Inside China’s chilling Uyghur ‘re-education’ camps
Inmates are encouraged to confess to a range of pre-crimes in weekly ‘thought reports’
Athunk from above. The lights go out. Running in the corridors. Next morning, women in the camp whisper news of the night before. Unable to bear the loss of her children – aged nine and one, they were sent to an orphanage – one of the detainees jumped head-first from her third-level bunk. Her body was wrapped in a blanket, and spirited away.
In 2018, the Chinese government conceded that Xinjiang province was being subjected to what it calls “transformation through education”. Ethnic tensions have been simmering for decades in this strategically important region, thanks to statesponsored Han migration to an area traditionally dominated by Turkic Uyghurs. But in the early 21st century, a long-standing Uyghur separatist movement turned violent, with a spate of suicide bombings in 2013 and 2014. Uyghur piety and interest in global Muslim culture, fuelled by access to social media, seemed to be on the rise. The government’s response was an attempt at social control in Xinjiang, whose contours have become known to us through grainy satellite imagery, photographs of fenced-off facilities and the occasional piece of harrowing witness testimony.
Two new books take us much further, probing a system into which more than a million people are thought to have been swallowed up. Darren Byler’s In the Camps blends first-hand reports from former internees – such as the one, cited earlier, who heard her desperate fellow inmate hit the floor of the cell – with research into the public-private partnership that underpins the system.
Byler reveals Chinese companies are being enticed by state subsidies and the prospect of cheap labour to locate new factories near camps. At the same time, more than a thousand companies from the country’s booming tech sector help to make those camps more effective, while making life outside feel effectively like a camp, too.
The enterprise was worth around $8billion in 2018, and includes real-time analysis of live CCTV feeds – a green square around your head if you’re innocent; yellow if you might be trouble – made possible by biometric technology such as facial recognition. According to a police report cited by Byler, offences documented in this manner – which might conceivably lead a person to a camp – include visiting a mosque more than 200 times.
The camps themselves combine high technology with low primitivism. Byler’s informants tell of security cameras in cells tracking punishable infractions – failing to speak Mandarin; using blankets to block out the bright lights that remain on at night – and relaying the threatening shouts of the guards (“Don’t talk! Don’t speak Uyghur!”). Days are spent watching re-education programmes. Detainees are encouraged to confess to a range of pre-crimes in weekly “thought reports”, based on discussions with “life teachers” – sunny euphemisms are everywhere in this system, from “Physicals For All” (a biometricsharvesting programme) to “Safe City” (a behaviour-monitoring scheme).
Most of Byler’s informants surrender to these re-education efforts in the end, worn down by the sound of screaming from other cells, a crowded confinement broken only once per week for a brief shower, and above all, the uncertainty of not knowing whether or when they will be released.
The state has managed to entice
Uyghurs to work in the camps, as guards and instructors – Byler tells of a primary school teacher reassigned to teach inmates on pain of punishment, her new pupils comprising respectable elderly men in chains whose “beards [were] wet from crying”. At the same time, the camps are setting Han against Uyghur, as the public interprets punishment as evidence of criminality.
Complementing Byler’s account, which is marred only by the occasional resort to academic jargon, is Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s memoir, How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-Education’ Camp. She and her husband left their oil-industry jobs in Xinjiang in 2006, after Uyghur discrimination escalated from “No Uyghurs” appearing in job adverts to stalled careers and police harassment.
They made lives for themselves and their two daughters in France, where Haitiwaji no doubt kept her opinions on the Eiffel Tower to herself – “a heap of scrap iron that reminded me a bit of the crooked cranes hanging over the oil refineries in Xinjiang”. Then, in 2016, a man claiming to work in the accounting department of her old company phoned her at home in Boulogne, asking her to return to Xinjiang to sign some pension documents. Alarm bells rang, but having returned several times with her family over the past decade with no trouble, she decided to make the trip. There follows an intimate, sensory self-portrait, written with the help of Rozenn Morgat (a journalist with Le Figaro), of a highly educated woman passing through a system that appears at turns cruel, paranoid, capricious and devastatingly effective.
It begins with the confiscation of Haitiwaji’s passport and a police interrogation during which she is shown a photograph of her daughter attending a Uyghur demonstration in Paris. One of the interrogators starts bawling at her – “Your daughter’s a terrorist!” – and before long Haitiwaji is plunged into a bewildering world of shackles, bunks and beaten-earth floors; grey gruel and stale bread served up by deaf-mute cooks hired for their silence; the sounds and smells of the communal toilet-bucket; and the buzz of cameras scanning the cell.
As the months pass, she finds her past slipping away. Re-education, we learn, works because, under threat of punishment if propagandistic factoids cannot be recalled, a person’s shortterm memory goes into overdrive, crowding out other capacities. “My thoughts,” she writes, “would get tangled up like a ball of yarn”.
In the end, Haitiwaji was lucky: sentenced to seven years, she was released in 2019 thanks to diplomatic activity behind the scenes, initiated by her family back in France. We can only guess at the fortunes of the others – one woman incarcerated for making a pilgrimage to Mecca, another for attending an alcohol-free wedding – who feature in these two invaluable books.