‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the East Turkestan colony.
BY AUSTIN RAMZY AND CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.
Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of concentration camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.
The Chinese authorities in the East Turkestan colony worried the situation was a powder keg.

And so they prepared.
The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. 

It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

“They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. 

If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.”

The question-and-answer script also included a barely concealed threat: Students were to be told that their behavior could either shorten or extend the detention of their relatives.

“I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good,” officials were advised to say, “and also for your own good.”​
The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. 

They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in East Turkestan, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

Read the Full Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps

The party has rejected international criticism of the camps and described them as "job-training centers" that use mild methods to fight Islamic extremism. 

But the documents confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words and orders of the very officials who conceived and orchestrated it.
Even as the government presented its efforts in East Turkestan to the public as benevolent and unexceptional, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in these internal communications. 

Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including the mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.
Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. 

Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. 

The key disclosures in the documents include:
• Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to East Turkestan in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants killed 31 people at a train station. 

Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

Xi Jinping visiting a mosque in the city of Urumqi in 2014. 

• Terrorist attacks abroad and the drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan heightened the leadership’s fears and helped shape the crackdown. 

Officials argued that attacks in Britain resulted from policies that put “human rights above security,” and Xi urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s “war on terror” after the Sept. 11 attacks.
• The concentration camps in East Turkestan expanded rapidly after the appointment in August 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealous new party boss for the colony. 

He distributed Xi’s speeches to justify the campaign and exhorted officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.”
• The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. 

Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.
The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. 

They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in East Turkestan. 

There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

The documents include

• 96 pages of internal speeches by Xi,
• 102 pages of internal speeches by other officials,
• 161 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in East Turkestan
• and 44 pages of material from internal investigations into local officials.

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. 

The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.
The Chinese leadership wraps policymaking in secrecy, especially when it comes to East Turkestan, a resource-rich territory located on the sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. 

The largest of these groups are the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and have long faced discrimination and restrictions on cultural and religious activities.

A restaurant in the old city of Yarkand in August. Above patrons a propaganda poster is quoting Xi Jinping : "Every ethnic group must tightly bind together like the seeds of a pomegranate."

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan. 

The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for East Turkestan.
Since 2017, the authorities in East Turkestan have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. 

Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.
Of the 24 documents, the directive on how to handle minority students returning home to East Turkestan in the summer of 2017 offers the most detailed discussion of the indoctrination camps — and the clearest illustration of the regimented way the party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.
Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.
Officials in Turpan, a city in eastern East Turkestan, drafted the question-and-answer script after the regional government warned local officials to prepare for the returning students. 

The agency coordinating efforts to “maintain stability” across East Turkestan then distributed the guide across the region and urged officials to use it as a model.
The government sends East Turkestan’s brightest young Uighurs to universities across China, with the goal of training a new generation of Uighur civil servants and teachers loyal to the party.
The crackdown has been so extensive that it affected even these elite students, the directive shows. 

And that made the authorities nervous.
“Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country,” the directive noted. 

“The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”

The document warned that there was a “serious possibility” students might sink into “turmoil” after learning what had happened to their relatives. 

It recommended that police officers in plain clothes and experienced local officials meet them as soon as they returned “to show humane concern and stress the rules.”

The directive’s question-and-answer guide begins gently, with officials advised to tell the students that they have “absolutely no need to worry” about relatives who have disappeared.

“Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs, and the standards are quite high,” officials were told to say, before adding that the authorities were spending more than $3 per day on meals for each detainee, “even better than the living standards that some students have back home.”

“If you want to see them,” the answer concluded, “we can arrange for you to have a video meeting.”​
The authorities anticipated, however, that this was unlikely to mollify students and provided replies to a series of other questions: 

• When will my relatives be released? 
• If this is for training, why can’t they come home? 
• Can they request a leave? 
• How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. 

Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.
“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. 

“No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”
Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.
“Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” one answer said. 

“This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”
The authorities appear to be using a scoring system to determine who can be released from the camps: The document instructed officials to tell the students that their behavior could hurt their relatives’ scores, and to assess the daily behavior of the students and record their attendance at training sessions, meetings and other activities.
“Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. 

“Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”

If asked about the impact of the detentions on family finances, officials were advised to assure students that “the party and the government will do everything possible to ease your hardships.”

The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, “Did they commit a crime?”

The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. 

“It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts,” the script said.

“Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”​

Secret Speeches
The ideas driving the mass detentions can be traced back to Xi Jinping’s first and only visit to East Turkestan as China’s leader, a tour shadowed by violence.
In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.
Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. 

And less than a month after Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.
Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in East Turkestan. 

While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.
The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.
“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. 

“None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”
“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”
In free-flowing monologues in East Turkestan and at a subsequent leadership conference on East Turkestan policy in Beijing, Xi is recorded thinking through what he called a crucial national security issue and laying out his ideas for a “people’s war” in the region.
Although he did not order mass detentions in these speeches, he called on the party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam in East Turkestan.

A watchtower this spring at a high-security facility near a concentration camp on the outskirts of Hotan.

Xi displayed a fixation with the issue that seemed to go well beyond his public remarks on the subject. 

He likened Islamism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.”“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to East Turkestan. 

“People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”
In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.”
“As soon as you believe in it,” he said, “it’s like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.”

Xi’s main point was unmistakable: He was leading the party in a sharp turn toward greater repression in East Turkestan.

Before Xi, the party had often described attacks in East Turkestan as the work of a few fanatics inspired and orchestrated by shadowy separatist groups abroad. 

But Xi argued that Islamic extremism had taken root across swaths of Uighur society.
In fact, the vast majority of Uighurs adhere to moderate traditions, though some began embracing more conservative and more public religious practices in the 1990s, despite state controls on Islam. Xi’s remarks suggest he was alarmed by the revival of public piety. 

