6

CULTURAL GENOCIDE, 2017–2020

6 Uyghur men sit at attention in a mass internment camp in Lop near Khotan, 2017.

The term ‘cultural genocide’ is generally attributed to the Polish lawyer who coined the overall concept of ‘genocide’ in the 1940s, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin viewed genocide as more than the mass killing of people from a given group; he defined the term as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.’¹ In discussing how this destruction takes place, he notes that it is rarely accomplished through the ‘immediate destruction’ of the group, which would connote the mass murder of its members. Instead, it is almost always implemented gradually through the systematic eradication of the group’s cultural distinctiveness and way of life, the ‘essential foundations of the life of national groups.’² In characterizing the objectives of genocide, Lemkin writes that it involves the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.’³

While Lemkin, who was the first to use the term, viewed genocide as a process of destroying group identity, the international community has generally interpreted it very narrowly as the mass murder of members of a nation or ethnic group with the intent of completely obliterating their gene pool. As most of the literature on the concept of cultural genocide bemoans, international conventions on genocide generally do not protect nations or ethnic groups from the intentional destruction of their cultural distinctiveness, way of life, and identity.⁴ However, this same literature also asserts, in line with Lemkin’s original definition of genocide, that such cultural erasure is central to all forms of genocide. If cultural erasure is not always accompanied by the mass physical extermination of a people, it historically has been expressed through substantial violence. The history of settler colonialism is abundant with examples of such violent attempts to destroy national and ethnic cultures. These include the involuntary relegation of groups to quarantined communities or reservations, the forced assimilation of peoples through threats of violence and torture, and the explicit separation of children from families for the purposes of indoctrination in boarding schools. In the process, large numbers of people from the groups experiencing cultural genocide have often been killed, especially if they demonstrated resistance to the efforts to obliterate their culture and identity.

In many ways, the plight of the Uyghurs since 2017 is reminiscent of the fate of indigenous populations in the context of settler colonialism elsewhere in the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only with twenty-first-century tools of electronic surveillance to assist in enforcement and coercion. Prior to 2017, Uyghurs were subjected to frequent violations of their human rights, faced discrimination on the basis of their identity, and were pressured to assimilate and restricted in their ability to practice their religion, but their identity did not face complete eradication. This situation changed over the course of 2017 as the PRC began a systematic and violent dismantling of Uyghur culture and identity that can be unequivocally described as cultural genocide.

In a mostly post-colonial world, such violent attempts to destroy identity and forcibly assimilate ethnic or national groups are generally no longer acceptable to the international community. However, the fact that the PRC has justified its actions as ‘counterterrorism’ in the context of GWOT has allowed them to take place, at least thus far, with impunity from the international community. As members of a community that is accused of harboring an existential ‘terrorist threat,’ the Uyghurs’ human rights have been largely suspended in the eyes of much of the global community. They have been dehumanized, stripped of their historical grievances, and portrayed as being irrational perpetrators of senseless violence. This dehumanization of the Uyghurs as alleged ‘terrorists’ has allowed most countries in the world to generally accept the PRC’s acts of cultural genocide as an appropriate response to an existential security threat. Furthermore, those states which have criticized the PRC over the cultural genocide faced by the Uyghurs are the same states who initiated GWOT and subsequently dehumanized and suspended the rights of alleged ‘terrorists’ for their own interests throughout much of the first decade of the 2000s. As such, their voice has lost its moral authority on this topic.

THE ORIGINS OF THE SYSTEMATIC ATTACK ON UYGHUR IDENTITY

In retrospect, one can see the foundations of present policies of cultural genocide emerging from the ‘People’s War on Terror’ starting in 2014. The ‘People’s War’ had identified the root cause of the alleged Uyghur ‘terrorist threat’ as emanating from Uyghur culture itself, or at least from dangerous influences that had been deemed by the state to have infected that culture. On the surface, this appeared to be a campaign against religiosity, but it was much more than that. The life sentence given to Ilham Tohti in 2014 made it clear that the ‘People’s War’ was an ideological conflict that went beyond the role of Islam in Uyghur culture or even beyond combating Uyghur calls for independence in the region. Tohti is actually a PRC patriot who believes that the Uyghurs and their homeland belong within the Chinese state. His real crime, the one for which he is presumably being punished, was putting the fate of Uyghurs and that of the PRC on equal footing. He was not advocating for an independent Eastern Turkistan before his arrest, but for a Xinjiang where Uyghurs had more control over their destiny and were respected as equals with the Han. He was not criticizing the inclusion of his homeland in China. He was criticizing the Han settler colonization of his homeland, and his life sentence sent a message to all Uyghurs that this was an issue that was non-negotiable. The state appeared to have its own designs on the region, and if the Uyghurs’ voice needed to be stifled in order to accomplish what was best for the PRC’s overall progress, then that was what needed to be done.

Not only was the logic of the ‘People’s War,’ particularly its focus on Uyghur cultural change and violent suppression of all dissenting voices, already pregnant with genocidal intentions, but many of the tools for cultural erasure were also being put into place at this time. As early as 2014, the PRC military contractor, China Electronic Technology Group, had been reported as being in the process of building a massive database of all Uyghurs to serve in a ‘preventative policing’ program that could predict which Uyghurs had the potential to become what the state categorized as ‘terrorists’ (i.e. those who were prone to resisting the power of the state).⁵ This massive database could cross-reference information from a variety of sources, which could be quickly disaggregated for individual Uyghurs. In essence, this was a project to build profiles for millions of Uyghurs in order to assess their degree of loyalty to the state and Party by their movements, communications, activities, and interrelationships. With this system on-line by 2016 and legally justified by the PRC’s new anti-terrorism law, which allowed the state greater access to personal data, it would become an important weapon of the expanded security apparatus in the region and allow for the immediate profiling of those with whom it came in contact.

In retrospect, the signs of future mass internment had also been visible in 2014. Adrian Zenz notes that in 2014, numerous counties in the Uyghur homeland began establishing ‘transformation through re-education’ programs – which had previously been limited to Falun Gong followers, drug addicts, and hardened criminals – to target alleged Islamic ‘extremists’.⁶ Throughout 2014 and 2015, this system became more widespread, but also appeared to be in a testing phase, where different regions employed different methods. Some of the programs appeared to be daytime ‘reform schools,’ others involved temporary boarding, and still others looked to involve longer term detention. This process had obviously become a part of the enforcement of the limits on public displays of religiosity in the region that were established by the ‘People’s War,’ and local authorities freely reported the metrics of their work in public documents, noting numbers trained, classes administered, and the success rate of those who were ‘transformed.’⁷ This campaign appeared concentrated in the south of the region and targeted those who were particularly religious, but it was also carried out in rural areas in the north that had high Uyghur population density. Despite the successes claimed by local authorities, it did not appear that these efforts were stemming the violence in the region, which had only escalated through 2014 and 2015.

There is also evidence from this period that the re-education campaign carried with it a clear biopolitical logic articulated through a discourse inspired by Public Health, which viewed ‘extremism’ as an infection that needed to be managed in a scientific manner based on demographics. Zenz, for example, cites the PRC Justice Department’s Party Committee Secretary in the region as suggesting in 2015 that ‘70% of Uyghur villagers will follow all the others, but that 30% are “polluted by religious extremism” and require “concentrated education;”’ ‘when the 30% are transformed … the village is basically cleansed.’⁸ He also quotes the secretary of the Khotan County’s Politics and Law Committee from the same time providing a similar analysis, noting that ‘about 5% belong to the hardened faction, 15% are supporters, and 80% are illiterates.’⁹ As Zenz suggests, this logic of percentages was already suggestive of a biopolitical strategy that considered the portions of the population requiring ‘treatment’ and/or ‘quarantining’ in order to ensure that the alleged infection of ‘extremism’ did not spread to others.¹⁰ Eventually, it would appear that this Public Health-inspired logic would additionally prescribe ‘inoculation’ for all through its targeting of Uyghur identity.

