The disappearing people of China
A Uighur refugee who lives in Auckland is worried about his family in China’s western region of Xinjiang.
SContact with their loved ones reduced to a trickle – then silence. Uighur New Zealanders say their families in China are disappearing into internment camps. But the Chinese Government says the facilities are ‘‘vocational training centres’’ to stop religious extremism. As China comes under global scrutiny, the Greens want our Government to take a bolder stance. Harrison Christian reports.
omewhere in central Auckland, Ali* has turned his flat into a makeshift printing house. The 40-something Ali has killed three printers so far, churning out thousands of flyers about the plight of the Uighur people, dropping them in letterboxes at dusk.
He doesn’t know what becomes of the flyers, which are scattershot collections of internet links, petitions and photos.
But he felt he had to do something – spurred into action, he says, after radio silence fell on his family in Kashgar, the oasis city in China’s far west.
The last time he spoke to his mother was more than two years ago. ‘‘Don’t call us again,’’ she told him.
Ali and his family are Uighurs (pronounced wee-gers): a Muslim ethnic minority of about 11 million people who live mainly in northwestern China.
Xinjiang, or ‘‘new frontier’’ in Mandarin, has long been a place of ethnic unrest; at its heart is a separatist movement that seeks to establish an independent Uighur homeland called East Turkestan.
In August, a United Nations human rights panel said it had credible reports that the detention of up to 1m people was taking place in a region now resembling a ‘‘massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy’’. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised the issue during talks with a visiting Chinese official in September.
The Uighur New Zealanders interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals against their families back home.
They hail from different cities and backgrounds, but share a common experience with their relatives in Xinjiang: in the years since they arrived in New Zealand, communications became terse and then ceased altogether.
It raises the question of whether their relocation overseas brought increased scrutiny on their loved ones. Most of them believe it has.
‘‘I am uncomfortable I am alive,’’ says Ali. Six of his family members – his mother, three brothers, a niece and nephew – are currently detained in what he calls ‘‘concentration camps’’.
After his mother stopped answering her phone, he lost contact with his eldest brother, and then his middle brother. When he finally got hold of one of his nieces last year, she just cried down the phone.
In Xinjiang he was a respected and well-paid government worker, while in New Zealand he works as a tradie.
In 2010, his then-wife came to New Zealand on an international scholarship, setting in motion the family’s daring relocation to Auckland. After his wife left, Ali signed government papers promising to remain in Xinjiang.
He secretly obtained a passport, he says, at a cost of about $10,000, and made plans to slip out of China with his daughter. On his last day of work, no-one knew he was about to leave. He shows us the passport, a relic of his former life. The document does not show his Uighur name, but a sinofied version of it in Mandarin characters.
‘‘I have to say thank you to the New Zealand Government. For the past 30 years, I haven’t been able to use my name properly. After I came to New Zealand, I started using my real name.’’
He arrived in Auckland as an international student, then claimed refugee status and became a citizen. He believes most Uighurs in New Zealand have followed the same path.
So far this year, Immigration NZ (INZ) has approved 36 claims of refugee status for people from China.
That’s more than the combined approvals for the next three countries on the list – Russia, Turkey and Syria. INZ doesn’t record the ethnicity of applicants, so it’s not possible to see how many refugees from China are Uighurs. It’s estimated there are 60 Uighurs in New Zealand, mostly in Auckland.
‘‘This is my second life,’’ says Ali. ‘‘If I was in China I would have already disappeared.’’
‘We need to be bolder’
In 2009, then-Green MP and the party’s foreign policy spokesman, Keith Locke, hosted Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer for a series of talks in New Zealand; a rare instance of overt support for the Uighur cause.
The visit came against a backdrop of riots in western China. Xinjiang was in lockdown, with an estimated 200 people killed in the unrest, the bloodiest ethnic violence the country had seen in decades.
In response to the riots, the government rolled out a security crackdown and surveillance programme that has accelerated in recent years.
‘‘Since then it hasn’t hit the headlines the same way, until recently,’’ Locke says.
‘‘Now the Chinese Government’s admitted to setting up what they call education or vocational training camps, that aren’t particularly voluntary, and people can’t decide whether to go or whether to leave.’’
China initially denied the existence of the camps. But under scrutiny ahead of a United Nations review into its human rights record this week, officials changed tack, launching a media campaign portraying the camps as job training centres, set up to cleanse Xinjiang of religious extremism.
Human rights groups say Muslims can be detained indefinitely without charge for infractions as minor as reciting verses from the Koran at a funeral.
Once in the centres, they sing hymns in tribute to the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘‘self-criticism’’ essays. The children of detainees are placed in state-run orphanages.
The crackdown in Xinjiang may have had the perverse effect of fanning, rather than quelling, the flames of religious extremism.