China's Uighur Genocide Policy
The Chinese government said the detention camps in China’s far western Xinjiang region were vocational training centers where the “students” voluntarily learned new skills. In 2019, the Chinese Communist Party said the attendees had graduated and most had found good jobs. An estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and Kazakhs had been sent to the camps. But detentions continue, and satellite images reviewed by RFA Uyghur indicate that some sites previously identified as internment facilities remain intact.
Many people rounded up by police remain missing. Questions about disappeared family members remain unanswered and reports of dubious arrests continue to emerge despite claims by the Chinese government that a widely condemned internment campaign targeting Uyghurs has ended. “Uyghurs are still very much living in a state of brokenness,” said Maya Wang, associate director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch.
Some people caught in the mass reeducation campaign appear to have been transferred from the camps to prisons to serve out long sentences for minor offenses. Some low-security camps appear to have been closed, but the “capacity for high security detention and higher security prisons has increased significantly,” said Adrian Zenz, a German academic whose research exposed the breadth of the campaign against Uyghurs. “The concentration camps have not disappeared,” said Bahtiyar Omer, director of the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database, a Norway-based group. The group says more than 12,600 Uyghurs are being held in camps in Xinjiang.
President Xi Jinping vowed to carry on what he called China’s “totally correct” strategy in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, drawing sharp criticism from a Uyghur group and from experts who point to the growing international outcry at Chinese policies that some say amount to genocide. Xi told the two-day Xinjiang Central Work Forum that ended on 26 September 2020 that China's XUAR strategy was “totally correct and must carry on for a long time,” according reports issued by state media. "The whole party must treat the implementation of the Xinjiang strategy as a political task, and work hard to implement it completely and accurately to ensure that the Xinjiang work always maintains in the correct political direction," Xi said. "We must also continue the direction of Sinicizing Islam to achieve the healthy development of religion," Xi said.
Recurrent troubles have shaken the region since its annexation to the People's Republic of China in 1949. This annexation followed two brief independent state experiments and the birth and construction of a sense of Uyghur national belonging, in the first part of the 20th century. The Uyghurs deplore the sinicization of their region induced by migratory, linguistic, social and cultural policies constituting an immediate danger for the continuity of their own culture. Although it is a region that has in principle enjoyed autonomous status since 1955, and despite the law on the rights of minorities in the People's Republic of China, the fundamental rights of the Uyghurs are not sufficiently guaranteed by the 1978 constitution. In this regard, it is significant that the Autonomy Law was not declared until 1984. For several scholars of China and the Uyghur Region, this law in fact guarantees only an extremely reduced autonomy. Other scholars even call this policy a colonial process.
Public expressions of discontent, demonstrations and sometimes violent acts involving Uyghurs are therefore to be placed in this context of forced assimilation policies and repressive policies put in place by the Chinese authorities. The latter refer to any form of Uyghur protest as acts of separatism and more recently of terrorism. This has been the case since the start of the " Global War on Terror " launched by George W. Bush in 2001, which China immediately joined in order to be able to suppress any Uyghur protest in the name of the fight against international terrorism.
Repressive policies against the Uyghurs, but also against other Turkic minorities in the region (Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Tatars), have taken on an unprecedented scale since at least 2014, when the leader of State of the People's Republic of China President Xi Jinping has declared a "People's War on Terror" in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, especially in prefectures where Uyghurs make up the vast majority of the population. They intensified following the appointment of Chen Quanguo as head of the Chinese Communist Party in the region in August 2016. put in place an extremely repressive system that provoked a large number of protests.
Beginning in April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas had been jailed or detained in re-education camps throughout the XUAR, where members of the ethnic group had long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule. Detainees face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers in the camps and endure poor diets and unhygienic conditions in the often overcrowded facilities.
From the very start of the Uighur “re-education” campaign, the Chinese state made plans to enrol state-orphaned Muslim children into high-security boarding schools. Writing in the Journal of Political Risk, German researcher Dr Adrian Zenz presents evidence to show that enrolment in Xinjiang state nursery schools, for very young children before schooling age, has gone from being far below the national average to the highest rate in the country – since early 2017. Around 90 per cent of the new pupils are from Muslim minority groups. And satellite images show that, around the same time China started expanding the facilities used for the detention of adult Uighurs, attached or independent boarding schools also started receiving dramatically increased dormitory facilities.