Thus, by 2014, the logic had been established and all of the required procedures were already being put in place for carrying out the systematic destruction of Uyghur identity we are witnessing today. A massive system of surveillance and loyalty evaluation was in advanced development, a methodology for mass internment and thought transformation was being beta tested, and the biopolitical logic had already been established for attacking Uyghur culture in the name of countering ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism.’ It just needed the motivation for the state to definitively give up on trying to get Uyghurs to voluntarily submit to assimilation, and a political leader aggressive enough to put the system into action. Chen Quanguo, who took over the Party leadership of the Uyghur region on 29 August 2016, would have the qualities to do just that, and it did not seem to take him very long to abandon the belief that Uyghurs would voluntarily assimilate and submit to Chinese settler colonialism. Given the prior existence of the procedures required for the destruction of Uyghur identity, Chen should not be considered the architect of the Uyghurs’ cultural genocide, but he certainly became its implementer.

CHEN THE ENFORCER

Chen Quanguo had made a name for himself as Party Secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) between 2011 and 2016. During that time, he had significantly transformed Tibet. Despite this region’s long history of resistance to Chinese rule, he was able to significantly limit public displays of Tibetan dissent during his tenure.¹¹ Chen’s strategy for mitigating dissent in the TAR called for ‘convenience police stations’ in urban areas every 500 meters connected to cities’ vast network of CCTV cameras.¹² Authorities called this extensive system of surveillance and police enforcement throughout urban areas ‘grid-style social management’ in the service of ‘stability maintenance.’¹³ Given the importance that Xi Jinping placed on ‘stability maintenance’ in the Uyghur region by 2016 and Chen’s experience working in what the CCP considered to be its other ‘troubled minority region,’ Chen was a logical candidate to take over governance of the region when Zhang was relieved of his position during the summer of 2016.

Chen’s arrival in the Uyghur region coincided with yet another incident that reified the narrative of the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs. On 30 August 2016, a day after Chen took over the leadership of the Uyghur region, it was reported that an alleged suicide attack had been carried out against the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, reportedly by a Uyghur.¹⁴ However, the details surrounding this incident were suspiciously nonsensical, reminiscent of the alleged ETIM plot to bomb the US Embassy in Bishkek in 2002. Within a week, the Kyrgyz authorities had claimed that the attack was carried out by a Uyghur of unknown origin who held a Tajik passport, had been ordered by a Uyghur group in Syria, and was funded by the Al-Nursra Front, but all five arrested in connection with the attack were Kyrgyz citizens.¹⁵ Furthermore, nobody had ever identified the Uyghur who had allegedly carried out the attack; Al-Nursra was not known to carry out attacks outside Syria; and the Kyrgyz who were arrested in connection with the attack were neither known to be associated with TIP nor claimed to have any knowledge of the operation.¹⁶ Regardless of who was actually behind the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, the PRC would use the incident to further hype the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs to China. In response to the attack, the Chinese authorities blamed the phantom group ETIM and threatened to ‘firmly strike’ against the group in retribution.¹⁷

These events conveniently played into Chen’s plans to step up security in the Uyghur region during his first year as Party leader. When Chen first articulated his policy agenda for the Uyghur region in September 2016, he stressed ‘placing stability above all else,’ and he called on security organs to employ increased proactive means for eradicating the ‘three evils.’¹⁸ In his first year, Chen advertised almost 100,680 security-related jobs, over thirteen times the average annual security-related government recruits for 2009–2015 when most of the violence involving Uyghurs inside China had allegedly occurred.¹⁹ He also established an estimated 7,300 ‘convenience police stations’ in urban areas around the Uyghur region based on the model he had employed in Tibet.²⁰ It was evident that Chen was beginning his term in office by building an unprecedented police state in the region.

If Chen’s initial contribution to the region’s already substantial security apparatus was his mass deployment of security personnel and the establishment of thousands of ‘convenience police stations’ as he had done in Tibet, he also proved to be adept at utilizing the Uyghur homeland’s existing security infrastructure. This was particularly the case with regards to electronic surveillance, which he quickly weaponized as a means of social control. While, as discussed above, the state had already contracted with China Electronic Technology Group in 2014 to build a massive database that could be utilized to identify potential ‘terrorists’ within the Uyghur population before they committed violence, Chen appears to be the first political leader in the region to put this database to extensive use by adding data points to the system and utilizing it as a mass social evaluation tool.

The PRC’s ‘Counterterrorism Law’ that had been passed in late 2015 already gave the state legal means for accessing a variety of information about Uyghurs, including bank accounts, social media accounts, work history, and history of travel. However, under Chen the state would collect a battery of biometric data on every Uyghur, which could be added to the program’s existing data points. As Darren Byler, who was doing fieldwork in the region at the time, notes, there were a variety of efforts to provide Uyghurs with free health exams in 2016 where they were asked to provide DNA, fingerprints, voice signatures, and face signatures, all of which went into this system.²¹ According to Byler, the state claimed to have collected such data for 18.8 million of the region’s 21.8 million people by the end of the campaign.²² In December 2016, the regional government adopted new internet regulations, which increased the state’s ability to legally monitor all content posted by Uyghurs on the internet, allowing Chen’s administration to make extensive use of Uyghurs’ internet history to mine for data about ‘ideological inclinations’ and associations that could also be input into this database.²³ To aid in this effort, the state also criminalized the possession of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for the circumvention of surveillance, calling such programs ‘terrorism software.’²⁴

In a 2018 report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided much more detailed information about this program of big data collection, surveillance, and profiling of Uyghurs, which it identifies by its official name, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP).²⁵ As HRW notes, additional information for the IJOP was collected via mobile apps on the phones of cadres who were sent out to regularly visit Uyghur homes, particularly in rural areas, and to ask household members for ‘a range of data about their family, their “ideological situation,” and relationships with neighbors.’²⁶ Other Uyghurs were asked at work or when engaging with the government on mundane tasks, such as obtaining licenses or registering residency, to fill out detailed questionnaires asking about their religious observation, daily habits, travel abroad, and so on, for inclusion in the IJOP. In short, the state would take every opportunity afforded it to collect both quantitative and qualitative data about each and every Uyghur, and that data was added to their profiles in the IJOP database.

However, more important than the additional data points collected for this database, was Chen’s use of the IJOP as a tool of social control and, ultimately, the infrastructure of the Uyghur region’s biopolitics. Under Chen, the state would use the IJOP to evaluate every Uyghur by a variety of parameters to characterize their degree of ‘safeness,’ hence determining the person’s fate. As James Leibold has noted, this system ‘sorts its citizenry into those deemed “normal” and thus trustworthy, and those who are “deviant” or “abnormal” in their thoughts or demeanour.’²⁷ Those determined to be ‘normal’ were allowed to continue their lives unfettered, albeit under continued surveillance, whereas those labeled as ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ were likely to be subjected to interrogation, detention, imprisonment, or extensive political re-education.²⁸ While the PRC had obviously been developing these tools to track and evaluate Uyghurs for some time, it was not until Chen came to power that they were used to explicitly sort the population and target ‘undesirables.’

Despite Chen’s implementation of this massive campaign to step up the use of surveillance technology and bolster the region’s police forces, violence had not been completely stopped in the region by the end of 2016. While there were virtually no reports of significant violence in the Uyghur homeland throughout most of 2016, in December reports emerged about a violent act perpetrated by Uyghurs, which appeared both politically motivated and premeditated. In the Karakash county near Khotan, a group of Uyghurs allegedly drove a truck into the yard of the regional CCP headquarters and blew up the truck, killing one person.²⁹ Declaring the incident a ‘terrorist attack,’ authorities immediately killed all four Uyghurs who had allegedly carried it out.³⁰

This was the first major act of violence reported in the Uyghur region during 2016, but it came at the end of a year that authorities were hailing as exemplary in terms of ‘counterterrorism’ efforts. Furthermore, less than two months later, in mid-February 2017, another alleged attack was reported in Guma county, about half way between Khotan and Yarkand. Allegedly, three Uyghurs had entered a residential compound near a regional government headquarters in Guma and killed five people, including government officials.³¹ Authorities predictably killed all three alleged attackers and placed the entire town under lockdown, with police and security reportedly standing every 10 to 20 meters on the street to keep order.³² The alleged attack in Guma would be the last incident of violence in the Uyghur homeland up to the time of this book’s publication that authorities would characterize as a ‘terrorist attack,’ but it would soon be followed by a violent state-led campaign of terror against Uyghurs that would be more extensive than all acts of Uyghur-led violence combined over the previous two decades.

