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发帖数: 897 | 1 KORLA, China — Nobody knows what happened to the Uighur student after he
returned to China from Egypt and was taken away by police.
Not his village neighbors in China’s far west, who haven’t seen him in
months. Not his former classmates, who fear Chinese authorities beat him to
death.
Not his mother, who lives in a two-story house at the far end of a country
road, alone behind walls bleached by the desert sun. She opened the door one
afternoon for an unexpected visit by Associated Press reporters, who showed
her a picture of a handsome young man posing in a park, one arm in the wind.
“Yes, that’s him,” she said as tears began streaming down her face. “
This is the first time I’ve heard anything of him in seven months. What
happened?”
“Is he dead or alive?”
The student’s friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of
thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been
spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political
crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely traveling or
studying abroad. The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part
of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-
driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of
Xinjiang and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim
minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.
“There are tens of thousands of cameras here.”
A police officer in the Xinjiang region
Along with the detention camps, unprecedented levels of police blanket
Xinjiang’s streets. Cutting-edge digital surveillance systems track where
Uighurs go, what they read, who they talk to and what they say. And under an
opaque system that treats practically all Uighurs as potential terror
suspects, Uighurs who contact family abroad risk questioning or detention.
The campaign has been led by Chen Quanguo, a Chinese Communist Party
official, who was promoted in 2016 to head Xinjiang after subduing another
restive region — Tibet. Chen vowed to hunt down Uighur separatists blamed
for attacks that have left hundreds dead, saying authorities would “bury
terrorists in the ocean of the people’s war and make them tremble.”
Through rare interviews with Uighurs who recently left China, a review of
government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip
through southern Xinjiang, the AP pieced together a picture of Chen’s war
that’s ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead instilling fear.
Most of the more than a dozen Uighurs interviewed for this story spoke on
condition of anonymity for fear that Chinese authorities would punish them
or their family members. The AP is withholding the student’s name and other
personal information to protect people who fear government retribution.
Chen and the Xinjiang regional government did not respond to repeated
requests for comment. But China’s government describes its Xinjiang
security policy as a “strike hard” campaign that’s necessary following a
series of attacks in 2013 and 2014, including a mass knifing in a train
station that killed 33. A Hotan city propaganda official, Bao Changhui, told
the AP: “If we don’t do this, it will be like several years ago —
hundreds will die.”
China also says the crackdown is only half the picture. It points to decades
of heavy economic investment and cultural assimilation programs and
measures like preferential college admissions for Uighurs.
Officials say the security is needed now more than ever because Uighur
militants have been fighting alongside Islamic extremists in Syria. But
Uighur activists and international human rights groups argue that repressive
measures are playing into the hands of the likes of al-Qaida, which has put
out Uighur-language recruiting videos condemning Chinese oppression.
“So much hate and desire for revenge are building up,” said Rukiye Turdush
, a Uighur activist in Canada. “How does terrorism spread? When people have
nowhere to run.”
Thought police
The government has referred to its detention program as “vocational
training,” but its main purpose appears to be indoctrination. A memo
published online by the Xinjiang human resources office described cities,
including Korla, beginning “free, completely closed-off, militarized”
training sessions in March that last anywhere from 3 months to 2 years.
Uighurs study “Mandarin, law, ethnic unity, de-radicalization, patriotism”
and abide by the “five togethers” — live, do drills, study, eat and
sleep together.
In a rare state media report about the centers, a provincial newspaper
quoted a farmer who said after weeks of studying inside he could spot the
telltale signs of religious extremism by how a person dressed or behaved and
also profess the Communist Party’s good deeds. An instructor touted their
“gentle, attentive” teaching methods and likened the centers to a boarding
school dorm.
But in Korla, the institutions appeared more daunting, at least from the
outside. The city had three or four well-known centers with several thousand
students combined, said a 48-year-old local resident from the Han ethnic
majority. One center the AP visited was, in fact, labeled a jail. Another
was downtown on a street sealed off by rifle-toting police. A third center,
the local Han resident said, was situated on a nearby military base.
While forced indoctrination has been reported throughout Xinjiang, its reach
has been felt far beyond China’s borders.
In April, calls began trickling into a Uighur teacher’s academy in Egypt,
vague but insistent. Uighur parents from a few towns were pleading with
their sons and daughters to return to China, but they wouldn’t say why.
“The parents kept calling, crying on the phone,” the teacher said.
Chinese authorities had extended the scope of the program to Uighur students
abroad. And Egypt, once a sanctuary for Uighurs to study Islam, began
deporting scores of Uighurs to China.
