A trail of online evidence establishes how President Xi Jinping and other senior officials adopted a tough new policy to assimilate ethnic minorities.
BEIJING — Rukiya Maimaiti, a local propaganda official in China’s far west, warned her colleagues to steel themselves for a wrenching task: detaining large numbers of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
The Chinese government wanted to purge the Xinjiang region of “extremist” ideas, she told her co-workers, and secular Uighurs like themselves had to support the campaign for the good of their people.
“Fully understand that this task is in order to save your relatives and your families,” wrote Ms. Maimaiti, a Communist Party functionary who works on the western edge of Xinjiang, in a message that was preserved online. “This is a special kind of education for a special time.”
Her warning is one piece of a trail of evidence, often found on obscure government websites, that unmasks the origin of China’s most sweeping internment drive since the Mao era — and establishes how President Xi Jinping and other senior leaders played a decisive role in its rapid expansion.
In a campaign that has drawn condemnation around the world, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been held in “transformation” camps across Xinjiang for weeks or months at a time, according to former inmates and their relatives.
Beijing says the facilities provide job training and legal education for Uighurs and has denied carrying out mass detentions.
But speeches, reports and other documents online offer a clearer account than previously reported of how China’s top leaders set in motion and escalated the indoctrination campaign, which aims to eradicate all but the mildest expressions of Islamic faith and any yearning for an independent Uighur homeland.
Mr. Xi has not publicly endorsed or commented on the camps, but he ordered a major shift in policy soon after visiting Xinjiang in 2014 to weaken Uighurs’ separate identity and assimilate them into a society dominated by the Han majority, according to the documents.
Later, amid official reports warning the results were insufficient, Mr. Xi reassigned Chen Quanguo, 62, the hard-line party chief in neighboring Tibet, to act as the chief enforcer of the crackdown in Xinjiang. Mr. Chen was also promoted to the 25-member Politburo, the party leadership council that governs China.
“What is happening in Xinjiang is the leading edge of a new, more coercive ethnic policy under Xi Jinping’s ‘new era’ of Chinese power,” said James Leibold, an expert on Xinjiang at La Trobe University in Australia who has monitored the campaign.
The Trump administration is weighing sanctions against Chinese officials and companies involved in the indoctrination camps, a move that would extend the friction between Washington and Beijing over trade and military disputes to human rights. A bipartisan commission has singled out Mr. Chen and six other officials as potential targets.
Last week, apparently stung by the international criticism, the Xinjiang government issued revised rules on “deradicalization” that for the first time clearly authorized the indoctrination camps.
Worried about Muslim extremism and ethnic nationalism, Beijing has long maintained tight control of Xinjiang, where nearly half the population of 24 million are Uighurs. In the decade up to 2014, the security forces struggled with a series of violent antigovernment attacks for which they blamed Uighur separatists.
Mr.
