ELI LAKE: China’s Campaign Against the Uighurs Demands a Response. “The evidence is mounting of China’s despicable strategy of cultural persecution in Xinjiang Province.”
This week the Washington Free Beacon reported that a separatist Uighur organization known as the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement has identified a network of 124 re-education camps in the province, almost all of them built since 2016. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has identified 28 such camps, noting that media reports have identified up to 180.
Last summer, United Nations investigators estimated that 1 million Uighurs were in the camps. In May, Randall Schriver, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security, estimated that at least 3 million Uighurs are being detained. (Other U.S. officials tell me this larger estimate includes people who are compelled to visit a re-education facility but still live in their homes.)
The Chinese claim the new centers are for vocational training. Survivors describe something closer to concentration camps. One, Mihrigul Tursun, told Congress last fall that she was forced to sit for hours in a chair where she suffered electric shocks and sleep deprivation.
This is, in effect, a campaign of mass child abduction. The grim details are laid bare in a study published this month by researcher Adrian Zenz in the Journal of Political Risk. Citing official documents, he writes that the government plan is “designed to systematically boost the ability of the state to house children of all ages in increasingly centralized and highly securitized educational boarding facilities.”
Might I suggest export controls on the Western technology (primarily from Google) being used to run China’s ever-growing surveillance/social-control state? The business they do with Beijing is the high-tech version of selling guns and barbed wire to Stalin’s GULAG, or genetic testing kits to Hitler’s SS.