Front Burner - Secret documents show scope of China’s mass detention of Uighurs

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

The systematic detention of a Muslim minority for surveillance, indoctrination and psychological modification is taking place at re-education camps in China, according to leaked official documents revealed this week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and CBC News . Today on Front Burner, The National’s Adrienne Arsenault delves into China’s crackdown of Uighurs, its aggressive international surveillance of the minority group and how the world is responding to these revelations.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. At first, China said the camps just didn't exist. Then, China said they're simply schools. But thanks to a massive leak of secret Chinese documents, we now have proof of the scale of China's systematic detention and indoctrination

of a Muslim minority. The documents are being called the China Cables, and they offer a blueprint for prison-like re-education camps, cultural suppression, and psychological modification. It's estimated that close to 2 million people of a Muslim minority known as the Uyghurs are or have been in these camps. And as leading researcher Adrian Zenz puts it, It's probably the largest internment of an ethnic or religious minority since the Holocaust. Today, I'm talking to The National's Adrian Arsenault about China's obsessive campaign to control the Uyghurs

and how it's reaching all the way to Canada. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Adrienne. Hey there, Jamie. Thanks for being here today. Not at all. So these camps, I know that China says they're education centers for people who could otherwise be dangerous extremists.

They say they prevent terrorism and provide job training. We've been hearing for a while now, though, that there are actually prisons where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being indoctrinated. These documents the CBC has obtained through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the ICIJ, they offer this incredibly rare window into what the Chinese state is doing with these camps. And what do they tell you about how they're actually being run? Well, the documents are amazing because they're basically manual. So they're instructions for people who are running the camps on what to do. If you go through the priorities on one of them, it talks about preventing escape and looking for perfect peripheral isolation. They go into such depth.

It's like when they talk about the staff, they say that the cars of the staff, the front of the vehicles have to be parked pointing inwards and locked. The dorm doors have to be double locked. Wow. The dorm doors have to be double locked. Preventing escape has to happen during class, during toilet breaks, during mealtime. That secret forces have to be rolled out to make sure people aren't spending too much time talking with each other and maybe colluding. They talk about full video surveillance 24-7. And when they say full, they make it very clear, no blind spots anywhere. Okay, video cameras everywhere.

Just to be super clear here, people can't leave these camps. The official word from China is that people can go home or they can go to medical appointments. But then you read a document like this that talks about, you know, the importance of secrecy and preventing escapes. And then you look at the satellite imagery, which people around the world have been gathering to try to understand what's actually happening on the ground. And you see the prison-like watchtowers, you see the massive cable fencing, you see the total isolation. And you realize, you know, you can call it what you want, but it functions definitely like a prison. And in the documents, it says people must be there for at least a year. And then those who may leave, who are deemed to have passed this de-extremification, de-radicalization, indoctrination, then have to be followed and surveilled for the next 18 months.

So freedom is a squishy concept after these camps, I think. And what kind of things are people subjected to in the camps? Are there like lessons or? Yeah, so it sounds like there's a big push on Mandarin, right? So a lot of the ethnic Uyghurs, it's not their first language, but it becomes their first language. So everything has to be conducted in Mandarin. The push is definitely on learning a Mandarin way, a Han Chinese way, and learning traits. I know you spoke with somebody who has been in these camps. He was initially skeptical. He thought maybe the Chinese weren't mistreating Uyghurs or other Muslim minorities, but he's changed his mind.

Totally. This is a really interesting guy. So his name is Olsi Yazeshi. He's an Albanian-Canadian historian, of all things. And so Olsi was hearing the rumors a few years ago that these camps were happening. And he confesses that his initial instinct was, oh boy, there's the West, right? Overplaying this. And so he got in contact with the Chinese government and said, look, I don't really believe what I'm hearing. I would like to see for myself.

I'm a historian. And China said, OK. They invited him for what was clearly a propaganda tour. He wasn't alone. There were a number of other people from other countries who were invited as well. And he got there and he started recording on his phone almost immediately. And so he's got all these videos. And so you take the walk through the camps with him. Very clearly, he's seeing a show. There are people dancing to sort of some choreographed moves.

