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.

Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag

Turning the desert into concentration camps

China is incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Muslims in concentration camps that are rising from the desert sands in East Turkestan. A forensic analysis of satellite images of 39 of these facilities shows they are expanding at a rapid rate.
By Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov

A United Nations panel has accused China of turning its far-flung western colony of East Turkestan “into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights zone’.” It estimates that there could be as many as one million Muslims who have been detained there.
Former detainees describe being tortured during interrogation, living in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of Communist Party indoctrination that drove some people to suicide. 

Most of those who have been rounded up by the security forces are Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that numbers some 10 million. 

Muslims from other ethnic groups, including Kazakhs, have also been detained.
China rejects the allegations that it has locked up large numbers of Muslims in re-education camps. The facilities, it says, are vocational training centers that emphasize “rehabilitation and redemption” and are part of its efforts to combat "terrorism" and religious extremism.
The crackdown includes tight control over information and access to the region. 

East Turkestan is now the most heavily policed area in the world.

This follows the launching of a “people’s war on terror” in 2014 after a series of violent attacks in East Turkestan and other parts of China that authorities blamed on religious extremists.

While China says the Uighur camps are "vocational training" centers, they are heavily guarded. Researchers have resorted to using satellite imagery to view and track the expansion of these facilities.
Reuters worked with Earthrise Media, a non-profit group that analyzes satellite imagery, to plot the construction and expansion of 39 of these camps, which were initially identified using publicly available documents such as construction tenders. 

The building-by-building review of these facilities revealed that the footprint of the built-up area almost tripled in size in the 17 months between April 2017 and August 2018. 

Collectively, the built-up parts in these 39 facilities now cover an area roughly the size of 140 soccer fields.
The facility at Turpan can be seen at the foot of the Tianshan mountains in East Turkestan. 

A tender notice revealed that officials there wanted to be able to listen in to telephone calls made by "trainees" at the camp.
Construction notices published on local government websites, including tenders and procurement requests, have provided clues about the location and features of many of the camps. 

The technical specifications in these documents include references to guardhouses, surveillance systems that leave “no blind spots,” automatic weapons and their safe storage.
A tender issued for the center at Turpan, for instance, canvassed bids for a telecommunications “control system,” saying the facility was in “urgent need to know in real time” the content of trainees’ telephone conversations so that they could be forcibly interrupted.
Having identified 80 detention facilities using construction notices, Reuters focused its analysis on 39 that were clearly identifiable from satellite imagery. 

Earthrise then scrutinized hundreds of satellite images spanning a two-year period.
“I was immediately struck by how many camps there were, how large, and how quickly they are growing. In a matter of months they are throwing up five-story buildings, longer than football fields, lined up in rows in the desert,” said Edward Boyda, co-founder of Earthrise. 

“The construction and arrangement of buildings is very similar from site to site, in the new sites especially, which means there is a method behind it.”
China’s State Council Information Office, foreign ministry and the East Turkestan government did not respond to questions from Reuters.

Uighurs have bristled at what they say are harsh restrictions on their culture and religion. 

They have faced periodic crackdowns, which intensified after riots in the regional capital in Urumqi in 2009 killed nearly 200 people.
Bombings in East Turkestan and attacks allegedly carried out by Uighur separatists, including a mass stabbing in the city of Kunming in China’s southwest in 2014 that killed 31 people, led to further restrictions. 

In recent years, under Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan and a loyalist of Xi Jinping, measures against Uighurs have included a ban on “abnormal” beards for men and restrictions on religious pilgrimages to Mecca.
Chen has also overseen the installation of a pervasive, technology-enhanced surveillance apparatus across East Turkestan. 

Tens of thousands of security personnel have been recruited to staff police stations and checkpoints. Security screening, including scanners equipped with facial recognition cameras, has been installed in public places such as mosques, hotels and transportation hubs.
Reuters did not receive a response to questions sent to Chen via the East Turkestan government.
Reuters visited the locations of seven of the facilities identified as detention camps from construction documents and satellite photos. 

All had imposing perimeter walls, guard watchtowers and armed guards at the entrances. 

Signs at two of the facilities identified them as "vocational training" centers. 

When reporters approached the compounds, police pulled them over and told them to leave.


Rapid expansion
The full scale of the camp network is likely vast. 

Many smaller buildings like schools, hospitals and police stations were repurposed to hold Muslims, according to residents in East Turkestan and construction and procurement documents. 

Two of the smaller camps visited by Reuters were previously a factory and a Communist Party school.
Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist who has tracked the expansion of the camps, estimates there could be as many as 1,200 – at least one for every county and township in East Turkestan. 

There is limited information on the costs of construction, but tenders for one facility outside the city of Kashgar list a combined budget of $45.6 million.
The vast majority of facilities have been built since early 2017, says Shawn Zhang, a law student based in Canada who has used government documents and open-source satellite imagery to identify dozens of camps. 

Recently, Zhang said, the Chinese government has stopped publishing tender notices and has been deleting old ones from the internet.
The construction of new facilities and expansion of existing ones largely began around April 2017. That was the month Beijing enforced new anti-extremism regulations in East Turkestan, including prohibitions on the wearing of veils in public places and the stopping of children from attending “patriotic education classes.”

Foreign reporters who arrive in East Turkestan are closely followed by Chinese security forces. Reuters reporters who visited 10 different cities in the region this year were under surveillance from the moment they got off the plane. 

They were followed in their car, on foot and on trains.
On several occasions, police threw up temporary roadblocks to block the reporters from reaching the camps.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions from Reuters about these restrictions.

A Chinese police officer stops reporters at a roadblock near what is officially called a "vocational training center" in Ghulja, a city in the northwest of East Turkestan.
A remote place with snow-capped mountains and sprawling wind farms, the district of Dabancheng is home to one of the largest camps.
It is one of many that have been built from scratch. 

It is surrounded by a barbed wire fence and high perimeter wall. 

A sign at the main entrance reads: “Urumqi Vocational Education Training Center.”

A guard watchtower can be seen above the perimeter fence at Dabancheng.
Satellite images reveal that before April last year, the site was a brown expanse of desert without a single building. 

Since then, a sprawling complex has risen from the sand.
A close-up look at the construction


Workers walk along the perimeter fence at Dabancheng (left). Signs at the entrance to the camp remind workers about building safety requirements.

In September, a narrow road running along the facility was filled with construction vehicles and workers, indicating that building was still underway at Dabancheng. 

Satellite photos from August reveal the scale of the construction at the camp.


Intense indoctrination
Interviews with eight former detainees, all of whom are now outside China, reveal a picture of harsh extrajudicial detention that is at odds with Beijing’s claim that it is providing vocational skills at training centers to help the local population.
The former detainees said they were shackled to chairs for days during interrogation and deprived of sleep. 

They described living in prison-like conditions. 

Their every move, including visits to the toilet, was monitored by cameras and microphones.

One female detainee said her cell was so crowded that inmates took turns to sit and rest while others stood.
From early morning to night, the detainees said they were subjected to mind-numbing political indoctrination. 

This included reciting Chinese laws and Communist Party policies, as well as singing the national anthem and other traditional Red songs. 

Those who failed to correctly memorize the lines of Communist Party dictums were denied food.

Detainees were forced to renounce their religion, engage in self-criticism sessions and report on fellow inmates, relatives and neighbors.
Of the eight former detainees interviewed by Reuters, four were Uighurs and four were ethnic Kazakhs. 

Some requested anonymity, in most cases because they said they feared repercussions for family members who remained in China.

Kairat Samarkan said he was detained late last year when he returned to his hometown of Altay, in the north of East Turkestan, to sell his home. 

Samarkan, a 30-year-old ethnic Kazakh who was born in China, had moved to Kazakhstan in 2009.
After about three months of intense indoctrination sessions at the camp where he was held, Samarkan said he became “obsessed with suicide. I had thought for a long time about how to do it,” he said. One day, he tried: He ran into a wall head first. 

When he regained consciousness, he was in the camp hospital. 

He was released in February this year and returned to Kazakhstan the next month.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions about the accounts given by former detainees.


China's explanation
Many of the construction tenders issued last year refer to “re-education” facilities. 

But China, which for months denied their existence, now calls them "vocational training centers".
“Through vocational training, most trainees have been able to reflect on their mistakes and see clearly the essence and harm of terrorism and religious extremism,” Shohrat Zakir, the East Turkestan governor, said in remarks to the state-run Xinhua news agency in October. 

“They have also been able to better tell right from wrong and resist the infiltration of extremist thought.”
In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of "vocational training". 

“If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.

The criminals who run East Turkestan
Criticism of China’s policies in East Turkestan has been growing. 

In late August, a bipartisan group of 17 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin urging them to impose sanctions on seven senior Chinese officials for their role in the “ongoing human rights crisis” in East Turkestan. 

At the top of the list was Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan, who made his name in Tibet. 

There, Chen implemented a sustained crackdown on the local population.


Chen Quanguo


Shohrat Zakir


Hu Lianhe


Sun Jinlong


Peng Jiarui


Shewket Imin


Zhu Hailun

Earlier this year, one of the U.S. lawmakers who signed the letter urging sanctions, Senator Marco Rubio, described what was happening to Muslims in East Turkestan as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
In August, a United Nations human rights panel said that Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”


Empty mosques
In Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis town in East Turkestan’s southern Uighur heartland, locals say they live in fear. 

As security forces have blanketed the region and high-tech surveillance has become pervasive, there have been waves of mass detentions of Muslims in places like Kashgar.
The arrests peaked last year as police convoys with sirens blaring took people away, their heads covered in black hoods. 

In Kashgar, the locals say that many of those detained have not yet returned. 

On the streets, there are few young men to be seen.
“You can go to a Uighur and slap him in the face and he won’t dare retaliate,” said one Han Chinese local, who grew up with Uighurs in Kashgar and saw many of his friends taken away. 

“It’s going to be quiet for another one or two years, but then what? The greater the pressure, the fiercer the backlash.”


An elderly man (left) sits in the Old Town of Kashgar. A Chinese flag (right) flutters next to the Id Kah Mosque in the Old Town.

Mosques across East Turkestan are now adorned with Chinese flags and banners exhorting people to “Love the Party, Love the Country.” 

During Friday prayers, the mosques are almost empty.
The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. 

That policy is reflected in other ways on the ground – such as the dramatic transformation of the Old Town section of Kashgar, once considered one of the best-preserved sites of traditional Islamic and Central Asian architecture in the region.
The local authorities have long espoused the need to bulldoze and modernize large swathes of the mud-brick maze of courtyard homes in the Old Town, citing building-safety concerns. 

Now, large sections of the quarter have been vacated and shut for reconstruction. 

Already, there are bars and restaurants springing up that offer food designed to appeal to Han tourists visiting from other parts of the country.
One mosque has been transformed into a trendy hookah lounge and bar serving shisha tobacco and alcohol. 

The interior of the “Dream of Kashgar 2018” has been renovated and freshly painted, except for the ceiling, where the original wood carvings and tapestries have been preserved.

A waitress carries drinks at a bar located in what was once a mosque in the Old Town of Kashgar.

A food market in Kashgar’s Old Town is now filled with Han Chinese tourists and adorned with Chinese flags.

A Uighur woman walks past a giant screen broadcasting Communist Party messages and images of Xi Jinping in the main square in Kashgar.

When Kairat Samarkan returned to his village in Altay prefecture in February, he noticed many changes. 

“Men were missing from almost every household in my village,” he said.
Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. 

