China’s Brutal ‘Boarding Schools’

Beijing’s concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs are stark violations of human rights.
The New York Times

A sign warning against "uncivilized" behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's East Turkestan colony.

The Trump administration may not be the most unimpeachable source when it comes to human rights, but the head of the State Department’s bureau for human rights, Michael Kozak, was dead on when he said China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities was “just remarkably awful.”
Mr. Kozak made the comments on Wednesday as the State Department presented its annual report on human rights around the world, an event at which his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”
That’s a tough call in today’s world.
But China’s brutal campaign to strip Uighur and other Turkic minorities in the East Turkestan colony of their culture, religion and identity through a network of secretive concentration camps must rank among the more outrageous continuing violations in the world. 
What makes it all the more galling is the Beijing government’s feigned umbrage whenever the camps are mentioned, and its absurd efforts to depict them as China’s contribution to the war on "terrorism".
After initially denying the existence of the camps, China in October began a campaign to portray them as “campuses,” “vocational training centers” and “boarding schools” intended to bring Uighurs into the modern era.
China has made direct news reporting from East Turkestan all but impossible, giving access only to carefully monitored official tours. 
On one, Reuters reported that camp inmates praised their new life and sang, in English, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”
Reports from survivors, Uighur dissidents, the Uighur diaspora, satellite imagery and other sources depict something far more akin to the gulag than a happy boarding school, with more than a million Uighurs, out of a population of more than 10 million Muslims in East Turkestan, forced to undergo Cultural Revolution-style coercion to adopt state-sanctioned norms of political thought and behavior.
Writing in The Times, Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam at the Cato Institute, described camps at which “people are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” 
He said survivors told of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
Conquered and incorporated into China in the 18th century, East Turkestan has long been a thorn in China’s side.
The Chinese government attributes scores of violent events, including bombings and assassinations, to Uighur separatists.
Violent riots in July 2009 in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital, escalated into attacks on Han Chinese people and a vicious crackdown and several death sentences.
But trying to extinguish national identity through what amounts to mass brainwashing is an atrocity that smacks of some of the worst experiments of our time — including China’s own Cultural Revolution — with some thoroughly modern twists. 
A key part of China’s campaign to control the Uighurs has been collecting DNA from members of the minority under the guise of a free health check.
Sadly, Muslim nations have been reticent about supporting the Uighurs, because of the economic clout China wields among them and the solidarity these states have with an anti-Western authoritarian regime.
In February, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted on Chinese television after a meeting with Xi Jinping as saying, “China has the right to carry out antiterrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”
That should not dissuade other governments and organizations from continuing to focus attention on the camps, as the State Department has.
A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, would require the State Department and intelligence agencies to report on what the Chinese government is doing in East Turkestan.
The bill should be promptly passed.
The United States should also support the request of 15 Western ambassadors to Beijing — America’s was not one of them — to meet with the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan.
What is happening in East Turkestan must not be ignored.

China’s Gulag for Muslims

In modern-day “re-education” prisons, Beijing is forcing ethnic Uighurs to forsake their religion. Why don’t Muslim governments rise up in anger?
By Mustafa Akyol

An Acehnese Muslim woman cries as she takes part in a protest rally in support of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 21 December 2018.

One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. 

The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
“Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides.”
Today, Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that operated them. 

But now another dictatorship, ruled by another Communist Party, is operating a new chain of prisons that evoke memory of the gulags — more modern, more high-tech, but no less enslaving.
These are China’s “re-education camps,” established in the far-western East Turkestan colony, where up to a million Uighurs are imprisoned in order to be indoctrinated. 

People are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays. 

Survivors also tell about military-style discipline, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
The target of this mass persecution is China’s Muslim minorities — especially the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people based in East Turkestan. 

They follow a mainstream, moderate interpretation of Sunni Islam. 

But that is enough of a “mental illness” for Chinese Communists, whose ideology considers all religions, including Christianity, to be backward superstitions that must be diluted and nationalized. 

That is why they go as far as forbidding people from having beards or fasting during Ramadan, and forcing them to consume pork and alcohol, both of which are forbidden in Islam.
Chinese authorities say they are alarmed about extremists among the Uighurs — and, in fact, a handful of extremists have carried out attacks against government targets over the years. 

But those extremists arose in response to a decades-old policy of subjugation, along with ethnic colonialization, that Beijing has pursued against the Uighurs. 

That history suggests that Beijing’s current “counterterrorism” campaign will be only counterproductive — deepening a vicious cycle that authoritarian minds are often unable to understand, let alone break.
And here is the strangest aspect of this story: China’s “re-education” policy is a major attack on Muslim people and their faith, Islam, yet the Muslim world has remained largely silent. 

While the policy has been condemned by human rights groups and the liberal news media in the West, along with Uighur organizations themselves, only a few Muslim leaders, like the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim and Pakistan’s minister of religion, Noorul Haq Qadri, have raised some public concerns. 

Not until last month did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation finally express concern about “the disturbing reports on the treatment of Muslims” by China.
That is all very meek given how grim the situation is — and how it compares to what we would have seen if the same persecution had been carried out by some other country, such as, say, Israel.
Why is that? 

Why are Muslim leaders, especially those who love to be the champions of oppressed Muslims, so lenient toward China?
There are three answers. 

