Cultural Genocide

In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared
In East Turkestan the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.

By Amy Qin

Children leaving school in Hotan, China, this month. Beijing has used schools in the city and across the colony of East Turkestan to indoctrinate Uighur children.

HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog.
“When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities.
The girl’s father had passed away, he added.
But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western East Turkestan colony.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to concentration camps and prisons in East Turkestan over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam.
Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
Nearly a half million children have been separated from their families and placed in boarding schools so far, according to a planning document published on a government website, and the ruling Communist Party has set a goal of operating one to two such schools in each of East Turkestan’s 800-plus townships by the end of next year.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017.
Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in East Turkestan without putting them at risk of arrest. 
But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.

A boarding middle school in Hotan. A government document says such schools immerse children in a Chinese-speaking environment away from the influence of religion.

State media and official documents describe education as a key component of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in East Turkestan, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures.
The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.
“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.
To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in East Turkestan have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group.
At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.
Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.
The campaign echoes past policies in Canada and Australia that took indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.
“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.
Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare.
References on social media are usually quickly censored.
Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.
Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in East Turkestan, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”

Abdurahman Tohti, a Uighur living in Istanbul, saw his son in a video shared by a stranger on a Chinese social media platform.

Indoctrinating Children
Abdurahman Tohti left East Turkestan and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul.
But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.
He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China.
His parents were detained too.
The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.
Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher.
The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.
Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.
“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”
Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. 
Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.
Then, after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and deadly attacks by Uighur militants in 2014, Xi ordered the party to take a harder line in East Turkestan, according to internal documents leaked to The New York Times earlier this year.
In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase.
Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in East Turkestan, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.
In the 2017 policy document, posted on the education ministry’s website, officials from East Turkestan outlined their new priorities and ranked expansion of the boarding schools at the top.
Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”
By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in East Turkestan — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools.
At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.

Mahmutjan Niyaz, a Uighur businessman living in Istanbul, learned last year that his 5-year-old daughter was sent to a boarding school in East Turkestan after his relatives were detained.

Chinese is also replacing Uighur as the main language of instruction in East Turkestan.
Most elementary and middle school students are now taught in Chinese, up from just 38 percent three years ago.
And thousands of new rural preschools have been built to expose minority children to Chinese at an earlier age, state media reported.
The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree.
But the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of Uighur culture.
Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.
Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.
Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them.
Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.
“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said.
“But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”

The Kasipi Village Elementary School near Hotan was converted into a full-time boarding school last year, according to an online diary of a Chinese language teacher there.

‘Kindness Students’
In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern East Turkestan, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.
It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top.
Cameras were mounted on every corner.
And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.
It wasn’t always like this.
Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.
Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred.
Classrooms were rearranged.
Bunk beds were set up.
Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.
Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.
The government says children in East Turkestan’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.
“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report.
He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”
But Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children.
Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left.
And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.
“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.
“It’s not just the children,” he added.
“The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”
The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders.
Before the conversion of the school, Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.
“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl.
“Daddy, why don’t you come back?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued.
“You must study hard too.”

Students in Hotan playing soccer in a schoolyard with a dormitory in the background

Nevertheless, Kang was generally supportive of the schools.
On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”
“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students.
Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.
Learning Chinese was the priority, Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.
On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.”
At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.
Tighter security has become the norm at schools in East Turkestan.
In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records.
At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.
Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern East Turkestan.
Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed.
But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.
“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.

A Uighur child doing his Chinese homework at a bus stop. The government says minority children will have better prospects if they are fluent in Chinese, but Uighur activists worry about losing their culture.

‘Engineers of the Human Soul’
To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline.
Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.
“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter, deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.
The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for East Turkestan from across China.
Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year.
The influx amounted to about a fifth of East Turkestan’s teachers last year, according to government data.
The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line.
Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.
The deputy secretary-general of the oasis town of Turpan, writing earlier this year, described such teachers as “scum of the Chinese people” and accused them of being “bewitched by extremist religious ideology.”
Teachers were urged to express their loyalty, and the public was urged to keep an eye on them.
A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.
Officials in East Turkestan also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.
Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.
Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun.
Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.
“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.
There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.
Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left East Turkestan to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.
Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media.
It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.
“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them.
“I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”

Kalbinur Tursun, right, at her tailor shop in Istanbul this month.

China's crimes against humanity

China calls them ‘kindness students.’ They’re actually victims of cultural genocide.
The Washington Post
Workers walk by the perimeter fence of a concentration camp in Dabancheng in East Turkestan, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. 

