob-vious: Where is my family?
“They’re in a training school set up bythe government,” the prescribed answerbegan. If pressed, officials were to tellstudents that their relatives were notcriminals — yet they could not leavethese “schools.”
The question-and-answer script alsoincluded a barely concealed threat: Stu-dents were to be told that their behavior
The students booked their tickets homeat the end of the semester, hoping for arelaxing break after exams and a sum-mer of happy reunions in China’s farwest.
Instead, they would be told that theirrelatives and neighbors were missing —all of them locked up in an expandingnetwork of detention camps built to hold
could either shorten or extend the de-tention of their relatives.
The directive was among 403 pages ofinternal documents that have beenshared with The New York Times in oneof the most significant leaks in decadesof government papers from inside Chi-na’s ruling Communist Party. They pro-vide an unprecedented inside view ofthe continuing clampdown in Xinjiang,in which the authorities have corralledas many as one million ethnic Uighurs,Kazakhs and others into internmentcamps and prisons over the past threeyears.
The party has rejected internationalcriticism of the camps and describedthem as job-training centers that usemild methods to fight Islamic extrem-ism. But the documents confirm the co-ercive nature of the crackdown.
Key disclosures in the documents in-clude:• President Xi Jinping, the party chief,laid the groundwork for the crackdownin a series of speeches delivered in pri-vate to officials during and after a visitto Xinjiang in April 2014, weeks after Ui-ghur militants stabbed more than 150people at a train station, killing 31.• Terrorist attacks abroad and the draw-down of United States troops in Afghani-stan heightened the leadership’s fearsand helped shape the crackdown.• The internment camps in Xinjiang ex-panded rapidly after the appointment inAugust 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealousnew party boss for the region.• The crackdown encountered doubtsand resistance from local officials whofeared it would exacerbate ethnic ten-
Where Is My Family?This document, obtained by The New York Times, advised Chinese officials in the Xinjiang region what to tell students whose parents had been detained in camps built to indoctrinate Muslim minorities. To protect the source’s anonymity, The Times recreated this page to eliminate any identifying markings.
Detainees are called “concen-trated education and training school students,” one of several euphemisms the Chinese government uses.
Family members sent away “have come under different degrees of harmful influence in religious extremism and violent terrorist thoughts,” the document says.
“You have nothing to worry about” — the food is high-quality, and tuition is free, the document says. Former detainees say facilities are sometimes overcrowded and unsanitary, and food can be withheld as punishment.
Question No. 1: Where is my family?
Question No. 2: Why are my relatives required to be in these schools?
A tale of Chinese repressionHONG KONG
Leaked documents exposemass detention of Muslimsin a key western region
BY AUSTIN RAMZYAND CHRIS BUCKLEY
Where is my family?
CHINA, PAGE 6
THE NEW YORK TIMES
You’ll find them up in the balcony, or instanding room, silently mouthing thelibretto or humming along with thescore. These are the superfans: thecompulsive lovers of opera or ballet ortheater who see every performance,who travel from city to city for MarilynHorne or Mikhail Baryshnikov, whoknow every downbeat of “Così FanTutte” or “A Chorus Line.”
Most are harmless admirers. Somebecome lay experts. But the superfancan be conniving, as in “All About Eve,”or even murderous: the Tejano sensa-
tion Selena was killed by her fan clubpresident. If great art stimulates theheart and the head, the superfan hasthe ratio out of whack: Passion winsout over reason, and appreciation tipsinto obsession.
In the annals of French art history,the superfan par excellence is EdgarDegas: the most Parisian of all theImpressionists, and an obsessive of thefirst magnitude over the opera andballet. For decades, he watched theleading singers and dancers under thenew electric lights, and scrutinized theyoung members of the corps de balletin the wings and backstage. Close tohalf of Degas’s painterly output depictsthe Opéra de Paris — which was (andstill is) an opera and a dance companyand which he knew as intimately asMonet knew Giverny’s gardens.
