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IV. SCHOOL Chen Quanguo’s crackdown was aimed at a single goal: moving a large percentage of Xinjiang’s population into an archipelago of fortified camps for political reëducation. Shortly after he arrived, he had begun building hundreds of prison-like facilities—what an official later described as trusted destinations for the untrusted.
By treating the entire indigenous population as a target, Chen was realizing a years-old objective. In 2015, around the time the IJOP system was being developed, a senior official had argued that a third of the region’s Uyghurs were “polluted by religious extremist forces,” and needed to be “educated and reformed through concentrated force.”
Xi Jinping had compared separatism and radical Islam to a disease, and officials often invoked medicine when they sought to allay concerns about the camps. “Although a certain number of people who have been indoctrinated with extremist ideology have not committed any crimes, they are already infected,” one noted. “They must be admitted to a reëducation hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain.”
As the mass arrests began, the Xinjiang Daily, a Communist Party organ, offered one of the first public acknowledgments of Chen’s plan. It described two men who had been assigned to a reëducation camp in Hotan Prefecture: a farmer and the owner of a village drugstore. Both described themselves as ideologically healed. “I was increasingly drifting away from ‘home,’ ” the drugstore owner explained. “With the government’s help and education, I’ve returned.”
Cartoon by Karl Stevens Copy link to cartoon Link copied
Shop The farmer noted that he had learned, to his surprise, that his thoughts were manifesting religious extremism. “I didn’t even know,” he said. Now, he added, “our lives are improving every day. No matter who you are, first and foremost you are a Chinese citizen.”
An official told the Daily that the camp had already processed two thousand people. “We have strict requirements for our students, but we have a gentle attitude, and put our hearts into treating them,” he said. “To come here is actually like staying at a boarding school.” The drugstore owner, he noted, was resistant at first to being reëducated. “Gradually, he became shocked by how ignorant he used to be.”
From the police station, Sabit and another detainee, a young Uyghur woman, were driven to a compound surrounded by a wall topped with concertina wire. A sign read “Kuytun City Vocational Skills Re-education Training Center Administrative Bureau.” Inside was a three-story building, a former police station that had been hastily repurposed. The women were ushered in and told to face a wall. Sabit tried to survey the place, but the light was dim. Standing beside her, the Uyghur woman began to cry.
“Don’t fidget!” an officer shouted. Sabit, noticing that the man’s Mandarin was imperfect, turned and saw that he was Kazakh; immediately, she felt disgust. The women were directed to the third floor, and, on the way, Sabit glimpsed several male detainees in gray uniforms. Their sullen figures made her fearful, and she looked away.
Sabit was led to a large room, where she was strip-searched. As she was getting dressed, she asked how long she would have to remain, and a guard said that no one would be let go before the Nineteenth National Congress, which was days away.
The detention cells were revamped offices, with walls, doors, and windows reinforced with iron latticework, giving them the appearance of cages. The doors were chained to their frames and could not be opened more than a foot; detainees had to shimmy through. In Sabit’s cell, five bunk beds were crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot space, with three cameras and a microphone hanging from the ceiling.
A few women, their eyes red from crying, were already there, and more arrived later. They were all sure that they had been rounded up in a dragnet preceding the National Congress. Some had been brought in for using WhatsApp. One was on leave from college in America; she had been detained for using a V.P.N. to turn in her homework and to access her Gmail account. A seventeen-year-old had been arrested because her family once went to Turkey on a holiday.
The Uyghur woman who was processed with Sabit had been assigned to the cell, too. She was a Communist Party propagandist. Years earlier, she told Sabit, she had booked a flight to Kashgar, but a sandstorm prevented the plane from taking off, so the airline had placed everyone on the flight in a hotel. Later, police officers in Kuytun detained her, and told her that two of the other people in the hotel were deemed suspect. Even though she was working for the Party, the mere fact of being Uyghur and staying in a hotel where others were under suspicion was enough to raise alarms.
The reëducation camp was nothing like a hospital, nothing like a boarding school. Chen Quanguo had instructed that such facilities “be managed like the military and defended like a prison.” Sabit and the other women had to exchange their clothes for drab uniforms that were accented with fluorescent stripes and a photo-I.D. tag. Male guards patrolled the halls and the compound’s exterior—each officer working a twenty-four-hour shift—while female staff members served as disciplinarians, following the women wherever they went, including the bathroom. When the disciplinarians were not there, the surveillance cameras were; even when showering, the detainees could not escape them.
The only language permitted in the building was Mandarin. Some of the older women did not know a word of it, and were consigned to silence, except for a few phrases they had to memorize. Everyone was required to shout “Reporting!” when entering a room, but many of the women forgot, enraging their minders. One disciplinarian, a member of the bingtuan, routinely insulted and humiliated the women. Detainees who angered her were subjected to punishments, which included being locked in a tiny room and shackled to a tiger chair for the night. She often intoned, “If you don’t behave, you’ll stay here for the rest of your life.”
Sabit quickly learned that every moment was controlled. The women had to wake at precisely eight each morning, but, except for trips to the washroom and the toilet, they were locked in their cells twenty-four hours a day. They had three minutes to wash their faces and brush their teeth, a minute to urinate. Showers could not exceed five minutes. Some women left soapy because they had misjudged their time.
For meals, the women had to line up in their cells to await a food cart, with their backs facing the door. The cups and bowls issued to them were made from cheap plastic, and Sabit, watching the hot food and water soften them, feared that toxins were leaching into her diet. (Later, replacements were introduced.) Sabit’s cell had no table, but the women were assigned stools—painful to use, because they were only about a foot tall. The women squatted on them and put their bowls on the floor. If they ate too slowly, or not enough, they were reprimanded. The elderly women, and people with dental problems, struggled, but neither age nor ailments spared them insults.