An editorial in Global Times published 31 August 2018 spoke of "the Chinese system rooted in the reality of Xinjiang and understood and supported by most developing countries. The region had been on the verge of great turmoil, and violent terror activities almost went out of control. Whether Xinjiang governance abuses human rights must be judged by whether its results safeguard the interests of the majority in the region. Had the situation in Xinjiang several years ago not been controlled, more people would have been brainwashed by extremist thoughts and joined the terrorists, leading to more killings against innocent lives. Xinjiang enjoys peace and tranquility from the chaos over the past two years. It's difficult to calculate how many lives have been saved and how many people have been relieved from dreadful days.... To a large extent, the past turbulence in Xinjiang was caused by external factors. Western accusations of Xinjiang governance seriously misled the extremists, making them believe they were launching religious Jihad and won sympathy and support from Western and international society. "
Numerous reports in 2018 of detention of large numbers of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities held incommunicado and often for long periods, without being charged or tried, under the pretext of countering terrorism and religious extremism. There is no official data on how many people are in long-term detention or who have been forced to spend varying periods in political “re-education camps” for even nonthreatening expressions of Muslim ethno-religious culture like daily greetings.
By late 2018 human rights groups said China had detained up to 2 million Uighurs to promote what the government calls "ethnic unity" in the country's far west. Estimates about the number detained range from tens of thousands to upwards of two million. The "vocational training centers" exist for people who committed minor offences without qualifying what this means. Some sources report a total Uigher population of 10 million, which Chinese census gives the present population of the Uighurs as slightly over 6 million. To put that "one million" number in dog-years, assuming that only males are incarcerated in these camps, this suggests that essentially all "military age men" [ie, age 18 to 40] are presently confined to thought reform centers. Another set of numbers offered by the US Defense Department in May 2019, named 3 million out of 10 million, yields the same conclusion.
More than one out of every six ethnic Uyghurs in one county in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) were being detained in political “re-education camps,” according to local officials. Onsu (in Chinese, Wensu) county, in the XUAR’s Aksu (Akesu) prefecture is home to around 230,000 people, according to the county government’s website. Some 180,000 of them are members of minority groups—the largest of which is Uyghurs. While investigating the political re-education camp network in Aksu, RFA’s Uyghur Service spoke with an officer at the Onsu county police station who said that “30,000 people” from the county are currently held in re-education camps.
The 30,000 detainees are held in five main camps in the county. The biggest camp is housed in a recently constructed four-story building located approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the seat of Onsu county in Yangaq Plaza, and holds around 10,000 inmates. A second camp is located in Jam Bazar village and holds around 7,000 people. A third camp, holding around 5,000 people, is located in Qizil Bazar village, around 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside of the seat of Onsu county and some 17 kilometers (10 miles) outside of Aksu city. The fourth and fifth camps, known as the Party School Re-Education Camp and the No. 2 Middle School Re-Education Camp because it is housed in a four-story former school building, are both located inside of Onsu township and hold 1,000 and 7,000 people, respectively.
Reports include mass surveillance disproportionately targeting ethnic Uighurs, including through frequent baseless police stops and the scanning of mobile phones at police checkpoint stations. Additional reports indicate mandatory collection of extensive biometric data in XUAR, including DNA samples and iris scans, of large groups of Uighur residents. Reports indicate that all XUAR residents are required to hand in their travel documents to police and apply for permission to leave the country, and that permission may not come for years. This restriction impacts most heavily on those who wish to travel for religious purposes.
The repressive policies are accompanied by a massive surveillance system, including a multitude of devices, among which: facial recognition cameras, compulsory spy applications on cell phones, automated platform for collecting data and reporting residents ( Integrated Joint Operations Platform), compulsory surveillance GPS in cars, engraving of QR codes linked to the identity number of buyers on sharp objects, QR code on the doors of Uyghur apartments, and checkpoints in the streets and between each city of the region. This surveillance extends even abroad, and in particular in France, where members of the Uyghur diaspora (some of whom are naturalized French) and their French spouses are intimidated or even hunted down and harassed by the Chinese police or the services of the Chinese embassy (multiple calls, pressure from family members who remained in the region of origin).
Reports that many Uighurs abroad who left China have allegedly been returned to the country against their will. There are fears about the current safety of those involuntarily returned to China.
To further improve the response time to emergency incidents, such as terrorist attacks, Xinjiang established a network of public security service stations in all cities and counties. Security officers are expected to arrive at any emergency within a minute. The region plans to set up more stations this year to strengthen the network, according to the regional government. Despite increased security, southern Xinjiang's Hotan prefecture still witnessed terrorist attacks and violent incidents targeting civilians and government buildings.
By December 2018 authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were secretly transferring Uyghur detainees to prisons in Heilongjiang province and other areas throughout the country to address an “overflow” in the region’s overcrowded political “re-education camps,” according to officials. While investigating claims from members of the Uyghur exile community, official sources in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) prefecture’s Kona Sheher (Shufu) county confirmed to RFA’s Uyghur Service 15 December 2018 that authorities have been moving Uyghurs from detention centers in the XUAR to prisons in other parts of China. “Based on the seriousness of their crime, inmates are being transferred to other major prisons in the region and also to inner China,” an officer at the police department in Kona Sheher’s Tashmiliq township told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I think they are being transferred to inner China because they can be educated better there, and another reason is that since there are too many prisoners here and we are experiencing an overflow of inmates.” The officer said that authorities began relocating Uyghur inmates to other parts of China at “the beginning of this year.”