They were “burned,” the locals told him.
“These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”

Methodology
For each of the 39 facilities, cloud-free, high-resolution satellite images of the scene were gathered from multiple sources. The dates of the satellite images from which data was derived vary for each camp. The first image of each camp that was analyzed was captured somewhere between Jan. 7, 2016 and April 9, 2017. The most recent image of each camp was captured between May 29, 2017 and Sep. 23, 2018, with the majority of these images being captured in August and September this year. The resolution of the satellite images makes wire fences and guard towers visible; perimeter walls and other features can also be traced.

Tech Quisling

China just laid out how it wants Google to help it persecute its Muslim minority

• Chinese authorities recently laid out the kind of speech suppression that Google will have to facilitate to launch its new product in China.
• They passed new laws on how to crack down on its Uighur ethnic minority, which includes heavy surveillance, policing, and censorship from tech companies.
• Google has received a lot of backlash from rights activists and the Trump administration for its nefarious China plans.

By Alexandra Ma
Google's secretive plans to launch a censored search engine in China are still bubbling away. Here, a Google sign is seen during a conference in Shanghai in August 2018.

Chinese authorities recently laid out the kind of speech suppression that Google will likely have to facilitate for the country's persecuted Muslim ethnic minority to launch its new product in China.
Authorities in East Turkestan, a colony in western China, on Tuesday, passed new local laws demonstrating how officials should root out banned speech to fight so-called religious extremists.
Around 11 million Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority, live in East Turkestan, and are subject to some of the most intrusive surveillance measures in the world, which include being monitored by 40,000 facial recognition cameras across the region, and having their DNA samples and blood types recorded.
Tuesday's laws made clear that authorities want tech companies to play their part in the surveillance, policing, and silencing of the Uighurs. 

Beijing justifies its crackdown in East Turkestan as a counterterrorism measure, though it's denied UN inspectors access to the region.
Google could be complicit in this persecution if its secretive plans to launch a censored search engine — codenamed "Project Dragonfly" — become a reality.Uighurs in East Turkestan are subject to some of the most intrusive surveillance measures in teh world. Here, Muslim Uighur women on a cellphone in Kashgar, in April 2002.

Article 28 of the new laws orders telecommunications operators to "put in place monitoring systems and technological prevention measures for audio, messages, and communication records" that may have "extremifying information."
Forms of "extremification," as laid out in the laws, are vague. 

They include "interfering" with people's ability to interact with people of other ethnicities or faiths, and "rejecting or refusing public goods and services."
It's not entirely clear what they mean, but authorities have detained Uighurs in the past for bizarre reasons like setting their watch to two hours after Beijing time and growing a beard.
According to the laws, when telecommunications companies find content unsatisfactory to the Chinese state, they will also be ordered to "stop its transmission, delete the relevant information, keep evidence, and promptly report the case" to Chinese authorities.
The companies will also have to "assist the public security organs in conducting a lawful disposition," which means giving up users' personal information — such as their addresses — so Chinese law enforcement can find them.

Google complicit if it enters China
Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, which would block out websites and search terms unsavory to the ruling Communist Party — such as human rights, democracy, and religion, The Intercept reported this August, citing leaked documents.
An early prototype of the search engine also showed that Google would link Android users' searches to their personal phone numbers. 

This means that individual users could have their online activity easily monitored, and be at risk of detention if Google passed on the data to the Chinese government.Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is building a dangerously intrusive police state in China.
Chinese tech giants have always passed on user data and the contents of private conversations to Chinese law-enforcement in the past. 

Earlier this year, China's Ministry of Public Security announced that law-enforcement officers could obtain and use private conversations on WeChat, the popular messaging app, in legal proceedings.
Shortly after Google's China plans were made public, 14 human rights organizations wrote a public letter to Google CEO that said: "Google risks becoming complicit in the Chinese government's repression of freedom of speech and other human rights in China."
US Vice President Mike Pence last week slammed Google's China plans, saying: "Google should immediately end development of the 'Dragonfly' app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers."This mural in Yarkland, East Turkestan, photographed in September 2012, says: "Stability is a blessing, instability is a calamity."

Tech companies already play a huge part in China's police state

Earlier this year Yuan Yang, the Financial Times' tech correspondent in Beijing, reported that state officials had accessed her private messages on WeChat without her knowledge or permission. 

A police officer randomly cited messages she had posted in a private chat, she said.
Similarly, Chinese police visited the mother of Shawn Zhang, a law student in Canada, in China after Zhang criticized Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on social media.
"I also didn't expect police to respond so quickly. It suggests my social media account is under their close monitoring. They will read everything I say," Zhang told Business Insider earlier this year.Ethnic Uighur men in a tea house in Kashgar, East Turkestan, in July 2017.

Chinese authorities have also forced many Uighurs to download an app that scans photos, videos, audio files, ebooks, and other documents.
The app, named Jingwang ("cleansing the web" in Mandarin Chinese), extracts information including the phone number and model, and scours through its files, the US government-funded Open Technology Fund reported.
The screenshots below show what the app looks like. 

The grab on the left shows Jingwang prompting users to delete "dangerous content" on their phone, while the one on the right shows the app's access.Jingwang Weishi

The type of regime Google is getting into bed with
Rights groups have accused China of imprisoning up to 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps, where people are shackled to chairs, beaten up, and forced to sing patriotic songs in order to get food.
The new East Turkestan laws formalized the use of those camps despite Beijing's previous claims that they did not exist.
China is also creating a global registry of the Uighur diaspora, even if they are citizens of other countries. 

Multiple Uighurs living overseas have reported threats made directly to them or their family members in China if they did not give up personal data such as license plate numbers and bank details.
If Google sets up a base in China, it won't just be party to Uighur abuses, either. 

China has a track record of publicly disappearing its critics, placing innocent family members under house arrest, and barging into people's homes to interrupt their phone calls.