The detainees were forbidden to sit on their beds during the day, though after lunch they were made to lie down, with eyes shut, for a compulsory nap. At 10 p.m., they were ordered to sleep, but the lights in their cells were never turned off, and they were not allowed to cover their eyes with a blanket or a towel. (The younger women volunteered to take the top bunks, to shield the older ones from the light.) If anyone spoke, everyone in the room would be punished with an ear-splitting reprimand from a blown-out loudspeaker. Any nighttime request to use the bathroom was treated with contempt, and eventually the women stopped asking. Dispirited, uncomfortable, often verbally abused, they masked their pain, because displays of sadness were also punished. “You are not allowed to cry here,” the guards had told them. School taught them how to turn from the cameras, hide their faces, and quietly cry themselves to sleep.
The women had been told that they were going to be reëducated, but for a long stretch there was only dull confinement. To pass the time, they sat on the stools and traded stories. The college student who was studying in America entertained the others by recounting the entire plot of “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Twelve days after Sabit arrived, the National Congress ended, and the women were summoned for interviews with officials from the Public Security Bureau. Sabit was led to an interrogation room, where an officer told her, “Your case is basically clear now.” She asked how she had ended up in the camp, given that the domestic-security team had provided her with a written declaration of her innocence. The officer said that he didn’t know. Later, a detainee told Sabit that she had heard it was because officials came to view her failed departures at the airport as an inconvenience.
After the interviews, the women waited hopefully, but no one was freed. Then, a month into Sabit’s detention, it was announced that everyone would study Mandarin six days a week—to master the “national language.” After learning of a detainee who was let go after three months, Sabit thought that perhaps she, too, could sail through the lessons and “graduate.”
The classroom, fortified with iron meshwork, was adjacent to her cell. There were rows of desks, and a lectern behind a fence at the front. A surveillance camera was mounted in each corner. During classes, two police officers stood guard.
spoiler
The women’s instructor—Ms. Y.—had been yanked out of her job as an elementary-school teacher and compelled to live at the facility most of the week. Although she was stern, the women liked her. Ms. Y. spoke frequently about how she missed her young students, and she brought a grade-school teacher’s sensibility to the camp: she sought to teach the women Chinese opera and calligraphy, and pushed the administrators to allow plastic scissors, for making traditional Han crafts. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to get the detainees time outside for exercise.) One day, she arrived visibly upset; the director had humiliated her for tardiness by forcing her to stand during a meeting.
At the outset, Ms. Y. had no Mandarin textbooks, or even worksheets, so she used first-grade instructional materials; later, she was provided with lesson plans, but they were riddled with errors. The detainees were told that they needed to master three thousand Chinese characters, even though several women, Sabit among them, already knew more than twice that many. No matter how fluent the women were, they were forced to perform the exercises, over and over, until the others caught up. Some of the elderly women who had never been schooled in Mandarin struggled with the lessons. To spare them punishment, Sabit and a few others covertly helped them.
The classes, of course, had nothing really to do with language. As a government document made clear, reëducation was intended to sever people from their native cultures: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
Sabit and the other women had to learn Communist songs and sing them loudly before each meal. (If they did not show sufficient zeal, guards threatened to withhold food.) Every morning, they had to stand and proclaim their fealty to the state:
Ardently love the Chinese Communist Party! Ardently love the great motherland! Ardently love the Chinese people! Ardently love socialism with Chinese characteristics!
They were compelled to watch videos like “The Hundred-Year Dream,” which celebrated China’s economic growth and power. The screenings were followed by discussion groups, in which detainees had to repeat propaganda and profess gratitude to the Party for saving them from criminality. On Saturdays, guest speakers gave presentations on terrorism law. The detainees were obliged to recite seventy-five “manifestations” of religious extremism.
It didn’t take great insight, Sabit thought, to recognize the absurdity of the curriculum as a counterterrorism tool. Most of the young women who were rounded up had secular life styles; they frequented bars on weekends and had barely any ties to religion, let alone religious extremism. The elderly women, though more traditional, clearly posed no threat, but their internment would stymie the transmission of cultural knowledge to younger generations.
All their work seemed geared toward pageants that were organized for visiting Party dignitaries, who would come to inspect the women’s progress and the camp’s efficacy. During these events—held at first in a room where the guards slept, with beds pushed to one side—the women had to recite maxims of Xi Jinping, sing patriotic anthems, dance, and make a show of Han cultural pride. “You need to have a smile on your face,” guards would say. “You need to show that you are happy.”
Sabit was often a featured performer; because of her fluency and her education, the camp could count on her to demonstrate that the program was a success. She would project excitement and positivity, in an exhausting pantomime. Many of the women felt ashamed by the hollow display, but still campaigned to perform. The preparations offered a respite from the language classes, and the pageants gave them a chance to prove their “transformation” and perhaps be set free.
At some point during every inspection, the visiting dignitaries would ask, “Do you recognize your mistakes?” In preparation, the detainees wrote out statements of repentance; the guards explained that anyone who did not do so would never leave. One detainee, a member of a Christian sect called Eastern Lightning, invoked a Chinese law that guaranteed freedom of religion, declaring, “I did nothing wrong!” She was taken away, to what the women assumed was a harsher facility—a pretrial detention center or a prison.
The logic of these forced admissions was clear: to gain their freedom, the detainees had to tear themselves down. Sabit strove to qualify her answers with words like “potentially,” and to characterize her life overseas as a “lack of patriotism” rather than as a manifestation of Islamic extremism. But, having lived in Shanghai, she found it hard not to seethe; she knew Han urbanites who had left the country for vacations in Malaysia, and who had used WhatsApp and V.P.N.s. Were they also infected?
Over and over, Sabit and the women confessed. Yet no one was released, and gradually Sabit’s optimistic delusions collapsed. In February, 2018, China’s annual Spring Festival arrived, and the women were preparing for a pageant, when a camp administrator woke them in the middle of the night and forced them into a classroom to write out their mistakes. When they were done, he gathered their papers, tore them up, and berated the women for being dishonest, then kept them writing until dawn. Sabit wondered if she was losing her grip on herself. Could she be wrong? she thought. Had she betrayed China?
Then, as the pageant neared, Sabit learned that after the performances any detainee who was a student would be let go. Because Sabit had been enrolled in school in Canada, she made the case that the policy applied to her. The camp administrators agreed, and she filled out forms for her release—discreetly, so that women who were not slated to leave would not grow agitated. The director told her to wait for an official departure date. She tried not to become hopeful, having been let down so often. But, she recalled, she regarded the news as “a ray of light.”
spoiler
V. THE CONFESSION Yarkand County is about eight hundred miles from Kuytun, in southwestern Xinjiang, on the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. When Marco Polo visited, in the late thirteenth century, he noted that Muslims and Christians lived alongside one another there, and that the region, with its temperate climate and rich soil, had been “amply stocked with the means of life.”Yarkand has a large Uyghur population, and the crackdown there has been severe. In 2014, authorities restricted Ramadan celebrations, and, according to a report from the region, police gunned down a family during a house-to-house search for women wearing head scarves. Locals armed with knives took to the streets, and, in an escalating confrontation with police, dozens were killed. Later, the authorities called in a seasoned Party official, Wang Yongzhi, to manage the county.
Wang moved aggressively to enact Chen Quanguo’s policies, but he evidently had misgivings. As he later noted in a statement, “The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with the realities on the ground, and could not be implemented in full.” He took steps to soften the crackdown, much to the dissatisfaction of Chen’s operatives, who monitored how officials were carrying out the measures. “He refused to round up everyone who should be rounded up,” an official assessment of Wang, later leaked to the Times, noted. In fact, he had gone further than that. He had authorized the release of seven thousand interned people.
Wang was removed from his post and duly submitted a confession, in which he wrote, “I undercut, acted selectively, and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment.” The Party savagely attacked him, accusing him of corruption and abuse of power. “Wang Yongzhi lost his ideals and convictions,” one government-run paper noted. “He is a typical ‘two-faced man,’ ” it added. “His problem is very serious.” He vanished from public life.
Wang’s confession was circulated across the Xinjiang bureaucracy as a warning, and it apparently reached Kuytun. Just as Sabit and the other students were to be released, her camp’s management revoked its decision—because, a guard told her, an official had been dismissed for freeing people without authorization. “Nobody is willing to sign off on your release now,” he explained. “Nobody wants that responsibility.”
A heavy silence fell over the building, as minders—the detainees’ conduits for news—became cautious about what they said. At first, Sabit was dismayed, but, just as she had modulated her joy at the prospect of leaving, she now dampened her disappointment. The one certainty she could count on was her patience. She had become good at waiting.
And yet the longer she was confined the more convoluted her path to freedom appeared. By then, her minders had instituted a point system: the detainees were told that they had each been assigned a score, and if it was high enough they could win privileges—such as family visits—and even release. Points could be gained by performing well on examinations, or by writing up “thought reports” that demonstrated an ability to regurgitate propaganda. The women could also win points by informing on others. One detainee, Sabit recalled, was “like another camera.”
The threat of losing points was constantly dangled over the women. For a minor infraction, the guards might announce that they were docking a point; for a large one, they might say that the penalty was ten points. Yet the women were never told their scores, so they were never sure if the points were real. One day, a woman got into a fight and was brought to a camp official, who furiously reprimanded her, then tore up a paper that, he claimed, recorded her score. “You now have zero points!” he declared. Back in the cell, Sabit and the others consoled her, but also gently pushed for details of what the official had said, hoping to glean some insight into how the system functioned. “We thought, Well, maybe they really are recording our points,” Sabit recalled. “Maybe there is something to it.”
In the winter of 2018, new arrivals began flooding into the camp. Word spread that the arrests were driven by quotas—a new kind of arbitrariness. As an official involved with IJOP later told Human Rights Watch, “We began to arrest people randomly: people who argue in the neighborhood, people who street-fight, drunkards, people who are lazy; we would arrest them and accuse them of being extremists.” An officer at the camp told Sabit that the arrests were intended to maintain stability before the Two Sessions, a major political conclave in Beijing.
The camp strained to manage the influx. Most of the new arrivals had been transferred from a detention center, which was also overflowing. There were elderly women, some illiterate, some hobbled. One woman, the owner of a grocery, was in custody because her horse-milk supplier had been deemed untrustworthy. Another was an adherent of Falun Gong; she was so terrified that she had attempted suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window.
For many of the new arrivals, the reëducation camp was an improvement. At the detention centers, there was not even a pretense of “transformation through education.” Uyghurs and Kazakhs were brought in hooded and shackled. The women spoke of beatings, inedible food, beds stained with urine, shit, and blood. Sabit met two women who had bruises on their wrists and ankles—marks, they told her, from shackles that were never removed.
With more women than beds at the camp, the authorities tossed mattresses on the floor, before shuffling the detainees around to find more space. New protocols were introduced. The women had to perform military drills inside their cells, and submit to haircuts. In Kazakh and Uyghur culture, long hair symbolizes good fortune; some of the women had grown their hair since childhood, until it was, as Sabit remembered, “jet black and dense, reaching their heels.” Later, evidence emerged to suggest that the internment system was turning hair into a commodity. (Last year, the United States interdicted a thirteen-ton shipment of hair, which White House officials feared had been partly harvested at the camps.) In Kuytun, the locks were cut with a few brutal chops, as some of the women begged the guards to leave just a little more. Sabit refused to beg, trying to hold on to some pride, but as her hair fell she felt a great shame—as if she had been transformed into a criminal.
At night, it was announced, the detainees would help police themselves, with the women serving two-hour shifts. For Sabit, the shifts offered rare moments of privacy. Sometimes, blanketed in solitude, she thought of her mother living alone. Over the months, she had convinced herself that she would be able to commemorate the anniversary of her father’s death with her family, in the Kazakh tradition. But a year had passed, and she was still stranded.
spoiler
While on duty, Sabit often gazed through the small caged window and took in the nighttime view: a garden, a poplar tree, and then Kuytun’s urban panorama—the city’s glowing lights, the cars tracing lines on a highway, reminding her of her old life. Later, she captured these reveries in a poem, written in Mandarin, which ends:Night watch I turn toward the darkness and Its wanton torment Of the feeble poplar.
As the months passed, the system took its toll on everyone. Guards who were once lenient became erratic and severe. A mild-mannered staff member lost it one evening, after being confronted with multiple requests for the bathroom; she yelled maniacally, then refused to let any woman out for the rest of the night.
The detainees, too, began to buckle. They joked that the state was merely keeping them alive. Some went gray prematurely. Many stopped menstruating—whether from compulsory injections that the camp administered or from stress, Sabit was unsure. Because they could shower only infrequently and were never provided clean underwear, the women often developed gynecological problems. From the poor food, many suffered bad digestion. One elderly woman could not use the bathroom without expelling portions of her large intestine, which she had to stuff back into herself. The woman was sent to a hospital, but an operation could not be performed, it was explained, because she had high blood pressure. She was returned, and spent most of the time moaning in bed.
In class one day, a detainee who had lost most of her family to the camps suddenly fell to the floor, unconscious. Her sister, who was also in the class, ran to her, then looked up at the others with alarm. The women tearfully rushed to her aid but were stopped by the guards, who ordered them not to cry. “They started hitting the iron fence with their batons, frightening us,” Sabit recalled. “We had to hold back our sobbing.”
Signs of psychological trauma were easy to find. An Uyghur woman, barely educated, had been laboring to memorize Mandarin texts and characters. One evening, she started screaming, yanked off her clothing, and hid under her bed, insisting that no one touch her. Guards rushed in with a doctor and took her away. The camp administrators, however, returned her to the cell, arguing that she had been feigning illness. Afterward, the woman occasionally had convulsions and was sent to the hospital. But she was not released.
“I get it. You have a podcast.” Cartoon by Brendan Loper Copy link to cartoon Link copied
Shop Sabit, too, felt increasingly frail. She was losing weight. She couldn’t hold down anything, not even a sip of water, and had to be given medicine to manage non-stop vomiting. Like the other women, her emotions were raw. Once, she was chatting with a Han guard, who mentioned that the camp’s deputy director had told him, “Anar being here is purely a waste of time.” Sabit smiled, worried that if she showed distress he would no longer share news with her. But, as soon as he left, she ran to her bed, turned her back to the cameras, and wept.
By the summer of 2018, Chen Quanguo’s reëducation campaign had been operating for more than a year. Beijing strove to hide its existence, but accounts leaked out, and it slowly became clear that something on a monstrous scale was taking place.
Reporters with Radio Free Asia called up local Chinese officials, who, accustomed to speaking with Party propagandists, were strikingly candid. When one camp director was asked the name of his facility, he confessed that he didn’t know, because it had been changed so often, but gamely ran outside to read the latest version off a sign. A police officer admitted that his department was instructed to detain forty per cent of the people in its jurisdiction. In January, 2018, an official in Kashgar told the news service that a hundred and twenty thousand Uyghurs had been detained in his prefecture alone.
The growing camp infrastructure attracted notice, too. Shawn Zhang, a student in Canada, began using satellite data to map the facilities. By the summer, it appeared that roughly ten per cent of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population was under confinement. Adrian Zenz, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen’s crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps—a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others. Not since the Holocaust had a country’s minority population been so systematically detained.
As the crackdown evolved, hastily assembled facilities, like Sabit’s in Kuytun, gave way to titanic new compounds in remote locations. When forced to acknowledge them publicly, the government described them as benign or indispensable—noting, “Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil.”
That summer, amid these changes, the director of Sabit’s camp permitted the detainees time in a walled-in yard; there were snipers keeping watch, and the women were restricted to structured activities, like emergency drills, but he nonetheless insisted that they should be grateful. Eventually, the women were also allowed to air out blankets in a vineyard that the staff maintained. “We would hide grapes inside the bedding,” Sabit recalled. “Then we would bring them back to our cell and secretly eat them.”
