Associated Press, Ng Han Guan

China’s Uyghur Crackdown

Goes Global
The Chinese government is stepping up the pressure
on the Uyghur diaspora, even as it cracks down on
their relatives in Xinjiang.
By Jojje Olsson

Life didn’t turn out as Wumaerjiang Jiamali had expected. He got

the opportunity to leave western China in 2014 to attend university
studies in Istanbul. Four years later he is a refugee in northern
Sweden. His son is locked up in their home province of Xinjiang,
and Wumaerjiang no longer has any contact with the rest of his
family.
With tired but sharp eyes, Wumaerjiang explained how everything
suddenly turned into a nightmare when he allowed his then 16-
year-old son, who had moved with him to Istanbul, to board a
flight back to China in December 2015 to visit his mother. “My son
disappeared as soon as he landed in China,” Wumaerjiang said.
“When the family came to meet him at the airport, he just didn’t
show up, and the family got no information on his whereabouts.”
It soon turned out that the police had taken Wumaerjiang’s son
directly at the airport, and put him on another flight to his
hometown, Yili, in northwestern Xinjiang. He was then held in a
pretrial detention center for two months, and released as a totally
different boy. His personality went from happy and cheerful, to
introverted and huffy. Wumaerjiang observed from Turkey how
his son’s updates on WeChat – China’s most popular messenger
service – now consisted mostly of dark, depressing drawings and
different types of ghosts.

Wumaerjiang’s ex-wife and the rest of his family in Xinjiang

advised him not to contact his son, who couldn’t return to Turkey
in any case since the police had seized his passport.
Simultaneously, the situation for exiled Uyghurs in Turkey
worsened as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan focused on
strengthening ties with Beijing. Wumaerjiang feared for his
personal safety, and decided to flee to Sweden. Since October 2017,
he has been waiting in the town of Kiruna, some 200 kilometers
north of the polar circle, as his request for asylum is being
processed.

Then in March this year, Wumaerjiang was suddenly contacted by

Chinese state security on WeChat. In the chat, a security agent told
Wumaerjiang his son had been taken away a second time, and that
Wumaerjiang needed to cooperate for the sake of his son’s well-
being. “The agent wanted information about Uyghurs living in
Turkey. Names, contact information and to know the organizers
behind protests and rallies,” Wumaerjiang said. “They also wanted
information about the Uyghur community in Sweden.”

When Wumaerjiang asked about his son, the agent replied that all
children who had spent time abroad must undergo “patriotic
 education.” Wumaerjiang reported the
case to the police in Kiruna, who
interrogated him for three days but
never contacted him again. He also
contacted the Swedish Security Service
by post and e-mail, but never heard back
from them either.

Out of pure desperation, Wumaerjiang

sent to the agent the names of two
Uyghurs he made friends with in
Istanbul. The two were not politically
active, and held a relatively positive
view of the Chinese Communist Party.
Nevertheless, Wumaerjiang felt ruined
afterwards. “What had become of me,
spying for the Chinese regime? I really,
really don’t want to be their spy,” he
burst out as we meet in Stockholm this
summer.
Camps for a Million Muslims

Perhaps due to Wumaerjiang’s

cooperation, his son was released from
his second spell in detention in mid-May.
Wumaerjiang reads in
front of a flag This time, he had been locked up in one
representing “East of the many camps for political re-
Turkestan,” many
Uyghurs’ preferred name education that have sprung up like
for Xinjiang. mushrooms throughout Xinjiang,
Jojje Olsson beginning in early 2017.
The first reports about the facilities
appeared that same spring. It started
with people from Muslim ethnic minorities, like the Uyghurs,
suddenly disappearing – often late in the night or early in the
morning – with no documentation or information left for their
relatives regarding the fate of the vanished. A judicial process
wasn’t needed, the authorities would later say, because the
disappeared were not going to prison but receiving “education.”
It took some time before the nature and the extent of the camps
became clear. In May this year, Adrian Zenz, a researcher with the
German European School of Culture and Theology, published a
groundbreaking report based on information from procurement
contracts on the construction of the camps. By studying 73 such
contracts, Zenz estimated the number of internees in re-education
facilities to be “between hundreds of thousands and one million.”
Other organizations have put the figure over 1 million. An exact
number was, however, not needed for the U.S. Congressional
Executive Commission on China, led by Florida Senator Marco
Rubio, to later that same month brand the situation in Xinjiang as
“the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the
world today.”

