[Media reports about brainwashing at the camps were “fabricated” and “totally groundless,” he said, noting that the authorities had started to open the camps to visitors, including selected diplomats and journalists, last year.]
By
Anna Fifield
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Copies
of the book on the governance of Chinese President Xi Jinping are displayed
with booklets
promoting Xinjiang during a news conference Tuesday
n
Beijing. (Andy Wong/AP)
|
BEIJING
— The Chinese government Tuesday declared its
campaign of control and repression in the majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang to
be a resounding success, claiming that almost all those detained in internment
camps had been released and were now “living very happy lives.”
Signaling the start of a new phase in
Xinjiang, officials quoted reams of figures to support their claims that life
in Xinjiang had improved remarkably under 70 years of Communist rule and that
the government’s “deradicalization” campaign had been effective.
“All
ethnicities have worked together to make Xinjiang a beautiful place,” Shohrat
Zakir, deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China in Xinjiang and the
highest-profile Uighur in the government, told reporters at a news conference
organized by the State Council, or cabinet office, on Tuesday.
As if to show the harmony of Xinjiang, the
State Council had organized Uighurs to sing and dance for the reporters, and
there were traditional handicrafts and dried fruit on display, along with signs
saying, “Build a beautiful Xinjiang. Realize the Chinese Dream.”
The government’s portrayal of the situation
in Xinjiang differs sharply from firsthand accounts of life there, with former
inmates having described a systematic effort to rid the Uighur minority of
their culture and religion and make them assimilate into the Mandarin-speaking
ethnic Han majority.
Some people who have emerged from the camps
have managed to escape from China or at least get word to relatives, despite
the Chinese government’s restrictions on international communication and heavy
surveillance.
They describe camps of relentless
indoctrination, where Muslim Uighurs are being forced to renounce their
religion and instead swear allegiance to the ruling Communist Party.
There are about 11 million Uighurs living in
the Xinjiang region of western China, and between 1 million and 3 million of
them have been detained in internment camps since 2017, according to American
government and human rights group estimates.
At the same time, Chinese authorities have
razed mosques, forced men to shave their beards and women to leave their hair
uncovered, and have instituted an all-encompassing surveillance system
involving facial recognition cameras, ubiquitous checkpoints and placing ethnic
majority Han Chinese in Uighur households to keep tabs on ethnic minority
families.
The Chinese government, after long denying
the existence of the camps, by the end of last year could no longer argue with
the satellite imagery showing huge detention centers with barbed wire and
watchtowers. It suddenly announced that they were “vocational training centers”
designed to “deradicalize” extremists in the area.
Asked about the camps, Zakir and Alken Tuniaz, another senior Communist official in Xinjiang, said that they were aimed at the “deradicalization” of people who had been influenced by extremists from surrounding countries.
“We have taken measures to educate and save
these people and help them see the real picture,” Zakir said. “For these people
we have set up vocational education and training camps. They are not
concentration camps as some people have said.”
Media reports about brainwashing at the camps
were “fabricated” and “totally groundless,” he said, noting that the
authorities had started to open the camps to visitors, including selected
diplomats and journalists, last year.
Those who have been through the camps
describe witnessing almost the exact same scenes, right down to the detainees
singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” in English.
Tuniaz said that people were not allowed to
practice their religion in the camps — the first time a Chinese official has
confirmed this — but said that their “freedom of religious beliefs is
protected” in the centers.
“There was a man who hadn’t cut his beard,”
said Tuniaz. “After the training at the center, he has the language skills to
communicate and he can understand what is legal and illegal and he has now
started a business. His elderly father shook my hand and thanked the government
for saving his son.”
The program had been successful and “most of
the graduates have reintegrated into society,” Tuniaz said.
“More than 90 percent of the graduates have
found satisfactory jobs and good incomes and have become positive members of
society. They have also driven other people around them to get rich and work
hard and live a better life,” he said.
The officials declined to say how many people
had been through the camps, describing the number as “dynamic.”
But academics and activists monitoring the
situation in Xinjiang say there have been no signs of mass liberations from the
camp.
“I don’t see any evidence that large numbers
are being released simultaneously,” said James Leibold, an expert on Xinjiang
who teaches at La Trobe University in Australia. “If they were out, we would
know.”
The camps have come in for sharp criticism
from mostly Western countries, with more than 20 countries — including
Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan — writing to the U.N.’s
Human Rights Council to express concern “about credible reports of arbitrary
detention” of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.
China this week said that 50 countries —
including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan — have written a joint letter
commending Beijing for its counterterrorism and deradicalization efforts and on
the economic and social progress in Xinjiang.
The Foreign Ministry declined to supply the
letter or the list of the 50 countries to The Washington Post, even though it
has been all over the state media this week, saying it was up to the Human
Rights Council to release it.
The Chinese authorities now seem to be
turning to a new phase in their operation of the camps and their repression of
ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, experts say.
In a report published this month, German
scholar Adrian Zenz wrote that growing numbers of detainees have been released
from camps into forced labor.
“The state’s long-term stability maintenance
strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a perverse and extremely intrusive
combination of forced or at least involuntary training and labor,” he wrote,
describing factory and other work as part of a supposed poverty-alleviation
effort.
State newspapers and television channels have
this week been full of reports about how happy and stable Xinjiang has become.
The Xinjiang Daily has constantly exhorted
readers to “remain true to our original aspiration and keep our mission firmly
in mind” — a phrase from the president about building a strong Communist Party.
Almost every day, government officials and party cadres in Xinjiang are
studying the Xi Jinping Thought doctrine and organizing self-reflection sessions,
asking themselves: “Did we do things right?” the paper reported this week.
Separately, in a white paper entitled
“Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang” released earlier this month, the State
Council said that the area had “ long been an inseparable part of Chinese
territory.” It also said that the area had “never been the so-called ‘East
Turkestan’ ” — referring to the name that many Uighur
activists use for the area — and that Uighurs were not a Turkic group.
Academics called this historical revisionism.
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