China has turned Xinjiang into a police state like no other

[Player Twelve]

“THE prophet Sulayman approached his son and said to him, ‘I have received a message from God. I want you to circle the Earth and see if there are more people who are alive in spirit or more people who are dead in spirit.’ After a period the son returned and said, ‘Father I went to many places and everywhere I went I saw more people who were dead than those who were alive.’”

Hasan shared that message on a WeChat social-messaging group in 2015, when he was 23. Born in Yarkand, a town in southern Xinjiang, Hasan had moved to the provincial capital, Urumqi, to sell jade and shoes and to learn more about Islam. He described himself to Darren Byler, an anthropologist from the University of Washington, as a Sufi wanderer, a pious man with a wife and small daughter, who prayed five times a day and disapproved of dancing and immodesty.

But in January 2015 the provincial government was demanding that everyone in Urumqi return to their native home to get a new identity card. “I am being forced to go back,” Hasan complained to Mr Byler. “The Yarkand police are calling me every day. They are making my parents call me and tell me the same thing.” Eventually, he and his family boarded a bus for the 20-hour journey home. It was hit by a truck. Hasan’s wife and daughter were killed. He was hospitalised. “It was the will of Allah,” he said.

Hasan hoped the authorities would allow him to return to Urumqi because of his injuries. No chance. Having lost wife, child and livelihood, Hasan lost his liberty, too. A fortnight after his accident, he was sent to a re-education camp for an indefinite period. There, for all his relatives know, he remains.

Hasan is one of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-language people, who have disappeared in Xinjiang, China’s north-western province. It is an empty, far-flung place; Hasan’s home town of Yarkand is as close to Baghdad as it is to Beijing. It is also a crucial one. The region is China’s biggest domestic producer of oil and gas, and much of the fuel imported from Central Asia and Russia passes through on its way to the industries of the east coast. It is now a vital link in the Belt and Road Initiative, a foreign policy which aims to bind the Middle East and Europe to China with ties of infrastructure, investment and trade.

But on top of that it is the home of the Uighurs, the largest Muslim group in the country, and ethnically quite distinct from the Han Chinese. A recent history of Uighur unrest—in particular bloody inter-ethnic violence in Urumqi in 2009 that followed the murder of Uighurs elsewhere in China—and subsequent terrorism have sent the government’s repressive tendencies into overdrive. Under a new party boss, Chen Quanguo, appointed in 2016, the provincial government has vastly increased the money and effort it puts into controlling the activities and patrolling the beliefs of the Uighur population. Its regime is racist, uncaring and totalitarian, in the sense of aiming to affect every aspect of people’s lives. It has created a fully-fledged police state. And it is committing some of the most extensive, and neglected, human-rights violations in the world.

The not-quite-Gulag archipelago

The government is building hundreds or thousands of unacknowledged re-education camps to which Uighurs can be sent for any reason or for none. In some of them day-to-day conditions do not appear to be physically abusive as much as creepy. One released prisoner has said he was not permitted to eat until he had thanked Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and the Communist Party. But there have been reports of torture at others. In January, 82-year-old Muhammad Salih Hajim, a respected religious scholar, died in detention in Urumqi.

Kashgar, the largest Uighur city, has four camps, of which the largest is in Number 5 Middle School. A local security chief said in 2017 that “approximately 120,000” people were being held in the city. In Korla, in the middle of the province, a security official recently said the camps are so full that officials in them are begging the police to stop bringing people.

As a result, more and more camps are being built: the re-education archipelago is adding islands even faster than the South China Sea. Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Kortal, Germany, has looked at procurement contracts for 73 re-education camps. He found their total cost to have been 682m yuan ($108m), almost all spent since April 2017. Records from Akto, a county near the border with Kyrgyzstan, say it spent 9.6% of its budget on security (including camps) in 2017. In 2016 spending on security in the province was five times what it had been in 2007. By the end of 2017 it was ten times that: 59bn yuan.

For all this activity, the government has not officially confirmed that the camps exist. They are not governed by any judicial process; detentions are on the orders of the police or party officials, not the verdict of a court. A woman working as an undertaker was imprisoned for washing bodies according to Islamic custom. Thirty residents of Ili, a town near the Kazakh border, were detained “because they were suspected of wanting to travel abroad,” according to the local security chief. Other offences have included holding strong religious views, allowing others to preach religion, asking where one’s relatives are and failing to recite the national anthem in Chinese.