One is that coziness with China, the world’s second-largest economic power, pays. 

China is the top trading partner of 20 of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. 

Its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a huge path of commercial and transportation infrastructure intended to pass through much of the Middle East, holds a lucrative promise for many Muslim nations.
Moreover, China does not shy away from offering its economic assistance as hush money. 

In July 2018, The Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, ran an interesting editorial suggesting that China’s government would help Turkey secure its “economic stability” — but only if Turkish officials stopped making “irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in East Turkestan,” which means stop criticizing China’s human rights violations. (At about the same time, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was also promising to help the Turkish economy, but only if Turkey corrected its own human rights violations. In other words, Turkey was being pulled in opposite directions, and, sadly, the dark side has proved stronger so far.)
A second reason for Muslim silence is that the Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society.

This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.

The third reason is that most Muslims who are likely to feel solidarity with their oppressed coreligionists think of the oppressors as “the West,” defined as the capitalist, hedonist, Zionist civilization led by the Great Satan. 

These Muslims, particularly the Islamists, believe that all of their coreligionists should unite with other anti-Western forces — a stance that evokes Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance against the West in his 1993 article in “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
For Muslim autocrats and Islamists, a Confucian-Islamic alliance may still be alluring. 

China can look like a great model, in which the economy grows without Western nuisances like human rights, free speech or limited government. 

For Muslim societies, however, the Uighur crisis must be a wake-up call. 

It shows what can happen to Muslims when authoritarian governments embrace Islamophobia as state policy.
Islamophobia exists in the liberal democracies of the West, too — but there it can be criticized by the news media, checked by the courts and constrained by liberal institutions and traditions. 

Muslims can still practice their religion freely, and can even become lawmakers by being elected to bodies like the United States Congress.
For Muslim societies, in other words, a choice between freedom and dictatorship should not be too difficult. 

In freedom, you can live as a Muslim in safety and dignity. 

Under dictatorship, as China shows us, you end up in a re-education camp.

Woman describes torture, beatings in Chinese detention camp

By MARIA DANILOVA
Mihrigul Tursun, right, speaks at a event at the National Press Club in Washington, Monday, Nov. 26, 2018. Tursun, a member of China’s Uighur minority is detailing the torture and abuse she suffered at the hands Chinese authorities as part of an escalating clampdown on hundreds of thousands of members of the country's Muslim minorities. She spent several months in detention in China where she was beaten, tortured with electric shock and given unknown drugs. 

WASHINGTON — A member of the Uighur minority on Monday detailed torture and abuse she says she experienced in one of the internment camps where the Chinese government has detained hundreds of thousands of religious minorities.
Mihrigul Tursun, speaking to reporters in Washington, said she was interrogated for four days in a row without sleep, had her hair shaved and was subjected to an intrusive medical examination following her second arrest in China in 2017.

After she was arrested a third time, the treatment grew worse.
“I thought that I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me,” Tursun, 29, told reporters at a meeting at the National Press Club.
Human rights groups say China has detained up to 2 million Uighurs to promote what the government calls “ethnic unity” in the country’s far west. 

On Monday, over 270 scholars from 26 countries released a statement drawing attention to mass human rights abuses and deliberate attacks on indigenous cultures taking place in China.
“In the camps, these detainees, most of whom are Uighur, are subjected to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs and cultural practices,” the statement said. 

“Outside of the camps, more than 10 million Turkic Muslim minorities in the region are subjected to a dense network of surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom.”
Raised in China, Tursun moved to Egypt to study English at a university and soon met her husband and had triplets with him. 

In 2015, Tursun traveled to China to spend time with her family and was immediately detained and separated from her infant children. 

When Tursun was released three months later, one of the triplets died and the other two developed health problems. 

Tursun said the children had been operated on. 

She was arrested for a second time about two years later.
Several months later, she was detained a third time and spent three months in a cramped, suffocating prison cell with 60 other women, having to sleep in turns, use the toilet in front of security cameras and sing songs praising China’s Communist Party. 

Tursun said she and other inmates were forced to take unknown medication, including pills that made them faint and a white liquid that caused bleeding in some women and loss of menstruation in others. Tursun said nine women from her cell died during her three months there.
One day, Tursun recalled, she was led into a room and placed in a high chair, and her legs and arms were locked in place.
“The authorities put a helmet-like thing on my head, and each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I would feel the pain in my veins,” Tursun said in a statement read by a translator.
“I don’t remember the rest. White foam came out of my mouth, and I began to lose consciousness,” Tursun said. 

“The last word I heard them saying is that you being an Uighur is a crime.”
She was eventually released so that she could take her children to Egypt, but she was ordered to return to China. 

Once in Cairo, Tursun contacted U.S. authorities and, in September, came to the United States and settled in Virginia.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment. 

Chinese authorities have denied that the internment camps exist but say petty criminals are sent to “employment training centers.”
The State Department estimates that since April 2017, the Chinese government has detained 800,000 to possibly more than 2 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in political re-education camps.
“The United States will continue to call on China to end these counterproductive policies and free all those arbitrarily detained,” the State Department said. 

“We are committed to promoting accountability for those who commit human rights violations and abuses, including by considering targeted measures against East Turkestan officials.”

