U.S. rips China over repression of minorities
WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that a cache of leaked documents proves that Chinese authorities are engaged in massive and systemic repression of Muslims and other minorities in western China.
Pompeo said the documents underscored “an overwhelming and growing body of evidence” that China’s leaders are responsible for gross human rights violations in the Xinjiang region.
“They detail the Chinese party’s brutal detention and systematic repression of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news conference.
Pompeo’s comments come at a delicate time in U.S.-Chinese relations amid ongoing negotiations to end a trade war and U.S. concerns about the situation in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protests have turned violent with clashes between police and demonstrators. His criticism was not accompanied by a warning about possible sanctions for the mass detentions, although U.S. lawmakers are pressing for penalties to be imposed.
The leaked classified documents were provided to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The documents, which include guidelines for operating detention centres and instructions for how to use technology to target people, reveal that the camps in Xinjiang are not for voluntary job training, as Beijing has claimed.
They show the camps are used for forced ideological and behavioural re-education. They also illustrate how Beijing uses a high-tech surveillance system to target people for detention and to predict who will commit a crime.
Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslim. But a classified blueprint leaked to the news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: forced ideological and behavioural reeducation centres run in secret.
The documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, and to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.
The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence.
Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.