To Control the Uighurs, China Uses Terror

It was May 2014. Men using explosives and knives killed three people outside a railroad station in Urumqi. And they wounded at least 79 others. Urumqi is the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region. Chinese President Xi Jinping was a visitor there days before the attack.

Violent anti-government attacks continued. Xi Jinping said Xinjiang is full of terrorist activities. He will not allow the region to separate from China. He says the people need “painful intervention.” He began a crackdown.

The crackdown aims at ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. The goal is to turn them into loyal citizens. It is also meant to make them supporters of the Communist Party.

China has tried for decades to restrict the practice of Islam in Xinjiang. The region is almost as big as Alaska. More than half the population of 24 million belong to Muslim ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs. They have a history of independence. They resist Chinese rule.

The Chinese Communist Party began a campaign of mass internment against the Uighurs. They claimed the campaign was an educational program. The world learned of the program. Firsthand accounts confirmed them. The Chinese government’s own records showed up at The New York Times.

Internment camps are everywhere in the Xinjiang region. Here is how the Chinese government documents describe the vast network of camps. They say they are a mild corrective “transformation through education” centers.

In fact, authorities pull families apart. Farmers cannot work the land. Debt is mounting for families. Guards force inmates to sing rousing patriotic hymns. One is “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China” in Chinese. Those who could not remember the words did not get breakfast. They all learned the words.

A Xinjiang inmate said, “In the end, all the officials had one key point. The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party. The backwardness of Uighur culture. And the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”

There are chilling details in the documents obtained by The Times. They include a description of Islamist radicalism as a virus or a drug addiction. The president said it required “a period of painful, intervention treatment.”

An observer said there is no more denying, no more dodging. The Chinese Communist Party can no longer hide its campaign of mass internment. It cannot claim that the effort is an innocent educational program. He said the government’s own records prove what has taken place.

Source: The New York Times November 24, 2019