Uyghurs: Deradicalized or Stifled?

By Bhavna Singh

New Delhi: The Uyghur Human Rights Bill (UHRB) or alternatively called as the ‘Uyghur Intervention and Global Humanitarian Unified Response Act of 2019’ (UIGHUR Act) was passed on May 27 by a bipartisan vote – 413 to 1 by the US House of Representatives allowing US President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, the top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official instrumental in decision-making in Xinjiang under the Global Magnitsky Act.

It mandated that the director of national intelligence produce a list of Chinese companies involved in the construction and operation of the camps where almost 2 million members of the ethnic minority (Uyghurs) have been detained. This was largely in response to the findings of the Congress that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had a long history of repressing Turkic Muslims in this resource rich province which is located on the sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

A foray of recent research into the Xinjiang Uyghur detention centers seems to be at the hub of this response. In May 2018, Shawn Zhang in his article published in Medium describing the extensive use of wire fences around camps which are often erected new or superimposed on school buildings. In November 2019, a Central directive which was among 403 pages of internal documents was compromised and shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades.

They provided an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years with vivid descriptions of how students returning for holidays and their relatives in XUAR were handled.

Some significant revelations were made on the “legal education conversion school” near YishiLaimuqi road where several Uyghur families had been held captive in The Xinjiang Papers by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley (November 2019), and how the leadership advised local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. Some of the students were even told that their behavior could either shorten or extend the detention of their relatives. 

The CCP blatantly rejected international criticism in these internal documents stating that these camps were merely job-training centers that used mild methods to fight Islamic Terrorism but the documents confirmed the coercive nature of the crackdown and how the hidden machinery of the state carried out the largest-scale internment campaign since the Mao era. 

The 96 page document consist of internal speeches by Xi, 102 pages of internal speeches by other officials, 161 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang, and 44 pages of material from internal investigations into local officials. The key disclosure remained how Xi Jinping called for “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy” as the top most priority for the leadership.  

In addition Xi Jinping claimed that instead of putting “human rights above security” the party should emulate aspects of America’s war on terror and follow the instruction of “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” Local officials objecting to such severe measures were to be obviously purged. However, these measures have hardly yielded the results that they were aimed at, that is, to transform local Muslims into loyal and secular supporters of the CCP and the objective of quarantining and curing the locals who had been infected by the virus of Islamic radicalism. 

The anti-detention report that was passed by the US aims exactly to put a check on all these practices stated in those confidential papers. It aims at reducing or to a certain extent guaranteeing a security against the fear and anxiety perpetrated by the state amongst locals. The US has been consistently vocal about the hard-line approach that culminated into a security offensive now under way in Xinjiang.

The bill maintains that instead of deradicalising the Uyghurs through accommodative means, the party unleashed the tools of dictatorship to eradicate Islam in Xinjiang. It condemns the strong and harsh narrative of the local government that warned against the “toxicity of religious extremism” and the party’s Marxist leanings that likened Islamic extremism to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.” 

The Bill warns against treating revival of public piety with alarm and rather introduces a complementary approach between state and religion. The US report suggests that rewiring of the thinking of religious minorities would not be of much benefit as long as the state fails to fulfill the basic minimum needs for deradicalising the youth and putting an infrastructure in place that could provide permanent solutions against terrorist acts. 

The bill has been supported by overseas Uyghur groups like the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American Association who have also urged the congress to pass the Uygur forced labour Prevention Act. Interestingly, though the Bill calls for closing down these camps there has been no mention about the source of terrorist financing or even the state’s support to these detention camps. Largely the students and their detained relatives are provided for by the state which means there is an extraordinary level of expenditure that is currently being incurred by the state.

Until and unless the US senate is able to keep a tag on the terrorist and extremist financing agents they are unlikely to make a dent in the architecture built up by the Chinese state in this region. Moreover, despite being able to produce a list of guilty officials the US does not seem to be in a position to enforce the immediate release of detainees in these camps. 

The bill makes an effort to introduce deradicalising measures but largely remains outside the gamut of economic reforms thereby stifling the state’s efforts to manage the internal situation by itself. While on the ground of human rights intervention it seems to a be a valid intervention but it would difficult for the US to hold the Chinese state responsible for any of its acts or programs under this bill as it strongly believes in non-intervention in internal policies and dubs this bill as a malicious attack on state sovereignty. –

Disclaimer: The views expressed by Bhavna Singh are her personal views and TheNews21 does not necessarily endorse the same.

(Author of China’s Discursive Nationalism – Contending in Softer Realms (2012)

Researcher, McKinsey & Company)

Author can be contacted on Email: bhavna.singh984@gmail.com