China's crimes against humanity

Why did China’s mass concentration camps go unnoticed for so long?
By DOUG SAUNDERS

How, in the most populated country, do you make a million people disappear? 

At first it sounds old-fashioned: You spend billions building a vast archipelago of high-security concentration camps across the mountainous far-western region of East Turkestan, you lock down the entire region, you seize hundreds of thousands of people from their families, for no significant reason other than their ethnicity, and you put them in coveralls, sometimes in chains, and shut them into those institutions, where they are forced to submit to authority.
The next question is more disturbing: How, in an ultraconnected country, do you keep the rest of the world from noticing and raising alarm?
For a surprisingly long time, Beijing succeeded. 

In May, 2014, Chinese authorities began their “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism,” aimed at pacifying the ethnically Turkic (Uyghur) population of East Turkestan. 

Initially, this involved arresting thousands on suspicion of Islamic "terrorism" or separatism.
In late 2016 or early 2017, the region opened a much larger network of “political re-education” camps, which have no basis in Chinese law and do not follow due process, and filled them with hundreds of thousands of people who were not legally accused of anything.
In recent months, the world at last raised alarm. 

Last month, the United Nations, after confirming the population of these camps, called on China to close them. 

Earlier this year, diplomats from Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland formally asked China to discuss the camps. 

Beijing refused.
Yet it was not governments that exposed those camps.

In this Nov. 4, 2017 photo, residents walk past a statue showing Mao Zedong near a square in Kashgar, in China's East Turkestan colony.

Journalists in Beijing tell me they began to hear alarming but unsourced reports starting in 2014, emerging from the Uyghur-language media outside China such as Radio Free Asia and from diplomats reading reports from their information networks, that something was happening in East Turkestan beyond the usual heavy-handed policing and mass arrests. 

By early 2017, there were whispers of large-scale concentration camps.
A few journalists risked their safety by making all-but-forbidden trips to East Turkestan. 

News of the scope of the camps, and the fact that this was now a mass ethnic roundup, was first broken in the summer of 2017 by my colleague Nathan VanderKlippe (who was detained by Chinese authorities), then by Megha Rajagopalan of Buzzfeed (who was expelled from China), by Josh Chin at The Wall Street Journal, by Gary Shih at Associated Press, Emily Rauhala at The Washington Post and Ben Dooley at Agence France-Presse.
They were aided by researchers who drew on data emerging from within China. 

Adrian Zenz, a German scholar, obtained work-tender contracts that revealed the size and purpose of the camps, and the billions being spent on them. 

Shawn Zhang, a University of British Columbia law student, combined Dr. Zenz’s documents with satellite images to reveal the precise location, rapid growth and widespread nature of the camp network.
“It took a lot of meticulous research – figuring out what’s going on took a combination of skills” from a wide range of organizations, said Maya Wang, the Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch who researched and authored, with Sophie Richardson, a major new report on the mass ethnic persecution campaign in East Turkestan.
How did it take more than a year, after the reality of the camps had been confirmed, before China faced serious criticism? 

On one hand, it showed just how much Beijing is able to silence its citizens, in spite of – and sometimes because of – the world’s most sophisticated social-media networks. 

Anyone in China attempting to type the words for East Turkestan, Uyghurs or re-education camps literally found their words electronically erased.
But China used another trick: Its authorities spoke a language of counterterrorism and cultural fear used by many Western political parties and leaders today.
A mass ethnic roundup may not be the best way, but “maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” Li Xiaojun, a spokesman for the Chinese government’s State Council Information Office, told reporters outside a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva this month. 

“Look at Belgium, look at Paris, look at some other European countries.”
The notion that terrorism is rooted not in criminal organizations and pathologies, but in entire ethnic groups and religions, is the motivating idea of the European extreme right, as it has been since the 1930s – the last time those parties were able to carry out mass ethnic roundups. 

There is no truth to the notion that attacks on ethnic groups constitute a form of "terrorism" prevention (quite the opposite, in fact.) 

But for some, that assertion was enough to shut their eyes on what was happening in western China.

Chinazism: The Next Holocaust

China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No End in Sight

1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come.
BY RIAN THUM

Local police patrol a village in Hotan prefecture, in China's East Turkestan colony, on Feb. 17. The Uighur area has become one of the most terrorized places in the world.
Last summer, online links between China’s East Turkestan colony and the rest of the world began to go dark.
Uighurs, who make up the largest ethnic group in East Turkestan, started cutting friends and family members abroad from their contacts on WeChat, the dominant online communication platform in China.
Many asked their family members not to call them by phone.
One family I spoke to smuggled a final communication through the chat function integrated into a video game.
In 2009, the government had shut down the internet entirely for almost a year, but this was something different.
Entire minority groups were cutting themselves off from the outside world, one contact deletion at a time.
As Uighurs were disappearing from cross-border conversations, distinctive new building complexes began cropping up throughout the region: large construction projects surrounded by double fences and guard towers, all clearly visible on satellite imagery. 
Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity.
As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. 
Contact with the outside world is one of those signs of purported untrustworthiness.

Given the dark consequences for communication with foreigners, it is surprising how much those of us outside of China have been able to discover about the mass-internment program for minorities in East Turkestan.
Based in part on leaks by an unusually forthcoming police official in Kashgar (now himself incommunicado), scholars have estimated that about 5 to 10 percent of the adult Uighur population has been interned without criminal charge. 
In one township, police told reporters from Radio Free Asia that they were expected to send 40 percent of the population, including nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 50, to the internment system.
For international audiences, the Chinese state has denied the existence of what have come to be known as “re-education camps,” but local officials continue to build new compounds, and openly call for construction contracts online, providing details on everything from camp sizes (up to 883,000 square feet) to the types of materials (“bomb-proof surfaces”) required. 
A few internees have been released for one reason or another and shared their stories of camp life with reporters, with conditions ranging from uncomfortable to literally torturous.
But questions remain, including the crucial matters of what the internment network is designed to do and what is in store for its victims.
The range of interpretations is wide.
Local media in East Turkestan present the camps as short-term rehabilitation facilities.

