he emergence in Xinjiang of a new network of political reeducation camps has been a poorly kept secret for some time. But research and reporting is giving us hard evidence of the scale of this new policy. Since the middle of 2017, a major construction boom has thrown up a variety of detention centers and prisons whose inmates number in the hundreds of thousands. These camps combine many of the brute horrors of China’s earlier reeducation-through-labor system with the latest high-tech surveillance and monitoring mechanisms. [...]
More than at any point since its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, Xinjiang today resembles occupied territory, and the party’s policies reveal an all-encompassing view of the Uyghurs as an internal enemy. The Uyghurs’ very presence in the land is an inconvenient reminder of Xinjiang’s alternative identity as the eastern fringe of the Islamic and Turkic-speaking world — one that Beijing would prefer to erase if it could. The party may not have any intention yet to physically remove the Uyghurs, but its efforts to marginalize the Uyghur language and rewrite the region’s history serve similar goals to a policy of ethnic cleansing. [...]
In the wake of 9/11, China refashioned its hard-line campaign against separatism into a wing of the global “war on terror,” and in doing so reached something of an accommodation with Washington. There have been sporadic acts of terrorist violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, some of which, tragically, have cost the lives of ordinary Han Chinese. But Uyghur resistance in Xinjiang is much more disorganized and demilitarized than China would like us to believe. China’s war on terror has claimed as its victims even mildly dissenting party members such as economics professor Ilham Tohti, who was given a lifelong prison sentence four years ago for criticizing the marginalization of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. [...]
There’s no point talking about holding China to international norms when those norms don’t exist. If anything, Islamophobic bigotry has become the norm around the world, and with it a variety of intrusive and punitive de-radicalization programs similar in conception, if not scale, to China’s. Reading Jim Wolfreys’s recent book on France, it’s not hard to see similarities with the measures being implemented in Xinjiang: bans on forms of veiling, citizens encouraged to look out for signs of radicalization as innocuous as someone changing their eating habits. In 2015, Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls went so far as to consult on the constitutionality of creating detention centers for more than ten thousand people on a police watch list of suspected extremists.
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