It’s hard to know what the Chinese government aims to do with the Uighur people, but we fear the worst. The Uighurs, an ethnic minority in the mineral-rich autonomous Xinjiang region of northwest China, are facing systematic persecution. Chinese security forces harass the largely Muslim ethnic group and wantonly detain individuals and even whole Uighur families.
No one knows how many languish in prison camps; the number is likely in the hundreds of thousands. Chinese authorities, when not denying the existence of the camps, say the surveillance and detention measures are designed to advance “social stability and long-term security.” They hint at Uighur riots and terrorism as justifications for the internment, but it’s unclear which came first.
Since at least 2014, the region’s roughly 12 million Uighurs have been subjected to an elaborate system of biometric scanning, identification, and location tracking. Chinese authorities aggressively follow them in shopping bazaars and other public places while requiring them to declare their religious affiliations, their prayer routines, their travel plans, and much more. Uighurs’ cell phones are often searched for “objectionable” material; if something’s found they will be sent to a camp.
There is much here to recall Orwell’s 1984. Uighurs are pushed or forced to renounce their faith and to submit to cultural “re-education.” If you’re a Uighur abroad, criticizing the Chinese government or even acknowledging the existence of the camps can land your entire family in detention. Earlier this month, Gay McDougall, a U.N. official, charged that “in the name of combating religious extremism and maintaining social stability, the State Party has turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone.”
After World War II, the region was briefly controlled by the Soviets and called East Turkestan, but in 1949, Mao annexed it and renamed it Xinjiang, or the “New Territory.” The Uighurs have inhabited the land for thousands of years; it isn’t new to them. Some Uighurs are agitating for statehood, which makes sense given Chinese contempt for their culture and ethnicity. But the separatist groups are fractured. A few have adopted violent methods. In 2002, the Treasury Department designated the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, now known as the Turkestan Islamic party, a terrorist entity—it has links to al-Qaeda. It’s now said to be actively fighting in the Syrian civil war. Xinhua, the Chinese state media service, has blamed several terror attacks on Uighur separatists—including the 2014 Kunming train station attack, for which no one claimed responsibility.
The threat of terrorism isn’t the only thing driving Beijing’s paranoid suppression of the Uighurs. Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has invested vast resources in the economic development project known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Its purpose is to boost infrastructure and other projects along the Silk Road and a variety of other major trade routes. Xinjiang’s Uighurs live athwart one of that initiative’s principal corridors. Chinese Communists have a long history of brutality in the face of opposition to their development projects.
Western journalists and U.S. officials have begun to shame Beijing over its outrageous treatment of the Uighurs. Florida senator Marco Rubio has urged Treasury to sanction seven Chinese officials and two companies for their association with the detention camps in Xinjiang. In July, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in fierce opposition to China’s oppression of the Uighurs, reminding listeners at a State Department event that “Beijing is holding hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uighur Muslims in so-called ‘reeducation camps,’ where they’re forced to endure around-the-clock political indoctrination and to denounce their religious beliefs and their cultural identity.”
That’s the right approach, and more of it is needed. If Beijing persists in its crimes against a suffering people, it should be forced to do so in the full light of day.