He blamed lax controls on religion, suggesting that his predecessors had let down their guard.

Chinese security forces securing an area outside a mosque in Kashgar, China, in 2014. 

While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in East Turkestan, Xi said that was not enough. 

He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities.
“The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Xi told the leadership conference on East Turkestan policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market.

The Soviet Prism
Xi is the son of an early Communist Party leader who in the 1980s supported more relaxed policies toward ethnic minority groups, and some analysts had expected he might follow his father’s milder ways when he assumed leadership of the party in November 2012.
But the speeches underscore how Xi sees risks to China through the prism of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he blamed on ideological laxity and spineless leadership.
Across China, he set about eliminating challenges to party rule; dissidents and human rights lawyers disappeared in waves of arrests. 

In East Turkestan, he pointed to examples from the former Soviet bloc to argue that economic growth would not immunize a society against ethnic separatism.
The Baltic republics were among the most developed in the Soviet Union but also the first to leave when the country broke up, he told the leadership conference. 

Yugoslavia’s relative prosperity did not prevent its disintegration either, he added.
“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right,” Xi said. 

“But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself.”
In the speeches, Xi showed a deep familiarity with the history of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule, or at least Beijing’s official version of it, and discussed episodes rarely if ever mentioned by Chinese leaders in public, including brief periods of Uighur self-rule in the first half of the 20th century.
Violence by Uighur militants has never threatened Communist control of the region. 

Though attacks grew deadlier after 2009, when nearly 200 people died in ethnic riots in Urumqi, they remained relatively small, scattered and unsophisticated.
Even so, Xi warned that the violence was spilling from East Turkestan into other parts of China and could taint the party’s image of strength. 

Unless the threat was extinguished, Xi told the leadership conference, “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected.”
Setting aside diplomatic niceties, he traced the origins of Islamic extremism in East Turkestan to the Middle East, and warned that turmoil in Syria and Afghanistan would magnify the risks for China. Uighurs had traveled to both countries, he said, and could return to China as seasoned fighters seeking an independent homeland.
“After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia,” Xi said. 

“East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in East Turkestan.”
Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, responded to the 2009 riots in Urumqi with a clampdown but he also stressed economic development as a cure for ethnic discontent — longstanding party policy. 

But Xi signaled a break with Hu’s approach in the speeches.
“In recent years, East Turkestan has grown very quickly and the standard of living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist violence have still been on the rise,” he said. 

“This goes to show that economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and security.”
Ensuring stability in East Turkestan would require a sweeping campaign of surveillance and intelligence gathering to root out resistance in Uighur society, Xi argued.
He said new technology must be part of the solution, foreshadowing the party’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in East Turkestan. 

But he also emphasized old-fashioned methods, such as neighborhood informants, and urged officials to study how Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Like the United States, he said, China “must make the public an important resource in protecting national security.”
“We Communists should be naturals at fighting a people’s war,” he said. 

“We’re the best at organizing for a task.”
The only suggestion in these speeches that Xi envisioned the concentration camps now at the heart of the crackdown was an endorsement of more intense indoctrination programs in East Turkestan’s prisons.
“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals,” he told officials in southern East Turkestan on the second day of his trip. 

“And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue.”
Within months, indoctrination sites began opening across East Turkestan — mostly small facilities at first, which held dozens or hundreds of Uighurs at a time for sessions intended to pressure them into disavowing devotion to Islam and professing gratitude for the party.
Then in August 2016, a hard-liner named Chen Quanguo was transferred from Tibet to govern East Turkestan. 

Within weeks, he called on local officials to “remobilize” around Xi’s goals and declared that Xi’s speeches “set the direction for making a success of East Turkestan.”
New security controls and a drastic expansion of the indoctrination camps followed.
“The struggle against "terror" and to safeguard stability is a protracted war, and also a war of offense,” Chen said in a speech to the regional leadership in October 2017 that was among the leaked papers.

In another document, a record of his remarks in a video conference in August 2017, he cited “vocational skills, education training and transformation centers” as an example of “good practices” for achieving Xi’s goals for East Turkestan.​
The crackdown appears to have smothered violent unrest in East Turkestan, but many experts have warned that the extreme security measures and mass detentions are likely to breed resentment that could eventually inspire worse ethnic clashes.
The camps have been condemned in Washington and other foreign capitals. 

As early as the May 2014 leadership conference, though, Xi anticipated international criticism and urged officials behind closed doors to ignore it.
“Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of East Turkestan,” he said.

‘Round Up Everyone’
The documents show there was more resistance to the crackdown inside the party than previously known — and highlight the key role that the new party boss in East Turkestan played in overcoming it.
Chen led a campaign akin to one of Mao’s turbulent political crusades, in which top-down pressure on local officials encouraged overreach and any expression of doubt was treated as a crime.
In February 2017, he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in a vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a “smashing, obliterating offensive.” 

In the following weeks, the documents indicate, the leadership settled on plans to detain Uighurs in large numbers.
Chen issued a sweeping order: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” 

The vague phrase appears repeatedly in internal documents from 2017.

The party boss for the East Turkestan colony, Chen Quanguo, right, during a Communist Party Congress in Beijing in 2017. 

The party had previously used the phrase — “ying shou jin shou” in Chinese — when demanding that officials be vigilant and comprehensive in collecting taxes or measuring harvests. 

Now it was being applied to humans in directives that ordered, with no mention of judicial procedures, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or antigovernment views.
The authorities laid out dozens of such signs, including common behavior among devout Uighurs such as wearing long beards, giving up smoking or drinking, studying Arabic and praying outside mosques.

For example, a 10-page directive in June 2017 signed by Zhu Hailun, then East Turkestan’s top security official, called recent terrorist attacks in Britain “a warning and a lesson for us.” 