Internees can be held for months or years, depending on their

perceived attitude and other factors. With the release of internees,
first-hand accounts of the dire camp conditions have started to
seep out. Nowhere are they better summarized than in the 117-
page report “‘Eradicating Ideological Viruses’: China’s Campaign of
Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims,” released on September 9
by Human Rights Watch.
The report includes interviews with 58 former residents of
Xinjiang, of which five have been camp internees. To end up in a
camp, it is enough for a person to have any link to one of 26
“sensitive” mostly Muslim countries, like having relatives or
communicating with friends there. Merely using foreign apps like
WhatsApp, or peaceful religious expressions such as reading a
prayer, have also landed people in the camps.
Inside, internees have to learn songs in Chinese extolling the
Communist Party, and condemn their faith in self-criticism
sessions. Before meals, they have to thank the Party and the
motherland, and wish President Xi Jinping good health. Failure to
do so results in punishments like stress positions, severe beatings,
or long stints in small isolation cells without food, water, or the
possibility of sleep. No wonder then that Radio Free Asia has
documented four deaths in the camps during 2018.
“The Chinese government is committing human rights abuses in
Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades,” Sophie
Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said when
the report was launched.

Refugee Espionage
The lengths to which China is prepared to go to prevent
information from leaving Xinjiang became obvious when I visited
Stockholm earlier this summer to interview five Uyghurs currently
residing in Sweden. Their stories are backed up by e-mails, chat
logs and voice recordings from WeChat, the Chinese security
service’s software of choice.
Chinese refugee espionage on foreign soil is not new. In 2010, a
Uyghur man was sentenced to 16 months in prison for having
spied on his own diaspora in Sweden on the behalf of the Chinese
embassy. The Swedish Security Service also collected evidence
against one diplomat at the embassy, and one intelligence officer
working undercover as a correspondent for the party newspaper
People’s Daily. Both were expelled.
In 2010, Adam Galif arrived in Sweden to study. It only took a week
before the Chinese security service visited his remaining family
back in Xinjiang. “My dad told me I needed to contact a ‘friend’
who had just visited him. The person sent me an e-mail a couple of
days later, saying that since I am a Chinese citizen, I have to inform
on other Uyghurs living in Sweden,” Galif recalled.

Galif instead turned to the Swedish Security Service, and applied

for asylum, which he was granted in the summer of 2011. The
pressure against his family continued nonetheless: the Chinese
agent “called me a traitor and said it’s against Chinese law to seek
asylum abroad. If I did not work as an informant, my dad would be
sent to prison,” Galif said.
The “friend” – an agent that Galif never met before – also had
information on his residential address in Sweden, and his extra job
delivering newspapers. During 2016, the same year Galif became a
Swedish citizen, contacting his family in Xinjiang gradually became
more difficult. “We only talked to each other maybe once every two
months. And they constantly said things like ‘don’t call us,’ ‘we are
 perfectly fine,’ or ‘live your own life in
happiness.’”
Over the next year and a half, the
“friend” adopted a tougher tone. He
demanded that Galif return to China. If
not, “anything” could happen to his
family. Galif also learned that several
relatives were frequently being
interrogated by the security service, and
always asked for information regarding
himself.

Over the past year, Galif has completely

lost contact with his immediate family. A
more distant relative told him that about
20 people from their family had been
either detained or taken to camps for
political re-education. “I ache to contact
them, just to know if they are still alive,”
Galif said hopelessly.
Since the scandal of 2010, Chinese
refugee espionage in Sweden has
continued undiminished. And it’s not
only Uyghurs that are targeted. As late as
Adam Galif stands behind
the blue-and-white flag. June this year, a man was sentenced to
22 months in prison for spying on
Jojje Olsson
Tibetans living in Sweden.

A Province of Unrest
The Uyghurs, with linguistic and cultural roots in the larger Turkic
world, have inhabited the Xinjiang region for some 2,000 years.
When the region became a part of the People’s Republic of China in
1949, Han Chinese made up less than 10 percent of the population,
compared to almost 80 percent Uyghurs. A campaign to “Sinicize”
the resource-rich and strategically important region soon began:
Between 1957 and 1967, 2 million Han settlers poured into
Xinjiang. Even more followed after China’s economic reforms
started in the late 1970s, as state-owned enterprises intensified
their hunt for oil and minerals.

