Xinjiang re-education camps

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
Xinjiang re-education camps
Internment camps, indoctrination camps, re-education camps
Opening Ceremony of a re-education camp in Lopnur County.jpg
Opening ceremony of a re-education camp in Lopnur County, Xinjiang
Other namesVocational Education and Training Centers
Built byCommunist Party of China
Operated byXinjiang local Party committee and government
CommandantChen Quanguo
(party secretary)
OperationalSince May 2014[1]
(as part of the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" under Xi Jinping)
Expanded in August 2016[2] (under party secretary Chen Quanguo)
Number of inmatesUp to 1.5 million each year (Zenz 2019 estimate)[3]
1 million – 3 million over several years (Schriver estimate)[4][5]
Re-education camps
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese再教育營
Simplified Chinese再教育营
Uyghur name
Uyghurقايتا تەربىيەلەش لاگېرلىرى
Vocational Education and Training Centers
Traditional Chinese職業技能教育培訓中心
Simplified Chinese职业技能教育培训中心
The Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government of the People's Republic of China,[6][7][8] are concentration camps that have been operated by the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional government for the purpose of interning Uyghur Muslims since 2014.[1][9] The camps were established under General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration.[9][10] They have significantly expanded since a hardline party secretary, Chen Quanguo, took charge of the region in August 2016. These camps are reportedly operated outside of the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them.[2][11][12] Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Muslims from other ethnic minorities in these camps, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism as well as to promote sinicization.[13][14][15][16][17][18]
As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui (Muslims) and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are kept in these secretive internment camps throughout the region.[19][20][21][22][23][24] In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense claimed that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps".[4][5] In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps".[25][26]
In 2019, the United Nations ambassadors from 23 nations, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States[27][28] signed a letter condemning China's mass detention of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the camps.[29][30]
We, the co-signatories to this letter, are concerned about credible reports of arbitrary detention in large-scale places of detention, as well as widespread surveillance and restrictions, particularly targeting Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, China.[31]
Conversely, a joint statement was signed by 37 states that voiced approval of China's counter-terrorism program in Xinjiang, including Algeria, the DR Congo, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines and Sudan.[27][32][28] The letter supporting China commended what it called China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights:
Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers[32]

History[edit]

Antireligious campaigns in China[edit]

Main article: Antireligious campaigns in China
The government of the People's Republic of China officially espouses state atheism,[33] and it has conducted antireligious campaigns in order to accomplish this end.[34] Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has shifted its policies in favor of outright sinicization of ethnic and religious minorities.[17] The trend accelerated in 2018 when the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Administration for Religious Affairs were placed under the control of the United Front Work Department.[35]

Xinjiang conflict[edit]

Main article: Xinjiang conflict

Before Chen Quanguo[edit]

Number of re-education related government procurement bids in Xinjiang according to the Jamestown Foundation[36]
Both prior to and until shortly after the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, Wang Lequan was the Party secretary for the Xinjiang region, effectively the highest subnational role; roughly equivalent to a governor in a Western province or state. Wang worked on modernization programs in Xinjiang, including industrialization, development of commerce, roads, railways, hydrocarbon development and pipelines with neighboring Kazakhstan to eastern China. On the other hand, Wang constrained local culture and religion, replaced the Uyghur language with Standard Mandarin as the medium of education in primary schools, and penalized or banned among government workers (in a region in which the government was a very large employer), the wearing of beards and headscarves, fasting and praying while on the job.[37][38][39]
In April 2010, after the Ürümqi riots, Zhang Chunxian replaced Wang Lequan as the Communist Party chief. Zhang Chunxian continued and strengthened Wang's repressive policies. In 2011, Zhang proposed "modern culture [to the exclusion of Uyghur tradition] leads the development in Xinjiang" as his policy statement and started to implement his modern culture propaganda.[40] In 2012, he first mentioned the phrase "de-extremification" (Chinese: 去极端化) campaigns and started to educate "wild Imams" (野阿訇) and extremists (极端主义者).[41][42][36]
In 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative was announced, a massive trade project at the heart of which is Xinjiang.[43] In 2014, Chinese authorities announced a "People's war on terror" and local government introduced new restrictions and banned "abnormal" long beards, the wearing of veils in public places and naming of children to exaggerate religious fervor (including names such as Muhammad or Fatimah)[44][45][46] as a campaign against terrorism and extremism.[47][48]
Under Zhang, the Communist Party launched its "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in Xinjiang, leading to many remands, detentions, arrests, and incarcerations.[citation needed]

