China’s crackdown on Muslims: How Chinese re-education and detention camps aim to “cure” Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims of their religion
The Times of India, 28 September 2018
By Eric Schluessel – China’s oppression of Muslim citizens has entered a new stage with news emerging about a system of re-education and detention camps aimed at isolating people the state identifies as Muslims to “cure” them of religion. The main targets are Uighurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang – what they prefer to call “East Turkestan” – with Chinese officials claiming to defend their country against Islamic extremism. The facts instead indicate systematic persecution of religious and ethnic minorities.
Since China announced its Open Up the West campaign in 1999, the mechanics of crony capitalism, as described in a 2016 essay “Lucrative Chaos” by Thomas Cliff in Ethnic Conflict & Protest in Tibet & Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West, have combined with China’s geo-economic strategy, rising nationalism and authoritarianism to produce an increasingly unequal society in Xinjiang, one marred by ethnic discrimination and managed by a surveillance regime of unprecedented sophistication.
Chinese authorities justify high expenditures on public security by deploying the language of the War on Terror. One official recently made the hyperbolic claim that the crackdown is meant to prevent Xinjiang from becoming “China’s Syria”. Such rhetoric once earned China the tacit support of the US and the UN, but international concern has increased following revelations of mass incarceration.
The PRC’s crackdown in Xinjiang has sent up to 1 million people into the camps, mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs, and many more have been disappeared. While the majority of those detained or sentenced to re-education are ordinary Uighur men, some high-profile cases have emerged, including those of a prominent anthropologist and the “Uighur Justin Bieber,” along with eyewitness testimony from former detainees and camp workers. Mounting evidence from official PRC documents and satellite imagery of prison camps confirm the programme’s existence and suggest its scope and extent – and has been presented to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the United Nations.
Chinese representatives deny the allegations, claiming instead that many Uighurs have been sent to vocational training schools or arrested for minor crimes. Coincidentally, many of the so-called vocational schools feature guard towers and razor wire, while the alleged crime rate has increased sharply: 21% of all arrests in China in 2017 were made in Xinjiang, which accounts for 1.5% of the nation’s population.
Economic factors discourage international outcry. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would seem to be a natural ally to the Turkic-speaking, mostly Sunni Uighurs and once referred to the situation in East Turkestan as “genocide.” Instead, Turkey has strengthened economic ties with China through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Other Muslim countries have been largely silent for similar reasons, prompting frustration among diaspora Uighurs. Some in the diplomatic community indicate that simply raising the issue of Muslim rights is enough to end productive discussion with Chinese counterparts and thus preclude negotiations on trade or security.
Nevertheless, countries around the world can expect to host more Uighur and Kazakh refugees in the near future as those abroad become aware of the consequences of returning to China, where any foreign contact is cause for suspicion. Germany ended Uighur deportations to China this year, and others may follow suit. Kazakhstanis are increasingly aware of imprisonment of their own citizens in Xinjiang, and testimony from a camp instructor suggested that many Chinese Kazakhs have fallen victim. All of this may contribute to popular resentment among China’s regional allies, if not actual policy change.
A Han Chinese activist once warned that “Xinjiang is a snapshot of China’s future,” in that the oppression of Islam would lead to more religious persecution elsewhere. A conflict recently arose over a mosque in Ningxia, where the religious institutions of the Hui – Chinese-speaking Muslims – were long thought to be safe from interference and even supported by the state. Just as China once assumed the time was ripe to curtail minority languages and culture in Xinjiang, so it seems to assume citizens will accept a general assault on Islam.
China may be overplaying its hand and missing the point: In Xinjiang, “Project Beauty” punishes Uighur men and women for sporting veils, beards and long skirts and propagandises dressing in a way the government considers harmlessly “ethnic” rather than “religious”. Similarly, officials in Ningxia have chosen to emphasise what is deemed “national” architecture over the community’s organic relationship to Islam.
The PRC’s ethnic policies in Xinjiang have long produced the opposite of their stated intended effects and will continue to do so. Official corruption and workplace discrimination have long denied Uighurs the economic benefits of resource extraction and development. The regional government has attempted to alleviate the pain of development with inconsistent and ham-handed efforts at cultural assimilation – a near-textbook example of how to create popular discontent and even encourage the anti-state Islamism that China has claimed to combat all along.
In another sense, Xinjiang is an extreme form of China’s emerging surveillance state. Citizens in east China, particularly those who live and work in massive factories, already experience similar techniques of discipline and surveillance, such as the use of biometric data to track citizens. Xinjiang party secretary Chen Quanguo, who first experimented with his “grid-style social management” system in Tibet, has demonstrated the continued efficacy of combining technological surveillance with forcing citizens to police one another. Such techniques could be deployed elsewhere, wherever the party-state desires control and the companies producing security technology seek profits. The outlook is grim.