The Next HolocaustUighurs with family members and friends now gone for six months and more fear much worse.
And the appearance of a recruitment notice for 50 “stouthearted” guards at a crematorium outside of Urumqi, the regional capital, has fed fears that the Chinese government is preparing for mass killing.
While the intent behind policy choices is never fully knowable, particularly in an opaque state like China, the last year has produced leaked data, online traces, and eyewitness reports that provide clues about the motives of decision-makers in East Turkestan.
Viewed in the context of the long history of resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan and the Chinese attempts to eliminate it, some motives become clear.
Since the Qing dynasty’s conquest of the region in 1759, China-based states have confronted the difficulties of outsider rule in the region they dubbed Xinjiang—the “new frontier”—including rebellions in 1864, 1933, and 1945 that led to the establishment of short-lived independent states.
At the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, only 6 percent of East Turkestan’s population was Han Chinese, and the Chinese authorities tended to view the indigenous inhabitants, particularly the majority Uighur ethnic group, with condescension and suspicion.
By 1982, pro-settler policies had increased the proportion of ethnic Chinese in East Turkestan to 40 percent, but authorities continued to worry about indigenous resistance as a threat to their state’s territorial aspirations.
Even after two centuries of China-based rule, the indigenous inhabitants of East Turkestan had more in common culturally with Central Asia and the Middle East than with China, and resistance, both peaceful and violent, was common.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made sense of this resistance in different ways over the years.
In the 1990s, it was mostly seen as ethno-nationalist “separatism” fueled by pan-Turkic ideology. After 2001, when the PRC aligned itself with the U.S. “global war on terror,” authorities began to speak more often of “terrorism” supposedly bred by religious “extremism,” borrowing heavily from Islamophobic discourses in the West. 
What the two approaches share is an assumption that belief systems and ideas are what cause people to resist, not restrictive cultural policies, economics, or relative status within society, and certainly not unfair treatment by a colonizing state.
Until recently, official explanations for acts of resistance dealt with the unsettling prospect of discontent by insisting that only a handful of bad apples held beliefs opposed to CCP rule.
Authorities in East Turkestan invested their energy in controlling those “evil forces” through security measures.
This approach peaked in the response to the deadly protests-turned-riots of 2009.
In July of that year, Uighurs in Urumqi protested the deadly beating of Uighur factory workers outside Shenzhen.
When police tried to break up an initially peaceful protest, it degenerated into rioting, and Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese.
State media blamed a purported plot by Uighur exiles in Europe and the United States.
The People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary security force, flooded the region, setting up checkpoints and fortified guard posts throughout East Turkestan.
Convoys of olive-green troop transports paraded continuously around town centers.
Not forgetting the importance of Uighur hearts and minds, they bore banners promoting “ethnic unity.”
In the following years, authorities blanketed cities with security cameras and placed restrictions on travel for rural Uighurs.
The early 2000s had seen a steady tightening of state controls on Uighur movement, religious practices, and expression, but the fallout of the 2009 uprising accelerated the transformation of East Turkestan into a full-bore racist police state.
Today’s internment camp system reflects a shift in official ideas about the scale of ideological threats. Under Chen Quanguo, East Turkestan’s top official since August of 2016, state policy treats all Uighurs as inherently opposed to the party, an implicit recognition that huge numbers of Uighurs are not, in fact, grateful for Chinese rule. 
In this view, not only are wrong beliefs the root of Uighur dissatisfaction with the party, but those wrong beliefs are endemic to Uighur, Kazakh, and other minority groups.
It is not surprising, then, that the most common officially cited purpose for the internment camps is to purify people’s thoughts, “eliminating extremism” and instilling a love for the party.
A recorded announcement leaked this month from East Turkestan’s Communist Party Youth League, designed to calm rampant fears about the re-education camps, explained that camps “treat and cleanse the virus from their brains.” 
The names used for camps have varied widely, both for the same camp over time and from one camp to the next, but most have included the word “transformation”—for example, “concentrated education transformation center.”
The handful of people released from the camps and able to share their stories describe a variety of indoctrination techniques aimed to instill love for the Communist Party of China and its leader, Xi Jinping.
“Teachers” and guards compel internees to chant slogans, watch videos on how to identify Islamic extremism, study Confucian texts, give thanks to Chairman Xi Jinping before meals, renounce Islam, write self-criticisms, and denounce fellow internees. 
Some of these, particularly self-criticisms and denunciations, are staples of CCP indoctrination programs as old as the People’s Republic itself, techniques that gave the English language the word “brainwashing,” a direct translation of the Chinese xi nao.
These go-to CCP techniques are combined with what are presented as modern psychological approaches, as re-education centers recruit staff with psychological training.
The content of the indoctrination reflects a new emphasis on nationalism throughout the PRC.
State media outlets tout the party as China’s savior as they always have, but “China” is now more tightly linked to the culture of the ethnic majority, the Han Chinese. 
In this view, religions deemed foreign, for example Islam and Christianity, are seen as threats, as is the purportedly Chinese religion of Buddhism when it is practiced by non-Han people such as Tibetans. 
More than any leader since Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping has promoted the idea that he himself is the embodiment and protector of the Chinese nation.
Outside of China, it is difficult to find informed observers who think that forced indoctrination, limits on cultural expression, and restricting religious practice are likely to do anything other than breed anger at the party.
In East Turkestan however, faith in these techniques seems to run high, and there is very little room for those officials who doubt them to voice concerns.
Before 2016, local officials enjoyed some room for improvisation as they attempted to implement central policies.
In many counties they created programs clearly aimed at compelling ideological transformation.
The strangest of these were the coerced line-dancing competitions that spread across the region in 2014. 
These were supposed to move people away from “extremist” forms of Islam that forbid dance. 
In other places they pushed children to sign promises not to believe in God and arranged public ceremonies for pledging loyalty to the CCP.
But the internment camps play other important roles. They allow police to physically remove whole classes of people from society. 
In at least three counties, police have reported that they interned all Uighurs born between 1980 and 2000, calling them an “untrustworthy generation.” 
Interned Uighurs are physically unable to engage in public resistance to CCP rule.
Physical removal also bolsters CCP programs to assimilate Uighur children to Chinese culture, by removing them from the care of their parents. 
One Kashgar-area county alone has seen the construction of 18 new orphanages over the last year to accommodate children left behind by interned parents, where they will be taught entirely in Chinese.
At a wider scale, the camps serve as the punitive threat behind the state’s cultural and ideological re-engineering of Uighur society.
Without the need for legal charges, authorities can arbitrarily disappear any member of an ethnic minority group for the smallest perceived disobedience. 
In January, an instructor at a daytime re-education course told his students that they would be sent to the internment camps if they could not memorize both the oath of allegiance to the Communist Party and the national anthem in Chinese within three days, according to village police who spoke to Radio Free Asia.
The day before the deadline, a class member in his 40s who was having difficulty memorizing the text hanged himself.
The threat of internment is magnified by a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented scale, marrying old-fashioned manpower—such as armed police and neighborhood committees of the sort that fueled East Germany’s police state—with high-tech, networked surveillance equipment.
Uighurs are subject to regular mandatory home visits by “work teams” composed of party members and other “loyal” state representatives. 
These visits range in duration from daytime visits to multi-day stays, during which the visitors interview their hosts about their thoughts and habits and inspect their homes for prohibited items. 
The results of these interviews are normally kept secret, but in one case a visiting team boasted online of their effectiveness: they sent one-fifth of a village population for internment and indoctrination. 
Children assist in the policing of private spaces, as schools encourage them to report on their parents’ religious practices in the home.
Cities are blanketed with surveillance cameras. 
Checkpoints at market entrances, train stations, and even book stores scan people’s faces and check them against their identification cards using facial recognition software.
Smartphone owners are required to install government spyware that reports on content stored in the phone. 
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the enormous amounts of data generated by these electronic monitoring systems are combined with the information from work teams’ home visits and entered into an “integrated joint operations platform” that employs big-data analysis to predict which individuals will engage in acts of disloyalty.
Police at checkpoints regularly check phones for “illegal” content.
Attempts to drop out of this surveillance web are dangerous; one police station reported interning people who stopped using their phones.
The near-complete eradication of privacy and the massive scale of internment appears to be changing Uighurs’ behavior.
Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable.
Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.
Today Uighurs rush to burn their books and strain to guess what will make their home visitors view them as loyal, out of fear that they will join the many family members and friends whom they have personally seen disappear over the last 18 months.
The re-education camps also cast their shadows beyond East Turkestan and even China’s borders.
East Turkestan security personnel have been calling Uighurs working in the rest of China back to their hometowns, where, more often than not, they disappear. 
Police track the activities of Uighurs from their locales even when they reside abroad, demanding photographic evidence of their presence at universities or offices. 
Some are commanded to return home to certain detention.
Uighurs comply out of fear for their families.
Some who have spoken out about the situation in their homeland have seen large numbers of relatives disappear. 
Depression is rampant among Uighur exiles.
All known cases of Uighurs returning to China in the last year have resulted in the returnee’s disappearance.
Across the world, Uighurs with expiring passports or visas are currently weighing whether to claim asylum in foreign lands and never see their families again, or to face near-certain internment upon their return to East Turkestan.