It blamed the British government’s “excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security,’ and inadequate controls on the propagation of extremism on the internet and in society.”

It also complained of security lapses in East Turkestan, including sloppy investigations, malfunctions in surveillance equipment and the failure to hold people accused of suspicious behavior.

Keep up the detentions, it ordered. 

“Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it said. 

“If they’re there, round them up.”​
The number of people swept into the camps remains a closely guarded secret. 

But one of the leaked documents offers a hint of the scale of the campaign: It instructed officials to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in crowded facilities.

‘I Broke the Rules’
The orders were especially urgent and contentious in Yarkand County, a collection of rural towns and villages in southern East Turkestan where nearly all of the 900,000 residents are Uighur.
In the 2014 speeches, Xi had singled out southern East Turkestan as the front line in his fight against religious extremism. 

Uighurs make up close to 90 percent of the population in the south, compared to just under half in East Turkestan over all, and Xi set a long-term goal of attracting more Han Chinese settlers.
He and other party leaders ordered a quasi-military organization, the East Turkestan Production and Construction Corps, to accelerate efforts to settle the area with more Han Chinese, the documents show.
A few months later, more than 100 Uighur militants armed with axes and knives attacked a government office and police station in Yarkand, killing 37 people, according to government reports. In the battle, the security forces shot dead 59 assailants, the reports said.
An official named Wang Yongzhi was appointed to run Yarkand soon afterward. 

With his glasses and crew cut, he looked the picture of a party technocrat. 

He had grown up and spent his career in southern East Turkestan and was seen as a deft, seasoned official who could deliver on the party’s top priorities in the area: economic development and firm control of the Uighurs.
But among the most revealing documents in the leaked papers are two that describe Mr. Wang’s downfall — an 11-page report summarizing the party’s internal investigation into his actions, and the text of a 15-page confession that he may have given under duress. 

Both were distributed inside the party as a warning to officials to fall in line behind the crackdown.
Han officials like Mr. Wang serve as the party’s anchors in southern East Turkestan, watching over Uighur officials in more junior positions, and he seemed to enjoy the blessing of top leaders, including Yu Zhengsheng, then China’s most senior official for ethnic issues, who visited the county in 2015.
Mr. Wang set about beefing up security in Yarkand but he also pushed economic development to address ethnic discontent. 

And he sought to soften the party’s religious policies, declaring that there was nothing wrong with having a Quran at home and encouraging party officials to read it to better understand Uighur traditions.
When the mass detentions began, Mr. Wang did as he was told at first and appeared to embrace the task with zeal.
He built two sprawling new detention facilities, including one as big as 50 basketball courts, and herded 20,000 people into them.
He sharply increased funding for the security forces in 2017, more than doubling spending on outlays such as checkpoints and surveillance to 1.37 billion renminbi, or about $180 million.
And he lined up party members for a rally in a public square and urged them to press the fight against terrorists. 

“Wipe them out completely,” he said. 

“Destroy them root and branch.”

Military police at a rally in Hotan, in February 2017. 

But privately, Mr. Wang had misgivings, according to the confession that he later signed, which would have been carefully vetted by the party.
He was under intense pressure to prevent an outburst of violence in Yarkand, and worried the crackdown would provoke a backlash.
The authorities set numeric targets for Uighur detentions in parts of East Turkestan, and while it is unclear if they did so in Yarkand, Mr. Wang felt the orders left no room for moderation and would poison ethnic relations in the county.
He also worried that the mass detentions would make it impossible to record the economic progress he needed to earn a promotion.
The leadership had set goals to reduce poverty in East Turkestan. 

But with so many working-age residents being sent to the camps, Mr. Wang was afraid the targets would be out of reach, along with his hopes for a better job.
His superiors, he wrote, were “overly ambitious and unrealistic.”
“The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with realities on the ground and could not be implemented in full,” he added.
To help enforce the crackdown in southern East Turkestan, Chen transferred in hundreds of officials from the north. 

Publicly, Mr. Wang welcomed the 62 assigned to Yarkand. 

Privately, he seethed that they did not understand how to work with local officials and residents.
The pressure on officials in East Turkestan to detain Uighurs and prevent fresh violence was relentless, and Mr. Wang said in the confession — presumably signed under pressure — that he drank on the job. 

He described one episode in which he collapsed drunk during a meeting on security.
“While reporting on my work in the afternoon meeting, I rambled incoherently,” he said. 

“I’d just spoken a few sentences and my head collapsed on the table. It became the biggest joke across the whole prefecture.”
Thousands of officials in East Turkestan were punished for resisting or failing to carry out the crackdown with sufficient zeal. 

Uighur officials were accused of protecting fellow Uighurs, and Gu Wensheng, the Han leader of another southern county, was jailed for trying to slow the detentions and shield Uighur officials, according to the documents.
Secret teams of investigators traveled across the region identifying those who were not doing enough. In 2017, the party opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in East Turkestan for infractions in the “fight against separatism,” more than 20 times the figure in the previous year, according to official statistics.
Mr. Wang may have gone further than any other official.
Quietly, he ordered the release of more than 7,000 camp inmates — an act of defiance for which he would be detained, stripped of power and prosecuted.

“I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” Mr. Wang wrote.

“Without approval and on my own initiative,” he added, “I broke the rules.”​

Brazen Defiance
Mr. Wang quietly disappeared from public view after September 2017.
About six months later, the party made an example of him, announcing that he was being investigated for “gravely disobeying the party central leadership’s strategy for governing East Turkestan.”
The internal report on the investigation was more direct. 

“He should have given his all to serving the party,” it said. 

“Instead, he ignored the party central leadership’s strategy for East Turkestan, and he went as far as brazen defiance.”
Both the report and Mr. Wang’s confession were read aloud to officials across East Turkestan. 

