The cat is out of the bag, again. The impregnable Chinese Wall of one-sided propaganda suppressing alleged persecution, domination and torture of Uyghur Moslems in Xinjiang province appears to have been breached. The purported secret documents – known as Xinjiang Police Files – recording ruthless attempts to subjugate the minority population by the Han China rulers give a horrifying picture of the repression that the Chinese leadership has, for so long, been rubbishing as a Western propaganda. These documents are claimed to have come directly from the Chinese security forces and were published May 24. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with cooperation from 13 media outlets from 10 countries have given the world an inside view of China’s ‘re-education camps’ and the ‘prison-like’ conditions that Uyghur Moslems are forced to endure inside them. The ‘files,’ which include leaked internal police documents and over 2,800 photographs of detained Uyghurs, including some as young as 15, were released first as part of a research article authored by Dr Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow, China Studies, at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington.
The media outlets which got access to the research findings include the BBC, Le Monde, and USA Today. The documents confirm what has been known from various sources and inside information. They describe, with chilling precision, the system under which entire families belonging to the Uyghur minority are crushed, held under suspicion through association and detained for being close to another detainee, or because of a ‘strong religious family atmosphere.’
The ‘files’ reveal how the head of the region, Chen Quanguo, in internal Chinese Communist Party speeches, congratulated himself on the fact that the ‘four ruptures’ had been ‘well accomplished.’ The ‘ruptures’ are breaking family lineages, people’s roots, their relationship with the outside world and with their own origins. No one has ever believed Beijing’s official explanation that the internment camps for Uyghurs and other Moslem ethnic groups in the Xinjiang region are ‘professional training centres.’ The many testimonies of survivors that have appeared in the press in recent years have given the world a clear idea of the arbitrary targeting of entire populations, the prison system, forced sterilizations and indoctrination intended to erase the distinctive signs of their culture.
The leaked information contains records of speeches from officials in 2018 with orders of “first shoot, then report” for incidents of suppression of the inmates. Dr Zenz tweeted May 24 that he could obtain the mine of information by “hacking into Xinjiang police/re-education camp computers”. He claims to have unearthed “first-ever image material from inside camps”. According to his sources China’s President Xi Jinping wants new camps to be set up because the existing ones are overcrowded.
The Uyghurs live in the Xinjiang region of China which is located in the country’s northwest. In the past, the Uyghurs, who are ethnically different from the Han Chinese forming the largest ethnic group in China, demanded greater autonomy. This is because most Uyghurs consider their own culture as distinct from that of the Han Chinese. Moreover, the Chinese government has been systematically resettling more Han Chinese to Xinjiang for top jobs and even encouraging them to marry, in some cases through official pressure, Uyghur women so as to cut off the future generations from their ethnic roots. This has caused widespread resentment among Uyghurs.
The Chinese government has adopted the strategy of demonising many Uyghur groups and individuals branding them as terrorists and extremists. Since 2018 international organisations have reported alleged detention of Uyghurs in large numbers. China, however, has consistently denied such reports. It says that Uyghurs are being given vocational training for acquiring various skills. The Chinese government has also maintained that some of the camps are ‘de-radicalisation’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ centres.
But the Xinjiang Police Files have punctured the Chinese propaganda claiming that around 2 million Uyghurs have been herded into these camps to indoctrinate them through coercion. This is contrary to reports carried in the Chinese communist party-backed Global Times newspaper that the measures taken against Uyghur terrorists have been successful and that “there have been no violent terrorist cases for over four consecutive years in the region.”
The BBC, however, reported in 2018 that Uyghur villages in the region were under strict surveillance. Uyghur government officials were prohibited from practising Islam, attending mosques and fasting during Ramadan. In 2021, China banned BBC World News from broadcasting in China mainly due to their coverage of Xinjiang. The next year The New York Times carried a report based on more than 400 pages of leaked documents from China. Some of these were speeches given by Xi Jinping explaining the principle of a ruthless and total crackdown.
The Xinjiang Police Files have revealed the extent of state-sponsored atrocities on the religious-minded minority Uyghurs whose moorings in their traditional culture and belief system pose a challenge to the political doctrine of the Chinese government. Also, these sudden leakages of information from inside China could also point to a brewing discontent within the superstructure. Someone or some people, fed up with Xi’s style of functioning, may have a hand in these spill out of vitally secret information.
Interestingly, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, who is on a six-day trip to China from May 23, is being taken on a conducted tour. The trip will turn into China’s public relations exercise to tell the world that all is well in Xinjiang. International brands are in a dilemma. It is difficult for them to decide whether to leave Xinjiang or not. With the rising costs of both cotton and shipping and increasing competition, the West is likely not to rub China the wrong way no matter what explosive truths tumble out of the Xinjiang Files.