A Uighur woman walks by a closed Islamic school in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony on July 1, 2017. 

The most widely circulated estimate of the number of people interned in re-education camps—several hundred thousand to just over 1 million—was developed by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology from leaks that surfaced in January and February.
In the half-year since then, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others have continued to disappear.
Uighurs with family in East Turkestan and academics who have visited in the past few months have only rarely reported individual releases, usually of older people with health problems.
Officials in one Kucha district have told reporters that none of the approximately 5,000 to 6,000 residents sent to the camps over the last two years have been released. 
Tellingly, the state has continued to invest in camp construction.
In response to growing global scrutiny, the Chinese state has deleted its existing online bid solicitations for re-education camp construction and ceased posting new announcements. 
Even so, public solicitations from March and April suggest that new camps will open later this year or early next year.
The expanding re-education internment system is interconnected with the ordinary prison system, which has seen its own expansion.
Last year, East Turkestan accounted for 13 percent of China’s indictments, despite having only 1.5 percent of the country’s population.
The number of arrests is even larger, accounting for 21 percent of China’s total. 
For many detainees, the first stop is a kanshousuo, a temporary detention center.
Shawn Zhang, a Chinese graduate student in Canada who has used Google satellite images to document the “construction boom” of re-education centers and other detention facilities across East Turkestan, notes that the kanshousuo account for many facilities.
Google imagery from April 22 shows one such structure near Khotan being expanded by 150 percent.
An official in Karakash explained that re-education camps also act as gateways to the formal prison system.
He reported that some districts have quotas for a percentage of internees who must be sent to prisons after evaluation of their performance at re-education camps.
The construction of new re-education camps suggests that the space freed up by the prison transfers is not sufficient to house the continued influx of internees sent for forced indoctrination.
The February numbers may have been eclipsed in the months since, but they are historically significant nonetheless.
At the upper end of the Zenz estimate, East Turkestan’s re-education camp population exceeds the peak daily inmate numbers of Nazi concentration camps (714,211 in 1945, according to Nikolaus Wachsmann’s 2015 book, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps), is several times the number of the Japanese citizens interned by the United States during World War II, and amounts to about half the capacity of the Soviet gulag system, which held around 2 million people.
It remains to be seen which of these precedents the massive East Turkestan internment infrastructure will ultimately most resemble.
The permanent construction style of the re-education camps, visible in satellite images that clearly document their building process, suggests that the Chinese state, left to its own devices, intends to maintain the camp system for the foreseeable future. 
Barring a complete abandonment of the camp system, the most moderate plausible outcome is that at some point authorities dramatically reduce the number of internees, maintaining recalcitrant inmates in the camps, and preserving the capacity to return huge numbers to extrajudicial internment.
In this outcome, the camps would continue to uphold East Turkestan’s racist police state and support the CCP’s assimilationist program of cultural and ideological cleansing.
Such a dire prediction could, however, turn out to be optimistic.
Historically, extrajudicial internment systems have often deviated from their original purposes.
A lack of due process, combined with the immense power that mass-internment programs give states to control the fates of minority populations, makes camps like those in East Turkestan easy to adapt to new goals.
The eruption of war, acts of violence by oppressed minorities, guards’ long inurement to abusive treatment of prisoners, and ideological shifts at the top of the bureaucracy all have the potential, alone or in interaction, to turn the camps to darker purposes.