The message was plain: The party would not tolerate any hesitation in carrying out the mass detentions.
Propaganda outlets described Mr. Wang as irredeemably corrupt, and the internal report accused him of taking bribes on construction and mining deals and paying off superiors to win promotions.
The authorities also emphasized he was no friend of Uighurs. 

To hit poverty-reduction targets, he was said to have forced 1,500 families to move into unheated apartments in the middle of the winter. 

Some villagers burned wood indoors to keep warm, leading to injuries and deaths, his confession said.
But Mr. Wang’s greatest political sin was not revealed to the public. 

Instead, the authorities hid it in the internal report.
“He refused,” it said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

Xiism and China's crimes against humanity

Global silence on China’s gulag
By Brahma Chellaney

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the East Turkestan colony at one point or another. 

Yet, with the exception of a recent tweet from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on China to ‘end its repression’, the international community has remained largely mute.
In its reliance on mass detention, the Chinese Communist Party has followed the Soviet Union’s example. 

But China’s concentration camps are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors, and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.
Although independent researchers and human-rights groups have raised awareness of practices such as force-feeding Muslims alcohol and pork, the Chinese authorities have been able to continue their assault on Islam with impunity. 

Even as China’s security agencies pursue Uyghurs and other Muslims as far afield as Turkey, Chinese leaders and companies involved in the persecution have not faced international sanctions or incurred any other costs.
Chief among the culprits, of course, is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who in 2014 ordered the policy change that set the stage for today’s repression of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui and members of other Muslim groups. 

The forcible assimilation of Muslims into the country’s dominant Han culture is apparently a cornerstone of Xiism—or ‘Xi Jinping Thought’—the grand ‘ism’ that Xi has introduced to overshadow the influence of Marxism and Maoism in China.
To oversee this large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities, Xi, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reassigned the notorious CCP enforcer Chen Quanguo from Tibet to East Turkestan and elevated him to the all-powerful Central Politburo. 

Though Chen’s record of overseeing human-rights abuses is well known, the Trump administration has yet to act on a bipartisan commission’s 2018 recommendation that he and other Chinese officials managing the gulag policy be sanctioned. 

In general, financial and trade interests, not to mention the threat of Chinese retribution, have deterred most countries from condemning China’s anti-Muslim policies.
With the exception of Turkey, even predominantly Muslim countries that were quick to condemn Myanmar for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims have remained conspicuously silent on China. 

Pakistan’s military-backed prime minister, Imran Khan, has feigned ignorance about the East Turkestan crackdown, and Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has gone so far as to defend China’s right to police ‘terrorism’.
Emboldened by the muted international response, China has stepped up its drive to Sinicise East Turkestan by demolishing Muslim neighbourhoods. 

In Urumqi and other cities, once-bustling Uyghur districts have been replaced with heavily policed zones purged of Islamic culture.
The irony is that while China justifies its ‘re-education camps’ as necessary to cleanse Muslim minds at home of extremist thoughts, it is effectively supporting Islamist terrorism abroad. 

For example, China has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against Masood Azhar, the head of the Pakistan-based, UN-designated terrorist group responsible for carrying out serial attacks in India, including on parliament and, most recently, on a paramilitary police convoy. 

As Pompeo tweeted, ‘The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. 

On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.’
An added irony is that while China still harps on about its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of foreign imperial powers, it has for decades presided over the mass humiliation of minorities in East Turkestan and Tibet. 

Ominously, by systematically degrading Muslim populations, it could be inspiring white supremacists and other Islamaphobes around the world. 

For example, Brenton Tarrant, the Australian extremist arrested for the recent twin mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared an affinity for China’s political and social values.

There has been a good deal of reporting about how China has turned East Turkestan into a laboratory for Xi’s Orwellian surveillance ambitions. 

Less known is how Xi’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative is being used as a catalyst for the crackdown. 

According to Chinese authorities, the establishment of a surveillance state is necessary to prevent unrest in the province at the heart of the BRI’s overland route.
Like Marxism–Leninism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, which left millions of people dead, Xiism promises to impose significant long-term costs on untold numbers of innocent people. 

It is the impetus behind China’s ruthless targeting of minority cultures and communities, as well as its aggressive expansion into international waters and introduction of digital totalitarianism.
Thanks to Xiism, the world’s largest, strongest and oldest autocracy finds itself at a crossroads. 

As the People’s Republic of China approaches its 70th birthday, its economy is slowing amid escalating capital flight, trade disruptions and the emigration of wealthy Chinese. 

The Chinese technology champion Huawei’s international travails augur difficult times ahead.
The last thing China needs right now is more enemies. 

Yet Xi has used his unbridled power to expand China’s global footprint and lay bare his imperial ambitions. 

His repression of Muslim minorities may or may not lead to international action against China. 

But it will almost certainly spawn a new generation of Islamist terrorists, compounding China’s internal security challenges. 

China’s domestic security budget is already larger than its bloated defence budget, which makes it second only to the United States in terms of military spending. 

The Soviet Union once held the same position—until it collapsed.

China’s Muslims Brace for Attacks

First, it was the Uighurs. Now, other Muslim minorities are being threatened—and the worst may be yet to come.
BY JAMES PALMER
A Chinese Hui Muslim girl wears a fancy headdress as she is held by her mother after Eid al-Fitr prayers marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at the historic Niujie Mosque on June 16, 2018 in Beijing, China. 

At a recent event at the Asia Society in New York discussing the million or more people, mostly Uighur Muslims, being held in internment camps in China’s western region of East Turkestan by the Chinese authorities, a young man of Chinese descent approached me with a disturbing question. 

