The Daily - ‘Absolutely No Mercy’

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

A trove of private government documents offers an unprecedented look inside China’s highly organized crackdown on Uighur Muslims — revealing Beijing’s systematic detention of as many as one million people in camps and prisons over the past three years. In one speech, China’s president ordered his subordinates to show prisoners in Xinjiang “absolutely no mercy.” Guest: Paul Mozur, a technology reporter for The New York Times based in Shanghai. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:In one of the biggest leaks of the last half-century, The Times obtained more than 400 pages of internal documents revealing the meticulous planning that has gone into the Chinese government’s crackdown on ethnic minorities.Yesterday we followed our correspondent into the heart of Xinjiang, where one woman risked her life to talk about her experience in China’s system of torture and surveillance.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a secret trove of government documents offers an unprecedented look inside China's highly organized crackdown on Uyghur Muslims. In one of them, China's president orders his subordinates to show, quote, absolutely no mercy. It's Tuesday, December 10th. Well, now the New York Times has obtained leaked Chinese government documents, it says, reveal new details about the crackdown on Muslim

Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. They include instructions to local... Paul Moser, tell me about these leaked documents from inside the Chinese government. Troves of classified documents reportedly leaked from within China's Communist Party. So the thing you have to understand is China is one of the most powerful countries in the world. But we know very little about the top politics and how the country works in so many ways. It's a great secret. You have the Chinese Communist Party, which kind of rules over the country, but doesn't really let anybody get behind the curtain to understand what's going on. And so this leak.

403 pages of documents about the concentration camps there. You just don't see this kind of thing happen. So somebody took a tremendous risk in making these documents available to the Times. Yes, untold risk, not just to themselves, to their family, to their friends. And beyond the unusualness of the scale of this leak, what is significant about the fact that this is coming directly from the government? So prior to this, the best proof we had of what was happening was mostly anecdotal. So you would talk to relatives of people who had been imprisoned, like, for instance, Faircat. And maybe you'd be able to talk to somebody like his mother who had been through the system. But you had no real hard proof. And Beijing used that to its benefit to basically come up with a very different version of reality, one in which this was an

attempt to very gently teach Uyghurs Chinese and to guide them away from extremism and that this was sort of a beneficial act by the government to raise up a minority that, you know, was sort of lost in poverty and radical Islam. And with these documents in these 403 pages, we see that even as the government is saying this internally, they have a completely different calculus. And it's one of punishment and it's one of indoctrination to bring an entire ethnic minority to heal. OK, so take us through how these documents lay all that out. So there's basically three major takeaways from these documents. And the first and probably the most important is that the architecture and the ideas behind this crackdown come from the very top. They come from Chinese President Xi Jinping himself.

Long before any camps had opened in the region, in 2014, Xi Jinping goes to Xinjiang. And in the documents, what we see is in secret speeches and in sort of internal discussions, he lays the groundwork for a truly ferocious crackdown. And what would be the instigation for that crackdown? What would be the rationale in 2014? Xinjiang has seen a spate of deadly attacks recently, where Muslim Uyghur separatists seek autonomy from Beijing. So 2014 is a particularly bloody year in what has been just a long-time conflict between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. 43 people killed when a bomb detonated in a market in the regional capital of Urumqi. Just weeks before Xi Jinping makes this trip.

China's state media reports 27 people are dead after mass stabbings at a train station. There's a Uyghur militant attack at a train station in southern China where Uyghurs go in with knives and stab 150 people. And then on the last day of Xi's visit to Xinjiang. It's the second time this station's been targeted in two months. There's a car bomb that goes off at the train station in Urumqi, the capital of the region. Beijing blames this violence on separatists from the mainly Muslim Uyghur minority. So you have these attacks and they're getting larger in scale.

And so as a leader, he's watching this happen and trying to figure out how to deal with it. And so he does something that I think would be surprising to a lot of people. But what happens a lot within China and its leadership, he looks to the United States. He says that Chinese officials should study the American response to the September 11th attacks. And I think, you know, this sort of gives you a sense of the sense of crisis he felt, even though in comparison, the 9-11 attacks are so much of a larger scale than what's happening in China at that moment. And so what he says is basically we are going to have an all out war against terrorism, infiltration and separatism. And he

says this very kind of chilling thing. He says we must use the organs of dictatorship and show absolutely no mercy in how we fight back against this. He likens Islamic extremism to a virus and a contagion. And one of the quotes goes basically, people who are captured by religious extremism have their consciences destroyed. They lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye. And he calls for treating the contagion with a period of painful interventionary treatment. So effectively, this is, you know, a doctor or a surgeon going in and cutting something out that is a problem. going in and cutting something out that is a problem.

So Xi Jinping is making the intellectual case basically for camps, for detention, for active repression. Right. And within months, we see indoctrination sites start to open. And these whole dozens or maybe a couple hundred people. And they have classes which basically teach people to disavow Islam or, you know, profess their gratitude for the Chinese Communist Party. Which brings us to the second big takeaway from these documents, which is how these small camps evolve into this tremendously complex and large scale system of concentration camps and prisons that we see scattered across the region today. And how is that? What do the documents show?

