Detention Center

[George K]

China is building vast new detention centers for Muslims in Xinjiang

A huge Brutalist entrance gate, topped with the red national flag, stands before archetypal Chinese government buildings. There is no sign identifying the complex, only an inscription bearing an exhortation from Communist Party founding father Mao Zedong: "Stay true to our founding mission and aspirations."

But the 45-foot-high walls and guard towers indicate that this massive compound — next to a vocational training school and a logistics center south of Kashgar — is not just another bureaucratic outpost in western China, where authorities have waged sweeping campaigns of repression against the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.

It is a new detention camp spanning some 60 acres, opened as recently as January. With 13 five-story residential buildings, it can accommodate more than 10,000 people.

The Kashgar site is among dozens of prisonlike detention centers that Chinese authorities have built across the Xinjiang region, according to the Xinjiang Data Project, an initiative of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), despite Beijing’s claims that it is winding down its internationally denounced effort to “reeducate” the Uighur population after deeming the campaign a success.

A recent visit to Xinjiang by The Washington Post and evidence compiled by ASPI, a ­Canberra-based think tank, suggest international pressure and outrage have done little to slow China’s crackdown, which appears to be entering an ominous new phase.

For the past year, the Chinese government has said that almost all the people in its “vocational training program” in Xinjiang, ostensibly aimed at “deradicalizing” the region’s mostly Muslim population, had “graduated” and been released into the community.

“This shows that the statements made by the government are patently false,” said ASPI researcher Nathan Ruser, adding that there had merely been a “shift in style of detention.”

The new compound, one of at least 60 facilities either built from scratch or expanded over the past year, has floodlights and five layers of tall barbed-wire fences in addition to the towering walls.
Satellite imagery reveals a tunnel for sending detainees from a processing center into the facility, and a large courtyard like those seen in other camps where detainees have been forced to pledge allegiance to the Chinese flag.

“This is a much more concerted effort to detain and physically remove people from society,” Ruser said. “There aren’t any sort of rehabilitative features in these higher-security detention centers. They seem to rather just be prisons by another name.”

Some prison-style facilities like the one outside Kashgar are new. Other, existing sites have been expanded with higher-security areas. New buildings added to Xinjiang’s largest camp, in Dabancheng, near Urumqi, last year stretched to almost a mile in length, Ruser said.

Some 14 facilities are still being built across Xinjiang, the satellite imagery shows.

Construction next to what is believed to be another new, prisonlike detention center built to intern Uighurs in Kashgar.

The findings support recent reporting from BuzzFeed News that China has built massive new high-security prison camps to create a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention.

These detention camps are the backdrop to all Chinese government efforts to control the population in Xinjiang, said James Millward, a professor of intersocietal history at Georgetown University who has been tracking the plight of the Uighurs.

“They exist as a threat,” Millward said. “[The authorities] can go to people and say: We want you to move 600 miles and work in a factory, or your father better not object to this marriage that’s been set up for you by the party committee, otherwise you’ll be seen as an extremist.”

When a Post reporter tried to visit the detention center half an hour’s drive south of Kashgar this month, her vehicle was quickly surrounded by at least eight cars that had previously been tailing at some distance. This site was clearly sensitive.

When The Post’s reporter and two European journalists headed toward another new camp in Akto, south of Kashgar, they were stopped repeatedly, made to register their passports and drive behind police cars, only to be turned around at a county border. Coronavirus precautions were given as the reason.

Conversely, when they visited several compounds that previously held local Uighurs, authorities didn’t bother much with trying to obstruct the reporters.

Those facilities appeared empty. Windows swung open at one former “vocational training” center. Bunk beds lay in piles in the yard at another. Litter rolled past ping-pong tables and over lonely soccer fields.

This reeducation center in Kashgar appeared on the BBC, with local officials taking BBC reporters inside in an effort to show the detentions were about deradicalization. The center now appears to be demobilized.

This reeducation center in Kashgar appeared on the BBC, with local officials taking BBC reporters inside in an effort to show the detentions were about deradicalization. The center now appears to be demobilized.

About eight camps appear to have been decommissioned, and 70 more, almost all of them lower-security facilities, have had their internal fencing or perimeter walls removed, according to ASPI’s database. But there are no signs of soccer fields, factories or vocational facilities at the new compound south of Kashgar that would indicate a rehabilitative purpose.
First she survived a Uighur internment camp. Then she made it out of China.

Many Uighurs and people of other ethnic minority groups who have been sent to reeducation camps have subsequently disappeared into prisons. Mayila Yakufu, a Mandarin-speaking insurance company worker, was released this month after two years and three months of detention without trial. She had previously been put into a “vocational training” internment camp for 10 months.

When the scale of the human rights abuses in Xinjiang came to light in 2017 and 2018, China categorically denied their existence. But as satellite imagery and testimony from survivors and relatives became incontrovertible, and United Nations experts estimated that 1 million people or more had been incarcerated, Beijing tried to explain away the camps as a necessary program to deal with terrorists.

One of the former “reeducation” centers in Kashgar, where Uighur Muslims were detained as part of what human rights advocates have described as a cultural genocide, stands empty.

The region, which was conquered during the Qing dynasty in the 1700s and given a name meaning “new frontier” in Chinese, is home to Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims whose culture and language are distinct from that of China’s dominant Han people.

[Mik]

I have no idea if this thing I saw is true or not. Perhaps Ax might know, but it might give some light on the attuitude.

[Doctor Phibes]

It's not that hard to feel morally superior to the Chinese Communist Party.

[Jolly]

Well, at least we know where our money went...

[taiwan_girl]

@Mik in Chinese, bai = white and zuo = left.

I guess the term is somewhat common in mainland China, but in Taiwan people, I have never really heard it before. I actually had to look it up! LOL