World

Chinese President Xi Jinping held a video call with UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday, as she visits Xinjiang during a mission overshadowed by fresh allegations of Uyghur abuses and fears she is being used as a public relations tool.

China’s Communist Party is accused of detaining over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western region as part of a years-long crackdown the United States and lawmakers in other Western countries have labelled a “genocide”.

As part of a long-awaited visit, Bachelet is expected to visit the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar on a six-day tour that has been dogged by concerns from Western officials, diplomats and rights groups that the Communist Party will attempt to use it to whitewash abuses.

China vehemently denies the allegations, calling them the “lie of the century”.

The United States has reiterated its view that Bachelet’s visit was a mistake after the release of thousands of leaked documents and photographs from inside the system of mass incarceration this week.

And activists have voiced concern that Beijing will prevent Bachelet from conducting a thorough probe into alleged rights abuses and instead give her a stage-managed tour.

But Xi defended his country’s human rights progress during the video call, according to a readout from state broadcaster CCTV, which did not say whether Xinjiang was mentioned by either side.

“Human rights issues should also not be politicised, instrumentalised, or treated with double standards,” Xi said according to CCTV, adding that China had “a human rights development path that… suits its national conditions”.

CCTV reported Xi as telling Bachelet there was no “ideal nation” on human rights.

He added that there was “no need for a ‘teacher’ who is bossy towards other countries” — an apparent reference to recent public criticisms of the trip by US and British officials.

According to the CCTV readout, Bachelet said the UN Human Rights Office was “willing to strengthen cooperation with the Chinese side”.

She was also reported to have said: “I admire China’s efforts and achievements in eradicating poverty, protecting human rights, and realising economic and social development.”

Bachelet’s spokesperson did not confirm the Chinese state media comments to AFP, but said the high commissioner told Xi she hoped her office could “accompany efforts to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights, justice and the rule of law for all without exception”.

Bachelet later tweeted that the meetings with Xi and other officials “have been valuable to discuss directly human rights issues & concerns in China & global”.

– Detention database –

In addition to mass detentions, Chinese authorities have waged a campaign of forced labour, coerced sterilisation and the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage in Xinjiang, researchers and campaigners say.

As Bachelet started the trip, a leak of thousands of photos and official documents from Xinjiang claimed to shed new light on the violent methods used to enforce mass internment in the region.

Reported by a consortium of media, including the BBC and Le Monde, the Xinjiang Police Files showed top leaders in Beijing including Xi calling for a forceful crackdown.

The files, leaked by an anonymous source to academic Adrian Zenz, also included a 2017 internal speech by Chen Quanguo, a former Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, in which he allegedly orders guards to shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday the United States was “appalled” by the latest allegations.

Britain and Germany also voiced outrage, with UK foreign secretary Liz Truss calling for China to grant Bachelet “full and unfettered access to the region” and her German counterpart urging a “transparent investigation”.

Overseas Uyghurs have staged rallies in recent weeks pressing Bachelet to visit relatives believed to be detained in Xinjiang.

Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, called for Bachelet to “demand information about the detainees from the Chinese government, have her office develop a database of all those arbitrarily detained and imprisoned, and urgently work to secure their release”.

Amnesty International has called the visit “a running battle against Chinese government efforts to cover up the truth” and said the UN must resist being “used to support blatant propaganda”.

The British government announced Wednesday it had approved Todd Boehly’s £4.25 billion ($5.3 billion) purchase of Chelsea football club from the sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Nadine Dorries said she had issued a licence permitting the deal, hours after it won approval from the Premier League on Tuesday evening.

“We are satisfied the proceeds of the sale will not benefit Roman Abramovich or other sanctioned individuals,” Dorries tweeted.

“Given the sanctions we placed on those linked to (Vladimir) Putin and the bloody invasion of Ukraine, the long-term future of the club can only be secured under a new owner,” she said.

A consortium led by Boehly, a co-owner of baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, had agreed a record deal to buy the club from Abramovich earlier this month.