When camp officials announced in July that Sabit and the other women were going to be moved to a new facility, the news seemed ominous. Not knowing where they were going, they feared that their situation would get worse. One night, guards roused the women and told them to pack: a bus was waiting to take them away. On the road, a caravan of police cars escorted them, and officers manned intersections. “A lot of people were crying,” Sabit recalled. “I asked the girl next to me, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘I saw a street that I used to walk on, and I started thinking of my previous life.’ ”
spoiler
In the darkness, they approached a massive, isolated complex. One of the buildings was shaped like a gigantic “L,” and surrounded by a wall. As the bus drove alongside one of its wings, the women counted the windows, to estimate how many cells it contained. Sabit was struck by the lifelessness of the structure. Its unlit chambers seemed hollow. Inside, she and the others learned that the building was indeed empty: they were its first occupants. It was summer, but inside the thick concrete walls it felt cold, like a tomb.
In the new building, the detainees were divided by ethnicity. With few exceptions, Uyghurs were subjected to harsher measures; some were sentenced, implying that they would be transferred to prison. In contrast, the women in Sabit’s cohort were gradually released. That September, as they rehearsed to perform for visiting dignitaries, a camp official asked Sabit if she had street clothes. The next day—the day of the performance—one of his colleagues told her, “Tomorrow, you’ll be able to leave.” Later, it occurred to her that, because of her fluency in Mandarin, she had been held longer just to be in the pageant.
The following day, during class, whispers of her impending release spread through the room. Some of the women begged her for her Mandarin notebook. “I was, like, Why?” she recalled. “They were, like, We know you are leaving! And I was, like, It’s not certain!” A guard winked at her and said that soon her name would be called on a loudspeaker, and she would be free. When the speaker blared, Sabit stood and waited for the door to be unlocked, as the other women wished her well. Then she returned to her room for her clothing. “I finally took off the disgusting uniform,” she recalled.
Sabit was brought to the camp’s Party secretary, who was waiting for her in a room with a chair, a small table, and a bed. She sat on the bed, and he lectured her, telling her that she needed to be more patriotic: “Your life style was too individualistic—completely fighting for yourself!” Sabit was silently outraged. With the prospect of release before her, the doubts instilled by the camp’s propaganda dissipated. She thought, Can only dying for China make me good enough for you? But she nodded and said, “Yes, yes. You’re right.”
The secretary told her that a local Party official and his aide were waiting to take her to her uncle’s home. As she walked from the camp toward their car, she thought about something that the other women had told her: “Don’t look back. It’s a bad sign.” She decided to heed their advice. But, glancing to the side, she saw a looming façade across the road: a detention center. Breaking into a run, she raced to the waiting car.
spoiler
Vi. ERASURE In the year that Sabit had been confined, Chen Quanguo was transforming Xinjiang. Cherished symbols of Muslim heritage—shrines, mosques, cemeteries—were systematically targeted for destruction. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged, with minarets pulled down and decorative features scrubbed away or painted over. An official in Kashgar told Radio Free Asia, “We demolished nearly seventy per cent of the mosques in the city, because there were more than enough.” In some cases, officials pursued an odd tactic: miniaturization. In 2018, the grand gatehouse of a mosque in the town of Kargilik was covered with a banner proclaiming, “Love the Party, love the country.” Then the structure was dismantled and rebuilt as an ersatz version of itself, at a quarter the size.The Uyghur and Kazakh languages were increasingly scarce in public, and so were their speakers. Within the first two years of Chen’s crackdown, nearly four hundred thousand children were transferred into state-run boarding schools, designed to block the “thinking and ideas” that they might encounter at home. New infrastructure had to be quickly built to house the children, many of whom had “double-detained” parents. One orphanage worker told Radio Free Asia, “Because there are so many children, they are locked up like farm animals.” Sabit recalled that mothers held in her facility were very pliant: “In order to see their children, they were willing to do everything.”
These children may mark a demographic milestone. Even as regulations on family planning had been eased across China, they were enforced ferociously in Xinjiang, with violations often punished by detention. Adrian Zenz, the academic, uncovered government records from 2018 which indicate that eighty per cent of China’s increase in IUD use occurred in Xinjiang. Amid the myriad stresses imposed by the crackdown, the region’s birth rate fell by a third that year. In areas where Uyghurs represent a larger share of the population, the declines were even sharper. “You see this incredible crash,” Rian Thum, a historian at the University of Manchester who has studied the issue, said. The government doesn’t dispute these figures, but it argues that they are a consequence of gender emancipation. This January, the Chinese Embassy in Washington went on Twitter to celebrate that Uyghur women were “no longer baby-making machines.”
Kuytun, like all Chinese cities, is divided into neighborhood units, each overseen by a Party organization called a residential committee. Although Sabit had not lived there in more than a decade, she was still registered with the committee that oversaw her old home. The Party official who had come to the camp to pick her up was the committee’s secretary, Zhang Hongchao. He was middle-aged but boyish, with the affect of an ambitious petty bureaucrat, skilled in pleasing people above him and bullying people below. He often wore Army-issue camouflage, and he kept the neighborhood under close watch.
To assure Zhang that she had been reëducated, Sabit spoke of her gratitude to the Party—words that poured out automatically, after countless repetitions. He seemed pleased. “We see you don’t have so many problems,” he said. “You’ve been abroad, that’s your problem.” Then he advised her, “Just stay and do something for your country. Don’t think of going abroad for the next ten years.”
Sabit understood that this was not a suggestion. With little more than a nod, Zhang could return her to the camp. She reassessed her future. O.K., she thought, I won’t die if I can never leave. “Can I go to Shanghai?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “After a time.”
