Uyghur links
The Chinese government is engaged in a “repressive, assimilative campaigns targeting the indigenous peoples of what it calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).” These programs, some decades old, have sought the forced assimilation of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim-majority peoples based on their ethnicity and religion. The campaigns have intensified since 2016, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) increasingly seeks to forcibly Sinicize the region’s indigenous peoples.
Some of the measures implemented include the banning the use of the Uyghur language in schools and the practice of Islam. According to reports, the Chinese government has banned long beards and Islamic names for children. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have destroyed or damaged thousands of mosques and other cultural sites throughout the Uyghur Region. Within a context of widespread surveillance, the government has sponsored a so-called “cultural exchange” program through which Han Chinese are pared with Uyghur households, potentially enabling the state to monitor the host family and assess whether they are engaging in banned practices or behaviors (including following Islam).
A according to recent Council on Foreign Relations Report (updated in January 2021), the state has subjected the Uyghur population to a range of documented treatments that may rise to the level of crimes against humanity and genocide. These include forced disappearances, internment camps, political indoctrination, disproportionate rates of prison incarceration, efforts to prevent births, and mass arbitrary detention. Scholars and religious leaders have been targeted, forced to renounce their faith and identity. The camps have allegedly become cites of forced labor, torture and rape.
The state appears to be engaged in a systematic effort to control the size of the Uyghur population by preventing births. What began as incentivizing inter-ethnic marriages grew to widespread, coercive family planning (namely forced sterilization, IUDS, and abortions) among Uyghur women starting in 2016. In 2018, the Uyghur Region accounted for 80 percent of China’s IUD placements, despite the region making up less than 2 percent of China’s population. Birth rates fell by 84 percent among Uyghur women in two of the largest prefectures between 2015 and 2018.
Forced labor also exists outside of the detention centers. Upon leaving internment camps, many Uyghurs are often sent to factories where they engage in a system of forced labor that implicates several Western companies, especially those in the garment and technology industries, as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reports. Since 2017, the Chinese government has sent over 80,000 Uyghurs to factories around the country where they experience conditions that strongly indicate forced labor.
As of early 2021, international response has been relatively limited. The United States recently banned cotton and tomato products from the Uyghur Region over forced labor. The United Kingdom and Canada plan to take similar courses of action. The United States also sanctioned Chinese officials and companies tied to the mass atrocity. Canada’s Subcommittee on International Human Rights has sought to designate the atrocity as genocide. On January 19, 2020, the U.S. State Department declared that China’s abuses against Uyghurs constitute genocide and crimes against humanity. They cited mass arbitrary detention, forced sterilization, torture, forced labor, and restrictions on religious freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of movement as grounds for the determination.
In addition to the journalists cited above, several civil society groups – including the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Protection Approaches (UK), Human Rights Watch, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and World Uyghur Congress – have been monitoring, documenting, and raising awareness about the situation.
Click here for more resources on the persecution of the Uyghurs.