The Face of Evil
China is a totalitarian, repressive, and evil state.
This may seem like a heavy handed appraisal, and perhaps containing some measure of sensationalized outrage for those unaware of what is taking place or simply inured to the scale of global injustice, but I can assure you it is not. The term “evil” is bandied about often these days, and many policies that result in human suffering (and increasingly, ones that don’t) receive the label. But there can be no denying that what is taking place in China is fundamentally inhumane and very, very evil.
In recent months, the government of China has rounded up scores of Uighur Muslims and placed them in detention. Though the exact number is not known, given the geographic scale, satellite imagery of detention centers, and targeted population loss, it is estimated that at minimum one million Uighurs are housed in detention facilities full time. These are people who are indigenous to the land and have resided in the Xinjiang province for centuries. They have committed no crime. To the government, their crime is one of being culturally different, and the grounds upon which they are apprehended are increasingly arbitrary. The blanket justification for the program is, unsurprisingly, “terrorism,” and government “reeducation” facilities are said to target allegedly toxic beliefs from materializing into acts of violence.
On the “terrorism” justification, US anti-terror czar Nathan Sales has said, “The scope of this campaign is so vast and so untargeted that it simply has nothing [emphasis mine] to do with terrorism. Instead, what’s going on is the Chinese Communist Party is waging war on religion. It is trying to stamp out the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious identities of the people that it’s been targeting.” Mind you, Sales is no liberal, and is certainly not soft on terrorism— in fact, he played a key role in drafting the Patriot Act and is, after all, a Trump nominee.
In a Vice documentary, Uighur Muslims who were detained and later escaped to Turkey spoke about their experiences. One sister mentions being arrested for learning the Quran and Arabic while a brother explains his “crime” being teaching at an Uighur school. They were fed pork and tortured. In a Guardian article, a former detainee named Alim recounts being “deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse,” further stating that he was “so weakened through this process that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically.”
Uighurs are paired with Han Chinese, and roughly 1.2 million Han Chinese have been relocated to Xinjiang to live in Uighur homes. The paired members instruct and teach the Uighurs how to live ‘like everyone else’ — without Islam, without their language, dress, or culture. Periodically, the Han residents report back information gleaned from their co-residence. In describing this state, human rights activist Nury Turkel says that Islam is viewed as a “mental illness” in need of curing.
The Vice documentary is chilling to watch. Across the Xinjiang province, policemen are sprawled throughout the streets patrolling activity. Checkpoints are ubiquitous, and hardly a few blocks can be passed without being stopped. Uighur men are regularly arrested at night and moved to camps, and security drills take place twice a day. The documentary is filmed in Ramadan, and yet Muslims are nowhere to be seen. The mosques still standing are closed, and a fair number of those walking the streets in plainclothes are informants, not residents.
The Chinese government recently provided the BBC access into a “reeducation” facility (accurately labeled “thought transformation camps” by the BBC). Access was mediated through the Chinese government, and satellite imagery indicates that the camps were essentially “show camps” dressed up to portray an easygoing and enjoyable setting for those being held. Weeks before the BBC’s arrival, barbed wire and watchtowers were shown taken down, while sports facilities and recreation fields were put in place in the vacant center yard. The BBC journalist is provided a tour of the facility and shown Uighur’s participating in art, dancing, and professing their love of country. In spite of the government’s best efforts, the charade is thinly concealed, and the extraordinary fear of those living in camps comes through. In one of the bathrooms, the camera crew passes graffiti reading, “O my heart, don’t break.” In the evenings, a small crowd of men are shown awaiting buses to return home — a privilege few receive in exceedingly rare circumstances, and even then for a single night.
