Persecution of Uyghurs in China

Based on Wikipedia: Persecution of Uyghurs in China

The Largest Mass Internment Since World War II

Over one million people. Detained without trial, without charges, without legal process of any kind. Not in the 1940s, but starting in 2017. Not in some distant historical epoch we can safely consign to textbooks, but in our present moment, documented by satellite imagery, leaked government documents, and survivor testimony.

This is the story of what happened to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group—meaning they share linguistic and cultural roots with peoples across Central Asia, from Kazakhstan to Turkey. They've lived in the region now called Xinjiang for centuries, long before it became part of China. They speak their own language, with roughly ten million speakers. They practice Sunni Islam, which forms a cornerstone of their cultural identity. And they look different from the Han Chinese, the ethnic majority that makes up over ninety percent of China's population.

That difference would prove dangerous.

A Region Between Empires

Understanding what happened requires understanding Xinjiang itself—a name that literally means "New Frontier" in Chinese. The region sits at the heart of Central Asia, historically a crossroads of empires and civilizations. Various Chinese dynasties controlled parts of it at different times, but full incorporation into China came only in the 1700s, when the Manchu-led Qing dynasty expanded westward, conquering not just Xinjiang but also Tibet and Mongolia.

Even then, Xinjiang remained peripheral. It briefly broke free during the Dungan Revolt of 1862 to 1877. In the chaotic early twentieth century, it was semi-autonomous, controlled by various warlords and briefly hosting two short-lived independent republics—the First East Turkestan Republic in 1933 and the Second in 1944.

When Mao Zedong's Communists established the People's Republic of China in 1949, they absorbed the Second East Turkestan Republic. What followed was a decades-long project of integration—or, depending on your perspective, colonization.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Beijing sponsored massive migration of Han Chinese settlers into Xinjiang. Policies suppressed local religion and culture. Uyghur independence movements emerged, some with quiet backing from the Soviet Union, which had its own interest in destabilizing China's western frontier.

A Brief Thaw, Then Reversal

The 1980s brought something unexpected: liberalization.

Under Deng Xiaoping, China adopted more flexible policies toward minorities, including in Xinjiang. Cultural expression received more tolerance. Language policies grew more accommodating. Party officials and minority groups responded positively.

Then Beijing grew nervous.

The government concluded that liberalization wasn't working—at least not in the way they wanted. By the mid-1980s, the official policy of pluralism became subordinate to an unofficial policy of assimilation. Multilingualism and cultural diversity gave way to what scholars have called a "monolingual, monocultural model." The irony was cruel: policies designed to create unity instead strengthened a distinct Uyghur identity, one increasingly defined in opposition to Beijing.

Tensions escalated. In April 1990, the People's Liberation Army suppressed the Barin uprising near Kashgar, with significant loss of life. In February 1997, police roundups of suspected separatists during Ramadan—the Muslim holy month of fasting—sparked large demonstrations. The military crackdown that followed killed at least nine people in what became known as the Ghulja incident. Bus bombings followed, killing and injuring dozens, with Uyghur groups claiming responsibility.

A cycle had begun: repression breeding resistance, resistance justifying further repression.

The Attacks of 2009-2016

In July 2009, riots erupted in Ürümqi, Xinjiang's capital. The immediate trigger was the Shaoguan incident—a violent confrontation between Uyghur and Han Chinese factory workers in a distant province. The riots killed over one hundred people.

What followed was a wave of terrorist attacks by Uyghur extremists targeting Han Chinese civilians. The September 2009 Xinjiang unrest. The 2011 Hotan attack. The 2014 Kunming attack—one of the deadliest, in which knife-wielding attackers killed thirty-one people at a train station. Attacks in Ürümqi in April and May of 2014.

Some of these were orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party, a militant organization designated as terrorist by the United Nations. Some were apparently spontaneous. All were horrific.

And all would be used to justify what came next.

Xi Jinping's "People's War"

In 2014, President Xi Jinping traveled to Xinjiang. His message to local police was unambiguous: "We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy."

A suicide bombing occurred in Ürümqi on the last day of his visit. It seemed to confirm everything he feared.

That same year, Communist Party leadership held a secret meeting in Beijing. The result was the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism. Publicly launched in May 2014, it would transform Xinjiang into something unprecedented: a surveillance state within a surveillance state, where an entire ethnic group became suspect.

The campaign declared war on the "Three Evil Forces"—separatism, terrorism, and extremism. Two hundred thousand party cadres deployed to the region. A program called Civil Servant-Family Pair Up sent Han Chinese officials to live with Uyghur families, monitoring them in their own homes.

Xi wasn't satisfied with the initial results. In 2016, he replaced the regional party secretary with Chen Quanguo, a man who had previously implemented similar policies in Tibet. Chen's approach was methodical and relentless. He recruited tens of thousands of additional police officers. He divided society into three categories: trusted, average, and untrustworthy.

At a rally in Ürümqi, with ten thousand troops, helicopters, and armored vehicles parading behind him, Chen announced a "smashing, obliterating offensive." The language was apocalyptic: authorities would "bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People's War."

Then came the order that would reshape millions of lives: "Round up everyone who should be rounded up."

The Camps

By April 2017, mass arrests had begun. New regulations took effect on April 1st. Abnormally long beards were banned. Veils in public were banned. Not watching state television became a crime. Not listening to radio broadcasts became a crime. Refusing family planning policies became a crime. Refusing to send children to state-run schools became a crime.

The detained had to go somewhere.

That somewhere was a network of internment camps that would eventually hold over one million people—by some estimates, one in six adult Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Satellite imagery showed facilities expanding across the region, surrounded by walls, guard towers, and barbed wire.

