How China Treats 3.5 Million Uyghur Muslims, Other Minorities as Terrorists, Stuffs Them in 'Gulags'

Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a forcibly occupied territory in 1949, can’t follow any religious Muslim tradition. Dictated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), children of the Uyghur population can’t get religious education or follow religious practices. Around 3.5 million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities of the Xinjiang province have been interned in prison camps that the CCP calls re-education centres.

The population of the Uyghur natives is down to half while the Han Chinese population from mainland China is now almost equal to them and dominates the province’s administration and income. XUAR is geographically the largest province in China.

The Chinese atrocities, described in detail in the 2022 ‘Report on International Religious Freedom’, which was released by the US Department of State this week, adds to the earlier investigative reports about the CCP’s cruelties in the province that many outside China call genocide.

The report says that as per US estimates, these re-education centres, which are described as concentration camps or gulags by many analysts, saw over a million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities of the province interned in the last six years. As mentioned above, other reports keep this number at as high as 3.5 million people jailed. Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) put the number of such camps at 380 in September 2020 in its investigative report.

The CCP thinks of Uyghurs of the province either as terrorists or terror sympathisers and corners them in these camps that are established under the country’s anti-terror operational mechanism. Entry into these camps means you are in a prison facility established under China’s national counterterrorism and regional counterextremism laws.

These Chinese gulags have treated 3.5 million Uyghur Muslims and other minority civilians as terrorists or suspected terrorists.

Uyghurs are arrested and put in these concentration camps that the CCP calls vocational skills education training centres with the sole purpose of ‘anti-extremist ideological education’ that can be equated to torture, pushing for religious alienation from Islam and political indoctrination towards Han Chinese culture and CCP’s ideology.

Around 900,000 Uyghur children have been separated from their parents. Their indoctrination begins early in life with them being trained in CCP ideology, Han culture, and Mandarin language.

The sole aim is to sinicise Xinjian absolutely. 2022 was the deadline.

In 1941, Uyghurs were 80% of Xinjiang’s population while Han Chinese were just 5%. Today, they are 42% of Xinjiang’s population, 37% up, while Uyghurs have seen their share coming down by 35%, at 45%.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) calls the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs serious human rights violations. The OHCHR says this can be categorised as international crimes targeting humanity. Forced disappearances, forced sterilisation, torture, political indoctrination, and sexual abuse are routinely observed. Adrian Zenz, a German research scholar on China, says the forced sterilisation policy could cut up to 4.5 million Uyghur births in future.

The CCP even assigns fake relatives to the Uyghur population, to live with them inside their houses to spy on them, the next step of Chinese surveillance on Uyghurs. These fake relatives are either CCP members or administration officials of the province.

The administration in the province has put up a mechanism that forces Uyghur neighbours to spy on each other as well. They are under 24/7 surveillance, both physical and virtual. They must update the Chinese authorities about their daily routine. Their phones, their home decoration, their religious preference, everything is governed by the CCP administration in Xinjiang. An Uyghur Muslim is jailed for a long period of time for owning a Quran or growing a beard.

Most of the Uyghur mosques are gone. According to the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), China destroyed 10,000 to 15,000 Uyghur mosques and religious places between 2016 and 2019.

The country carried out a massive exercise in June 2022 when it screened 23 million Xinjiang minority residents for being terrorists. Those with international ties were immediately arrested. Uyghur Muslims are also used as forced labour for agriculture and industrial activities in the province. This is done through a “widespread and systematic programme”, says a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO).