Britain must do more to challenge China’s persecution of Muslim minorities
In recent months, the protests in Hong Kong have drawn the attention of the world. Scenes of students and demonstrators raging against the Beijing Behemoth have invoked sharp criticisms from the international community, with many commentators denouncing the Chinese government’s crackdown as a calamitous violation of the city’s historic rights and freedoms.
Yet on the other side of the Chinese mainland, too, a calamity has been taking place. While the world has had its gaze fixed upon the Chinese government’s repression in the east, flagrant human rights abuses have been taking place in the north-western province of Xinjiang. Here, the region’s Muslim minorities are being silently, but systematically, coerced into concentration camps. It is a repression which is all the more sinister for the relative quietness with which it has been pursued.
The striking imbalance between the coverage of the Chinese government’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang reflects the ways in which disparate geographies are mirrored by imbalances of power – the minorities of Xinjiang are exposed to the strong arm of state repression in a region where the Chinese government believes it can control dissidence with impunity. Until recently, Beijing has kept a firm grip of censorship on the region, rigorously preventing news of what is taking place from leaving the province.
The Chinese state has accordingly been able to repress the population in ways which are not possible in the well-publicised global hub of Hong Kong. Beijing’s authorities have now coerced and detained an estimated 800,000 to 2 million ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs into internment camps and prisons without trial since 2016. Beijing claims that these camps, which have been built across Xinjiang, are for the purposes of voluntary re-education and counter-extremism.
The Uighurs and Kazakhs are both Turkic-speaking peoples with their own traditions, culture, and language. The Uighurs have been in Xinjiang since at least the eighth century AD, when they migrated and settled the lands bordering modern day Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. While Kazakhs now have their own state, by an accident of history there are many who still live outside its borders in Xinjiang. In total, China is home to roughly 10 million Uighurs and 1.2 million Kazakhs.
Both Uighurs and Kazakhs are united by the same religion – the overwhelming majority are Sunni Muslims, and have been since the expansion of Islam into the Eurasian steppes from the eighth century onwards. For the Chinese government, their religion is a cause for deep mistrust.
Beijing sees the Muslim minorities of Xinjiang as a national security threat. The government believes that there is a connection between their faith, cultural identity, and religiously-motivated terror. They argue that violent riots in the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi, in 2009 and a terrorist attack in 2014 as well as the more than one-hundred radicalised Uighurs who joined ISIS serve as a confirmation of this assessment. Accordingly, the Chinese government has reinvigorated its efforts to tackle what it sees as a subversive fifth column within its territories since 2016.
In November 2019, new information emerged about these efforts and the internment camps being run by the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang, when secret intelligence documents were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ has published translations of this cache of leaked intel, which includes six separate documents. These reveal the ways in which Beijing seeks to “re-educate” and brainwash its Muslim minorities and detail how Beijing’s mass surveillance projects are linked to the government’s efforts in Xinjiang.
One item is a 2017 “Telegram” from the Communist Party commission in charge of security in Xinjiang. It was also approved by the man who was then the deputy secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party, Zhu Hailun. The Telegram is a manual for running detention camps in Xinjiang. Its contents show the methods and mechanisms that have been put into place to ensure the “ideological education” and “psychological correction” of China’s Uighurs and Kazakhs.
It conclusively proves that Beijing’s insistence that these camps are voluntary is a lie. They are centres designed to bring about the forced Sinification of the population, and the Telegram is coldly sinister in its emphasis upon disciplining and punishing its inmates in the fine details of their daily lives. It instructs those operating the camps that they “must never allow escapes”, adding that “there must be full video surveillance coverage” in classrooms and dormitories at all times.
The “students” of these camps are made to spend their days on the “concentrated study of the national language (Mandarin)”, in the belief that this will lead to “de-extremification” and elevate their “cultural level”. This is combined with “ideological education” which is worked into the curriculum in order to “effectively resolve ideological contradictions, and guide students away from bad emotions.” Each student possesses a “file” in which “scores” are kept to “assess individually the students’ ideological transformation”, one which is linked to rewards and punishments for the inmate and their family.
This “transformation” is a process without end, even for those who manage to outwardly conform and become “integrated” into society. For, the Telegram makes clear, “Students must not leave the line of sight for one year and their performance should be grasped in a timely manner.” It is not specified precisely how long a period of time “a timely manner” describes. Who can tell how much suffering resides within so few words.
The methods employed by the Beijing government for identifying and incarcerating dissidents offer a showcase of the terrifying powers of the modern police state. Beijing now possesses surveillance capacities which George Orwell could not have imagined in his worst nightmares. Four “bulletins” leaked to the ICIJ show secret intelligence briefings from Beijing’s Integrated Joint Operation Platform (IJOP), the government’s central data collection system.
The IJOP are exploiting artificial intelligence technologies to screen entire groups of Uighur and Kazakh people. They run algorithms which use data to compile lists of suspicious persons based upon their online profiles. In a single week in June 2017, a total of 24,412 individuals were placed upon such a list, of whom more than 15,000 were then sent to re-education camps, and a further 706 were jailed.
