A secret document reflects leaders’ struggle
to manage Xinjiang sites swelling with Muslim detainees.
By
Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley
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Officials have taken
journalists and diplomats to visit this indoctrination camp in
Xinjiang, China. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York
Times
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HONG
KONG — As the government
accelerated mass detentions of Muslim minorities in northwest China, a senior
official issued a secret directive giving detailed orders for how the rapidly
expanding indoctrination camps holding them should be managed.
Guards should impose pervasive,
round-the-clock video surveillance to prevent escapes. Inmates were to be kept
isolated from the outside world and held to a strict scoring system that could
determine when they might be released. And the facilities were to be shrouded
in secrecy, with even employees banned from bringing in mobile phones.
“It is necessary,” the directive from two
years ago said, “to strengthen the staff’s awareness of staying secret, serious
political discipline and secrecy discipline.”
Now that secrecy has been shattered with the
publication of the directive itself. It is one of six internal documents
obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that shed
new light on China’s crackdown in the Xinjiang region, where a million or more
ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been detained in the past three years.
The disclosure of the 24 pages of documents
amounts to a second significant leak from inside China’s ruling Communist Party
related to the crackdown. A member of the Chinese political establishment
shared a different, 403-page set of internal papers with The New York Times
earlier this year, expressing hope that it would make it more difficult for
party leaders, including President Xi Jinping, to escape culpability for the
mass detentions.
While the source of the new documents is
unknown — they were provided by Uighur overseas networks — their disclosure may
amount to another sign of dissent in the party over the crackdown.
The International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, an independent nonprofit based in Washington, led the inquiry into
the documents, bringing together more than 75 journalists from the consortium
and 17 partner organizations, including The Times, in 14 countries. Outside
experts also reviewed the papers and concluded they were authentic.
“In terms of documentary evidence, we have
reached a next level of disclosure,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher who has
studied the camps and a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of
Communism Memorial Foundation, a human rights group in Washington. “The
evidence we have now is very comprehensive, very complete. It’s kind of game
over for Beijing in terms of the cover-up, the denials and the half-truths.”
The most significant of the new documents is
the secret directive on how to manage the camps, which is the only document in
both sets of leaked papers to describe the inner workings of these facilities.
The nine-page order was issued in November 2017 by the Communist Party
committee in Xinjiang that oversees legal affairs.
The papers also include four “daily bulletins”
from another regional party committee that provide information about those that
have been targeted for investigation and detention in camps and a court
judgment sentencing a Uighur resident to 10 years in prison on charges of
inciting ethnic hatred and discrimination, a vaguely defined crime.
‘Prevent
escapes’
Beijing has rejected criticism of the camps
and described them as job-training centers that use humane methods to fight the
spread of Islamic extremism. Internally, the government often uses language
consistent with that position. The leaked directive, for example, refers to the
camps as “vocational skills education and training centers” and the detainees
as “students.”
But it also lays bare the punitive
underpinnings of these facilities, and some of its language on guarding against
escapes and other incidents is identical to that used in guidelines for prisons
and other detention sites.
The orders called on guards to strictly
control and monitor the activities of students. “Prevent escapes while they are
at class, dining, using the toilet, washing, receiving medical care or meeting
with family.”
Other instructions call for erecting
guardhouses and internal partitions inside the camps to prevent inmates from
moving around freely; rigorously checking any people, vehicles or goods
entering, and recruiting informants to spy on other detainees.
“Evaluate and resolve students’ ideological
problems and abnormal emotions at all times,” the directive said.
The document included orders for “full video
surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots,” and
prohibited detainees from having contact with the outside world, except in
strictly monitored interactions.
The government says these sites help prevent
Uighurs and other Muslims from being drawn to religious extremism by teaching
them the Chinese language, job skills and how to be law-abiding citizens. In
response to the earlier leak of documents, the government argued that its
methods have effectively stifled extremist violence in Xinjiang.
Former detainees, though, have described the
classes as numbing, harsh and ultimately futile attempts at brainwashing. And
residents have been sent to internment camps for behavior that would be
commonplace elsewhere: traveling abroad, showing signs of religious devotion
praying regularly or growing a long beard, or installing certain cellphone
apps, such as encrypted messaging tools.
Mr. Zenz, the scholar who reviewed the
documents, said he also obtained a cache of more than 25,000 files from
government departments that provides new detail on the scale of the detentions
and their impact on families.
In six villages in Yarkand, a county in
southwestern Xinjiang where nearly all the residents are Uighur, he found that
about one in six rural adult residents were interned or in prison. In two
villages in that county, nearly 60 percent of households had at least one
person in custody.