Criminal Confession

China Locks Up Ethnic Minorities in Camps. It Says So Itself.
By Rian Thum

An image from undated video footage of Muslims reading from official Chinese language textbooks at a training center in Hotan, in East Turkestan. The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged the existence of a vast network of indoctrination camps.

NOTTINGHAM, England — “Citizens, please remain calm and relax, no one in the re-education camps will starve, be left in the cold, be punished or be forced to work.” 

With these words, an official from China’s Communist Youth League tried to reassure relatives and friends of members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who had been taken to internment centers. 

The detainees were “infected by an ideological illness,” the official said, and the camps would “cleanse the virus from their brain.”
When the speech was delivered in October 2017, the camps were unknown even to some of the people they targeted, the roughly 11 million ethnic Uighurs and one million Kazakhs of East Turkestan, a colony in northwestern China. 

A year later, the network of indoctrination centers is widely known even outside China: first revealed by inmates’ families and then confirmed, perhaps unwittingly, by the government’s public call for bids on procurement contracts to build camp infrastructure — and now by an official justification of sorts.
A couple of weeks ago, the East Turkestan People’s Congress passed legislation that for the first time provides an explicit basis for the “transformation” of people influenced by “extremism” in “education institutions” through “ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral correction, Chinese language training” and other programs. 

Last week, the chairman of East Turkestan’s government described the camps as air-conditioned boarding schools that offer cultural programs for people suspected of minor offenses to help them realize that “life can be so colorful.”
Yet former participants have described a system of forced detention and abuse, with military-style discipline, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
In the past, local officials and local media would sometimes boast online of successfully implementing this camp system. 

But more senior officials — presumably partly out of concern with global opinion — have tended to profess ignorance, including as late as August, in response to questions by a United Nations panel on racial discrimination.
So why is China suddenly acknowledging a network of concentration centers whose existence it had so adamantly denied?
Some news reports say that the law “legalizes” the camp system. 

But that characterization is misleading: Authorizing the construction and administration of so-called training centers does not in itself sanction the extrajudicial internment of people in them, which, as scholars have argued, is illegal even under Chinese law.
The recent legislation does, however, recognize and officialize the detention system — and that’s significant.
In China, the law sometimes seems to play catch-up with enterprising officials. 

For example, “abnormal” beards were legally banned in March 2017, years after the East Turkestan authorities had begun arresting or otherwise penalizing men with large beards. 

Likewise, the latest legislation is evidence that the entire camp program has evolved from local, extralegal improvisation to a formal system that is to be woven into the fabric of the Chinese state.
The concentration camps no longer are an ad hoc measure; they are meant to be permanent. 

And their reach is spreading geographically.
Uighurs throughout China have been called back to East Turkestan by their hometown police and then detained. 

Thousands of Uighurs also appear to have been sent out of East Turkestan to prisons elsewhere in China.
The central government in Beijing provides part of the funding for this enormous internment and indoctrination system. 

And only the highest levels of the ruling Politburo could have decided in 2016 to reassign Tibet’s party chief Chen Quanguo to East Turkestan — to which he brought the repressive measures he had used against Tibetans and Buddhist pilgrims.
The intensifying repression against Uighurs and other minorities in East Turkestan reflects a nationwide shift in the government’s approach to ethnic difference. 

Chinazism

Whereas the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) once professed to value diversity, it now increasingly seeks to assimilate minorities: In recent years, it has even encouraged Uighurs to marry members of the ethnic Han majority by offering cash to mixed couples. 

And as the anthropologist Darren Byler has documented, the authorities are enlisting Han civilians in their efforts, sending them out as “big brothers” and “big sisters” to check in on and watch Uighur and Kazakh homes.
The foremost theorist of this Sinicization project, known as “ethnic mingling,” is Hu Lianhe, an official at the Central Political and Legal Affairs Committee. 

He was the Chinese representative who denied the existence of re-education camps in East Turkestan to the United Nations panel this summer. 

Hu is also known for developing a “theory of stability” that links ethnic identity with extremism, and as the political scientist James Leibold recently pointed out, Hu’s growing visibility likely is no coincidence. 

It may portend a far more comprehensive effort by the government in Beijing to control and subjugate non-Han minorities throughout the country within what official propaganda calls the “Chinese race.”
As the C.C.P. has steadily moved away from recognizably communist policies over the last three decades, its leaders have increasingly justified their rule through Han-centered nationalism and by casting the party as the ultimate guarantor of China’s stability and prosperity, notions encapsulated under the slogan “Chinese Dream.” 

Uighur aspirations for basic cultural rights and more autonomy threaten those claims, and the handful of Uighur attacks over the past decade or so call into question the C.C.P.’s ability to protect the country’s ethnic-Han majority.
Han-centric racism and Islamophobia are driving China’s leaders to blame unrest on Uighur culture and religion. 

But behind their efforts to forcibly re-engineer minority cultures also lies a pressing need to boost their legitimacy and account for their hold on power. 

The East Turkestan problem, in their view, isn’t a local issue; it’s a threat to the foundations of the entire system they oversee today.

Interpol Tragicomedy

Meng Hongwei faces indefinite detention in system experts say is cover for a purge of political rivals
By Lily Kuo in Beijing
 

Meng Hongwei appears to be the latest target of the Chinese ruling Communist party’s controversial anti-corruption campaign. 

The bizarre case of the former Interpol president Meng Hongwei, now detained and under investigation in China, has raised concerns about the country’s expanded anti-corruption drive.
Meng, a senior Chinese security official, appears to be the latest target in a far-reaching anti-graft campaign that critics say is a cover for eliminating political figures disloyal to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

On Monday, days after Meng was reported missing by his wife, Chinese authorities accused him of bribery in a lengthy statement stressing the importance of the country’s “anti-corruption struggle” and the need for “absolute loyal political character”. 

On Sunday, authorities said Meng was in the custody of the National Supervisory Commission (NSC), China’s new super-agency charged with investigating corruption throughout the government, which is overseeing his case.
Human rights advocates say Meng is likely being held in liuzhi or “retention in custody” – a form of detention used by the NSC that denies detainees access to legal counsel or families for as long as six months.
Liuzhi is meant to be an improvement on the previous shuanggui system, a disciplinary process within the ruling Chinese Communist party known for the use of torture and other abuses. 

Under liuzhi, family members are supposed to be notified.
Rights advocates say there are few indications liuzhi will be much better. 

The Chinese journalist Chen Jieren, who had accused a party official in Hunan province of corruption, has been detained since July by the NSC and denied access to his lawyer, according to Radio Free Asia.
In May, the driver of a low-ranking official in Fujian province died during interrogation after almost a month in liuzhi. 

When family members saw his body, his face was disfigured.
“Liuzhi ’is a very new system, but we can speculate pretty clearly [about] the kind of treatment people are subjected to,” says Michael Caster, a human rights advocate with Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

“Prolonged sleep deprivation, forced malnourishment, stress positions, beatings, psychological abuse, threats to family members certainly, oftentimes leading to forced confessions.”
Meng’s case is the most high-profile yet for the NSC, which was created in March to expand China’s anti-corruption drive to people and entities outside the Communist party, including government ministries, state-owned companies, and people working in the public sector.
“Since its inauguration, however, the NSC has not nabbed any big ‘tigers’, so to speak,” said Dimitar Gueorguiev, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, where he focuses on Chinese governance. 

“Meng’s arrest seems like a powerful demonstration of China’s commitment to rooting out corruption, even when it can cost them the directorship of an important international vehicle,” he said.
Speculation for the reasons behind Meng’s swift downfall ranges from his access to sensitive information after a long career at the public security ministry to his tenure at Interpol, when the organisation revoked an international alert for Dolkun Isa, the president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, which is critical of China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs in East Turkestan. 

While Meng’s exact whereabouts are still unclear, rights activists say his fate is not.
“The formula is simple,” says Maya Wang, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Like others forcibly disappeared before him, including human rights activists mistreated in custody by Meng’s public security ministry, he faces detention until he confesses under duress, an unfair trial, and then harsh imprisonment, possibly for many years.”

Chinazism

Inside China’s new mass-indoctrination camps
By Associated Press

Omir Bekali talks about the psychological stress he endure in a Chinese internment camp during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Hour upon hour, day upon day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China’s new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party.
When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. 

A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement, where he was deprived of food for 24 hours. 

After 20 days in the heavily guarded camp, he wanted to kill himself.
“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. 

“I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of East Turkestan have ensnared hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. 

This detention campaign has swept across East Turkestan, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. 

China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.
The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. 

The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. 

Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.
The recollections of Bekali, a heavyset and quiet 42-year-old, offer what appears to be the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education camps. 

The Associated Press also conducted rare interviews with three other former internees and a former instructor in other centers who corroborated Bekali’s depiction. 

Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their families in China.
Bekali’s case stands out because he was a foreign citizen, of Kazakhstan, who was seized by China’s security agencies and detained for eight months last year without recourse. 

Although some details are impossible to verify, two Kazakh diplomats confirmed he was held for seven months and then sent to re-education.
The detention program is a hallmark of China’s emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of Xi Jinping. 

It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi.

Omir Bekali, front right, prepares to pray at a mosque in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

“Cultural cleansing is Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the East Turkestan problem,” said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University.
Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, said China’s re-education system echoes some of the worst human rights violations in history.
“The closest analogue is maybe the Cultural Revolution in that this will leave long-term, psychological effects,” Thum said. 

“This will create a multigenerational trauma from which many people will never recover.”
Asked to comment on the camps, China’s Foreign Ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation. When asked why non-Chinese had been detained, it said the Chinese government protects the rights of foreigners in China and they should also be law-abiding. 

Chinese officials in East Turkestan did not respond to requests for comment.
However, bits and pieces from state media and journals show the confidence East Turkestan officials hold in methods that they say work well to curb religious extremism. 

China’s top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged East Turkestan’s authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls the “transformation through education” drive in an “all-out effort” to fight separatism and extremism.
In a June 2017 paper published by a state-run journal, a researcher from East Turkestan’s Communist Party School reported that most of 588 surveyed participants did not know what they had done wrong when they were sent to re-education. 

But by the time they were released, nearly all — 98.8 percent— had learned their mistakes, the paper said.
Transformation through education, the researcher concluded, “is a permanent cure.”

On the chilly morning of March 23, 2017, Bekali drove up to the Chinese border from his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, got a stamp in his Kazakh passport and crossed over for a work trip, not quite grasping the extraordinary circumstances he was stepping into.
Bekali was born in China in 1976 to Kazakh and Uighur parents, moved to Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. 