“I’m a Hui person,” he said, referring to China’s largest Muslim minority group. 

“And among the community in China, they are very afraid that they will be next, after the Uighur. There are already ‘anti-halal’ groups attacking us and breaking the windows of our restaurants. What do you think will happen?”
The news for the Hui, and other Chinese Muslims, isn’t good. 

In mid-December, several provinces removed their halal food standards, a move heralded by government officials as fighting a fictional pan-halal trend under which Muslim influence was supposedly spreading into secular life. 

That’s a severe contrast with previous government policies, which actively encouraged the development of the halal trade for export. 

This week, meanwhile, three prominent mosques were shut, sparking protests. 

Many mosques across the country have already been closed, or forced to remodel to a supposedly more Chinese style, and the Communist Party presence there has been strengthened, with pictures of Xi Jinping placed in prominent locations and the walls covered in Marxist slogans.
There are more than 20 million Muslims in China, and 10 of the country’s 55 officially recognized minorities are traditionally Muslim, with the largest by far being the Hui and the Uighur. 

Islam’s history in China is more than a millennium old, and there have been previous clashes—as with other faiths—between imperial authorities and believers, most notably the Dungan rebellions of the 19th century. 

Muslim minority cuisine is common, cheap, and popular throughout the country; these restaurants usually feature Arabic writing and images of famous mosques on the walls. 

As Islamophobia has grown in the last four years, however, restaurants are increasingly removing any public display of their faith.
Islam isn’t the only religion being targeted. 

Beijing demands state control and oversight of all faiths. 

This supervision used to be run through the State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA), but that department was dissolved last March, with responsibility for religion taken over directly by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which handles the Communist Party’s control of civil society domestically. 

The dissolution of SARA also meant the end of many working relationships between the department and religious groups. 

Most of the former staff have left, and while Wang Zuo'an—the long-standing head of SARA known for a relatively light hand—is now one of 10 vice ministers at the UFWD, he has almost no staff, no power, and no role.
“SARA had become a very important buffer between the legitimate practices, needs, and works of the faiths and the demands of the party. Now it’s been turned into an instrument of overt and explicit control. They were once there to make religion work well. Now they are there to make religion work for the party,” commented one Westerner with long experience working with religious NGOs in China, who asked for anonymity. 

Local officials, meanwhile, under pressure in an increasingly paranoid internal party environment, have been forced to abandon policies of local tolerance in favor of heavy-handed enforcement.

On the ground, that has translated into a much colder environment for believers. 

Christians across the country have faced a wave of repression, with arrests of prominent ministers, the closure of churches, a ban on Bible sales online, and the removal of crosses. 

Tibetan Buddhism, always closely monitored, is being more tightly watched than ever. 

Even so-called Chinese religions, such as Taoism and non-Tibetan Buddhism, are having a tough time, being denied permission for new buildings or classes and going through layers of added bureaucracy.
But the turn against Islam is by far the most prominent—and potentially the nastiest—example of China’s clampdown on religion.
In large part, it flows from the adoption of a totalitarian regime in East Turkestan, where any Islamic practice is now read by the security state as a sign of potential extremism. 

Other Muslim communities were previously able to endure the storm in part because their Uighur members were forced back to East Turkestan; even advocates of Saudi-style Salafism were able to operate in Ningxia and elsewhere.
Today, though, the intensity of the anti-Islamic campaign in East Turkestan has resulted in other provinces adopting the same ideas, lest their leaders be accused of being soft on terrorism or of having ideological sympathy for Islam. 

That’s particularly the case for party officials who are from Islamic families; numerous Uighur officials have been arrested for being “two-faced”—presenting themselves as loyal party members while being secretly sympathetic to religion. 

“They used to ask the Hui officials to help handle Hui affairs sensitively,” a Han Chinese state employee who works in Islamic areas told Foreign Policy. 

“But now if you’re Hui, you have to be doubly hard on your own people.”
The state campaign has been backed by a growing popular Islamophobia, which has erupted in the last four years. 

Anti-Uighur racism has always existed, but it previously focused largely on ethnicity, not belief. 

The new hate largely began with the attack at a train station in the southern city of Kunming in 2014, when eight Uighur attackers killed 31 travelers. 

An aggressive Han chauvinism became the norm online—aided by it being one of the few remaining forms of tolerated public political speech. 

Many Chinese friends and colleagues bristled at any mention of Islam, seeing Westerners as anti-Chinese and biased in favor of Islam. 

While other online speech has been harshly shut down, the censors have barely touched abuse of Muslims, even calls for violence.
Chinese Islamophobes have created a mythical halalification movement, which functions in their imagination something like sharia does in the minds of rural American lawmakers fearful that the mullahs might start marching down Main Street. 

Food has often been a clashing point; young Uighurs often avoid eating in nonhalal restaurants not for religious reasons but as a gesture of cultural defiance, and the forced consumption of pork has now become routine in East Turkestan. 

In the minds of Chinese Islamaphobes, however, Muslims are the ones imposing themselves on good, ordinary Chinese. 

The mere offering of halal services is taken as a sign of imminent threat; when one delivery app included it as an option, Muslims faced a wave of online hate.
Several fears are bundled together here. 

Chinese are very worried about food safety, and the description of halal food as qingzhen—which just means “Islamic” but literally translates as “pure and clean”—created a belief that halal consumers were somehow privileged or claiming that the Han were dirty. 

That’s linked to a deep-seated belief among Han Chinese that ethnic minorities are enjoying special treatment, based on government policies that gave them bonus points on university entrance exams or allowed more lenient family planning. (The daily discrimination faced by visibly non-Han Chinese citizens was largely invisible to Han.) 

Fake news about Muslim atrocities has spread via social media into Chinese society.

In its attempts to control Uighurs abroad, the Chinese government is holding families hostage.

