Chinazism

China’s Concentration Camps Turn to Forced Labor
By Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy

Chinese state television showed Muslims attending classes on how to be law-abiding citizens. Evidence is emerging that detainees are also being forced to take jobs in new factories.

KASHGAR, China — Muslim inmates from internment camps in far western China hunched over sewing machines, in row after row. 

They were among hundreds of thousands who had been detained and spent month after month renouncing their religious convictions. 

Now the government was showing them on television as models of repentance, earning good pay — and political salvation — as factory workers.
China’s ruling Communist Party has said in a surge of upbeat propaganda that a sprawling network of camps in the East Turkestan colony is providing job training and putting detainees on production lines for their own good, offering an escape from poverty, backwardness and the temptations of radical Islam.
But mounting evidence suggests a system of forced labor is emerging from the camps, a development likely to intensify international condemnation of China’s drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate a Muslim ethnic minority population of more than 12 million in East Turkestan.
Accounts from the region, satellite images and previously unreported official documents indicate that growing numbers of detainees are being sent to new factories, built inside or near the camps, where inmates have little choice but to accept jobs and follow orders.
“These people who are detained provide free or low-cost forced labor for these factories,” said Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a researcher in Turkey who has collected accounts of inmates in the factories by interviewing relatives who have left China. 

“Stories continue to come to me,” he said.
China has defied an international outcry against the vast internment program in East Turkestan, which holds Muslims and forces them to renounce religious piety and pledge loyalty to the party. 

The emerging labor program underlines the government’s determination to continue operating the camps despite calls from United Nations human rights officials, the United States and other governments to close them.

A satellite image taken in September shows an internment camp in East Turkestan. The buildings in the upper left corner appear to be of a design commonly used by factories.

The program aims to transform scattered Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities — many of them farmers, shopkeepers and tradespeople — into a disciplined, Chinese-speaking industrial work force, loyal to the Communist Party and factory bosses, according to official plans published online.
These documents describe the camps as "vocational training centers" and do not specify whether inmates are required to accept assignments to factories or other jobs. 

But pervasive restrictions on the movement and employment of Muslim minorities in East Turkestan, as well as a government effort to persuade businesses to open factories around the camps, suggest that they have little choice.
Independent accounts from inmates who have worked in the factories are rare. 

The police block attempts to get near the camps and closely monitor foreign journalists who travel to East Turkestan, making it all but impossible to conduct interviews in the region. 

And most Uighurs who have fled East Turkestan did so before the factory program grew in recent months.
But Serikzhan Bilash, a founder of Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, an organization in Kazakhstan that helps ethnic Kazakhs who have left neighboring East Turkestan, said he had interviewed relatives of 10 inmates who had told their families that they were made to work in factories after undergoing indoctrination in the camps.
They mostly made clothes, and they called their employers “black factories,” because of the low wages and tough conditions, he said.
Mr. Kasikci also described several cases based on interviews with family members: 

Sofiya Tolybaiqyzy, who was sent from a camp to work in a carpet factory. 

Abil Amantai, 37, who was put in a camp a year ago and told relatives he was working in a textile factory for $95 a month. 

Nural Razila, 25, who had studied oil drilling but after a year in a camp was sent to a new textile factory nearby.
“It’s not as though they have a choice of whether they get to work in a factory, or what factory they are assigned to,” said Darren Byler, a lecturer at the University of Washington who studies East Turkestan and visited the region in April.

Uighur men at a tea house in Kashgar, an area in southern East Turkestan that is a focus of the expanding labor program.

He said it was safe to conclude that hundreds of thousands of detainees could be compelled to work in factories if the program were put in place at all of the region’s internment camps.
The East Turkestan government did not respond to faxed questions about the factories, nor did the State Council Information Office, the central government agency that answers reporters’ questions.
The documents detail plans for inmates, even those formally released from the camps, to take jobs at factories that work closely with the camps to continue to monitor and control them. 

The socks, suits, skirts and other goods made by these laborers would be sold in Chinese stores and overseas markets.
Kashgar, an ancient, predominantly Uighur area of southern East Turkestan that is a focus of the program, reported that in 2018 alone it aimed to send 100,000 inmates who had been through the “vocational training centers” to work in factories, according to a plan issued in August.
That figure may be an ambitious political goal rather than a realistic target. 

But it suggests how many Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities may be held in the camps and sent to factories. 

Scholars have estimated that as many as one million people have been detained. 

“I don’t see China yielding an inch on East Turkestan,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that lobbies China on human rights issues. 

“Now it seems we have entrepreneurs coming in and taking advantage of the situation.”
The evolution of the East Turkestan camps echoes China’s “re-education through labor” system, where citizens were sent without trial to toil for years. 

