China's Final Solution: China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking.

More disclosures reveal the full impact of the Chinese repression of ethnic minorities — well beyond concentration camps.
By Adrian Zenz

Uighur men having tea in Yarkand County in the northwestern region of East Turkestan.

No more denying, no more dodging. 

The Chinese Communist Party can no longer hide its relentless campaign of mass internment against the ethnic minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan, or claim that the effort is an innocuous "educational" program. 

What was already widely known, vastly reported and confirmed by firsthand accounts has now been proved beyond doubt by the government’s own records — gigabytes of files, reams of reports, thousands of spreadsheets — some of them classified and highly confidential.
Last weekend, The New York Times disclosed and analyzed the contents of a trove of leaked internal Chinese government documents that outline specific policies for how to repress East Turkestan's predominantly Muslim minorities — and reveal that Xi Jinping himself set out the foundation for them.
This Sunday, the contents of two more sets of documents — all of which I have reviewed — are being disclosed. 

Among the first batch, also leaked, is a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, East Turkestan's deputy party secretary, which details how local authorities should manage and operate the “vocational skills training centers” — a euphemism for the concentration camps. (All translations here are mine.) 

The second set of documents, a large cache of files and spreadsheets from local governments, reveals the internment campaign’s devastating economic and social impact on the families and communities it targets.
The telegram — dated Nov. 5, 2017, and addressed to local political and legal affairs bureaus — is marked “extremely urgent” and bears the second-highest level of secrecy within China’s classified-document scheme. 

It reveals the extent of the security and surveillance measures taken around the camps, partly to shield the camps from external scrutiny. 

The message, a directive, notes that the work conducted there is “strictly confidential” and “highly sensitive” in nature. 

Even staff at the camps are forbidden from aggregating detainee figures.
The authorities’ attempt to enforce absolute secrecy is confirmed by another document dated November 2018, this one from a local government file in Hotan County. 

It chides officials for not “protecting secrets” related to the internment campaign well enough. 

It stipulates that “no person is under any circumstances permitted to disseminate information about detention or re-education via telephone, smartphone, or the internet,” and that officials are “strictly forbidden” from receiving “related media interviews” or make “unauthorized disclosure” about the internment campaign. 

That the Chinese authorities so deliberately sought to shield from external scrutiny information about operations at the East Turkestan camps suggests that they are only too aware of how incriminating their policies and practices are.
I was also able to obtain a massive cache of local government files from within East Turkestan. Among the most revealing documents are thousands of detailed spreadsheets with the names, identification numbers and addresses of tens of thousands of people, mostly Uighurs and many of them in detention, prison or concentration camps.
In Yarkand, a county of about 800,000 people in southwestern East Turkestan, 96 percent of the population is Uighur. 

Six official spreadsheets about six villages dated 2018 show that, on average, nearly 16 percent of the rural adult population was either interned or in prison. 

In two villages in Kosherik Township — which the documents describe as “heavily polluted by extremist ideology” — nearly 60 percent of all households had one person or more interned.
In addition to the extraordinary scale of the internment campaign, the files reveal its devastating impact well beyond the camps — deep into the communities and families of East Turkestan.
The spreadsheets show that the government has primarily targeted middle-age men, most often the heads of the households and main wage-earners. 

Beijing’s occasional tours of its so-called model camps often feature attractive young women. 

In reality, people between 30 and 59 were especially likely to be interned, according to the spreadsheets.
The policy’s socioeconomic fallout is dire — and local governments are keeping a meticulous record of it. 

One spreadsheet from 2017 for one town in Yarkand County, which listed households with low incomes that might qualify for welfare, included a young family with five children between the ages of three and 14. 

The father had been imprisoned, the mother placed in a concentration camp and the children, in effect, orphaned.
In another, hardly unusual, case, a household’s two working-age parents were detained, leaving elderly grandparents — including a grandmother described as “seriously ill” — to care for two toddlers. 

