By Loui Marchant
In recent years, Chinese internment policies in Xinjiang have made headlines around the world. The region has a long and complicated history with the Chinese Government, characterised by violence, mistrust and oppression.
And yet, what the international community knows about the region is limited by restrictions on independent observers. Careful reporting and information leaks suggest that this opaqueness has covered up inhumane treatment of minority groups in Xinjiang. Here, The International examines what we do know about the history of the region, and the human rights abuses occurring there today.
Regional Background
The Xinjiang province, also known as East Turkmenistan, is a region in the northwest of China with a population of over 22 million. The area was briefly declared independent from China in 1949 before being swiftly brought under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the same year. Today, the region is classified as ‘autonomous’, although this does not fully translate into reality as the Chinese state maintains authority.
While making up over 90% of the Chinese population, the Han Chinese are not the majority ethnic group in Xinjiang. Uighurs are a primarily Muslim Turkic ethnic group who total 45% of the Xinjiang population. There is also a significant Muslim Kazakh minority (approx. 7%).
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A Rocky History
Following Xinjiang’s reunion with China, the CCP sought to consolidate power by setting up the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC or Bingtuan), a militia of demobilised soldiers, to oversee work farms in the region. Various controversial interventions were subsequently introduced in an effort to encourage cultural and economic assimilation. Policies which curbed religious freedoms and phased out the Uighur language were seen to discriminate against Uighurs and other minority groups. Unification was not achieved and calls for independence continued for decades.
In the 1990s, the CCP launched the first of its ‘Strike Hard’ campaigns to suppress militarised factions of the separatist movement. Anyone considered to have sympathies with separatism could be detained without trial. Following 9/11, there was some evidence of links between Uighur separatists and Afghan Islamist groups. The CCP began framing its Xinjiang campaign as part of the Global War on Terrorism with a programme countering the three so-called ‘evils’ of separatism, religious extremism and international terrorism.
Simultaneously, the Government began large-scale development projects in Xinjiang cities. Billions of dollars were being invested in the region, but Uighur residential and cultural sites were bulldozed and Han Chinese citizens were encouraged to move to Xinjiang to take up new job opportunities, in preference to hiring Uighurs.
In 2009, riots broke out in the region’s capital city, leading to nearly 200 deaths and the detention of thousands of Uighurs. This violence appears to have consolidated Government perceptions of the Uighur population as a legitimate security threat. Several smaller violent incidents in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China were attributed to Uighur separatists and by the time President Xi Jinping came to power in the early 2010s, groundwork had been laid for harsher regional governance.
The Rise of ‘Re-Education’
In 2014, the CCP launched the ‘Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism’, signalling further intensification of China’s approach to tackling dissent and violence in the Xinjiang region. A significant part of this policy was increasing reliance on the arrest and detention of Uighurs and other minorities in ‘re-education’ camps, which reportedly aimed to politically and culturally indoctrinate detainees. Human Rights experts reported that an estimated one million people were detained arbitrarily, indefinitely and without trial. This included people with serious illnesses and disabilities, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women, teenage children and the elderly. Former detainees gave testimonies of torture, abuse and suicide attempts at camps.
On a wider scale in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities implemented a variety of ethically dubious high-tech mass surveillance methods including compulsory downloading of phone spyware. Police monitoring including house watches, passports controls and checkpoints were the norm. 2017 regulations categorised almost any display of Uighur culture or Islamic faith, including fasting, regular prayer and wearing of a headscarf or ‘abnormal’ beard, as extremism. Meanwhile, region-wide flag-raising ceremonies and Mandarin ‘night schools’ were becoming compulsory.
In 2018, a UN committee questioned the Chinese Government on its troubling human rights record in Xinjiang. The Chinese delegation denied the existence of camps and spoke of protecting the region from terror through education and employment training without infringing on rights. This stance was contradicted by a series of journalistic investigations into camps and leaked Government documents appearing to show the scale of systemic abuses.
Have the Camps Closed?
With international opposition mounting, Government officials announced in December 2019 that all Xinjiang camp detainees had ‘graduated’. Human rights concerns did not subside, though, as policy appeared to be moving instead towards forced labour. In parts of Xinjiang, quotas were put in place to penalise members of minority groups who weren’t working. Military-style work training is described by Government authorities as voluntary but by other actors as coerced. Thus, surveillance and detainment has continued in new guises. Reports have since suggested that international exports such as sportswear and even products made from human hair have been made through forced labour in Xinjiang camps.
In February 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic was a growing threat in Xinjiang. That month the Karakax list published the names and details of hundreds of minorities detained in Karakax county, Xinjiang. Families of Xinjiang residents were still unable to contact their relatives, due to continued mass surveillance and incarceration, and expressed fear that camps would be pandemic breeding grounds.
At this time, Uighur model Merdan Ghappar contacted his family, sending text messages and video footage from inside a Xinjiang internment camp. His reports detailed dirty and crowded conditions, poor medical care and violent enforcement of quarantine rules including public beatings. Ghappar has not been heard from for months. Dr Adrian Zenz, a leading Xinjiang scholar, has spoken of how Ghappar’s story shows that camps are not being wound down.
Last month, Zenz also reported on disturbing mass sterilisations in Xinjiang. Leaked Government plans show that in 2019 alone more sterilisations were scheduled in two predominately Uighur counties than in the whole of China between 1998-2018. Growing numbers of former female camp detainees have told stories of being forcibly administered birth control. Zenz states this is crucial evidence that Government actions in Xinjiang are crimes of genocide, in accordance with the UN definition.
The Way Forward: Sanctions and Investigations
The international community has been slow in responding to the situation in Xinjiang, likely for a combination of reasons including China’s power on the international stage and difficulties in gathering evidence without proper access to the region. However, in July progress appeared to be made when the US Government took the step of imposing significant economic sanctions on the XPCC. Other governments are also beginning to explicitly condemn China’s Xinjiang policy, but it remains to be seen whether words will turn into political action to hold the CCP accountable and enforce change.
The Uighur Human Rights Project states that the international community must now put pressure on China to immediately close internment camps and let journalists and the UNHCR into the Xinjiang region to conduct independent investigations. Their message is clear: the people of Xinjiang deserve the opportunity to tell the world their truth and the international community has an obligation to listen.
Loui Marchant is a researcher and contributor to The International. You can follow her on Twitter here.