What has been transpiring in East Turkistan in the last few years, already engendered copious international opprobrium, can be described as “a composite version of twentieth century authoritarian fantasies and popular dystopias that is made possible by twenty-first century technology” (Clarke 2018; Vanderklippe 2017; cited in Cliff 2019, 181), accompanied by the Chinese regime’s intensified efforts to coercively indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in a massive network of internment camps, subject Uyghurs to forced labor, indoctrinate Uyghur children (i.e. The Stolen Generation), control Uyghur birth rates (i.e. genocide in accordance to the UN Genocide Convention), for which the endgame is to eradicate the Uyghur identity and thereby accomplishing a successful assimilation, effectively constituting an ethnocide.
Since 2017 news outlets in the West have been covering China’s unprecedented social reengineering project that is the mass indoctrination camps. The Chinese regime intensified its efforts to persecute the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims by rounding them up in their estimated millions and effectively extrajudicially/extralegally interned them in many of its so-called “re- education” camps, prison-like fortified internment facilities, across East Turkistan (aka. Xinjiang). In the summer of 2017, Uyghurs in East Turkistan began deleting their contacts (i.e. friends and family members) abroad on the Chinese social messaging app Wechat. They also made clear to their contacts abroad that they should stop the communication by phone calls, or else troubles would ensue.
As the situation was getting tense in the region, satellite imagery showed a wave of building complexes/projects installed with double fences and guard towers across the region. Many existing facilities were likely converted to prison-like compounds, based on many procurement bids advertised to construction companies that required installations of prison-style features (Denyer 2018). These internment camps are equipped with barbed wire, security fences, surveillance devices, surveillance rooms, guard railings, and guard netting (Introvigne 2018). As of October 2018, the Agence France-Presse (AFP 2018), based on its collected data, estimated that there were at least 181 internment facilities. In an interview conducted by Radio Free Asia on November 8, 2019, Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, estimated, based on the Communist Party’s primary source documents as well as other sources of information, that the number of the internment camps in East Turkistan had likely surpassed 1000, a speculative number that he was cautiously confident about (RFA 2019).
The conditions in the internment camps have been pestilential, according to the former camp teacher Qelbinur Sedik (Ingram 2020). The internees were crammed into small spaces, allowed to go to toilet only three times a day at fixed times, and allocated 15 minutes for the shower that happened only once a month. At a women’s internment camp in Ürümchi, each prison cell stank of urine, the source of which was from a toilet bucket that was placed in each cell and emptied once a day. The internees only had 1 minute for the face wash in the morning and were allowed to take a 15-minute long shower once a month. Consequently, many became sick given the highly unhygienic conditions.
Furthermore, there have been many reported cases of torture, which included for example “four kinds of electric shock: the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick” (ibid.). Former internees told the Human Rights Watch that they had been subjected to physical abuse and torture: shackled, deprived of sleep, and beaten and hung from ceilings/walls (HRW 2018a, 33–36). Another former internee was tortured for not making his bed, forced to wear an outfit of iron claws and rods that had locked him in a star position for 12 hours; those like him, refused to comply, would also be fitted with handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours (Kuo 2018). If the noncompliance continued, they could be punished with waterboarding or strapped to a metal ‘tiger chair’ for 24 hours (Denyer 2018; Shih 2018). One Uyghur man, also a former internee, testified that he was subjected to gang rape by more than 20 camp guards (Chao 2019). A policewoman at a women’s internment camp told a former camp teacher that each day several Uyghur girls would be gang raped by the Han Chinese executives in the camp, “sometimes with electric batons inserted into the vagina and anus” (Ingram 2020).
With respect to the number of people affected by one of up to 8 forms of extrajudicial/extralegal mass internment, estimates have ranged between 1 million to 3 million people: more than 1 million according to UN human rights panel (ABC 2018a); up to 1.5 million (Zenz 2019b); 2 to 3 million (Chinese Human Rights Defenders 2020); likely closer to 3 million, according to Randall G. Schriver, the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs (Buckley & Wong 2019). The impact of this mass internment is felt nearly by every Uyghur family in East Turkistan in that at least one in each family and in countless other cases several individuals in a family are extrajudicially interned (Zenz 2019b). In the south of the region, up to 80% of adults in the cities are interned/detained at some point in 2018, according to the remaining locals; “[e]mpty streets in [Ürümchi] and Kashgar are an eerie testament to how the security campaign is fraying Xinjiang’s economic and social fabric” (Feng 2018a).
The Human Rights Watch reports that those detained have no due process with no access to legal counsel (HRW 2018a, 28), and have been subjected to gross human rights violations, viz., torture and brainwashing (ibid., 30 & 69; Denyer 2018), sexual abuse (Introvigne 2020), family separation (HRW 2019a), and forced sterilization (Zenz 2020a; The Associated Press 2020).
This unprecedented large-scale detention system, evidenced to be larger than China’s entire prior ‘education through labor’ system (Zenz 2019a, 103), is illegal according to China’s Constitution (Article 37) and Law on Legislation (Articles 8 & 9) despite the Xinjiang legislation24 that “has no legal authority to prescribe measures for detention” (Donald Clarke 2018; also see Daum 2018). The physical restriction of personal liberty is authorized only in accordance with the statutes passed by the National People’s Congress or its standing committee, while detentions in the massive network of internment camps have no basis in any such statute (ibid.). The interned do not go through a judicial process, thereby making the detentions extrajudicial in addition to being extralegal.
China is a party to four international conventions on human rights: the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ratified by China in 1981); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, ratified by China in 2001); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, ratified by China in 1980); and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT, ratified in 1988). The forced internment and religious suppression of [Uyghurs] arguably violates each of these conventions. (Hurd 2018)
The Chinese regime’s “re-education” campaign began in late 2013 according to its official and state media reports, which was only to become more institutionalized in the following years (Zenz 2019a, 103). As Xi Jinping became the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) On November 15, 2012, the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) that he first formally announced during a visit in Kazakhstan in September 2013 became his overarching ambition. Given its geographically strategic location, East Turkistan plays a crucial role in China’s ever increasing economic influence and political clout directed westwards by land and sea, hence the ‘securitization’ project in East Turkistan — the massive network of internment/indoctrination camps accompanied by mass surveillance — to ensure stability in the region. Furthermore, this ‘securitization’ project was further justified to an extent following the continued violent incidents engendered by state repression in East Turkistan since the July 5 uprising of 2009; in other words, “an escalating cycle of repression followed by violence and more repression in the following years” (Roberts 2018, 244). Subsequently, several high-profile alleged Uyghur-initiated violent incidents26 also accelerated, if not consolidated, the Chinese regime’s ‘securitization’ project.
By 2014, the Chinese regime stepped up its crackdown on Uyghur websites, restricting, what was already nonexistent, freedom of speech, censoring online contents, and imprisoning many Uyghur webmasters for lengthy sentences for, among other things, “splittism, leaking state secrets, and organizing an illegal demonstration” (Olesen 2014). Following the abovementioned high- profile violent incidents in 2013 and 2014, the Chinese regime declared a “People’s War on Terror” in May of 2014, and carried out further restrictions on religious practices and expression, for instance, authorities established checkpoints in Kashgar to enforce the “project beauty” campaign, where the use of headscarves to cover the face or even the neck was banned; there also were house-to-house searches targeting suspected separatists, terrorists, extremists in Yarkend, where the Chinese state spent 2 million dollars on surveillance system, according to its official document; the religious repression in southern East Turkistan in 2014 became an “all-out attack on Islam” (Denyer 2014).
In August 2016 Chen Quanguo (陈全国), the former Communist Party chief in Tibet, was transferred to East Turkistan to be the new party chief, which can be interpreted as “a vote of confidence” for his conflict management in Tibet, where he had developed and enforced “a new model of intensive policing and ‘grid surveillance’ 网格化管理 involving ‘convenience police stations’ 便民警务站”, accompanied by the ‘double-linked household management system’, i.e. “groups of ten families are required to spy on one another to check on security threats and risks of poverty” (Dillon 2019, 188), constituting a part of a more expansive social control: Three- Dimensional Public Security Preventative Control System (立体化社会治安防控体系) (Groot 2019, 102; also see Zenz & Leibold 2017a, 17). Based on the analysis of the ‘Qaraqash (Karakax) list’, a leaked Chinese government document, Zenz (2020b) notes that the primary role of Chen was to “adjust, optimize and especially upscale existing frameworks and mechanisms” linked to the mass internment efforts. Zenz also argues that prior to Chen’s transfer to East Turkistan, the “reeducation” framework was already developed and well under way.
The Grid-style surveillance management is made possible by utilizing CCTV cameras, mobile network technologies, and big data processing power, surveilling the public within a distinctly allocated geometric zone (Zenz & Leibold 2017b, 24), which turned East Turkistan to “a security state within a state”, “virtually quarantined from the rest of the PRC” (Roberts 2018, 246). This surveillance system primarily targets the general Uyghur population, making them “feel increasingly under siege in their own homeland” and thereby putting a strain on the long-term social stability in the region (ibid., 26). After being appointed as the party chief in East Turkistan, applying the same securitization tactics he had developed in Tibet, Chen within a year’s time had accomplished what took him five years in Tibet (Zenz & Leibold 2017a, 16).
Uyghurs across East Turkistan were commanded/forced to return to their hometowns, typically with fewer employment opportunities, to obtain a new checkpoint pass; visiting a relative in a neighboring town now requires a written permit; this measure restricts the mobility of the majority of the Uyghur population as they couldn’t procure such pass (Zenz & Leibold 2017a, 22; Byler 2020). The Uyghur mobility restrictions also include, among other things, the confiscation of passports (Wong 2016), the ordering (also repatriations) of Uyghur students studying abroad to return home (Feng 2017), and enclosures of neighborhoods with fences accompanied by security checks (RFA 2016); the limitation of Uyghur movements also occurs between cities in addition to mobility restrictions within individual urban area.
The National People’s Congress of the PRC, directly controlled by the Communist Party, officially approved the counter-terrorism law on December 27, 2015 that came into effect at the turn of the year, criminalizing almost all Uyghur dissenting voices, traditions, and Islamic belief and practices as indications of terrorism and extremism; moreover, this law was complemented by the “de- extremification regulations” that further encroaches upon Uyghur’s public expressions of their religiosity, allowing to legally persecute “Uyghurs’ thoughts, appearance, and behavior” (Roberts 2018, 246), though some local officials in East Turkistan had already been enforcing many of the regulations’ restrictions for years, according to James Leibold (Gan 2017). As discussed earlier, neither the counter-terrorism law nor the de-extremification regulations allow for prolonged detention, i.e. the massive network of internment camps, with indefinite detention, are illegal.
At the end of 2014 the Communist regime put out a booklet entitled The Basics to Identifying Religious Extremist Activities — 75 different signs of religious extremism (识别宗教极端活动(75 种具体表现)基础知识), consisting of three parts, viz., the advocacy of religious extremism ideology, abnormal religious extremist activities and their initial signs, and suspicion of engaging in illegal religious extremist activities. The public was encouraged to report to the police whenever there was an encounter with any of the 75 signs of religious extremism. Many signs on this list constitute grounds for internment (see Greer 2018).
According to the former detainees and their relatives interviewed by Byler (2020), they were interned because of the digital texts, audio clips, and videos that they shared on their mobile devices, and in many other cases the acts of registering several SIM cards by using single ID card, installing unsanctioned foreign apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp on their cell phones, or using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to bypass China’s “great firewall” in order to access blocked websites, applications, or to simply anonymize their online activities by encrypting their web traffic. Constituting no real crime by any legal standard, “the digital footprint of unauthorized Islamic practice” or even one’s association to someone who transgresses one of these violations, is reason enough to be taken away to one of the detention centers, and thereafter most Uyghurs would either receive lengthy prison sentences or be sent to one of the internment camps (Byler 2019b).
