China’s Gulags–Uighur Incarceration Camps

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed, in August 2018, concerns on the incarceration of over a million Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province. The situation does not still appear to augur well for the Uighurs. On the other hand, structured violence against the Uighurs only has increased by the day.

Various reports consistently have indicated to the situation becoming grimmer than improving Uighur human, religious and cultural rights. The Chinese agenda appears to be completely different with incarceration based on religion and culture of the Uighurs.

China is experimenting a thorough ethnic rebooting of its minority nationalities, assimilating them and their resources to fulfil ‘Han’ China’s rejuvenation and dream. Despite inscribing rights related to religion, assembly, speech and others in its 1982 Constitution; China’s actual practice has come under cloud and is being carefully monitored by the international community.

In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done, using publicly available satellite images, coupled with many interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News found more than 260 structures built within the last couple of years bearing the hallmark of fortified detention centres. There is at least one detention centre in each county in Xinjiang province. China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim and religious minorities, in what is already the largest detention of minorities since World War II.

It has been reported that the so-called “Vocational Education Training Centres” in various parts of Xinjiang have become incarceration centres. The detention centres in Xinjiang have been built to fulfil the “social re-engineering project” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute found in its research that over 80,000 Uighurs have been forced to work in factories in Xinjiang producing goods for global brands like Apple, Nike, Volkswagen and others.

International criticism on China has also increased given the changes in the ground situation in Xinjiang. On June 30 this year, 27 countries have called on the United Nations Human Rights Council to conduct investigation. In July, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China demanded the United Nations for probe in Xinjiang.

The United States President Donald Trump approved in June 2020 the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 that seeks to punish China for mass surveillance and detention of the Uighurs. The US State Department awarded the 2020 International Women of Courage Award to a Uighur activist Sayragul Sauytbay.

Further, on July 9, 2020, invoking Global Magnitsky Act, the US had imposed sanctions on Xinjiang Communist party Secretary Chen Quanguo and three others for human rights violations. Chen earlier worked in Tibet as party secretary from 2011 to 2016 when he criticised the Dalai Lama as a “wolf in a sheep’s clothes”. He had introduced massive policing measures. As party secretary in Xinjiang since 2016, Chen introduced “strike hard” policies of massive scale surveillance systems on profiling the Uighurs.

Faced with growing criticism from the global community, China’s strategy is to continue to isolate the Uighur community, seek support from authoritarian regimes for its policies in Xinjiang, emphasize on its exclusive sovereignty, further the Belt and Road Initiative projects connecting Xinjiang to Central Asia and Europe, focus on “developmental agenda” in the region and seek aid from multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank for loans for its projects in the region. However, despite this “developmental agenda” the Uighur resistance to China’s policies are only increasing.

Uighur resistance to China’s policies are taking many forms. These include targeting police stations, party cadres, military convoys and infrastructure projects. As “endangered state security” cases in Xinjiang as compared to the national cases have increased substantially as the court cases have indicated, there is an increasing tendency to use extra-judicial incarceration in Xinjiang by the party-state recently.

Script: Prof. Srikanth Kondapalli, School of Chinese Studies, JNU

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