9 Questions about the Uighurs
An explanation…
I’m sorry for the recent delay in The Vernaculist. A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago to check in. He had noticed that my pace of podcast production and writing had all but stopped, and was making sure that everything was ok. The short answer, I told him, is that I am fine. The longer answer is that my mom passed away unexpectedly last month after a three year battle with cancer.
A few of you on the recipient list for this email had the pleasure of knowing my mom, and so you know firsthand how special of a person she was. Despite the cruelty of hospital visit limitations during her final unconscious weeks, her funeral last Friday-which we were able to conduct with social distancing and stream for those unable to attend-was a testament to how deeply she enriched the lives of so many people.
I appreciate your prayers for my family and for the repose of my mother’s soul.
And now…
When I published my last newsletter, I mentioned that I wanted to do a “deep dive” on the plight of the Uighurs in China. For style, I’m following what @Max_Fisher used to do at The Washington Post and later at an explainer piece that starts with “9 questions about [topic] you were too embarrassed to ask.”
But readers of The Vernaculist, of course, don’t have an embarrassment problem or an ignorance problem. So these are 9 questions that I’m asking and answering. You might already know these things, but hopefully you’ll learn something along the way.
Ready? Here goes.
1. How do you pronounce/spell “Uighur/Uyghur”?
The pronunciation answer is pretty easy: in English, the word is pronounced “ WEE-gur.” You can hear it in various news outlets here. Amusingly, the word bears only a passing resemblance to the Mandarin Chinese word that it emulates. For spelling, either answer is correct, but the most recent convention (adopted by The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, , and the) tends to be “Uighur.”
2. Who are the Uighurs?
The Uighurs are are native to China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region (see above) in the country’s vast northwest. Uighurs are Turkic, belonging to a collection of ethnic groups that numbers about 160 million globally, with significant populations in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. The Uighurs speak a Turkic language, and look very different from Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). Estimates of the size of China’s Uighur population vary (and are disputed due to the PRC’s lack of transparency on its own demographics), but there are probably around 12 million Uighurs living in China. This represents the vast majority of the global Uighur population (~13.5 million) but constitutes less than a tenth of one percent (!) of China’s population ( 1.44 with a “b”).
3. What is the history of the Uighurs before the 20th century?
The Uighur people have been in what is now the Xinjiang region for well over a thousand years, likely since the 6th century. The Uighur Khaganate of the 8th and 9th centuries commanded a vast swath of territory stretching from Manchuria westward to the Caspian Sea, but the Khaganate collapsed in the middle of the 9th century. Simultaneous and competing Uighur kingdoms sprang up over the next several hundred years, and some of these kingdoms converted to Islam, well in advance of the Mongol conquest at the beginning of the 13th century. Most of the remaining Uighur areas converted to Islam under Mongol rule, which lasted for over five hundred years before giving way to the Qing Dynasty conquest in the middle of the 18th century. In 1884, the Qing Dynasty officially incorporated Xinjiang Province into the Chinese empire ( xin jiang means ‘new frontier’ in Mandarin).
4. What happened in the 20th century?
When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911 and the new Republic of China (ROC) took its place, Xinjiang remained in the ROC as a province. Its residents made several ill-fated attempts to create separate, fully sovereign Muslim states, but those efforts failed and probably sowed seeds of discord that would yield thorns after Mao Zedong’s rise to power and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In 1955 Xinjiang was redesignated as the “Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region” (similar to what the PRC did in the contested Tibet region), and more or less remained in this stasis throughout the Cold War. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, independent states for Turkic people sprang up on and near to Xinjiang’s borders: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. But there was no such independence for Xinjiang’s Uighurs. Rather, the following two decades witnessed increasing tensions between the PRC’s government and the Uighur population, with the former suspicious of the Uighur’s Islamic faith, and the latter consistently agitating for political liberation.
5. What happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
To understand this, we have to go back to March 1996, when the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo issued a top secret document on the topic of Xinjiang. Called “Document No. 7,” the white paper called for “intensified controls over religious activity throughout the region.” The result was gruesome: Amnesty International reports that between 1997 and 1999, the CCP executed 200 people in the region for political and religious offenses. In 2001, Human Rights Watch said that Xinjiang was the only province “where execution of political prisoners is common.” In April of that year (2001), China launched an ostensible “anti-crime initiative” cryptonymously labeled the “Strike Hard Campaign.” Michael Dillon records the results this way:
Anyone suspected of sympathies for ‘separatism’ — advocating an independent Uighur state — or involvement in ‘illegal religious activities’, primarily with the Sufi brotherhoods — could be detained without trial. Attempts by family members to extract relatives from police stations or other detention facilities have led to frequent clashes with the authorities, many of which have turned violent. Sporadic attacks against the police or other symbols of Chinese rule, either by local people or armed militant groups, were followed by government reprisals. Most conflict occurred in the old Sufi strongholds in the south of Xinjiang but, in July 2009, clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the regional capital, Urumqi, cost many lives. ( source)
I found at least one source suggesting that when Xi Jinping was ascendant in 2012, some hoped that he would take a more peaceful and pragmatic approach to Xinjiang and the Uighur population. Sadly, the reverse happened.
