Europe seeks a ‘golden era’ of trade and investment with a country that is holding a million people in ‘re-education’ camps
China is facing mounting international criticism over its systematic repression of Muslim Uighurs in western Xinjiang province, where an estimated 1 million people have been detained in “re-education” camps and subjected to prolonged physical and psychological abuse.
But Chinese leaders remain defiant, telling the UN and human rights activists last week, in effect, to mind their own business. The stand-off highlights one of the most challenging 21st century dilemmas for western democracies: how to sustain the pretence that an increasingly totalitarian China is a “normal” country with which they can do business.
The crackdown on the Uighurs, who make up about 11 million of Xinjiang’s 24 million inhabitants, has intensified since Xi Jinping became Communist party leader in 2012 and president in 2013. Xi claims the campaign is necessary to defeat Islamist terrorism and the “ideological virus” of separatism, despite anecdotal evidence that it is having the opposite effect.
Uighurs say the harsh measures, effectively criminalising an entire ethnic group, are intended to erase their identity, religion, culture and language while assuring the party’s ascendancy. Hundreds of thousands – exact figures are unobtainable – have been sent to the camps, where they are indoctrinated in party dogma, forced to learn Mandarin, and ordered to correct their thinking through self-criticism.
Uncounted thousands more are held in prison, while the remainder of the population is subject to an Orwellian surveillance system comprising cameras placed in Uighur homes and neighbourhoods, networks of local snoopers, biometric data collection, and voice and face recognition technologies. As in Stalin’s Russia, children are encouraged to inform on their parents. Winston Smith of George Orwell’s 1984 would have recognised Xi’s Xinjiang.
A UN human rights panel challenged China last month over “credible reports” that up to 3 million ethnic Uighurs had been subjected to detention or forced re-education. Xinjiang, it was claimed, had become “a massive internment camp”.
Chinese officials responded with a variation on Vladimir Putin’s “Skripal defence”, in which truth is fungible, or fluid.