China abolished “re-education through labor” five years ago, but East Turkestan appears to be creating a new version.
Retailers in the United States and other countries should guard against buying goods made by workers from the East Turkestan camps, which could violate laws banning imports produced by prison or forced labor, Mr. Kamm said.
While the bulk of clothes and other textile goods manufactured in East Turkestan ends up in domestic and Central Asian markets, some makes its way to the United States and Europe.
Badger Sportswear, a company based in North Carolina, last month received a container of polyester knitted T-shirts from Hetian Taida, a company in East Turkestan that was shown on a prime-time state television broadcast promoting the camps.
The program showed workers at a Hetian Taida plant, including a woman who was described as a former camp inmate. 

But the small factory did not appear to be on a camp site, and it is unclear whether it made the T-shirts sent to North Carolina.
Ginny Gasswint, a Badger Sportswear executive, said the company had ordered a small amount of products from East Turkestan, and used Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, a nonprofit certification organization, to ensure that its suppliers meet standards.
Seth Lennon, a spokesman for Worldwide, said that Hetian Taida had only recently enrolled in its program, and the organization had no information on coerced labor in East Turkestan. 

“We will certainly look into this,” he said.
Repeated calls over several days to Wu Hongbo, the chairman of Hetian Taida, went unanswered.
Satellite imagery suggests that production lines are being built inside internment camps.

A state television broadcast promoting the internment camps showed textile workers at a company named Hetian Taida. The company shipped T-shirts to North Carolina last month.

Images of one camp featured in the state television broadcast, for example, show 10 to 12 large buildings with a single-story, one-room design commonly used for factories, said Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. 

The buildings are surrounded by fencing and security towers, indicating that they are heavily guarded like the rest of the camp.
“It seems unlikely that any detainee would be able to go to any building that they were not taken to,” Mr. Ruser said.
Commercial registration records also show at least a few companies have been established this year at addresses inside internment camps. 

They include a printing factory, a noodle factory and at least two clothing and textile manufacturers at camps in rural areas around Kashgar. 

Another clothing and bedding manufacturer is registered in a camp in Aksu in northwestern East Turkestan.
The government’s effort to connect the internment camps with factories emerged this year as the number of detainees climbed and East Turkestan faced rising costs to build and run the camps.
Many camps were once called “transformation through education centers” by the government, reflecting their mission: inducing inmates to cast aside Islamic devotion and accept Communist Party supremacy.
But since August, the Chinese government has defended the camps by arguing that they are "job training centers" that will help lift detainees and their families out of poverty by giving them the skills to join China’s economic mainstream. 

Many rural Uighurs speak little Chinese, and language training has been advertised as one of the main purposes of the camps.
Yet the practical training in the camps often appears to be rudimentary, said Adrian Zenz, a social scientist at the European School of Culture and Theology who has studied the campaign.

The old city of Kashgar, where officials set a goal of sending 100,000 camp inmates to work in factories this year.

An early hint of the factory labor program came in March when Sun Ruizhe, the president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, described it to senior industry representatives, according to a transcript of his speech that was posted on industry websites.
Sun said that East Turkestan planned to recruit from three main sources to increase the textile and garment sector’s work force by more than 100,000 in 2018: impoverished households, struggling relatives of prisoners and detainees, and the camp inmates, whose training “could be combined with developing the textile and apparel section.”
In April, the East Turkestan government began rolling out a plan to attract textile and garment companies. 

Local governments would receive funds to build production sites for them near the camps; companies would receive a subsidy of $260 to train each inmate they took on, as well other incentives.
In remarks in October defending the camps, a top official in East Turkestan, Shohrat Zakir, said the government was busy preparing “job assignments” for inmates formally finishing indoctrination and training. 

A budget document this year from Yarkant, a county in Kashgar, said the camps were responsible for “employment services.”
The inmates assigned to factories may have to stay for years.
Mr. Byler said a relative of a Uighur friend was sent to an indoctrination camp in March and formally released this fall. 

But he was then told he had to work for up to three years in a clothing factory.
A government official, Mr. Byler said, suggested to his friend’s family that if the relative worked hard, his time in the factory might be reduced.
The Chinese state media has cynically praised the centers as leading wayward people toward "modern civilization".

It also reports that the workers are "generously" paid.
“The training will turn them from ‘nomads’ into skilled marvels,” the official Xinjiang Daily said last month. 

“Education and training will make them into ‘modern people,’ useful to society.”

In China's far west the perfect police state is emerging

During a trip through China’s violence-plagued Xinjiang, the Guardian witnesses dramatic security surge as Communist party fights to ‘pacify’ region

By Tom Phillips in southern Xinjiang

Shopkeepers perform daily "anti-terror" drill outside the bazaar in Kashgar, in March. 