"Some international voices say Xinjiang has concentration camps and re-education camps," Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said on the sidelines 12 March 2019 of the annual meeting of China's ceremonial legislature. "These kinds of statements are completely fabricated lies, and are extraordinarily absurd." Beijing contends the camps are part of a broader campaign to reduce the threat of Islamic extremism. "The number of people in the education centers should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs [them], these education centers can gradually disappear," Zakir said.
The publication of a white paper on vocational education and training in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on 16 August 2019 immediately drew heated discussion both inside and outside China, focused on the training centers that "effectively eliminated" religious extremism in the restive province. The white paper, published by the State Council Information Office, includes six chapters: urgent needs for education and training, law-based education and training, content of education and training, protection of trainees' basic rights, remarkable results in education and training, and experience in countering extremism. “Religious extremism has been effectively eliminated. Through education, the vast majority of trainees can recognise the nature and harm of terrorism and religious extremism, and free themselves from the control these phenomena exert over their minds,” the white paper said. China said no terrorist incidents have occurred in Xinjiang for nearly three years since the education and training started.
A report in November 2019 by Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation suggested a new speculative upper limit estimate of 1.8 million or 15.4 percent of adult members of Xinjiang’s Turkic and Hui ethnic minority groups, and a new minimum estimate of 900,000 or 7.7 percent. Based on the new data, the author estimates that Xinjiang likely has approximately 1,300 to 1,400 extrajudicial internment facilities. The internment drive has focused on removing male authority figures from families as part of the state’s coercive social re-engineering campaign.
An August 2020 article from Buzzfeed News revealed more than 300 suspect locations being used as part of the internment program in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Buzzfeed claimed that it used China's Baidu Maps to identify blank locations where it used to find a network of buildings bearing the hallmarks of "prisons and internment camps" in China's Xinjiang. By using satellite imagery, the news site said it identified 428 such locations "bearing the hallmarks of prisons and detention centers" since the summer of 2018, and said it believes "315 are in use as part of the current internment program." Aside from using "gray tiles" to spot possible camps on map platforms, Buzzfeed said it narrowed the search scale by reasoning that "internment camps" need to be near towns as it is easier for families to visit their loved ones "in custody" and guards' families need to have access to health care, and so on. Previous Western media reports claimed that Xinjiang set up "camps" in sparsely populated areas.
Uyghurs are deported to other parts of China to be forcibly conscripted into factories there. Testimonies on the conditions of detention in these camps also attest to torture, and in particular sexual assault and systematic rape, humiliation and constant dehumanization of detainees affecting their health and physical and mental integrity. The survivors also testify to cases of death of fellow prisoners subjected to torture and who never returned.
Testimonies from survivors and a Uyghur surgeon also attest to forced organ harvesting from Uyghur detainees, a practice that already exists against political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in China, and increasingly documented, especially in the case of death row inmates – whose consent is not asked. Previously, these practices were condemned by resolution 2013/2981 of 12 December 2013 of the European Parliament. Organizations like China Tribunal are slowly accumulating evidence indicating that Uyghurs interned in camps would be considered a potential “organ bank”.
More than 570,000 Uighurs have been pressed into slave labor in cotton fields, according to a report published on 14 December 2020. The Xinjiang region produces over 20% of the world's cotton — making it a major player in global textile supply chains. These revelations are a “game-changer” and any person or business involved in these supply chains has to “divest”, according to Adrian Zenz, the researcher behind the report. The research published by Washington-based think tank the Center for Global Policy followed years of investigations by human rights activists showing that Xinjiang is home to a vast network of camps where at least 1 million people have been imprisoned. The report – which used Chinese regime documents available online – said the total number involved in three majority-Uighur regions exceeds a 2018 estimate of 517,000 people forced to pick cotton as part of the scheme by tens of thousands.
Adrian Zenz, the German reseacher behind a chilling series of revelations about China's policies against the Uighur minority, said Beijing was pursuing “demographic genocide” through the use of mass forced sterilisation campaigns. In an interview 23 July 2020 with FRANCE 24, Zenz said he had unearthed documents from the Chinese authorities indicating a massive drop in population growth in the western Xinjiang region and precise orders given to the authorities to attain that goal. Zenz;s report was based on official Chinese statistical data, policy documents, and interviews with minority women in Xinjiang. He found that between 2015 and 2018, the natural population growth rate in Xinjiang dropped by 84 percent.
