China's oppression of Muslim citizens has entered a new stage with news emerging about a system of reeducation and detention camps aimed at isolating people the state identifies as Muslims to "cure" them of religion. The main targets are Uighurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang - what they prefer to call "East Turkestan" - with Chinese officials claiming to defend their country against extremism. The facts indicate systematic persecution of religious and ethnic minorities.
Since China announced its Open Up the West campaign in 1999, the mechanics of crony capitalism, as described in a 2016 essay Lucrative Chaos by Thomas Cliff, have combined with China's geo-economic strategy, rising nationalism and authoritarianism to produce an increasingly unequal society in Xinjiang, one marred by ethnic discrimination and managed by a surveillance regime of unprecedented sophistication. Chinese authorities justify high expenditures on public security by deploying the language of the War on Terror. One official recently made the hyperbolic claim that the crackdown is meant to prevent Xinjiang from becoming "China's Syria." Such rhetoric once earned China the tacit support of the United States and the United Nations, but international concern has increased following revelations of mass incarceration.
The PRC's crackdown in Xinjiang has sent up to one million people into the camps, mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs, and many more have been disappeared. While the majority of those detained or sentenced to reeducation are ordinary Uyghur men, some high-profile cases have emerged, including those of a prominent anthropologist and the "Uighur Justin Bieber," along with eyewitness testimony from former detainees and camp workers. Mounting evidence from official PRC documents and satellite imagery of prison camps confirm the programme's existence and suggest its scope and extent - and has been presented to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the UN.
Chinese representatives deny the allegations, claiming instead that many Uighurs have been sent to vocational training schools or arrested for minor crimes. Coincidentally, many of the so-called vocational schools feature guard towers and razor wire, while the alleged crime rate has increased sharply: 21 per cent of all arrests in China in 2017 were made in Xinjiang, which accounts for 1.5 per cent of the nation's population.
Nevertheless, the international response remains muted with political factors in play: Uighurs, unlike Tibetans, have relatively low name recognition and little serious support abroad. For complex historical reasons, the Uyghur cause has largely been championed by conservative politicians or far-right groups with little chance of implementing policy. Those politicians often deploy the Uyghur issue cynically from an anti-China rather than pro-Uyghur position. Economic factors also discourage international outcry. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would seem to be a natural ally to the Turkic-speaking, mostly Sunni Uighurs and once referred to the situation in East Turkestan as "genocide." Instead, Turkey has strengthened economic ties with China through the Belt and Road Initiative. Other Muslim countries have been largely silent for similar reasons, prompting frustration among diaspora Uighurs. Some in the diplomatic community indicate that simply raising the issue of Muslim rights is enough to end productive discussion with Chinese counterparts and thus preclude negotiations on trade or security.
The PRC's ethnic policies in Xinjiang have long produced the opposite of their stated intended effects and will continue to do so. Official corruption and workplace discrimination have long denied Uighurs the economic benefits of resource extraction and development. The regional government has attempted to alleviate the pain of development with inconsistent and ham-handed efforts at cultural assimilation - a near-textbook example of how to create popular discontent and even encourage the anti-state Islamism that China has claimed to combat all along.
Xinjiang is an extreme form of China's emerging surveillance state. Citizens in East China, particularly those who live and work in massive factories, already experience similar techniques of discipline and surveillance, such as the use of biometric data to track citizens. Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who first experimented with his "grid-style social management" system in Tibet, has demonstrated the continued efficacy of combining technological surveillance with forcing citizens to police one another. Such techniques could be deployed elsewhere, wherever the party-state desires control and the companies producing security technology seek profits.
In Xinjiang, the technological sophistication of the reeducation and surveillance system suggests to some observers that the party state may have finally created the secularised, Sinicized Uyghur population it has desired for decades. Some reports state that the reeducation programme is slated to continue for 30 years, long enough to produce a generation steeped in 'Xi Jinping thought'. Reports that detainees' children have been placed in orphanages recall the Soviet Union's practice of placing well-trained wards of the state in leadership positions.
China will succeed if the international climate does not change quickly. The loss of credible US moral leadership and military power in Central Asia make it difficult for Uighurs' allies in the United States to intercede, although some may be speaking up precisely because they are not obliged to back up their words with actions. The prospects for change from within are dismal, and any domestic rebellion in Xinjiang would probably fail immediately. Meanwhile, as China adopts a superpower posture, its actions will create precedents, justified in terms of the PRC's interpretation of human rights and insistence on discretion in "internal matters." The outlook is grim.
-Yale Global