Chen Quanguo era[edit]

In August 2016, Chen Quanguo, a well-known hardline Communist Party leader in Tibet,[49] took charge of the Xinjiang autonomous region. Chen was branded as responsible for a major component of Tibet's "subjugation" by critics.[50]
Following Chen's arrival, local authorities recruited over 90,000 police officers in 2016 and 2017 – twice as many as they recruited in the past seven years,[51] and laid out as many as 7300 heavily guarded check points in the region.[52] The province has come to be known as one of the most heavily policed regions of the world. Gradually the concept of "transformation through education" started to expose and came to be systematically used with the "de-extremification" campaigns.[53] International media have labelled the current regime in Xinjiang as "the most extensive police state in the world".[54][55][56][57]
Local media have reported on these facilities and generally referred them as "counter-extremism training centers" (去极端化培训班) and "education and transformation training centers" (教育转化培训中心). Most of those facilities are converted from existing schools or other official buildings, although some are specifically built for "reeducation" purposes.[58]
The heavily policed region and thousands of check points assisted and accelerated the detention of locals in the camps. In 2017 the region constituted 21% of all arrests in China despite comprising less than 2% of the national population, eight times more than previous year.[54][59] The judicial and other government bureaus of many cities and counties started to release a series of procurement and construction bids for those planned camps and facilities.[36] Increasingly, massive detention centers were built up throughout the region and are being used to hold hundreds of thousands of people targeted for their religious practices and ethnicity.[60][1][61][50][62]
Victor Shih, a political economist at the University of California, San Diego, claims the mass internments were totally unnecessary because "no active insurgencies" existed, only "isolated terrorist incidents". He suggests that because a great deal of money was spent setting up the camps, the money likely went to associates of the politicians who created them.[63]

Camp facilities[edit]

In urban areas, most of the camps are converted from existing vocational schools, communist party schools, ordinary schools or other official buildings, while in suburban or rural areas the majority of camps were specially built for the purposes of re-education.[64] These camps are guarded by armed forces or special police and equipped with prison-like gates, surrounding walls, security fences, surveillance systems, watchtowers, guard rooms and facilities for armed police etc.[65][66][67][68]
In November and December 2018, the magazine Bitter Winter released three videos it claimed had been shot inside two camps in the Yining area. The videos show jail-like features and the magazine claimed they proved that the camps are detention facilities rather than "schools".[69][70][71] According to Business Insider, the second "Bitter Winter’s video... matches the descriptions of former detainees and witnesses of other detention facilities in Xinjiang."[72]
While there is no public, verifiable data for the number of camps, there have been various attempts to document suspected camps based on satellite imagery and government documents. On 15 May 2017, Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C. based institute, released a list of 73 government bids related to re-education facilities.[36] On 1 November 2018, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's (ASPI) International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) reported on suspected camps in 28 locations.[73] On 29 November 2018, Reuters and Earthrise Media reported 39 suspected camps.[74] The East Turkistan National Awakening Movement has reported larger numbers of camps.[75][76]

Camp detainees[edit]

Background[edit]