Detainees chant Communist songs and repeat jingoistic slogans. One former detainee in the Vice piece mentions the chants as a precondition to receiving food. In a short piece from The Economist, the technology apparatus enabling full-scale surveillance is examined. Given its technological advances, the Chinese government makes full use of biometric tracking, including facial recognition, voice recognition, DNA registration, and more to maintain a complete and comprehensive account of resident movement and speech. Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime, and CloudWalk are but a few of the Chinese tech companies servicing this market, advertising technology anchored in advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence for the purpose of “minority recognition.” Each of those companies is currently valued at over a billion dollars. They are bankrolled by major investors, with a New York Times piece stating,
Fidelity International and Qualcomm Ventures were a part of a consortium that invested $620 million in SenseTime. Sequoia invested in Yitu. Megvii is backed by Sinovation Ventures, the fund of the well-known Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.
A Sinovation spokeswoman said the fund had recently sold a part of its stake in Megvii and relinquished its seat on the board. Fidelity declined to comment. Sequoia and Qualcomm did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
A Buzzfeed investigation into sources of funding for SenseTime and Megvii discovered a number of additional investors, including prominent universities and foundations. Names in the piece include Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Duke University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and CalPERS (the California Public Employees’ Retirement System - “the US’s largest public pension fund with more than $350 billion in assets”). A Princeton spokesperson told Buzzfeed that “as a matter of policy, we do not comment on our investment portfolio,” while the others too declined to comment. But if you think these institutions are unaware of their investments, get this:
A private equity investor in SenseTime who spoke to BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity said that his firm had weighed the human rights issues, but ultimately decided that it was an investment with significant financial upside for his limited partners. He compared his firm’s investment in SenseTime to funds backing US defense companies or firearms manufacturers, stating that in those cases, investors aren’t responsible for how people or governments use those products.
He also noted that SenseTime’s collaboration with the Chinese government was a given from the start: “If you don’t work with them, you’ll no longer have a business. Doing business is expected.”
Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee has elsewhere regarded China’s lack of “moral fuss” a competitive advantage in the race to develop robust artificial intelligence technologies. Technologies are also used to enforce social atomization and isolate those who have successfully managed to leave Xinjiang. A woman named Atawula now residing in Turkey has gone over two and a half years without communication from her family, including some of her children. In describing the feeling of loneliness she lives with she says, “Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life — ever since I was born,” asking later, “Why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
Uighurs not yet in detention are forced to install spyware on their phones, and cameras are perched on every street and alleyway. Some women are forced to take pregnancy tests, and if the result is positive, they are immediately moved for abortion. One former resident explains that many women, unable to cope with the anguish, opt for suicide.
A recent report by an independent tribunal focused on organ harvesting reports strong evidence pointing to government use of detainee organs for transplant. The report states,
It is alleged that in China prisoners of conscience are killed for the purpose of removing one or more of their organs. The recipients of these harvested organs are Chinese citizens or international transplant tourists who travel to China and pay substantial sums to receive trafficked organs.
Within the Chinese transplant system, waiting times are said to be ‘extremely short by international standards and at times, transplants of vital organs (hearts, full livers) can be ‘booked’ in advance. The alleged victims of forced organ harvesting are primarily people who follow the Buddha School meditation practice of Falun Gong, possibly along with Uyghur Muslims (a Turkic ethnic group currently being detained in vast numbers in the Xinjiang region) and some Tibetan Buddhists and House Church Christians…
Those supporting China’s medical practices claim that issues to do with unethical organ procurement have been resolved but have offered no clear evidence to support their claims. At times, Chinese medical professionals have appeared to dismiss questions about forced organ harvesting without addressing the substance of the allegations.
Detention is not exclusively for adults. Children, too, are taken into government custody, living in “kindergartens” where they are indoctrinated with songs of praise for country and president Xi Jinping. In one scene, children at a “kindergarten” are asked “Are you Chinese? Do you love China?” to which they reply in unison, “yes.” Many of these children will never return to their parents, and their fate is not yet known. Perhaps the government will relocate them to new families, or perhaps they will raise them in permanent detention. There can be no inquiry, and parents displaced from their children have no appeal.
The objective here is plain as day. Furnish conformity and eradicate Islam along with the Uighur heritage. It is a program of social engineering, religious extermination, and ethnic cleansing at scale, making use of modern policing and advanced technology, being carried out by a country that the vast majority of the world depends on economically. The US Department of Defense has called the “reeducation” centers “Concentration Camps,” with the Washington Post describing the current situation as perhaps “the most scandalous human rights atrocity of our time.”