Hundreds of thousands of Uighur have been detained without trial in China's western colony of East Turkestan.

There could be another reason for Islamophobia in China. 

A newly powerful Han nationalism needs an internal enemy, and Islam fits the bill. 

Originally, the People’s Republic of China, like the Soviet Union from which it drew its model, envisaged itself as a multiethnic state. 

As with Russians in the Soviet state, though, Han Chinese massively dominated—but at least in official statements, Han chauvinism was condemned from the very top.
Today, however, Han nationalism is openly on the rise, both among ordinary Chinese and in state policy. 

Minority language education, once guaranteed, has been vastly restrained; even for minorities largely viewed in a positive light, such as Koreans, the number of schools offering their own tongues has shrunk from dozens to a handful. 

State rhetoric increasingly pushes a purely ethnonationalist line.
A new identity often depends on a convincing foe. 

The party might prefer it if young Han men and women defined the enemy as Americanness, but that’s impossible in a country that loves The Big Bang Theory and defines success as getting a child into Harvard University. 

Islam, however, makes for the perfect enemy. 

It’s perceived as foreign, but it’s present across China. 

It’s ideologically unacceptable to the state. 

It’s stained by an association with "terrorism". 

And for the vast majority of Han, it has no cultural or political appeal.
For China’s Muslim citizens, vast numbers of whom see themselves as loyal Chinese, the turn against their faith and history is already a tragedy. 

But with Islamophobia fueled by both the terror of East Turkestan and the anger of ordinary Chinese, there may be worse to come.

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.

China vs. Islam

Poet fears for his people as China 'Sinicizes' religion

By SAM MCNEILL

In this Sept. 28, 2018, photo, Muslim Chinese poet Cui Haoxin dons an Islamic hat in his home in the city of Jinan in the eastern province of Shandong, China. Cui is an outspoken critic of the government's policies towards Muslims at home and abroad, writing poetry and tweeting about alleged abuses against Islamic traditions. 

JINAN, China – Cui Haoxin is too young to remember the days of his people's oppression under Mao Zedong.
The 39-year-old poet was born after the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Hui — China's second-largest Muslim ethnic group — were among the masses tormented by the Red Guard.
In the years since, the Hui (pronounced HWAY) generally have been supportive of the government and mostly spared the kind of persecution endured by China's largest Muslim group, the Uighur.
There are signs, though, that that is changing.

Cui fears both that history may be repeating itself and for his own safety as he tries to hold the ruling Communist Party accountable.
In August, town officials in the Hui region of Ningxia issued a demolition order for the landmark Grand Mosque in Weizhou, though they later backed off in the face of protests.
More recently, authorities in nearby Gansu province ordered closed a school that taught Arabic, the language of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. 

The school had employed and served mainly Hui since 1984. 

And a Communist Party official from Ningxia visited East Turkestan, center of Uighur oppression, to "study and investigate how East Turkestan fights 'terrorism' and legally manages religious affairs."
China under Xi Jinping is clamping down hard on minorities, tightening control over a wide spectrum of religious and political activity. 

In many places, a campaign to "Sinicize" religion has prompted authorities to seize Bibles, remove the "halal" designation from food products, demolish churches and strip mosques of loudspeakers and Islamic crescents and domes.
Cui has spoken out against government intrusions. 

He is working on a novel with a nightmarish plot: believers are brutalized by demons in a Cultural Revolution in Hell. 

"The Muslims resisted and tried to protect the mosque," he said, describing the work. 

"They failed."
He worries that violence lies ahead.
"One has dignity. For a person, it is his or her bottom-line." he said. 

"If the persecution is too unbearable, if something happens, as I said, there could be a disaster."
___
Cui speaks eloquently about his people, who claim descent from Persian and Arab traders who came to China 1,300 years ago.
The 10 million Hui living across China generally speak Mandarin — Cui is a former teacher of the standard Chinese dialect — and follow many Chinese cultural practices. 

They enjoy relative freedom of worship compared to the Uighurs, some of whom call the Hui "tawuz," which means watermelon in the Uighur's Turkic language.
"Green or Islamic on the outside, and red or Communist on the inside," writes University of Toronto professor Isabelle Cote in a study on Uighur attacks on Hui in East Turkestan from 2009 to 2013. Farther back, Hui served Chinese emperors as shock troops repressing Uighur rebellions.
In Beijing, Arabic signs mark Hui bakeries, teahouses, halal restaurants and a thousand-year old mosque bustling with activity in the historically Islamic neighborhood of Niujie.
Ma Changli, who has run a butcher shop in the enclave for the past five years, said police help provide security for Friday prayers at the mosque.
"Our country has always been pretty supportive to our worship," the 39-year-old butcher said, standing in front of an Islamic inscription and hanging lamb and beef racks.
While the Hui face prejudice from the Han Chinese majority, they are proud to be Chinese and have a "positive outlook for the future," said David Stroup, a University of Oklahoma professor who met Hui across China in 2016.
Many saw an opportunity in China's Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion trade and infrastructure initiative that runs across several Muslim-majority nations in central Asia and Africa, he said. 

They aspired to become middlemen on a revived Silk Road linking China with Islamic nations.
"It was going to be an opportunity for the Hui to play an important role as ambassadors to the Islamic world," Stroup said.
It came as a shock, he said, when new regulations targeted the practices of Hui alongside those of other religious groups earlier this year. 

Stroup said the shift has dampened optimism in a community that saw language and religion as links to trading partners in the Muslim world.
___
Tension bubbled up in August in Weizhou, a dusty Muslim-majority town in China's northwestern "Quran Belt."
The town's pride and joy is a gleaming white mosque with four minarets and nine domes tipped with crescent moons that dwarfs a surrounding warren of brick and concrete homes.
Officials issued a demolition order for the Grand Mosque, alleging it had been "illegally expanded" and adding that 1.07 million yuan ($154,765) from foreign sources had been received by four local mosques — financing that would be illegal under Chinese law.
Hundreds of Hui flocked to the mosque's courtyard for a rarity in China: a political protest. 

