One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters
that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several
months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic
beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party
propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates
being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well as reports of torture and death.
The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China
describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority
population in the world today.”
Beijing began by targeting Uighur
extremists, but now even benign manifestations of Muslim identity—like
growing a long beard—can get a Uighur sent to a camp, the Journal noted. Earlier this month, when a UN panel confronted a senior Chinese official about the camps, he said there are “no such things as reeducation centers,” even though government documents refer to the facilities that way. Instead, he claimed they’re just vocational schools for criminals.
China
has been selling a very different narrative to its own population.
Although the authorities frequently describe the internment camps as
schools, they also liken them to another type of institution: hospitals.
Here’s an excerpt from an official Communist Party audio recording,
which was transmitted last year to Uighurs via WeChat, a social-media
platform, and which was transcribed and translated by Radio Free Asia:
Members
of the public who have been chosen for reeducation have been infected
by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious
extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek
treatment from a hospital as an inpatient. … The religious extremist
ideology is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the
people. … If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the
violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an
incurable malignant tumor.
“Religious
belief is seen as a pathology” in China, explained James Millward, a
professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, adding that
Beijing often claims religion fuels extremism and separatism. “So now
they’re calling reeducation camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking.
It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that
they want to apply to the whole Uighur population, to kill the germs of
extremism. But it’s not just giving someone a shot—it’s locking them up
for months in bad conditions.”
China
has long feared that Uighurs will attempt to establish their own
national homeland in Xinjiang, which they refer to as East Turkestan. In
2009, ethnic riots there resulted in hundreds of deaths, and some
radical Uighurs have carried out terrorist attacks in recent years.
Chinese officials have claimed
that in order to suppress the threat of Uighur separatism and
extremism, the government needs to crack down not only on those Uighurs
who show signs of having been radicalized, but on a significant swath of
the population.
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