He was out of China in 2016, when authorities sharply escalated a “People’s War on Terror” to root out what the government called religious extremism and separatism in East Turkestan, a large territory bordering Pakistan and several Central Asian states, including Kazakhstan.
The East Turkestan he returned to was unrecognizable. 

All-encompassing, data-driven surveillance tracked residents in a region with around 12 million Muslims, including ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs. 

Viewing a foreign website, taking phone calls from relatives abroad, praying regularly or growing a beard could land one in a political indoctrination camp, or prison, or both.
East Turkestan has a history of violence and military crackdowns due to simmering ethnic tensions.
The new internment system was shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly available data on the numbers of camps or detainees. 

The U.S. State Department estimates those being held are “at the very least in the tens of thousands.” A Turkey-based TV station run by East Turkestan exiles said almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just over 1 million. 

Government bids and recruitment ads studied by Zenz suggest that the camps have cost more than $100 million since 2016, and construction is ongoing.

Omir Bekali holds up a mobile phone showing a photo of his parents whom he believes have been detained in China.

Bekali knew none of this when he visited his parents on March 25. 

He passed police checkpoints and handed over his decade-old Chinese identity card.
The next day, five armed policemen showed up at Bekali’s parents’ doorstep and took him away. They said there was a warrant for his arrest in Karamay, a frontier oil town where he lived a decade earlier. 

He couldn’t call his parents or a lawyer, the police added, because his case was “special.”
Bekali was held in a cell, incommunicado, for a week, and then was driven 500 miles (804 kilometers) to Karamay’s Baijiantan District public security office.
There, they strapped him into a “tiger chair,” a device that clamped down his wrists and ankles. 

They also hung him by his wrists against a barred wall, just high enough so he would feel excruciating pressure in his shoulder unless he stood on the balls of his bare feet. 

They interrogated him about his work with a tourist agency inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas, which they claimed was a way to help Chinese Muslims escape.
“I haven’t committed any crimes!” Bekali yelled.
They asked for days what he knew about two dozen prominent ethnic Uighur activists and businessmen in Kazakhstan. 

Exhausted and aching, Bekali coughed up what he knew about a few names he recognized.
The police then sent Bekali to a 10- by 10-meter (32- by 32-foot) cell in the prison with 17 others, their feet chained to the posts of two large beds. 

Some wore dark blue uniforms, while others wore orange for political crimes. 

Bekali was given orange.
In mid-July, three months after his arrest, Bekali received a visit from Kazakh diplomats. 

China’s mass detention of ethnic Kazakhs — and even Kazakh citizens — has begun to make waves in the Central Asian country of 18 million. 

Kazakh officials say China detained 10 Kazakh citizens and hundreds of ethnic Kazakh Chinese in East Turkestan over the past year, though they were released in late April following a visit by a Kazakh deputy foreign minister.
Four months after the visit, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper.
But he was not yet free.

‘We Now Know Better’
Bekali was driven from jail to a fenced compound in the northern suburbs of Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees receiving political indoctrination, he said.
He walked in, past a central station that could see over the entire facility, and received a tracksuit. Heavily armed guards watched over the compound from a second level. 

He joined a cell with 40 internees, he said, including teachers, doctors and students. 

Men and women were separated.
Internees would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7:30 a.m. 

They gathered back inside large classrooms to learn “red songs” like “Without the Communist Party, there is no New China,” and study Chinese language and history. 

They were told that the indigenous sheep-herding Central Asian people of East Turkestan were backward and yoked by slavery before they were “liberated” by the Communist Party in the 1950s.
Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”
Discipline was strictly enforced and punishment could be harsh. 

Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. 

Cameras were installed in toilets and even outhouses. 

Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, which internees were told was equated with Islamic ablution.
Bekali and other former internees say the worst parts of the indoctrination program were forced repetition and self-criticism. 

Although students didn’t understand much of what was taught and the material bordered on the nonsensical to them, they were made to internalize it by repetition in sessions lasting two hours or longer.
“We will oppose extremism, we will oppose separatism, we will oppose terrorism,” they chanted again and again. 

Almost every day, the students received guest lecturers from the local police, judiciary and other branches of government warning about the dangers of separatism and extremism.
In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end.
“Do you obey Chinese law or Sharia?” instructors asked. 

“Do you understand why religion is dangerous?”
One by one, internees would stand up before 60 of their classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history, Bekali said. 

The detainees would also have to criticize and be criticized by their peers. 

Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings, he said.
“I was taught the Holy Quran by my father and I learned it because I didn’t know better,” Bekali heard one say.
“I traveled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad,” Bekali recalled another saying. 

“Now I know.”
A Uighur woman told AP she was held in a center in the city of Hotan in 2016. 

She said she and fellow prisoners repeatedly were forced to apologize for wearing long clothes in Muslim style, praying, teaching the Quran to their children and asking imams to name their children.
Praying at a mosque on any day other than Friday was a sign of extremism; so was attending Friday prayers outside their village or having Quranic verses or graphics on their phones.
While instructors watched, those who confessed to such behavior were told to repeat over and over: “We have done illegal things, but we now know better.”