IMAGINE THIS: a facility in southern East Turkestan colony in China, in a dusty village nestled among fields of barren walnut trees.
It is surrounded by a tall brick wall, two layers of barbed wire, cameras on every corner, and a guard wearing a black helmet and protective vest with a metal detector at the entrance.
This is a school?
The building, recently described in a New York Times article, is a clue to the eradication of a people’s culture and language taking place every day in concentration camps in western China. 
The building is in fact a boarding school and part of China’s attempt to wipe out the mind-set of the ethnic Uighur population and others, including Kazakhs.
They are Turkic Muslims, and about 1.8 million of them are now incarcerated in camps that China calls “vocational education” facilities but look more like prisons.
As the Times article and other recently published research has revealed, China’s attempts to suppress Uighur traditions start with the youngest.
Children are separated from their parents — who are hauled off to faraway camps — and the kids are then subjected to intensive indoctrination at places such as the boarding school. 
The goal is to erase from their minds the Uighur language and cultural ways and replace them with coerced respect for China’s ruling Communist Party and the traditions of its Han-majority population.
In the village with the barbed wire, government officials call the children “kindness students,” referring to the party’s supposed "generosity" in making special arrangements.
But the glove bearing this generosity has a fist inside.
As Adrian Zenz at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has documented, in some Uighur-majority regions in southern East Turkestan, preschool enrollment more than quadrupled in recent years, exceeding the average national enrollment growth rate by more than 12 times.
Why? 
Because parents, and in some cases both parents, have disappeared into the camps. 
China is carrying out cultural genocide and social reengineering on young minds when they are most impressionable.
China has claimed the campaign is a response to extremism and violence in East Turkestan a decade ago, but these methods far exceed what would be needed for counterterrorism.
The punishment of the Uighur Muslims appears to fit the definition of crimes against humanity. 
The annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, released Wednesday, says: “Security personnel at the camps subjected detainees to torture, including beatings; electric shocks; waterboarding; medical neglect; forced ingestion of medication; sleep deprivation; extended solitary confinement; and handcuffing or shackling for prolonged periods, as well as restricted access to toilet facilities; punishment for behavior deemed religious; forced labor; overcrowding; deprivation of food; and political indoctrination.”
That is some “kindness.”
Congress should promptly finish with legislation that would pave the way for sanctions on those responsible for the repression.
If this horror is not ended soon, the entire world must ask: Should China be allowed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in one city while running concentration camps in another?

Chinazism: State Terrorism

'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over East Turkestan protests
Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing
By Benjamin Haas in Munich

Demonstrators holding Uighur flags in Berlin before a meeting between German chancellor Angela Merkel and Li Keqiang. 

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. 

But the call from East Turkestan, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. 

It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in concentration camps.
Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. 

But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. 

Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. 

Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.
By the end of the conversation, the façade constructed by the Chinese security agent was broken and Emet’s sister wept as she begged him to stop his activism. 

Then the Chinese official took the phone again with a final warning.
“You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. 

“You need to think of their safety.”
In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. 

Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in East Turkestan, and some were asked to spy for China.
More than a million Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and other minorities are being held in concentration camps, according to the UN, with some estimates saying the number is “closer to 3 million”.
Emet, originally from Aksu in East Turkestan, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. 

He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.
“I will not keep my silence and the Chinese government should not use my family to threaten me,” Emet said. 

“I was clear with them on the phone: if they harm my family, I will speak out louder and become a bigger problem for the government.”

‘China threatening people in Germany should never become normalised’
Most Uighurs remain silent, and have found little help from European authorities. 

But Margarete Bause, a member of the German parliament representing Munich, said Chinese interference was unacceptable and urged Uighurs to contact their MPs.
“We need to protect visitors to the Bundestag. Observing parliament is a fundamental right in any democracy,” she said. 

“It’s also important for the German public to know how China is trying to exert influence here. The Chinese government threatening people in Germany should never become normalised.”
Bause has been interested in Uighur issues for over a decade, after she was admonished by Chinese diplomats in 2006 for attending an event hosted by the World Uyghur Congress. 

In August she was denied a visa as part of a parliamentary visit to China and the trip was eventually cancelled in response.
Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. 

Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. 

Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way, he said, with his number well known in the Uighur community in Munich.
Chinese agents offer cash, the promise of visas to visit East Turkestan or better treatment for family members as a reward, but also dangle the threat of harsh consequences for those same family members if their offers are refused. 