The Final Solution
Local officials have already expressed dehumanizing outlooks on the role of the re-education camps as “eradicating tumors” and “spraying chemicals on the crops to kill the weeds.” 
Should authorities decide that forced indoctrination has widely failed, much of East Turkestan’s minority population will be framed as irredeemable.
And with the state-controlled Global Times claiming, in response to the recent U.N. condemnation of China’s racist policies in East Turkestan, that “all measures can be tried” in the pursuit of China’s “stability,” mass murder and genocide do not look like impossible outcomes.

China's State Gangsterism

Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

By Alexandra Ma
The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to suppress ideas that could undermine the sweeping authority it has over its 1.4 billion citizens — and the state can go to extreme lengths to maintain its grip.
In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.
Even leaving China isn't always enough. 

The state has continued to clamp down on dissent by harassing and threatening family members who remain in the country.
Scroll down to see what China can do to people who criticize it.

1. Make you disappear.Li Wenzu holds a photo of her husband, detained human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, while protesting in front of the Supreme People's Protectorate in Beijing in July 2017.
Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defended political activists in the past, has not been seen since he was taken into detention three years ago.
He was taken away in August 2015 alongside more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists for government questioning. 

Three years later, he remains the only person in that cohort who still isn't free.
Nobody has heard from him since. 

His lawyers, friends, and family have all tried contacting him, but have consistently been denied access, Radio Free Asia reported.
The lawyer's friends and family, and other lawyers, have tried visiting him, but to no avail. 

His wife, Li Wenzu, has been routinely harassed by Chinese police for protesting Wang's detention, according to the BBC.
His wife recently received a message from a friend saying that Wang was alive and "in reasonable mental and physical health," but was denied further information when she contacted authorities.

2. Physically drag you away so you can't speak to the media.

A woman being taken away by police after she tried sharing footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing on July 26.
A woman was dragged away by men in plainclothes after she tried to share footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing with journalists on the ground in July.
As the woman was trying to share images of the scene with journalists, a group of men took her across, claiming it was a "family matter," according to Agence France-Presse reporter Becky Davis who witnessed it.
The woman claimed she didn't know any of the men. 

You can watch the whole scene unfold in this video.
China was trying to cover up news of the explosion. 

Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, reportedly wiped all posts about it in the hours following the incident, before allowing some media coverage of it later on.
While it remains unclear who the men were and why they took the woman, Davis said it is common for plainclothes police to act as "family members" and take people away.
Read more: 'I do not know that man. I didn't do anything!': A woman who tried to share footage of the explosion near Beijing's US Embassy was forced into a car and driven away

3. Put your family under house arrest, even if they haven't been accused of a crime.Portraits of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia displayed at a protest in Hong Kong in June 2017.
China has kept family members of prominent activists under house arrest to prevent them from traveling abroad and publicly protesting the regime.
In 2010 Liu Xia tried to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who at the time was imprisoned for "inciting subversion" with his protests.
She wasn't allowed to go and was placed under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance. 

She had no access to a cell phone or computer, even though she hadn't been charged with a crime.
She was allowed to leave the house in 2017 to attend the sea burial of her husband after his death from liver cancer, before being sent to the other side of the country by authorities so she wouldn't see memorials held by supporters in Beijing.
Liu Xia was detained in her house for eight years in total. 

She was released to Berlin in July after a sustained lobbying effort from the German government for Liu's release.
Still, she is not completely free: Xia is effectively prevented from appearing in public or speaking to media for fear of reprisal from Beijing. 

She fears that if she does, the government will punish her brother, who remains in Beijing, her friend Tienchi Martin-Liao told The Guardian.

4. Threaten to kill your family and forbid them from leaving China.Anastasia Lin, whose family in China is being punished for her activism against China.

Even when dissidents leave China, they are not safe. 

Chinese expats and exiles have seen family members who remained in China pay the price for their protest.
One example is Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, who repeatedly speaks out to criticise China's human rights record.
She told Business Insider earlier this year that her uncles and elderly grandparents had their visas to Hong Kong — a Chinese region that operates under a separate and independent rule of law — revoked in 2016.
Security agents also contacted Lin's father saying that if she continued to speak up, the family "would be persecuted like in the Cultural Revolution" — a bloody ten-year period under Mao Zedong when millions of Chinese people were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured.
Shawn Zhang, a student in Vancouver who has criticized Xi Jinping online, told Business Insider earlier this year that police incessantly called his parents asking them to take down his posts.
The family members of five journalists with Radio Free Asia — a US-funded media outlet — were also recently detained to stop their reporting on human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in China's East Turkestan colony.
Read more: China uses threats about relatives at home to control and silence expats and exiles abroad

5. Take down your social media posts.

A woman surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police on a smoggy day in Beijing in December 2015.