It was Friday, the Islamic day of assembly, but outside Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque on Liberation Avenue it was the growl of diesel engines that filled the air not a muezzin’s wistful cry.
One by one armoured personnel carriers, some with machine guns poking from their turrets, rolled towards People’s Square where a 12-metre statue of Mao Zedong was preparing to preside over the latest in a series of tub-thumping “anti-terror” rallies to be held here in the heartlands of China’s Muslim Uighur minority this year.
Open-backed lorries packed with heavily-armed troops joined the procession, red and yellow propaganda banners draped from their sides.
“Unity and stability are blessings! Separatism and unrest are a curse!” read one.
A second warned: “Let all those terrorists who dare to be enemies of the people be smashed to pieces!”
To ensure the march went off without a glitch, police had placed this entire city of about half a million inhabitants on lock down. 

“All the roads are blocked,” said a black-clad officer who was posted outside the mosque with a 12 gauge shotgun slung across his chest.
The mass rally, witnessed by the Guardian at the end of April, came as a long-running crackdown in China’s violence-stricken far west hit draconian new heights.
Three days earlier thousands of armed troops had swept onto the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where, according to one local newspaper, they vowed to “sacrifice everything for the party and the people” in their fight against the Islamic "extremists" Beijing blames for a series of attacks on government officials and civilians.
“Please rest assured, my fellow countrymen, that I will ... crack down on the arrogance of those violent gangs and terrorists so they are left with no road to go down and no place to hide,” one participant told reporters.
A week before, more than 1,000 troops flooded Aksu, a city in Xinjiang’s south, for a three-day show of strength. 

“Suddenly a siren rang out and vehicles shot out onto the streets like swords being drawn from their sheaths,” read an account of the event by one local propaganda writer.

‘The perfect police state’
The parades are part of a wider security escalation that has gripped China’s western frontier since Chen Quanguo, a Communist party hardliner who Beijing credits with quelling a wave of unrest in Tibet, was drafted into Xinjiang last summer.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher who has studied the securitisation of both politically sensitive regions, said China’s leaders believed Chen had managed to contain a surge in self-immolations in the Tibet Autonomous Region, using a series of innovative and repressive policies such as high-tech surveillance and the introduction of tight social controls. 

Police patrolling the Old Town in Kashgar, a 2,000-year-old oasis city in China’s far west. 

Now, they hoped he could do the same in Xinjiang, a vast and resource-rich borderland that has endured decades of bloodshed including anti-government uprisings, ethnic rioting and, more recently, terrorist attacks targeting civilians. 

“I’m sure he has been sent there … to pacify Xinjiang,” said Zenz, from Germany’s European School of Culture and Theology.
Chen has wasted no time in putting his controversial ideas into practice. 

Since he became Xinjiang’s party chief last August thousands of security operatives, ranging from elite special forces to poorly trained rookies, have been deployed onto the streets of villages, towns and cities. 

Many are low-level surveillance officers tasked with keeping tabs on the region’s 23m inhabitants and – above all – members of the 10m-strong Uighur minority.
Zenz said the recruitment of security staff in Xinjiang had gone “absolutely through the roof” under Chen’s rule. 

In the first five months of this year, 31,000 such jobs were advertised -- more than the entire total between 2008 and 2012. 

Last year a record 32,000 security agents were hired.
“[It is] almost like in the old East Germany,” Zenz said. “The perfect police state.”

“What are they going to do? Start a war?”

A shopkeeper comes into the street brandishing a metal pole during a regular anti-terror drill in Tashkurga, Xinjiang. 

During a week-long road trip through southern Xinjiang, the Guardian saw first-hand how the unfolding security surge was affecting life across the region.
In a village near Upal, a Uighur market town 50km south of Kashgar, members of one local militia lined up in the main square, wielding 5ft metal rods, for what are now daily security drills. 

Nearby, the white and green armoured personnel carriers of China’s paramilitary People’s Armed Police raced past, along a corridor of white poplars. 

“I haven’t seen so many roadblocks since the last time I was in Hebron,” said a European traveller who had come to the region in search of the ancient Silk Road but had instead stumbled across scenes from a conflict zone.
Further south in Tashkurgan, a town on the border with Pakistan, an alarm sounded and shopkeepers rushed into the street brandishing poles and clubs. 

At a local hotel, the receptionist greeted guests in a black stab jacket; a medieval-style cudgel, spikes soldered into its tip, was propped up against the entrance near a metal detector.
Down the road another drill was underway with police training local men and women to bludgeon imaginary assailants with an arsenal of improvised hand-held weapons. 