Uighurs described having crucial documents withheld from Chinese embassies and consulates unless they agreed.
One Uighur living in Germany who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said a Chinese agent asked for photos of Eid and other celebrations, and specifically asked for information on Uighurs who had recently arrived in Europe.

A group of people stage a protest against China’s human rights violations against members of the Turkic Uighur minority.

The recent surge in activism among Uighurs overseas is mostly a direct response to the increasingly repressive policies in East Turkestan, and as more people speak out China has doubled efforts to silence them and control the narrative over what it calls “re-education camps”.
There are some signs China’s campaign to silence Uighurs in Europe is working. 

Gulhumar Haitiwaji became an outspoken critic of policies after her mother disappeared into one of the camps in East Turkestan, appearing on French television and starting a petition addressed to French president Emmanuel Macron that garnered nearly half a million signatures. 

But after threats from Chinese officials targeting her mother, Haitiwaji cancelled a planned appearance in March at a human rights summit in Geneva, according to two sources familiar with her plans. 

Haitiwaji and the organisers of the meeting did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who focuses on East Turkestan, said European governments needed to do more to protect their citizens from Chinese intimidation.
“The biggest mistake European Union countries make is that once they allow China to get away with something, that emboldens Beijing,” he said. 

“China has systematic strategies in place and the threats to Uighurs in exile show that. Europe needs its own unified strategy to stand up to China and respond to these threats.”
The Chinese embassy in Berlin did not respond to requests for comment.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

How China Uses Hikvision and Huawei to Subdue Minorities

By Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur

Xi Jinping looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the East Turkestan colony. As many as one million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.

KASHGAR, East Turkestan — A God’s-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. 

At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. 

The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.
The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of East Turkestan, the troubled colony where Kashgar is located.
This is the vision of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making East Turkestan an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that will spread across the country and beyond.
It is also a vision that some of President Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. 

Beyond market barriers, theft and national security, China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States must stop it.

How China Turned a City Into a Prison. Children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere.

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corporation (C.E.T.C.), a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in East Turkestan.

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to “apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security,” Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog post. “Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.”
The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”

Pictures from presentations by the China Electronics Technology Corporation at recent industry shows.

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring East Turkestan for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of East Turkestan’s population.
It is a virtual cage that complements the concentration camps in East Turkestan where the authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. 

The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.
President Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the East Turkestan effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across East Turkestan, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and concentration camps. 

C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of Hikvision through subsidiaries.
“East Turkestan is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China’s mass surveillance systems,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. 

“These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target Muslims.”

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall.

Virtual fences
In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 — about 85 percent of them Uighur — the C.E.T.C. platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people’s movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.
By comparison, the F.B.I.’s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.
The police in East Turkestan use a mobile app, made by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.
Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an “unusual” amount of electricity.
The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else’s car.
The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual “fences” across East Turkestan. 

If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.
“The government’s arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app,” Ms. Wang said, adding that the system “is programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.”
Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. 

But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in East Turkestan as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.
The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in East Turkestan are job training centers. 

Hikvision has denied “any inappropriate actions in East Turkestan,” and C.E.T.C. declined to comment when reached by phone.
C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China’s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. 

Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government’s internal security requirements.
In recent years, it turned to East Turkestan.
The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. 

State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.
The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in East Turkestan totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the concentration camps.
Hikvision has received contracts in East Turkestan worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. 

Another company tapping into East Turkestan’s security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. 

It signed an agreement last year with the region’s police department to help officers analyze data.

A checkpoint in Hotan last year.

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across East Turkestan in buildings that look like toll plazas.
Instead of coins, they collect personal information.
On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their identity cards.
“Head up,” the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.
There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.
Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. 

The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.
Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. 

At many checkpoints, privileged groups — Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors — are waved through “green channels.” 

In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets — and in the online police databases — one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.

“The goal here is instilling fear — fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about East Turkestan as well as China’s surveillance state. 

“The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.”
A database stored online by SenseNets, a Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of surveillance in East Turkestan: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of about 3.5 million.
“This can be pulled off by anyone, and that’s the part that worries me,” said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.
According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000 checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.
The authorities in East Turkestan also force residents to install an app known as “Clean Net Guard” on their phones to monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.
Kashgar and other areas of East Turkestan have in recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from residents too, especially Muslims. 