Sitting in a restaurant outside Istanbul where many students had fled, four
recounted days of panic as they hid from Egyptian and Chinese authorities.
One jumped out a window running from police. Another slept in a car for a
week. Many hid with Egyptian friends.
“We were mice, and the police were cats,” said a student from Urumqi,
Xinjiang’s regional capital.
All who returned were intensely grilled about what they did in Egypt and
viewed as potential terror suspects, the students said. Many were believed
held in the new indoctrination camps, while some were sentenced to longer
prison sentences.
The young man from Korla rarely went out in the two years he spent studying
Islam in Egypt. He played some soccer — a beloved sport among Uighurs —
but wasn’t particularly athletic or popular.
Instead, he kept to himself in an apartment that he kept fastidiously clean,
steeped in his studies at the revered Al Azhar University, the 1,000-year-
old seat of learning in Sunni Islam. He freely discussed Quranic verses with
his Uighur friends but mostly avoided politics, one friend said. He spoke
of one day pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative religion.
“He had big dreams,” said the friend who is now hiding in Turkey to avoid
being sent to China. “He wanted to be a religious scholar, which he knew
was impossible in China, but he also wanted to stay close to his mother in
Korla.”
He was fluent in Arabic and but also in Chinese. When they huddled around a
smartphone to watch a Taiwanese tear-jerker about a boy separated from his
mother, he would be the one weeping first.
When homesickness got to him, he would tell his friends about how his mother
doted on him, and about Korla and the big house he grew up in. And when he
gets married, God willing, he would say, he’d start a family in that house,
too.
“If my wife doesn’t agree, then we don’t marry,” he declared.
He returned to China when he was called back in 2016 and taken away in
February, according to three students and a teacher from Cairo. They say
they heard from reliable sources in China — but cannot prove — that he
died in detention.
Show of force
Southern Xinjiang, the vast desert basin from where many of the students
came, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.
Deep in the desert’s southern rim, the oasis town of Hotan is a microcosm
of how Chen, the Xinjiang party boss, has combined fearsome optics with
invisible policing.
He has ordered police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols be built
every 500 meters (yards)— a total of 1,130, according to the Hotan
government. The AP saw cavalcades of more than 40 armored vehicles including
full personnel carriers rumble down city boulevards. Police checkpoints on
every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for
religious content.
Shopkeepers in the thronging bazaar don mandatory armored vests and helmets
to sell hand-pulled noodles, tailored suits and baby clothes.
Xinjiang’s published budget data from January to August shows public
security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to
roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 percent a year ago.
It’s quadrupled since 2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out
in Xinjiang, leaving nearly 200 members of China’s Han ethnic majority dead
, and security began to ratchet up.
Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology who
tracks Chinese public security staffing levels based on its recruiting ads,
says Xinjiang is now hiring 40 times more police per capita than populous
Guangdong Province.
“Xinjiang has very likely exceeded the level of police density seen in East
Germany just before its collapse,” Zenz said. “What we’ve seen in the
last 12 to 14 months is unprecedented.”
But much of the policing goes unseen.
To enter the Hotan bazaar, shoppers first pass through metal detectors and
then place their national identification cards on a reader while having
their face scanned.
The facial scanner is made by China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a
state-owned defense contractor that has spearheaded China’s fast-growing
field of predictive policing with Xinjiang as its test bed. The AP found 27
CETC bids for Xinjiang government contracts, including one soliciting a
facial recognition system for facilities and centers in Hotan Prefecture.
Hours after visiting the Hotan bazaar, AP reporters were stopped outside a
hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been
remotely tracking the reporters’ movements.
“There are tens of thousands of cameras here,” said the officer, who gave
his name as Tushan. “The moment you took your first step in this city, we
knew.”
The government’s tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes, and
even voices. In February, authorities in Xinjiang’s Bayingol prefecture,
which includes Korla, required every car to install GPS trackers for real-
time monitoring. And since late last year, Xinjiang authorities have
required health checks to collect the population’s DNA samples. In May, a
regional police official told the AP that Xinjiang had purchased $8.7
million in DNA scanners — enough to analyze several million samples a year.
In one year, Kashgar Prefecture, which has a population of 4 million, has
carried out mandatory checks for practically its entire population, said
Yang Yanfeng, deputy director of Kashgar’s propaganda department. She
characterized the checkups as a public health success story, not a security
measure.
“We take comprehensive blood tests for the good of the people, not just
record somebody’s height and weight,” Yang said. “We find out health
issues in citizens even they didn’t know about.”