At her uncle’s home, Zhang and his aide stayed for tea, along with “relatives”—members of a cadre. Sabit’s uncle later told her that, during her internment, he and his family had been designated “focus personnel.” Every week, they had to attend reëducation classes and a flag-raising ceremony at their residential-committee center. Cadre members also visited, staying for meals and urging the family to serve drinks—an indication that they did not obey Muslim strictures on alcohol. Initially, they spent the night, until they realized that they could photograph themselves in different clothes and fake an overnight stay.
As the officials sat on floor cushions and sipped tea, Zhang and the head of the cadre explained that Sabit was confined to Kuytun. “We’ll monitor you for some time to see how you’ve transformed,” one of the officials said. Sabit asked if she could shop or see friends, and was told, “You need to be cautious about whom you contact, but you’re allowed to have friends.”
The sun set, and the officials stayed for dinner. After they left, Sabit’s aunt recorded a voice message for Sabit’s mother and texted it to her in Kazakhstan; a direct call seemed too risky. Then Sabit settled into a guest room decorated in a traditional Central Asian way, with a carpet on the wall and flat cushions for sitting or sleeping. Turning out the lights, she felt the warmth of family, the security of reclaimed comforts. For more than a year, she had never been alone, never slept with the lights off. The darkness and solitude felt both welcoming and strange. She wanted to rush to her sleeping relatives to explain, but decided that she was getting carried away. To calm herself, she used a trick that she had developed in the camp. She imagined herself listening compassionately to her inner monologue, as a parent would listen to a child. Soon, she was fast asleep.
Kuytun had become an open-air prison. The city was ringed with checkpoints, where Uyghurs and Kazakhs were forced through scanners, even as Han residents passed freely. “We will implement comprehensive, round-the-clock, three-dimensional prevention and control,” Chen Quanguo had proclaimed while Sabit was in captivity. “We will resolutely achieve no blind spots, no gaps, no blank spots.” The technology was deployed to create a digital-age apartheid.
In Xinjiang, the Sharp Eyes surveillance program had been wired into a large computing center, but sifting through the vast amount of image data had been time-consuming and, according to state media, “required a lot of manual work.” As capabilities increased, so did the need for processing: at first, the surveillance systems could track only the movement of crowds, according to a former Chinese official; later, the technology could assess a person’s gait, even her facial expressions. In the summer of 2017, the authorities unveiled the Ürümqi Cloud Computing Center, a supercomputer that ranked among the fastest in the world. With the new machine, they announced, image data that once took a month to process could be evaluated in less than a second. Its thousands of servers would integrate many forms of personal data. State media called the new machine “the most powerful brain.”
Lower-level Party officials struggled to keep up with the technological advances. Sabit asked Zhang Hongchao if she could walk around unimpeded. Unsure, he suggested that she and a Party official test her I.D. at a hospital. The next morning, when they swiped her card, it triggered an ear-piercing alarm. Police swarmed Sabit within minutes.
After the experiment, she went to a mall to buy clothes. Almost immediately, police surrounded her again. An officer explained that facial-recognition software had identified her as a “focus person.” Learning that she had already been reëducated, the officers let her go. But it soon became clear that there was nowhere Sabit could walk without being detained. Eventually, police began to recognize her, and, annoyed by the repeated encounters, urged her to stop going out at all. Instead, Sabit laboriously identified convenience stations that she might pass and gave the police notice, so that they could ignore the IJOP alerts.
A few times a week, Sabit had to report to the residential-committee center, for a flag-raising ceremony and additional reëducation classes. She hated these visits, but they were her only escape from solitude. Except for her uncle’s family, just about everyone she knew—neighbors, friends, relatives—stayed away from her, fearing that any association would land them in the camps, too.
The only people she could safely mix with were other former detainees, who were similarly isolated. The Party propagandist in Sabit’s cell had been fired from her job. The woman who had run a grocery store could no longer operate her business, so she turned to menial labor; she also discovered that the man she wanted to marry had found another woman. Shunned and vulnerable, they found safety in one another.
Two weeks after Sabit’s release, several officers from her internment camp turned up on her uncle’s doorstep and explained that they had used her file to find her. It was not an official visit. They emphasized that they, in their own way, were also prisoners: resigning from the camp was impossible. Two of the officers were Kazakh, and they said that they lived in fear that any misstep would send them to the camps as detainees. One of them confessed that he had been drinking to ease his guilt and his nightmares.
Because the men had been kind, Sabit and the other women decided to take them out to dinner, as thanks. The group started meeting regularly, and the officers soon began insisting that the women join them for drinks and give them loans. Sabit usually handed over the money, not expecting it back. But the officers became more demanding. One asked her to buy him a car, and, when she gently declined, his kindness gave way to threats. He called Sabit and, using the IJOP data, itemized where she had been the previous day. She decided that isolation was better than such company.
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Members of Sabit’s residential committee constantly interfered with her life—trying to mold her into the state’s idea of a good citizen. They urged her to take a Han husband. There was money in it for her, they said; in an attempt to alter the ethnic balance of Xinjiang, the state had launched an aggressive campaign to encourage indigenous women to marry Han men. (Darren Byler, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University who studies repression in Xinjiang, recently uncovered evidence that some Han “relatives” in Uyghur homes had coerced women into such marriages.) When Sabit demurred, the officials told her that Muslim men were chauvinists—adding, with a laugh, “Han husbands dote on their wives!”
The residential committee urged her to work, and then made it impossible. Sabit found a job teaching English, but on her first day the committee called her in for an unscheduled meeting with officials from her camp. She could not tell the school why she had to leave, fearing that she would be fired if her employer knew that she was a “focus person.” At the meeting, she asked if she could speak first, so that she could return to her job. One of the officials responded with a threat: “I can send you back to the camp with one phrase. Stay!” She lost the job, and decided that it wasn’t worth looking for a new one.