Other detainees and a re-education camp instructor tell similar stories.
In mid-2017, a Uighur former on-air reporter for Xinjiang TV known as Eldost was recruited to teach Chinese history and culture in an indoctrination camp because he spoke excellent Mandarin. 

He had no choice.
The re-education system, Eldost said, classified internees into three levels of security and duration of sentences.
The first group typically consisted of illiterate minority farmers who didn’t commit any ostensible crimes other than not speaking Chinese. 

The second class was made up of people who were caught at home or on their smartphones with religious content or so-called separatist materials, such as lectures by the Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti.
The final group was made up of those who had studied religion abroad and came back, or were seen to be affiliated with foreign elements. 

In the latter cases, internees were often sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 15 years, Eldost said.
While he was teaching, Eldost once saw through the window 20 students driven into the courtyard. Two rows of guards waited for them and beat them as soon as they got out of the police van. 

He later heard that the internees were recent arrivals who had studied religion in the Middle East.
Violence was not regularly dispensed, but every internee AP spoke to saw at least one incident of rough treatment or beatings.
Eldost said the instruction was aimed at showing how backward traditional Uighur culture is and how repressive fundamentalist Islam is compared to a progressive Communist Party. 

The internees’ confessions of their backwardness helped drive the point home.
“Internees are told to repeat those confessions to the point where, when they are finally freed, they believe that they owe the country a lot, that they could never repay the party,” said Eldost, who escaped from China in August after paying a bribe.
Eldost said he tried in little ways to help his internees. 

Tasked with teaching the Three Character Classic, a Confucian standard taught widely in elementary schools, he would make up mnemonic devices to help his students — including elderly or illiterate Uighur farmers who barely knew their own language — recite a few lines. 

He also advised students to stop habitually saying “praise God” in Arabic and Uighur because other instructors punished them for it.
Every time he went to sleep in a room with 80 others, he said, the last thing he would hear was the sound of misery.
“I heard people crying every night,” he said. 

“That was the saddest experience in my life.”
Another former detainee, a Uighur from Hotan in southern East Turkestan, said his newly built center had just 90 people in two classes in 2015. 

There, a government instructor claimed that Uighur women historically did not wear underwear, braided their hair to signal their sexual availability, and had dozens of sexual partners.
“It made me so angry,” the detainee said. 

“These kinds of explanations of Uighur women humiliated me. I still remember this story every time I think about this, I feel like a knife cut a hole in my chest.”
Kayrat Samarkan, a Chinese Kazakh from Astana who was detained while running errands in a northern East Turkestan police station in December, was sent to an internment camp in Karamagay with 5,700 students.
Those who didn’t obey, were late to class or got into fights were put for 12 hours in a loose body-suit that was made of iron and limited their movement, he said. 

Those who still disobeyed would be locked in a tiger chair for 24 hours. 

As one form of punishment, he said, instructors would press an internee’s head in a tub of ice and water.

Omir Bekali looks at a computer to trace the location of the Chinese internment camp he was held during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

After three months, Samarkan couldn’t take the lessons anymore, so he bashed his head against a wall to try to kill himself. 

He merely fell unconscious.
“When I woke up, the staff threatened me, saying if I did that again they would extend my sentence to 7 years there,” he said.
After 20 days, Bekali also contemplated suicide. 

Several days later, because of his intransigence and refusal to speak Mandarin, Bekali was no longer permitted to go into the courtyard. 

Instead, he was sent to a higher level of management, where he spent 24 hours a day in a room with 8 others.
A week later, he went to his first stint in solitary confinement. 

He saw a local judicial official walking into the building on an inspection tour and yelled at the top of his lungs. 

He thought even his former detention center, with the abuse he suffered, would be better.
“Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison,” he shouted. 

“I can’t be here anymore.”
He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. 

It lasted 24 hours, ending late afternoon on Nov. 24.
That’s when Bekali was released, as suddenly as he was detained eight months earlier.
A Baijiantan policemen who had always gone easy on Bekali during interrogation appeared and checked him out of the facility.
“You were too headstrong, but what the department did was unjust,” he told Bekali as he drove him to his sister’s home in Karamay.
Bekali was free.

Freedom, But Not For His Family
The next morning, a Saturday, the police opened their immigration office for Bekali to pick up a unique, 14-day Chinese visa. 

His original had long expired. 

Bekali left China on December 4.
Seeking compensation from the Chinese government is out of the question. 

But Bekali keeps a plastic folder at home of evidence that might prove useful someday: his passport with stamps and visas, travel records and a handwritten Chinese police document dated and imprinted with red-ink seals.
The document is the closest thing he has to an official acknowledgement that he suffered for eight months. 

It says he was held on suspicion of endangering national security; the last sentence declares him released without charge.
At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to re-education.
But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. 

A week later, on March 19, they took his mother, Amina Sadik. 

And on April 24, his father, Ebrayem.
Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story, no matter the consequences.
“Things have already come this far,” he said. 

“I have nothing left to lose.”

Sina Delenda Est

China’s Ignoble Treatment of a Nobel Laureate
By CHEN GUANGCHENG

Protesters holding portraits of Liu Xiaobo at a demonstration in Hong Kong on Saturday.

