China's Final Solution to the Muslim Question

China is secretly imprisoning over one million Muslims — but they've left 2 big pieces of evidence behind

• More than one million Muslims have been caught up in China's "re-education camps" over the last year.
• The camps, which operate outside the courts, are designed to indoctrinate ethnic minority Uighurs and force them to reject their religious beliefs.
• Bids for constructing or renovating these centers, as well as staff job ads, provide clear evidence of the purpose and scale of these re-education programs.
• Uighurs face constant surveillance in East Turkestan, which experts consider a testing ground for the a wider surveillance state.

By Tara Francis Chan
Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in western China's Xinjiang region.

In East Turkestan, many locals read endlessly, write often, and sing loudly.
But not by choice.
In extrajudicial indoctrination camps around Xinjiang, ethnic Uighur men and women are forced to study Chinese history, write personal reflections, and sing songs like "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China." 

Many are beaten, tortured, and are unable to go home.
China considers this process "re-education." 

It runs outside the court system with people dragged away for infringements like talking to a loved one overseas or having a beard, and there is no course for appeal.
A recent estimate put the number of people who have been, or are currently, interned since April 2017 just over one million.
Though the exact total is unknown, Adrian Zenz, a social researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, pored over local job ads and government bids to find new evidence of the system's existence and scale.
Old town of Kashgar, in East Turkestan

Since 2016, there were government bids to construct or upgrade 73 facilities in East Turkestan that, despite various names, appeared as though they will operate, wholly or at least in part, as re-education centers.
Re-education centers are often disguised as vocational training hubs, as many were in these bids, but the details betray their hidden purpose.
Together, the facilities required guard rooms, video surveillance, security fences, police equipment, police living quarters, handheld security inspection devices, steel-reinforced concrete walls, and even iron chains.
"Many of these facilities are heavily secured, to an extent that they do not just aim to keep potential intruders out, but to keep those inside under tight surveillance." Zenz told Business Insider.
Twenty bids listed new or upgraded monitoring or video surveillance. 

One bid from January wanted 122 cameras to cover the whole facility without leaving any "dead angles."
One center required security nets, the renovation of a guard room, and "four watchtowers." 

Another, submitted on 25 April, requested an 86,000 square-foot "underground facility."
These security features, according to Zenz, confirm reports that vocation centers frequently function as internment camps, though many facilities likely sit on a continuum.
"All we know is that a substantial number of facilities, likely capable of holding at least several hundred thousand, are geared more towards the re-education side. Some are explicitly and directly marked as re-education facilities. More than likely, facilities with a stronger vocational training focus can likewise hold several hundred thousands," said Zenz.

"Some even specifically state that they are designed to perform 're-education.' 

An official government notice from April 2017 pertaining to these facilities in a particular prefecture mandated that training topics include military drill, Chinese language, legal knowledge, ethnic unity, religious knowledge and patriotic education."

A policeman holding shield and baton guards a security post leading into a center believed to be used for re-education in Korla in East Turkestan on Nov. 2, 2017.

Job ads are also a huge giveaway
As easy as it may be to silently whisk away thousands of people to new re-education centers, skyrocketing prisoner would also require a huge recruitment drive.
According to Zenz, from May 2017, counties with large ethnic minority populations "initiated a wave of recruitments" for so-called education and training centers.
But ads for such staff were often listed in the same ads as open police positions, and some ads even preferred recruitees with a military or police background.
Other job ads conflated the two roles, hiring "training center policing assistants." 

If the staff were being hired to work at a regular vocation center the high number of security personnel would be "difficult to explain," said Zenz.
Ads also frequently lacked required skills or qualifications that would normally be crucial to providing vocational training. 

Many required only a middle-school education whereas other provinces, where few Uighur would live, usually require at least a bachelor degree.
In one East Turkestan county, where Uighurs make up 95% of the population, 320 jobs available at a "training center" had three criteria: have a middle-school education, be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, and be part of the ethnic majority Han.
An Uighur woman protests in front of policemen on July 7, 2009 in Urumqi, the capital East Turkestan

Re-education isn't the only problem Uighurs face
In an attempt to crack down on religion, authorities in East Turkestan have targeted almost any form of religious expression by Uighur Muslims.
Women have been banned from wearing burqas and veils. 

Residents were barred from fasting during Ramadan with restaurants ordered to stay open despite religious obligations. 

And in 2016, millions of East Turkestan residents were ordered to surrender their passports and must seek permission to travel abroad.
Authorities have installed surveillance apps on residents' phones and begun collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types from all East Turkestan residents aged between 12 and 65. 

