Muslims in China province detained
BEIJING: China’s “strike hard” campaign in remote Xinjiang is set to intensify in the month of Ramzan, with one report saying monitoring of minority Muslim communities in the province had become invasive and another claiming that several thousand Muslims had been detained in “re-education camps”.
Thousands of Communist Party of China cadres have been tasked with carrying out “home stays” with Muslim Uyghur families across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region under an ongoing scheme broadly designed to “safeguard social stability”.
“During these visits, families are required to provide officials with information about their lives and political views and are subjected to political indoctrination,” Human Rights Watch said in a report released this week.
“Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes. The latest drive adds to a whole host of pervasive – and perverse – controls on everyday life in Xinjiang,” HRW’s China researcher Maya Wang said.
The impetus is new but the idea of “homestay” surveillance is not.
The large-scale surveillance throughout the province has also led to the detention of thousands of men from Muslim minority communities in re-education camps, says the second report by Adrian Zenz from the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany.
Zenz cites official construction tenders as evidence of these camps being built.
China’s foreign ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation when asked by the Associated Press to comment on the camps.