The Russian put Chelsea on the market in early March, just before he was sanctioned by Britain following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Completion of the takeover has been a lengthy process due to government concerns over the potential for Abramovich to profit from the sale.

Earlier this month, the deal seemed close to collapse over concerns proceeds would not reach good causes as promised by the outgoing owner.

The Russian, who bought Chelsea in 2003, denied he had asked for his £1.5 billion loan to the club be repaid when the sale was concluded.

The total value of the deal smashes the previous record for the sale of a sports team — $2.4 billion for the New York Mets baseball franchise in 2020.

– Special licence –

Chelsea have been forced to operate under a special licence since Abramovich was sanctioned.

The billionaire, also the target of European Union sanctions, was described by the British government as part of President Putin’s inner circle.

The asset freeze imposed on Chelsea meant they could not conduct any transfer business with either existing players or external targets.

The Blues will be now be able to return to business as usual — and there will be no time to lose in reconfiguring the playing squad.

Thomas Tuchel’s side, who won the Champions League last season, finished third in the Premier League — 19 points behind champions Manchester City — and were beaten by Liverpool in the finals of the FA Cup and League Cup.

The German manager is set to lose key defenders Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen on free transfers to Real Madrid and Barcelona.

Tuchel, in an interview on Chelsea’s website conducted before the sale was confirmed, said the club had been operating at a “huge disadvantage” and would need to be nimble in the transfer market.

Reports on Wednesday said the former Paris Saint-Germain boss would be handed a £200 million transfer kitty.

Chelsea have been transformed since Abramovich bought them in 2003 for just £140 million at a time when Manchester United and Arsenal were the dominant forces in the Premier League.

They evolved from a club on the brink of a financial crisis into one of the richest in the Premier League thanks to the deep pockets of the Russian, who routinely bankrolled blockbuster transfers.

He was rewarded with a staggering 19 major trophies in his 19-year reign — including five Premier League titles and two Champions League triumphs.

Abramovich’s arrival at Stamford Bridge also set a trend for a wave of foreign investment in the Premier League.

Chelsea’s 42,000-capacity Stamford Bridge home is in need of major redevelopment to match the stadium size and income streams enjoyed by their rivals.

But Boehly has a track record of delivering both stadium improvement and sporting success with the Dodgers.

Thanks to heavy investment in players, the Dodgers have made the MLB (Major League Baseball) playoffs every season for the past nine years and won their first World Series for 32 years in 2020.

Chinese President Xi Jinping held a video call with UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday, as she visits Xinjiang during a mission overshadowed by fresh allegations of Uyghur abuses and fears she is being used as a public relations tool.

China’s Communist Party is accused of detaining over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the far-western region as part of a years-long crackdown the United States and lawmakers in other Western countries have labelled a “genocide”.

As part of a long-awaited visit Bachelet is expected to visit the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar on a six-day tour that has been dogged by concerns from Western officials, diplomats and rights groups that the Communist Party will attempt to use it to whitewash abuses.

China vehemently denies the allegations, calling them the “lie of the century”.

The United States has reiterated its view that Bachelet’s visit was a mistake after the release of thousands of leaked documents and photographs from inside the system of mass incarceration this week.

And activists have voiced concern that Beijing will prevent Bachelet from conducting a thorough probe into alleged rights abuses and instead give her a stage-managed tour.

But Xi defended his country’s human rights progress during the video call, according to a readout from state broadcaster CCTV which did not say whether Xinjiang was mentioned by either side.

“Human rights issues should also not be politicised, instrumentalised, or treated with double standards,” Xi said according to CCTV, adding that China has “a human rights development path that… suits its national conditions”.

CCTV reported Xi as telling Bachelet that there is no “ideal nation” on human rights.

He added that there is “no need for a ‘teacher’ who is bossy towards other countries” — an apparent reference to recent public criticisms of the trip by United States and British officials.

According to the CCTV readout, Bachelet said the UN Human Rights Office is “willing to strengthen cooperation with the Chinese side”.

