China fills its prisons with Muslims.
The Chinese government has built a network of re-education camps and a system of surveillance to monitor and subdue millions from Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region.
Now China is turning to an older, harsher method of control: filling prisons in Xinjiang.
The region in northwest China has experienced a record surge in arrests, trials and prison sentences in the past two years, according to a New York Times analysis of previously unreported official data.
As the Chinese government pursues a security campaign aimed overwhelmingly at minorities in Xinjiang, the use of prisons is throwing into doubt even China’s limited protections of defendants’ rights.
Courts in Xinjiang — where largely Muslim minorities, including Uighurs and Kazakhs, make up more than half of the population — sentenced a total of 230,000 people to prison or other punishments in 2017 and 2018, significantly more than in any other period on record in decades for the region.
During 2017 alone, Xinjiang courts sentenced almost 87,000 defendants, 10 times more than the previous year, to prison terms of five years or longer. Arrests increased eightfold; prosecutions fivefold.
Experts, rights advocates and exiled Uighur activists say that Chinese
Paul Mozur, Austin Ramzy, Christiaan Triebert and Christoph Koettl contributed reporting. officials have swept aside rudimentary protections in their push. The police, prosecutors and judges in the region are working in unison to secure convictions, serving the Communist Party’s campaign to eradicate unrest and convert the largely Muslim minorities into loyalists of the party.
Arrests, the critics said, are often based on flimsy or exaggerated charges, and trials are perfunctory, with guilty judgments overwhelmingly likely. Once sentenced, prisoners face potential abuses and hard labor in overcrowded facilities.
Xinjiang does not disclose how many people are in prison, and the regional government did not answer faxed questions about incarceration.
The wave of arrests, prosecutions and sentences, however, points to an enormous upswell in imprisonment. It also appears unequaled in China’s recent past, based on official reports going back decades. Across Xinjiang stand hulking prisons, many newly built.
“It’s as if the whole population is treated as guilty until proven innocent,” said Sean R. Roberts, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington who studies Uighurs. “These internment camps and prisons are not going away and stand as a warning to the population that they better be more loyal to the party.”
A Uighur student, Buzainafu Abudourexiti, 27, was sentenced to seven years in prison in Xinjiang in 2017.
Her husband, Almas Nizamidin, a Uighur who migrated to Australia a decade ago, had been trying to secure a visa for her to join him. He said his wife was convicted of assembling a crowd to disturb public order, calling it a trumped-up offense.
“I’m very worried about her, because there’s been no information,” Mr. Nizamidin said. “Everyone is talking about the camps, even at the U.N., but the prisons are taking in more and more, and they’re under even stricter control.”
Security in Xinjiang has been tight for years. In 2009, hundreds were killed during ethnic riots in the regional capital, Urumqi, prompting the government to start instituting harsher policies.
Officials took the security drive to new extremes after Xi Jinping became China’s top leader in 2012 and demanded an end to anti-Chinese attacks by Uighurs.
Many Uighurs and Kazakhs who have left China said they had been told of relatives imprisoned, sometimes after being detained in camps. Among 24 ethnic Kazakhs interviewed in January, six said family members had been imprisoned since 2017.
A sizable fraction of Uighurs sent to prisons were businesspeople, professionals and academics, said Habibulla Altay, a Uighur tea merchant who left China in 2016 and has settled in Switzerland.
“The government thinks they are more dangerous, because they have money and knowledge and often have been abroad,” Mr. Altay said.