THE HAMMER COMES DOWN: 2017

In 2017, all of the disparate aspects of China’s counterterrorism efforts that had been in effect over the last few years came together to create a unified and systematic campaign to destroy Uyghur identity. It would be inaccurate to suggest that any one event triggered this campaign, especially given that its preparation had likely long been in process, but there were warning signs that the hammer was about to come down on Uyghurs in unprecedented ways. The violent incidents in Karakash and Guma in late 2016 and early 2017, while far less violent than the many incidents in 2014 and 2015, provided the perfect justification for Chen’s administration to begin a re-evaluation of the state’s ‘counterterrorism’ strategy in the region, particularly the role of ethnic Uyghur cadres in the implementation of that strategy.

Following the truck bombing of the government building in Karakash, it is noteworthy that Chen ordered an inspection of police and Party ‘counterterrorism’ work in the Khotan region in March 2017. Ninety-six rural cadres, assumed to all be ethnic Uyghurs, were subsequently punished for not monitoring religious behavior in the region adequately, failing to sufficiently gather household information, poorly monitoring mosque attendance, and not examining the religious content of traditional Uyghur life-cycle rituals for what the state considered ‘extremist’ influences.³³

At the same time, an ‘open letter’ campaign began to require that high-ranking Uyghur officials issue public written statements declaring their loyalty to China and calling on ethnic Uyghurs throughout the region to focus their efforts on both weeding out so-called ‘terrorists’ and ensuring those responsible for doing so were not shirking their duties.³⁴ As one ethnic Uyghur high-ranking CCP official in Kashgar wrote in one such letter, ‘we must stand out and reveal “two-faced” people, thoroughly seize bad elements out from the masses, clean them out.’³⁵ In retrospect, this appeared to be the initiation of a larger effort to identify and punish ‘two-faced’ officials who might not be sincere in fighting Uyghur dissent. Thus, from this point onward, even those Uyghurs who appeared loyal to the Party, worked in the police, or were CCP members were put under scrutiny as potential dissidents, disloyal to the state, and facilitating the alleged ‘terrorist threat.’ In retrospect, this was a turning point in the PRC’s biopolitical interpretation of this threat. As far as the PRC was concerned, the ‘infection’ of ‘extremism’ had already spread like a cancer throughout the entirety of the Uyghur people.

As if to reassure the Han population of the region, in the wake of the violent incidents in Karakash and Guma, the PLA also held two massive military parades and ‘anti-terrorism’ exercises demonstrating the PRC’s capacities of blunt force in January and February of 2017. The first, within a week of the alleged December 2016 truck bombing on the Party headquarters in Karakash, was held in Urumqi, with high-ranking officials, including Chen Quanguo, in attendance.³⁶ The demonstration of force displayed armed units trained to fight ‘terrorists,’ rows of armored anti-riot vehicles, and exhibitions of ‘counterterrorism’ tactics in urban environments.³⁷ Two days after the violence in Guma, a similar event was orchestrated, with thousands of armed officers marching through the streets of Khotan.³⁸ This was a particularly impressive show of force in a region that demographically was still around 90% Uyghur. Similar parades and military exhibitions would subsequently take place in major cities throughout the region for the remainder of the spring, traveling from city to city like a carnival of strength.³⁹

In the context of the punishment of ‘two-faced’ Uyghur cadres that was taking place at the time, these parades seemed to be sending a message to the Han population that the state’s central apparatus was ready to use any means necessary to eradicate the threat of Uyghur resistance even if local ethnic Uyghur cadres and police could not be trusted. To accent this point, the deputy Party chief of the region, Zhu Hailun, would state at the rally in Khotan that ‘continued vigilance and high-pressure deterrence against terrorists have forced them to the end of the road, like a cornered beast driven to desperate action.’⁴⁰ In using this rhetoric, he might as well have declared the ‘end of the road’ for the Uyghur people.

Another sign of impending systematic cultural erasure that also appeared in March was the approval by the regional CCP of new ‘deextremification’ regulations for the region. In general, these regulations represented a clarification of the PRC ‘Countererrorism Law’ and the ‘Religious Affairs Regulations,’ providing a more explicit definition of ‘extremism’ and ‘extremist’ behavior. The regulations list fifteen different manifestations of ‘extremist’ behaviour, which include virtually all forms of advice given to others on proper religious observation, including characterizing activities other than eating certain food as Haram, giving advice about the proper rituals to be used in religious ceremonies, discouraging others from marrying, living with, or intermingling with those of other ethnicities and faiths, and generally encouraging others to be religious.⁴¹ Furthermore, it also lists as ‘extremist’ behavior the possession, sharing, obtainment, or distribution of materials that might encourage religiosity among others, the use of certain names of Arabic origin, and the wearing of ‘irregular’ beards and specific styles of clothing.⁴² In short, the regulations criminalized virtually all religious behavior and any consumption of religious information that was not explicitly promoted by the state.

While many of these restrictions had already been applied in rural areas, particularly in the south of the Uyghur homeland, during the ‘People’s War on Terror,’ the new regulations advocated a more pervasive application and one that was more explicitly assimilationist. As Article 4 of the regulations states, ‘de-extremification shall persist in the basic directives of the Party’s work on religion, persist in an orientation of making religion more Chinese and under the law, and actively guide religions to become compatible with socialist society.’⁴³ The regulations also adopted what the state called a ‘whole of society’ approach, calling for the eradication of anything deemed ‘extremist’ (i.e. Islamic) in any sphere of life. Article 12 of the regulations criminalized academic research on anything that could be interpreted as ‘promoting extremification through research projects, social investigation, academic forums and the like.’⁴⁴ Likewise, subsequent articles outlined how manifestations of extremism must be removed from, and ‘de-extremification’ promoted in, the commercial sphere, the arenas of public health, education, telecommunications, media, transportation, trade unions, and virtually every area of governance and society one can imagine. In this sense, it was obvious that this new ‘de-extremification’ effort was to include scrutiny of all Uyghurs in all sectors and regions of society. While it was mostly focused on religion, it is noteworthy that its pervasive application suggested that it could be used to criminalize most aspects of Uyghur culture itself and especially any parenting acts that brought children in contact with religious ideas or which promoted Uyghur distinctiveness.

However, it was Article 14 of the new regulations that was perhaps the most ominous, as it laid the foundations for the soon to be established mass internment ‘re-education’ system. It prescribes efforts to establish ‘educational transformation, implementing a combination of individual and group education; combining legal education and mentoring; combining ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral corrections, and skills training; combining educational transformation and humanistic care; and strengthening the effectiveness of educational transformation.’⁴⁵ Adrian Zenz, who was the first scholar to expose the construction of mass internment camps in the Uyghur homeland, has suggested that this particular article in the ‘De-extremification Regulations’ marked the beginning of these camps’ establishment.

It is not surprising, therefore, that March 2017 also marked the beginning of a year-long process of accelerated state procurement for construction services focused on the building of the mass internment camps that were subsequently established throughout the region.⁴⁶ Zenz’s research for the period between spring 2016 and the end of 2018 tracks a massive institutional build-up of prison-like structures around the region, equipped with substantial security features including high walls, barbed wire, monitoring systems, and guard rooms.⁴⁷ It is likely that the Party had based its decision to institute this mass system of internment centers on the experiences of the earlier smaller ‘re-education’ programs that had existed since 2014 and which were testing different methods of reprogramming Uyghurs’ consciousness. Zenz, for example, cites a local Party-led study of the ‘re-education’ work against ‘extremism’ from 2014 to 2016, which recommended the establishment in all prefectures and counties of ‘centralized transformation through education training centres.’⁴⁸ This is exactly what Chen’s administration had decided to do by the middle of 2017, and it would dramatically change the situation in the region, essentially initiating the process of cultural genocide.

