What really takes place inside China’s concentration camps?

Photo Credit: Huseyin Aldemir / Shutterstock.com

By Ilah Ross

Nestled on the outskirts of the Xinjiang district in China sits one of the Chinese government's “re-education” camps designed for the Uighur Muslims, an ethnic and religious minority group. Places where, according to China’s ambassador to the UK, “Uighur people enjoy peaceful, harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups.”

However, despite the idyllic description painted by the Chinese government, this re-education camp does not look like a place for introspection and learning. Instead lies a series of cement buildings surrounded by barbed wire fences, with guard towers and military personnel pacing along the perimeter with weapons in hand. Inside these intimidating buildings are an estimated 1 million Uighur Muslims, who are being systematically detained, tortured, interrogated, and forced into labor against their will because of their religion.

The Uighurs are an ethnic and religious minority group originating from Central Asia who have historically had a fraught relationship with the Chinese government. After the state of East Turkestan was annexed by China in 1949 and renamed Xinjiang, the relationship between the Uighurs and the Chinese government worsened.

Following attacks in 2013 and 2014 that Uighur militant groups were responsible for, China introduced restrictions on the Uighur people as a whole. In late 2016, China began to detain Uighur Muslims living in the Xinjiang district, arguing that the Uighur people pose a security threat to the Republic of China. In 2017, the government of Xinjiang further restricted Uighurs’ religious freedom by introducing laws which forbade men from growing long beards and women from wearing head coverings. Since these laws were passed, many mosques have been destroyed in Xinjiang with no compensation for the Uighur people. 

Due to China’s ambiguous and misleading representation of the purpose and inner workings of these internment camps, it is impossible to determine the exact amount of Uighur Muslims that have been detained. However, many sources, including the Washington Post, estimate that the number is around one million. 

Though the majority of Uighurs are denied any knowledge of why they were detained, many leaked documents from a source inside Xinjiang show that individuals are jailed for reasons as trivial as having more than three children, wearing a veil, applying for a passport, traveling abroad, internet browsing, or even the frequency of their prayer. Once an individual is involuntarily imprisoned in the camp, they are subjected to “torture, solitary confinement, forced birth control, [and] forced brainwashing sessions about Communist Party propaganda,” Mark Moore wrote in an article for the New York Post.

By night, the prisoners endure this torturous mistreatment, and by day, many are sent to fenced compounds where they produce apparel which is purchased by US companies, such as Nike, Adidas, H&M, Calvin Klein, and many others. In addition to being subjected to forced labor, there have been many accounts describing hair weaves being sent to salons and individuals in the U.S. made from hair forcibly taken from Uighur prisoners.

The countless disturbing reports which have surfaced exposing what is really happening in these internment camps pose an important question: why are so many Americans unaware of the reality of this situation? There is no definitive answer as to why the situation with the Uighurs is largely underreported in the media. 

“The reality is that things happening in foreign countries can feel far away, so the situation with the Uighurs is unfortunately something that’s fairly easy to slip through the cracks,” Mark Lukach, Chinese History seminar teacher at Athenian, said. “Since there’s so much going on currently in the United States, and even more narrowly, in the Bay Area, there’s kind of a saturation point of attention.” 

Lukach discussed the question of why the Chinese government considers the Uighurs a threat.  

“Since its founding, Communism has been in conflict with religion. Since the Uighurs are a Muslim group, China doesn’t like them. China has gotten scarily good at using modern technology to keep track of citizens, so they are able to oppress the Uighurs very effectively because of this technology”. 

Though many nations vehemently insist that religious, racial, and ethnic persecution are things of the past, China’s treatment of the Uighur people confirms a very different reality.