Officials now collect blood, fingerprints, voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises, which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.
These databases are not yet completely integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the East Turkestan surveillance state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers, officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.
“We risk understating the extent to which this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower,” said Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in East Turkestan. 

“It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century police state so powerful.”

Security gates at the entrance to a Kashgar mosque in 2016.

Expanding beyond the colony
East Turkestan’s security and surveillance systems are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. 

Delegations of police officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities to admire — and consider adopting — the measures.
They often visit police command centers where rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.
“The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in East Turkestan,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to East Turkestan last year, according to an official report on the website of the city’s police bureau.
East Turkestan’s high-tech policing, he added, was “something we should vigorously study.”
Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces on China’s southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance system used in East Turkestan, “laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout,” the company said last year.
C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced “command center information system” similar to the one in East Turkestan.
The technology has some way to go. 

Dust and bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle to track large numbers of people simultaneously. 

Even the best systems can be accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.
A technician who until recently installed and maintained computers for the authorities in East Turkestan said police surveillance centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and inefficient undertaking.
And outside urban centers, police officers often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for speaking to a journalist.
The spending spree on security in East Turkestan has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.
In Kashgar, for example, the county of Yengisar warned this year of a “huge shortfall” from spending on security and said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in previously undeclared “invisible debt.”
“The pressure from ensuring basic spending for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary,” it said.
Still, the region’s leaders told officials this year that they must not wind back spending.
“Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task that takes priority over everything else,” the leadership said in the region’s annual budget report. 

“Use every possible means to find funds so that the high-pressure offensive does not let up.”

China's crimes against humanity

INSIDE WECHAT MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
By Isobel Cockerell

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in East Turkestan, in northwest China. 

The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. 

In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. 

Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. 

At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. 

Her husband was regularly called to the police station. 

The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. 

Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in East Turkestan and waited for the children’s passports.
“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. 

When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. 

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.
She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in East Turkestan was over. 

Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. 

“Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.
Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. 

It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to East Turkestan, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. 

She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. 

“I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. 

“I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
For Uyghurs in East Turkestan, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. 

Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. 

And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. 

It’s just one of the ways Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.
Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. 

The Uyghur separatist flag—a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. 

It’s a banned image in China, representing free East Turkestan.
East Turkestan was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. 

During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. 

The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to East Turkestan.
During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. 

In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. 

Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, East Turkestan, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. 

“I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said. 

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital. 

Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. 

It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown
In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. 

In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. 

It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.
The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.
By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. 

Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” 

Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. 

Most Uyghurs didn’t understand the authorities were watching.
This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. 

But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” 

WeChat was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.
Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left East Turkestan in 2014, just before the crackdown. 

During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. 

They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.
Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the East Turkestan police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. 

“He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,” Mijit said. 

She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. 

If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to East Turkestan for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born
The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. 

Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. 

Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. 

He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. 

The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. 

Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across East Turkestan. 

“All your life will be in the record,” he told her.
In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.” 

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. 

Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in East Turkestan.
After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave East Turkestan for Turkey. 

When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. 

Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. 

“I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. 

She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.
Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.

“It was like a monkey show,” she said. 

“They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”
Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. 

This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of East Turkestan’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. 

“The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. 

“All of them were there to give blood samples.”
Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. 

“They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”
The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. 

In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in East Turkestan province. 

The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. 

The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.
Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. 

“Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.
Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. 

“You feel like you are under water,” he says. 

“You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”
He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. 

“My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”
To transform East Turkestan into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. 

Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.
In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. 

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. 

In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”
For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in East Turkestan is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. 

A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. 

Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags
The government’s efforts to control the people of East Turkestan were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. 

In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”
At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. 

But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”
In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in East Turkestan to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming East Turkestan in its own image.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. 

She now lives in Istanbul. 

According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” 

Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.
Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the East Turkestan capital. 

Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. 

She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.
Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. 

She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp—a blocked app in China—storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.
She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. 

“The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. 

Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. 

“If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,” Jalilova said. 

“You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to East Turkestan.

Escape to Turkey
Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. 

It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.
It follows that the majority of people who have escaped East Turkestan for Turkey in recent years are women. 

Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.
Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from East Turkestan by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. 

In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.
The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in East Turkestan, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.
Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left East Turkestan in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. 

She left her other children and husband in East Turkestan. 

She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.
When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. 

Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. 

She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. 

“I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. 

Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. 

They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.
Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in East Turkestan as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)
On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. 