Since that time, the PRC has set in motion a systematic campaign to destroy the Uyghur identity, along with that of other indigenous Muslims of the region, and to forcibly assimilate these people into a Han dominant culture. The most headline-grabbing part of this systematic assault on ethnic identity is the network of mass internment camps, which are reminiscent of genocides past, but this is only the centerpiece of a complex of policies and measures promoting cultural destruction. In addition to the ‘re-education’ internment camps, this system includes multiple other forms of incarceration as well as the comprehensive system of surveillance and evaluation in the region. Together, these institutions create an environment of complete fear and complicity while dismantling the social capital of Uyghur communities and breaking the spirits of individual Uyghurs. As this system of fear and spirit-breaking neutralizes all forms of Uyghur resistance, the Chinese state is also gradually cleansing the Uyghur territory of its uniquely Uyghur cultural markers through language destruction, the erasure of cultural traditions, and the razing of cultural monuments and communities. In place of these Uyghur cultural markers, the PRC is establishing a distinctly Chinese landscape both culturally and physically. At the same time, the state is instituting policies of forced assimilation, coerced residential labor, and coerced miscegenation aimed at breaking down Uyghur collective identity. In essence, this system is facilitating a process of erase and replace, erasing Uyghur culture and identity and seeking to replace it with a Han-centric Chinese culture and identity.

THE SYSTEM OF INCARCERATION AND INTERNMENT

By most accounts, the mass internment of Uyghurs and other indigenous Muslims in the region started shortly after the release of the ‘De-extremification Regulations,’ in April and May 2017.⁴⁹ However, it was not until the fall, the week of 11 September 2017, sixteen years after the attack that initiated GWOT, that reports were coming out in foreign media which acknowledged the widespread nature of this program. Over three successive days, reports were filed by The Globe and Mail, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and RFA suggesting that ‘re-education’ in the region had transitioned, from something to which a nominal number of particularly religious Uyghurs were subjected in rural areas, to a mass phenomenon applicable to large swaths of the population.⁵⁰

HRW reported that ‘re-education’ internment centers, with a variety of names from ‘Counterterrorism Training Centers’ to ‘Educational Transformation Training Centers,’ had popped up throughout the region and that families had told the organization that their relatives had disappeared into them for months with no information about why they had been interned or when they would be released.⁵¹ HRW also reported that the centers were a combination of repurposed existing public buildings and new construction.⁵² Having successfully called up local Party organs and police stations in rural regions, RFA noted that the numbers of people entering these centers were significant in rural regions.⁵³ According to one female police officer from Akto who agreed to speak with RFA, ‘five kinds of suspicious people have been detained and sent to education camps: people who throw away their mobile phone’s SIM card or did not use their mobile phone after registering it; former prisoners already released from prison; blacklisted people; “suspicious people” who have some fundamental religious sentiment; and the people who have relatives abroad.’⁵⁴

In the months between the beginning of the program in the spring and the reporting on it in September, Zenz estimates that procurements for the renovation and construction of these institutions amounted to at least 860 Million Yuan or 126 Million US dollars.⁵⁵ By spring of 2018, a Chinese ethnic Han law student studying in Canada had documented, using the satellite imagery of Google Earth, that these procurements had resulted in the building of 94 separate new re-education internment camps throughout the Uyghur homeland.⁵⁶ According to Zenz’s calculations, these camps held an estimated one million Uyghurs by the spring of 2018, which he suggests equals 11.5% of the population of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in the region between 20 and 79 years old.⁵⁷ If these figures are accurate, the mass internment of Uyghurs and other indigenous Muslims in the region had quickly escalated to one of the largest ethnically profiled extra-legal mass internment of people in history.

As the existence of these mass internment camps was being revealed internationally during 2018, the PRC continued to deny their existence.⁵⁸ However, it was clear that the PRC would be unable to keep such a mass campaign against specific ethnic groups a secret, especially when they involved the new construction of almost 100 large prison-like structures. Furthermore, in May 2018, the Associated Press was able to interview several Uyghurs and Kazakhs who had been in camps and, by a variety means, had been able to escape to Kazakhstan.⁵⁹ This provided the first eyewitness accounts of life inside these camps, and the stories were highly disturbing. Amidst this mounting evidence, in October 2018, the Chinese government finally acknowledged the existence of the camps, but it claimed that these institutions were benign ‘vocational training centers’ meant to rehabilitate alleged ‘extremists.’⁶⁰ A number of internees and staff who have been in these camps have had the opportunity to speak openly to international media and scholars since 2017. Their descriptions of daily life in the camps suggest that these institutions are not merely benign vocational schools, but are essentially ethnically profiled mass internment centers, deliberately intended to cleanse internees of their identities as Uyghurs and other indigenous Muslim ethnicities.

Life in the camps

There is evidence that these camps are not uniform either in whom they intern or in their conditions. In particular, it has been documented that people are not sent to these camps merely by a single list of criteria. Rather, there is solid evidence that regional administrations are given quotas for internees. An official from a village near Ghulja, for example, confirmed to RFA in March 2018 that his local government had been tasked with ensuring that at least 10% of the local population was sent to the ‘re-education’ camps.⁶¹ As a result, the criteria for internment differs by location as Party officials need to find a predetermined number of alleged ‘extremists’ in their locale. Given that the definition of ‘extremist behavior’ is so broad, officials have significant leeway in determining whom to intern. To highlight the many absurd reasons for which Uyghurs have been sent to these camps, Foreign Policy published an article in 2018 highlighting ‘48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp,’ including such ‘suspicious behavior’ as owning a tent, telling others not to swear, and refusing to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol.⁶² If the reasons for internment vary, the conditions in different camps also inevitably differ. Some are brand new buildings, while others are repurposed ones; some are seriously over-crowded, and others likely are not. However, as is the case in any mass internment camp, the most important factor determining the conditions inside them is the character of the person in charge and their staff. Unfortunately, given the lack of access by outside observers to these camps, except on public relations junkets to model internment centers, such granular information as which camps are the most oppressive has yet to come to light.

That said, it does seem that there is some uniformity in the activities to which internees are subjected region-wide. Most accounts of the camps mention a regime that involves both intensive Chinese-language training and hours of ‘political education.’⁶³ However, neither of these activities are as benign as they appear at first glance. Teachers of language classes in the camps, for example, have suggested that their lessons were more concerned with power and intimidation than with pedagogy.⁶⁴ One teacher recounted that she taught behind bars, separated from her students, and students were required to sit upright at full attention for a four-hour language class.⁶⁵ If the students moved, nodded off, or twitched, the omni-present CCTV cameras would capture the movement, and the person monitoring the class on CCTV would warn them via loudspeaker to sit at full attention. Students who did not follow these orders would be forced to stand for the remainder of class or even be removed from class for further punishment. Furthermore, this particular teacher said that students did not have a common level of Chinese-language ability, some with better Chinese-language skills than the teacher, and others with no prior instruction in the language at all.⁶⁶ This dynamic suggests that these classes are intended less as a means of instruction and more as a powerful assertion of the now declared prominence of the Chinese language over that of Uyghur.

The political education classes are at least as torturous if not more so. After several hours of being subjected to propaganda videos and lectures about the greatness of the CCP, the internees are forced to participate in self-criticism. As Saraygul Sautbay, an ethnic Kazakh who also taught in an internment camp, recounted, ‘the pupils had to think about their sins; almost everything could be considered a sin, from observing religious practices and not knowing the Chinese language or culture, to immoral behavior; inmates who did not think of sins that were severe enough or didn’t make up something were punished.’⁶⁷ Another internee who escaped to Kazakhstan, Omär Bekali, notes that the repetitive nature of chanting propaganda slogans in these classes become akin to psychological torture over time.⁶⁸

If the language and political education classes are themselves psychologically torturing, life outside the classroom involves an even graver spirit-breaking experience. Internees are not only forbidden to speak in their native language, but are not permitted to even interact among themselves or speak to each other outside the classroom. Furthermore, according to one alleged former guard at a particularly large camp, internees were not even allowed to display any emotions throughout their stay.⁶⁹ To enforce these draconian rules, ubiquitous CCTV cameras provide omni-present surveillance. Bathrooms are reported to be in open spaces in dorm rooms, and some have reported having to use buckets instead of actual toilets in their rooms.⁷⁰ Internees are also provided minimal rations of food, which accounts for the gaunt appearance of most of those who have been lucky enough to be released. These conditions have made suicide in the camps so pervasive that internees are sometimes asked to procure ‘suicide-safe’ clothing through relatives to prevent them from taking their lives.⁷¹

One of the more mysterious stories that is found in most eyewitness accounts of the camps is the mandatory administration of drugs to internees. A former guard notes that all young to middle-aged internees are forced to receive unknown shots on a monthly basis allegedly to prevent flus and other sicknesses.⁷² None of the internees who have spoken about this practice believe that this is the purpose of the medicines that were provided them. It is unclear whether the drugs being administered are all the same or if different internees are given different medicines. Several female former internees have said that these drugs stopped their menstrual cycle and ultimately resulted in sterilization.⁷³ Others have said that they have lost cognitive abilities from the drugs they were given.