A significant chunk of the total Uighur population is interned in this way. If the rate of detention in Kashgar applied to the province as a whole, 5% of the Uighur population of 10m would be detained. Other evidence suggests that this is quite possible. In February Radio Free Asia (RFA), a broadcaster financed by an independent agency of the American government, cold-called 11 families at random in Araltobe, in the north of the province, far from the Uighurs’ heartland. Six said family members had been sent to camps. In a village later visited by Agence France Presse in Qaraqash county, near Hotan, a fifth of adults had been detained over four months.

Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, reckons the overall number detained may be 800,000. Timothy Grose, a professor at Rose-Hulman University in Indiana, puts the total between 500,000 and 1m, which would imply that something like a sixth to a third of young and middle-aged Uighur men are being detained, or have been at some point in the past year.

The Chinese government argues that harsh measures are needed to prevent violence associated with Uighur separatism. In 2013 a Uighur suicide-driver crashed his car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In 2014 a knife-wielding Uighur gang slaughtered 31 travellers at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan province, an incident some in China compared to the September 11th 2001 attacks on America. Unrest in Yarkand later that year led to a hundred deaths; an attack at a coal mine in Aksu killed 50 people. Kyrgyzstani authorities blamed Uighur terrorists for an attempt to blow up the Chinese embassy in Bishkek; Uighurs have been blamed for a bombing which killed 20 at a shrine in Bangkok popular with Chinese tourists.

There are worrying links, as the Chinese authorities are keen to point out, between Uighur separatism and global jihad, especially in the Uighur diaspora, which is based in Turkey. Chinese and Syrian officials say 1,500 Uighurs have fought with Islamic State (IS) or Jabhat al-Nusra (part of al-Qaeda) in Syria. A group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, which demands independence for Xinjiang, is banned under anti-terrorist laws in America and Europe. In 2016 a defector from IS provided a list of foreign recruits; 114 came from Xinjiang.

In the grid

But the system of repression in the province goes far beyond anything that would be justified by such proclivities and affiliations. In Hotan there is a new police station every 300 metres or so. They are called “convenience police stations”, as if they were shops—and in fact they do offer some consumer services, such as bottled water and phone recharging. The windowless stations, gunmetal grey, with forbidding grilles on their doors, are part of a “grid-management system” like that which Mr Chen pioneered when he was party boss in Tibet from 2011 to 2016. The authorities divide each city into squares, with about 500 people. Every square has a police station that keeps tabs on the inhabitants. So, in rural areas, does every village.

At a large checkpoint on the edge of Hotan a policeman orders everyone off a bus. The passengers (all Uighur) take turns in a booth. Their identity cards are scanned, photographs and fingerprints of them are taken, newly installed iris-recognition technology peers into their eyes. Women must take off their headscarves. Three young Uighurs are told to turn on their smartphones and punch in the passwords. They give the phones to a policeman who puts the devices into a cradle that downloads their contents for later analysis. One woman shouts at a policeman that he is Uighur, why is he looking at her phone?

There can be four or five checkpoints every kilometre. Uighurs go through them many times a day. Shops and restaurants in Hotan have panic buttons with which to summon the police. The response time is one minute. Apparently because of the Kunming knife attack, knives and scissors are as hard to buy as a gun in Japan. In butchers and restaurants all over Xinjiang you will see kitchen knives chained to the wall, lest they be snatched up and used as weapons. In Aksu QR codes containing the owner’s identity-card information have to be engraved on every blade.

Remarkably, all shops and restaurants in Hotan must have a part-time policeman on duty. Thousands of shop assistants and waiters have been enrolled in the police to this end. Each is issued with a helmet, flak jacket and three-foot baton. They train in the afternoon. In the textile market these police officers sit in every booth and stall, selling things; their helmets and flak jackets, which are uncomfortable, are often doffed. A squad of full-time police walks through the market making sure security cameras are working and ordering shop assistants to put their helmets back on. Asked why they wear them, the assistants reply tersely “security”.

More in: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2...-like-no-other

[CatchingFire]

But in January 2015 the provincial government was demanding that everyone in Urumqi return to their native home to get a new identity card. “I am being forced to go back,” Hasan complained to Mr Byler. “The Yarkand police are calling me every day. They are making my parents call me and tell me the same thing.” Eventually, he and his family boarded a bus for the 20-hour journey home. It was hit by a truck. Hasan’s wife and daughter were killed. He was hospitalised. “It was the will of Allah,” he said.

It truly is breathtaking the levels to which people will defend their religious beliefs.

[Vapo]

It truly is breathtaking the levels to which people will defend their religious beliefs.

Yea, maybe getting taken to the re-education camp is also will of Allah. Case closed.

[Deleted]

It's scary when people are so religious that they see everything as the will of their god.

