A MAGAZINE ON RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
by Ruth Ingram
The seering Hotan heat is stifling. Desert sands scald unprotected feet and wheat is harvested in the fields amidst swirls of talcum powder dust. In the Village
“>village square a table full of officials waits in vain for volunteers willing to leave their homes to work on factory production lines 4000 kilometres away. A Chinese official, forehead glistening with sweat takes a much needed swig from his water bottle. But despite loudspeakers blaring insistently, they were destined to wait in vain. Still no takers after two days.
Beijing’s undisguised ambitions to forcibly uproot and assimilate Uyghurs
“>Uyghurs and reduce their population density by rounding up huge swathes of so-called “surplus rural labour” largely from Southern Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang, have been unmasked in a BBC news report this week.
Drawing on evidence uncovered by Dr. Adrian Zenz, leading researcher on Tibet and Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang, whose new report was published by The Jamestown Foundation and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and Chinese government footage intended for CCP
“>CCP eyes only, the exposé spotlights the coercion used to corral quotas of Uyghur villagers for factories in the East, and the more sinister motives behind the schemes.
After two days, undeterred by a lacklustre response, the recruiting team were forced to ply their wares door to door. We watch the propaganda footage. The officials are welcomed in by 19 year old Buzaynap’s father. Grapes would have dangled in huge bunches from a trellis in their shady courtyard home, where a huge supa would be ready to entertain guests with spiced tea and melon. But the Village
“>village committee was made to stand. Voluntary registration having failed, and with quotas to fill, plan B was coercion. One official after the other tried to cajole the tearful teenager to leave it all behind and travel with them to the big smoke, far from her lanes and streams, bustling animal markets and bazars, and warm family gatherings in the cool of the evening.
She was told she would have a return ticket and could come home if she didn’t like it. “If you don’t go you’ll end up like your sister,” seemed to be the ultimate threat if she failed to comply. “You’ll soon get married and you’ll never be able to leave this place.” Her arm was finally twisted on a promise that she could go with her friends.
Dr Zenz’s report unveils new evidence from Chinese sources, notably the previously untranslated “Nankai Report” which was the result of fieldwork published by three academics from Nankai University in 2019, and inexplicably removed from the university website in mid 2020, but not before being archived by Zenz. Ulterior motives behind labour transfer are neither poverty alleviation nor economic development, according to the findings, but are exposed as reducing labour costs for companies, and more troublingly, in the long-term to promote “assimilation” and “reduce Uyghur population density.”
The Report recommended the program be “initiated quietly” with “no need to overly publicize it internationally.”
Elsewhere, according to Zenz, Chinese academic publications describe labour transfers as a crucial means to deal with several thorns in Beijing’s side. They would “crack open the solidified [Uyghur] society” and “mitigate the negative impact of religion,” which has been blamed in several studies for a “dense religious atmosphere.” This, according to CCP
“>CCPIt stands for Chinese Communist Party, which from 1949 controls all social and political life in China. Members of CCP should in principle be self-proclaimed atheists. The ultimate goal of CCP is suppression of religion. However, how this goal is achieved has varied during time, and after Chairman Mao’s death the CCP has acknowledged that, notwithstanding its efforts, religions may survive in China for a long time.
Lax family planning policies are blamed for the “severely excessive” number of Uyghur surplus laborers that now constitute a “latent threat to the current regime,” and increase numbers of those deemed “problematic” by the government.
During his investigations into labour transfer, Zenz unearthed two previously unreported campaigns. The first was a plan to “liberate” hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority farmers and pastoralists onto the conveyor belts and production lines of industry, by transferring usage rights to their land or herds to state-run collectives while they were away. The second was to settle 300,000 additional Han Chinese settlers in Uyghur heartland regions by 2022 in order to “optimize southern Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
Staggeringly, Zenz has calculated, based on Chinese academic research and government figures, that up to 1.6 million transferred laborers are thought to be at risk of forced labor.
According to Zenz, the government’s two-pronged approach to surplus labour either places graduates from vocational internment camps into factory jobs that are often located near the camps, or assigns mandatory training and job placements throughout China for “surplus labour” from minority regions. This of course has an ethical knock on effect for opponents of forced labour among the world’s largest suppliers of garments and other manufactured goods.
Zenz traces the “increasingly detailed, intrusive and coercive,” development of both kinds of forced labour from 2014 following several violent attacks by Uyghurs
“>UyghursThe largest part of the population (46,5 %) in Xinjiang, where Han Chinese have however grown to 39% through a government-sponsored immigration program aimed at sinicization. Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese and speak their own Turkic Uyghur language. Many Uyghurs do not speak Chinese at all. The overwhelming majority of the Uyghurs are Sunni Muslim. They experience a severe religious persecution, and one million of them have been taken to the dreaded transformation through education camps.
Following the incidents, Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
Coercion was stepped up in 2017, according to Zenz, who discovered that settings for targeted groups of rural surplus laborers became highly militarized, increasingly securitized, and in several ways not dissimilar to the vocational internment camps that were being developed at the same time. This approach sought to maximize “iron-like” discipline, obedience, and the production of “standardized behavior”
Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
January 2018 saw a government-initiated a program to transfer 221,000 laborers from 22 poor counties in southern Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
Given that the intention is to forcibly displace ethnic minority populations from their heartlands, intentionally reduce their population density, and to tear apart homogeneous communities, the report concludes that “several experts in international criminal law agree that there are ‘credible grounds for concluding’ that Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
“Consequently,” concludes Zenz, “the global community is faced with a strong moral imperative to fully divest its supply chains from any product that is made in whole or in part with raw materials or forced labor from Xinjiang
“>Xinjiang(新疆, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The “autonomous” region of China whose largest ethnic group is Uyghurs, with another 7% of Ethnic Kazakhs, and Islam as the majority religion. The World Uyghur Congress and other Uyghur organizations do not accept the name Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier” or “New Borderland” and was imposed by Imperial China in 1884, after it conquered or rather reconquered the region, that it had already occupied between 1760 and 1860. Uyghurs prefer the name “East Turkestan,” which was also used by two ephemeral independent states, known as the First (1933) and the Second (1944–49) East Turkestan Republics. In order to avoid the choice between “Xinjiang” and “East Turkestan,” both problematic designations, American scholar Rian Thum suggested to adopt the ancient name of the region, Altishahr (“Six Cities”), which is however rarely used outside of scholarly circles.
