Inside the Chinese "Education" Camps
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Remember, China is an asshole:
This massive detention center, the size of 13 football fields, is a cog in the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities in the world since World War II, in which 1 million or more Muslims, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others, have been rounded up and detained in China’s western region of Xinjiang. Publicly, China has claimed that Muslim detainees have been freed. Yet an ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation, based on dozens of interviews with survivors and thousands of satellite images, has exposed how China has built a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention in Xinjiang, marking a radical shift away from the government’s makeshift use of preexisting public buildings at the beginning of the campaign. Using the same techniques that revealed the scale of China’s expanding network of detention centers, BuzzFeed News can now expose the inner workings of one such compound. The Mongolküre facility is one of at least 260 newly built sites bearing the hallmarks of long-term detention centers capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people in total servitude to the state.
The three former detainees all described being beaten over small infractions, such as speaking Kazakh. They faced interrogations as often as once a week, where they would be asked the same questions over and over again about why they had gone to Kazakhstan, whom they knew there, and what their personal religious beliefs were. They were forced to pledge loyalty to the Communist Party. Sometimes they were asked to write and sign “self-criticism” documents.
But what they remember most about their time in Xinjiang’s camps is the shame they felt for being treated like criminals — locked up for weeks without going outside — despite never being accused of a crime.
In response to a list of questions about this story, the Chinese consulate in New York responded: “The issue of Xinjiang is about combating violent terrorism and separatism. We hope people making rumors about Xinjiang stop playing double standards and interfering in China's internal affairs.” The government, led by President Xi Jinping, has in the past said that the camps are for vocational training or education. A Xinjiang official said in December 2019 that the detainees had “graduated” — but satellite evidence shows that the government kept building new facilities after that date.
“Xi’s government prioritizes political loyalty — conformity — above all else, and in the authorities’ eyes, Turkic Muslims’ distinct identity is seen as a serious threat,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “Beijing’s response should make anyone’s blood run cold: detaining vast numbers of people, wholly outside any legal process, freeing them only when they have been terrorized into abandoning their language, religion, and culture — and voicing allegiance to their tormentors.”
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Prisoners of Geography Ten Maps that explain the world has an excellent chapter on China that helps in understanding the “why” here. Maybe it was somewhere else that I read that one strategy is to migrate non Muslims to the region to breed out the “dangerous” element.