[Nitros14]

I doubt you'll get much sympathy from the general American public for Muslims.

[derpkitteh]

i will continue to praise china for their efforts to suppress religion.

if only the US could be so strong.

[Deleted]

4 replies all of which basically boil down to 'He's Muslim, he deserves it'.

[Kaleredar]

4 replies all of which basically boil down to 'He's Muslim, he deserves it'.

Pretty disturbing, really.

"Man forced out of his home and constantly harassed by the government, has his family die due to their direction, tries to remain upbeat, but is then interred in a mass work camp" apparently equals "Nothing to see here, he/they were muslim"

i will continue to praise china for their efforts to suppress religion.

if only the US could be so strong.

Say the United States decided that Christianity was the religion of the land, and decided that you needed to be re-educated.

I would guess that the "stripping of religious freedom" you're always jerking it to wouldn't seem so great when it favors a faith that isn't yours. But hey, you were for removing it, so...

[Airlick]

I have a teacher that spent a lot of time in Xinjiang and he clearly stated it was an alright place to live all the way until 2008 terrorist attack. It was only then that the Chinese really started cracking down on the Uyghurs. It could just be a pretext, but a country that doesn't strike hard against terrorists killing 16 police officers isn't a true country. Actually, the same should be said about terrorists killing normal citizens, as it is in Europe.

The truth is, noone in the world will lift a finger for the Uyghurs, not just because the silent majority sees the problem with radical islam (which is all islam, frankly, except of pacified forms of islam influenced by other sources, just like the form Hui Chinese adhere to), but also because everyone knows China won't bend to international pressure. They didn't bend in case of Falun Gong, they didn't bend in case of Liu Xiaobo, why would they bend in case of an actual threat? The best thing that could happen to the relatively peaceful Uyghurs is being dispersed all around China. I'm sure it will happen at some point, anyway. Probably after the next big terrorist attack. The peaceful will be dispersed, those who refuse to move will be deported from China, those deemed dangerous will just get slapped down into labour camps, Xinjiang will be fully colonized by Chinese and that will be it for the Uyghurs.

Pretty sad, but it's not China that should be blamed for striking against Uyghurs, it's the terrorists that should be blamed for bringing all of this upon the Uyghurs.

[derpkitteh]

Say the United States decided that Christianity was the religion of the land, and decided that you needed to be re-educated.

I would guess that the "stripping of religious freedom" you're always jerking it to wouldn't seem so great when it favors a faith that isn't yours. But hey, you were for removing it, so...

that would be the wrong direction, so i would be very unhappy.

it should be none.

[P for Pancetta]

I have a teacher that spent a lot of time in Xinjiang and he clearly stated it was an alright place to live all the way until 2008 terrorist attack. It was only then that the Chinese really started cracking down on the Uyghurs. It could just be a pretext, but a country that doesn't strike hard against terrorists killing 16 police officers isn't a true country. Actually, the same should be said about terrorists killing normal citizens, as it is in Europe.

The truth is, noone in the world will lift a finger for the Uyghurs, not just because the silent majority sees the problem with radical islam (which is all islam, frankly, except of pacified forms of islam influenced by other sources, just like the form Hui Chinese adhere to), but also because everyone knows China won't bend to international pressure. They didn't bend in case of Falun Gong, they didn't bend in case of Liu Xiaobo, why would they bend in case of an actual threat? The best thing that could happen to the relatively peaceful Uyghurs is being dispersed all around China. I'm sure it will happen at some point, anyway. Probably after the next big terrorist attack. The peaceful will be dispersed, those who refuse to move will be deported from China, those deemed dangerous will just get slapped down into labour camps, Xinjiang will be fully colonized by Chinese and that will be it for the Uyghurs.

Pretty sad, but it's not China that should be blamed for striking against Uyghurs, it's the terrorists that should be blamed for bringing all of this upon the Uyghurs.

It is china's fault for striking against innocent people instead of preventing actual terrorism. Oppressing a bunch of people because of what other's have done only created more terrorists, it is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, people who can't live a normal life and get harassed continuously will at one point give up trying to live a normal life and instead will pick up arms and try to create a brighter future for their children. What China is doing here is state sponsored terrorism.

[Kaleredar]

that would be the wrong direction, so i would be very unhappy.

it should be none.

We get it, you want the state to decide what the appropriate religion is and enforce it harshly.

As I said, you're also hoping that it aligns with your own personal religious beliefs. Because if they did exactly what you asked for in spirit but it didn't align with your own sentiments, you'd be on the wrong end of the barrel.


Treat others how you want to be treated, and all.

