Beijing's Cultural Genocide of Uyghurs

    Congress makes the following findings:
            (1) The Government of the People's Republic of China has a 
        long history of repressing Turkic Muslims, particularly 
        Uighurs, in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
            (2) In May 2014, Chinese authorities launched their latest 
        ``Strike Hard against Violent Extremism'' campaign, using wide-
        scale, internationally-linked threats of terrorism as a pretext 
        to justify pervasive restrictions on and human rights 
        violations of members of the ethnic minority communities of the 
        Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The August 2016 transfer of 
        former Tibet Autonomous Region Party Secretary Chen Quanguo to 
        become the Xinjiang Party Secretary prompted an acceleration in 
        the crackdown across the region. Scholars, human rights 
        organizations, journalists, and think tanks have provided ample 
        evidence substantiating the establishment by Chinese 
        authorities of ``reeducation'' camps. Since 2014, Chinese 
        authorities have detained no less than 800,000 Uighurs, ethnic 
        Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other ethnic minorities in these camps.
            (3) Those detained in such facilities have described forced 
        political indoctrination, torture, beatings, and food 
        deprivation, as well as denial of religious, cultural, and 
        linguistic freedoms, and confirmed that they were told by 
        guards that the only way to secure release was to demonstrate 
        sufficient political loyalty. Poor conditions and lack of 
        medical treatment at such facilities appear to have contributed 
        to the deaths of some detainees, including the elderly and 
        infirm.
            (4) Uighurs and ethnic Kazakhs, who have now obtained 
        permanent residence or citizenship in other countries, attest 
        to receiving threats and harassment from Chinese officials. At 
        least five journalists for Radio Free Asia's Uighur service 
        have publicly detailed abuses their family members in Xinjiang 
        have endured in response to their work exposing abusive 
        policies across the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
            (5) In September 2018, United Nations High Commissioner for 
        Human Rights Michele Bachelet noted in her first speech as High 
        Commissioner the ``deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale 
        arbitrary detentions of Uighurs and other Muslim communities, 
        in so-called re-education camps across Xinjiang''.
            (6) The Government of the People's Republic of China's 
        actions against Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang Uighur 
        Autonomous Region, whose population was approximately 13 
        million at the time of the last Chinese census in 2010, are in 
        contravention of international human rights laws, the 
        International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of 
        Racial Discrimination, and the Convention against Torture and 
        Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both 
        of which China has signed and ratified, and the Universal 
        Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on 
        Civil and Political Rights, which China has signed. Congress Gov

 China says the camps are a necessary measure against terrorism following separatist violence in Xinjiang   Getty Images

 

"[The ultimate goal is to thoroughly purge Xinjiang of all inkling of distinct identity and] identify with the country, such that, in the future, the idea of Uyghur will be in name only, but without its meaning."

Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti in self-exile

The New York Times accessed and published Chinese internal government documents that revealed a situation that confronts Uyghurs should they enquire about relatives who have been spirited away by authorities for 're-education' purposes, when they are advised in response to "treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills". Denying the Yughurs their language, their culture, their history, their religion.

 

The Beijing Chinese Communist Party loves to demonstrate to the world how proficient they are in rising to special occasions. As for example, the speed and efficiency they are able to muster during a time of SARS-CoV-2 causing the pandemic of COVID-19, by building in the blink of an eye hospital facilities to care for thousands upon thousands of people in China's great populous megapolises. They tend not, however, to focus publicly on their impressive capacity to build huge, sprawling campuses for 're-education', complete with guard towers, fences and razor wire.

 

The Chinese 'province' of Xinjiang is Muslim-dense, its ethnic and cultural origins reflective of neighbouring Uzbekistan. The region suffered a conquest by the Qing Dynasty in the 1870s -- even back then China was resolute in its determination to expand its territory by swallowing those of its neighbours to enable it to announce to the world that an unwilling, conquest-battered territory (such as Tibet) is henceforth to be recognized as Chinese. In like vein, the People's Republic of China's military aspires to fulfill its function of wresting disputed territory in the Himalaya from India. 

 

Still from video: blindfolded, head-shaven Yughur men awaiting transport by train to re-education destination

 

The vast network of 're-education centres' in China's northwest keeps growing in China's hegemonic outreach; the purpose, to pacify and integrate an ethnic culture foreign to and hostile to Chinese occupation. For its part, the CCP looks on the Xianjing-native Uyghurs as 'splittists' -- a nasty pejorative for people who yearn for freedom from oppression -- and is determined to create a spirit of 'harmony' through re-education; which is to say after breaking a people's collective spirit.

 

An estimated one, and as much as two million people in the region have been involuntarily incarcerated in the re-education facilities, mostly ethnic Turkic Uyghurs, to cure them of "crimes" charactrerized as such for attending Mosque or texting a relative in Turkey. For its part, the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes no mention of the plight of the Uyghurs, evidently unperturbed by human rights abuses they suffer under Chinese occupation. Erdogan focuses instead on Israel, accusing it of human rights abuses against Palestinians among whom close to two million are citizens of Israel with equal rights.

 

Beijing uses the classification of "boarding schools" or "vocational training schools" when referencing the centres, for anodyne public consumption -- guard towers, high walls topped with razor wire notwithstanding. A video that had been leaked out of China in 2019 features large groups of blindfolded, shaven Uyghurs forced to kneel on the ground, awaiting processing at a train station in Xinjiang, presumably headed for a boarding school. 

 

 

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute with the use of satellite imagery assembled 3D models of close to 400 Uyghyur detention facilities located in Xinjiang. Local government construction tenders were analyzed in 2018 by Reuters, confirming the facilities to have been designed as fully equipped prisons with surveillance and security systems, when according to official Chinese designation-descriptions they are vocational training schools. Clearly, western intelligence cannot tell the difference between prisons and educational establishments.

 

Former detainees describe being subjected to brutal regimens of indoctrination replete with torture and sexual abuse for good measure, for those who stubbornly dissent from China's well-intentioned interventions on the way to creating good citizens.  Ample evidence has also surfaced that Uyghurs are forcefully used as slave labourers in Chinese factories. Some of those factories produce goods sold by brand-name international corporations relying on China for its cheap labour.

Twice the region attempted in the 1930s and 1940s -- taking advantage of political instability -- to beak away as an Islamic republic. This had most recently been attempted in 1991 on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then incidents of ethnic riots in Xinjiang and separatist Uyghur violence emerged that drew Beijing under President Xi Jinping to once-and-for-all solve the problem of troublesome Uyghurs with the launch of the Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism.

The entire population of Xinjiang between 2016 and 2017 was required to hand over biometric data like DNA samples and iris scans under the rubric of Physicals for All. And this, after residents were made to surrender their passports, while police checkpoints popped up in their cities. According to Chinese authorities, the Uyghur culture and Islamic faith is but a mental illness, or an "ideological virus". And if any nation knows about viruses, it is China.

Uyghur women were "no longer babymaking machines", having been liberated from that tiresome task by the thoughtful measures taken by Beijing to sterilize them and thus "eradicating exttremism", according to China's embassy in the United States. In interviews with Han Chinese residents n Dabancheng city, Xinjiang, investigators from the BBC asked their opinion of the presence of new high-security "re-education" centres in their midst. One man succinctly responded they were purposed for the tens of thousands of Xinjiang residents known to have "problems with their thoughts".

Once detainees "study well and their mental state is healthy, they will be able to live happily in society", explained a counsellor from one of the facilities. China's Xinjiang crackdown employs a wave of forced sterilization, birth control and abortion, revealed an AP investigation last year. Hugely successful as a control mechanism, since the birthrate is in free fall; population in some regions falling by over 80 percent.