There's lots of chaos, people in class. Looking at the classes is interesting, by the way, because we now know from the documents that people are ordered to be in a fixed classroom spot, a fixed queue line, a fixed dormitory bed. And if you veer from that, the punishment for veering from that behavior is supposed to get more severe. So you see people in class. And so initially, he says his thought was, oh, you know, this sort of does kind of fit the government narrative. And then he started asking questions. Beneath the surface.

You know, he would say, well, why is, what's her mistake? Why is she here? And there'd be sort of an exchange with the interpreter. And then he'd realize, well, this, she was praying. And he would say, well, what's the big deal about that? And so he said, ah, we were told by the Chinese government that they had extremists in here. We were expecting, he literally says we were expecting, he's like suicide bombers and killers. And what we found are...

These people, they were not criminals. They were normal people who believed in their God and believed in their identity as being Uyghurs and not Han Chinese. So the more Olsi asked questions, it was interesting because you started to see the interpreters crack a little bit. And they would say things to him like, you really insist on this question? This was a question he had asked about a woman who had been separated from her four-year-old. And he was asking, is this really the right thing to do? And then at one point, he notices a wound on a woman's arm, and he's sort of looking

at her arm, and the interpreter has had enough of him. And he sort of turns and looks to him and says, You can give me another $20, or $2 million to rescue her. This is my idea to you. Really. Because you are so nice. Oh is my idea to you. Really. Because you are so nice. Oh, I checked her hand. Okay.

It's good. He started to realize, you know what? These people are locked in here. They cannot leave. They look terrified. The man who was a skeptic has become a man who's trying to wake the world up, he says, to what's really going on.

They wanted us to sell a fake story to the outside world, to tell to the world that in China there are no concentration camps, that people are not being persecuted because of their belief in Islam or their ethnic identity. Islam or their ethnic identity. I want to understand why it came to be that the Chinese have created these camps. In the first place, you know, I understand the majority of people in these camps are Uyghurs, but there are other Muslim minorities as well. So can you tell me a little bit about who the Uyghurs are? We're talking about northwestern province of Xinjiang,

right? It's a very big part of China, right? Huge. It's beautiful, you know, mountains, desert. This is a place that the Uyghurs will say that they have lived for maybe a thousand years, but the demographics have been altering. Certainly over the last 50 years, the Chinese Communist Party has enacted some policies, sort of moved into the area. You know, maybe 25 million people in total in Xinjiang. The ethnic Turkic community used to be the vast majority. But now, again, there's been a big swell of Han Chinese. Okay. So it's changing the demographics.

Completely. Restrictions on the birth rate, you know, all sorts of restrictions. So the population is changing. There have been some tensions. Between the Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities and the Han Chinese. Correct. Okay. But there's also been some violence.

And this is what Beijing hangs on to. And this is where it tells the rest of the world, mind your. Correct. Okay. But there's also been some violence, and this is what Beijing hangs on to, and this is where it tells the rest of the world, mind your own business, because we're minding ours. China will say, look, the violence started popping up about a decade ago. There were riots in 2009. China's state news agency says 140 people have been killed in riots in the western region of Xinjiang.

The government has blamed separatist Uyghurs based abroad for attacks on the majority ethnic Han Chinese, but the Uyghur exiles say police had fired indiscriminately on a peaceful protest. There have been increasingly violent attacks over the last decade or so, either done by Uyghurs or by people who claim to be acting in the name of Islam. And the Chinese have said, no, this is not going to happen anymore. So they've used these attacks as a justification to tighten control. And this is their war on terror. But China says, hey, you know what, everybody, mind your own business.

We have managed to control to a degree sort of the terrorism here. Okay. And this is how. You know, as you just mentioned, this isn't just the camps. And so can you paint me a picture of what's happening outside in Xinjiang? So it's really interesting that part of the documents is something called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform Bulletin. Okay. That sounds like something out of Orwell.