[Snowfunk]

"Religion is poison"

[Deleted]

It is china's fault for striking against innocent people instead of preventing actual terrorism. Oppressing a bunch of people because of what other's have done only created more terrorists, it is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, people who can't live a normal life and get harassed continuously will at one point give up trying to live a normal life and instead will pick up arms and try to create a brighter future for their children. What China is doing here is state sponsored terrorism.

You do know that there are numerous Islamic minorities in China, from Hui who are the largest by demography, to Kazakhs and others. They have no problems with Chinese authorities and actually despise Uyghurs for their systematic terrorist actions.

[derpkitteh]

We get it, you want the state to decide what the appropriate religion is and enforce it harshly.

As I said, you're also hoping that it aligns with your own personal religious beliefs. Because if they did exactly what you asked for in spirit but it didn't align with your own sentiments, you'd be on the wrong end of the barrel.


Treat others how you want to be treated, and all.

i'm agnostic, not really religious. i want actual religions to be repressed, because they spawn hatred and violence.

if a government tries to force a religion on me, it further proves my point that they need to be repressed.

[Deleted]

i'm agnostic, not really religious. i want actual religions to be repressed, because they spawn hatred and violence.

if a government tries to force a religion on me, it further proves my point that they need to be repressed.

I just knew that posters would try the route "You are Christian and so" on you.

[CatchingFire]

4 replies all of which basically boil down to 'He's Muslim, he deserves it'.

I criticised the man's use of religious belief to justify the suffering he has endured because it was "Allah's will". I didn't imply he deserved what happened to him because he is Muslim.

[Airlick]

It is china's fault for striking against innocent people instead of preventing actual terrorism. Oppressing a bunch of people because of what other's have done only created more terrorists, it is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, people who can't live a normal life and get harassed continuously will at one point give up trying to live a normal life and instead will pick up arms and try to create a brighter future for their children. What China is doing here is state sponsored terrorism.

They are fighting fire with fire. The problem for terrorists is, they probably didn't expect that China would launch a firestorm in response to them basically burning down an empty barn. It's not fair to the innocent, but to say they are not preventing actual terrorism? Of course they are. The surveillance in Xinjiang is so extreme that the terrorists are basically down to using kitchen knives or ramming people down with cars. That doesn't leave them much ground in terms of picking up arms. And then it's pretty telling how few fatalities there were in those terrorist attacks. I'd say it's likely at this point the Chinese are purposedly letting some minor terrorist groups get through with their plans in order to stir up the general population and keep its support for the pacification of Xinjiang.

It's ruthless, but claiming it's not working is just false. It's not supposed to make the Uyghurs integrate, they didn't before and they never would. The reality is the Chinese weren't and aren't going to move out of Xinjiang. Life is brutal, the Uyghurs pretty much had a choice between integrating into Chinese society and probably retaining semi-independence or refusing to integrate and facing repercussions. I'm sure China would rather have them integrate and avoid spending huge amounts of money and resources on fighting the terrorism. It was obvious they wouldn't go European cuckold mode and allow them to run rampant killing people, though.

[Kuntantee]

You do not need religion to be hateful. Certain people in this thread, and a good portion of mmo-c gen-ot posters are examples.

[P for Pancetta]

They are fighting fire with fire. The problem for terrorists is, they probably didn't expect that China would launch a firestorm in response to them basically burning down an empty barn. It's not fair to the innocent, but to say they are not preventing actual terrorism? Of course they are. The surveillance in Xinjiang is so extreme that the terrorists are basically down to using kitchen knives or ramming people down with cars. That doesn't leave them much ground in terms of picking up arms. And then it's pretty telling how few fatalities there were in those terrorist attacks. I'd say it's likely at this point the Chinese are purposedly letting some minor terrorist groups get through with their plans in order to stir up the general population and keep its support for the pacification of Xinjiang.

It's ruthless, but claiming it's not working is just false. It's not supposed to make the Uyghurs integrate, they didn't before and they never would. The reality is the Chinese weren't and aren't going to move out of Xinjiang. Life is brutal, the Uyghurs pretty much had a choice between integrating into Chinese society and probably retaining semi-independence or refusing to integrate and facing repercussions. I'm sure China would rather have them integrate and avoid spending huge amounts of money and resources on fighting the terrorism. It was obvious they wouldn't go European cuckold mode and allow them to run rampant killing people, though.

You're clueless, there are daily terrorist attacks in Chinese cities like Beijing by disgruntled people from all kind of persuasions, the Uighur aren't the only group being persecuted for little to nothing. China doesn't care for people integrating they want them gone so they can move Han Chinese people into the region.