‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang

Abstract

Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented reeducation campaign. According to media and informant reports, untold thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities, with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates publicly available evidence from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of re-education in Xinjiang in the context of 'de-extremification' work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the 'core hub' of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question. Since summer 2017, troubling reports emerged about large-scale internments of Muslims (Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) in China's northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). By the end of the year, reports emerged that some ethnic minority townships had detained up to 10 percent of the entire population, and that in the Uyghur-dominated Kashgar Prefecture alone, numbers of interned persons had

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“…88 The existence of camera systems aimed at tightening control over citizens, combined with detainment camps and facerecognition tools, intensify the matter's urgency. 89 From a human rights perspective, the events taking place in Xinjiang constitute a violation of human rights as the state's interventions conflict with proportionality considerations and the legitimate use of state power. The fact that the members of ethnic minorities are generally placed under suspicion, the violations of the right to physical integrity and equal treatment (such as article 18/19/21/29 of the Counterterrorism Law of the PRC, or the 'Regulation on De-Extremification') and the low legal threshold for detaining individuals seem to confirm this view.…”

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“…This mission is akin to one of social (or human) engineering: "projects to create new kinds of subjects for political and economic transformation" (Anagnost 2013: 8). This particular notion has recently gained some traction among Xinjiang scholars trying to grapple with the party-state's attempts to re-define Uyghur identity in the region and beyond (Zenz 2018;Byler 2017;Byler and Grose 2018). Darren Byler, for instance, builds on this notion to describe how the state in southern Xinjiang is attempting to project and impose an image of secular Uyghur-ness struggling against the tyranny of religious dogmatism.…”

“…Several reports point to various torture methods routinely employed inside the camps, ranging from physical punishments to bright lights left on throughout the night in overcrowded rooms, with inmates unable to exercise or go outdoors for weeks at a time. On the subject of mass internment of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, see Zenz (2018); The Economist (2018); Thum (2018); Bunin (2018); Brophy (2018).…”

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“…Moreover, this issue gained wider coverage in 2019 as large international enterprises started to cancel their contracts with Chinese firms. For instance, Badger, an American supplier of campus clothing, cancelled its contracts with Hetian Taida, a XUAR-based firm specializing in the production of clothing materials, and which allegedly used forced labor from education camps (Zenz, 2019a;2019b).…”