In a column with the header “reason for poverty,” the relevant spreadsheet offers this explanation: “lacks labor force and finances.” 

The toddlers’ father isn’t scheduled to be released until 2030.
Another spreadsheet from September 2018 shows lists of loan defaulters in Pilal Township, Akto County. 

In 80 percent of the cases where the reason for default was listed as “internment,” most of the borrowed funds were shown to still be in the bank.
A particularly depressing example comes from a village in Yarkand County. 

A Uighur farmer and head of a family of five was interned in 2017. 

In October 2016, he had received a loan of 40,000 renminbi (nearly $5,700) to purchase agricultural machinery. 

The equipment went unused during his detention — no other family member knew how to operate it — and the loan could not be repaid as scheduled. 

The government directed the family to rent out the equipment and send its oldest child, a son, to work. 

The family was then officially marked as having been “poverty-alleviated by benefiting from policies.” 

In June 2018, after his release, the farmer applied for financial assistance so he could repay the loan and related interest. 

In January 2019, he started to work in the Yarkand County textile industrial park, earning just 800 RMB (about $113) a month. 

By then, the son, age 20, had somehow become disabled and was listed on government forms as unable to work.
Thanks to these new document disclosures, we now have hard evidence — and the government’s own evidence — that in addition to implementing a vast internment program in East Turkestan, the Chinese Communist Party is deliberately breaking up families and forcing them into poverty and a form of indentured labor. 

For all its efforts at secrecy, the Chinese government can no longer hide the extent, and the reach, of its campaign of repression in East Turkestan.
Some important elements are still unknown. 

The total internment figure remains a well-guarded secret. (Based on the new evidence, I have revised my own estimate: I think that between 900,000 and 1.8 million people have been detained in East Turkestan since the spring of 2017.) 

Also missing from the official documents that have surfaced so far are precise records of how the detainees are treated and how, exactly, the process of "re-education" works. (About those things, however, we have witness accounts.) 

The confidential telegram and local files do not mention the use of physical violence — but for one notable exception. 

The telegram states that people who resist brainwashing must be singled out for “assault-style re-education.” 

Yet another sinister understatement, and it suggests that force and torture are, in fact, widely used.
In a way, though, we already know all that we really need to know. 

The documents that have been disclosed these past few weeks reveal the staggering scale of the repression in East Turkestan and its ruinous effects on the region’s ethnic communities, well beyond the camps themselves. 

Consider this: Official statistics show that the combined net population growth rates of Hotan and Kashgar, two of the largest Uighur regions, dropped by about 84 percent between 2015 and 2018.
The Chinese Communist Party set out, it claimed, to “transform through education” ethnic minorities in East Turkestan. 

In fact, it is ripping apart entire communities and subjugating them on a colossal scale. 

And this, at the direction of Xi Jinping himself.

China's Reinhard Heydrich -- Zhu Hailun

The man behind China's detention of one million Uighur Muslims

AP

This screenshot taken from the Xinjiang Legal News Network website shows Zhu Hailun who has played a key role in detaining a million or more Uighurs in detention camps. 

After bloody race riots rocked China's far west a decade ago, the ruling Communist Party turned to a rare figure in their ranks to restore order: a Han Chinese official fluent in Uighur, the language of the local Turkic Muslim minority.
Now, newly revealed, confidential documents show that the official, Zhu Hailun, played a key role in planning and executing a campaign that has swept up a million or more Uighurs into concentration camps.
Published in 2017, the documents were signed by Zhu, as then-head of the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Communist Party in the East Turkestan colony.

A Uighur linguist recognized Zhu's signature scrawled atop some of the documents from his time working as a translator in Kashgar, when Zhu was the city's top official.
"When I saw them, I knew they were important," said the linguist, Abduweli Ayup, who now lives in exile. 

"He's a guy who wants to control power in his hands. Everything."
Zhu, 61, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Long before the crackdown and despite his intimate familiarity with local culture, Zhu was more hated than loved among the Uighurs he ruled.
He was born in 1958 in rural Jiangsu on China's coast. 

