What is the history of the Uyghurs?

The Uyghurs are a nomadic Turkic people native to China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. Many Uyghurs are Muslim and their faith has put them at odds with the officially atheistic Chinese Communist Party. About 12 million Uyghurs live in Xinjiang, with smaller communities residing in Kazakhstan, Turkey and other countries. Parts of Xinjiang had two brief periods of self-rule as East Turkestan (1933-1934 and 1944-1949) before the region came under Mao Zedong’s Communist rule in 1949, along with the rest of China. A number of Uyghurs continue to hope for political independence one day, a stance harshly opposed by Beijing.

Why has China targeted the Uyghurs?

China points both to sporadic terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and an active Uyghur independence movement as justification for the crackdown. Uyghur activists say years of state-sponsored oppression and discrimination have fueled grass-roots anger against the government. Ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and China’s majority Han people have long simmered in the region, occasionally breaking out into violence. In 2009, Xinjiang’s capital city, Urumqi, was wracked by riots , resulting in 197 dead and many more injured. Beijing’s move to clamp down in Xinjiang is also driven by the region’s geopolitical and economic importance. Xinjiang is rich in oil and produces the vast majority of China’s cotton . It also shares land borders with Afghanistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan. China has long prioritized the need for stability on its sometimes fractious periphery.

What steps has China taken against them?

China has long attempted to assimilate its Uyghur population but the policies reached new levels under President Xi Jinping. In 2017, authorities began a massive political reeducation program with more than 1 million Uyghurs from all walks of life taken into detention. People were detained for everything from wearing a headscarf or sporting a long beard to having more than two children or traveling overseas for vacation . The detentions lasted for months or even years and former detainees reported having to take daily lessons in patriotism and the Chinese language. Some said they were tortured by guards . Others learned vocational skills such as textile-making. A number of former detainees say they were forced to work at a factory as a condition of release. During the same period, the Xinjiang government rolled out a high-tech surveillance system across the region that tracked Uyghurs’ movements through police checkpoints, facial recognition surveillance cameras and house visits by officials. The U.S. Treasury Department in last December added the Chinese artificial intelligence firm SenseTime to a sanctioned list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” for developing facial recognition programs that can determine a target’s ethnicity, “with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs.” When applying for patent applications, Treasury said in a statement, SenseTime “has highlighted its ability to identify Uyghurs wearing beards, sunglasses, and masks.”

Are these really concentration camps?

Definitions differ for the emotionally charged term, but the Xinjiang camps have key similarities to the early Nazi concentration camps . They similarly targeted an ethnic minority and political dissidents, with detainees explicitly expected to contribute factory labor. In both cases, the detentions were made without formal charges or trials. The Xinjiang camps, however, were not death camps — the most notorious type of Nazi concentration camp, where detainees were killed en masse by gassing or other methods. While some detainees died in the Xinjiang camps, the official goal was to release them back into society after ideological training. One definition of “concentration camp” from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is “a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.” The Chinese government disputes the characterization of the facilities as concentration camps, saying they are vocational training centers meant to reform people with extremist tendencies.

What is the world saying about it?

The State Department last year said China’s actions against Uyghurs should be categorized as “genocide.” Biden in December signed a bill banning imports from China’s Xinjiang region — including cotton, tomatoes and the polysilicon used in solar panel manufacturing — because of concerns over forced labor. A number of Western governments have also denounced China’s policies in Xinjiang and joined the United States in boycotting the Winter Games. Many countries, however, were muted in their responses. Beijing has warned foreign governments not to interfere in its internal affairs. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for the Opening Ceremonies in February in a show of solidarity as Western leaders largely stayed away. Lily Kuo and Christian Shepherd contributed to this report.

Asia

Who are the Uyghurs, and what’s happening to them in China?

China’s crackdown on the Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang, explained

By Eva Dou

and

Erin Cunningham

Updated May 24, 2022 at 2:12 p.m. EDT|Published November 19, 2021 at 6:07 p.m. EST

People stand in a guard tower at a detention center in Dabancheng, in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in 2021. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

China began its sweeping crackdown in the northwest Xinjiang region under the banner of counterterrorism in 2017. It was a harsh campaign to forcibly assimilate the local Uyghur population, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group native to Xinjiang.

Scholars estimate that Chinese authorities ultimately detained more than 1 million Uyghurs as part of the crackdown, holding them in centers and reeducation camps for periods ranging from weeks to years. The abuses have drawn international condemnation over the years, including accusations of genocide and a sweeping U.S. ban on imports from the region.

China says that the moves by Western nations — including a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — to highlight its human rights abuses are “distractions” and “political manipulation.”

Now, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, is on a six-day trip to China to look into violations in Xinjiang. Her visit marks the first for a U.N. human rights chief since 2005. Critics say it could turn into a propaganda show for Beijing.

Bachelet’s trip has also coincided with the release of a cache of classified documents obtained by the BBC and a consortium of media outlets providing new evidence of the Chinese government’s systematic crackdown on its Uyghur minority. Among the documents are photographs, speeches, spreadsheets and surveillance logs apparently hacked from Xinjiang police servers and that offer harrowing details of the mass incarceration of Uyghur residents, including children.

China to pull BBC News off the air, state broadcast regulator says

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