Who is Shohret Hoshur?

Very few reporters become news themselves, unless they get captured by terrorists or killed in combat.  Shohret Hoshur made news in China and he doesn't even live there.  He can't.  The Chinese would arrest him if he did, mostly for doing his job as a reporter.

In a New York Times article over the weekend, Michael Forsythe [Reporting Fropm the U.S. On China's Uighur Homeland]  pieced together the story of a reporter who wrote two really pointed articles in his native language, Uighur.  His sources were local and his stories were decidedly not friendly to a repressive government which seeks to control the news in their own country, and what we say about them in ours. They use intimidation, threats, and physical violence against the sources and authors of stories to make sure they don't stray too far from what the Communist Party wants them to say.  This is control of the press and the news, something many countries do well, but where the Chinese excel.  They are the world's leaders in suppression of ideas not consistent with their own.

China is officially athiest, so a crackdown on Muslims is not particularly abnormal behavior for them.  Muslims and the Dalai Lama's Buddists seem to catch most of the flack thrown up.  The reporter's younger brothers were arrested in a roundup.  The police told him they would release them if he stopped reporting on the Uighurs.  I wonder if I would stop if the FBI arrested my younger brothers and told me to stop reporting on the Chinese government.  It takes a braver man than I am to not stop.

Shohret Hoshur is a brave man, who has to work around Chinese censorship of electronic media and messaging services.  He thinks that is part of his job, but it is something we rarely think about.  Even the New York Times and Bloomberg have had trouble with the Chinese trying to find their sources.  They are not satisfied with controlling their own press.  They come after the Shohret Hoshurs of the world to try to stop our own press from reporting on them.    It would be clever it weren't so corrupt.