'If you enter a camp, you never come out': inside China's war on Islam

In Hotan, documents show officials are expanding detention camps and increasing surveillance

by Lily Kuo in Luopu

The Luopu County No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre is hard to miss. 

It emerges suddenly, a huge campus towering over hectares of farmland.
Outside the compound, surrounded by tall white concrete walls lined with barbed wire and surveillance cameras, a police car patrols while several guards carrying long batons stand watch. 

The centre, which straddles a highway, is bigger than most of the surrounding villages – about 170,000sq metres. 

A banner on one building says: “Safeguard ethnic unity.”
Half a dozen people stand on the roadside, staring at the buildings. 

No one is willing to say exactly what this prison-like facility is or why they are waiting on its perimeter.

Images of East Turkestan, China, taken in December as part of a Guardian investigation into the mass detention of Uighur Muslims in China. 

“We don’t know,” says an older woman. 

Another woman has come to see her brother but declines to say more. 

A young girl with her two brothers announces they have come to see their father. 

Her mother quickly hushes her.
They are reluctant to talk because the building is not a formal prison or university, but an internment camp where Muslim minorities, mainly Uighurs, are sent against their will and without trial for months or even years.
Researchers and residents say East Turkestan, where the Luopu County No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre is located, has borne the brunt of the government’s crackdown on Muslims because of its density of Uighurs and distance from major cities.
“We have a saying in Hotan: If you go into a concentration camp in Luopu, you never come out,” said Adil Awut*, from Hotan City, who is now living overseas.
In December, the United Nations asked for direct access to the camps after a panel said it had received “credible reports” that 1.1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs, Hui and other ethnic minorities had been detained.

Beijing has aggressively defended its policies and sought to portray the camps as benign and East Turkestan, where outbursts of violence occurred in the 1990s and 2000s, as peaceful thanks to government efforts.

Uighur leaders say China's actions are precursors to genocide

A starkly different reality emerges in Luopu, also known as Lop county, where Guardian interviews with current and former residents and analysis of public documents reveal new details about the government’s continuing campaign in one of the worst-affected areas of East Turkestan.
Local authorities are expanding detention camps, increasing surveillance and policing, and co-opting residents through intimidation, force and financial incentives.

The cost of ‘stability control’
In the past year, at least 10 buildings have been added to the No 1 Vocational Skills Training Centre, according to satellite imagery. 

Construction work on the camp, identified through company records found by the University of British Columbia student Shawn Zhang, was still being carried out when the Guardian visited in mid-December.
Luopu, a sparsely populated rural county of about 280,000 that is almost entirely Uighur, is home to eight internment camps officially labelled “vocational training centres”, according to public budget documents seen by the Guardian.

Police patrol the Old Town in Kashgar, to the west of Luopu county. 

In 2018, officials expected to accommodate 12,000 “students” as well as another 2,100 inmates at another detention centre – a total of about 7% of the county’s adult population, or 11% of the entire male population.
Luopu county also planned to spend almost 300m yuan ($44m) on “stability control”, including almost $300,000 on a surveillance system to cover all mosques, and funding for almost 6,000 police officers to work in “convenient police stations” and security checkpoints, as well as to patrol residential areas.
The security measures and staggering costs underline China’s commitment to its controversial policies in East Turkestan despite growing criticism.
Across the province, domestic security expenses doubled in 2017 as the security campaign got under way, with spending on detention centres in counties with large concentrations of ethnic minorities quadrupling, according to Adrian Zenz, a researcher focused on China’s ethnic policies.
Budget overruns were common. 

Luopu county exceeded its budget by almost 300% in 2017, the highest increase in spending in all of Hotan prefecture.
Yet, the buildup continues. 

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute analysed 28 camps across East Turkestan and found they had expanded 465% in size since 2016, with the largest growth between July and September last year. Five camps in Hotan city and surrounding counties had at least doubled in size, with one camp increasing 2,469% between 2016 and 2018.
In Luopu, officials are bringing more than 2,700 assistant officers into the county’s 224 villages and townships. 

The “students” are closely monitored: almost 2,000 staff and police have been hired to oversee 12,000 detainees.
Authorities are also spending money on incentivising residents. 

Officials in Luopu hire local imams and other religious leaders as “patriotic religious people”, paid a yearly stipend of 4,200 yuan (about $600) in an area where average disposable income is 6,800 yuan a year. 

Their job is in part to stop residents from going on non-government organised pilgrimages to Mecca.
The relatively low-level assistant police, recruited mostly from Uighur communities, are paid 4,100 yuan a month, almost on a par with police in major cities.
Some local governments are struggling to maintain this pace of spending. 

In neighbouring Cele county, where authorities expected to have almost 12,000 detainees in "vocational" camps and detention centres, a budget for 2018 says: “There are still many projects not included in the budget due to a lack of funds. The financial situation in 2018 is very severe.”
As China’s economy slows, they may struggle even more. 

Zenz said: “The sustainability of this system basically depends on the financial capabilities of the central government … The long-term financial sustainability of all these top-down measures is certainly questionable.”

‘Don’t come here’
Today, Hotan prefecture is under “grid style” management, involving intense policing and mass surveillance. 

On the Luopu government website, it is described as “often in a state of level one or two response”, the highest state of emergency.
In Luopu, like many places in East Turkestan, the movements of Uighur residents are restricted. While Han Chinese are waved through security checkpoints, Uighur commuters register their ID cards, do full body scans, have their vehicles searched and their faces scanned.

CCTV monitoring on a street corner in Luopu county.

Hand-held devices scan smartphones for content deemed problematic. 

A police officer demanded to check the phone of a Guardian reporter because, she said “someone saw Arabic or Uighur language on it”.
Abdulla Erkin*, born and raised in Luopu county, was living in Urumqi, in the north of East Turkestan, when the crackdown began in earnest. 

He says his family warned him not to return. “They all told me: ‘Don’t come here. Don’t come here. Just live in Urumqi.’” 

His sister, who works in a local government bureau in Luopu told him: “It’s worse day after day.”
Erkin says most of his friends have been sent to a camp or prison. 

Now living overseas, he discovered last month that two of his brothers had been detained, and he fears five of his nephews have also gone. 

A Uighur businessman living in north-eastern China told the Guardian he left Hotan because of the constant threat of being detained.
“My sense as well is that the counties of Hotan prefecture have been the target of most severe repression,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who has been focusing on East Turkestan. 

“From the perspective of the state, Hotan is framed as the most ‘backward and resistant’.”
Chinese officials have said international observers are “welcome to East Turkestan”, but Guardian reporters were questioned by police in Luopu for four hours and followed by at least seven people in Hotan City.
An official at the police station adjoining the No 1 Vocational Training Centre told the Guardian “all reporters, foreign or Chinese, from outside East Turkestan” were subject to their security measures.

‘Red star’ households
In a village in Luopu county, almost every home has a plaque on the door marking it a “model red star family”. 

These are families who have met requirements, including demonstrating “anti-extremism thought” and a “sense of modern civilisation”.
Over the past year, Luopu local officials have gathered villagers to sing patriotic songs, a practice common in the camps, or to teach female residents how to be “good new era women” who promote “ideological emancipation”.
But it’s not clear that these initiatives are what have inspired obedience.
A woman burning a pile of branches lists people in her family who have been sent “to training”, including her 16-year-old son. 

Another woman says her husband has been in training in a different village since December 2017. She doesn’t know why he was sent. 

“We have always been farmers,” she says.
A man carrying plastic bags of naan and skewers explains that his neighbour has gone to the training centre. 

He suddenly interrupts himself: “We are scared talking with you.” 

He says: “They will retaliate.”

* Name has been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers
By Chris Buckley

“That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings,” Abdusalam Muhemet said of the internment camp in East Turkestan, where he and other Muslims were held for months.

HOTAN, China — On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. 

Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.
Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.
The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.
Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. 

Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.
“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. 

“That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”
This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. 

It is part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.
Though limited to China’s western colony of East Turkestan, it is the country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era — and the focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.
China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain an iron grip in East Turkestan, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups. 

Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.
After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.

A sign describes this facility on the edge of Hotan, a city in East Turkestan, as a “concentrated transformation-through-education center.”