As one might expect, the most disturbing stories to have emerged from the camps are those about torture and abuse. Most eyewitness accounts discuss having either experienced or witnessed some level of torture. Many mention that the camp in which they were located had dedicated rooms for torture, and there are numerous accounts of the diverse ways that the ‘Tiger Chair,’ which latches ankles and wrists, is used in torture.⁷⁴ Others, such as Mihrigul Tursun, say they were subjected to electro-shock on numerous occasions.⁷⁵ In general, torture appears to be ubiquitous in these camps, but its brutality may depend upon the given camp. More recently, former female internees have also come forward to tell terrifying stories of sexual abuse and rape at the hands of camp guards.⁷⁶ While this sexual abuse is likely not condoned by the state, it seems to be tacitly allowed by at least some of the camp administrators. It is likely, given the scale of these camps and the apparent power given to guards in them, that such incidents are endemic.

One of the common statements heard from witnesses is that they feel as if their identity and nation is deliberately targeted in the camps. This is accomplished through both the content of the reeducation classes and the psychological torture and physical humiliation to which internees are subjected. This was apparent even to one ethnic Kazakh with Kazakhstan citizenship who was interned for eight months in a camp without much prior knowledge of the Chinese language. While he admits to not understanding much of the content, he notes, ‘what I gathered from those classes was that they just wanted to erase us as a nation, erase our identity, turn us into Chinese people.’⁷⁷

In this context, it is important to note that many of the people who work as staff in these internment centers are themselves Uyghurs or from other indigenous Muslim groups. Accounts of teachers who have worked in camps suggest that their work is considered a sort of punishment in itself. Saraygul Sautbay claims she was forcibly sent to a camp to teach, and an account from another teacher suggests that school directors threaten to send underperforming teachers to teach in the camps. However, it appears that most Uyghurs and other Muslim guards and CCTV monitors have taken jobs of their own free will and are paid handsomely for their work. While it is likely that some of the staff from the indigenous groups sadistically enjoy the power they wield, the one unverified letter that has come to light from such a camp security staff member, an alleged ethnic Kazakh CCTV monitor, suggests that the work is traumatic for many if not most.⁷⁸ In addition to writing with disdain about the disturbing evidence he saw of sexual abuse and rape, he notes that he was frequently threatened with possible internment himself if he made any mistakes or refused to report violations.⁷⁹

From internment to forced labor

Recent research suggests that there have been attempts since at least 2018 to marry ‘re-education’ camps with new centers for forced labor. This is also related to another state-led program that is seeking to transform rural Uyghur farmers and Kazakh herders into factory laborers after the completion of a shorter course of ‘re-education.’ These programs may provide insight into PRC plans for re-integrating some of the people who have been relegated to mass internment camps since 2017, as well as its more general plans for transforming the Uyghur identity and the Uyghur homeland, particularly in the still Uyghur-dominated Uyghur south.

Research by Adrian Zenz suggests that, starting in 2019, numerous camps began adding factory spaces within their encampments and have allowed companies, particularly in the textile industry, to establish operations in these new factories. According to Zenz, these companies use the internees as workers in exchange for a series of state-provided subsidies, which include using the factories free of charge for two years and at half market value subsequently, getting salary subsidies for each former internee they take on as workers, and a variety of other preferential benefits.⁸⁰ It is assumed that these workers are the ‘graduates’ of the camps, who have proven themselves fluent in Chinese and having a thorough knowledge of the political education they received. Furthermore, some of these workers are allowed to go home on weekends and to eventually transfer to ‘satellite factories’ in their home region.⁸¹ This provides a possible endgame for the PRC in its ‘re-education’ system, but it also allows for the long-term sustainability of the system and a means to integrate it with settler colonization by creating ethnically segregated and low-paid work for sufficiently ‘re-educated’ Uyghurs and other indigenous Muslims in the region. Furthermore, reports that were published while this book was still in production provide evidence that some of these former internees, along with other Uyghur youth from the rural south, are being funneled into factories in inner China that produce parts and goods for major international corporations, directly impacting settler colonization by reducing the indigenous population of the Uyghur homeland’s south.⁸²

This system also provides propaganda cover for the PRC from international criticism of the mass internment of Uyghurs. It appears, for example, that during 2019, the aims and courses of some of the camps described above have shifted to teaching factory labor skills for eventual placement in factories, which are often adjacent to the internment camps themselves, but are sometimes elsewhere in the region or even located entirely outside the Uyghur homeland in China proper. This is most likely the case with the model camps shown to a variety of international journalists during the summer of 2019 where internees were shown doing factory work and receiving vocational training.⁸³ Additionally, as Zenz points out, some of these factories are hybrid production units that include both internees and non-internees, helping to further hide the existence of the mass internment system.

Equally, and perhaps even more disturbing, Zenz and others have identified several other related factory work programs that serve ‘surplus rural labor.’ One provides former farmers with training that includes the classes of the original ‘re-education’ program in addition to factory labor skills, eventually placing them in the new factories that are being constructed throughout the region, both adjacent to internment camps and in industrial parks.⁸⁴ It seems that this training’s implementation may be done differently in different regions, but in Kashgar, it involves at least a one-month centralized training implemented by the state, which focuses on Chinese-language instruction and political education.⁸⁵ In many ways, this can be characterized as ‘re-education lite,’ and those who undergo such courses are frequently placed in factories mixed with former internees. As Zenz suggests, these programs are characterized by the state as ‘industry-based poverty alleviation,’ but they are effectively serving to quarantine large swaths of the rural population in factories where they will also be forced to use the Chinese language and follow the directives of Han foremen.⁸⁶

A report published in Australia in March 2020 identifies a related program of coerced labor that has been in place since 2017, sending both former internees and other Uyghur youth to inner China to work in segregated and closely monitored work units within large factories supplying major international corporations including Nike and Apple. According to this report, at least 80,000 Uyghur youth, mostly from the rural south, have been a part of this labor transfer from the homeland since 2017, and they are limited in their movement as well as subjected to ‘re-education’ during hours after work. As of this book’s printing, it appears as if this program may be expanding, helping to facilitate large transfers of Uyghurs from their homeland.⁸⁷

Another program involves the construction of small ‘satellite factories’ in rural areas, which usually serve no more than two villages.⁸⁸ This program explicitly targets women, who otherwise might avoid salaried work to stay at home and raise their children, seeking to integrate them into the Han-dominated and Chinese-language environment of daily factory work. To account for the care of these women’s children, these ‘satellite factories’ have built-in daycare centers, which serve to socialize their children into Chinese society and break the generational transfer of cultural mores, which would be accomplished through child-rearing by a stay-at-home mother.

While it is unknown how recruitment is carried out for any of these ‘surplus rural labor’ programs, both in the region and in inner China, it is clear that participation in them cannot be considered voluntary given the present conditions in the Uyghur homeland. It is assumed, for example, that those who are asked to participate in these labor programs and deny the opportunity to do so will quickly earn themselves a potentially one-way ticket to an actual internment camp or a prison.

As Zenz points out, the program for internees and those for rural surplus labor and stay-at-home mothers are overtly political, and combine the goals of development, increasingly framed as ‘poverty alleviation,’ with those of ‘stability maintenance’ and ‘counterterrorism.’ In demonstrating this, Zenz cites the region’s Vice-Chairman of the Political Consultative Council as saying ‘satellite factories are to be built in the vocational skills education training centers (i.e. re-education internment camps), so that people affected by terrorism and extreme thoughts can learn the nation’s common language, study law, and understand the right and wrong; they can also learn skills, become able to work, and increase their incomes.’⁸⁹ The labor transfer program to Inner China, which also involves ‘re-education,’ serves a similar purpose, but it also facilitates demographic changes to the Uyghur homeland, thus directly aiding Han settler colonization. It is apparent that all of these programs are a high priority of the state given that much of the infrastructure for this coercive labor and ‘reeducation’ scheme is being funneled through the Pairing Assistance Program (PAP) that has been driving the region’s development and colonization since at least 2010. In this way, these programs represent a transition of sorts from cultural genocide in the name of ‘counterterrorism’ to settler colonization by ‘public-private partnership.’

