China has rejected all accusations of human rights violations in Xinjiang, its northwestern province. Less than half the population of this province is Uyghur Muslim, a people that has been the subject of systematic abuse and incarceration by the Chinese authorities.
But China continues to be obdurate that it is not guilty of crimes charged against it by the UN, the US, the UK and the EU, who have insisted that the Chinese government allow unfettered access to a UN mission to investigate crimes against the Uyghur population. This month (June 2022), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visited Xinjiang, and the US and other countries have also called for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to set up a mission to investigate labour abuses in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a mostly desert region and produces about a fifth of the world’s cotton. Human rights groups have alleged that much of that cotton export is harvested by forced labour, and, in 2021, some Western corporations banned Xinjiang cotton from their supply chains.
In December 2020, BBC research exposed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang. There is evidence that new factories have been built within the grounds of purported `re-education camps’.
Over the past few years, China has incessantly oppressed freedom of expression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong under the guise of “anti-separatism”, “anti-extremism” and “counter-terrorism”. In Xinjiang, since 2017, an estimated one million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim peoples were arbitrarily detained without trial and subjected to political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation in “transformation-through-education” centres. Despite having initially denied the existence of these camps, authorities later described them as “vocational training” centres or “re-education camps”. Nevertheless, satellite imagery indicated that an increasing number of these camps continued to be built over the years.
Several countries, including the US, UK, Canada and the Netherlands, have held China culpable of committing genocide in Xinjiang. Genocide is defined by international convention as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
There have been reports that, as well as interning Uyghurs in camps, China is conducting mass sterilisation of Uyghur women to whittle down the native population. China has also been systematically diluting the proportion of Uyghur population in Xinjiang by perpetrating mass migrations of Han Chinese to the province over recent decades. Today, due to these orchestrated mass migrations, the native Uyghur population comprises less than half of the total population of Xinjiang.
The re-education camps itself are aimed at annihilating religious and cultural sentiments. China has also been accused of targeting Muslim clerics and banning religious practices in the region. Chinese authorities have used various pretexts to damage or destroy two-thirds of Xinjiang’s mosques; about half of those have been demolished outright. Important Islamic sacred sites have been destroyed across the region. As part of regional authorities’ intrusive “Becoming Families” surveillance, development, and indoctrination campaign, officials impose themselves for overnight stays at the homes of Turkic Muslims, a practice that authorities say “promote[s] ethnic unity.” In another particularly cruel practice of separation of families, Muslim children, whose parents have been arbitrarily detained, are placed in state institutions such as orphanages and boarding schools, including boarding preschools.
In 2017, according to official statistics, arrests in Xinjiang accounted for nearly 21 percent of all arrests in China, despite people in Xinjiang making up only 1.5 percent of the total population. A list obtained and partially verified by the Associated Press cites the names of more than 10,000 Uyghurs (or 1 in 25 of the population) sent to prison in the Konasheher county alone, one of dozens of counties in southern Xinjiang.
Earlier, leaked documents known as the China Cables indicated how the feigned re-education camps were actually run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments, including shoot-at-sight orders.
People who have managed to escape the camps have reported physical, mental and sexual torture. Women have spoken of mass rape and sexual abuse.
Since 2017, when Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a diktat saying all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation, there have been large-scale crackdowns, in what is termed by outside observers as China’s attempts to eradicate Uyghur culture.
The Xinjiang Police Files, which all date from before 2019, have exposed how Uyghurs are being punished for alleged crimes that took place years ago. Many appear to have been targeted for their mobile phone use, for listening to “illegal lectures” or not using their phones enough, which is regarded as a sign the user is trying to evade digital surveillance.
China has an indelible insecurity about the dismemberment of itself through ethnic dissent. It has pursued a policy of so-called ethnic blending, in other words forced assimilation, of ethnic minorities. Chinese leaders want to turn China into a cohesive state-race, which means making ethnic minorities like the majority Han peoples. Because of Chinese secrecy and its increasing global might and reach, it has succeeded in obfuscating the extent of its atrocities on its ethnic and religious minorities.
The United State has sanctioned officials and blacklisted dozens of Chinese agencies linked to abuses in Xinjiang. In January 2021, it determined that China’s actions constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has said “China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity.”
The UK parliament declared, in April 2021, that China was committing a genocide in Xinjiang. A UN human rights committee in 2018 said it had credible reports that China was holding up to a million people in “counter-extremism centres” in Xinjiang.
But China remains arrantly defiant against the accusations of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang province being leveled against the country. “I wish to point out that the representatives of the United States and Britain in their statements made unfounded accusations against China, which China firmly rejects,” Dai Bing, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council open debate on strengthening accountability and justice for serious violations of international law, this month (June 2022).
“As the saying goes, to hide a lie, 1,000 lies are needed,” Xinhua quoted Dai as saying. “Allegations of ‘genocide’ or ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang are lies of the century, pure and simple.”
Dai claimed that US and Britain are afraid that their “cooked-up lies” about Xinjiang “are seen through” by the international community.
“However, no amount of lies spread by the United States and Britain can deny the factual reality of Xinjiang that it enjoys stability and prosperity, and its people are living and working in peace and happiness,” Dai fulminated.
China continues to display no compunction over the cultural genocide and other atrocities it has committed in Tibet and Xinjiang. Besides the crushing of political dissent in Hong Kong. It has remained vehement in its obstruction of human rights observation agencies investigating the situation within its boundaries and denied any access to information. It has the habit of making allegations of its human rights violations against the state seem like canard. Even though talk in the Chinese ethnic minority diaspora are rife with tales of torture, arbitrary arrests, killings, disappearances and various other abuses. Going by its suppression of information within and without its borders, it is not wrong to estimate that human rights abuses in China are far worse than they seem.
The ‘Great China’ dream espoused by China’s President Xi Jinping comes at a cost. The cost is transforming ethnic minorities into cohesion, collusion and homogeneity. If they resist, they then face the prospect of complete extermination…
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