Personal information is acquired by stealth as much as by coercion. According to Human Rights Watch, the sources of data include numerous checkpoints that have been set up throughout Xinjiang with closed-circuit cameras using facial recognition software and spyware that the police require some Uighurs to install on their phones.
The Chinese police in the region have also come to rely upon an app which they use to run detailed and intrusive background checks on individuals. The categories include physical measures of height and blood type as well as educational level, profession, and household electric meter readings. The app was developed by a state-owned Chinese company which cooperates with the German conglomerate, Siemens.
Maya Wang, the senior China analyst at Human Rights Watch, said that the IJOP’s ultimate goal is to screen the entire population of Xinjiang for their behaviours and beliefs. She said that it has created “a background check mechanism, with the possibility of monitoring people everywhere”.
The bitter fruit of this mechanism has been the abductions which have afflicted China’s Muslims. In 2017, a prominent Uighur academic at Xinjiang University, Tashpolat Tiyip, disappeared without a trace, and with no word from officials. His friends believe that he was convicted of separatism and sentenced to death in a secret trial. In February 2019, Aibota Serik, a Chinese Kazakh, told the BBC that her father, a local Imam in Tarbagatay, Xinjiang, was detained by local police. She said that “I don’t know why my father was imprisoned”, adding that “he didn’t violate any laws of China, he was not tried in a court”. She has not heard from him since.
Such stories have now become commonplace in Xinjiang. Within them, there is a haunting echo of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece, Dr Zhivago, a novel set in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its traumatic aftermath, an era which Pasternak himself witnessed first-hand. Describing the way in which the Bolsheviks treated their political prisoners, Pasternak wrote of one character’s tragic end that “One day, she went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was afterwards deliberately misplaced, in one of the innumerable…concentration camps”.
These haunting echoes have now become deafeningly loud. The spectre of concentration camps is no longer a cipher from a buried European past, it is now a very real menace hanging over the lives of China’s Muslim minorities.
In response, the UK government has once again called for international action. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has urged China “to allow UN observers immediate and unfettered access to the region” of Xinjiang in order to investigate China’s internment camps. This follows fast upon the heels of the events of a UN Human Rights Council in February, in which Britain was the only country aside from Turkey to challenge China on the situation in the region.
However, there is little indication that these stern words alone will amount to more than political symbolism. The difficulty confronting those seeking to grasp the nettle of Beijing’s human rights record in Xinjiang is the importance of Chinese capital across the world. In the Gulf, Chinese consumption of energy exports and strategic investments have contributed to diplomatic support for Beijing. Meanwhile, within Europe, major recipients of Chinese investment such as Greece and Hungary have previously blocked EU efforts to deliver statements confronting China’s human rights abuses.
Britain, too, is not immune to this predicament. Research conducted by the law firm Baker McKenzie and the research company, the Rhodium Group, concluded that in 2018 Britain was the largest recipient of Chinese outbound foreign direct investment. Chinese outbound FDI in Britain stood at a total of $4.94 billion last year, a figure which shows the vast extent of Chinese investment in UK infrastructure and markets. Chinese students are significant contributors of fees to the UK’s private schools and universities.
Such factors undoubtedly provide Beijing with significant leverage, and yet Britain’s policy-makers must not be cowed into silence by the conveniences of Chinese capital. This relationship cuts both ways – Chinese investors like Britain because it is a stable, law-bound, and well-governed country by international standards. If Beijing can threaten to turn off the tap of capital investments, the UK can equally close off attractive and lucrative markets.
The United States and many European national governments have already begun to take a tougher stance against Beijing. In October, the US imposed sanctions on companies and security bureaus operating in Xinjiang. The UK, and more than 20 other countries, including France and Germany, issued a statement of condemnation on 29th October 2019. Some of the signatories of this statement, including the UK, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have also passed legislation to impose sanctions similar to those of the US.
The UK’s future governments must remember that there are certain principles which ought to be valued at a higher premium than short-term economic expediency. Britain should accordingly seek to spearhead moves to turn abstract statements of disapproval into concrete diplomatic and trade sanctions which affect the Beijing government in meaningful ways.
Much more can still be done. The first task should be for Britain to work more alongside other European countries and the US who are willing to impose tougher embargoes and sanctions on Western companies, particularly app-developers, who are working with the Chinese government. Many more European and US companies have extensive operations in Xinjiang itself, providing another source of potential diplomatic leverage if a broader coalition against Beijing’s actions can be formed.
Britain’s response to the tragedy occurring in Xinjiang matters now more than ever. If the UK proceeds to leave the European Union after 12 December, this will be an early test for the advocates of a new “global Britain”. If Britain doesn’t work to build an alliance capable of exercising real diplomatic leverage over Xinjiang, then it will starkly reveal a more sober reality behind the rhetoric of those proclaiming Britain to be an internationalist power promoting free trade and personal freedom. It would be a damning expression of Britain’s abdication of moral leadership on the international stage.