Joshua Lipes
Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in as many as 1,300 to 1,400 internment camps, one of the world’s foremost experts on mass incarcerations in the region said in a paper released Sunday.
Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, obtained a cache of more than 25,000 files from different government departments in the XUAR to inform his latest estimate of the number of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities being held in a vast network of camps in the region since April 2017.
Zenz had initially estimated that some 1.1 million people are or have been detained in the camps, which he refers to as Vocational Training Internment Camps (VTICs), but in March this year revised his assessment to 1.5 million. Camp inmates have been accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas.
“Adding 177,000 to the current internment estimate of 1.6 million results in a combined figure of 1.777 million, or approximately 1.8 million,” he said in the report, which also cited members of the Hui Muslim minority as being among those detained.
“This means that 15.4 percent of the adult Turkic and Hui minority population are or have been interned. This is equivalent to just below one in six members of that population, with the difference to the author’s previous estimate from July 2019 of 1.5 million being explained by using updated population figures, including the Hui population in the sample.”
Zenz said that his new estimate was based on information obtained mostly from rural minority regions in the XUAR’s Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian), Kashgar (Kashi), and Kizilsu Kirghiz (Kezileisu Keerkezi) Autonomous prefectures.
According to Zenz’s report, official government documentation “repeatedly and unambiguously testifies to the fact that Xinjiang’s VTICs engage in known and pre-existing forms of coercive and abusive political re-education.”
He cites at least five different XUAR government or educational institution websites as stating that the VTICs “are dedicated brain-washing institutions” that claim to “wash clean the brains of people who became bewitched by the extreme religious ideologies of the ‘three forces,’” or the terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism China says are threatening Xinjiang.
Zenz’s report also bolsters reports that internment camp detainees are “in involuntary internment” and that the camps are “heavily guarded, prison-like facilities.”
Shifting strategy
Speaking with RFA earlier this month, Zenz said that China significantly increased its internment and internment capacity in the XUAR in 2018, but gradually shifted from “vocational training” into what he called “involuntary or coercive forms of labor” in the second half of last year.
Zenz said that while it is difficult to confirm such trends, as there is limited evidence to work from and China’s government doesn’t provide statistics, he believes that “in 2019 Xinjiang has been moving from internment into forced labor.”
Last month, at a hearing in Washington held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), witnesses including Zenz highlighted reports of a widespread system of forced labor in the XUAR, which requires Uyghurs and other ethnic minority Muslims to work in the production of textiles, food, and light manufacturing.
Zenz detailed a forced labor system he called even “more shocking” than that of the internment camps, which he said involved coerced military, political, and vocational training for the purpose of working in officially subsidized companies as part of a “business of oppression.”
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