For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. 

“Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. 

Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.
Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. 

In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. 

Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.
In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in East Turkestan became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. 

“When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”
A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. 

A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. 

A sun emoji—“I am alive.” 

A flower—“I have been released.”
Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. 

Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. 

Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”
On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” 

A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” 

By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve
In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled East Turkestan after police took her DNA. 

They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. 

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”
Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. 

She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.
Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.
Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. 

The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. 

“I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. 

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.
Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.
Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in East Turkestan.
Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. 

This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. 

“There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.
He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. 

“It’s a strong sign the East Turkestan authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.
China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in East Turkestan, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. 

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. 

That followed a statement by East Turkestan governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”
Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.
Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.
On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in East Turkestan—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. 

She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in East Turkestan.
She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. 

An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. 

Tursun was astonished.
On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. 

“Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. 

“I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” 

It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.
The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. 

Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”
Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. 

She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. 

In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in East Turkestan. 

She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. 

The woman agreed. 

Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.
“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. 

She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.
A month later, she got a reply. 

The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.
Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. 

Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. 

She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.
It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. 

She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. 

In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister,
How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.

China's crimes against humanity

CHINA’S UYGHUR CONCENTRATION CENTERS AND THE GHOSTS OF SOVIET AND GERMAN EXTERMINATION CAMPS 

By MICHAEL CLARKE

It is now beyond doubt that China is undertaking a program of mass incarceration of the Uyghur population of its northwestern colony of East Turkestan in a region-wide network of detention and “re-education” centers.
Up to 1.5 million Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslim minorities) are caught up in the largest human rights crisis in the world today. 
Analysis based on Chinese government procurement contracts for construction of these centers and Google Earth satellite imaging has revealed hundreds of large, prison-like facilities that are estimated to hold up to 1 million of East Turkestan’s Turkic Muslims. 
One of the largest concentration camps, Dabancheng, could hold up to 130,000 people, architectural analysis suggests.
Many of these facilities resemble prisons, complete with barbed wire, guard towers and CCTV cameras.
Within them detainees are compelled to repeatedly sing “patriotic” songs praising the benevolence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), study Mandarin, Confucian texts, and Xi Jinping’s “thought.”
Those who resist or do not make satisfactory progress “risk solitary confinement, food deprivation, being forced to stand against a wall for extended periods, being shackled to a wall or bolted by wrists and ankles into a rigid ‘tiger chair,’ and waterboarding and electric shocks.”
This inevitably brings to mind the grim precedents of the Stalinist gulag and Nazi concentration camps. 
There are clear ideological and tactical parallels between those examples and what is occurring in East Turkestan.
China’s “re-education” centers reflect a similar totalitarian drive to not only use repression as a means of control but to mobilize society around an exclusive ideology, which, as Juan Jose Luiz remarks, “goes beyond a particular program or definition of the boundaries of legitimate political action to provide some ultimate meaning, sense of historical purpose and interpretation of social reality.” Under Xi, William Callhan suggests, the ideology centers on the “China dream” of “great national rejuvenation” which is not focused on the Maoist “class struggle” but rather on an “appeal to unity over difference, and the collective over the individual” as a means of achieving the country’s return to great power status.
Crucially, this approach blends aspects of the statism of the Leninist model and traditional Chinese statecraft, which, as James Leibold notes, have both long held a “paternalistic approach that pathologizes deviant thought and behavior, and then tries to forcefully transform them.”
Consider, for instance, the East Turkestan CCP Youth League official who asserted that the re-education centers are necessary to “cleanse the virus [of extremism] from their brain” and to help them “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Tactically, there are also parallels between the manner in which Beijing has sought to justify its actions to domestic and international audiences, and those of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. 
As both of those totalitarian governments did, Xi’s China has embarked on a multiphase propaganda strategy to manage the potential fallout from its “re-education” efforts: secrecy and outright denial giving way to justificatory counter-narratives, propaganda intended for domestic consumption, and “tours” of camps for select foreign observers.
However, crucial differences suggest a different model of state control of society in China.
This model is defined on the one hand by the idea that political and social “deviancy” should be proactively transformed rather than excluded, and on the other hand by the innovative use of surveillance and monitoring technologies that paradoxically have allowed more international scrutiny. Thus it is to be hoped that, unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, China will not succeed in obscuring its systematic incarceration and destruction of excluded populations.

From denial to justification
China has employed a strategy of outright denial about the "re-education" centers, followed by counter-narratives.
This approach is similar to those deployed by Stalin to defend the gulag labor camp system and by Hitler to defend the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
The CCP has suggested that reports of mass “re-education” are the product of either ignorance or malicious “misinformation.”
Thus the state-run China Daily editorialized in August 2018 that “foreign media” had “misinterpreted or even exaggerated the security measures” China had implemented in East Turkestan.
These “false stories,” the article alleged, were being spread by those bent on “splitting the region from China and turning it into an independent country.”
Senior officials echoed such denials before international forums.
Shortly after the China Daily editorial was published, Hu Lianhe, a senior member of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, told the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination point-blank that “there is no such thing as re-education centers” in East Turkestan.
However, just over a month later Chinese officials and media changed their tune to deploy a narrative that framed the facilities as a necessary and benevolent measure to assist Uyghurs from succumbing to the scourge of “extremism.” 
The party’s discourse on “extremism,” as Jerome Doyon noted in War on the Rocks, “aims to legitimize mobilizing the population for a massive social transformation of the region” in the service of “a preventive approach to terrorism” that targets Uyghur identity.
In October 2018, the chairman of the East Turkestan government, Shohrat Zakir, told the state-run news agency Xinhua that China was simply pursuing an approach to counter-terrorism “according to their own conditions.”
In the first, if circuitous, admission of the existence of the “re-education” centers, Zakir stated that enduring terrorist attacks in East Turkestan required that authorities not only “strictly” push back against extremism but also address “the root cause of terrorism” by “educating those who committed petty crimes” so as to “prevent them from becoming victims of terrorism and extremism.”
In 1931, as Stalin embarked on his mass collectivization campaign, Maya Vinokour notes: “Russian papers began calling reports of forced labor ‘filthy slander’ concocted by an ‘anti-Soviet front’” before soon thereafter admitting forced labor was happening.
Vyachslav Molotov, one of Stalin’s key lieutenants, stated publicly in March 1931 that forced labor “was good for criminals, for it accustoms them to labor and makes them useful members of society.” 
Just as China has attempted to frame the “re-education” camps as positive and necessary, Soviet authorities expended great propaganda efforts to frame the gulag as a transformative “reforging” of former “class enemies” into ideologically committed Soviet citizens.
After Hitler’s ascent to chancellorship in 1933, his regime almost immediately established the first concentration camps for around 150,000 people — mostly those defined by the regime as irreconcilable political opponents, such as communists and social democrats.
Similar to Stalin’s strategy, these camps“were sold to the German people as reformatory establishments rather like penitentiaries for offending adolescents in 1950s America, where the public were told fresh air, exercise and skills training were on offer to discipline social deviants who could then be returned to the society.”

Painting a rosy picture: The role of propaganda
Both the Soviets and the Nazis produced prominent tracts of propaganda in both print and film to justify the gulags and the concentration camps.
Most notable in the Soviet case was the 1933 History of the Construction of the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal — a 600-page volume collectively written by 120 Soviet writers and artists under the supervision of Maxim Gorky, then the Soviet Union’s most famous writer.
This tome exulted in the fact that construction of the 227-kilometer canal used the forced labor of some 150,000 gulag inmates.
It was also accompanied by a film capturing Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Sergei Kirov undertaking a celebratory cruise on its official opening in July 1933.
Film was an even more important medium of propaganda for the Nazis.
During World War II, the regime produced the infamous film Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area — a supposedly “objective” depiction (hence the subtitle of “documentary”) of life in a Jewish concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The film included scenes of inmates training in baking, sewing and carpentry, watching a camp orchestra, and playing a soccer match. 
The film was carefully scripted and stage-managed and was intended for foreign audiences — for instance, it was screened for a delegation of the International Red Cross in April 1945.
China too has produced such stage-managed visual propaganda on its re-education camps. 
On the same day as Zakir’s interview with Xinhua, China Central Television (CCTV) aired a 15-minute story detailing interviews with “cadets” in the Khotan “Vocational Skills Education and Training Center” in southern East Turkestan.
Echoing Theresienstadt, the story depicts the center as an altruistic CCP endeavor to provide “education” through training in the Mandarin language and the Chinese legal code, along with “vocational skills” such as cosmetology, carpet weaving, sewing, baking, and carpentry. 
A young Uyghur woman interviewed on camera said, “If I didn’t come here, I can’t imagine the consequences. Maybe I would have followed those religious extremists on the criminal path.
The party and the government discovered me in time and saved me.”
The supposedly benevolent nature of such assistance is somewhat belied by one scene in the film — showing “cadets” taking Mandarin classes — that reveals the “classroom” is under constant surveillance with cameras clearly visible on the walls and microphones hanging from the ceiling.

