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.

Cultural Genocide

China has launched a massive campaign of cultural extermination against the Uighurs
The Washington Post

Rushan Abbas of Herndon, Va., holds a photo of her sister, Gulshan Abbas, who is among the many Uighurs detained in China. 

IN AN attempt to defend the gulag in which it has imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony, China has tried to rebrand concentration camps as centers for “vocational training.” 

The goal, as a state television broadcast put it, is to “rescue ignorant, backward and poor rural minorities.” 

That description encapsulates the gross bigotry with which Chinese authorities view the Uighurs, against whom they have launched a massive campaign of cultural extermination.
But accept for a moment Beijing’s description of the camps’ purpose. 

How, then, to explain the fact that not just “ignorant” peasants but also scores of the most prominent Uighur intellectuals have been sent to them? 

Are poets, professors, scientists and journalists living in East Turkestan also in need of vocational training?
According to a report in the New York Times, Uighur exiles have compiled a list of 159 intellectuals who have been detained over the past year. 

They are the propagators, curators and defenders of a culture that the regime of Xi Jinping appears determined to eradicate. 

“Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins,” concluded a state news commentary cited by the Times. 

It’s hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent.
Chinse spokesmen sometimes describe Uighur detainees as actual or potential "terrorists". 

But the intellectuals the Chinese government has swept up include figures who openly supported the communist regime, such as Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, an expert on medieval poetry at East Turkestan Normal University. 

Like other scholars, he wrote an open letter declaring his loyalty to the state but was detained anyway.
Up to 1.1 million people, or 11.5 percent of the Uighur population between the ages of 20 and 79, are held in the camps. 

There they are forced to renounce the Muslim religion and Uighur language, and memorize and recite Chinese characters and propaganda songs. 

The “vocational training” is actually forced labor. 

Torture and deaths are common. 

Thousands of children have been separated from their parents and placed in a separate network of orphanages.
A Canadian parliamentary report issued last month echoed others in saying that “what is happening to Turkic Muslims is unprecedented in its scale, technological sophistication and in the level of economic resources attributed by the state to the project.” 

Yet thanks to China’s growing power, global reaction has been muted. 

Muslim nations have been shamefully silent, and while some Western democracies have spoken up, the Trump administration has also largely ignored the issue.
The vacuum in Washington should be filled by Congress. 

Bipartisan legislation that would create a special coordinator to respond to the East Turkestan crisis and prepare the ground for sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the repression failed to pass the last Congress. 

It should be promptly taken up this year.

A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag

How one university student was almost buried by the “people's war on terror.”
Foreign Policy
An officer speaks into a radio transmitter at a prison in China.

Since announcing a “people’s war on terror” in 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has created an unprecedented network of re-education camps in the East Turkestan region that are essentially ethnic gulags. 

Unlike the surgical “strike hard” campaigns of the recent past, the people’s war uses a carpet-bombing approach to the country’s tumultuous western border region. 

Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s party secretary and the architect of this security program, encouraged his forces to “bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of a people’s war.” 

But the attempt to drown a few combatants has pulled thousands of innocent people under in its wake.
Sporadic violence has rattled the region since July 5, 2009, when indigenous Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, took to the streets of Urumqi, the regional capital, to protest the murder of fellow Uighurs who worked in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. 

The protests spiraled into a riot, which claimed 197 lives and nearly 2,000 injuries before order was restored. 

Insurrection has since spread beyond the capital, and skirmishes between Uighurs and security personnel have become common occurrences.
Amid the protracted conflict and rising Islamophobia in China, Communist Party officials are responding by creating a surveillance state. 

In the 12 months preceding September 2017 alone, the party-state advertised nearly 100,000 security positions in East Turkestan. 

Every resident of the region has been affixed with the label “safe,” “normal,” or “unsafe,” based on metrics such as age, faith, religious practices, foreign contacts, and experience abroad. 

Those deemed unsafe, whether or not they are guilty of wrongdoing, are regularly detained and imprisoned without due process.
Estimates indicate that as many as 800,000 individuals, mostly Uighurs, have been incarcerated in the re-education camps. 

Based on the current population of Uighurs in East Turkestan, which stands at some 11 million, this amounts to the extrajudicial detention of nearly 10 percent of the ethno-national group.
While Chinese officials maintain that these re-education camps are schools for eradicating extremism, teaching Chinese language, and promoting correct political thought, Radio Free Asia has reported that the detention centers are overpopulated and detainees poorly treated. 

Those reports are confirmed by testimony from a young Uighur man studying in the United States, torn from the American university where he studied, and where I work, to a Chinese gulag. 