He claimed the goal was "ethnic dilution" by bringing more ethnic Han into the area while bringing down the birth rate of Uighurs through forced sterilisation. Zenz noted that birth suppression being one of the five criteria used by the UN to define genocide, his findings illustrate that "demographic genocide" is underway in Xinjiang. He brushed aside claims in the official Chinese media that he was an extremist Catholic firebrand and a US intelligence asset, stressing that he had become "a very big problem for Beijing" precisely because he had drawn his reports from official Chinese data.
A massive birth prevention strategy has also been implemented. This strategy is based on both the forced sterilization (insertion of intrauterine devices, abortion, sterilization) of an extremely high number of Uyghur women of childbearing age and the internment of Uyghur men of childbearing age. In 2017, more than 80% of sterilizations carried out throughout China were carried out in the Uyghur region, whose population nevertheless constitutes less than 2% of the national population. As a result, the Uyghur birth rate has dropped drastically in the region: there is a drop of around 50% in births between 2017 and 2019. In the two southern prefectures of the region where almost the entire population is Uyghur, this drop amounts to 84%.
Starting in 2017, a vast network of state boarding schools and orphanages was built in the region in order to detain Uyghur children separated from their families, forcing them to follow an education program provided exclusively in the Chinese language ( Mandarin). In 2017, official Chinese statistics reported 497,800 children in state orphanages or boarding schools in the region. In 2019, these same statistics indicated that state orphanages and boarding schools now housed 880,500 children, the majority of whom are most likely Uyghurs, an increase of 76.9% in two years. These figures testify to a forced transfer of children.
There is also a desire to eradicate Uyghur culture and identity: destruction of religious sites (mosques, Muslim cemeteries, etc.), Uyghur architecture (traditional houses, district known as "old Kashgar" in Kashgar, etc.), language bans, end of education in the Uyghur language. The policies going in this direction are multiple and widely documented; they aim to forcibly sinicize the Uyghurs.
State-mandated stay-at-homes were also implemented following Chen Quanguo's inauguration as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Uyghur Region. Chinese cadres have been sent to live in the homes of Uyghurs since 2016 to monitor them, as part of the "Become a Family" campaign, which is an extension of the "Visit the people, benefit the people, gathering the hearts of the people” initiated in 2014. This causes the breakdown of family ties. Testimonies report rape and incitement to consume alcohol and pork. This policy also encourages and forces marriages between Chinese and Uyghurs.
Twitter locked the official account for China's US embassy, over a tweet it said violated its policy against dehumanization. After getting locked out of Twitter account for saying #Uighur women had been freed from being “baby-making machines,” Beijing continues to lash out at those accusing China of #Genocide in #Xinjiang. The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. on 07 January 2021 proclaimed the detention of Uyghur women in internment camps has put an end to their role as "baby-making machines" due to a forced family planning policy. The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. on its Twitter page cited a study by the Xinjiang Development Research Center alleging the eradication of religious extremism in Xinjiang has "emancipated" the minds of Uyghur women and promoted "gender equality and reproductive health." The embassy bragged that the Chinese government's indoctrination campaigns have put an end to Uyghur women's role as "baby-making machines" and made them "more confident and independent."
An article published by Chinese state-run mouthpiece the China Daily, which claimed the dramatic drop in the birthrate among the Uyghur population in Xinjiang was a result of the eradication of religious extremism. The article cited a report by the state-operated Xinjiang Development Research Center as alleging that extremism had "incited people to resist family planning" and that the elimination of extremism had "given Uyghur women more autonomy" in choosing whether to have offspring. The article denied that the drastic and sudden drop in population growth was due to forced sterilization and denied German scholar Adrian Zenz's claims that forced sterilizations are taking place in the region.
The policy pursued by the Chinese authorities has primarily targeted intellectuals, academics, artists, public figures, and Uyghur community leaders. These people were interned in camps, condemned to life imprisonment, even to the death penalty. Among them, two former presidents of universities worked with French universities: Professor Tashpolat Tiyip, honorary doctor of the École Pratiques des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) since 2008, and Professor Halmurat Ghopur, who worked closely with the of Bordeaux for twenty years. Both were arrested in 2017 and sentenced to death with a two-year suspended sentence. The Chinese authorities have not yet communicated any news concerning them.
Much of the Uyghur diaspora has been cut off from all contact with family remaining in the country since 2017, and thus suffers the pain of the absence of family ties. Many young students have had to stop their studies due to lack of financial support from their families with whom the link is interrupted, sending money abroad being one of the reasons for the confinement of Uyghur parents. To these difficulties is added the violence of the comments made on the Internet denying the violence suffered and repeating the official Chinese speeches. Members of the Uyghur diaspora, including those settled in France, thus live in permanent fear.
All of these elements, now widely documented and presented here in a non-exhaustive way, bear witness to an intention to destroy Uyghur identity, community ties, possibilities of filiation and ties between generations, and more generally to destroy the Uyghurs, including biologically, as a group in their own right. This extreme and systematic political violence, organized and planned by the Chinese state, constitutes genocide.