The comprehensive surveillance system as it has been developed by the world’s leading Chinese tech companies would only go so far to detect “deviant” religious or problematic behavior, but if the Chinese state wants to probe even deeper into the Uyghur daily life, it needs to be physically present at their homes. And enter the Uyghur homes they did, becoming the ultimate uninvited guests. Since 2016 over a million Chinese Communist members, i.e. civil servants, had been commanded to physically surveil Uyghur families through a number of week-long homestays (Byler 2018). These surveillance workers had been assigned as “relatives” to Uyghur families, with whom they ate, lived, did house chores, and studied Communist Party guidelines together (同吃同住同劳动同学习), even sharing the same bed. As Byler (2018, 4) notes that these state-directed visits often focus on the (extended) families of those who had been sent to the internment camps or detention centers.
Neighborhood committees across East Turkistan would evaluate Uyghurs’ trustworthiness by examining them with the Trustworthiness Assessment Form, in which people start with the highest score of 100 and then by taking into account various causes of point deductions, their total scores go down. Among the causes of point deductions, one can find for example 1) being Uyghur; 2) in possession of a passport; 3) in the age range of 15-55; 4) daily praying; 5) being unemployed. Each point-deductible cause leads to 10-point deduction, where those in urban areas with a score below 50 points would potentially be sent away to internment camps (Byler 2020), and in other cases a score that falls below 60 means one risks internment (Zand 2018).
According to Global Times (2018), the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, between October 2016 and September 2018 there had been around 1.1 million civil servants assigned to pair up and become “family” with “more than 1.69 million ethnic minority citizens”. It also reported that along with 49 million assessment visits to Uyghur families, there had been held 11 million ideology study sessions. In the provided guideline, the “relatives” can follow the guidance as to how best carry out their assessment visits. In addition to filling out various forms, they also need to take notes regarding suspicious or deviant behavior or thoughts, which in turn could send the suspected Uyghurs away to the mass internment camps for “re-education”.
Human Rights Watch (HRW 2019b) reverse-engineered an app that is, used by government officials and the police, linked to the mass surveillance system called Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, 一体化联合作战平台), managed by the Public Security Bureau. IJOP gathers information from various sources, e.g. CCTV cameras, checkpoints, gas stations, and integrates the collected information with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) in such a fashion that the system actively looks for “abnormal” and “suspicious” activities/behavior that can in turn alert the authorities and warrant further investigation. All Uyghurs are required to install Clean Net Guard app (净网卫士) on their cell phones, which literally turns every phone into a ‘big brother’ in a pocket.
The mass internment efforts of the Chinese regime are facilitated, if not streamlined, by China’s domestic surveillance technologies that are increasingly in demand among authoritarian regimes across the globe. Tech companies, such as Huawei, Hikvision, iFlytek, Dahua as well as hundreds of other Chinese companies, supply surveillance technology to East Turkistan, facilitating human rights violations. Uyghurs generate data, which then feed into the AI-assisted surveillance apparatus, which in turn governs and social-engineers Uyghur life.
The web of surveillance in Xinjiang reaches from cameras on the wall, to the chips inside mobile devices, to Uyghurs’ very physiognomy. Face scanners and biometric checkpoints track their movements. Nanny apps record every bit that passes through their smartphones. (Byler 2019b)
The Chinese regime also started collecting several types of biometric data of people between the ages of 12 and 65 in 2017 under the guise of “physical examinations”, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, iris scans, voice and face signatures (HRW 2017). According to the Chinese government’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, 18.84 million of the region’s circa 21.8 million people have “enjoyed” the government’s free health checks, in other words, all their biometric data have been collected.
