The Repression of the Muslim Minority in China’s Xinjiang Region
TW: Mentions of Sexual Abuse
One week ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) voted to abandon research by its own commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, which detailed evidence that found Beijing liable of grave human rights abuses of Uyghur and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang province of China. Being only the second occurrence in history that such a motion has been dismissed, questions around the reputability of the UNHRC have been raised: Amnesty International’s Anges Callamard accuses the UN of “fail[ing] the test to uphold its core mission, which is to protect the victims of human rights violations everywhere, including in such places as Xinjiang.”
Following this discussion, it is imperative to re-open conversations around the stories of China’s Uyghur community that have been tragically abandoned as a result of the UN and the West’s silence on this moral issue.
The North-Western region of Xinjiang is home to around eleven million Uyghurs–a predominately Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group. For many years, Chinese officials have grown to become anxious of Uyghurs and their indicted extremist ideals, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believing that Uyghurs may attempt to use religion to challenge Chinese territorial integrity which could ultimately incentivise separatism within the country. More than one million Uyghurs have been arbitrarily mass detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps in China’s ‘dystopian hellscape’ since 2017, with Chinese officials frequently citing being a practicing Muslim as the reason for their criminalisations. Under President Xi Jinping, the ‘re-education’ process in Xinjiang’s detention centres includes the indoctrination of Uyghurs on Sinicise religion via the acceptance into the faith, practice, and rituals of Chinese culture. Not only is President Jinping's ‘Sinicisation’ religious, it is also overtly political: President Jinping demands Uyghurs to become fully immersion in state socialism, speak Mandarin, and pledged alliance to the CCP. A document from the Kunes County justice system 2017 – 2018 declared this process as a system of “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness and eliminating evil,” although, ironically, it has never outrightly been described as anything malicious by Chinese Officials.
Transcending outside Xinjiang detention camps, China has attempted to erase Muslim culture in Xinjiang through anti-extremism laws, such as the prohibition of wearing Uyghur veils in public and the growing facial hair since 2017. Moreover, thousands of Mosques in the province have since been decimated, conveniently explained by the Chinese Government as describing their infrastructure as “shoddily constructed” and “unsafe for worshippers.” By analysing Chinese behaviours from within Xinjiang’s camps, it is absurd to consider this deception in any way convincing.
Far from ‘re-education’—which President Jinping claimed as their primary purpose of the detention centres in their introduction—, Xinjiang’s detention centres employ the use of grotesque torture methods such as solitary confinement, sexual abuse, and sleep deprivation. Uyghur Tursunay Ziawudun spent nine months inside, where she endured numerous counts of sexual violence, including the repeated, forcible insertion of an electric stick vaginally, which would punish her with countless shocks internally. Various minority women also experienced compulsory sterilisations and imposed insertions of intrauterine devices to protect against pregnancy, with Chinese officials exercising threats of detainment for those who fail to comply with Chinese governmental standards. As a result, between 2015 and 2018, the natural population growth in two prefectures with the greatest number of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang fell by 84%, and further declined the following year. What is clear from this unprecedented figure is China’s radical attempts to subjugate the Uyghur race in China, particularly within the Xinjiang province.
Today, the reality of the UN’s dismissal of such indisputable evidence of China’s wage against the Uyghur community is incredibly difficult to comprehend. Evidently, it has been shamefully insinuated that while many Chinese officials have been prosecuted, some officials are still excused from scrutiny, and seemingly permitted to conduct human rights violations with zero consequences in return. In this instance, it is the Chinese Officials who walk free and the Uyghurs who suffer—once again.
Image courtesy of Tea Rose via Wikimedia, ©2008, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