Detainees listening to speeches in a re-education camp in Lop County, Xinjiang, April 2017.[77][78]
Many media reports said that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities,[79][80][81] are being detained without trial in "re-education camps" in the province.[citation needed] Radio Free Asia, a site funded by the US government, estimated in January 2018 that 120,000 members of the Uyghurs are currently being held in political re-education camps in Kashgar prefecture alone.[82]
Uyghur politician Rebiya Kadeer, who has been in exile since 2005, has had as many as 30 relatives detained or disappeared, including her sisters, brothers, children, grandchildren, and siblings.[83][84] It is unclear when they were taken away.[85][86]
On 13 July 2018, Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national and former employee of the Chinese state, appeared in a court in the city of Zharkent, Kazakhstan for being accused of illegally crossing the border between the two countries. During the trial she talked about her forced work at a re-education camp for 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs.[87][88] Her lawyer believed that if she is extradited to China, she would face the death penalty for exposing re-education camps in Kazakh court.[89][88] Her testimony for the re-education camps have become the focus of a court case in Kazakhstan,[90] which is also testing the country's ties with Beijing.[91][92] On 1 August 2018, Sayragul Sauytbay, who fled one of the Chinese re-education camps, was released with a six-month suspended sentence and direction to regularly check in with police. She applied for asylum in Kazakhstan to avoid being deported to China.[93][94][95] Kazakhstan refused to grant her asylum. On June 2, 2019 she flew to Sweden where she was then given political asylum.[96][97]
Gene Bunin created the Xinjiang Victims Database[98] to collect public testimonies on people detained in the camps. Each page lists basic demographic information including dates and suspected cause of detention, location, in addition to supplementary videos, photos and documents.
Writing in the Journal of Political Risk in July 2019, independent researcher Adrian Zenz estimated the upper speculative limit to the number of people detained in Xinjiang re-education camps at 1.5 million.[3] In November 2019, Adrian Zenz estimated that the number of internment camps in Xinjiang had surpassed 1,000.[99] In November 2019, George Friedman estimated that 1 in 10 Uyghurs are being detained in re-education camps.[100]

Treatment[edit]

In January 2018, Abdurahman Hasan, a Uyghur businessman from Kashgar, was interviewed by BBC News in Turkey and rhetorically asked the reporters to shoot his 68-year-old mother and 22-year-old wife after talking of the abuse conducted in one of the camps in Kashgar.[55] Kayrat Samarkand, a Kazakh citizen who migrated from Xinjiang, was detained in one of the re-education camps in the region for three months for visiting neighboring Kazakhstan. On 15 February 2018, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the same day as Kayrat Samarkand was freed from custody.[101] After his release, Samarkand claimed that he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, and that he was forced to study communist propaganda for hours every day and chant slogans giving thanks and wishing for a long life to Xi Jinping, current General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.[102]
Mihrigul Tursun, an Uyghur woman detained in China, after escaping one of these camps, talked of alleged beatings and torture. After moving to Egypt, she traveled to China in 2015 to spend time with her family and was immediately detained and separated from her infant children. When Tursun was released three months later, one of the triplets had died and the other two had developed health problems. Tursun said the children had been operated on. She was arrested for a second time about two years later. Several months later, she was detained a third time and spent three months in a cramped prison cell with 60 other women, having to sleep in turns, use the toilet in front of security cameras and sing songs praising China’s Communist Party.
Tursun said she and other inmates were forced to take unknown medication, including pills that made them faint and a white liquid that caused bleeding in some women and loss of menstruation in others. Tursun said nine women from her cell died during her three months there. One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place. "The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins," Tursun said in a statement read by a translator. "I don’t remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness," Tursun said. "The last word I heard them saying is that you being an Uyghur is a crime." She was eventually released so that she could take her children to Egypt, but she was ordered to return to China. Once in Cairo, Tursun contacted U.S. authorities and, in September, came to the United States and settled in Virginia.[103]
Some detainees reportedly endure physical and mental torture to suppress dissident religious beliefs and separatist movements. Former inmates claim that they are "forced to study communist propaganda for hours and give thanks to the general secretary (paramount leader) by chanting 'Long live Xi Jinping'",[104] as well as learn to sing the national anthem of China and communist songs. Punishments, like being placed in handcuffs for hours, waterboarding, or being strapped to "tiger chair" (a metal contraption) for long periods of time, are allegedly used on those who fail to follow.[105][106]
According to detainees, they were also forced to drink alcohol and eat pork, which are forbidden in Islam.[24][105][104] Some reportedly received unknown medicines while others attempted suicide.[107] There have also been several deaths from unspecified causes reported.[108][109][110][111][112][113][114] [115] Some detainees have alleged widespread sexual torture, including forced abortions, forced use of contraceptive devices, sterilization, and rape.[116] Rushan Abbas of the Campaign for Uyghurs claims that the actions of the Chinese government amount to genocide according to United Nations definitions which are laid out in the Genocide Convention.[117]
According to Time, Sarsenbek Akaruli, 45, a veterinarian and trader from Ili, Xinjiang, was arrested in Xinjiang on Nov. 2, 2017. As of November 2019, he is still in a detention camp. According to his wife Gulnur Kosdaulet, Akaruli was put in the camp after police found the banned messaging app WhatsApp on his cell phone. Kosdaulet, a citizen of neighboring Kazakhstan, has traveled to Xinjiang on four occasions to search for her husband but could not get help from friends in the Communist Party of China. Kosdaulet said of her friends, "Nobody wanted to risk being recorded on security cameras talking to me in case they ended up in the camps themselves."[118]
According to Time, former prisoner Bakitali Nur, 47, native of Khorgos, Xinjiang on the Sino-Kazakh border, was arrested because authorities were suspicious of his frequent trips abroad. He reported spending a year in a cell with seven other prisoners. The prisoners sat on stools seventeen hours a day, were not allowed to talk or move and were under constant surveillance. Movement carried the punishment of being put into stress positions for hours. After release, he was forced to make daily self-criticisms, report on his plans and work for negligible payment in government factories. In May 2019, he escaped to Kazakhstan. Nur summarized his experience in jail and under constant monitoring after his release saying, "The entire system is designed to suppress us."[118]