They have also collected voice samples that may be used to identify who is speaking on tapped phone calls.
There's also 40,000 facial-recognition cameras that are being used to track, and block, the movement of Uighurs in the region.
East Turkestan is considered by experts to be a testing ground for what the US State Department has described as "unprecedented levels of surveillance."
The concern is East Turkestan could also be a testing ground for a nationwide re-education system.

Chinese Colonialism

China’s Campaign Against Uighur Diaspora Ramps Up

In its attempts to control Uighurs abroad, the Chinese government is holding families hostage.
BY MARTIN DE BOURMONT
People hold placards and flags during a demonstration of France's exiled Uyghur community on July 4, 2010 in Paris.

Mahmut, a Uighur living in a Scandinavian country, describes 2017 as the “saddest” year for his family.

Born to secular Muslim parents, Mahmut, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, says his family’s troubles began in late 2016 when the Chinese government pressured a cousin and his wife to return to East Turkestan from Egypt.
Local authorities threatened to imprison his parents and confiscate their property if his cousin, who was studying theology, did not return. 

When Mahmut’s cousin arrived in East Turkestan, the authorities jailed him and his wife.
Then, in early summer 2017, Mahmut tried to call his mother, who was recovering from a recent hospitalization. 

No one picked up, and Mahmut feared for the worst.
Communication with his parents was already sporadic, and when his father finally picked up the phone, Mahmut could sense fear in his voice. 

“Your mother went to study,” he told Mahmut, saying that community service officials had instructed her to go.
As Beijing continues its clampdown on East Turkestan, the state is using overseas Uighurs’ families in China as a way to pressure them.
And over the past year, the Chinese government has intensified its campaign to surveil and intimidate the diaspora, according to Uighurs and outside experts following the issue.
“This is clearly part of the determined push to silence overseas critics,” says Kevin Carrico, a lecturer in Chinese studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. 

“Whether Uighurs, Tibetan, Han, Australian, or American, anyone who is outspokenly critical of the party-state’s increasingly ridiculous policies is going to eventually feel pressure.”
A Turkic-speaking minority, Uighurs in China and abroad have faced increasing repression from the state over the past few years in response to a low-level insurgency in East Turkestan, a reaction rights advocates argue is vastly disproportionate.
In East Turkestan, the government has established a sophisticated surveillance network that mixes informers, guards, and high-tech measures such as a DNA database, and thousands of Uighurs — potentially up to 10 percent of the ethno-national group — now languish in re-education camps.
With East Turkestan locked down, China is now looking to rein in the Uighur diaspora, often outspoken in its opposition to Beijing’s rule. 

Last year, China ordered some Uighurs studying abroad to return home or risk having their families punished. 

In Europe, Chinese police contacted Uighurs in France demanding personal information, and China also detained relatives of six U.S.-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia’s Uighur service.
Parhat, an American citizen — who also asked not to be identified by his real name — faced problems similar to Mahmut. 

In October 2016, police arrested Parhat’s niece under the pretext that her laptop contained copies of forbidden Islamic texts.
She was released after a month, only to be arrested again in June 2017.
Parhat decided to return, in part to arrange new care for his sister, who was ill and had been cared for by his niece. 

Landing at a major airport in eastern China, security personnel detained him for more than three hours with no explanation.
When he finally arrived at the small city in East Turkestan where most of his family lives, Parhat’s older brother told him that police officers had paid him a visit a few days before his arrival. 

The police had asked Parhat’s brother to “take him to us.”
Two days later, Parhat was detained by public security officials, who took him to a squalid hotel room, where they confiscated his phone and personal documents, including his passport. 

Holding a packet of what seemed like hundreds of names, the officials began reading them out loud and asking if he knew people who worked at the Uyghur American Association.
“The guy was telling me how big a crime I committed because I helped those people to escape and join ISIS,” Parhat says.
Parhat was released later that evening on the condition that he agree to continue talking to security officials. 

Instead, he fled East Turkestan, intending to book an earlier return flight to the United States from a city in eastern China. 

As Parhat waited to go through security at the airport, officials began to pull Uighurs out of the line. Terrified, Parhat pretended not to speak Chinese and showed his American passport.
After passing for a foreigner, Parhat got through the checkpoint.
Parhat’s brother-in-law was not so lucky. 

Following Parhat’s escape from East Turkestan, his brother-in-law was arrested. 

“Nobody knows where he is,” Parhat says.
Alongside the surveillance and detention system, the Chinese government applies another tactic that seeks to turn loved ones and trusted confidants against one another, says James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of East Turkestan. 

