Torture
Within re-education camps and detention facilities, detainees are reported to have been subject to torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, including sleep-deprivation, stress positions, prolonged restraints, forced medical examination and sexual assault. Some of this treatment reflects patterns of torture and other ill-treatment that Chinese security forces have carried out in Xinjiang and other parts of China for decades, such as severe beatings, forced “confessions”, being shackled or cuffed for extended periods of time.
While the Chinese government had previously cracked down throughout the 1990s in response to protests and small scale violent incidents in Xinjiang, following the 9/11 attacks 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 a 2002 report by Amnesty International, the number of people detained in Xinjiang for investigation on political grounds in the six months following 9/11 was likely to be in the thousands, most of them Uyghurs. The numbers could have been much higher: official Chinese sources rarely accounted for the numbers of people detained for interrogation, who could be held for long periods without charge, or for those who received “sentences” of “re-education through labour”, an administrative punishment imposed without charge or trial which involved up to three years’ detention in a labour camp.
Included in the post 9/11 crackdown 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 a visit in 2005, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reported that arrested Uyghurs were frequently subjected to torture, with some left physically and mentally scarred as a result.
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. In 2016, Chen Quanguo was elected as Xinjiang’s Party Secretary. Credited with “restoring stability” in his previous role in Tibet through the introduction of widespread surveillance and “zero-distance” policing, Chen’s election would see these measures rapidly expand across Xinjiang.
Between 2016 and 2017, the number of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang 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.
Survivors report having been subjected to a systematic regime of physical and psychological abuse, made to repeatedly recite lines of gratitude to the party while being tortured with white noise, stress positions, marching exercises, and sleep deprivation, with the high rate of deaths in custody - or following release as a result of injuries and withheld medical treatment - supporting reports of beatings and intrusive physical torture. A BBC investigation in February 2021 issued further eyewitness accounts of mass rape, torture and forced sterilisation in the camps.