Forced labor[edit]

Scholar Adrian Zenz and others have reported that the re-education camps also function as forced labor camps in which Uyghurs produce various products for export, especially those made from cotton grown in Xinjiang.[119][120][121]
In 2018, the Financial Times reported that the Yutian / Keriya county vocational training centre, among the largest of the Xinjiang re-education camps, had opened a forced labour facility including eight factories spanning shoemaking, mobile phone assembly and tea packaging, giving a base monthly salary of ￥1,500 ($220). Between 2016 and 2018, the centre expanded 269 percent in total area.[122]

Children[edit]

Children of Uyghur parents have been separated from their families and sent to schools where they are taught Mandarin Chinese.[123][124][125]

New York Times and ICIJ leaks[edit]

Main articles: Xinjiang papers and China Cables
On November 16, 2019, The New York Times released an extensive leak of 400 documents, sourced from a member of the Chinese government who sought that Xi Jinping would be held accountable for his actions. The New York Times stated the leak suggests discontent inside the Communist Party relating to the crackdown in Xinjiang. The anonymous government official that leaked the documents did so with the intent that the disclosure "would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions".[9]
We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy. -Xi Jinping in 2014, after 3 recent terrorist attacks (translated from Mandarin Chinese)[9]
The New York Times highlighted documents that were aimed at communicating messages to Uighur students who were returning home and would ask about their missing friends relatives who had been interned at the camps. The documents acknowledged that the internees had not committed a crime and that government staff should acknowledge that no crime had been committed and that "It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts."[9] The times stated that speeches obtained demonstrated how Xi views risks to the party in a manner similar with that to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which The New York Times stated Xi "blamed on ideological laxity and spineless leadership."[9] Concerned that violence in the Xinjiang region could damage social stability in the rest of China, Xi stated "social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected."[9]
The China Daily reported in 2018 that communist party official Wang Yongzhi was removed for "serious disciplinary violations."[9][126] The New York Times obtained a copy of Wang's confession (which the report noted was likely signed under duress) and stated that The New York Times believed he was sacked for being too lenient on Uyghur's including his release of 7000 detainees. Wang had told his superiors that he was concerned that the actions against the Uighur's would breed discontent and thus result in greater violence in the future. The leaked documents stated, "he ignored the party central leadership's strategy for Xinjiang, and he went as far as brazen defiance...He refused, to round up everyone who should be rounded up".[9] The article was discreetly shared on the Chinese platform Sina Weibo, where some netizens expressed sympathy for him.[127][128] In 2017, there were also more than 12,000 investigations into party members at Xinjiang for infractions or resistance in the "fight against separatism", which was more than 20 times the figure in the previous year.[9]
On November 24, 2019, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the China Cables, consisting of six documents, an "operations manual" for running the camps and detailed use of predictive policing and artificial intelligence to target people and regulate life inside the camps.[129][130]