He shared his story with me over four meetings in 2017 and 2018. (Due to concerns for Iman’s security — the Chinese government has previously targeted the families of Uighur writers — pseudonyms have been used for all parties.)
Iman, from a middle-class Uighur family, came to study in the United States a few years ago. 

He succeeded in the Chinese education system, even earning a degree from a university in eastern China. 

In 2017, Iman flew back to China for the summer recess, planning to spend time with friends on the east coast before he returned to East Turkestan to see his mother. 

Despite the exhaustion from the long flight, he was filled with joy as he landed in the Chinese metropolis where he’d previously lived for several years, despite the discrimination he would likely face. 

Ethnic minorities in China, especially Uighurs, are often denied hotel rooms.
As he remained strapped in his seat, a flight attendant approached. 

“They are asking for you,” the woman told him. 

“It’s probably just a visa issue.” 

Her words were of little comfort — after all, he possessed a Chinese passport.
Three uniformed Han Chinese border patrol officers waited for the young Uighur student on the jet bridge. 

Taken into custody, he was subject to a cavity search and then had his devices checked. 

“I knew to delete any sensitive files before the flight,” Iman recalled with a smirk. 

Unable to find incrementing files, an officer rattled off a barrage of questions: “What do you do in North America? Where do you study? We found business cards of Chinese professors. You know a lot of important people, don’t you?”
Although unnerved, Iman answered each question with carefully constructed responses. 

Airport interrogations were nothing new to the young man — he was subjected to questioning after landing in China the previous year — but the protocol was different this time. 

The inspection was much more thorough, the officers more meticulous and less friendly. 

“I knew something was wrong when an officer inspected my shoes. They took out the soles, looked inside, turned them upside-down, and violently shook them. This never happened in the past.”

Another officer approached Iman and told him he would be transported to a local jail. 

The young man demanded an explanation or at least a formal charge. 

He was given neither. 

“May I at least call my mother?” Iman asked. 

“I want to let her know I’ve arrived safely.” 

His request was denied. 

“Will you call her for me?” the young man pleaded. 

The officer retorted, “No, we can’t call her. The local police in Xinjiang should provide her with an update.”
Iman was held for nine days in a local jail while the border authorities contacted law enforcement from his hometown in East Turkestan. 

He was the only Uighur in a room of 34. 

On the ninth day of his incarceration, the police squad from East Turkestan arrived. 

They cuffed Iman tightly and transported him to the train station. 

“Are the handcuffs necessary?” Iman asked. 

“Don’t ask questions,” one officer demanded. 

“We are being lenient — you are supposed to be shackled, too.”
The three Han officers from Iman’s hometown escorted the young man to a train bound for East Turkestan. 

First, though, these three officers had their own questions. 

They repeatedly asked if Iman received a notice from his local police station requesting his return before May 20, 2017, in reference to a regionwide order that required Uighurs studying outside China to return to their hometowns. 

Iman had not. 

The four individuals spent the next 50 hours packed in a hard sleeper compartment set aside for the security personnel. 

As they settled on the train, one of the Han officers handed Iman, who observes Islamic dietary laws, a sack of bread. 

“It was more difficult to find halal food in this city than we expected. This is the best we could do. It has to last you until we reach Xinjiang.”
Iman’s hands remained bound for the entire trip. 

He was only permitted to leave the compartment to use the restroom but was accompanied by at least one officer on each occasion. 

While awake, he spent his time reading textbooks he brought from America. 

“I wore my glasses and read for hours. I thought if I looked as if I was studious, the officers wouldn’t consider me a threat.”
The four detrained in Turpan in East Turkestan. 

“Put this on,” one officer barked as he shoved a hood stitched of heavy fabric at Iman. 

The three officers then guided him to a vehicle and departed for Iman’s hometown. 

The poor ventilation under the hood was made more suffocating by the stale air inside the vehicle, hunger, and dehydration. 

Iman began suffering from severe nausea. 

The officers agreed to remove the hood. 

His symptoms slightly alleviated, and Iman began to engage in small talk with the officers. Coincidently, the chief was Iman’s former classmate, and they reminisced about their school days.
The camaraderie was brief; the vehicle was pulling into the local police station. 

It was the police chief’s turn to interrogate Iman, who was eating his first proper meal since he landed in China, a bowl of soyman, a dish made of small, flat noodles mixed with vegetables. 

The meal, however, could not prevent the panic attack that soon overcame Iman. 

During this third round of interrogation, Iman became dizzy and sweated profusely. 