She was also reported to have said: “I admire China’s efforts and achievements in eradicating poverty, protecting human rights, and realising economic and social development.”  

– Detention database –

In addition to mass detentions, Chinese authorities have waged a campaign of forced labour, coerced sterilisation and the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage in Xinjiang, researchers and campaigners say.

As Bachelet started the controversial trip, a leak of thousands of photos and official documents from Xinjiang claimed to shed new light on the violent methods used to enforce mass internment in the region.

Reported by a consortium of media, including the BBC and Le Monde, the Xinjiang Police Files showed top leaders in Beijing including Xi calling for a forceful crackdown.

The files, leaked by an anonymous source to academic Adrian Zenz, also included a 2017 internal speech by Chen Quanguo, a former Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang, in which he allegedly orders guards to shoot to kill anyone who tries to escape.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday the United States was “appalled” by the latest allegations.

Britain and Germany also voiced outrage, with UK foreign secretary Liz Truss calling for China to grant Bachelet “full and unfettered access to the region” and her German counterpart urging a “transparent investigation”.

Overseas Uyghurs have staged rallies in recent weeks pressing Bachelet to visit relatives believed to be detained in Xinjiang.

“The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights should not look away,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“She should also demand information about the detainees from the Chinese government, have her office develop a database of all those arbitrarily detained and imprisoned, and urgently work to secure their release.”

Bachelet’s office has said she will meet with civil society organisations, business representatives and academics, and has given assurances over her access to detention centres in calls with diplomatic sources this week.

But Amnesty International has called the visit “a running battle against Chinese government efforts to cover up the truth” and said the UN must resist being “used to support blatant propaganda”.

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on Wednesday said it would sell its patented drugs at a not-for-profit basis to the world’s poorest countries, as part of a new initiative announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“An Accord for a Healthier World” focuses on five areas: infectious diseases, cancer, inflammation, rare diseases and women’s health — where Pfizer currently holds 23 patents, including the likes of Comirnaty and Paxlovid, its Covid vaccine and oral treatment.

“This transformational commitment will increase access to Pfizer- patented medicines and vaccines available in the United States and the European Union to nearly 1.2 billion people,” Angela Hwang, group president of the Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group told AFP.

Five countries: Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda have committed to joining, with a further 40 countries — 27 low-income and 18 lower-middle-income — eligible to sign bilateral agreements to participate.

Developing countries experience 70 percent of the world’s disease burden but receive only 15 percent of global health spending, leading to devastating outcomes.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, one child in 13 dies before their fifth birthday, compared to one in 199 in high-income countries.

Cancer-related mortality rates are also far higher in low and middle-income countries — causing more fatalities in Africa every year than malaria.

All this is set to a backdrop of limited access to the latest drugs. 

Essential medicines and vaccines typically take four to seven years longer to reach the poorest countries, and supply chain issues and poorly resourced health systems make it difficult for patients to receive them once approved. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic further highlighted the complexities of access to quality healthcare and the resulting inequities,” said Hwang.

“We know there are a number of hurdles that countries have to overcome to gain access to our medicines. That is why we have initially selected five pilot countries to identify and come up with operational solutions and then share those learnings with the remaining countries.”

Specifically, the focus will be on overcoming regulatory and procurement challenges in the countries, while ensuring adequate levels of supply from Pfizer’s side.

The “not-for-profit” price tag takes into account the cost to manufacture and transport of each product to an agreed upon port of entry, with Pfizer charging only manufacturing and minimum distribution costs.

If a country already has access to a product at a lower price tier, for example vaccines supplied by GAVI, that lower price will be maintained.

Hwang acknowledged that even an at-cost approach could be challenging for the most cash-strapped countries, and “this is why we have reached out to financial institutions to brief them on the Accord and ask them to help support country level financing.”

Pfizer will also reach out to other stakeholders — including governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs and even other pharmaceuticals — to ask them to join the Accord.

It is also using funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance work on a vaccine against Group B Streptococcus (GBS), the leading cause of stillbirth and newborn mortality in low-income countries.