City authorities detained AP journalists and prevented them from conducting interviews at the mosque.
The protesters' success was even rarer. 

The mosque remained unscathed, if draped in a banner reading in Chinese: "Stick to directives of Sinicized religion."
Weeks later, a top Communist propaganda official in Ningxia blamed the incident on "an oversimplified administrative decision" by local authorities.
"It originally should not have happened," Bai Shangcheng, director-general of the regional Communist Party department that oversees religious groups, said at a news conference in Beijing.
Dissent simmered quietly in the Hui community after the mosque incident, according to Cui, who circumvented China's internet censorship to tweet about the protest and feed video to a Turkish television station.
In late November, the Communist Party-run Global Times reported that Ningxia had signed an anti-'terrorism' cooperation agreement with East Turkestan during a visit by Ningxia Communist Party head Zhang Yunsheng.
China has set up a vast security apparatus in East Turkestan with pervasive police checkpoints and surveillance cameras. 

By some estimates, more than 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs have been detained in internment camps in a crackdown on 'extremism'. 

Two former camp detainees have told the AP that some Hui have been swept up in the clampdown too.
The order to close the Arabic language school came early this month, the Global Times reported. 

An unnamed expert in Beijing told the newspaper that teaching Arabic arouses public concern if it crosses over into preaching religious content.
The article quoted China's education law: "The State separates education from religion."
___
Cui is one of the few Chinese citizens disturbed enough — and brave enough — to criticize the Communist Party openly. 

For that, he has experienced censorship, detention, and "home visits" by police.
He spoke to The Associated Press at his home in Jinan, a city in eastern China where his family traces its roots back five centuries. 

Skyscrapers dwarf old mosques and boisterous halal restaurants with gold domes, Arabic script and crescents.
He doesn't drink alcohol or eat pork, but neither does he pray five times a day.
His bedside table is stacked with poetry and novels, not religious books.
Hanging in the living room is a framed red embroidery by his mother of the Islamic profession of faith in yellow Arabic stitching.
It was underneath this tapestry that police entered his home earlier this year to demand he stop criticizing the government online.
Cui posts attacks on Beijing's policies related to Muslims in China and abroad, such as the government's support of Myanmar despite widespread criticism of its treatment of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority.
A few months later, on Nov. 27, police brought him to the local Public Security Bureau for a few hours of questioning.
A recent Human Rights Watch report said that China started in November "targeting Twitter users in China as part of a nationwide crackdown on social media."
Cui refused to stop or delete his tweets.
Sixty years ago, Communist Party cadres descended on the historically Hui city of Linxia to excise "superstitions" in the city in a "struggle against the privileges of feudalism and religion," according to a 2016 book by Matthew Erie, an Oxford University professor of modern China studies.
Red Guards lit bonfires with wood from demolished mosques and tombs, Erie writes in "China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law."
They forced Muslims to wear signs reading "enemies of the state."
Cui fears the current crackdown on religion will return China to those days of blood.
At a teahouse in Jinan, as steam from his jasmine tea mixes with the scent from a tray of sweets, he recites from his poem "Letter from Prison:"

"It seems like I can see the bulldozer running wild in the Thousand and One Nights.

The angel upon my shoulder urges me: 'Tell the truth under the grey sky.'"

Chinazism: For China, Islam is a mental illness that needs to be cured

China's relentless campaign to erase the identity of the Uighurs continues, as the Muslim world remains silent.

By Khaled A Beydoun
Muslims pray at a mosque in Aksu, East Turkestan colony, China, August 3, 2012 

Abdulla* goes to bed every night dreading that knock on the door, a knock he has heard in recurrent nightmares and in stories from neighbours. 

He expects it can come at any moment.
He is an ethnic Uighur and has always called East Turkestan his home. 

His forefathers lived and toiled atop this land for centuries, which the nascent communist Chinese government annexed in 1949. 

He is a father of two, a son and a daughter, and a devout Muslim -- cautiously performing his five prayers every day behind the veil of secrecy his home temporarily offers him.
In the past months, several of his friends and colleagues have heard that dreaded knock on their doors and in the quiet of the night, disappeared with no trace or warning. 

Everybody, including Abdulla, knows where they have been taken and kept. 

But nobody knows for how long they will be held, nor do they know if they'll ever come back home. Most are yet to return, and those who have returned are shells of their former selves, neighbourhood ghosts, warning others of what looms around the corner for Uighurs refusing to disavow Islam.
In August, a United Nations human rights panel reported that nearly 1.1 million Uighur Muslims were being held in concentration camps in East Turkestan -- the colony in western China, home to approximately 11 million Uighurs. 

Gay McDougall, who sits on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, claimed that the imprisoned population could be as high as 2 million. 

Notwithstanding the estimates, the number of Uighur Muslims being arrested, uprooted from their families and lives, and imprisoned in concentration camps -- for no other reason than being Uighur and Muslim -- is rising with each passing day.
Shortly after the UN broke the news of the concentration camps, Sigal Samuel of The Atlantic reported that inmates were "forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day." 

Male inmates were compelled to shave their beards and were force-fed pork and alcohol -- which Muslims are forbidden from consuming.
These concentration camps, which hold more than 10 times the number of Japanese citizens and residents the US government locked away during World War II, are where Uighur Muslims are remade into atheist Chinese subjects.