“I felt as if I had just played a grueling soccer game. My discomfort induced uncontrollable laughter and then a sensation that I was going to faint.”
The stress intensified as he was taken to the detention center, or kanshousuo. 

“I was terrified as we approached.” (As we talked, for the first time Iman directed his gaze at the ground, avoiding eye contact.) 

“The compound was surrounded by towering walls. Military guards patrolled the metal gate. 

Inside, there was little light. It was so dark,” he continued.
He was immediately processed. 

An officer took his photograph, measured his height and weight, and told him to strip down to his underwear. 

They also shaved his head. 

Less than two weeks before, Iman was an aspiring graduate at one of the top research universities in the United States. 

Now, he was a prisoner in an extrajudicial detention center.
Still in his underwear, Iman was assigned to a room with 19 other Uighur men. 

Upon entering the quarters, lit by a single light bulb, a guard issued Iman a bright yellow vest. 

An inmate then offered the young man a pair of shorts. 

Iman began scanning the cell. 

The tiled room was equipped with one toilet, a faucet, and one large kang-style platform bed — supa in Uighur — where all of the inmates slept. 

He was provided with simple eating utensils: a thin metal bowl and a spoon.
Daily routines were monotonous and highly scripted, Iman said. 

“We were awoken every morning at 5 a.m. and given 20 minutes to wash. The guards only provided three thermoses of hot water each day for 20 men, though. I had to vie with the others for hot water. 

I didn’t properly bathe for a week. We were then required to tidy the bed. The guards inspected our work: The corners had to be crisp and the two blankets, which covered the entire platform, wrinkle-free. Breakfast was served at 6 a.m. The menu did not change: moma or steamed bread. After breakfast, we marched inside our cell, calling out cadences in Chinese: ‘Train hard, study diligently.’ Huh, I can’t remember the rest of the verse. I bet it’s on Baidu [Chinese search engine]. Anyway, we marched for several hours. We then viewed ‘re-education’ films until lunch.

“The videos featured a state-appointed imam who explained legal religious practices and appropriate interpretations of Islam. Sometimes the videos had skits warning about the consequences of engaging in ‘illegal religious activities,’ which are displayed on large posters outside every religious site in the region. 

In one skit, a young man was apprehended for studying the Quran at an underground school, a practice authorities are trying to eliminate. 

We watched until it was time for lunch, when we were again served moma and ‘vegetable soup,’ minus the vegetables. After lunch, we were allowed to rest in our quarters, but we were only permitted to sit on the platform bed; lying down was forbidden. After this break, we repeated the morning routine — more marching and videos — until we got the same food for dinner. We were permitted to sleep at 8 p.m. Beijing time, but the light was never turned off.” (Xinjiang’s real time zone is two hours behind Beijing, but the government imposes a single clock across the country.)

In his crowded cell, Iman suffered from loneliness and isolation. 

It was often too disheartening to speak to the others, he said, so he kept to himself. 

“Most of my cellmates had already been incarcerated for over two months without being formally charged. I did befriend a man in his 60s who, during my detention, was sentenced to six years in prison. His ‘crime’? He sent a religious teaching [tabligh in Uighur], a simple explanation of the Quran, though one not produced by a state-appointed cleric, to his daughter using his mobile phone. She shared it with a friend. The authorities convicted him of possession and dissemination of extremist religious content.”
The days in the detention center accumulated with no end in sight. 

Three days turned into a week. 

A week into 10 days. 

Ten days into two weeks. 

Yet Iman was never formally charged. 

Although arbitrary and prolonged detentions violate international law, in China law enforcement may detain “major suspects” for as many as 30 days.
On the 17th day of his incarceration, Iman was called over by a guard. 

“Grab your things,” he shouted as he handed Iman the clothes he wore when he arrived. 

“You are being released.” 

A neighborhood watch group, or jumin weiyuan hui, from his hometown arrived at the detention center to escort Iman to his house but not before they delivered him again to the local police chief. The man looked at Iman and warned: “I’m sure you may have had some ideological changes because of your unpleasant experience but remember: Whatever you say or do in North America, your family is still here and so are we.”
Thirty days after landing in China, Iman finally reached home. 

But there, he was now behind electronic bars. 

His resident ID card, which would be scanned at security checkpoints ubiquitous to the region, now contained information about his “criminal” past. 