International reactions[edit]

Reactions to China's Xinjiang policies as of November 2019
  Against
  Support
  China

Reactions by other countries[edit]

On July 8 2019, 22 countries signed a statement to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights in which they called for an end to mass detentions in China and expressed concerns over widespread surveillance and repression.[27][131]
In July 2019, 37 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Sudan, Angola, Algeria, Nigeria, DR Congo, North Korea, Serbia, Russia, Venezuela, Philippines, Myanmar, Pakistan and Syria had signed a joint letter to the UNHRC praising China's "remarkable achievements in Xinjiang."[27][32] The Global Times later claimed that 50 countries including Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Djibouti and Palestine signed the letter.[132]
In October 2019, 23 countries including United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Japan, Australia and United States signed a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly's Third Committee urging China to close the camps in Xinjiang.[28]
In November 2019 the Belorussian U.N. mission released a full list of 54 countries which they said were in support of China's Xinjiang policies.[133][unreliable source?]
PositionQuantityStates
Against22 (per July 8 letter)Albania,Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.[134]
Support37 (per July 12 letter)Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Gabon, Kuwait, Laos, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe[27]
Withdrawn support1Qatar[134]
Total–

Other reactions by country[edit]

NPR reported that "Kazakhstan and its neighbors in the mostly Muslim region of Central Asia that have benefited from Chinese investment aren't speaking up for the Muslims inside internment camps in China".[135]
  • In November 2017, Kazakhstan's Ambassador to China Shahrat Nuryshev met with Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Li Huilai regarding Kazakh diaspora issues.[136]
  • On 15 February 2018, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the same day Samarkand, a Kazakhstan citizen, was released from re-education camp. From 17 to 19 April, Kazakh First Deputy Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi visited Xinjiang to meet with local officials.[101]
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman defended China’s re-education camps.[137]
  • In February 2019, the Spokesperson for the Turkish Foreign Ministry denounced China for "violating the fundamental human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region."[141][142]
  • In July 2019, when Turkish President Erdoğan visited China, he said "It is a fact that the people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang are leading a happy life amid China's development and prosperity." as paraphrased by the Chinese officials[143] Turkey claims the paraphrase was actually mistranslated, they claim it rather should have read "hopes the peoples of China's Xinjiang live happily in peace and prosperity"[144] Erdogan also said that some people were seeking to "abuse" the Xinjiang crisis to jeopardize the "Turkish–Chinese relationship".[145][146][147]
  • On 3 July 2018, at UK Parliamentary roundtable, the Rights Practice helped to organise a Parliamentary Round-table on increased repression and forced assimilation in Xinjiang. Rahima Mahmut, an Uyghur singer and human rights activist, gave a personal testimony about the violations suffered by the Uyghur community. Dr. Adrian Zenz, European School of Culture and Theology, (Germany), outlined the evidence of a large scale and sophisticated political re-education network designed to detain people for long periods of time and which the Chinese government officially denies.[148] In November 2019, a BBC Panorama confronted Chinese Ambassador Liu Xiaoming about the issue.[149]
  • On 3 April 2018, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith sent a letter urging Ambassador to China Terry Branstad to launch an investigation into the reported mass detention of Uyghurs in political re-education camps in Xinjiang.[150][151]
  • On 26 July 2018, Vice President of the United States Mike Pence raised the re-education camps issue at Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. He said that "Sadly, as we speak as well, Beijing is holding hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uyghur Muslims in so-called 're-education camps', where they're forced to endure around-the-clock political indoctrination and to denounce their religious beliefs and their cultural identity as the goal."[152][153][154]
  • On 26 July 2018, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), an independent agency of the U.S. government which monitors human rights and rule of law developments in the People's Republic of China, released a report that said as many as a million people are or have been detained in what are being called "political re-education" centers, the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic minority population in the world today.[155][156] On 27 July 2018, The U.S. Embassy & Consulate in China released Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom Statement on China, which mentioned the detention of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in "political re-education camps", and called the Chinese government to release immediately all those arbitrarily detained.[157]
  • On 28 August 2018, U.S. senator Marco Rubio and 16 other members of Congress urged the United States to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.[158] In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, they called for the sanctions on Chen Quanguo who is the current Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang (the highest post in an administrative unit of China) and six other Chinese officials and two businesses that make surveillance equipment in Xinjiang.[159][160][161][162]
  • U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for his refusal to condemn the Chinese government’s repressions against the Uyghurs.[163]
  • On 3 May 2019, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver condemns the detention of Uyghurs as concentration camps.[4][164][138]
  • On 11 September 2019, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.[165][166] On 3 December 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a stronger version of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act by a vote of 407 to 1.[167][168]

