Inside the Xinjiang ‘Re-education’ Camps

Olivia Groom

The Nazi concentration camps are viewed as one of the cruelest schemes in history. With more than 1000 of these camps, 1.65 million people were registered prisoners at one point. Yet, whilst it is rare to find a single person unaware of this past inhumanity, most people turn a blind eye to the occurrence of similar events on a large scale right under our noses.

China is operating a system of internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang. ASPI identified 380 detention centres established across the region since 2017, ranging from lowest security re-education camps to fortified prisons. This is despite claims by the Chinese authorities that its Xinjiang Data Project was winding down. By September 2020, 1.3 million people had been through Xinjiang’s “re-education” scheme annually for six years. In a clear crackdown against ethnic minorities in China, those detained include Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians, and some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis. Known as “Vocational Education and Training Centers”, the purpose of these camps, and the extreme measures implemented within, is apparently to prevent religious extremism and terrorist activities, and to ensure ethnic unity. In reality, these camps are “places of brainwashing, torture, and punishment,” said Nicholas Bequeline, Amnesty International’s East Asia Director. Those admitted to camps are not put on trial, have no access to lawyers or right to challenge the decision, and it is only the authorities who can decide when an individual has been ‘transformed’ and can therefore leave. Leaked Chinese government documents, which the ICIJ have labelled "The China Cables", include a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, who was the deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official. This memo instructs the camps should be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline and punishments. Anyone who resists or fails to demonstrate enough progress face punishments ranging from verbal abuse to food deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and use of restraints and stress positions. There have also been reports of deaths and suicides inside the facilities.

Despite this clear breach of human rights, it is doubtful the West will significantly intervene in China’s wrongdoings. Only in the future - whether it is five, ten, or twenty years, will we probably wonder why we chose to do not to do so little. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Yet, in 2019 at the United Nations, 54 nations rejected allegations against China and supported China's policies in Xinjiang. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past, and allow for the triumph of evil. Then again, perhaps it is already too late.