A classified blueprint shows the camps, holding over a million ethnic minorities in China’s far west, are forced re-education centers to rewire thinking.
leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.
Zenz said the documents echoed the aim of the camps as outlined in a 2017 report from a local branch of the Xinjiang Ministry of Justice: to “wash brains, cleanse hearts, support the right, remove the wrong.”China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where the Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.
The documents were given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source. The ICIJ verified them by examining state media reports and public notices from the time, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.
In the years since, as Uighurs and Kazakhs were sent to the camps in droves, the government built hundreds of schools and orphanages to house and re-educate their children. Many of those who have fled into exile don’t even know where their children or loved ones are. The IJOP spat out the names of people considered suspicious, such as thousands of “unauthorized” imams not registered with the Chinese government, along with their associates. Suspicious or extremist behavior was so broadly defined that it included going abroad, asking others to pray or using cellphone apps that cannot be monitored by the government.
In recent years, Beijing has put pressure on countries to which Uighurs have fled, such as Thailand and Afghanistan, to send them back to China. In other countries, state security has also contacted Uighurs and pushed them to spy on each other. For example, a restaurateur now in Turkey, Qurbanjan Nurmemet, said police contacted him with videos of his son strapped to a chair and asked him for information on other Uighurs in Turkey.
“Once you’re stamped as an enemy, the gloves go off,” she said. “They’re not even trying to justify this legally....This is arbitrary.” Publicly, in a recent white paper, China’s State Council said “the personal freedom of trainees at the education and training centers is protected in accordance with the law.” But internally, the documents describe facilities with police stations at the front gates, high guard towers, one-button alarms and video surveillance with no blind spots.
AP journalists who visited Xinjiang in December 2018 saw patrol towers and high walls lined with green barbed wire fencing around camps. One camp in Artux, just north of Kashgar, sat in the middle of a vast, empty, rocky field and appeared to include a police station at the entrance, workshops, a hospital and dormitories, one with a sign reading “House of Workers” in Chinese.
By showing students the error of their former ways, the centers are supposed to promote “repentance and confession,” the directive said. For example, Qurban, the Kazakh herder, was handcuffed, brought to an interview with a Han Chinese leader and forced to acknowledge that he regretted visiting abroad.
Mandarin is mandated. Beijing has said “the customs of all ethnic groups and the right to use their spoken and written languages are fully protected at the centers.” But the documents show that, in practice, lessons are taught in Mandarin, and it is the language to be used in daily communication. Detainees are tested on Mandarin, ideology and discipline, with “one small test per week, one medium test per month, and one big test per season,” the documents state. These test scores feed into an elaborate point system.
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