When I think of concentration camps, I think of Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge, Japanese Americans in WW2 and Soviet Gulags. I would not immediately think of modern day China. However, that belief has changed. Beginning in September, the Human Rights Watch and other such groups have released studies on growing repression and abuse of Muslims in China. Specifically, the trend since 2016 of increased restrictions on the rights of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (which is an autonomous region in western China). China has recently caused other controversy over its social credit system which monitors everything about citizens’ lives and forces people to be obedient to the state or face the consequences. And in early 2018 China voted to allow their president to maintain the office for life, further restricting their democracy. This progressive growth of the government’s power and restriction on people’s basic human rights has come to a point in the form of these concentration camps. But I fear this is far from the end of it. It is not just the concentration camps; people’s movement is highly restricted as their passports have been recalled by the government, men are not allowed to have beards, women may not wear veils, children cannot learn from the Quran, and people who are found to pray five times a day are detained.
It is estimated that 1 million people are being held in these “reeducation camps” where they are allegedly forced to sing propaganda songs and learn Mandarin Chinese–which is not their native language; Turkic Muslims are forbidden from saying “As-Salaam-Alaikum,” [an Islamic greeting, meaning “peace be unto you”]; and they must say hello in Mandarin instead. If they resist, or officials deem they have failed their lessons, they are punished. They may be subjected to solitary confinement, not be allowed to eat for a certain period, or required to stand for 24-hour periods, among other punishments. Proof of these camps and the events inside come from the few witnesses who have been able to escape from China as well as Google maps satellite imagery, showing rapid growth of large groups of prison like buildings.
The UN has officially denounced the mass detentions and violations of human rights in Xinjiang. However, the Chinese government has not responded positively. Rather, they have denied any such illegal incarceration. The Chinese government has said quite frankly that “the training has only one purpose: to learn laws and regulations…to eradicate from the mind thoughts about religious extremism and violent terrorism, and to cure ideological diseases. If the education is not going well, we will continue to provide free education, until the students achieve satisfactory results and graduate smoothly.” They have said that in order to improve their society they must first “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.” These words are, of course, highly concerning and evident of serious issues in the government’s agenda.
The UN is calling for all affiliated nations to pressure China economically and politically, but few have done much in the way of action. The United States Congress has put forward a bill called the Xinjiang Uyghur Human Rights Act of 2018 which is meant to direct funds to pressure China to release the detainees.Various media and human rights groups are pulling international attention onto the issue, which has been ongoing for years but only recently drawing major attention. The way I see it, there are three things we can do: 1) let our representatives know that this is important and they need to pass the bill; 2) hope that the international community continues in this path of focusing attention on China’s abuse of human rights; 3) stay up-to-date. This is an ever-changing field of information as more news trickles out of China and different investigatory commission’s report on the situation. So please, keep yourself informed. Do not let these atrocities go unnoticed; that is a mistake we have made too many times before. As the great Dr. King once said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”