Trapped inside East Turkestan’s dystopian surveillance apparatus, he wouldn’t be allowed to step foot in any public buildings, board public transportation, or even enter a shopping center.
Yet much to his surprise, Iman was allowed to return to the United States in time for the fall term. Unable to provide a definitive explanation for this abrupt change of fate, Iman offered two possibilities: He did not, after all, commit any crimes and was deemed unthreatening, or a distant relative who worked in law enforcement negotiated his release and ensured his safe return to school.
Although free, Iman now faces the confines of exile. 

He does not know when or if he can return home. 

Calling or emailing his mother, who herself has been in a re-education center since last October for traveling to Turkey, risks her safety: Contact with relatives abroad is punishable by interrogation and detention.
The Chinese Communist Party’s approach is radical but one officials will not abandon anytime soon. At a recent security meeting in Kashgar in East Turkestan, a Han Chinese official told a crowd of Uighurs: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.”

The Quiet Death of 'Liu Xiaobo Plaza'

Just as China has one party, the United States has one party, when it comes to policy toward China: Whatever you do, do not annoy the CCP.
By Jay Nordlinger

Readers of National Review are well aware of “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” 
We have editorialized in favor of it, and I have written about it from time to time. 
A bill has passed the Senate. 
It has apparently been killed by the House — the Republican House. 
Worse, it has been killed in silence, without explanation. 
Let me back up. 
Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese intellectual, democracy activist, and political prisoner. He has been imprisoned since 2008. Two years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in absentia, of course). 
I wrote about this here. 
Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest for all this time: a brutal form of house arrest. She has no access to the outside world. No television or Internet. 
Guards make sure she is locked in, day and night. 
According to reports, she is in bad physical and mental shape. 
In the mid-1980s, Congress, with President Reagan, did something symbolic: They renamed the area outside the Soviet embassy in Washington “Andrei Sakharov Plaza” — in honor of the great Russian scientist and dissident (who was also a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize). 
Taking a page from the anti-Communists and freedom champions of that era, Senator Ted Cruz and others proposed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” — an area outside the Chinese embassy named after one of the dictatorship’s most prominent political prisoners, and one of the greatest men in all of China. 
The Senate passed the bill, by unanimous consent, in February. 
Since then, it has gone to the House — to the committee chaired by Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), as I understand it. 
He has refused to move on the bill. 
The speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has refused to move as well. 
Chaffetz, I don’t know much about. It seems to me he had about 17 positions on Donald Trump during the recent campaign. 
Ryan, I do know something about: and he has long been a freedom champion. 
A Reaganite. An old-style Republican. 
In the vice-presidential debate four years ago, he ripped Joe Biden six ways to Sunday on this question of freedom. 
The Obama administration had betrayed our values, he said. 
This was particularly true in Iran, whose Green Revolution was essentially ignored by Obama, Biden & Co. 
Jared Genser is a well-known human-rights lawyer. 
He represents both Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia (pro bono). About two weeks ago, he had an article in the Wall Street Journal, urging Ryan to act. 
There has been no sign of action. 
Why? 
To my knowledge, neither Ryan nor Jason Chaffetz nor anybody else has offered a word of explanation. 
That is their right, I suppose. 
Even public officials can keep mum, if they want. 
But I think they owe the public an answer. 
I think the public — or somebody — should demand an answer. 
President Obama would no doubt veto a Liu bill. 
So? 
Is the House GOP’s view the same as Obama’s? 
So far as I know, the 2009 Nobel peace laureate (Obama) has never lifted a finger for the 2010 Nobel peace laureate (Liu). 
For decades now, I have said that, just as China has one party, the United States has one party, when it comes to policy toward China: Whatever you do, do not annoy the CCP. 
There are some honorable exceptions to this rule — George W. Bush appeared in public with the Dalai Lama — but not enough. 
My guess is, Republican donors don’t like the idea of “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” because they want commercial relations with China. 
They fear that honoring a dissident will endanger commercial relations. 
I doubt this is so. 
The Free World has more leverage than it knows. 
I should say, too, that I’m all for commercial relations. 
In fact, I’m more for them than are most. 
But there are other considerations in life, such as standing up to a one-party dictatorship with a gulag. 
Standing up for the values and principles that constitute our heritage — that constitute our very reason for being. 
Evidently, “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” is dead in this session of Congress — killed by the House Republicans. 
If it is to come to pass, it must be revived in a future session: starting from square one. 
I hope that Speaker Ryan will have a change of mind. 
And that President Trump will sign the bill. 
Human rights are not all of foreign policy, heaven knows. But they are a component. 
And Americans are a peculiar nation, a peculiar people — not like all the others. 
Freedom has few enough friends as it is. 
If it loses us, it barely stands a chance.