The video starts with a teenager offering eyelash curling advice to her followers. But this is no ordinary beauty tip.
Just seconds into Feroza Aziz’s seemingly straightforward tutorial, the 17-year-old Afghan American woman tells the viewer to put down the lash curler and seamlessly transitions from eyelash curling to politics. “Use the phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China,” she states matter of factly.
She spends the rest of the 40-second clip — which has racked up more than 1.5 million views on the wildly popular short video app TikTok — criticizing the Chinese government and its detention centers, which hold mostly Muslim Uyghurs in the country’s far western region of Xinjiang.
Beijing has long insisted that the camps are voluntary “vocational training centers.” However many Western nations, including the United States, have condemned them as mass detention centers designed to eradicate Uyghur culture and Islamic practices.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday there was an “overwhelming and growing body of evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is committing human rights violations and abuses against individuals in mass detention.” He called for the immediate release of all those “arbitrarily detained” and for Beijing to end the “draconian policies that have terrorized its citizens in Xinjiang.”
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang accused the United States of attempting to meddle in its affairs, and said there were no “ethnic, religious, human rights” issues in the region. “The measures that the Xinjiang government takes are about counter-terrorism and de-radicalization,” Geng said at a briefing on Wednesday.
In her video, Aziz rattles off a list of allegations — “how they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating their families from each other” — before launching into even more serious claims of abuse. Her video has even taken on a life outside of TikTok, attracting millions of views on other social platforms like Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR).