6. What is Xi Jinping’s approach to the problem?
First, let’s talk briefly about Xi. He’s probably the most powerful leader in China since Mao (or at least since Deng Xiaoping), and is already the head of the PRC military, President of China, and the General Secretary of the CCP. Some experts have suggested recently that Xi may next try to resurrect the title of Chairman, a position that died with the titular Chairman Mao.
In an op-ed this weekend in which he calls Xi “China’s comrade-emperor,” Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall describes Xi’s status quo nicely:
Xi seems to think he can do no wrong. As a result, not much is going right. Xi’s authoritarian, expansionist policies, pursued with increasing vehemence since he became communist party chief and president in 2012–13, have enveloped China in a ring of fire. Its borderlands are ablaze with conflict and confrontation from Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and the Himalayas in the north and west to Hong Kong, the South China Sea and Taiwan to the east. More than at any time since Mao’s 1949 revolution, China is also at odds with the wider world.
With respect to the Uighur policy: after becoming CCP General Secretary in 2012, Xi oversaw the efforts of Chen Quanguo to make Tibet a police state and to implement “urban design-a panopticon-like system that is euphemistically referred to as ‘grid-style social management’ [and] that enables CCP police offers to easily surveil Tibetans.” ( source) Four years after rising to power, Xi deftly pivoted to the northwest and deployed these methods to Xinjiang against the Uighurs. In fact, Chen Quanguo, the official who turned Tibet into a police state, moved to a new post in 2016: Secretary General for Xinjiang.
7. What is life like for the Uighurs now?
Under the watchful eyes (see what I did there?) of Chen Quanguo, the Uighurs in Xinjiang have been unwilling lab rats in history’s largest and most ambitious experiment in comprehensive government surveillance. A recent article in The Atlantic dreadfully declared, “the Panopticon is already here.” (The panopticon is a reference to philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s design of a perfect prison, in which every prisoner can be watched all the time. It makes sense that a utilitarian would come up with an idea like that!)
From The Atlantic:
In the near future, every person who enters a public space [in China] could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.
Identifying someone instantly using AI by interpreting their protein-construction schema, more unique than a fingerprint? Surely that must be wishful thinking-something closer to Minority Report than real life. But no-China has multiple systems and firms that are actively developing these and similar capabilities. And in the northwest, there’s a ready testbed where the state can prototype early iterations:
A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China’s northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich. Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him from extending AI surveillance across China… Purchasing prayer rugs online, storing digital copies of Muslim books, and downloading sermons from a favorite imam are all risky activities. If a Uighur were to use WeChat’s payment system to make a donation to a mosque, authorities might take note…
The list of horrors go on. There are tales of Uighurs being subjected to involuntary genetic data collections. People can’t leave their neighborhoods without their absence being digitally recorded. Police force Uighurs to download surveillance apps on their phones, impervious to VPN workarounds.
And sadly, it isn’t only about the digital panopticon-this isn’t just a government experiment gone wrong. Uighur women are checked by the state for pregnancies, and sometimes forced to abort their babies or undergo an IUD procedure (more here; an anecdotal account is here). “Unauthorized” babies are sometimes taken from their parents, who are promptly punished. And that isn’t where the government’s intrusion into Uighur family life ends:
The Chinese government has moved thousands of Han Chinese “big brothers and sisters” into homes in Xinjiang’s ancient Silk Road cities, to monitor Uighurs’ forced assimilation to mainstream Chinese culture. They eat meals with the family, and some “big brothers” sleep in the same bed as the wives of detained Uighur men… ( source)
This specific topic was the subject of an email I received from Vernaculist reader Clayton S., who said that “the CCP has (unsurprisingly) managed to turn ‘normal’ Han Chinese ‘houseguests’ into a well-oiled spy ring that sustains the concentration camps in Xinjiang.”
Clayton sent me this article with more info on the camps and the domestic human surveillance, and it is chilling. This is not a small, finely-tuned operation to identify the most radical of dissidents. This is over one million Han Chinese who have been tasked with assisting the government in indoctrinating (“re-educating”) and surveilling the millions of Uighur Chinese in Xinjiang, and in some cases selecting them for concentration camps.