A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last
year under “Document No. 44,” a regional public security directive to “
comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and
fingerprints.” The document’s full text remains secret, but the AP found
at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase
orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.
Meiya Pico, a security and surveillance company, has won 11 bids in the last
six months alone from local Xinjiang jurisdictions. It won a joint bid with
a DNA analysis company for 4 million yuan ($600,000) in Kargilik and has
sold software that automatically scans smartphones for “terror-related
pictures and videos” to Yarkent.
Meiya and CETC declined comment.
Prying eyes
To monitor Xinjiang’s population, China has also turned to a familiar low-
tech tactic: recruiting the masses.
When a Uighur businessman from Kashgar completed a six-month journey to flee
China and landed in the United States with his family in January, he was
initially ecstatic. He tried calling home, something he hadn’t done in
months to spare his family unwanted police questioning.
His mother told him his four brothers and his father were in prison because
he fled China. She was spared only because she was frail.
Since 2016, local authorities had assigned ten families including theirs to
spy on one another in a new system of collective monitoring, and those
families had also been punished because he escaped. Members from each were
sent to re-education centers for three months, he told the AP.
“It’s worse than prison,” he said. “At least in prison you know what’s
happening to you. But there you never know when you get accused. It could be
anytime.”
A document obtained by U.S.-based activists and reviewed by the AP show
Uighur residents in the Hebei Road West neighborhood in Urumqi, the regional
capital, being graded on a 100-point scale. Those of Uighur ethnicity are
automatically docked 10 points. Being aged between 15 and 55, praying daily,
or having a religious education, all result in 10 point deductions.
In the final columns, each Uighur resident’s score is tabulated and checked
“trusted,” “ordinary,” or “not trusted.” Activists say they
anecdotally hear about Uighurs with low scores being sent to indoctrination.
At the neighborhood police office, a woman who gave her surname as Tao
confirmed that every community committee in Urumqi, not just Hebei Road West
, needed to conduct similar assessments. She said there were no statistics
on how many residents had been deemed “not trusted,” nor were there
official procedures to deal with them.
“What is happening is every single Uighur is being considered a suspect of
not just terrorism but also political disloyalty,” said Maya Wang, a
researcher at Human Rights Watch who is studying how Chinese police are
using technology to track political dissidents as well as Uighurs.
This month, Xinjiang announced it would require every government employee in
the region to move into a Uighur home for a week to teach families about
ideology and avoiding extremism.
What pains most, Uighurs abroad say, is the self-imposed barrier of silence
that separates them from loved ones, making efforts to say happy birthday or
find out whether a relative is detained risky.
When Salih Hudayar, an American Uighur graduate student, last called his 70-
something grandfather this summer, he spoke in cryptic but reassuring tones.
“Our phones will not work anymore,” his grandfather said. “So, don’t try
calling and don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine as long as you’re all
fine.”
He later heard from a cousin in Kyrgyzstan that his grandfather had been
sent to re-education.
A Uighur student who moved to Washington following the crackdown this summer
said that after his move, his wife, a government worker still in Urumqi,
messaged to say the police would show up at her home in 20 minutes. She had
to say goodbye: after that she would delete him permanently from her
contacts list.
A month later he received calls on WhatsApp from a man who introduced
himself as Ekber, a Uighur official from the international cooperation
office of the Xinjiang regional public security bureau, who wanted him to
work for them in the U.S. — and warned him against saying no.
“If you’re not working for us then you’re working for someone else. That
’s not a road you want to take,” he snapped.
A week after that, he couldn’t help himself placing one last call home. His
daughter picked up.
“Mom is sick but she doesn’t want me to speak to you. Goodbye,” she said.
Unanswered questions
For the past year, Chen’s war has meant mass detentions, splintered
families, lives consumed by uncertainty. It has meant that a mother
sometimes can’t get an answer a simple question about her son: is he dead
or alive?
A short drive from Korla, beyond peach plantations that stretch for miles,
the al-Azhar student’s mother still lives in the big house that he loved.
When the AP arrived unannounced, she said she had not received any court
notices or reasons about why her son and his father were suddenly taken
months earlier. She declined an interview.
“I want to talk, I want to know,” she said through a translator. “But I’
m too afraid.”
AP reporters were later detained by police, interrogated for 11 hours, and
accused of “illegal reporting” in the area without seeking prior
permission from the Korla government.
“The subjects you’re writing about do not promote positive energy,” a
local propaganda official explained.
Five villagers said they knew authorities had taken away the young student;
one said he was definitely alive, the others weren’t sure.
When asked, local police denied he existed at all. |
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