Basically what it does, it's like the brain. It's like the surveillance brain of the region and of the Chinese Communist Party in the sense that it will help to identify the people who then need to be put into the camps from the perspective of this entity. So the way they do it is with an incredible web of surveillance. So this is everything from Wi-Fi sniffers. So people in Shenzhen could walk through something like a data door without even realizing they've done it. That scans all the apps you have on your phone. You have cameras watching changes in movement and behavior. You have QR codes at one point. We're put on the doors of the Uyghurs.

of the Uyghurs. So police could walk by and scan the QR codes and get a sense of who's in this, who's supposed to live here, how old are they, what do they do for a living, what apps are they on, you name it. There's, of course, facial recognition being used to track the movements of people cameras on mosques, for example. But really interesting thing is Human Rights Watch Wow. and become family program. And so, you know, China says, this is this, hey, we're integrating, we're becoming, this is helping us to become a family. But the actual effect of that, whether that's the intention or not, that woman in that home, good luck to her if she wants to have a private conversation with someone,

if she wants to pray, if she wants to talk about her religion, if maybe she wants to reach her extended family and be upset about what's happened to her husband, and where is my husband? And then maybe she'll end up in one of these camps. That's right. Regardless of the intention, the effect is a desperately chilling one. And it's interesting in Xinjiang. There are pictures of homes where Uyghurs have been detained, and the homes have locks on them. And on the doors,

where the locks are, are also signs that basically say, don't worry, the missing people are being looked after. When we're thinking about the scope of this, I know you've mentioned that there's evidence that this has grown exponentially in the last several years. But what kind of numbers are we looking at? How many people are in these camps? So firstly, it's really hard to quantify that. And there are a bunch of ways you can try to do that. One of these documents talks about a seven-day period in which 15,683 people in June of 2017, in just seven days, are swept off the streets and sent to these education centers, vocational centers, detention facilities,

whatever you want to call them. This is one bulletin talking about one week period, 15,000 people. So imagine, imagine the scale. Is it fair for me to say, you know, you mentioned that the Chinese government says this is about integrating, right? This is about creating a family. But what it sounds like is an attempt by the Chinese state to wipe out an entire culture. That is absolutely what Uyghurs would say. What the families of people who've gone to the camps would say, people who've managed to get out, young Uyghurs who are studying here in Canada, they all say, and Human Rights Watch in particular, a number of other organizations trying to keep an eye on this, say that this is erasing a culture.

Let's talk about the Uyghurs that you've spoken to living in Canada that you mentioned. It seems like they don't feel free from China's crackdown either. You know, I know one person even took you out into the middle of the woods, which actually makes a bit more sense to me now after hearing about all the ways that the Chinese government has been surveilling people in Xinjiang. You know, how are they feeling this pressure even on the other side of the world, even here? So we don't know how many Uyghurs for sure there are in Canada, in part because some people don't want to stick up their hand and say, this is my identity.

Some activists will put it at around 2,000. And so a lot of what happens, and some of the young people in particular we've spoken with, say they're here, they're free, they're studying, but then they'll get a coded message on WeChat saying, son, we need you to send us a picture of your driver's license, your school ID, a picture of your school, and maybe your blood type and DNA. We really, really, really, really need you to do this. And in the case of this one young man who wants to be called Abraham, he said he knew his parents actually didn't want him to do that,

but clearly they were being pressured. I don't know what they want to do, get this all information, but I think they just want to get all information from Uyghurs living in Canada. It's more easy to them to track them. This is a story you hear again and again, that the parents are pressured to provide all of the location information for their children to give to the police, the implied threat being you do this or you're going to the camps. So that leverage is really important.

So you have a young person here who's studying, cut off from their family. The last thing they want is for their family to go into the camp. So some of them have actually been lured back to China because of that threat and have just disappeared. Really? How do we know that they've disappeared? We know this because we spoke with another Uyghur activist named Rukia Tordosh, who has been here long enough that she says she's no longer afraid for herself, but people do reach out to her. So she says the people who've reached out to her can itemize for her at least six or seven people from the Ontario region who have just gone back.