China’s gulag ‘tourism’
The final plank in China’s propaganda effort is what amounts to Potemkin tours of the East Turkestan camps for foreign observers.
This, too, has clear Soviet precedents. 
Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, sponsored what historian Jeffrey Hardy has dubbed “gulag tourism” whereby Soviet authorities carefully managed visits for foreign delegations to major penal institutions throughout the 1950s.
This was an attempt to both negate the predominant Western narrative of the gulag as a slave labor system and demonstrate the positive social benefits of the system.
China’s preparations for its own version of “gulag tourism” have been characterized by both secrecy and deception. 
As authorities anticipated visits of international observers late last year, Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service reported that detainees had been required to sign “confidentiality agreements” to ensure that they did not divulge details of their experiences, while obvious manifestations of security and surveillance — such as barbed wire and heavily-armed police — were either removed or scaled back. 
Moreover, according to Bitter Winter, local authorities have been ordered to compile more detailed information on the seriousness of individual detainees’ “crimes” to determine which detainees could be transferred “to facilities that are less obviously prison-like, appearing more like low-cost housing.”
With such preparations made, Beijing permitted a tour of the facilities by some diplomats and international media.
From Jan. 3 to 5 officials chaperoned diplomats from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Thailand and reporters from Kazakhstan’s state-run agency, Kazinform, Sputnik News, Associated Press of Pakistan, and Indonesia’s national news agency Antara to facilities in Urumqi, Kashgar, and Khotan.
The diplomats and journalists were told an identical narrative as the one detailed above: The centers were implemented to “assist those affected by extremism” by provision of education in Mandarin, Chinese laws, and “vocational skills.”
Three European Union officials toured a number of facilities the following week.
Beijing obviously hoped its managed tours of “re-education” camps would deflect international criticism.
But it appears the efforts have not achieved their objective.
Neither set of visitors seems to have been deceived by the Potemkin tours. 
A report published by Kazinform, for example, concludes by dryly noting the similarities in testimony provided by “trainees” and that “throughout the press tour in all cities and locations, interviews were taken in the mandatory presence of Chinese authorities.”
Pakistan’s response was a notable exception (Pakistan is a long-term ally of China).
Islamabad’s charge d’affaires in Beijing, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, asserted that “I did not see any sign of cultural repression” and during her visit to three facilities she “observed the students to be in good physical health” while “living facilities are fairly modern and comfortable.”
The European Union delegation, by contrast, noted that while “the sites that were visited were carefully selected by the authorities to support China’s official narrative,” they judged what they observed to be “consistent” with what international media, academics, and nongovernmental organizations have documented over the past two years — i.e., that “major and systematic human rights violations” are in fact occurring in East Turkestan.
For both Stalin and Hitler, domestically-oriented propaganda was arguably more important than staving off international criticism, as the former contributed to regime legitimacy and served as a means of mobilization of support. 
In the Soviet case, as Steven Barnes demonstrates, the gulag played a central role in the “construction of socialist society and the new Soviet person” by emphasizing key ideological tropes including struggle as the motivating force of history, labor as the defining feature of humanity, and the redeemability of class enemies.
In the Chinese context, much of the CCP’s propaganda plays directly to what Brandon Barbour and Reece Jones describe as a “discourse of danger” erected around the Uyghur since 9/11.
Through this narrative, state media “seek to de-humanise the Uyghur, creating the perception that the Uyghur identity category is filled with a backward people” susceptible to “extremism.” 
In this way, Beijing implies that disorder and violence would ensue if it didn’t forcefully penetrate East Turkestan with the state’s security and surveillance capabilities.
Like their Soviet precedents, however, official statements on the “re-education” centers also emphasize their objective of redeeming actual or potential extremists.
The March 2019 white paper, “The Fight against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in East Turkestan” released by China’s State Council, asserts that while “a few leaders and core members of violent and terrorist gangs who have committed heinous crimes or are inveterate offenders will be severely punished in accordance with the law,” those “who have committed minor crimes under the influence of religious extremism will be educated, rehabilitated and protected through vocational training, through the learning of standard Chinese language and labor skills, and acquiring knowledge of the law.”
In this manner such individuals will “rid themselves of terrorist influence, the extremist mindset, and outmoded cultural practices.”
This is not simply about preventing attacks.
It’s also a means of demonstrating to the region’s Han population that the state will ensure “security” and “stability.”
“People feel less uncomfortable,” Tom Cliff argues, “when they are told that the police on the streets are there to protect them from dangerous ‘others’, rather than to protect the state from them or other Han.”