Organizations[edit]

  • On 1 March 2019, the OIC has produced a document which “commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens.”[170][171][172][173]
  • On 21 May 2018, during the resumed session of the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations in UN, Kelley Currie, the U.S. representative to the U.N. for economic and social affairs, raised the mass detention of Uyghurs in re-education camps, and she said that "reports of mass incarcerations in the Xinjiang were documented by looking at Chinese procurement requests on Chinese websites requesting Chinese companies to tender offers to build political re-education camps".[174][175]
  • On 10 August 2018, United Nations human rights experts expressed alarm over many credible reports that China had detained a million or more ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang.[176] Gay McDougall, a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, said that "In the name of combating religious extremism, China had turned Xinjiang into something resembling a massive internment camp, shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone".[177][178][179]
  • On 10 September 2018, U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet called on China to ease restrictions on her and her office's team, urging China to allow observers into Xinjiang and expressing concern about the situation there. She said, "The UN rights group had shown that Uyghurs and other Muslims are being detained in camps across Xinjiang and I expect discussions with Chinese officials to begin soon".[180]

Human rights organisations[edit]

  • On 10 September 2017, Human Rights Watch released a report that said "The Chinese government should immediately free people held in unlawful 'political education' centers in Xinjiang and shut them down."[58]
  • On 9 September 2018, Human Rights Watch released a 117-page report, "'Eradicating Ideological Viruses': China's Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang's Muslims",[181] which accused China of the systematic mass detention of tens of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims in political re-education camps without being charged or tried and presented new evidence of the Chinese government's mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment, and the increasingly pervasive controls on daily life.[182][183] The report also urged foreign governments to pursue a range of multilateral and unilateral actions against China for its actions, including "targeted sanctions" against those responsible.[184]

Other[edit]

In a July 2018 article, the Foreign Policy reported:
No Muslim nation’s head of state has made a public statement in support of the Uighurs this decade. Politicians and many religious leaders who claim to speak for the faith are silent in the face of China’s political and economic power...Many Muslim governments have strengthened their relationship with China or even gone out of their way to support China’s persecution.[185]
In 2019, The Art Newspaper reported that "hundreds" of writers, artists, and academics had been imprisoned, in what the magazine qualified as an attempt to "punish any form of religious or cultural expression" among Uyghurs.[186] Additionally, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum published an article about the camps, claiming they were used by China to persecute Uyghurs and make them a minority in their ancestral homeland, claiming China did the same against Tibetans in Tibet.[187]
The Center for World Indigenous Studies has labeled these policies as "cultural genocide".[188]
Vox Media,[20] The Daily Telegraph[138] and Dolkun Isa have referred to these camps as concentration camps.[189] The Washington Post editorial board further referred to the camps as part of a "mass ethnic cleansing."[190]

Responses from China[edit]