“One, two, three,” the group shouted in unison, pummeling their invisible targets on the final count.

Weapons at the entrance to a hotel in Tashkurgan. 

The effects of Chen’s surge are also impossible to miss in Kasghar itself, a 2,000-year-old Silk Road oasis town where petrol stations, considered possible targets, now resemble prisons, with vehicles only allowed through their razor-wire perimeters one at a time.
By night the city lights up like a flickering disco ball as hundreds of newly built police strongholds, positioned at almost every intersection, illuminate the darkness with their red and blue glow.
As the sun rises, guards with clubs that resemble giant rolling pins and halberd-style spears assemble outside schools, shops and government buildings. 

Surveillance vehicles cruise the streets and troops with assault rifles man checkpoints on the outskirts of town, searching boots and demanding documents from commuters who are ordered off yellow city buses. 

It is almost impossible to walk without running into a security agent of some description.
“It’s extreme now,” sighed one local, who said they were shocked by the scale of the recent parades. “What are they going to do? Start a war?”
The crackdown has been accompanied by a ratcheting up of controls on religion in a place where it was already forbidden for under-18s to enter mosques, to broadcast calls to prayer or make unauthorised pilgrimages to Mecca.
This year there have been reports of authorities forbidding ‘Islamic’ names such as Islam, Muhammad or Mecca, outlawing face veils and “abnormal” beards and even ordering imams to praise Xi Jinping during religious services.
At Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque -- where the pro-Beijing imam was stabbed to death in the summer of 2014 -- worshippers file out through an arch fitted with at least six CCTV cameras. 

A nearby sign in English for tourists reads: “All ethnic groups warmly welcome the party’s religious policy ... All ethnic groups live friendly together here.”
Social controls have also been stepped since Chen took office with some citizens have reportedly being told to surrender their passports to police while others have been instructed to install GPS tracking devices in their vehicles. 

There are plans for the mass collection of DNA samples a move human rights campaigners lamented as a sign Beijing was taking “its Orwellian system to the genetic level”.

CCTV cameras at Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque. Worshippers are filmed by at least six CCTV cameras as they enter and leave.

‘I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee’
Daily life in Xinjiang goes on in spite of the crackdown. 

“It’s like this every day. It’s normal,” shrugged one Kashgar resident as a convoy of armoured vehicles sped by. 

But the tightening has pushed others to breaking point. 

Fighting back the tears, one young Uighur clutched this reporter’s arm as they described their growing despair at the repression and hope -- one day -- of fleeing overseas.
“I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee than Chinese,” they said, their hands trembling. 

“This is hell for me.”
Another resident captured the almost universal fear of discussing, let alone questioning, the changes sweeping the region. 

“The system is very tight, so we must be careful.” 

In 2014, Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual known for his moderate public criticism of Beijing’s policies in the region, was jailed for life for separatism.
Nick Holdstock, a British author who has written two books on Xinjiang, cautioned against lumping all Uighurs together as members of an “entirely down-trodden, oppressed minority”. 

“On some level things are getting better in Xinjiang. The infrastructure is improving. Its economy is quite healthy.”

But Holdstock said the outlook for Uighurs had grown increasingly bleak over the last three decades, with cultural and religious controls ramping up after a succession of now-notorious outbreaks of ethnic violence in 1990, 1997 and 2009.
“There is no sense in [the government’s] minds that anything that they are doing is necessarily part of the problem. It is the sense that the more troops you can have, the more security checkpoints, then that is the way to keep going.”

Wang Hongwei, a national security expert at Beijing’s Renmin University, said the “high-pressure crackdown” was designed to intimidate Islamist militants who threatened China’s national and political systems. 

“They are like millipedes whose bodies keep wriggling even when they are being cut into pieces,” Wang said, claiming there was nothing “excessive at all” about the recent mass parades.

On Liberation Avenue, outside Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque, Uighur men watch security forces file past for the city’s latest mass “anti-terror” rally.

Authorities defend the tightening as a necessary offensive against extremists they blame for a series of attacks, such as a machete attack on a train station in Kunming and a bombing in Urumqi.
But many experts -- who believe the violence is fuelled not by religious extremism but economic exclusion, government meddling and the erosion of Uighur culture and traditions -- fear clamping down further will only breed more resentment and bloodshed.
“I think they are going at the flies with a sledgehammer,” said one western Xinjiang scholar who asked not to be named for fear of not being allowed back into the country.
Zenz meanwhile warns the current policy by Beijing could inflame rather than extinguish anti-government anger.
“Xinjiang is a powder-keg … much more so than Tibet,” he said. 

“The combination of securitisation and crackdown on normal religious practise is an absolute recipe for disaster ... This is absolutely a ticking time-bomb.”