Mass repression and the constraints of propaganda in the 21st century
Skeptics of the comparison between China’s current practices and those of the Soviet and Nazi regimes might argue that, to date, there has been no evidence of physical elimination of those detained, and that the state remains committed to integrating Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslims) into Chinese society.
These two counter-arguments do not invalidate the comparison, however.
The purpose of the “re-education” centers and the discourse that has developed around them clearly overlap with both the Soviet and Nazi precedents. 
The purpose of the centers echoes the Soviet focus on the gulag’s potential to “reforge” enemies through labor, married with the Nazis’ racialized conception of political and social deviancy in determining who should be “re-educated.”
The counter-narratives that Beijing has deployed to combat international criticism also shed further light on the three regimes’ thinking about social control.
First, these narratives play to what have become the defining characteristics of the state’s discourse with respect to the Uyghurs and East Turkestan: that a deviant religious extremism is inherent to Uyghur identity. 
It can only be overcome through “education” and assimilation into prevailing Chinese culture.
Here, there’s a crucial contrast to be drawn with Stalin’s gulag and Hitler’s concentration camps.
As Richard Overy notes, these were products of binary ideologies of belonging and exclusion.
They were conceived of as instruments of “ideological warfare” aimed at the “redemptive destruction of the enemy.” 
For Beijing, however, the Uyghur (and other Turkic Muslim minorities) are still integral parts of the Chinese nation (zhonghua minzu).
The re-education endeavor, James Leibold argues, emerges as a means of standardizing behavior to achieve a cohesive, state-sanctioned national identity.
Unlike the Soviet and Nazi precedents, Beijing’s camps appear to be designed to facilitate the destruction of Uyghur culture rather than physical destruction of individuals.
This, of course, is cold comfort to the Uyghur people.
Second, China’s propaganda offensive, largely externally-oriented, demonstrates clear parallels with Soviet and Nazi attempts to deflect international criticism by presenting misleading and falsified accounts of the detention facilities. 
But here, too, there is an important difference: Beijing has not succeeded in deceiving the international community. 
Indeed, it is undertaking this propaganda effort in an environment in which, paradoxically, innovations in surveillance and data collection technologies enhance the state’s capacity to monitor and control individuals while also helping reveal it to the outside world.
China has sought to ensure the “comprehensive supervision” of East Turkestan with the “Skynet” electronic surveillance system in major urban areas; GPS trackers in motor vehicles; facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations, and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material.
Yet, the Chinese state’s own internet records of contract bids for construction of detention facilities, advertisements recruiting new public security personnel to man them, and open-source satellite imagery have enabled international media and researchers to expose the full scope of Beijing’s systematic repression. 
Adrian Zenz, for instance, has analyzed official advertisements for security personnel to staff the camps and construction bids and tender notices for the construction of the centers online.
University of British Columbia student Shawn Zhang has similarly used information gleaned from Baidu (China’s version of Google) searches about the location of centers to plug into Google Earth to obtain satellite imagery.
The continued vigilance of such external observers can ensure that China does not follow the worst precedents of the 20th century.
Of even greater significance, however, may be the model of social control that has been implemented in East Turkestan.
The fusion of the Chinese state’s technological innovation with its longstanding desire to “transform” individuals or groups who don’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy augurs a “digital totalitarianism” defined by “a static model of centralized, one-way observation and surveillance.”
The “comprehensive supervision” implemented in East Turkestan, as Darren Byler recently detailed, not only enables the state to identify those it deems in need of “re-education” but also makes sure that those that remain outside are not only transparent citizens seen by the state but fixed in place and inherently controllable.
This model of social control suggests a significant evolution in the nature of the party-state.
The CCP under Xi Jinping, as Frank Pieke has argued, is now not simply a traditional Leninist state that has adopted technological innovations as a means of augmenting its hold on power.
It is rather a regime that has developed an innovative set of “governmental technologies” that proactively seeks to mold and direct the behavior of citizens.