Teachers, students, and parents staged rare protests earlier this month in Inner Mongolia as the government began requiring schools to teach key subjects in Mandarin rather than the Mongolian language. Students will begin taking Chinese language classes one grade earlier and must use new Chinese textbooks for language and literature, morality and law, and history classes. 

“Belarus has woken up,” said Bela-rusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in an Aug. 25 address to members of the European Parliament. “We are not the opposition anymore. We are the majority now.”

Two hundred police officers in face masks barged into Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newsroom Monday, hours after police arrested the pro-democracy newspaper’s publisher, Jimmy Lai, on charges of “colluding with foreign forces” under the new national security law. The arrest and raid make up the highest-profile attack on the free press in Hong Kong since the law went into effect on June 30. 

The last time Akida Pulat saw her mother, renowned Uighur anthropologist Rahile Dawut, was in 2016. Dawut had come as a visiting scholar to the University of Washington, where Pulat was studying for her master’s degree. She remembers her mother spending hours cooking Uighur polo, a traditional dish of rice mixed with carrots and topped with lamb, for her newly made Chinese and American friends. When Pulat said goodbye to her mother at the airport, she promised she’d go back home to Ürümqi to visit the next year.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has been enacting a cultural genocide of the Uighur people and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the western region of Xinjiang. Officials have thrown between 1 and 3 million Uighurs into re-education camps, created a high-tech surveillance state, used Uighurs for forced labor in factories around the country, and razed mosques and Uighur cemeteries. 

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act is the strongest action yet by any nation over China’s mistreatment of the ethnic minority group. The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Wednesday, will penalize officials who arbitrarily detain and torture Uighurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region, freezing their assets and preventing their entry into the United States.

On June 9, on the anniversary of the anti-extradition bill protest that drew one million people and kicked off Hong Kong’s protest movement last year, several hundred protesters marched the streets of Hong Kong with their cellphone flashlights flickering in defiance of the government’s coronavirus restrictions.

Unlike a year ago, police no longer sign off on scheduled protests—deeming them illegal from the start—and quickly begin to search protesters, fire pepper spray, and disperse the small crowds.