China still has more than half a million Uyghurs in prisons or detention centers and has expanded its repression of the ethnic group, a new report says, despite Beijing’s assurances that the northwestern region of Xinjiang has returned to normalcy.
Another 3 million Uyghurs were subjected to forced labor in 2023, according to the 30-page report by the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Using Chinese state documents, satellite imagery, survivor testimony and findings from recent academic publications, researchers concluded that between 2022 and 2024, China continued all its main repressive policies, including those that led the United States to conclude that China was imposing a genocide on the Uyghur people.
“In some cases, such as mass detention, the institutional forms of the policy have changed without substantially changing their effects, while in others, such as forced labor and the transfer of Turkic minority children to Han care in residential schools, the repressive actions have expanded,” the report says.
The report outlines nine key findings, including an estimate that the current number of Turkic minority individuals in prisons or extrajudicial internment likely exceeds half a million, though it could be higher.
New type of internment
Additionally, as China closed its so-called vocational training centers, it increased the use of another type of internment facility known as kanshousuo — nominally jails for temporary, pretrial detention and interrogation.
Many of those who had been interned in the camps have been moved into forced labor or into the formal prison system, said Rian Thum, the report’s author.
“The other element of significance is that the Chinese state has continued to produce evidence and share online evidence for what they’re doing,” Thum told RFA. “So, we have now very recent evidence that these activities are ongoing.”
The report’s other findings are:
- The annual rate of new formal imprisonments has surpassed levels seen before the initiation of the Strike Hard campaign in 2014, which is still ongoing. However, despite somewhat unreliable government data, it appears these rates have significantly decreased, nearing those of other provinces.
- The number of assimilationist boarding schools for Uyghur and other Turkic children continues to grow, with the aim of enrolling 100% of the middle-school population. New facilities are either under construction or in the bidding process.
- Population growth in the region has continued to decline, dropping to nearly zero growth in 2021 and 2022, according to recent government statistics, amid strict birth control policies targeting minority groups.
- Forced labor programs for Turkic minorities have expanded further, with close to 3 million individuals placed in forced labor assignments in 2023.
- The government is rapidly increasing the number of state-run nursing homes, aiming to triple the number of facilities available to care for elderly people separated from their families on account of the forced labor program.
- State-led land appropriation has risen as part of efforts to push farmers into industrial labor camps.
- Visible surveillance and police checkpoints have decreased.
Some electronic surveillance technologies, such as widespread cameras, AI-driven data processing, GPS tracking, gait and voice recognition, mobile phone scanning, facial recognition checkpoints, and DNA collection, may have become obsolete or replaced by newer methods in recent years, the report says.
“That does not include surveillance that people cannot immediately see or experience, for example, some kinds of digital surveillance,” Ryan Thum, the report’s author, told RFA. “But in terms of controls on everyday movement checkpoints, these kinds of highly visible, highly disruptive surveillance seem to have seemed to have decreased.”
Accusations of whitewashing
Human rights organizations and Uyghur advocacy groups have criticized China for attempting to whitewash the ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang by organizing scripted tours for diplomats and select individuals, showcasing Uyghurs living seemingly happy lives.
“We know from history that perpetrators will go to great lengths to try to hide the evidence of their crimes,” said Naomi Kikoler, director of the Simon-Skjodt Center.
“We also know that they will evolve their techniques to enable them to continue to perpetrate mass atrocities without the international attention,” she said. “This is what the Chinese government has, and continues to do.”
An August 2022 report by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights determined that China’s policies in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity.
The report came after a decision by a nonbinding Uyghur Tribunal in December 2021 that China had committed genocide against the Uyghurs via birth control and forced sterilization measures, as well as found evidence of crimes against humanity, torture and sexual abuse of Uyghurs in re-education camps.
Additionally, several Western governments and parliaments, including the United States, declared that the atrocities amounted to crimes against humanity or genocide.
China has denied the abuses and said it closed down the internment facilities, which it called vocational education and training centers where Uyghurs and others learned skills.
“In their totality, the policies described in this report threaten to erase Turkic minority cultures and lifeways, interrupt cultural transmission across generations, dispossess indigenous populations, reduce the proportion of minority populations in the region, break apart families, and subordinate survivors to Han Chinese colonial goals,” the report concludes.
“Evidence from the last two years suggests that the state’s progress toward these ends continues, at the cost of immense suffering for millions of members of the targeted groups.”
To address the repressive measures, the U.S. Congress must maintain its broad bipartisan backing for Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Kikoler told Radio Free Asia.
“Policymakers can’t take their eye off of the grave threats facing the Uyghur and other Turkic communities,” she said. “Congress needs to sustain its strong bipartisan support for the Uyghurs.”
“China’s efforts to deceive can’t be allowed to succeed,” she said. “The existence of the Uyghur community is at risk.”
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.