The detainees in Xinjiang are mostly
working-age men, he wrote in a new paper, and that has led to hardships for
families. In one case Mr. Zenz documented, five children were effectively
orphaned after their father was imprisoned and their mother put in an
indoctrination camp.
One of the leaked daily bulletins orders an
investigation of people from Xinjiang who have obtained foreign citizenship or
applied for visas or other documents at Chinese embassies abroad.
Another describes how 15,683 “suspicious
persons” were sent to centers in southern Xinjiang on the week of June 19,
2017. The government has repeatedly refused to say how many people are being
held in these camps.
Other bulletins reveal how the authorities
settled on targets for detention by using databases that collect and collate
information on Xinjiang residents, especially Uighurs and other Muslim
minorities.
The daily bulletins and the document on camp
operations were signed by Zhu Hailun, who was then the top security official in
Xinjiang. He was assigned to another position in the regional legislature early
this year.
Mr. Zhu, 61, appears to have been a key
enforcer of the internment campaign, turning the orders of the regional party
secretary, Chen Quanguo, into detailed plans. A party official who spent his
career in Xinjiang, Mr. Zhu had previously served as the head of Xinjiang’s
capital, Urumqi, succeeding an official who was fired in 2009 after bloody
ethnic riots killed nearly 200 people, most of them Han Chinese.
Like many in his generation, Mr. Zhu was no
stranger to the idea that minds can be reprogrammed through intense
indoctrination and propaganda: He grew up in Mao’s era, when such techniques
were widespread. In an official biography, Mr. Zhu described the two years he
spent as a teenager working in a rural commune as a period of “re-education.”
Over 40 years later, Mr. Zhu was
uncompromising as Mr. Chen’s right-hand man for security. An internal document
from 2017 signed by Mr. Zhu that was among the papers leaked to The Times
attributed attacks in London and Manchester in part to putting “human rights above
security.”
‘Promote
repentance’
The directive on camp operations instructed
officials to keep extensive records on detainees, and described a scoring
system that measured how they behaved to determine their fate.
Inmates should be assigned to one of three
zones based on how dangerous they are judged to be — general management,
strict, and very strict, the document said. But detainees could be moved
between the grades of control depending on their scores.
“Break down scores and manage and
individually assess the students’ ideological transformation, study and
training, and compliance with discipline,” the document said.
Officials were told to assign inmates to
fixed positions in dormitories, classes, lineups and workshops, and to control
every detail of life inside the camps, at every moment of the day, including
wake-up, meals, studies and showers.
Detainees must meet “disciplinary demands” or
face punishment, the directive added.
“Strengthen the management of the students’
hygiene,” it said. “Ensure that they get timely haircuts and shave, change and
wash their clothes. Arrange for them to have baths once or twice a week, so
that they develop good habits.”
The demands listed in the directive echoed
the accounts of former detainees like Orynbek Koksebek, an ethnic Kazakh man
who spent four months in an indoctrination camp in Xinjiang after being
detained by the Chinese authorities in December 2017.
“There was military discipline in everything
we did, how you walk, stand up straight. If you didn’t, they would slap you,”
he said in an interview in the Kazakh city of Almaty earlier this year.
A key disclosure in the leaked directive is
an official description of the conditions that detainees must meet to be
released from the camps. Aside from achieving a good score in the point system,
the document said, inmates must be categorized at the lowest threat level and
have served a minimum term of one year — though interviews with former
detainees indicate that camps sometimes release people sooner.
The directive also emphasized the importance
of showing remorse. Discussions with detainees should “promote the repentance
and confession of the students for them to understand deeply the illegal,
criminal and dangerous nature of their past behavior,” it said.
A different document, among the set shared
with The Times earlier this year, described how family members outside the
camps are told that their behavior can also affect when a detainee is released
— a implied threat aimed at silencing complaints.
Former detainees said the criteria for
release seemed arbitrary, and there was little clarity on when or why people
could leave.
“You enter the camp with 1,000 points. You
can’t gain points. You can only lose them if you yawn or smile,” recalled
Rahima Senbai, who was held in a camp in October 2017 and only allowed to
return to her home in Kazakhstan a year later. “If you ever went under 500
points, you’d have to stay for another year.”
Zharqynbek Otan, who was held in a camp for
seven months after his arrest in January 2017 and has since fled China, said
the goal of the detention was to impose loyalty to the Chinese state.
“The main purpose is to brainwash you,” he
said, “so you forget your roots and everything about Islam and ethnic
identity.”
Austin Ramzy is a Hong Kong correspondent,
focusing on coverage of the city and also of regional and breaking news. He
previously covered major events around Asia from bases in Taiwan and in
Beijing. @austinramzy
Chris Buckley covers China, where he has
lived for more than 20 years after growing up in Australia. Before joining The
Times in 2012, he was a correspondent for Reuters. @ChuBailiang