By January, 2019, Sabit understood that this kind of attention was causing her uncle’s community anxiety. Fearing that she was endangering her relatives, she moved into a hotel. One night, she returned to her family’s home for a meal, and posed with them for a photo. She shared it on social media. Immediately, Zhang texted her about an embroidered portrait that was on the wall. “Who’s in the picture?” he wrote.
The portrait showed a bearded man in traditional dress: the Kazakh poet Abai Qunanbaiuly. “I was afraid that this would bring me and my uncle’s family doom,” Sabit recalled. She deleted the photo and sent Zhang a Chinese encyclopedia entry on Qunanbaiuly.
“You were quick to delete,” he wrote.
“You scared me,” she said.
“Just asking,” he said. “Don’t be nervous.”
She told him that she was no longer living in her uncle’s home, and planned to move again. She had found an inexpensive rental apartment, owned by an elderly Kazakh woman, in an adjoining community.
The Spring Festival was again approaching, and Sabit and the other former detainees were compelled to rehearse for a performance at the residential-committee center. As the festival neared, Zhang told Sabit and the other women to hang chunlian—holiday greetings on red paper—outside their homes, a Han tradition that Sabit had never practiced before. Returning to her apartment, she hung the scrolls beside her front door. Fearful of being disobedient, she photographed them and texted Zhang the evidence. “I have put up the chunlian,” she wrote. “I wish you good luck and happiness.”
“Same to you,” he wrote.
That night, two men pounded on her door—a police officer and the secretary of the local residential committee. “When did you move?” one asked. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Stunned, Sabit told them that she had informed Zhang. But the men said that this didn’t matter, that she had to leave their community—“tonight.”
The men ushered her to a nearby police station, for further questioning. There, Sabit ran into her Kazakh landlady and her husband. As officers escorted them into an armored vehicle, the landlady glared at her with terror and contempt, and screamed, “Just look! Because of you, we’re going to school!”
Racked with guilt, Sabit asked an officer if they were really being sent to a camp. He told her that they were only being taken to another police station for questioning. Still, Sabit was aghast that she could provoke such fear, just by existing. “I cried a lot that day,” she recalled. “I was like a virus.”
Not knowing where to go, she called Zhang, who told her that his residential-committee center had a dormitory. She moved into it that night with a few of her possessions, and texted him, “Lucky to have you today.”
“You can live here,” he told her.
She shared a room with two other Kazakh women. Later, one of them told Sabit that Zhang had instructed them to monitor her: he wanted to know what she did, what she said, whom she met—“basically all the details.”
VIi. ESCAPE At the time that Sabit was released from the camp, leaving China seemed unthinkable. Then she learned of a Kazakh detainee who had contracted TB, and in the hospital had bemoaned his inability to see his family in Kazakhstan. Eventually, he was permitted to go. Stories like this gave her the idea that leaving might be possible.
A month after her release, Sabit returned to the police station to obtain her passport, and was told that there was a new procedure: she had to be interviewed, and then a transcript would be sent for approval to a legal commission in Kuytun.
Cartoon by Liana Finck Copy link to cartoon Link copied
Shop Sabit sat for the interview, but months went by with no news. She was still anxiously waiting when she moved into Zhang’s dormitory. One day, a senior Party official who had stopped by the center told her that he had heard she was approved to travel. When Sabit ran into Zhang, he said, “I heard you can go. If you get your passport, when do you plan to leave?”
“Right now!” Sabit said, excitedly.
He frowned. “It looks like your education was incomplete,” he said. “Do you want to be sent to study again?” Alarmed, she told him, “No!”
Not long afterward, a member of the legal commission called Sabit to say that he had seen her file and thought that she could help a local import-export company. The firm, he said, had business with Uzbekistan, and needed someone with language skills. “Can you work there?” he asked.
Sabit struggled to make sense of the call. Did it mean that she wasn’t cleared to leave? And, if the whole reason she had to go to the camps was that work had taken her to countries like Uzbekistan, then why was the state introducing her to this job? She suspected that she couldn’t turn it down. Later, she reached out to the Public Security Bureau, and was told, “Go do it.”
Sabit took the job. Every time she had to call an overseas client, or write an e-mail to one, she contacted the bureau. “Can I?” she asked. Each time, the question had to go to superiors. The officials told her to stop calling.
After a few weeks, Sabit learned that her passport was ready. She rushed to the police station, where she signed a pile of papers, including an agreement that she would never publicly discuss her time in the camp, and then she retrieved her passport. Fearful of the airport, Sabit bought a ticket for an overnight train to the Kazakhstan frontier. She said goodbye to her uncle and left.
Just past daybreak, she arrived at a town in the far west, where she had to catch a shuttle bus to cross the border. Entering the bus station, she swiped her I.D., and silently urged the scanner, “Don’t go off. Please.”
No alarms sounded, and she went in. The bus ride to the border took ten minutes. As Sabit gazed out the window, her phone rang. It was Wang Ting, the Public Security Bureau official. “If you see anyone with religious or separatist ideas, you need to report it,” he said. She had no interest in spying, but, knowing that he could block her departure, she murmured, “O.K.”
At the border, Sabit could see the Kazakh steppe: wind-strewn grass among patches of snow. Behind it was a mountain range, wild and pristine. Everyone disembarked into a Chinese border station, where each passenger was called for an interview, until Sabit was waiting alone. Finally, in a windowless chamber, three officials, one with a camera mounted on his shoulder, interrogated her for forty minutes. Then they told her that she, too, could go. Crossing into Kazakh territory, she felt a wave of relief. She thought of the border guards as family. People were speaking Kazakh freely. With barely any possessions, she sailed through customs. A cousin was there to pick her up and return her to her mother. A strong wind blew as she walked to his car, and she took in the crisp air. After a year and eight months as a captive, she was free.