China initially denied the camps existed at all. When leaked documents and journalistic investigations made denial impossible, the government changed its story. They were "vocational education and training centers," officials claimed. Happy places where grateful students learned useful skills.

Survivors told a different story. They described forced political indoctrination. Torture. Sexual violence. Families torn apart without warning or explanation. Children taken and sent to state boarding schools, forbidden to speak their language or practice their religion.

Chen Quanguo's own internal orders, later leaked, were explicit about the camps' true nature: they should "be managed like the military and defended like a prison."

The Technology of Control

What made the Xinjiang system distinctive wasn't just its scale—it was its sophistication.

In 2017, China's Ministry of Public Security began deploying artificial intelligence systems capable of identifying whether someone was Uyghur based on their face. The accuracy was questionable. The implications were chilling. A "Uyghur alarm" could now be integrated into surveillance systems across the region.

Border controls tightened. Communist Party secretary Zhu Hailun signed a bulletin establishing a remarkable legal standard: if someone from Xinjiang had traveled abroad and "suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out," they should be arrested. The burden of proof had inverted. You weren't innocent until proven guilty. You were guilty unless proven innocent.

In 2016, there had been a brief window when Uyghurs with passports could leave China. Many did. But they had to leave relatives and children without passports behind, essentially as hostages. Many of those families have never been reunited.

The Birth Rate Collapse

Among the most disturbing evidence of what happened in Xinjiang are the demographic statistics—China's own statistics.

From 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the predominantly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than sixty percent. In the same period, the national birth rate declined by less than ten percent. In 2019, Xinjiang's birth rate dropped another twenty-four percent, compared to a nationwide decrease of just over four percent.

Survivors have testified about forced sterilizations, forced contraception, and forced abortions. An estimated sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged. Hundreds of thousands of children have been separated from their parents.

Chinese authorities acknowledged the birth rate collapse but denied forced sterilization. They attributed the decline to voluntary family planning and economic development.

The numbers tell their own story.

The World's Response

What does the world do when confronted with mass atrocities in a nuclear-armed superpower that is also the world's largest trading nation?

The answer, so far, has been: not much.

At the United Nations, reactions split along predictable lines. Countries in North America and Europe signed letters condemning China's policies. Countries in Asia and Africa—many dependent on Chinese investment and trade—signed letters supporting them as legitimate counterterrorism measures.

In 2020, someone tried to bring a case to the International Criminal Court. It was dismissed. China isn't party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court. The International Criminal Court, or ICC, had no jurisdiction to investigate.

In 2021, the United States formally declared China's actions genocide. Several other countries' legislatures passed non-binding motions doing the same. Others stopped short, condemning "severe human rights abuses" or "crimes against humanity" without using the word genocide.

In 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Office issued an assessment stating that China's policies "may constitute crimes against humanity." It did not use the term genocide.

The legal distinction matters. Genocide—the intentional destruction of a racial, ethnic, or religious group—is the gravest crime in international law. Under the Genocide Convention, acts committed with intent to destroy a group "in whole or in part" qualify. This includes "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" and "measures intended to prevent births within the group."

Those who call what happened in Xinjiang genocide point to exactly those provisions. Mass detention causing serious harm. Forced sterilization preventing births. The destruction of mosques and forced separation of children aimed at erasing Uyghur culture and identity.

China calls it counterterrorism.

After the Camps

International pressure, particularly the threat of economic consequences, appears to have had some effect. The use of the mass internment camps seems to have ended around 2019. Some scholars attribute their closure simply to cost—they were expensive to operate.

But the end of the camps didn't mean the end of the system. According to Amnesty International, detainees have increasingly been transferred into the formal penal system—actual prisons with actual sentences, if not actual trials. The surveillance apparatus remains. The demographic damage is done.

Journalists who have visited former camp sites in recent years have found them converted to other purposes—coronavirus quarantine facilities, schools, vocational training centers. Most appeared empty or abandoned.

The Chinese government has engaged in an extensive propaganda campaign to defend its record, including releasing videos of apparently happy Uyghurs praising their "education" in the camps. Women who have testified about abuse have been subjected to character attacks by Chinese authorities, including the disclosure of confidential medical and personal information.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Genocide

The word genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had lost forty-nine relatives in the Holocaust. He combined the Greek word genos, meaning race or tribe, with the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. He spent years lobbying for its recognition as an international crime.

But genocide doesn't require gas chambers. Lemkin himself understood this. The Genocide Convention prohibits not just killing but also causing serious harm, imposing conditions calculated to destroy a group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children.

What happened to the Uyghurs may not look like the Holocaust. It doesn't need to. The question is whether it meets the legal definition—whether it constitutes acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a racial or religious group.

Mass detention causing serious bodily and mental harm. Forced sterilization and contraception preventing births. Hundreds of thousands of children forcibly transferred to state institutions. Sixteen thousand mosques destroyed. A birth rate collapse unprecedented in peacetime.

The debate over the word genocide sometimes obscures what is not debated: that these things happened. That over a million people were detained without trial. That families were torn apart. That a culture was systematically targeted for destruction.

Whether we call it genocide, cultural genocide, ethnocide, or crimes against humanity, what happened in Xinjiang represents one of the most significant human rights crises of the twenty-first century. It happened in plain sight. Satellite images were available to anyone with an internet connection. Survivors told their stories to anyone who would listen.

And the world, for the most part, kept trading with China, kept buying its products, kept looking the other way.

The camps may be closed. The system that built them remains. And for the Uyghurs who survived—and for those who didn't—the question of what the word genocide means matters less than the question of what the world is willing to do about what was done to them.

So far, the answer has been: not enough.