The Chinese government denied the existence of re-education camps in Xinjiang[citation needed], until October 2018, when it officially legalized them.[191] When international media had asked about the re-education camps, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had not heard of this situation.[192]
On 12 August 2018, a Chinese state-run tabloid, Global Times, defended the crackdown in Xinjiang[193] after a U.N. anti-discrimination committee raised concerns over China's treatment of Uyghurs. According to the Global Times, China prevented Xinjiang from becoming 'China's Syria' or 'China's Libya', and local authorities' policies saved countless lives and avoided a 'great tragedy'.[194][195] The paper published another editorial the day after, titled "Xinjiang policies justified".[196]
On 13 August 2018, at a UN meeting in Geneva, the delegation from China told the United Nations Human Rights Committee that "There is no such thing as re-education centers in Xinjiang and it is completely untrue that China put 1 million Uyghurs into re-education camps".[197][198][199] A Chinese delegation said that "Xinjiang citizens, including the Uyghurs, enjoy equal freedom and rights." They claimed that "Some minor offenders of religious extremism or separatism have been taken to 'vocational education' and employment training centers with a view to assisting in their rehabilitation".[200]
On 14 August 2018, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said "anti-China forces had made false accusations against China for political purposes and a few foreign media outlets misrepresented the committee's discussions and were smearing China's anti-terror and crime-fighting measures in Xinjiang" after a U.N. human rights committee raised concern over reported mass detentions of ethnic Uyghurs.[201][202]
On 21 August 2018, Liu Xiaoming, the Ambassador of China to the United Kingdom, wrote an article in response to a Financial Times report entitled "Crackdown in Xinjiang: Where have all the people gone?".[203] Liu's response said: "The education and training measures taken by the local government of Xinjiang have not only effectively prevented the infiltration of religious extremism and helped those lost in extremist ideas to find their way back, but also provided them with employment training in order to build a better life."[204]
On 10 September 2018, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang condemned a report about the re-education camps issued by Human Rights Watch. He said: "This organisation has always been full of prejudice and distorting facts about China." Geng also added that: "Xinjiang is enjoying overall social stability, sound economic development and harmonious co-existence of different ethnic groups. The series of measures implemented in Xinjiang are meant to improve stability, development, solidarity and people’s livelihood, crack down on ethnic separatist activities and violent and terrorist crimes, safeguard national security, and protect people’s life and property."[205][206]
On 11 September 2018, China called for U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet to "respect its sovereignty", after she urged China to allow monitors into Xinjiang and expressed concern about the situation there.[207] Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said: "China urges the U.N. human rights high commissioner and office to scrupulously abide by the mission and principles of the U.N. charter, respect China's sovereignty, fairly and objectively carry out its duties, and not listen to one-sided information".[208][207][209]
On October 16 2018, a CCTV prime-time program aired a 15 minute episode on what was termed as Xinjiang's 'Vocational Skills Educational Training Centers', featuring the Muslim internees. Sinologist Manya Koetse documented that it received a mixture of supportive and critical responses on the Weibo social media platform.[210]
In March 2019, against the background of the US considering imposing sanctions against Chen Quanguo, who is the region's most senior Communist Party official, Xinjiang governor Shohrat Zakir denied the existence of the camps.[citation needed] [164]
On 18 March 2019, the Chinese government released a white paper about the counter-terrorism, de-radicalization in Xinjiang. The white paper claims "A country under the rule of law, China respects and protects human rights in accordance with the principles of its Constitution." The white paper also claims Xinjiang has not had violent terrorist cases for more than two consecutive years, extremist penetration has been effectively curbed, and social security has improved significantly.[211]
In July 2019, the Chinese government released another white paper that claims "The Uygur people adopted Islam not of their own volition … but had it forced upon them by religious wars and the ruling class."[212] A Global Times opinion piece the same month claimed that the re-education camps employed "the advanced version of normal social govern" and said the process is "the victory of all the Chinese people including Xinjiang people".[213] In November 2019, the Chinese ambassador in London responded questions about newly leaked documents on Xinjiang by calling the documents "fake news."[149]

Response from exiled dissidents[edit]

On 10 August 2018, about 47 Chinese intellectuals and others, in exile, issued an appeal against what they describe as "shocking human rights atrocities perpetrated in Xinjiang".[214]

See also[edit]

References