One of my countrymen, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been imprisoned for eight years for the crime of drafting Charter 08, a political manifesto calling for democracy in China.
Now, the 61-year-old intellectual and literary critic has liver cancer — and the Chinese authorities are refusing to allow him to travel to the United States for medical treatment. 

If Mr. Liu’s incarceration for “inciting subversion of state power” was appalling, the way China has handled Mr. Liu’s illness should give pause to any government or business seeking to form closer ties with Beijing.
No lawyer or independent medical professional has been allowed to see Mr. Liu since his diagnosis. This is particularly troubling given that Reuters recently reported that Mr. Liu’s “time is limited” because of a fluid buildup around his stomach. 

Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, herself under house arrest, was allowed to see her husband in the hospital, but only under the close watch of guards. 

In the meantime, the Chinese authorities released a preposterous video in which a figure purported to be Mr. Liu exercises and undergoes “routine medical exams.”
But Mr. Liu’s treatment is anything but routine, as indicated by his release from prison on medical parole and the Chinese state’s condemnations of outside meddling — a sign the authorities are worried. 

Clearly, Beijing is concerned about what a tragic end for this famous dissident could mean for its international reputation.
All of this calls to mind the recent case of Otto Warmbier, the American citizen who, as a result of strong U.S. pressure, was released in June after being imprisoned last year by North Korea. 

When he went to the hermit kingdom as a tourist he was a healthy young man; when he returned home to Ohio he was in coma and died days later. 

North Korea continues to deny any wrongdoing.

China, like North Korea and other authoritarian regimes, has a penchant for brutality, lies and self-deception. 

I know this from personal experience.

In 2005, the Chinese authorities began what would turn out to be seven years of persecution of my family and me in retaliation for my work as an activist and lawyer, which focused on the corruption of the Communist Party, including its violent one-child policy. 

I was kidnapped, put in jails and detention centers and sentenced to over four years in prison on a bogus charge of “disrupting traffic order.”
In serving out my sentence in prison — where torture, forced labor and inhumane conditions were the norm — I was occasionally brought to the medical wing for sham exams performed by a staff made up of convicts who had a smattering of experience in medicine or biology. 

I was never seen by a properly trained doctor, despite grave illness and serious injuries inflicted on me by other inmates on order of the wardens. 

Before I was released, I was given a “medical exam” during which they injected me with drugs that caused me to be unable to speak properly for many days.
Once I returned home, my family and I were immediately placed under house arrest, during which we suffered from extreme deprivation, isolation, and beatings. 

If fleeing entered our minds, we were deterred by guards in our house and in our village tracking us 24 hours a day.
I was severely ill, and my wife often heard the guards chatting among themselves, saying they thought either I or my elderly mother would die soon. 

Meanwhile the authorities publicly claimed — accompanied by propaganda photos and videos — that I was well and free. 

Ultimately I escaped, crawling to a nearby village on my hands and knees — a task made more difficult given my blindness. 

I arrived, finally, at the United States embassy in Beijing in 2012. 

Now I live in freedom in America with my family.
My case and Mr. Liu’s are fairly well known in the West, but there are many attorneys and activists in China who have endured horrific suffering. 

Such political prisoners are routinely denied due process under the law and are forced to participate in show trials in which verdicts are predetermined by Communist Party insiders. 

Some don’t survive prison: Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, Cao Shunli, Li Wangyang and Peng Ming-Min are among those who have died behind bars. 

Families of the victims will likely never get clear answers, as their loved ones’ organs are immediately removed and bodies cremated before independent autopsies can be performed.
For a nation with no rule of law, one of the main levers for influencing the status quo is outspoken condemnation from foreign governments and the public. 

Authoritarian regimes fear public shame, which is why it is time to shame China’s Communist Party for its brutal treatment of Mr. Liu and other champions of liberty currently being held by Beijing.
The Trump administration had no qualms about condemning North Korea’s shameful treatment of Otto Warmbier. 

The White House should do the same for Liu Xiaobo by forcefully demanding his immediate release to the United States for medical treatment.
The document that sent Mr. Liu to prison, Charter 08, insists that “every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom.” 

That sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence we will be celebrating tomorrow. 

This Fourth of July, will we in America use our freedom to call for the liberation of others?

China eliminating civil society by targeting human rights activists

Report details use of torture by Chinese security agencies – including beatings, stress positions and sleep deprivation – to force activists to confess ‘crimes’
By Benjamin Haas In Hong Kong

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

China’s human rights situation further deteriorated last year as police systematically tortured activists and forcibly disappeared government critics while state TV continued to broadcast forced confessions, a new report shows.
A creeping security state also attempted to codify much of its existing behaviour on paper, giving the police legal authority to criminalise a host of NGOs deemed politically sensitive by the authorities, according to the report by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
“The Chinese government seems intent on eliminating civil society through a combination of new legislation restricting the funding and operations of NGOs, and the criminalisation of human rights activities as a so-called threat to national security,” Frances Eve, a researcher at CHRD, told the Guardian.
“What stands out is the institutionalised use of torture to force defenders to confess that their legitimate and peaceful human rights work is somehow a ‘crime’.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

In 2015, police targeted almost 250 rights lawyers and activists in a “war on law”, and the effects of that campaign continued to be felt throughout last year.
Reports of torture while in detention in 2016 were rampant, with methods including beatings, attacks by fellow inmates on the orders of prison guards, stress positions, deprivation of food, water and sleep, inhumane conditions and deprivation of medical treatment.
In some cases, human rights activists were prevented from receiving medical care even once they were released.
Huang Yan, who was detained in November 2015, was suffering from ovarian cancer and diabetes. Police confiscated her diabetes medication, and despite an exam done at a detention facility in April 2016 showing the cancer had spread, she was not treated and was denied medical bail.
When she was finally released, Huang was scheduled to undergo surgery last November to treat her cancer, but the authorities pressured the hospital and the team of surgeons declined to treat her.
Torture also took more overt forms. 

