Re-education Camps
“Re-education” has been a key part of the CCP’s strategy for maintaining ideological conformity since the PRC was founded in 1949, and re-education campaigns have taken place in Xinjiang for decades.
However, it was not until 2014, following a series of violent incidents in Xinjiang - and one attack in Beijing - that “re-education” took on a new dimension with Xi Jinping’s declaration that Xinjiang was now the “frontline” of China’s battle against “terrorism”, and consequently a testing ground for new policing and surveillance methods.
As part of new “de-extremification” campaigns in the region, the “transformation through education” concept started to become systematically used by officials in Xinjiang; in 2014, the first reports of what this system would come to look like emerged in Kashgar, with the creation of a three-tier “transformation through education base” operating at county, township and village levels. 2015 saw the first media report stating the capacity of a centralised re-education facility, with Khotan City’s “de-extremification education and training center” said to hold up to 3,000 detainees whose thinking was “deeply affected” by “religious extremism”.
Under Chen Quanguo, who took on the role of Xinjiang Party Secretary in August 2016, the publication of new “de-extremification regulations” issued by Xinjiang’s government in March 2017 stated that “de-extremification must do transformation through education well, jointly implementing individual and centralized education”. This correlated closely with the release of detailed information in the form of government procurement and construction bids, related to re-education or similar “training” facilities, often referred to as “justice bureau transformation through education centers'', or simply “justice system schools”.
Bid descriptions indicated both the construction of new re-education facilities as well as upgrades and enlargements of existing ones. Several facilities branded as vocational also carried bids calling for extensive security installations, with some mandating police stations on the same compound.
Recruitment notices also indicated the same trends. Staff and teacher recruitment notices for these new “educational training centers” often required no specific degree, skill, or teaching background. Instead, they frequently preferred recruits who demonstrated strong ideological conformity, army or police experience, or called for “training center policing assistants”.
Within re-education camps, former detainees have reported being forced to study Mandarin and Communist Party (CCP) dogma, and encouraged to regularly praise the CCP, while being prevented from practicing their religion. This “patriotic education” continues for those who had left the camps as part of labour transfers to factories across China, where at the end of the work day Uyghur employees attend evening classes where they study Mandarin, sing the Chinese national anthem and receive further “vocational training”.
A leaked government manual from 2017 offered guidance for communicating messages to Uyghur students who were returning home and would ask about their missing friends or relatives who had been interned in the camps. It said that government staff should acknowledge that the internees had not committed a crime and that "it is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts." Officials were directed to say that even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared.
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.