The Daily Sigh

Muslim Internment Camps

ONE MILLION MUSLIMS ARE BEING HELD RIGHT NOW IN CHINESE INTERNMENT CAMPS, ACCORDING TO ESTIMATES CITED BY THE UN AND U.S. OFFICIALS. FORMER INMATES—MOST OF WHOM ARE UIGHURS, A LARGELY MUSLIM ETHNIC MINORITY—HAVE TOLD REPORTERS THAT OVER THE COURSE OF AN INDOCTRINATION PROCESS LASTING SEVERAL MONTHS, THEY WERE FORCED TO RENOUNCE ISLAM, CRITICIZE THEIR OWN ISLAMIC BELIEFS AND THOSE OF FELLOW INMATES, AND RECITE COMMUNIST PARTY PROPAGANDA SONGS FOR HOURS EACH DAY. THERE ARE MEDIA REPORTS OF INMATES BEING FORCED TO EAT PORK AND DRINK ALCOHOL, WHICH ARE FORBIDDEN TO MUSLIMS, AS WELL AS REPORTS OF TORTURE AND DEATH.

The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” Beijing began by targeting Uighur extremists, but now even benign manifestations of Muslim identity—like growing a long beard—can get a Uighur sent to a camp, the Journal noted. Earlier this month, when a UN panel confronted a senior Chinese official about the camps, he said there are “no such things as reeducation centers,” even though government documents refer to the facilities that way. Instead, he claimed they’re just vocational schools for criminals.

China has been selling a very different narrative to its own population. Although the authorities frequently describe the internment camps as schools, they also liken them to another type of institution: hospitals. Here’s an excerpt from an official Communist Party audio recording, which was transmitted last year to Uighurs via WeChat, a social-media platform, and which was transcribed and translated by Radio Free Asia:

Members of the public who have been chosen for reeducation have been infected by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient. … The religious extremist ideology is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people. … If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumor.

“Religious belief is seen as a pathology” in China, explained James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, adding that Beijing often claims religion fuels extremism and separatism. “So now they’re calling reeducation camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking. It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that they want to apply to the whole Uighur population, to kill the germs of extremism. But it’s not just giving someone a shot—it’s locking them up for months in bad conditions.”

China has long feared that Uighurs will attempt to establish their own national homeland in Xinjiang, which they refer to as East Turkestan. In 2009, ethnic riots there resulted in hundreds of deaths, and some radical Uighurs have carried out terrorist attacks in recent years. Chinese officials have claimed that in order to suppress the threat of Uighur separatism and extremism, the government needs to crack down not only on those Uighurs who show signs of having been radicalized, but on a significant swath of the population.

THE MEDICAL ANALOGY IS ONE WAY THE GOVERNMENT TRIES TO JUSTIFY ITS POLICY OF LARGE-SCALE INTERNMENT: AFTER ALL, ATTEMPTING TO INOCULATE A WHOLE POPULATION AGAINST, SAY, THE FLU, REQUIRES GIVING FLU SHOTS NOT JUST TO THE ALREADY-AFFLICTED FEW, BUT TO A CRITICAL MASS OF PEOPLE. IN FACT, USING THIS RHETORIC, CHINA HAS TRIED TO DEFEND A SYSTEM OF ARREST QUOTAS FOR UIGHURS. POLICE OFFICERS CONFIRMED TO RADIO FREE ASIA THAT THEY ARE UNDER ORDERS TO MEET SPECIFIC POPULATION TARGETS WHEN ROUNDING UP PEOPLE FOR INTERNMENT. IN ONE TOWNSHIP, POLICE OFFICIALS SAID THEY WERE BEING ORDERED TO SEND 40 PERCENT OF THE LOCAL POPULATION TO THE CAMPS.