China built its internment system with methods and language it borrowed straight from the West's own war on terror. Nobody who lent that language gets to act surprised by what it was used for.
A homeland with a name Beijing won’t use
Xinjiang, which Uyghurs call East Turkestan, has been under varying degrees of Chinese control since the eighteenth century, with a brief window of independence as the East Turkestan Republic in the 1930s and 40s before the People’s Republic asserted full control in 1949. Uyghurs are a Turkic, majority-Muslim people, ethnically and culturally distinct from China’s Han majority, and for decades after 1949 they lived under a state that steadily encouraged Han migration into the region.
The pivot: after 2001, separatism became "terrorism"
Through the 1990s, sporadic Uyghur unrest was treated by Beijing largely as a domestic ethnic and political problem. That changed almost immediately after September 11, 2001. China moved quickly to fold its own long-standing suppression of Uyghur identity into the vocabulary the United States had just handed the world, rebranding Uyghur dissent as "terrorism" and "extremism." The war on terror did not just kill and displace Muslims directly through American bombs. It also handed authoritarian governments a ready-made script to justify crushing their own Muslim populations, and Beijing read from it closely.
2009, and the turn toward mass detention
Ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009 killed around 200 people and hardened Beijing’s approach further. But it was after 2014, following a wave of attacks China attributed to Uyghur militants, that the region tipped into what it is today: a mass surveillance and internment state. Beginning in 2017, credible independent estimates put well over a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims detained in a network of camps China calls "vocational education centers." Some estimates run as high as 1.8 to 2 million people at the system’s peak.
What happened inside, and outside
Leaked internal Chinese police records, published by international journalists in 2020, show people detained for offenses as minor as having a relative abroad, wearing a beard, or simply being deemed insufficiently loyal. Reporting describes forced political indoctrination, forced labor, family separation, and, per multiple investigations, forced sterilization of Uyghur women. The US government formally determined in 2021 that Beijing’s actions constitute genocide. A UN human rights report found the conduct could amount to crimes against humanity.
Where it stands now
China says the camps closed in 2019. Independent researchers dispute that the system has actually ended, documenting camps still operating and a shift of many detainees from camps into formal prison sentences instead. Thousands of families still do not know what happened to relatives who were taken.
A silence worth naming
Uyghurs are one of the largest Muslim populations subjected to mass detention anywhere in the world today, and the response from most Muslim-majority governments has been muted at best, several openly siding with Beijing, wary of jeopardizing trade and investment ties.
Timeline
- 1949 — PRC control asserted
- 2001 — Uyghur separatism rebranded terrorism
- 2009 — Urumqi riots
- 2017 — Mass internment begins
- 2021 — US genocide determination
Key Locations
Urumqi, Kashgar, Hotan