“There are cases of Uighurs communicating, clearly under duress, and saying scripted things to deliver a message to relatives or friends abroad,” Millward says.
According to Ilshat Hassan, a prominent Uighur activist in the United States, this practice goes back many years.
In 2009, Hassan — who left East Turkestan in 2003 — received word from his now ex-wife that he would be offered a good job with a high salary, among other benefits, if he returned home.
Later, a former university classmate of Hassan’s, now working as a police officer, called him in 2012 and said he would be reunited with his wife and son if he behaved well.
The pressure campaign may not be entirely new, but technology has made it more powerful.
“It’s the technological element that was not there before,” Millward says. 

“So many people communicate via WeChat and phones and Skype, [and] because the internet is so controlled now, the Chinese state can know of all communications like that. They know and can visit a family within hours or minutes even of a contact from abroad. Many families have had to delete contact information from their phones.”
For those like Parhat, the consequences of the Chinese government’s policies in East Turkestan reverberate far beyond its borders. 

“The whole of East Turkestan was like a prison,” Parhat says. 

“Once you get in, it’s very hard to go out.”
“Relatively few people who have made it through these [re-education camps] and made it out have felt it wise to share that information internationally,” says Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. 

“Most of what we know about, from a small handful of sources, really, is people being obliged to sit for hours at a time and listen to lectures about the merits of Xi Jinping thought, for example.”
For those abroad, such as Mahmut, answers about what has become of their relatives sent to the camps are hard to come by.
Sending coded messages to a cousin outside of East Turkestan, Mahmut learned that his mother had been placed in a re-education camp.
Mahmut began to call relatives in East Turkestan, only to find they were too afraid to speak to him. “They don’t answer,” Mahmut says. 

“Or they hear my voice and don’t talk and cut the connection.”
The cousin also told Mahmut that the Chinese government had recently recalled a distant relative from Turkey, only for the relative to die under mysterious circumstances in a East Turkestan prison.
Then, in January, Mahmut lost contact with his father. 

Neighbors reported that he, too, was in re-education.

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.”

Chinese Colonialism

China holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Chinese police patrolling the old town in Kashgar, East Turkestan. The city has been the focus of a major crackdown on the Muslim Uighur people.

At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed.
Radio Free Asia (RFA), a US-backed news group whose journalists have produced some of the most detailed reporting on the heavily securitised region of Xinjiang, said it obtained the figure from a security official in Kashgar, a city in China’s far west that has been the focus of a major crackdown.
Last year, as Xi Jinping was crowned China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at a politically sensitive congress in Beijing, Xinjiang’s re-education centres were “inundated” by detainees, who were forced to endure cramped and squalid conditions.

Just in the city of Kashgar – which has a population of about half a million inhabitants – tens of thousands of people were confined. 

Taking into account the wider region around Kashgar, the number rose to 120,000.
Maya Wang, a Human Rights Watch campaigner who wrote a recent report on the camps, said the figures cited by RFA were credible although growing levels of repression in Xinjiang meant reliable numbers were impossible to ascertain. 

Estimates of the total number of people who have spent time in such centres in Xinjiang, which has a population of about 22 million, ran as high as 800,000, Wang added. 

“It’s just like a black hole which people are added to and don’t get out of.”
Kashgar, the largest city in southern East Turkestan, has found itself at the eye of a growing security storm since a hardline party leader, Chen Quanguo, took charge of the region in the summer of 2016.
Activists and academics say a key strand of an increasingly high-tech push to control Xinjiang’s residents has been the creation of “re-education centres”, where those suspected of going against the party’s teachings or being “politically unreliable” are being interned in their thousands.
Last year BuzzFeed visited one such institution, known as the Kashgar Professional Skills Education and Training Centre, describing a beige building with shades covering its windows. 

“People disappear inside that place,” one local warned.
One leading East Turkestan expert told Canada’s Globe and Mail the camps were “a form of enforced disappearances in a very organised way”.
China defends what authorities call “extremism eradication” schools as an important part of its fight against radicals it blames for a wave of attacks.
According to Human Rights Watch’s report, the centres are often housed in converted government buildings such as schools or specially built facilities. 

Wang said detainees were often held, unlawfully and without charge, as a result of religious “offences” such as excessive praying or non-religious acts such as accessing proscribed websites.
Wang said that while authorities claimed the centres were about combating terrorism and separatism, they were in fact designed to brainwash and assimilate Uighurs. 

“At the political education facilities, they sing patriotic songs. They learn about Xi Jinping thought. These are 'patriotic' measures aimed at making Uighurs love the Chinese government,” she said. 

“It’s extreme repression and yet completely silent.”