Beijing: The horrors of Chinese atrocities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in China’s northwest, are inexorably emerging on an almost daily basis. In response, China has continually changed its narrative about its mass internment of Uyghurs.
Organizations such as the United Nations estimate at least a million Muslims are incarcerated in concentration camps, which China insists are “vocational training centers”. Such a figure equates to 10 per cent of Xinjiang’s adult Muslim population.
Beijing is now feeling Western pressure over its gross human rights abuses, and it is angrily wielding its entire arsenal of instruments to refute allegations and deflect criticism. In January 2021 the USA was the first to accuse China of genocide, with others following suit as diplomatic pressure ramps up.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exhibits irrational fear over instability and dismemberment of China, with top leaders advocating ethnic blending of the nation’s 120 million ethnic minorities. By that, they mean making ethnic minorities more like the Han majority. China wants to meld minorities into a cohesive state-race, with stability maintenance a key driver.
Chairman Xi Jinping advocated early on at a Central Ethnic Work Conference, We should not continue with what is rotten. Rather, China should discard the dross and select the essence; weed out the chaff to bring forth new roots.
The first couple of years of Xi’s rule saw widespread Uyghur militant attacks against the state, angering the paramount leader and turning a softer approach into a harsh one. Xi personally set about transforming Xinjiang into a social re-engineering laboratory, with XUAR party secretary Zhang Chunxian pushed aside by Chen Quango in August 2016.
Chen advocated a clenched fist approach, and his appointment marked a turning point in Xi’s strategy. The CCP abandoned small-scale de-radicalization work and created a massively scaled “concentrated transformation through education” apparatus.
Chen spoke of a five-year plan to alter Xinjiang society: stabilizing the situation in the first year; consolidating during the second year; normalizing the third year; and achieving comprehensive stability within five years. Chen has been in power for nearly five years, but the campaign is not slackening. The CCP was secretive about its concentration camps for the first 1.5 years. When news about them started escaping, China’s first response was to vehemently deny their existence.
When mounting evidence to the contrary became overwhelming, China changed its tune and claimed they were training centers to give the backward Uyghur people valuable job skills. Yet, if this was so and the camps were so holistically beneficial, why did China originally cover up their existence? Furthermore, if these were vocational training schools that Uyghurs attended voluntarily, why did so many reports from former detainees of torture and abuse become rife? Thus, China’s supposed raison d’etre for these camps is not logical.
This phase of China’s propaganda campaign highlighted the positive aspects of its pogrom. This might involve inviting foreign diplomats on highly controlled visits, or encouraging useful idiots, typically foreigners or Chinese media outlets, to deny the existence of concentration camps. China’s obfuscation was often accompanied by the canard that these camps were also “preemptive measures against extremism”.
China provided evidence for their success, such as the fact that no terrorist act has occurred since their establishment. In other words, ends justify the means, no matter how abhorrent the treatment that many innocents undergo and how families are split asunder. Many Uyghur children were carted off to orphanages when both parents were incarcerated, allowing the government to indoctrinate them and alienate them from their own culture.
Again, it could be argued, if there is now no terrorism in the XUAR, why are the prisons not being scaled back? Soon, the next phase was to say that these camps were only a temporary measure. Indeed, at the March 2019 National People’s Congress, Shohrat Zakir, the Xinjiang government’s chairman, said, Generally speaking, we will have fewer and fewer people at these centers and, if one day the society no longer needs them, then these training centers will gradually disappear.
However, Zakir’s comments are illogical. If vocational training centers are doing so much good in educating Uyghurs, why would they be phased out? Furthermore, so grand is the scale of China’s internment that it cannot lightly relinquish control of so many. After having started on this radical course, Beijing is obliged to perpetuate it to control the populace’s behavior and thinking. Claims they were temporary camps was merely a ploy to defray criticism and soften the harsh reality of their existence. While some camps might be eventually hibernated, there is no chance all will be closed, since they remain a powerful deterrent to scare the Uyghur population into submission.