Reacting to the news, Amesh Adalja, of Johns Hopkins Center for  Health Security, said: “The Pfizer Accord program will facilitate access to some of their critical medicines and hopefully lead to better control of the targeted diseases which include: Covid, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, meningococcal disease, tick-borne encephalitis, and pneumococcal disease.” 

A head pops out of the toilet, a woman gets pregnant from birth control pills — South Korean Booker Prize nominee Bora Chung’s short stories are full of horror, inspired by her own lonely life.

An academic specialising in Slavic literature, Chung was considered a “genre writer” and excluded from South Korea’s mainstream literary scene. Until recently, she was relatively unknown to local readers.

Her stories — which combine science fiction, horror and fantasy — are not considered “pure” literature by Seoul’s cultural elite. But her life took a dramatic turn when her 2017 collection “Cursed Bunny” caught the eye of translator Anton Hur.

Hur’s English edition of the book, released by British publisher Honford Star, has been named a finalist for this year’s International Booker Prize.

Only two South Korean writers — Han Kang (“The Vegetarian”) and Hwang Sok-yong (“At Dusk”) — have previously been nominated for the honour, and both were far more established and well-regarded domestically.

“Cursed Bunny” has not won any prizes in South Korea, and Chung mostly earned a living teaching at a university and translating Russian literature.

Despite the elements of horror in her work, Chung said the collection was ultimately about the innate loneliness of being human.

She spent nearly a decade overseas as a graduate student, living year to year and unsure of her next move, which profoundly shaped her imagination as a writer, she told AFP.

“I wasn’t sure if anything was actually waiting for me in South Korea even if I wanted to return,” she said.

“I was constantly nervous about the future, and because this lasted for nine years, I became very used to the state of being lonely,” she added.

– Horrors of modern society –

A graduate of Seoul’s Yonsei University, Chung holds a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies from Yale and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University, both in the United States.

She was deeply inspired by Soviet Russian writer Andrei Platonov’s 1928 novel “Chevengur”, about a poor orphan whose quest to find a communist utopia ultimately fails and ends in a bloodbath.

The Booker Prize Foundation says Chung’s collection uses the fantastical to address the horrors of the “patriarchy and capitalism of modern society”.

Her characters include a father who locks up his daughter and exploits her for business, a designer who falls in love with a robot companion she’s invented and a woman who is constantly shamed after becoming pregnant due to the side effects of birth control pills.

Another character faces the horror of repeatedly seeing a creature appear in her toilet bowl, claiming to be her child. 

In her own life, Chung said the prospect of falling pregnant felt like a serious threat during her years overseas.

“To me, it was horror,” she told AFP at her apartment in the South Korean port city of Pohang before leaving for the United Kingdom to attend the awards ceremony set for Thursday.

“All I could think was if I suddenly fell pregnant and gave birth, I would just die with my child. I would just be on the streets and die,” she said.

“I had no ability to raise a child, didn’t have a partner, had no support network and I was a foreigner.”

– ‘A very hard sell’ – 

Chung’s nomination rides a global wave of enthusiasm for South Korean culture, from Netflix’s “Squid Game” to author Han Kang’s 2016 International Booker Prize winner “The Vegetarian”.

But Anton Hur, who translated “Cursed Bunny” and marketed its English edition, said the book was “actually a very, very hard sell” given what he characterised as a lack of interest in Korean literature.

“I did everything I could to promote the book, whether it was on social media, at Oxford University where I won a translators residency… and the many literary festivals I dragged the author to so that we could sell just one more book,” he told AFP. 

Chung, who is married to a labour rights activist, prefers to spend her spare time attending political rallies.

“I feel at ease at rallies as I get to be with a lot of people who share the same thoughts as me,” said the author, who met her husband at a rally.

Chung’s years overseas, meanwhile, have made her painfully aware of cultural differences, and her work seems to ask: If culture and language are such barriers to intimacy, then what hope do humans have of understanding robots?