“East Turkestan is in an active period of "terrorist" activities, intense struggle against separatism and painful intervention to treat this,” Xi told officials, according to reports in the state news media last year.
In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the use of informers and expanded police surveillance, installing cameras in people’s homes. 

The campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured communities and families.
“Penetration of everyday life is almost really total now,” said Michael Clarke, an expert on East Turkestan at Australian National University in Canberra. 

“You have ethnic identity, Uighur identity in particular, being singled out as this kind of pathology.”
China has categorically denied reports of abuses in East Turkestan. 

At a meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.
“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in East Turkestan policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 

The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security measures were comparable to those of other countries.
The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.
The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps — usually called “transformation through education” centers — that has expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any system of appeal for those detained.
The New York Times interviewed four recent camp inmates from East Turkestan who described physical and verbal abuse by guards; grinding routines of singing, lectures and self-criticism meetings; and the gnawing anxiety of not knowing when they would be released. 

Their accounts were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Uighurs with relatives who were in the camps or had disappeared, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.
The Times also discovered reports online written by teams of Chinese officials who were assigned to monitor families with detained relatives, and a study published last year that said officials in some places were indiscriminately sending ethnic Uighurs to the camps to meet numerical quotas.
The study, by Qiu Yuanyuan, a scholar at the East Turkestan Party School, where officials are trained, warned that the detentions could backfire and fan radicalism. 

“Recklessly setting quantitative goals for transformation through education has been erroneously used” in some areas, she wrote. 

“The targeting is imprecise, and the scope has been expanding.”

A satellite image taken over Hotan in late August showed that the internment camp, center, had expanded. 

Eradicating a ‘Virus’
The long days in the re-education camp usually began with a jog.
Nearly every morning, Mr. Muhemet recalled, he and dozens of others — college graduates, businessmen, farmers — were told to run around an assembly ground. 

Impatient guards sometimes slapped and shoved the older, slower inmates, he said.
Then they were made to sing rousing patriotic hymns in Chinese, such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” 

Those who could not remember the words were denied breakfast, and they all learned the words quickly.
Mr. Muhemet, a stocky man who ran a restaurant in Hotan before fleeing China this year, said he spent seven months in a police cell and more than two months in the camp in 2015 without ever being charged with a crime. 

Most days, he said, the camp inmates assembled to hear long lectures by officials who warned them not to embrace Islamic radicalism, support Uighur independence or defy the Communist Party.
The officials did not ban Islam but dictated very narrow limits for how it should be practiced, including a prohibition against praying at home if there were friends or guests present, he said. 

In other sessions, the inmates were forced to memorize laws and write essays criticizing themselves.
“In the end, all the officials had one key point,” he said. 

“The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party, the backwardness of Uighur culture and the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”
After two months, Mr. Muhemet’s family was finally allowed to visit the camp, located near “New Harmony Village,” a settlement built as a symbol of friendship between ethnic Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. 

“I couldn’t say anything,” he recalled. 

“I just held my two sons and wife, and cried and cried.”
The East Turkestan government issued “deradicalization” rules last year that gave vague authorization for the camps, and many counties now run several of them, according to government documents, including requests for bids from construction companies to build them.

Police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets of Hotan every few hundred yards. Xi Jinping, seen on the screen above, has overseen a security crackdown across East Turkestan.

Some facilities are designed for inmates who are allowed to go home at night. 

Others can house thousands around the clock. 

One camp outside Hotan has grown in the past two years from a few small buildings to facilities on at least 36 acres, larger than Alcatraz Island, and work appears to be underway to expand it further, according to satellite photos.
In government documents, local officials sometimes liken inmates to patients requiring isolation and emergency intervention.
“Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation-through-education classes before illness arises,” a document issued by party authorities in Hotan said.
The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. 

Estimates range from several hundred thousand to a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.
About 1.5 percent of China’s total population lives in East Turkestan. 

But the region accounted for more than 20 percent of arrests nationwide last year, according to official data compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group. 

Those figures do not include people in the re-education camps.
Residents said people have been sent to the camps for visiting relatives abroad; for possessing books about religion and Uighur culture; and even for wearing a T-shirt with a Muslim crescent. 