In the year 1885 alone, Degas went55 times to the still-new Palais Garnier.He saw one opera, the now-forgotten DEGAS, PAGE 2
“The Curtain” by Degas. The exhibit “Degas at the Opéra,” now in Paris, reveals theleering intensity rather than the sentimentality in his ballet and opera pictures.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Art as an obsession:Degas, a (creepy) superfanCRITIC’S NOTEBOOKPARIS
BY JASON FARAGO
Perverse and enlightening,an exhibition shows theera of mania is not new
The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.
As Turkey has followed through on itsthreat to release more Islamic State de-tainees, Western European nationshave been confronted with a problemthey long sought to avoid: what to doabout the potential return of radicalized,often battle-hardened Europeans tocountries that absolutely do not wantthem back.
Faced with fierce popular oppositionto the repatriation of such detainees andfears about the long-term threat theycould pose back home, European lead-ers have sought alternative ways toprosecute them — in an internationaltribunal, on Iraqi soil, anywhere but onthe Continent.
But President Recep Tayyip Erdoganof Turkey, made more powerful by a sud-den shift in American policy, is deter-mined to send the problem of the cap-tured European Islamic State fightersback to the countries they came from.
Last week, Turkey sent a dozen for-mer Islamic State members and rela-tives to Britain, Denmark, Germany andthe United States, and Mr. Erdogan sayshundreds more are right behind them.
“All of the European countries, espe-cially those with most of the foreignfighters, have desperately been lookingfor the past year for a way to deal withthem without bringing them back,” saidRik Coolsaet, an expert on radicalizationat the Egmont Institute, a Brussels-based research group. “But now, Euro-pean nations are being forced to con-sider repatriation, since Turkey is goingto put people on the plane.”
The sudden problem for Europe is along-tail consequence of PresidentTrump’s precipitous decision last monthto withdraw American forces fromnorthern Syria, which cleared the wayfor Turkey to take control of territory, aswell as many of the Islamic State mem-bers who were held there in Kurdish-run
The soldiers of ISIS are on theirway homePARIS
Deportations by Turkey are forcing Europe to facefears about its militants
BY NORIMITSU ONISHIAND ELIAN PELTIER
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Tur-key has used the threat of returningfighters as leverage with Europe.
PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
EUROPE, PAGE 7
When President Richard Nixon’s Water-gate misconduct was being dissectedbefore congressional committees in1973 and 1974, Republican support forhim collapsed because most Americansshared news sources and inhabited asimilar political reality.
In short, facts mattered.Aides to Nixon did propose to him a
plan to create sympathetic televisionnews coverage; Roger Ailes backed theidea; and it eventually evolved into FoxNews. And today Fox gives PresidentTrump an important defense systemthat Nixon never had.
Fox was the mostpopular televisionnetwork for watchingthe first day of im-peachment hearingsthis week, with 2.9million viewers (57percent more thanCNN had), and Foxviewers encountereda very differenthearing than viewers
of other channels.With Rep. Adam Schiff on the screen,
Fox News’s graphic declared in all caps:“TRUMP HAS REPEATEDLY IM-PLIED THAT SCHIFF HAS COMMIT-TED TREASON.” At a different mo-ment, the screen warned: “9/26:SCHIFF PUBLICLY EXAGGERATEDSUBSTANCE OF TRUMP-ZELENSKYCALL.”
Fox downplayed the news and under-mined the witnesses. While Ambassa-dor William Taylor was shown testify-ing, the Fox News screen graphic de-clared: “OCT 23: PRESIDENT TRUMPDISMISSED TAYLOR AS A “NEVERTRUMPER.” It also suggested hiscomments were, “TRIPLE HEARSAY.”
Researchers have found that FoxNews isn’t very effective at informingAmericans. A 2012 study by FairleighDickinson University reported thatwatching Fox News had “a negativeimpact on people’s current eventsknowledge.”
The study found that those who regu-larly watched Fox News actually knewless about both domestic and interna-tional issues than those who watched nonews at all. N.P.R. listeners were partic-ularly well-informed, the study found,but even people who got their newsfrom a comedy program like “The DailyShow” — or who had no news source
Is Fox ‘news’or Trump’sbodyguard?
OPINION
Nixon lackedthe cablenetwork’sadvantage,but are itsviewersmisled?
KRISTOF, PAGE 13
Nicholas Kristof
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