The ways in which these coercive labor programs seamlessly blend with the mass internment camps is instructive of the actual role that mass internment and incarceration plays in the ongoing destruction of Uyghur identity. The mass indoctrination in the camps is unlikely to actually eradicate Uyghur culture by force, but the fear of internment or incarceration provides a significant incentive for those outside the camps to comply with state assimilation designs. As is suggested above for the factory labor programs targeting rural Uyghurs, the omni-present implicit threat of internment provides coercive incentives for Uyghurs who are not interned to ‘voluntarily’ participate in a variety of assimilationist programs, since refusal of participation would raise suspicion from the state of ‘extremist’ inclinations.

Imprisonment

While the stories of life in the mass internment camps are horrific, it is important to note that many other Uyghurs face even more brutal conditions in actual prisons, as the internment camps only house part of the population taken out of society since 2017. During 2017, almost 87,000 people were convicted of crimes in the Uyghur region, ten times more than in 2016, and between 2017 and 2018 the total number of convictions in the region was 230,000.⁹⁰ While not all of these convictions were against Uyghurs or other Muslims, and not all received prison terms, one would assume that the lion’s share were Uyghurs and other indigenous Muslims who were subsequently incarcerated.

It is noteworthy, for example, that most Uyghur cultural figures, including professors, writers, and musicians, as well as most religious figures, appear to have received actual prison terms rather than being subjected to ‘re-education.’ These people are likely considered too important to the production and maintenance of Uyghur culture and identity to risk allowing them to influence others in ‘reeducation’ classroom settings. Furthermore, by the logic of the 2017 ‘De-extremification Regulations,’ which mostly criminalize those who influence others, it would follow that cultural and religious figures would be prime suspects for influencing the larger Uyghur population. In addition to such high-level cultural and religious figures, it is likely that many others whom the local authorities determine are particularly ‘deviant’ are arrested rather than extra-legally interned and are subsequently given lengthy prison terms. In fact, the line that distinguishes whether one is incarcerated or interned is probably determined by the limits on the state to process actual arrests and the limited physical space of prisons in the region.

Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests that ‘re-education’ internment and prison sentences are not mutually exclusive. Poorly behaving internees may be arrested and relegated to prisons, and prisoners ending terms may be sent for ‘re-education.’ There is also some evidence that the PRC may be using the blurred lines between the two systems as a means to cover up its mass internment in the region. Since October 2018, there have been reports of large numbers of people being transferred from the region to prisons in inner China.⁹¹ Most of these reports mention the movement of internees from ‘re-education’ camps to these prisons outside the region, but it is also possible that this is merely a response to over-crowded prisons in the Uyghur region or, more insidiously, that it is a gradual process of population transfer.

While there are likely substantive differences between being interned and being imprisoned in the Uyghur region, it is important to note that the number of Uyghurs who have suffered either of these two forms of punishment appears to be astronomical. This has left a chilling effect on all those who have not suffered these fates. It has created an environment of unprecedented fear that is felt throughout the Uyghur population, from poor farmers to government bureaucrats. Saying or writing the wrong thing, talking to the wrong person, owning the wrong book, or being from the wrong family can land anyone in either a mass internment camp or a prison. As a result, those outside these penal institutions do everything they can to please authorities. In this way, the threat of internment and incarceration has proven to be the most persuasive tool for the destruction of Uyghur identity outside the camps, especially when combined with the pervasive system of surveillance and evaluation being implemented throughout the region.

SURVEILLANCE OUTSIDE THE CAMPS AND THE ALGORITHM OF ‘EXTREMISM’

As suggested above, the threat of arbitrary internment or incarceration has created an environment of complete fear for those left outside of penal institutions in the Uyghur homeland since 2017. Colleagues of mine who went to the region to try to do fieldwork in the summer of 2018, for example, found that they could only exchange pleasantries with friends for short periods of time in ‘unwatched places’ and could not engage substantively with anybody with whom they were not familiar. In essence, everybody in the region is in a constant state of self-censorship. This sense of constant fear is further reinforced by the sophisticated system of surveillance and evaluation that Chen Quanguo has succeeded in making pervasive throughout the region. This omni-present surveillance has created an ‘open-air panopticon prison’ that can track every Uyghur’s movement, communications, biometrics, and history at the press of a button. As The Guardian suggested in spring 2017, it is the ‘perfect police state.’⁹²

The most striking aspect of the surveillance system outside the camps is its high-tech nature, which evokes visions of dystopian science fiction. Although the sophisticated gadgetry that goes into the region’s network of electronic surveillance is novel, the network’s true power comes from the way it is integrated into the IJOP. Through the IJOP, the information collected by this network is automatically fed into an algorithm meant to evaluate one’s level of exposure to influences deemed by the state to be ‘extremist.’⁹³ Since 2017, daily life in the region’s cities inevitably involves having one’s IJOP profile examined multiple times. The ubiquitous checkpoints throughout public spaces require some form of identity confirmation, whether it is from one’s ID card, mobile phone, iris scan, facial scan, or a combination of any of these identifiers. This immediately allows those manning the checkpoint to get notifications if an IJOP profile is determined suspicious. A state document leaked in 2020, which details personal information about 311 people from Karakash who had been interned in camps, for example, demonstrates that 38 of them had been identified for internment by such IJOP ‘push notifications.’⁹⁴ Checkpoints also provide additional opportunities to collect data for the IJOP, as police officers are equipped with scanners that can check the contents of one’s mobile phone. CCTV cameras equipped with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology and facial recognition perform similar feats by identifying those involved in suspicious behavior on the street. Any consumer product that could serve as a weapon, including kitchen utensils and farming tools, is engraved with a QR code, which must be registered to its owner and, thus, appears in their IJOP profile.

Essentially, Uyghurs’ lives and loyalties are constantly monitored and evaluated. In this respect, the level of surveillance on an urban street in the region is almost as extensive as that in the mass internment camps. However, it is the threat of internment or arrest that makes this constant surveillance so frightening. A Uyghur who lived in the region in 2017 and much of 2018 told me that this fear prevented them from talking to anybody about anything beyond pleasantries. Although they lived in constant fear, they could discuss this with nobody and even sought to avoid appearing agitated around others in the event that such behavior would be deemed suspicious. They recounted being frequently visited by neighborhood committee members and asked to fill out information about habits and being constantly evaluated at work. Every night the person stayed up at night in fear that they would get a ‘knock on the door’ and be taken away. It was such fears that caused most people with family members abroad to ask them to cut off all contact with them in 2017, and those who retained contact adopted a sophisticated code system to speak about others’ well-being by discussing the weather.

While this high-tech surveillance is less widespread in rural areas, it is also less necessary as a means of keeping track of the local population. Since 2013, Party cadres had been dispatched to rural areas, particularly in the south, to participate in house-to-house inspections and report on families’ behaviors to assess their potential to become extremists or terrorists. According to Darren Byler, who has interviewed both Han who partook in these missions and Uyghurs who were the object of investigation, these interactions, while framed as assistance from the Party, were very tense for all involved.⁹⁵ According to a Xinjiang TV report, such cadres visited 24 million rural Uyghur homes between 2016 and 2018, conducting a total of 33 million interviews.⁹⁶ As such, this program must have yielded valuable data for the security apparatus in the region, leading authorities to vastly expand it in 2018 to include more than one million Party workers, who have been assigned partner families with whom they must live for extended periods of time, sometimes as often as one week each month.⁹⁷ These cadres present themselves to their Uyghur partner families as ‘relatives,’ but the power relationship inherent in the relationship is much more akin to paternalistic.