Last year reports also emerged that rights lawyer Xie Yang was subject to beatings and stress positions in detention, with interrogators warning him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
In November 2016, Jiang Tianyong, a respected Christian attorney, disappeared while about to board a train and police waited weeks to confirm he had been detained. 

Jiang’s whereabouts are still a mystery nearly three months later.
In a rare strongly-worded statement, the European Union called for his immediate release along with several other lawyers.
China also continued the practice of airing confessions on state television, a move that is reminiscent of internal Communist party political purges.
In one of the most prominent cases, Swedish NGO worker Peter Dahlin was paraded on the national broadcaster after three weeks in detention, declaring: “I have violated Chinese law through my activities here. I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
The confessions air before detainees ever see the inside of a courtroom, and in Dahlin’s case he was promptly deported.
For those activists that do go to trial, in at least 15 cases last year police attempted to pressure activists into accepting government-appointed lawyers. 

In cases where state-appointed lawyers represented human rights activists, little defence was mounted and the accused pleaded guilty and promised not to appeal their cases.
The report also outlined two laws passed in 2016 that are likely to curb civil society: legislation regulating charitable giving and a law on foreign NGOs. 

The charity law, while not explicitly requiring all NGOs to register with the government, makes it difficult for unregistered organisations to raise funds domestically.
The foreign NGO regulations require overseas groups that give money to Chinese organisations to be registered with the police.
“Together, these laws will hamper the development of Chinese civil society by restricting their funding,” the CHRD report said.
“There are no more ‘grey areas’,” an unnamed human rights activist said in the report. 

“To advocate for human rights in China today, you must be willing to accept the reality that the government views your work as ‘illegal’.”

China torturing suspects in political purge against members of rival factions

Opaque extralegal detention system used by officials to hold suspects indefinitely until they confess
By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

Regular beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions and solitary confinement are among the tools used by China’s anti-corruption watchdog to force confessions, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
The report throws the spotlight on to Xi Jinping’s "war on corruption", which has punished more than a million Communist party officials since 2013. 

Xi has said fighting corruption is “a matter of life and death” but experts characterise the campaign as a political purge against members of rival factions.
The opaque extralegal detention system is used by "anti-corruption" officials to hold suspects indefinitely until they confess. 

At least 11 have died while in the custody of the country’s widely feared Commission for Discipline Inspection.
“Xi has built his 'anti-corruption campaign' on an abusive and illegal detention system,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.
“Torturing suspects to confess won’t bring an end to corruption but will end any confidence in China’s judicial system.”
All of China’s 88 million Communist party members can be subject to detention or shuanggui, which in Chinese means to report at a designated time and place, where suspects are held incommunicado and often in padded, windowless rooms.
“If you sit, you have to sit for 12 hours straight; if you stand, then you have to stand for 12 hours as well. My legs became swollen and my buttocks were raw and started oozing pus,” a former detainee is quoted as saying in the report. 

Names were withheld for fear of government reprisals.
Others have described detention simply as a “living hell”. 

It is extremely rare for those who have been through the system to speak openly.
In one account a detainee was kept awake for 23 hours a day, forced to stand the entire time and balance a book on his head, one lawyer said. 

After eight days he confessed “to whatever they said” and was then allowed to sleep for two hours a day.
While Xi champions his "anti-corruption" drive, he has also advocated enhancing China’s “rule of law”, but activists say the two concepts are completely at odds when suspects are tortured and forced to confess.
Although the "anti-corruption" campaign is technically separate from China’s judicial system, Human Rights Watch documented cases where prosecutors worked alongside corruption investigators, using the shuanggui system to gather evidence. 

After the extralegal detention, cases are usually transferred to the courts, where there is a 99.92% conviction rate.

“In shuanggui corruption cases the courts function as rubber stamps, lending credibility to an utterly illegal Communist party process,” Richardson said. 

“Shuanggui not only further undermines China’s judiciary – it makes a mockery of it.”
Those sentiments have been echoed by western governments as Xi has ramped up his "anti-corruption" push and use of the system has skyrocketed.
Shuanggui “operates without legal oversight” and suspects are “in some cases tortured”, the US State Department wrote in its annual human rights report on China. 

Some confessions extracted in detention were eventually overturned by courts, the US government report said.
Government officials are the majority of suspects disappeared into the system, but bankers, university administrators, entertainment industry figures and any other Communist party member can be detained.
Human Rights Watch called for shuanggui to be abolished, adding that successfully fighting corruption required “robust protections for the rights of suspects”.
“Eradicating corruption won’t be possible so long as the shuanggui system exists,” Richardson said. “Every day this system threatens the lives of party members and underscores the abuses inherent in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.”