They show a trajectory that is led by a single man, Chen Xuan Guo. This official, Chen Xuan Guo, is known as a hardliner, and he's been in Tibet for about five years. And during this period, he installs police stations across the major cities and across the region to gain really strong control over the ethnic minority Tibetan population there. a guy who had a solution to a problem in another part of China that has a similar issue with an ethnic minority that resents Chinese rule. And the idea is he could do it once. Maybe he can do it again. In August of 2016, this official is transferred from his post in Tibet to take over in Xinjiang. And he calls for local officials to carry out an obliterating offensive. And one of his orders, I think, is very telling and also very chilling. He says, round up everyone who should be rounded up.

Any kind of sign of religious devotion becomes something that you can be rounded up for. So, you know, issues like people who would pray regularly, people who have a Koran at home, men who grow long beards or who advise against smoking or drinking, people who study Arabic, and also importantly, people who have ties overseas or relatives who are studying overseas. So that's the plan. But it doesn't go all that smoothly. As these sort of orders come down, lower level officials aren't implementing them the way Chen Chengguo wants. In some cases, they are helping shelter Uyghurs and letting them out of camps. In some cases,

they're not putting as many in the camps as Chen Chengguo would want. And so there's a real resistance in some ways to the severity and strictness of what's coming from the top. And why would that be, given everything that you have explained? Why would these lower level officials not carry out the orders that they had been given? So China is very authoritarian, but it's also not a monolith. And what I mean by that is that the top officials will set goals and then lower officials have to carry them out. But oftentimes lower officials are judged by a different set of metrics, in particular economic growth. And so in this case, a lot of local officials were looking at these new guidelines that said to throw a fifth of the population into camps and saying, well, there's no way I can grow the economy at the level I need to and also do this. This is just unrealistic. And so they started to kind of undermine what

these rules were. And so we see very specific examples laid out in the documents of how officials sort of grumble privately about this exact problem. And so how does this new leader in the region respond to all this resistance, basically this failure to carry out this crackdown? He punishes the officials that aren't seen to be carrying out his orders. He opens up investigations into thousands and thousands of them. Many are sent to jail and they're made to sign confessions before they go. And then he takes those confessions and he spreads those around to the officials as a sort of warning, you know, saying these guys, they didn't listen to my orders and now they're in jail.

And it's sort of breathtaking the level of fear, not just in the Uyghur population, but in the population of officials that are having to enact it. Because even if they don't want to enact it, they no longer have a choice. They're stuck. So now, with all of this opposition essentially wiped away, what happens to the camp system in Shenzhen? It begins to grow utterly unimpeded. it begins to grow utterly unimpeded. So you started with sort of small camps in cities, maybe schools that were repurposed to hold people.

Now we see large concentration camps going up outside of cities where you have, you know, maybe a dozen buildings, each possibly holding thousands of people. And we see sort of new lots that are then filled in again and again to the point where you just have probably more than a thousand of these camps around the region. The prison system as well starts to fill up. And so the prison system is expanded and there's overcrowding there. We see hundreds of thousands of convictions with people being thrown into prisons. And ultimately, the last phase of this is the labor camp.

So either a factory goes in or a fence and a road is built to a factory, and we start to see people being sort of siphoned out into these factories. And this is kind of the idea of how you would graduate from one of these camps, is you would eventually return not to your hometown, but to a factory town where you work in a factory in compulsive labor. And so all of this together by 2018 is just taking a tremendous toll on the entire region. When you go there, the streets are empty. People are clearly scared. Businesses are shut down. Mosques are all locked up. Nobody dares go near them and they're closed anyway. People are being taken away at night. And ultimately, a million to three million people have been swept up into the system.

Hmm. I mean, Paul, what's staggering about that number is that even in a country as big as China, it's hard to fathom more than a million people suddenly disappearing from their homes and their streets. What is the story that China tells to explain that? Yeah, and that leads us to the third major takeaway from the documents, which is how the Chinese government methodically tried to hide that all of this was happening.

We'll be right back. So, Paul, what do these secret documents show us about how the Chinese government somehow hides this all from its own people? One of the biggest things they're worried about is actually students. So a large number of Uyghur students go out from Xinjiang each year to go to college all over China. And so within the documents, they're specifically worried about those children returning home for the summer, seeing their home just transformed and their relatives missing, and then spreading news about it across apps like WeChat and other social media and talking about the problem. And so what they do is they come up with this incredibly bureaucratic guide. It's basically a manual for how to deal with these kids who have a lot of questions about the missing relatives

and the empty streets and the locked mosques. And what does the manual say should be done? I wonder if you could read from it. Yeah, sure. So it's called Tactics for Answering Questions Asked by the Children of Concentrated Education and Training School Students. And the first question is a very simple one.