Chinese tech companies routinely delete social media posts and forbid users from posting keywords used to criticize the government.
Censorship in China has soared under Xi Jinping's presidency, with thousands of censorship directives issued every year.
Posts and keywords are usually only banned for a few hours or a few days until an event or news cycle is over.
In February, popular chat and microblogging platforms WeChat and Weibo banned users from writing posts with the letter N when it was used to criticize a plan allowing Xi to rule without term limits.
Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

6. Remove your posts from the internet — and throw you in a psychiatric ward.Dong Yaoqiong live-streaming herself defacing a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on July 4.

In July, Dong Yaoqiong live-streamed herself pouring black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, while criticizing the Communist Party's "oppressive brain control" over the country.
Hours later, she reported seeing police officers at her door and the video — which can still be seen here— was removed from her social media account.
She has not been seen in public since, although Voice of America and Radio Free Asia reported that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in her home province of Hunan, citing local activists.

7. Barge into your house to force you off the airwaves.Sun Wenguang in his home in Jinan in August 2013.
Sun Wenguang, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, was forced off air during a live phone interview with Voice of America in early August.
The 83-year-old former economics professor had been arguing that Xi Jinping had his economic priorities wrong, when up to eight policemen barged into his home, and forced him off the line.
His last words before he got cut off were: "Let me tell you, it's illegal for you to come to my home. I have my freedom of speech!" 

You can listen to the audio (in Chinese, but subtitled in English) here.
The father of Dong Yaoqiong, the woman who defaced the poster of Xi, was also interrupted while live-streaming a video calling for his daughter's release.
In the recording, which can be seen here, a man purporting to be a plain-clothed police officer can seen entering the premises, demanding to take Dong's father and his friend away, and ignoring their questions about whether the man had a search warrant.

8. Trap you in your house, and detain people who come to see you.

About 11 days after Sun Wenguang, the dissident Chinese professor, was interrupted on his call, he was found locked inside his own home.
Police had detained him in his house and Sun told two journalists who went to interview him that police forced his wife to tell people he had gone traveling to avoid suspicion.
He added: "We were taken out of our residence for 10 days and stayed at four hotels. Some of the rooms had sealed windows. It was a dark jail. After we were back, they sent four security guys to sleep in our home."
The journalists, from the US government-funded Voice of America, were detained immediately after the interview. 

Their whereabouts are not clear at this point.
Read more: A renegade Chinese professor who was forced off-air while criticizing the government was locked in his apartment and told to make up a story that he left town

9. Forbid you from leaving the country.Ai Weiwei in London in September 2015, two months after his release from China.
Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and avid critic of the Chinese government, was blocked from leaving China for four years.
Authorities claimed he was being investigated for various crimes, including pornography, bigamy, and the illicit exchange of foreign currency.
He was detained for 81 days and charged with tax evasion, for which his company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million). 

His supporters claimed the tax evasion charges were fabricated.
The government took away his passport in 2011 and refused to give it back until 2015. 

He then immediately flew to Berlin, where he now lives.

10. Intercept your protests before they even begin.Police surrounding a group of people preparing to protest in Beijing on August 6.
A group of protesters had been planning a demonstration in Beijing's financial district over lost investments with the country's peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Many of those platforms had shut down due to a recent government crackdown on financial firms, causing investors to lose some tens of thousands of dollars in savings.
But the demonstration, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday in front of China's banking regulatory commission, never materialized — because police had already rounded up the protesters and sent them home.
Many demonstrators who arrived in Beijing earlier that day found police waiting for them at their bus and train stations, before sending them away.
Peter Wang, who planned to take part in the protest, told Reuters: "Once the police checked your ID cards and saw your petition materials, they knew you are here looking to protect your [financial] rights. Then they put you on a bus directly."
Becky Davis, AFP's reporter in Beijing, described seeing more than 120 buses parked nearby to take the protesters away.
Other protesters seen traveling from their home towns to Beijing to take part in the demonstration were forced to give their fingerprints and blood samples, and prevented from traveling to the capital, Reuters said.
Activists told The Globe and Mail that the police found out about the protest by monitoring their conversations on WeChat.

Activists say we are now seeing 'human rights violations not seen in decades' in ChinaSurveillance cameras in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2009.

China has a long history of suppressing dissenting views and actions. 

But Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the number of people being targeted and the extent of their punishment has worsened under Xi's rule.
"While life for peaceful critics in modern China has never been easy, there have been times of relative latitude," she told Business Insider.
"Eleven's tenure is most certainly not one of those times — not just in the numbers of people being targeted, but in the use of harsh charges and long sentences, and in the state's adoption of rights-gutting laws.
"Add to that the alarming expansion of high-tech surveillance and mass arbitrary detentions across East Turkestan, and you've got a scale of human rights violations we have not seen in decades."
The United Nations recently accused China of holding one million Uighurs in internment camps in the western colony of East Turkestan. 


Does the Chinese Communist Party care that people know what's going on?
Probably not.

Richardson said: "The Chinese communists will keep treating people however badly they want unless the price for doing so is made too high for them — clearly this calculus finally changed recently for them with respect to Liu Xia," referring to the activist's wife who was released to Beijing after eight years of house arrest.
"That's why relentless public and private interventions on behalf of those unjustly treated is critical — to keep driving up the cost of abuses many people inside and outside China find unacceptable," Richardson added.
But there's a catch, says Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders. 

While the Party has released political activists due to public pressure in the past, it has kept family members in China to make sure the activists don't speak out.
Eve told The Guardian in July: "The Chinese Communist Party has become more immune to international pressure to release activists and let them go overseas, coinciding with its growing economic clout.
"Nowadays, on the rare occasion it does allow an activist to go abroad, it's with the sinister knowledge that their immediate or extended family remains in China and can be used as an effective hostage to stifle their free speech."