Survivors of China’s internment camps speak
‘WILL THEY LET US LIVE?’
ÜRÜMQI, China — The car drove toward a site visible by satellite but not marked on Chinese maps. It lay hidden in the mountains along a desolate road lined with Islamic cemeteries. The car traveled south as a red sun sank over snow-blanketed peaks, turning tombstones to silhouettes.
Night was coming to Xinjiang. The car approached a police tower guarding the Hongyan Clothing Park compound. A slogan appeared on the building’s walls: “Forget not the Party’s mercy, walk with the Party forever.” In an instant, police and men in dark clothing sprinted toward the car, surrounding the reporters inside.
“Delete everything,” one of the men ordered. The reporters complied and left, only to be stopped twice more by cars that swerved in front and beside them, letting out minders who demanded double-checks of the journalists’ phones and cameras.
This was territory Chinese authorities did not want the outside world to see: evidence against President Xi Jinping’s claims of bringing mass “happiness” to the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where a vast system of surveillance, detention, cultural erasure and forced labor has devastated the Uighur people in their homeland.
On a recent weeklong trip across Xinjiang, a Los Angeles Times reporter and a colleague working for a German outlet visited more than a dozen prisons, detention centers, demolished mosque sites and former reeducation camps turned into high-security factories. The Times met with Uighurs — they are predominately Muslim — who spoke of their imprisonment, fear and life in the region.
The Chinese government’s tactics in Xinjiang are the culmination of tensions that have simmered since the Mao era, when the state sponsored a massive influx of Han Chinese settlers. The repression that followed led to deadly riots and Uighur attacks on police and civilians, some of which were claimed by a separatist movement.
In 2017, the Chinese government forced more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into indoctrination camps in what authorities described as a “counterterrorism” strategy. But many swept into that system had no ties to extremist or separatist groups.
Jevlan Shirmemmet, 29, a Uighur who left China as a student in 2011 and is now a tour guide in Istanbul, lost contact with his parents and brother when they were taken to the camps in 2018. Only in June this year did he hear from his father, who called from a police station. His first sentence after two years was not a greeting, but an accusation that his son had joined “troublesome groups” abroad. Shirmemmet was shocked.
He hadn’t joined any political movements, he told his father. “This was my father’s mouth,” said Shirmemmet, “but it was the Xinjiang authorities and public security speaking through him.”
His mother, he was told, had been sent to prison — likely because she visited him in Turkey in 2013. When Shirmemmet asked the Chinese Embassy in Turkey for proof of her trial or conviction, they suggested he instead write a list of his activities and contacts abroad. “If you can figure out where you did wrong, tell us,” an embassy official told him.
Shirmemmet’s parents were civil servants who taught him to speak fluent Mandarin and avoid politics. But being Uighur, he said, made him a target for the Communist Party. “They reached their hands into my family, strangled us and wouldn’t let us go,” he said of the party. “As long as you are Uighur, you are political.”
In Xinjiang today, cameras hang over every street and inside every taxi, sending footage to the police. Residential compounds are watched by facial recognition systems, security guards, and pandemic QR codes that are scanned at every entry or exit. Police in flak jackets stand at bus stops, stores and ubiquitous “convenience stations” that often have large portraits of Xi surrounded by happy children, smiling through the windows.
Whatever technology misses, humans report. Inside a Uighur store near Ürümqi’s grand bazaar, a document on the wall listed 10 Uighur names and phone numbers linking nearby stores together, along with instructions to spread party doctrine, watch for outsiders and monitor acts threatening “social stability.” In a village on the outskirts of Kashgar, posters announced an upcoming disciplinary inspection of local cadres and welcomed villagers to report any suspicious behavior of the cadres.
Several Uighur villages the reporters visited near Kashgar and Korla appeared empty. Signs were posted on doors stating that the locks had been changed because residents had been absent for too long. Murals portrayed Uighur women bursting out of black veils into colorful clothing and a giant ax chopping Uighurs holding an East Turkestan flag — a symbol for Xinjiang independence — into pieces.
Every day, the two reporters were summoned off trains and planes upon arrival. They were registered, photographed and given coronavirus tests by police. Their car was tailed by several vehicles and men who sometimes called police to stop them. At times, the men manhandled the journalists.
During one confrontation in a village outside Korla, an official blurted: “You can’t speak with the people here. We’ve had too many negative reports from outside. You can only speak with the people we arrange.” Talking to locals would create a “security problem,” he said.
What the minders preferred to present of Xinjiang was an illusion of normalcy: Uighurs mingled with Han Chinese at the night market in Kashgar. They invited shoppers to eat samples at a naan museum in Ürümqi. They sang about ethnic unity and “never splitting apart” in slick music videos played at tourist sites.
In Korla, minders led reporters to a plaza to watch dozens of mostly Han Chinese middle-aged residents wearing Uighur costumes, dancing to a Uighur song. “Aren’t these uncles and aunties cute?” one of the minders said.
Behind these performances lies a yearslong program to eradicate Uighur heritage and replace it with Han Chinese culture and obedience to the Communist Party. More than 10,000 mosques, shrines and other cultural sites have been razed, according to satellite imagery analyses. The few left standing as tourist sites have mostly had Islamic features carved off or covered up with signs declaring: “Love the Party, Love the Nation.”
Since 2016, the Chinese government has also sent more than 1 million party cadres into ethnic minorities’ homes in Xinjiang to “become family,” a program that purports to promote ethnic unity but spies on and indoctrinates minorities.
A 2018 manual posted online for such visits instructed cadres to observe Uighur homes for signs of extremism, like receiving outside visitors, religious hangings on walls, or watching videodiscs instead of television. If they weren’t sure of the Uighurs’ honesty, they could question the children, the manual suggested: “Children don’t lie.”
Those who visited overseas websites, used unapproved apps and shared anything from such sites with others were guilty of “preparing to commit terror crimes and inciting ethnic hatred,” the manual said. Cadres should explain to families of violators: “Such activity harms national security. The party and government are punishing him to educate and save him, or else this path would lead to destruction.”