Where are my family members? And the answer goes, they're in a training school set up by the government to undergo collective systematic training, study and instruction. They have very good conditions for studying and living there. And you have nothing to worry about. Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs. And the standards are quite high. Our officials accompany them at study every day, offering counseling and assistance, and they eat the same food and live in the same dormitories. So you have absolutely no need to worry about how they're doing. If you want to see them, we can arrange for you to have a live video meeting. Wow.

That's positively Orwellian. Yeah. So in this telling, these re-education camps, they're kind of a gift to the people in them. Their life is good. The food is wonderful. The tuition is free. Right. Everything is great. There's nothing to worry about. This is a school and things are good. And so then as you go down the list, it anticipates people pushing a little bit. So, you know, question number four is, since it's just training, why can't they come home? And the answer is, it seems that you're still misunderstanding how concentrated education is run. Usually, you would return home for winter or summer vacation without any problem. But if you were careless and caught an infectious virus like SARS, you'd have to undergo enclosed, isolated treatment because it's an infectious illness. If you weren't thoroughly cured, as soon as you returned home, you would infect your family with the virus and your whole family would fall ill. The party and government would not be so So here, the mission is being described with a little bit more candor.

We think something is wrong with these people, and we will not return them home until it's been fixed. Exactly. And again, we come back to that language of illness, the idea that this is infectious and that people have to be isolated and the problem with them eradicated. And then as you kind of go down, it starts to deal with,

well, if the students are pushing harder, if they seem like they're suspect something's up, then you start sort of moving more towards threats. And, you know, that becomes apparent in one of the questions. When can my family member graduate and leave school? And the answer says that the family members must be diligent in their studies, abide by the school rules, and do outstandingly in morning exercises, chores, dining, study, and so on. And family members, including you, must abide by the state's laws and rules and not believe or spread rumors and take an active part in collective life. take an active part in collective life. Only then can you add points for your family member. And after a period of assessment, they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards. And Paul, what are these points that this passage refers to?

So another really important thing that comes from the documents, it lays out how there is a point system for getting through the camps. And then if you act out or if there are problems, you lose points. And if your family members act out, you can also lose points. And if you go below a certain threshold, then one year of study, quote unquote study, turns into two or turns into three. So the concept here is complain too loudly about your missing relative and your missing relative may be missing for even longer. You have the power to make this better or you have the power to make this worse for them. Exactly. And this is why Faircat is so unique because he goes the opposite way. He speaks out and continues to speak out.

the opposite way. He speaks out and continues to speak out. And many people in his community in the United States are afraid to speak out. And they're not afraid for themselves. You know, they're in the United States. They're afraid for their family members and they're afraid the punishments that will come down on them or that other family members could be thrown into camps for what they're saying and doing. And Faircat's point in all this is that this whole system is bogus, that you should not sit back and hope that silence will secure a release for your family members because it won't. This is just an intimidation tactic. And all along, the kind of punitive measures are going to be worked out anyway. So you might as well go out and talk. Right, because this system hinges on silence, on people's belief and their fear

that unless they are anything other than silent, it will all get worse. Exactly. And that's why I think, you know, Faircat told us that once he had no more fears, he felt like he had power because that was when he could speak up and speak out and say, this is what's happening and it needs to stop. Paul, what has happened since the Times published these 400 or so pages of internal documents? What has been the response from the international community that has consumed everything that you've just described? Not a lot. You get some condemnations from some quarters, but, you know, the rest of the world is basically quiet about this because China is such an important global player and they fear the consequences. And so I talked to Faircat about that. We have been speaking the same thing for a couple of years, but many of them, they still trust the Chinese government, even though there is a really strong fact. And I think for him, it's just both like baffling and infuriating because, you know, he's fighting this propaganda war where the Chinese government keeps saying these things don't exist or aren't

as we've described them. And now you have the proof, you have it. And then the first feeling I had is just bring that document and then slap on the face of country leaders and then tell them, like, this is the proof that you need it. He wanted to take this pile of documents and basically use it to slap the faces of the leaders who continue to do nothing about this across the globe. Like, it is a time that you have to speak up. You know, he said, what more does the world need? Like, what else do you need? Do you want to see the pile of bodies piled up as a mountain and then you're going to speak up?

Or like, what are you waiting? Do they need a pile of bodies in front of them in order to act? What are they waiting for? Paul, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A long-awaited report from the Inspector General of the Justice Department has found no evidence that the FBI engaged in a politically biased investigation

of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and that the FBI had sufficient grounds to open the investigation in the first place. The report, released on Monday, debunks the president's repeated claim that the investigation was an illegal conspiracy carried out by his enemies. But the report did criticize the FBI for its handling of a controversial wiretap used to monitor a Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page. It found that the documents filed to justify the wiretaps contained significant omissions, inaccuracies,

and claims not backed up by supporting evidence. And a secret history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan reveals that American officials misled the public about the state of the conflict, manipulated data, and concealed evidence that the war was unwinnable. The history, obtained by the Washington Post, includes an interview with a three-star general who oversaw the war for President George W. Bush and President Obama. In it, the general said, quote, We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.