PORTRAITS OF XINJIANG
A photography project documents changes in the Chinese province
A photography project documents changes in the infamous Chinese province.
It was an eventful July for French photographer Patrick Wack. His new body of work, Dust, from a three-year project documenting life in China’s Xinjiang region, was cast into the spotlight when US company Kodak posted, and later deleted, a selection of the images on its Instagram account. In response, online supporters of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accused Wack of making pictures to profit from the scrutiny of China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It was a trenchant reaction that, to Wack and many others online, spoke of China’s denialism and dissimulation of the issue. The CCP has been accused of serious human rights abuses, amounting even to genocide, against Xinjiang’s Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim group ethnically more closely linked to Central Asians than to China’s Han majority. The party has consistently maintained its innocence, often dismissing accusations as a failure on the part of Western democracies to comprehend Chinese politics and culture. Wack’s work was met with a similar sentiment. One article in the Chinese-state-run Global Times newspaper even accused Wack of ‘hyping [the] Xinjiang issue to make more money’. Xinjiang is home to 11.6 million Uyghur people. Their language, Uyghur, stems from Turkish and is written in Arabic script. ‘A little like Tibet, Xinjiang has always carried a cultural and philosophical otherness with China,’ says Wack. Uyghur– Chinese relations are historically tumultuous; ‘Xinjiang’ itself translates to ‘new territory’ in Mandarin, stemming from the Qing dynasty conquest of the region. In the first half of the 20th century, parts of Xinjiang around the cities of Kashgar and Yining sought independence from China – moves quelled by the new Chinese Communist government in 1949. Beijing has never forgotten the incident, an embitterment later fuelled by violent outbreaks in the region. In 2009, ethnic violence broke out in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, killing 197 Han and Uyghur people. In 2014, the CCP initiated a strategy to minimise the perceived terror threat. They subjected Uyghur Muslims to stringent surveillance and quickly erected internment camps that the party still maintains are used to ‘re-educate’ Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Investigations using satellite imagery and interviews with previous inmates have revealed the shocking conditions in these camps, along with the extent of systematic repression and population control faced by the Uyghurs. The UN estimates that more than one million people have been interned – about one in ten Uyghurs. Anything suggesting a Uyghur identity or Muslim beliefs – such as growing a beard – is enough to land an individual in a camp. When inside, prisoners are politically indoctrinated and subjected to forced labour. Female prisoners have also documented forced sterilisation. Few signs of such repression are detectable in Wack’s work, a choice that was partly practical, partly artistic. ‘Photojournalists don’t have access to the camps or many signs of repression. Plus, you’re putting people in danger if you’re trying to talk to them,’ he says. ‘I don’t have images of Uyghur people being rounded up.’ Instead, Wack opted to document visible life in the region. The first half of his work began in 2016, the latter in 2019. ‘The book [ Dust, in which the images have been collected] is about showing how in only a few years the region itself has been radically altered. In 2016, it was still full of colour – you had golden domes and Muslim symbols everywhere, and women wearing veils. In 2019, all of this had disappeared.’ According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank, 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang have been destroyed or damaged since 2016, tombs have been knocked down and the government now mandates Mandarin-only education in schools. In 2017, President Xi Jinping ordered that all religions in China should be Chinese in orientation. Since then, religious expression has been strictly controlled. ‘Even within the three years I was there I could tell the difference. Muslim and Middle Eastern symbols in the landscape had been removed; women weren’t veiled anymore; men could no longer wear beards. The cultural and religious essence was ripped out and now it looks like anywhere in China, just in a desert.’ Significant demographic changes have also occurred. Recent decades have seen a mass migration of Han-Chinese people into Xinjiang, largely orchestrated by state-run incentive schemes. ‘The strategy has been to turn the Uyghurs into a minority by demographically occupying the region with Han Chinese,’ Wack says. When he returned to Xinjiang in 2019, he saw an increase of Han-Chinese tourism in the region. The patriotic waving of a Chinese flag is a recurring motif in the images from this time. ‘Xinjiang tourism has become part of the CCP’s PR thing, to show that Xinjiang is now a stable, secure and beautiful Chinese region.’ However, he says that many
resident Han-Chinese are now leaving the area, having felt uncomfortable living alongside anti-Uyghur policies. Stringent surveillance operations also undermine the CCP’s portrayal of a stable and secure Xinjiang. State police monitor Uyghurs using the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, a remote data-collection surveillance system that tracks movement and mobile phones for signs of religious observation. Interviews with Uyghurs have revealed that the Chinese government appoints Han civilians and officials to stay in Uyghur homes to report on domestic activity. As a photographer, Wack got a taste of such surveillance. ‘In 2016 and 2017, I had some freedoms, but when I returned in 2019 it was a different world,’ he says. ‘The police presence had multiplied and I was followed for maybe half the trip. Often, state police were waiting in the lobby of my hotel. They often forced me to delete my images.’ Like Tibet, Xinjiang is autonomous according to the Chinese constitution (it’s officially known as the Uyghur Autonomous Region), meaning that it’s supposed to enjoy some powers of self-governance. In practice, however, both Tibet and Xinjiang are subject to restrictions by China’s central government. ‘There’s a small fraction of Uyghurs who want independence and those people are used by the CCP as scapegoats for the crackdown,’ says Wack. Many Uyghurs simply want the region to be given the autonomy that’s enshrined in the constitution and to preserve their religion and culture. Resolving economic disparities is another urgent need. ‘The north of Xinjiang is a wealthy region with huge hydrocarbon and construction sectors, but you very seldom see Uyghurs working in those industries,’ says Wack. Instead, many spend their time picking cotton, often under forced conditions. One in five cotton garments sold globally contains cotton or yarn from Xinjiang. Evidence from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Axios and others connects China’s forced detention of Uyghurs to the supply chains of fashion retailers including Adidas, Lacoste and Ralph Lauren. Investigations have revealed that local officials are given targets for the number of people they must provide for state-sponsored labour programmes and evidence has emerged that between 2017 and 2019, more than 80,000 Uyghurs were sent to work in factories producing goods for dozens of multinationals. On 22 July 2021, 190 organisations issued a call to action, urging clothing brands to stop using cotton suppliers who make use of Uyghur forced labour. More broadly, there’s even a planned boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics by groups that oppose China’s actions in Xinjiang. Ultimately, Wack hopes that his work will help to raise more awareness. ‘There’s a lot of Chinese response to accusations, saying things such as, “China is a big country that the Western political system cannot fully understand”. But I think that the Chinese government is now showing its real face.’