Overseeing the Orwellian infrastructure is a man named Chen Quanguo, a Jinping loyalist who previously oversaw a similar regime of indoctrination and social control in Tibet. For president Xi’s part, the eradication of Uighurism is essential to the success of his highly lauded Belt and Road Initiative which seeks to connect China with Africa and Europe, a project described by many as Xi’s signature policy and legacy-defining program. The Xinjiang province sits at the intersection of every major connecting byway for the project, and the economic stakes are high for a country currently boasting the second largest economy in the world and eager to become the first.
The Han Chinese do not evince much sympathy for the Uighurs. In the Vice documentary, the journalist takes a train ride and shares a passenger cabin with an elderly Han Chinese woman who lives on a farm. They strike up a conversation and at some point the journalist slips in questions about the Uighur. The woman responds saying that minorities like the Uighur and the Han need to be the same — they need to dress the same, eat the same food, and live the same lives. When asked why, she responds: “unity.”
Reasons of realpolitik have imperiled the Muslim world from doing so much as raise concerns. Turkish President Recep Erdogan recently said the Uighur were “living happily” in Xinjiang during a state visit, while Egypt has actively deported Uighurs back to China. Pakistan is increasingly a client state of Beijing and far too economically dependent to proffer objection. Just last month, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) “commended” China for its treatment of Muslims, while the UAE Peace Forum has been mum on the issue altogether. The future Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques has come out defending China’s right to “fight terrorism.” In recent days, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have co-signed a letter alongside 29 other nations praising China’s “counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures.”
It is highly unlikely that Western nations will meaningfully intervene. President Trump recently described president Xi as a “terrific president, a great leader of China.” The US has also withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, and with election season coming up, finalizing a trade agreement with China will be crucial for US market stability in the months to come, thus lowering the priority of human rights even further. Oppression of Uighurs does not figure prominently in our political discourse, and the Democratic debates featured nothing on the subject. Two bills have been drafted (one for the House and another for the Senate) — S.178 and H.R. 649 — that call for the preparation of reports on China’s treatment of the Uighur, though no vote has been called yet and it is unclear when either will see the light of day.
A number of European nations co-signed a recent UN Human Rights Council letter condemning China’s treatment of Uighur minorities. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were among the countries who expressed concern “about credible reports of arbitrary detention… as well as widespread surveillance and restrictions, particularly targeting Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.” This is encouraging, though it is unclear what impact, if any, this will have. It goes without saying that such condemnations are regularly ignored by offending actors (see: Israel), and China stands to lose little by doing the same.
What we are left with is a truly beleaguered minority, suffering untold oppression, without any material solution in sight and plenty of countries sharing their faith collaborating with their oppressors. Bills instructing the provision of preliminary reports are themselves still awaiting vote, and there exists little to no political will to move urgently on this issue. The Uighur are, for all intents and purposes, on their own.
But all hope is not lost. In a sound hadith, the Prophet (pbuh) said (paraphrasing) that if humanity conspired together to harm you, and God had not ordained for harm to come to you, then no harm would ever befall you. He, ‘azza wa jal, is our Protector, Sustainer, and in full control of His dominion. It is easy for Him to change the condition of a people. He, subhana wa ta’ala, responds to supplicants who call upon Him in earnest, and it is an obligation for those who care for the ummah of Islam and see in it the shared fraternity of brotherhood and sisterhood to partake in qunut and lengthy prayers for our brothers and sisters in China.
There is of course work to be done on the ground as well. Follow the work of https://www.saveuighur.org/ and sign up for emails, participate in campaigns, and help spread awareness.
We ask Allah to help our brothers and sisters in China in their moment of need, that He bring to them peace, prosperity, and justice swiftly and reckons with those who wish them harm, and that He make all of our last words the kalima in this life and reunite us under the banner of it in the next. Ameen.
Allah Knows Best.