Today, Uyghurs make up less than half of Xinjiang’s 23.5 million

population. While the local economy has been growing, there is
little doubt that ethnic Han Chinese are the largest beneficiaries.
Holders of top positions in local government and state companies
alike are almost exclusively Han. The population of the provincial
capital, Urumqi, which accounts for a quarter of Xinjiang’s GDP, is
roughly 75 percent Han Chinese.
Segregation and mutual distrust culminated with ethnic riots in the
summer of 2009, which began in Urumqi before spreading to other
parts of Xinjiang. At least 198 people were killed during the riots.
The unrest was blamed on “foreign forces” and followed by
military shows of force and countless arrests. The first executions
took place only four months later; the internet was almost
completely shut down in all of Xinjiang for 10 months.

Since Xi Jinping assumed China’s presidency in 2013, the gloves

have been taken off completely. That same summer kicked off with
a major police operation in the restive city of Kashgar, where at
least 21 people were shot dead on the spot, suspected of various
acts of terrorism. In the following months several similar
operations took place, as well as attacks on police stations and in
public spaces by militant Uyghurs. The dead were counted in the
hundreds after incidents in cities such as Turpan, Aksu, Hotan, and
Hanerik.

The Uyghurs – by tradition relatively moderate in their religious

practices – seemed to be increasingly radicalized due to the vicious
spiral of violence. In late 2013, Uyghurs crashed a car in
Tiananmen Square, in the very heart of Beijing, resulting in five
deaths. In March 2014, Uyghurs armed with knives and homemade
explosives attacked a train station in Kunming, leaving 29 people
dead.

The Chinese response: more repression. In April that same year, Xi

visited Xinjiang, and soon the “Strike Hard Campaign Against
Violent Terrorism” was launched, starting with a public trial in a
sports stadium in front of 7,000 spectators. At the public trial, 55
people were sentenced for crimes related to the terrorism, of
which three were handed a death sentence.
During the first year of the Strike Hard Campaign, the number of
arrests in Xinjiang increased by 95 percent, according to official
statistics. The campaign quickly took the shape of collective
punishment toward the region’s Muslims and their religious
practices. Fasting during Ramadan was banned. Growing an
“abnormal” beard, wearing a veil, or refusing to watch state TV
were deemed as acts of extremism. In some areas, children given
“Muslim names” could not get an ID card, and hence were shut out
from school and healthcare systems. Intrusive home visits to
Uyghurs developed into a “home stay” program, where cadres live
with families several days a month, confiscating Islamic
possessions and teaching “Xi Jinping Thought.”

The system of re-education camps was established under Chen

Quanguo, party boss of Xinjiang since August 2016. Chen
previously held the same post in Tibet, where he ruthlessly
suppressed the area’s Buddhists. His well-tested methods were
swiftly implemented in Xinjiang. Neighbors were forced to spy on
each other, and Uyghurs ordered to hand in their passports to the
police. For most Uyghurs to leave China, a special permit is now
required, together with contact information for all relatives in
China.
A grid of small police stations that can easily be turned into
checkpoints has been constructed, in some areas only 500 meters
apart. According to Zenz, some 90,000 police officers have been
hired in Xinjiang in the last two years alone, which is twice as
many as the previous seven years combined. Zenz also estimates
the number of police per capita in Xinjiang to be 40 times higher
that in Guangdong province, and that the density now surpasses
that of East Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Official
statistics show that every fifth arrest in China takes place in
Xinjiang, home to only 1.5 percent of the country’s population.

The central government shows unfaltering support for Chen’s

hardline policies. At the annual National People’s Congress in 2017,
Xi urged the construction of “a Great Wall of steel” around
Xinjiang. At the CCP’s National Congress in October the same year,
Chen was awarded a seat on the Politburo, becoming one of the
country’s 25 highest ranked politicians.

High-Tech and Biometric Surveillance

The escalating situation is also obvious when interviewing the
Swedish Uyghurs. One, who wishes to remain anonymous, has
lived in Sweden for nine years and been a Swedish citizen for four.
He claimed he had never engaged in any political activities, and
never had any serious problems with the Chinese authorities in the
past.
But his mother called him this February after having been
contacted by the Chinese security service. They required the man
to send copies of his passport and other documents to his mother,
including information on his residential address, education, and
employment. The security services were right by her side during
the call, warning that failure to obey would result in the mother
being detained.
The man sent a copy of his passport only, and then stopped
contacting his family. He constantly thinks about their situation, he
said, and how he should act. Anxiety and many sleepless nights
forced him to take leave from work.
Haimiti Tuogeluke.

Jojje Olsson

Haimiti Tuogeluke was born in 1987, but like most other

interviewees he looks considerably older. He has lived in Sweden
for nine years and holds a permanent residence permit. The last
time he saw his parents was in Turkey in 2014. In January this
year, they both disappeared. “My sister told me they were detained
because of me requesting asylum and engaging in political
activities in Sweden,” he said.

Tuogeluke admits he has participated in political activities a few

times, but says he has never been involved in organizing.
Nevertheless, he is said to be a threat to China’s security. In April,
his sister was sent to one of the re-education facilities. Tuogeluke
stopped contacting his relatives in Xinjiang, and tries not to be
completely consumed by the situation that has already “destroyed”
his psyche and private life.
The repression is made possible by a surveillance state second to
none in sophistication or resources. Cellphones are searched for
keywords and material deemed religious not only at checkpoints,
but also by compulsory software and wireless scanning
technologies. Last December, Human Rights Watch warned that
Xinjiang authorities are collecting DNA, fingerprints, blood
samples, and eye scans of all Uyghurs between 12 and 65 years old.

Since 2016, biometrics are stored together with personal

information and other data on a huge integrated platform. That
year, local authorities issued “Document No. 44” with directives for
the collection of biometric data from ethnic minorities, including
three-dimensional face scanning. Face scanning is now a regular
feature at hotels, train stations, and airports, where Uyghurs often
have to walk in a specially designated lane.

The authorities have spared no expense in this campaign. Last

year, domestic security spending in the Xinjiang region increased
92 percent, to 57.95 billion Chinese renminbi (roughly $8.5 billion).
In 2007, it was 5.45 billion RMB.

Denials

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has categorically denied

the existence of re-education facilities, and the Ministry of Security
has refused to comment on the matter at all. But when the United
Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
reviewed the situation in mid-August, the Chinese delegation for
the first time acknowledged the camps. Naturally, it disputed the
occurrence of repression, instead calling the camps “vocational
educational and employment training centers.”

The existence of re-education facilities had, however, been

confirmed earlier by local media. They are described as free
facilities for ethnic minorities to improve themselves and discard
“backward” religious habits. In May this year, China's top
prosecutor Zhang Jun called for intensifying “transformation
through education” to erase extremism in the region.
Indeed, many Uyghurs have travelled abroad to join the Islamic
State or other extremist groups. While many experts see the
radicalization of Muslims in Xinjiang as a consequence of the
increasing repression, Chinese authorities blame the violence on
the spread of three “evil forces”: separatism, terrorism, and
extremism.

The camps for political re-education are meant to “rehabilitate”

minorities who have been affected by those forces. In Xi’s own
words it is vital to strengthen the Uyghurs’ sense of identity with
the motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Chinese
Communist Party, and socialism with Chinese characteristics.

As the repression increases, politicians and religious leaders

around the world have been worryingly silent. The sheer size and
weight of China's economy has translated into political clout, not
least in many Muslim countries along the Belt and Road Initiative’s
path.
In this undated photo, Wumaerjiang poses with his son.

Courtesy of Wumaerjiang Jiamali

Meanwhile, the suffering among divided families is enormous.

After I parted with Wumaerjiang Jiamali this summer, he soon
contacted me again. At the end of July, his son disappeared for a
third time; Wumaerjiang’s ex-wife said he was taken away without
explanation.

“When I asked for more details, she didn’t even reply to me.
Probably she is afraid as well,” said Wumaerjiang.
He hasn’t heard his son’s voice since waving goodbye to him at the
Istanbul airport almost three years ago.

The Author
Jojje Olsson is a journalist and author living in Asia since 2007. He is currently based in
Taipei.