In his teens, during China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Zhu was sent to Kargilik county, deep in the Uighur heartland in East Turkestan. 

He never left.
Zhu joined the Party in 1980 and moved up East Turkestan's bureaucracy, helming hotspot cities. 

By the 90s, he was so fluent in Uighur that he corrected his own translators during meetings.
"If you didn't see him, you'd never imagine he's Han Chinese. When he spoke Uighur, he really spoke just like a Uighur, since he grew up with them," said a Uighur businessman living in exile in Turkey, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

The businessman first heard of Zhu from a Uighur friend who dealt with the official while doing business. 

His friend was impressed, describing Zhu as "very capable" — a Han Chinese bureaucrat the Uighurs could work with. 

But after years of observing Zhu oversee crackdowns and arrests, the businessman soon came to a different conclusion.

A sample of classified Chinese government documents leaked to a consortium of news organisations, is displayed for a picture in New York on Friday. 

"He's a crafty fox. The really cunning sort, the kind that plays with your brain," he said. 

"He was a key character for the Communist Party's policies to control Southern East Turkestan."
Ayup, the linguist, met Zhu in 1998, when he came to inspect his township. 

He was notorious for ordering 3 a.m. raids of Uighur homes, and farmers would sing a popular folk song called 'Zhu Hailun is coming' to poke fun at his hard and unyielding nature.
"He gave orders like farmers were soldiers. All of us were his soldiers," Ayup said. 

"Han Chinese controlled our homeland. We knew we needed to stay in our place."
Months after a July 5, 2009 riot left hundreds dead in the region's capital of Urumqi, Zhu was tapped to replace the city's chief. 

Beijing almost always flew in officials from other provinces for the job, in part as training for higher posts. 

But central officials on a fact-finding mission in Urumqi concluded that Zhu, seen as tougher than his predecessor, needed to take charge.
"They were super unhappy," said a Uighur former cadre who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. 

"It had never happened before, but because locals said he was outstanding at maintaining stability, he was snatched up and installed as Urumqi Party Secretary."
Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar. Classified documents lay out the Chinese government's deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities. 

Upon appointment, Zhu spent three days holed up in the city's police command, vowing to tighten the government's grip. 

Police swept through Uighur neighborhoods, brandishing rifles and rounding up hundreds for trial. Tens of thousands of surveillance cameras were installed.
But instead of healing ethnic divisions, the crackdown hardened them. 

Matters came to a head in April 2014, when Chinese dictator Xi Jinping came to East Turkestan on a state visit. 

Just hours after his departure, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.
Xi vowed to clamp down even harder.
In 2016, Beijing appointed a new leader for East Turkestan — Chen Quanguo. 

Chen, whose first name means "whole country", had built a reputation as a hard-hitting official who pioneered digital surveillance tactics in Tibet.

A guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around one of a growing number of concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, where by some estimates over 1 million Muslims have been detained. 

Zhu was his right-hand man. 

Appointed head of the region's security and legal apparatus, Zhu laid the groundwork for an all-seeing state surveillance system that could automatically identify targets for arrest. 

He crisscrossed the region to inspect internment centers, police stations, checkpoints and other components of an emerging surveillance and detention apparatus.
After Chen's arrival, Uighurs began disappearing by the thousands. 

The leaked documents show that Zhu directed mass arrests, signing off on notices ordering police to use digital surveillance to investigate people for having visited foreign countries, using certain mobile applications, or being related to "suspicious persons". 

State television shows that Zhu continued on his relentless tour of East Turkestan's camps, checkpoints, and police stations, personally guiding the mass detention campaign.
Zhu stepped down last year after turning 60, the traditional retirement age for cadres in the Chinese Communist Party. 

Chen remains in his post.
"Chen Quanguo came in the name of the Party," said the Uighur businessman. 

"Zhu knows how to implement, who to capture, what to do."