She believes there are more, but people are just simply too afraid. They're so scared. They don't want to tell anything, right? They don't want to talk to anybody. And they don't come to the place where we were gathered. They just become so alone. And because they're scared... You know, there are families who have said to their kids, I need you to sign, get a power of attorney and say you're no longer my child. And have your life. Enjoy your life. Forget us.

But please don't ever contact us again. Not because they don't love them. It's because they love them so much they want to save their lives. I know we've been hearing sort of anecdotally stories about these camps for a while now, but it certainly feels like this massive document through the ICIJ. These are official Chinese government documents. They paint a very detailed picture of hundreds of thousands of people being, you know, for lack of a better word, incarcerated and indoctrinated. And so how has the international community responded since these documents have been published this week? First, I think the first question everybody asks is, are the documents real? And it certainly seems that they are.

And it's important to know that this isn't a hack. This is a leak. It came from inside the Chinese government, which that seems incredibly rare, very risky for whomever. Absolutely. I mean, it raises the possibility that someone is having a crisis of conscience. I don't know that to be the case, but it certainly raises that possibility. They have also been verified and authenticated through the ICIJ by people who are experts in Chinese internal documentation. So that's the first thing to react to is like, okay, this is serious. This is legitimate proof. Then there's the matter of what do you do about it? Other than saying saying this is terrible, what's the next line?

Right. I mean, Canada says they're deeply concerned. Here's the quote from Global Affairs. We continue to call on the Chinese government to ensure the human rights of its people, including freedom of religion, are fully respected. So that's what the Canadian government has said. Right. And so what are you going to do about it is the question lots of people are asking. We know that the UK Foreign Office has said that it wants China to open the doors to UN monitors to actually have a look at these camps. to be hosting the Olympics in 2022? Should Canada continue to sell things to China that may be used in the act of incarcerating or indoctrinating or hurting these people? No Canadian equipment is sent to China that could be used for crowd control or used to limit freedom of speech.

There's going to be that question, right? Is there going to be pressure put on China? And how do you pressure an economic superpower like China? It's not going swimmingly well for Canada. Right. I mean, we have two Canadians currently in detention in China. There are many, many people who believe that this was retribution for Canada arresting Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, at the behest of the United States? Certainly they have been held now for a year, basically, and they haven't even seen their lawyers. So Canada has not made a lot of headway. And, you know, the trade dispute is very difficult

as well. So that's going to be a big question is how is Canada, how countries like Canada going to do something about this. But there's another reaction that's possible, and that is frightening for a lot of people. What about the autocratic regimes that may see documents like this and say, well, that's interesting. Could we get a copy of that? Maybe that's a good manual for dealing with troublesome populations. Don't think there aren't human rights groups right now

who are terribly afraid that what China is doing is a way of whether you call it counterterrorism as China does or erasure of a culture as others do, that whatever China is doing is a method to be exported. This makes the blood run cold of human rights groups. How is China responding to all of this? It's been really interesting. Initially, there were dismissals. The document, so-called document you're talking about is a pure fabrications. Don't listen to fake news. Don't listen to fabrications. We have in the last 24 hours, though, had something of an official reply from Beijing, a more fulsome reply. It says, I'm just sort of paraphrasing mostly,

these are local government efforts at counterterrorism and de-radicalization. It says the region is stable, people are happy. And there's a big push on blaming the media for this, saying Western media is hyping despicable lies. And this is interesting, that the UNHCR has been invited to Xinjiang and other places. So we'll see. We'll see if that's true. We'll see if that happens. We'll see if the world responds or if it gets distracted by something else and moves on. Okay, Adrienne Arsenault, thank you so much for bringing this really incredibly important story to us. Thank you.

Not at all. Today's episode is part of a larger series of the CBC examining Beijing's expanding circles of influence, both around the world and here in Canada. It's called China's Power. And you can find those stories online on the National's website. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and see you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.