Michelle Bachelet (left) attends a virtual meeting with China's President Xi Jinping in Guangzhou on May 25, 2022. Photo: Handout / OHCHR / AFP
Follow Rachel Cheung on Twitter and Instagram.In the spring of 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous peoples began quietly disappearing into prisons and internment camps in China’s “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” By the end of that year, this secretive internment program had become obvious to the small community of international scholars who specialize in the study of the region, and in 2018 we wrote to United Nations officials urging an investigation.
Four years on, we are still awaiting a report from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on this issue. In the intervening years, we have conducted rigorous studies of China’s policies in Xinjiang (or Eastern Turkistan, as it is known to much of its indigenous population) and found that China is committing crimes against humanity at a scale that extends far beyond the mass internment program.
We are grateful that the OHCHR, under the direction of Michelle Bachelet, consulted with some members of our community of academic experts on the region before her visit to China and Xinjiang last month. However, we were deeply disturbed by her official statement of May 28, which ignored and even contradicted the academic findings that our colleagues, including two signatories to this letter, provided.
It is rare that an academic field arrives at the level of consensus that specialists in the study of Xinjiang have reached. While we disagree on some questions of why Beijing is enacting its atrocities in Xinjiang, we are unanimous in our understanding of what it is that the Chinese state is doing on the ground.
This extraordinary consensus is a result of the unprecedented quantity of evidence that the Chinese state has provided in its own documents, some of them leaked but most of them publicly released on the Chinese internet. This evidence, complemented by survivor testimonies and satellite imagery, offers a detailed picture of what can be credibly called a genocidal program.
The evidence clearly shows that Beijing has indiscriminately placed an estimated one million or more indigenous inhabitants of Xinjiang into various forms of extra-legal confinement, not just in the internment camps, but also in pre-trial detention centers and formal prisons. Many of the internment and indoctrination camps have recently been closed, though there is no evidence that the system has been shut down entirely. More importantly, a substantial portion of internees from now-closed camps have been transferred to formal prisons after sham trials, while others have been placed in forced labor programs. Torture, rape, and other mistreatment are rife within the prisons, detention centers, and camps.
At the same time, Uyghur children have been separated from their parents in increasing numbers, moved to boarding schools where they are raised to speak and act as Han Chinese. By 2018, the Chinese government reported that they had achieved a boarding rate of roughly 50% in Xinjiang’s middle-school population. Uyghur women have been subjected to systematic forced sterilization, birth control, and abortion to achieve what Beijing calls “population optimization,” while Han Chinese citizens have been encouraged to have more children.
Han Chinese settlers have been moved into the region by the thousands, while the state has expropriated Uyghur land and destroyed Uyghur towns, often moving inhabitants to non-voluntary labor in factories outside of Uyghur-majority areas. Religious practices as simple as owning the Qur’an or avoiding pork and alcohol have been criminalized. Authorities have bulldozed key historical monuments, pilgrimage sites, mosques, and Uyghur graveyards.
In her statement, High Commissioner Bachelet not only failed to condemn these policies, but she declined to mention any of them beyond the mass internment program, which she referred to using Beijing’s latest euphemism, “vocational training education centers.” Instead, Bachelet asked Beijing to “undertake a review of all counter terrorism and deradicalization policies to ensure they fully comply with international human rights standards.”
High Commissioner Bachelet’s words echo the Chinese state’s claim that their atrocities in Xinjiang are all are part of a “counter-terrorism” effort, a claim that our research and the Chinese state’s own documents show to be false. Beijing’s state media has, predictably, presented her comments as vindication.
The information that our profession has provided to the OHCHR is not the result of just one or two researchers’ work. It is the unanimous consensus of the entire community of scholars who are independent of the Chinese state and have devoted their lives to the study of the region. We urge the OHCHR to fully incorporate this knowledge into its long-delayed report on China’s actions in Xinjiang, and we urge the OHCHR to release the report without political interference or further delay.
Björn Alpermann, Professor, University of Würzburg
Ildiko Beller-Hann, Associate Professor Emerita, University of Copenhagen
Gardner Bovingdon, Associate Professor, Indiana University
Darren Byler, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University
Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer, Monash University
Sandrine Catris, Assistant Professor, Augusta University
William Clark, Adjunct Professor, Northwest University
Michael Clarke, Senior Fellow, Australian Defence College, and Adjunct Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney
Tom Cliff, Senior Lecturer, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University
Michael Dillon, Professor of History, Affiliate, Lau China Institute, King’s College, London
June Teufel Dreyer, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, Florida
Arienne Dwyer, Professor, University of Kansas/University of Washington
Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor, Cornell University
Vanessa Frangville, Senior Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles
Timothy Grose, Associate Professor of China Studies, Rose Hulman Institute of Technology
Chris Hann, Professor Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle, Germany, and Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK
Rachel A. Harris, Professor of Ethnomusicology, SOAS University of London
Aziz Isa Elkun, Researcher, SOAS University of London
Justin Jacobs, Professor, American University
Thierry Kellner, Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles
Ondrej Klimes, Research Fellow, Czech Academy of Sciences
James Leibold, Professor, La Trobe University
Jonathan Lipman, Professor Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College
Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania
James McMurray, Lecturer, University of Sussex
Mukaddas Mijit, Postdoctoral Fellow, Université libre de Bruxelles
James Millward, Professor, Georgetown University
Laura T. Murphy, Professor, Sheffield Hallam University
Alexandre Papas, Chargé de recherche, Centre National de la recherche scientifique, France
Dilnur Reyhan, French National Institute for Oriental Studies/European Uyghur Institute
Sean R. Roberts, Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University
Eric Schluessel, Assistant Professor, The George Washington University
Guldana Salimjan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University
Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester
Sabine Trebinjac, Directrice de recherche, Centre National de la recherche scientifique, France
Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow in China Studies, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation