Detention in Xinjiang
While Uyghur activists, academics and protestors had previously been targeted in state crackdowns, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the international declaration of the War on Terror, actions that were previously perceived by the government to be anti-state were now described as “terrorist”. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2005 alone, these arrests numbered in the thousands. Included in their ranks were numerous influential Uyghurs in the cultural sphere, including scholars, writers, journalists and editors, with those detained accused of being separatists, religious extremists or terrorists.
Following the Urumqi riot in 2009 and further violent incidents in Xinjiang in the years after Xi Jinping became General Secretary in 2012, Xi declared that Xinjiang was now the “frontline” of China’s battle against “terrorism”, and consequently a testing ground for new policing and surveillance methods. Following the election of Chen Quanguo to Party Secretary in 2016, this crackdown expanded to target the entire Uyghur population.
Satellite imagery analysis shows the widespread construction, beginning in 2016, of detention centres and re-education camps - described by the state as “vocational training schools” - across Xinjiang, as well as the adaption and expansion of existing structures with new security infrastructure.
This was combined with mass surveillance - and a system introduced in 2016 which uses artificial intelligence to identify people for questioning and potential detention. The China Cables, a leak of secret government intelligence briefings, revealed that in a single week in June 2017, the automated system detected nearly 25,000 "suspicious" persons in southern Xinjiang, 15,683 of whom were sent to "education and training" and a further 700 "criminally detained".
Across Xinjiang, between 2016 and 2017, the number of ethnic minorities in prisons due to “risks of extremism” increased five-fold, constituting just over a fifth of all arrests in China despite Xinjiang comprising less than 2% of China’s population. By 2017 Xinjiang was spending more than three times the national average on its justice system - funded separately to its prosecution and court systems - which, among other functions, has significant responsibilities in re-education and general legal education and previously oversaw the former re-education through labour system that was formally abolished in China in 2013.
China’s strict control on the flow of information within and outside its borders makes it challenging to establish concrete numbers of those detained or verify reports of what happens inside these “re-education” camps. Estimates put the number of those interned in the camp system as somewhere between 7 and 15 percent of the Uyghur population, from 800,000 to over a million. There is a wealth of victim testimonies and that of families who have had friends and relatives disappear into the re-education system, with no indication of where they have been detained or what their crime was. Reasons for detention, if they were revealed at all, included communicating with people outside China (including their own relatives), spending time overseas, or having any sort of religious association.
Accounts from camp survivors bear many of the same hallmarks: that they were subjected to a systematic regime of physical and psychological abuse, sexual assault, forced medical procedures, constant surveillance, tortured with white noise, stress positions, marching exercises, and sleep deprivation, and made to repeatedly recite lines of gratitude to the CCP.
In August 2018, a UN committee expressed its concern about emerging reports of what it described as resembling a “massive internment camp [...] shrouded in secrecy” for “political indoctrination purposes”. At the same meeting, Chinese officials denied the existence of “re-education camps”, with a United Front Work Department official arguing that this was a misrepresentation of “criminals involved only in minor offenses'' who were being assigned to “vocational education and employment training centres to acquire employment skills and legal knowledge”.
This was contradicted by the Xinjiang government’s own budgets; analysis shows that vocational spending in Xinjiang actually decreased from 2016 to 2017, as widespread camp construction began. In the same period, domestic security spending went from exceeding that of vocational training by a factor of 6.5 to nearly 20 times. Spending on prisons also doubled.
In December 2019, Xinjiang’s government chairman announced that all the “trainees” held in re-education camps had now "graduated", and - with the "help of the government"- had "realised stable employment [and] improved their quality of life". Research tracking the continuing construction and expansion of Xinjiang’s detention system in 2020 suggested instead that many of those detained in the re-education system were now being sent to factory compounds on forced labour assignments, or being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities with long-term sentences.
For those that have been released, regular police visits serve as a constant reminder that they can be detained again at any time. Uyghurs living overseas face a future without a home or a family, with their relatives back in Xinjiang - if not already detained - telling them not to return under any circumstances or cutting off contact, emphasising the threat they and their families may face for speaking out against the regime.