Women are sometimes detained because of transgressions by their husbands or sons.
One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of “religious extremism,” including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.

Chinese military police at a rally last year in Hotan. Schools, hospitals and other facilities in the city are ringed by barbed wire.

‘We Are in Trouble’
Hotan feels as if under siege by an invisible enemy. 

Fortified police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets every few hundred yards. 

Schools, kindergartens, gas stations and hospitals are garlanded in barbed wire. 

Surveillance cameras sprout from shops, apartment entrances and metal poles.
“It’s very tense here,” a police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”

This city of 390,000 underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. 

Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. 

But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. 

Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress.
Now the beards and hijabs are gone, and posters warn against them. 

Mosques appear poorly attended; people must register to enter and worship under the watch of surveillance cameras.
The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in East Turkestan’s capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead. 

Xi and his regional functionaries went further, adopting methods reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and “work teams” assigned to ferret out dissent.
They have also wired dusty towns across East Turkestan with an array of technology that has put the region on the cutting edge of programs for surveillance cameras as well as facial and voice recognition. 

Spending on security in East Turkestan has soared, with nearly $8.5 billion allocated for the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies last year, nearly double the previous year’s amount.
The campaign has polarized Uighur society. 

Many of the ground-level enforcers are Uighurs themselves, including police officers and officials who staff the camps and security checkpoints.
Ordinary Uighurs moving about Hotan sometimes shuffle on and off buses several times to pass through metal detectors, swipe their identity cards or hand over and unlock their mobile phones for inspection.

On patrol in Hotan. “It’s very tense here,” one police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”

A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in East Turkestan, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. 

Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.
The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. 

Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.
The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. 

The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.
One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.
“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. 

“Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”
A Uighur woman in her 20s who asked to be identified only by her surname, Gul, said she came under scrutiny after wearing an Islamic head wrap and reading books about religion and Uighur history. 

Local officials installed cameras at her family’s door — and inside their living room.
“We would always have to be careful what we said and what we did and what we read,” she said.
Every week, Ms. Gul added, a neighborhood official visited and spent at least two hours interrogating her. 

Eventually, the authorities sent her to a full-time re-education camp.
Ms. Gul, who fled China after being released, later tried to contact her brother to find out if he was in trouble. 

He sent a wordless reply, an emoticon face in tears.
Afterward, Ms. Gul’s mother sent her another message: “Please don’t call us again. We are in trouble.”

Walking past a mosque in the city of Kashgar. Muslims throughout East Turkestan are under intense scrutiny. “Penetration of everyday life is almost really total now,” one expert said.

Broken Families
The Chinese government says it is winning a war against Islamic extremism and separatism, which it blames for attacks that have killed hundreds in recent years. 

Information about such violence is censored and incomplete, but incidents appear to have fallen off sharply since 2014, when the “deradicalization” push began.
Still, many who have emerged from the indoctrination program say it has hardened public attitudes against Beijing.
“It was of absolutely no use,” said Omurbek Eli, a Kazakh businessman, of his time held in a camp in 2017. 

“The outcome will be the opposite. They will become even more resistant to Chinese influence.”
For many families, the disappearance of a loved one into the camps can be devastating, both emotionally and economically — a point reflected in reports posted online by the party’s “work teams.”
Some of these reports describe Uighur families unable to harvest crops on their own because so many members have been taken away, and one mentioned a mother left to care for five children. 

In another report, an official near Hotan described holding a village meeting to calm distraught relatives of those sent to the camps.
The mass internments also break Uighur families by forcing members to disown their kin or by separating small children from their parents. 

So many parents have been detained in Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan, that it has expanded boarding schools to take custody of older, “troubled” children.
“Whether consciously or unconsciously, authorities in East Turkestan have recognized the power of families as an alternative source of authority,” said Rian Thum, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who has followed the detentions. 

“The kind of extreme party loyalty they want has no room for that.”
Ms. Gul said the camp she was in was ramshackle enough that children who lived nearby sometimes crept up to a window late at night and called out to their mothers inside. 

“Their children would come and say, ‘Mother, I miss you,’” she said.
“We didn’t say anything,” she added, “because there was a camera inside the cell.”