Since 2016 The Chinese regime has used a variety of terms to refer to the internment camps before settling on the euphemistic term ‘Transformation through Education Center. This all- encompassing term is used to include “a taxonomy of incarceration”, ranging from detention centers (看守所), prisons (监狱), to vocational training centers (Grose 2019). Some of the terms used are as follows: De-extremification Transformation through Education Base (去极端化教育转化 基地), Legal Bureau Transformation through Education Training Center (司法局教育转化培训中心), Transformation through Legal System Education Training Center (法制教育转化培训中心), Centralized/Concentrated Closed Education Training Center (集中封闭教育培训中心), Transformation through Legal System Education School (法制教育转化学校), Transformation through Education Training Base (教育转化培训基地), Transformation through Education and Correction Center (教育培训转化及矫治中心), Vocational (Skills Education) Training Center (职业 技能教育培训中心).
In August 2018 following the condemnation of a UN human rights panel that more than 1 million Uyghurs had been held in the mass clandestine internment camps (ABC 2018a), the Chinese regime initially repudiated any claims of this sort and denied the existence of the indoctrination camps (ABC 2018b). Two months later the Chinese regime started calling the internment camps as benign vocational training centers that teach law, its common language (i.e. Mandarin), and vocational skills. However, the Chinese regime’s efforts to indoctrinate a large swath of the Uyghur population are evident in its official documentation: “Vocational Skills Education Training Centers wash clean the brains of people who became bewitched by the extreme religious ideologies of the ‘three forces’” (cited in Zenz 2019b).
Based on Chinese official documents as well as public procurement bids or advertisements to construction companies, it is to be indicated that there are up to 8 types of internment facilities, which then can be subsumed under three categories, viz. transformation through education camps; legal system “schools” (camps); and vocational training internment camps (Zenz 2019b). It is worth to note that though technically correct to refer to these internment camps as ‘concentration camps’ given that people are taken away and interned in a concentrated manner that involves indoctrinating a large swath of the general Uyghur population in restrictive/limited spaces, the objective of the camps is not brought to the fore with this term (ibid.).
According to the activist group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (2018), 13% of all China’s indictments in 2017 were carried out in East Turkistan, despite the latter constituting only 1.5% of China’s population; with respect to the number of arrests, East Turkistan accounted for 21% of all China’s arrests. These official Chinese statistics can, along with other mounting evidence, serve as an indication of the scale of the state-directed mass internment drive.
In June 2020 German DW news reported that some former detainees gave testimonies about how they were mistreated in the internment camps, stating that they had to pick from a list one or more deviant acts, in other words they had to choose the “crimes” that they “committed” prior to their incarceration. The lack of, or rather non-existent judicial process while incarcerated in the mass internment camps is a well-known fact. After choosing a “crime” from a list, the internees would then have their Potemkin trials with no legal representation, set up only to give the appearance of a judicial process. The former internees were coerced to pick their “crime(s)” and also had to confess their “crime(s)”, or else they would remain in the internment camps indefinitely, a standard threat that they each received. One former female internee remarks that she was sentenced to 2 years in prison for having travelled abroad. Preposterous the sentence may be, but she felt she was one of the lucky ones, for other internees were sentenced to 6 or even 10 years. Following the international opprobrium and the increased media coverage, the Chinese regime seems to use the sham trials to empty out several of its indoctrination camps, while prisons start to swell.
Beginning in late 2018, there was strong indication that the extrajudicially/extralegally interned in the mass “re-education” indoctrination camps were being given prison terms while still incarcerated in the camps (Bunin 2019). Some internees were released months or almost 2 years after being given lengthy prison terms, all thanks to their relatives or family members’ persistent campaigning outside of China (ibid.).
Source: “The persecution of Uyghurs in East Turkistan” Authors: Erkin Kâinat; Adrian Zenz; Adiljan Abdurihim
Link: https://www.utjd.org/register/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/the_persecution_of_uyghurs_hard_copy.pdf
Cover Artwork
‘Uyghur identity as mental illness’ by Chinese-Australian political cartoonist, artist and rights activist Badiucao, created for an article on ChinaFile.