And that’s still not all. There’s also the intentional destruction of cultural, religious, and historical heritage. Vernaculist reader Ben B. wrote me to tell me about his experiences there:
I traveled throughout the region in the summer [of 2007], and I can’t imagine what it’s like now; they were already bulldozing the ancient parts of Kashgar [a Chinese Uighur city of ~500,000 a few miles from the Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan borders] and replacing them with steel and glass and Han Chinese occupants. It was a beautiful area of the world with a bunch of unique cultures, and we were able to communicate because we spoke Uzbek, which was 90% the same language as Uighur, except for the developments of the last century for which Uzbek used Russian words and Uighur the Chinese words. It’s a terrible thing that’s happening to [the Uighur people].
8. What goes on in the “re-education” camps?
The PRC keeps the Xinjiang operation cloaked in secrecy, so it’s hard to say for sure. If we take the Governor of Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir, at his word, it’s all butterflies and happiness:
Zakir said the training institutions “care about the mental health of students” and provide counselling services. He said the cafeterias in the camps prepare “nutritious diets” and that all dormitories were equipped with radios, televisions, and air conditioning. Facilities for basketball, volleyball, table tennis and stages for performances have been built, he added. Activities such as writing, singing and dance contests are also organised for students, he said. “Many trainees have said they were previously affected by extremist thought and had never participated in such kinds of arts and sports activities. Now they realise how colourful life can be,” Zakir said.
Table tennis? Yea, right. This official account, via an interview with China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, does not square with any of the other information we can glean from other accounts. It’s also a reversal of China’s position from two years ago, when it flatly denied that these camps existed. And the existence of these camps-from both human intelligence and geospatial intelligence (satellite imagery) is extraordinarily well documented.
We can be confident that since April 2017, at least 800,000 and possibly more than 2 million Uighurs have been forcibly placed in these concentration camps. And the atrocities that happen within the camp walls form a long list. In 2018, Scott Busby, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on this topic (emphases mine):
Former detainees who have reached safety have spoken of relentless indoctrination and harsh conditions. They report mandatory classes where detainees are required to recite Communist slogans and sing songs praising the Chinese Communist Party. Failure to quickly learn these lessons leads to beatings and food deprivation. There are reports of the use of stress positions, cold cells, and sleep deprivation in the camps. We have also seen reports of other forms of torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, including sexual abuse. One common goal in reports from former detainees seems to be forcing detainees to renounce Islam and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. For example, praying and using common Muslim greetings are forbidden in the camps. There are reports that authorities constantly surveil detainees to ensure that they do not pray, even in their own beds in the middle of the night. Detainees are reportedly forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Some have reported being forcibly medicated with unknown substances.
But at least there’s ping pong! Unless China’s also lying about that…
9. What happens next?
Mercifully, the plight of the Uighurs is receiving more attention now than it ever has, in part due to high profile stories like the Customs and Border Protection Agency’s July seizure of a 13-ton shipment of Chinese goods due to suspicions that they were made with forced labor (and, in the case of the wigs, with human hair from unwilling subjects). This event was the catalyst for a multinational “call to action” that is seeking commitments from clothiers to cut ties with Xinjiang suppliers.
This event raises broader questions about the complicity of U.S. and European firms in China’s human rights abuses-as New York Times acknowledges, “Recent investigations . . . have found evidence that connects China’s forced detention of Turkic-speaking Uighurs to the supply chains of … Adidas, Lacoste, H & M, Abercrombie & Fitch, Ralph Lauren and the PVH Corporation, which owns labels including Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.”
There’s also the the NBA, which will postpone games after police shootings in the United States (fair enough), but will muzzle its executives who speak up against anti-independence police brutality in Hong Kong and will downplay human rights abuses at its own co-branded basketball academies in China, according to an ESPN report earlier this year. And ironically, ESPN’s parent company, Disney, is under fire for its Mulan feature film, which shot on location in Xinjiang and which includes propaganda arms of the Chinese government in the film credits.
And tech firms need to bear their share of the blame as well-until last year, Google was working on plans for a censored version of search for the internet behind the Great Firewall; just last week, Apple published its own commitment to human rights that conspicuously omitted any mention of China (the company has removed apps at the request of the Chinese government, and relies on cheap Chinese labor for the vast majority of its hardware production).
But these items are in the news precisely because of the fault lines growing between China and the rest of the world. Nixon’s great opening may have finally failed definitively-it is becoming harder and harder to pretend that China is something other than a brutally repressive regime that is illiberal in all of its tendencies. The suffering of the Uighurs is only one example. Political dissidents across the country, journalists, religious minorities- especially Christians -all of these have often seen the full power of the Chinese state and not lived to tell the tale. I encourage you to donate to an organization that is fighting for the Uighurs and to help educate your friends on what is going on there.
It’s been five decades since Meir Kahane popularized the slogan “Never Again” to describe how the genocidal violence of the Holocaust can never be repeated. But the phrase was never describing a certainty. It is an exhortation.
In the face of China’s attempts to erase the Uighurs of Xinjiang, we cannot turn a blind eye.
I hope you enjoyed this installment of The Vernaculist. Let me know what you think: zac@vernacularpodcast.com.