These are horrific sites where fear and physical violence, psychological trauma and emotional abuse are all available tools, wielded to push Uighur inmates to renounce Islam, which the state has called a "mental illness", and reject the distinct Uighur customs that are deeply intertwined with their faith.
This programme of brainwashing and indoctrination is not exclusive to adults. 

The state also operates orphanages for Uighur Muslim children taken from their parents, where the process of disconnecting them from their Islamic faith and ethnic heritage is deeply inculcated into their education. 

At these orphanages, disguised as schools, China is converting future generations of Uighur Muslim children into loyal subjects who embrace atheism and Han customs, pushing them to turn their backs on their families and towards Beijing's vision of destroying the Uighur Muslim people.
Three months have passed since the UN broke the news of China's network of concentration camps and the ancillary programmes designed to purge Islam and destroy the Uighur people who cling so tightly to it. 

Yet, global outrage and political pressure are slow to match the velocity and ferocity of China's designs to cleanse itself of a population it deems inimical to and inassimilable with its national identity.
Why? 

Answers can be traced to prevailing economic and geopolitical pressures, namely, nations fearing the economic hit they would foreseeably take if they challenged or sanctioned China for its ethnic cleansing of the Uighur people. 

China is an economic superpower, and nations across the world rely on it heavily for imports, trade, and more. 

The economic factors deterring humanitarian intervention are accompanied by a global so-called "war on terror" landscape that opened the door for Beijing, after 9/11, to violently rev up its persecution of Uighur Muslims behind the veneer of countering terrorism. 

Today, China is violently upping the ante, capitalising on this global moment to use Islamophobia to push forward its own populist vision: Wiping out an indigenous people seeking self-determination and standing against the state-sponsored mandate of Han supremacy.
With Islam serving as the spiritual lifeline connecting the Uighur people to their land, their history and to one another, the state has zeroed in on it. 

If it can destroy Islam, Beijing believes, it can destroy the Uighurs. 

And this is precisely what it has been doing behind a curtain of global ignorance for years and, even after the UN lifted that curtain for the whole world to see in August, it has carried forward without pause.
For Abdulla, that feared knock on the door is yet to come. 

It may never come, or it may come tomorrow, or the day after. 

Yet, the fear of the unknown and the stark reality that every moment with his children, his wife, and his elderly parents, could be his last, follows his every step like a shadow. 

Beyond the walls of the concentration camps, East Turkestan has become an open-air prison for Uighur Muslims like Abdulla, whose every word is monitored and religious expression closely policed.
He only finds solace in prayer. 

Prostrating himself before Allah, beginning in the early morning and one final time after sitting with his children at dinner, he prays that the state does not take him away and destroy his family.
Yet, the paradox of prayer symbolises the imminent perils of being Muslim in East Turkestan today, whereby the more people are unwilling to relinquish their spiritual identity and disavow Islam, the more likely they are to be taken way and kept far from everybody they love and everything they know, locked away in a living hell devised to purge them of their faith, disintegrate their families, and wash away their nation.

*Name changed to protect identity

China's crimes against humanity

China Must End Its Campaign of Religious Persecution

By SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY Concentration Camps Construction is Booming in East Turkestan

The United States was founded on the premise that all individuals are created equal, with certain unalienable rights. 

Throughout our history, Americans have fought and died for these rights. 

They are ingrained in the fabric of our society and regularly debated, whether in coffee shops on Main Street or the halls of Congress.
Those fundamental rights and freedoms are part of our national identity, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. 

That’s why for more than a century, the United States has been a vocal supporter, not just rhetorically but financially, as well, of global humanitarian efforts.
Over the past two decades, religious persecution in China has become a larger and more pressing issue. 

The Department of State’s annual International Religious Freedom report has included the People’s Republic of China as a particularly concerning offender since 1999.
Disturbing reports have surfaced out of China of late detailing the imprisonment of Christian pastors, Bible burning, and demolishing of Christian churches. 

The Chinese government has rounded up more than one million Uighur and Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps. 

The state has long suppressed the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, as well as those who practice Falun Gong.
The Chinese government has removed crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 Christian churches as of a 2016 New York Times report, and has instructed police officers to stop citizens from entering their places of worship. 

There have been violent confrontations between government authorities and worshipers, and communist leaders have implemented restrictions prohibiting children 18 years old and younger from participating in religiously-focused education.
A piece published in Forbes earlier this year describes how Chinese authorities have bulldozed homes belonging to Uighur Muslims, collected passports to restrict travel and collected Uighur DNA and fingerprints in order to track its own citizens.
Communist leaders in China try to explain away these abuses by reiterating their commitment to preserving the Chinese culture, a practice known as sinicization. 

Approximately 100 million people in China belong to religious groups that are outside what the Chinese government deems acceptable. 

That’s approximately 100 million people who are subject to persecution by communist leaders in China, and even those that practice an officially sanctioned religion have not been spared harassment. That persecution stems from religious differences and has spread to other areas of daily life, including the restriction of social media.
The United States doesn’t have the singular authority to stop the religious persecution occurring in China, but it can apply significant pressure to Chinese leaders by linking the need for religious freedom to the economic and political aspects of our bilateral relationship that are important to China. As China’s largest trading partner, the United States is in a powerful position to influence Chinese leaders and stand up for human rights. 

Fighting for religious liberty should be a central part of the United States’ relationship with China. Senator David Perdue and I, with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a resolution condemning violence against religious minorities in China and reaffirming America’s commitment to promote religious freedom and tolerance around the world. 

It also calls on China to uphold its Constitution and urges the President and his administration to take actions to promote religious freedom through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1988, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, and the Global Magnitsky Act.
No matter where they live, everyone should be able to freely express their religious beliefs. 

The United States has been a beacon of freedom since before its founding. 

We must continue that tradition by doing what we can to promote human rights and freedoms both here and around the globe.