This year marks an important anniversary in the history of human-rights law. A hundred years ago, a Polish attorney named Raphael Lemkin began following the trial of a man who had gunned down the Ottoman Empire’s former Interior Minister—an official who had overseen the near-complete eradication of the Empire’s Armenian population. The assassin, an Armenian whose mother had died in the massacres, stopped the former minister outside his home in Berlin and shot him dead. During the trial, he proclaimed his conscience clear, saying, “I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer.”
As Lemkin read about the case, he was struck by a conundrum: the gunman was on trial, but his victim, who had orchestrated the slaughter of more than a million people, had faced no legal reckoning. How could that be? “I felt that a law against this type of murder must be accepted by the world,” he later wrote. In 1944, as Lemkin, a Jew, witnessed the horrors of Nazism, it occurred to him that the vocabulary of modern law was missing a word, so he coined one: “genocide.”
Over the years, the term has taken on a specific legal definition, but Lemkin had a broad understanding of it. “Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings,” he noted. “It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” Such a plan is unfolding now in Xinjiang. As in the cases that inspired Lemkin, it is happening under a shield of state sovereignty.
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In December, the International Criminal Court declined to rule on the People’s War in Xinjiang, because the actions taken there appear to have been committed “solely by nationals of China within the territory of China,” and China is not a party to the court. For years, most of the world’s nations officially ignored what was happening. Only recently did the United States declare that China is committing genocide. Last year, Washington imposed sanctions on Chen Quanguo, Zhu Hailun, and the bingtuan, and barred imports of cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang. The European Union, the U.K., and Canada took similar measures a few weeks ago.Given the scope of China’s global power, it seems likely that only a severe and coördinated international response would have significant impact. Swiftness also matters. The longer a genocidal policy is in place, the more it provides its own rationale; as the Ottoman minister explained to an American diplomat who implored him to stop, “We have got to finish them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.” It is easy to imagine that China, after years of systematically punishing Xinjiang’s Turkic minorities, will adopt a similar attitude. Changes on the ground, including newly built infrastructure, suggest a commitment to a long-term process.
In December, 2019, the chairman of Xinjiang’s regional government announced, “The education trainees have all graduated.” Even as he said it, estimates of the number of detainees were at their peak. Although some people were indeed released, many others have remained incommunicado. Evidence suggests that a large fraction of the people in the camps have been formally imprisoned, or pressed into labor. Last year, an Uyghur woman in Europe told me about her brother, who was released from a camp and then vanished—she suspected into forced labor. Some of his last posts on TikTok showed photos of him moving piles of boxes. “To be honest,” she told me, “I am scared for my family.”
Fear permeates the émigré community. As a recent Freedom House report notes, “China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Its tactics have ranged from digital intimidation and threats of lawsuits to unlawful deportation. Recently, Xi Jinping’s government took an unprecedented step: sanctioning Western academics whose work on Xinjiang it found objectionable. “They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance,” the Foreign Ministry declared. A number of émigrés who have spoken out about the crackdown describe relatives in Xinjiang who have been targeted for retribution and forced to denounce them.
Ilshat Kokbore, an Uyghur activist who immigrated to America in 2006, told me that some men recently drove up to his home, in suburban Virginia, and overtly began to photograph it; they tried to go through his mail, until they noticed a neighbor watching them. On another occasion, he was attending a protest at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, when a woman he did not know approached him and began speaking in Mandarin. “She said, ‘If you get poisoned, do you know how to treat yourself?’ ” he told me. “I said, ‘Why should I know that?’ And she said, ‘You know, the Chinese government is very powerful. You could die in a car accident, or get poisoned.’ ”
For years, Kokbore has been separated from his family: two sisters, a brother-in-law, and a niece are in the camps, and the rest are incommunicado. The last family member he was able to contact was his mother, in 2016. “Don’t call again,” she told him. “And may God bless you.” Her fate remains unknown.
Sabit, as it happens, was confined with Kokbore’s sisters. She thought that the women seemed thoroughly broken. One day, the deputy director of the camp turned to them in her presence and said, “Your problem is your older brother. Unless your older brother dies, your problem cannot be resolved.”
Sabit told me that, for many months, she feared coming forward, but that Chinese propaganda about the camps had caused her to set aside her fear. “I was thinking, You have done this. I should talk about what happened to me.”
In October, 2019, half a year after gaining her freedom, she began putting her recollections into writing. She found that it helped her overcome her trauma. Seeing a therapist helped, too. But she still feels severed from the confident and purposeful woman she once was. Nightmares trouble her sleep. “I have one where I’m in the camp, in different forms,” she told me. Sometimes she is in a cell. Once, she was confined in a chicken coop. Another time, she was in a massage parlor, getting a massage; she looked over and saw people imprisoned, then was with them. “For almost a year, I had this dream every night,” she told me. “Many times, I would wake up crying, feeling very scared. That was torture, I would say, because even if you are in a safe place you are reliving the experience.”
With therapy, the nightmares subsided for a time, but recently they returned, in a different form. Sabit now dreams that she is in Xinjiang. “When I try to leave, the police tell me I can’t,” she told me. “I’m at the border, I’m at the airport, they stop me, and I start asking myself, ‘Why did I come? How am I in China?’ ”