These cadres are tasked with both propaganda and data collection duties, collecting information about family habits and attitudes while also instructing them on proper behavior and child-rearing. In this respect, the program represents both a part of the surveillance system and a part of the CCP’s outright assimilation campaign in the Uyghur homeland. The intimacy in these homestays must provoke as much fear, if not more so, than the pervasive and impersonal electronic surveillance of Uyghurs in urban areas. As Byler notes from one of his interviews with a young Uyghur man who had experienced numerous such interactions with visiting Party cadres in his home, there was a constant fear that acting the wrong way or saying the wrong thing would result in internment. Thus, following the cadres’ instructions and displaying willful assimilation was a must.

The power of this pervasive surveillance throughout the region’s cities and villages, especially when combined with the fear of internment, is two-fold. First, the fear it instills in the Uyghurs effectively breeds distrust within this ethnic community and breaks down the social capital that is central to their identity. It erases the opportunity for freely engaging in the collective social behavior that makes up the substance of Uyghur culture, whether that be life-cycle rituals, holiday celebrations, or other social gatherings. Second, it makes all Uyghurs in the region incapable of resisting CCP-led campaigns to promote assimilation. In essence, it ensures that participation in anything promoted by the Party cannot be voluntary since non-participation will be noted and likely result in internment or imprisonment.

WELCOME TO THE POMEGRANATE: ERASING AND REPLACING UYGHUR IDENTITY

In this context, state policies have enjoyed a free hand in implementing blatantly assimilationist policies that are meant to dismantle Uyghur culture as we know it. While most of these policies are more subtle than the violent forced assimilationism of the internment camps or the intrusive system of surveillance and evaluation, their power emerges from the threat these more brutal measures pose. Together, they form a systematic effort to destroy Uyghur identity and replace it with something more palatable to the state and in harmony with Han dominant society. Such an assimilationist strategy has been a CCP priority in state ‘counterterrorism’ efforts in the Uyghur homeland since 2014 when the state first identified the source of alleged ‘extremism’ as being within Uyghur culture itself. As Xi Jinping had stated at the Second Xinjiang Work Forum, in order to defeat ‘terrorism,’ the Party needed to promote the ‘intermingling’ of ethnic groups in the region so that they became one, ‘tightly bound together like the seeds of a pomegranate.’⁹⁸

This metaphor for assimilating the Uyghurs has been prominent in Party propaganda ever since, but, until 2017, most Uyghurs had resisted becoming seeds of the pomegranate. After 2017, resistance had become futile in the context of pervasive surveillance and the threat of internment. While this assimilation drive is being framed as ‘counterterrorism’ in defense of society from existential threats, its implementation appears more like an intensive and perhaps final stage of settler colonization. As a part of such colonization, it inevitably involves changing both the geographic landscape of the Uyghur homeland and the human terrain of the Uyghur people themselves.

Changing the Uyghur homeland

The PRC has been changing the landscape of the Uyghur region for decades through development efforts meant to spur economic growth, but these efforts always left some room for Uyghurs to leave their mark on their homeland. However, by 2017, it appeared that this room was rapidly shrinking and was potentially no longer tolerated. Perhaps due to the plans for the region as a commercial center in the BRI, there seemed to be an urgency to remove its last markers of ‘Uyghurness.’ This has included the demolition of religious sites, the destruction of graveyards, and a drive to enforce new building standards for residencies that are not based on Uyghur traditional housing structures.

Much of this effort has involved removing signs of the Islamic religion, which is in line with the PRC’s general attack on the religious aspects of Uyghur identity. This began with the removal of crescent symbols on minarets, progressed towards repurposing mosques, and has culminated in destroying many of them. One investigative report done in collaboration between The Guardian and Bellingcat using satellite images found that at least 31 mosques and 2 shrine sites had been either partially or completed demolished since 2016.⁹⁹ However, a more recent report by the UHRP suggests that the number of holy sites partially or fully demolished during this time is over 100.¹⁰⁰ Many of the mosques and sites mentioned in the UHRP report are smaller community mosques, which remain difficult to document through satellite images, but both sources provide information regarding the demolition of major mosques of significance in Kaghilik and Keriya that have long histories. Such mosques not only hold religious significance to Uyghurs, but are viewed as part of their cultural history and are symbolic of the Uyghur nature of particular cities or towns.

However, perhaps of even more concern than the destruction of these major historical mosques are reports that the PRC has demolished critical pilgrimage sites that contain shrines of important Sufi saints of significance to the Uyghurs. Beyond their religious significance, these sites, which are generally outside major population centers, hold critical importance to Uyghurs’ identity and their connection to the land. As Uyghur anthropologist Rahilä Davut, who has been either imprisoned or interned since at least 2017, has said about the cultural significance of these sites, ‘if one were to remove these … shrines, the Uyghur people would lose contact with earth; they would no longer have a personal, cultural, and spiritual history; after a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.’¹⁰¹

In addition to the destruction of the burial shrines to Sufi saints, there are reports that local authorities have also begun to uproot entire cemeteries unceremoniously, not bothering to rebury the dead. According to one investigative report, 30 Uyghur graveyards in the region have been completely excavated, presumably waiting for new construction. In addition to serving to desecrate the memories of family members, these acts suggest yet another manner in which the local CCP is severing the connection between Uyghurs and the land.

Beyond the religious realm, there is also evidence that the CCP administration in the Uyghur region is actively involved in altering the structure and appearance of rural Uyghur villages, especially in the south. On-going research by Timothy Grose demonstrates that this is part of a larger policy seeking to transform Uyghur villages through the promotion of the ‘three news’ intended to ‘advocate a new lifestyle,’ ‘establish a new atmosphere,’ and ‘construct a new order.’¹⁰² While much of this program is focused on ideologically transforming rural Uyghurs, the ‘new atmosphere’ portion of the campaign is deliberately focused on altering the landscape and housing of Uyghur villages. According to Grose, part of this campaign focuses on renovating houses in ways that rid them of their traditional Uyghur architectural elements, replacing them with allegedly ‘modern’ attributes associated with Han lifestyles.¹⁰³ Among other changes to residential properties, it advocates ridding homes of the mahrab niche in most houses, which indicates the direction of Mecca and governs one’s positioning during prayer, demolishing traditional supa beds, and replacing traditional furniture, particularly the dining table, with ‘modern’ variants.¹⁰⁴ While mostly appearing benign, these architectural alterations actually directly impact Uyghur ritual behavior, which has contributed to the traditional logic of their residential spaces. In connection with the ‘surplus rural labor’ factory program, this effort suggests an attempt to completely transform rural areas in the Uyghur homeland.

The human terrain: changing Uyghurs

If the campaign to change aspects of the Uyghur homeland’s physical landscape has sought to cleanse the territory of religious markers and more generally break the connection between Uyghurs and the land, the efforts to change the human terrain of Uyghur identity has been far more radical. In many ways, this is the central aim of the cultural genocide being carried out by the state, and it fits with the broader aims of the ‘Second Generation Nationalities Policy’ that seeks to erase ethnic cultural distinctiveness throughout the PRC. Some aspects of this forced assimilation have already been discussed above, such as the violent transformation of Uyghur consciousness applied in the mass internment camps and the implicit self-censorship of one’s cultural distinctiveness enforced by the mass surveillance system. However, the drive to change the human terrain of Uyghurs is also promoted explicitly in a host of other state campaigns that are framed as ‘modernizing’ Uyghurs and promoting ‘poverty alleviation.’ One example is the various coercive labor programs for rural Uyghurs discussed above. However, it is worthwhile mentioning a few others that, while described by the state as ‘voluntary’ are likely understood by Uyghurs as being at the very least ‘coerced’ under the threat of internment.

One such effort is related to the aforementioned ‘three news’ campaign, which seeks to alter traditional thought and community behavior in rural communities through condemnation of religion, and coerced participation in events that promote Chinese culture and values. These efforts are directly reinforced by the Party cadre ‘relatives’ who have inserted themselves in village communities and include events to celebrate patriotic songs, flag-raising ceremonies, and celebrations of Chinese holidays. While little information is available about such efforts, they are likely widespread and sometimes coordinated on a regional level through activities termed ‘national security education,’ which even include a ‘National Security Education Day’ holiday. On that day in 2018, apparently over ten million residents of over 12,000 communities throughout the region took part in flag-raising ceremonies accompanied by speeches on obeying the law and reporting ‘suspicious behavior.’¹⁰⁵ While such activities have a benign performative nature to them, they shape a new social environment for rural Uyghurs, which can gradually supplant traditional social relations. Furthermore, some of these activities entail partaking in practices that are explicitly in violation of being a Muslim. These include being asked to partake in the drinking of alcohol or cigarette smoking by Party cadre ‘relatives’ or, as Darren Byler has noted of the 2019 Chinese New Year celebration, being forced to consume pork in honor of the ‘Year of the Pig.’¹⁰⁶ In both of these instances, refusal to participate could be quickly flagged by authorities as a sign of ‘extremist’ inclincations.

A more disturbing campaign to change the Uyghur human terrain involves the educational system in the Uyghur region. While the process of making the schools in the region teach exclusively in Chinese had been underway since the early 2000s, changes in 2017 served to create one education path of assimilation for a few of the brightest Uyghurs while promoting a path of marginalization for the majority. As for all students in China, Uyghurs’ educational and career paths are determined by their performance on a nationwide exam taken between eighth grade and high school. Those who pass are given a standard academic high school education, and those who do not are relegated to vocational schools. While the transition to all-Chinese-language instruction had already required Uyghur students to take this exam in Chinese and attend high school or vocational training in the Chinese language, affirmative action programs encouraging the integration of Uyghurs into PRC society had long given them a 50-point advantage on their test grade. In 2017, this advantage was slashed to 15 points, thus dramatically reducing the number of Uyghurs attending academic high schools.¹⁰⁷

As a result, high schools in the Uyghur region now have a much higher proportion of Han students, providing for a more assimilation-ist experience for those Uyghurs who do get admitted. Furthermore, since such schools are mostly located in urban areas, the rural Uyghur students who do get admitted must study in boarding school environments, which further separate them from their culture and language.¹⁰⁸ For those who do not get admitted, they are generally relegated to the new system of coerced labor connected to the internment camps through the ‘surplus rural labor’ program and its ‘reeducation lite’ curriculum or sent to work and be simultaneously re-educated in larger factories in inner China. Thus, whichever path they are afforded, this system assumes that their future will be much less ingrained in Uyghur culture than that of their parents.

However, the situation of Uyghur children whose parents have been interned is far more dire, and the state’s apparently intentional role in their fate is far more disturbing. The children of interned parents essentially face involuntary intergenerational separation, which has long been a hallmark of settler colonialism and cultural genocide. This is particularly true of children whose parents have both been interned in ‘re-education’ camps. While there is evidence that a portion of these children have been able to remain in the care of family members, there is also substantial evidence that large numbers of them are being raised in state-run institutions from a very early age.

Adrian Zenz has done ground-breaking research on this subject and has found that Chen Quanguo’s administration may have had plans for massive forced intergenerational separation even prior to the establishment of the mass internment camps. According to Zenz, Chen had already established in his first month in office a plan to institute universal preschool for the children of the Uyghur region within the course of a year.¹⁰⁹ However, the actual implementation of this plan not surprisingly corresponds with 2017, the year that mass internment began. By late February 2017, the government began construction of 4,387 preschools that were intended to serve 562,900 new students, particularly in the south of the Uyghur homeland, with a completion deadline before the beginning of the 2017–2018 school year.¹¹⁰ While this goal itself appeared ambitious, it is noteworthy that during the 2017–2018 school year, the number of children enrolled in preschool was far greater than this target. While the total preschool intake target for the region in fall 2017 had been around one million, the actual number enrolled was closer to 1.4 million.¹¹¹ Furthermore, Zenz suggests that a substantial number of these new preschool students appeared to attend institutions with the capacity to house boarding students from a very early age.

While there is no way to prove conclusively that this larger enrollment figure is accounted for by the children of interned parents, there are few other reasonable reasons for it. If this is the case, these children have effectively become wards of the state unless they are returned to their parents once they have ‘graduated’ from ‘re-education.’ Regardless of whether or not they are reunited with their birth parents, while in the care of the state, these children are being raised ostensibly as Han children in a Chinese-language environment with Han childrearing methods adopted by the state as standard. The state itself has lauded the opportunity for children to be raised by the state and Party while their parents are being themselves ‘re-educated.’ Zenz, for example, cites one government report that talks about a preschool adjacent to a mass internment camp in Khotan that allows the children to ‘eat and live’ at the school while their parents are engaged in ‘carefree study.’

In general, the educational system in the region since 2017 appears to be increasingly built for the re-engineering of the next generation of Uyghurs as the region presumably prepares for a more intensive stage of settler colonialism. This includes the separation of children from parents through those parents’ internment, the coerced employment of women who then are obliged to bring their children to state-run day-care, and an expansion of boarding schools at all levels of education. The parallels to settler colonialism examples from the past in the Americas and Australia barely require pointing out.

One final aspect of transforming the Uyghur human terrain that bears mentioning is the campaign of coerced miscegenation in the region. Formally, this campaign is driven by incentives provided to couples of mixed ethnic background to marry. Many of these incentives have existed since 2014 when Xi Jinping first hailed the importance of ethnic ‘intermingling’ and the pomegranate metaphor in the Uyghur region, leading to a variety of monetary and other incentives for such marriages.¹¹² In 2017, new incentives were added, which gave children of mixed marriages a 20-point advantage, higher than the 15-point concession given to Uyghurs, on school qualifying exams.¹¹³ Furthermore, the present marriage market in the Uyghur region would naturally appear to incentivize marriages between Han men and Uyghur women since there is a dearth of Han women in China writ large due to the one-child policy, and there is presently a dearth of Uyghur men in the region due to internment and incarceration. While these various incentives may account for some of the interest of Han men in marrying Uyghur women, the reverse has generally not been true given the long-held animosities between the two groups.

However, like Uyghur participation in other assimilationist policies in the Uyghur region that are on the surface ‘voluntary’ or ‘incentivized,’ the real motivation for Uyghurs to partake since 2017 has been coercion. On this particular issue, the coercive elements are particularly intense. First, the state is heavily invested in promoting inter-ethnic marriage in the Uyghur region, and there have even been campaigns to draw Han men to the region for this purpose, showing the exotic beauty and caring nature of Uyghur women.¹¹⁴ Secondly, and more importantly, refusing a Han man’s hand in marriage in the present context could have grave consequences for Uyghur women and especially for their parents. The 2015 ‘De-extremification Regulations’ that have served as the template for reasons to be sent to mass internment and imprisonment, for example, explicitly mention the prevention of others from marrying outside their ethnic group or faith as a manifestation of ‘extremism.’ Thus, if Uyghur parents were to refuse to offer their daughter’s hand in marriage to a Han, it would be an almost automatic relegation to internment or imprisonment. Furthermore, if a Uyghur woman was to refuse a Han proposal, it may result in the internment or imprisonment of both her and her parents. As an interview with a Uyghur woman on the subject by Darren Byler points out, many Uyghur women are presently resigning themselves to marrying Han men, only seeking to stall the process as long as possible. Again, the comparisons to other settler colonial circumstances in history are obvious.

BREAK THEIR ROOTS

PRC policy in the Uyghur homeland today is a systematic attempt to destroy this ethnic group’s collective identity and its cultural markers. It is violent, calculated, and shockingly transparent. This effort continues to be couched as an attempt to eradicate a ‘terrorist threat’ within the Uyghur population, but it is painfully obvious that this is not its real goal. Given that Uyghur-led violence had already markedly diminished in 2016 before the campaign began, and has presumably been absent from the region’s life ever since, the ‘counterterrorism’ slogans still used to justify this state-led erasure of Uyghur culture must sound like a cruel joke to most Uyghurs in the region today. Rather, the cultural genocide taking place against the Uyghurs in China is very much like the many other examples of this phenomenon from the past history of settler colonialism. As in many of these examples from colonialism’s past, at the center of the experience is a network of mass internment concentration camps. The intent of these camps with regards to the indigenous population, in the words of one local Han official, is to ‘break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.’¹¹⁵ It is unclear if that can be completely accomplished by the camps alone, but in conjunction with the other policies discussed in this chapter, it seems that this is exactly what authorities are trying to systematically do to the Uyghur people. Unfortunately, for the time being, they seem to be succeeding.