Today, Explained - The government will sleep in your bed

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

This week, 22 UN ambassadors condemned China for detaining at least a million ethnic Uighurs in “reeducation camps.” After Gulchehra Hoja, a Uighur journalist, started reporting on the camps, over twenty of her relatives were imprisoned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I mean, just, these are crazy things. Things that we've read about that used to happen thousands of years ago. In China's Xinjiang province, to be a Uyghur Muslim is to be accused of having a contagious disease. Now, according to the United Nations panel report, more than one million Uyghur Muslims are placed in detention camps in China. There are reports from police of lists of actions that can get you disappeared. Giving up alcohol, which is seen as a sign of Islamic extremism. Not greeting officials on the street.

Growing a beard. Giving up smoking. Not knowing Chinese. If you receive a phone call from abroad, if you've gone abroad, if they find WhatsApp on your phone, a VPN, which allows you to get outside the Great Firewall, if they find a picture of a mosque or something that looks Islamic, if they stop using their phones, which they see as an effort to get outside of the surveillance network, you can be disappeared for that. Essentially anything that suggests to a police force that you might be externally compliant but internally disloyal to the Communist Party of China. This week, 22 UN ambassadors sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council.

The letter condemned China for its mass detention of over one million Uyghurs and called on China to grant access to international monitors. It's the first coordinated response to the mass detention of Uyghurs, but still it fell short of a formal resolution. The ambassadors are worried about upsetting China. And notably, the United States did not participate. Ryan Thum, you're a historian. You focus on Islam in China and on the Uyghurs. Am I saying it right, Uyghurs? Is that how you say it?

Yeah, Uyghur. But you can also say... The Uyghur pronunciation is something more the Uyghurs. Am I saying it right? Uyghurs? Is that how you say it? Yeah, Uyghur. But you can also say... The Uyghur pronunciation is something more like Uyghur. Briefly, who are the Uyghurs? The Uyghurs are an ethnic group of about 11 million people in China. The vast majority of Uyghurs are Muslims. In general, they share a lot more culturally with their Central Asian neighbors than they do with the Chinese. So what is happening to the Uyghurs right now in China?

Extrajudicial internment of somewhere between a few hundred thousand to just over a million members of the Uyghur ethnicity and an unknown number of Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities. A million people represents 10% of the Uyghur population. And when did that start happening? About two years ago. So it's quite remarkable that the Chinese state was able to confine such an enormous number of people in such a short amount of time. This was all done in secret, and the camps were originally sold under various innocuous names like vocational training centers. And it's part of an effort to reshape Uyghur culture to fall in line with the

norms of the majority culture of the Han Chinese. Where are the Uyghurs being sent? Structures surrounded by double fences with barbed wire. I would be surprised if there are fewer than several hundred of them. One scholar has estimated about 1,200 of them. And they're spread across the region of Xinjiang, which is the part of China where the Uyghurs represent the plurality of the population. Pretty much any county in Xinjiang will have at least one of these, although it looks like it might be more like four or five per county.

What's going on inside the camps? It's a kind of prison plus forced indoctrination. It's an effort by the Chinese state to inculcate a sense of love for the Communist Party of China through force. People are singing patriotic songs, they're being taught Chinese, they're memorizing bits of ideological tracts, as well as self-criticism, which is an old party tool where an individual looks back on the previous years

and makes confessions about all the things they did wrong and then says, well, now I see that the party is the savior of China. Human Rights Watch interviewed 58 people who'd either been in the camps or knew someone. And one of the frightening things that has come out of that is that torture seems to be somewhat widespread in these internment and indoctrination camps. What kinds of torture are we talking about? Physical restraint and stress positions. One person said he was put in what he called a well, which is a very small space where he could only stand up for many, many hours. Some other detainees have described some sort of metal body suit that prevents you from moving in certain ways and is really hot inside. And the so-called tiger chair, which is a metal chair with restraints that keeps you up all night, unable to move.

I mean, I'm hearing everything short of they're being killed. Next to that, it sounds a lot like a concentration camp. Is that like an inappropriate comparison or is this that bad? Well, it's a sticky comparison. There haven't been a large number of deaths in these camps. But the precedent of the German concentration camps is important to remember because mass killing was not linked to the concentration camps in Germany for seven, eight years. Concentration camps existed without a program of directed mass killing. These kinds of extrajudicial systems targeted at minority groups, because they're subject to no due process and no system of accountability, can change very rapidly from one purpose to another purpose.

We need to be very watchful. We've seen a lot of dehumanizing language talking about the people in the camps as weeds or tumors. We know that there is no system of redress for people who are abused in the camps and no system of monitoring of the authorities. What about outside the camps? Is the government cracking down on Uyghurs who aren't in the camps in other ways? The camps really serve as the force behind a whole host of other policies. Everyone knows, because they have relatives in the camps, that at the drop of a hat, an official can, on their whim, send you away for an indeterminate time. For example, they have a policy of creating fictive relatives across ethnic groups. So you, as a Uyghur, will be assigned a new, quote, relative who will be a Han Chinese party member and official.

And that person will come to your house and they will look around to see what kind of books you have on your shelf. And in the most extreme manifestation of these home visits, officials are actually sent to Uyghurs' homes to stay with them. And in many cases, because many Uyghurs' families sleep together on a single platform, the Han Chinese officials will sleep in the same bed with them. I'm sorry, the government will come sleep in your bed to make sure you're behaving? Yes, the government will come sleep in your bed and will eat a meal with you, which you are obliged to provide to them. And Uyghurs are expected to respond to this with joy.

If you're caught complaining about any of these policies, that also is a sign of your disloyalty to the party and can get you sent to the camps. The government is even installing cameras inside people's houses to watch them. There really is no private space left for Uyghurs. Where is information about what's happening in these camps coming from? Information about the inside of the camps comes from a very small number of people who have the rare constellation of three characteristics. One, they were let out, and there don't seem to be a lot of people that have been released from the camps yet.

Two, they have to have left China. And then even once they left, they have to be willing to take the risk of speaking to journalists or other researchers. And that's a big risk because there's good evidence that the Chinese state will imprison family members of anyone who speaks out. My name is Gulceh Rahoja. I am a Uyghur reporter at Radio Free Asia in Washington, D.C. I am from Urumqi, the capital of Uyghur region, Chinese call Xinjiang. I have been working at Radio Free Asia 18 years. All these years, my family back home in Urumqi, they're under Chinese government's close watch.

But the situation getting worse. September of 2017, Chinese officials took my brother. My mom asked me, don't call us too often. It's going to be trouble for us. In February 3rd, my neighbor's daughter, she called me. Do you know your family, like 24 people been arrested because of you? 24 people? Yes. It was my father and mother, my aunts, my cousins, all gone. I couldn't reach them. Does this have something to do with you and the work you do here in the United States? Of course, because we are the only source for world to know what's happening in the Uyghur region,

so they want to punish us. I immediately report to our management, and then I know it's not only me. My other five colleagues also, their family members missing and arrested or already held in the concentration camps. Then management encouraged us to speak out. Did you do it? Did you speak out? I did. In the congressional hearing, I gave testimony. Ms. Hoja, we'll begin with you and your testimony. Thank you for being here.

I've been releasing every day similar situations, similar human rights issues, abuses by Chinese. But unfortunately, we are the only source. Radio Free Asia is the only voice to world to talk about ourselves. So is that enough? We don't know. So I cannot give up. Thank you, Chairman. Were you afraid when you spoke out about what might happen to your family?

I don't want to use afraid. Of course we worried. We worried. But we don't afraid. Have you been able to speak with your family since they were detained? My mom, after she locked up in the jail, she just very sick because of the torture. She stays there nine days. Somehow I get some information.

My mom is out right now. She's just like house arrest. Because of my mother's safety, I cannot go very detail, but she's been through so much, mentally and physically tortured heavily. Can you believe she's 73 years old, sick woman, but they don't care. When they took her to the facility, they black hooded her. Just because of me, they treat them like that. And the rest of your family, are they out of reach? Yes, 23 of them. My cousins, my aunt, my brother.

Some of my cousins have very little children as two years old. I don't know where they are right now. I don't know. Are you ever afraid to report on everything that's going on with the Uyghurs in China as a journalist at Radio Free Asia? No, actually, my duty is bring light to our people. We have freedom. We have ability in this great country. But it's not fear. They're paying so much for our freedom. We have to do more.

That's why me and my colleagues, we're still working because the world needs to pay attention to the people, innocent people. Chinese government mentioned this is fight against terrorism. No, my parents are not terrorism. It's fight against people. Gulchera Hoxha is a reporter at Radio Free Asia in Washington, D.C. After the break, Antre explained how things got this bad for the Uyghurs to begin with. Just some facts about the Quip electric toothbrush really quickly before we get back to the show.

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It's going to be with you when you need it. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25 at getquip.com slash explained to getquip.com slash explained. Travel bonus, first set of refills is free. Almost all the world's Uyghurs live in China, but a lot of them don't consider themselves Chinese. Gulchera Hoxha, who you just heard from before the break, doesn't. She identifies much more with some of the countries that border China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan.

But Xinjiang, the Chinese province where most of the Uyghurs live, has been under Chinese control since 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established. Things start to get really bad for the Uyghurs in 1990. From about 1990, the state has year by year instituted more restrictive policies on Uyghurs, restricting their movement, their ability to leave the country, their ability to move within the province, restricting what they can read, what can be published, restricting where and when they can pray. At the same time, this is unfolding in an environment of discrimination.

People are openly putting out job ads that say only Han people, only the majority ethnic group can apply to this. So Uyghurs are subject to rampant, rampant discrimination. Has the Uyghur population ever taken a stand, had like a forceful protest of the treatment from China? There are protests that have happened pretty frequently over the last 20 or 30 years, but they're very rarely reported on. The biggest event was the 2009 protest-turned-riot. Ethnic tensions are never far from the surface in Xinjiang, and on Sunday, they boiled over. They were protesting the death of Uyghur factory workers on the east coast of China,

who had been beaten to death by their Han Chinese co-workers. Somewhere between 700 and 800 Uighur workers have been moved to a separate compound, and now they're under 24-hour guard. Uighurs gathered in the city center to ask the Chinese government to respond more strongly to this unjust beating of Uyghur factory workers. Accounts differ over what happened. Some reports say the violence started when a crowd of Uyghur protesters refused to disperse. The Chinese police tried to disperse the protest with force. And then some part of the protesters turned to rioting, breaking store windows, and indiscriminate killing of Han Chinese and also Hui people.

Chinese state media says the protesters attacked passersby, burned public buses, and blocked traffic, and accuses exiled separatists for planning the violence. A day or two later, Han Chinese vigilantes emerged and went around killing Uyghurs indiscriminately. Eyewitness accounts have been posted on the internet. Some accuse police of using electric cattle prods and firing gunshots. To the government's credit, those Han vigilantes were stopped. But this 2009 protest, riot, uprising was a turning point in Xinjiang. And I think part of the reason is that the Han Chinese population,

which makes up about 40% of the population of the region of Xinjiang, rather than ask what would have made Uyghurs so angry, unsurprisingly, they asked why the government couldn't control the Uyghurs better. And the state responded by flooding the region with the People's Armed Police, putting up surveillance cameras everywhere, instituting the checkpoints, which we still see, flooding the cities with propaganda banners that call for, quote, ethnic unity. And while that beating of the factory worker was the proximate cause, really what lay behind this was a long series of policies that created escalating

grievances. And now you've got these estimates saying that roughly a million Uyghurs are in camps. Is the Chinese government openly doing this? Is it admitting it? The local governments have been quite frank and open about it. So if you go on to the Internet and do some searching with the right Chinese terms, you'll find a lot of reports from local governments who are very proud of having done a good job of following directives from above and want to brag about it online. For foreign audiences, on the other hand, the Chinese state initially lied about the camps and said, no, no such thing exists. As attention grew, they started to say, well, we don't have re-education camps, but we do have vocational training centers to which we send people who have engaged in some minor criminal offense. They have admitted that the things they've been calling all along training centers are actually places where they punish people for some sort of infraction.

But the majority of the Chinese population has no idea that this is going on. Of course, there's very little room to respond or to complain. There have been Han Chinese people in China who have raised this issue and the issue of the treatment of Tibetans on social media, and they get their accounts shut down and they're vulnerable to getting visits from the police. One thing I've learned from watching this unfold is that it takes a very long time for public awareness of something to develop, and then it takes a very long time for governments to develop a response. Ryan, we had these 22 UN ambassadors sign this letter this week, but it still wasn't even a formal resolution.

If the world lets this continue, what's going to happen to the Uyghur people? You know, the important lesson from previous great injustices against ethnic minorities is that doing nothing is actually doing something. Doing nothing sends a message that it's okay. But I would also emphasize that every little bit of doing something also has a powerful effect. I talked earlier about how the Chinese official story of what these camps are has changed over time. It shows that the Chinese government is sensitive to global opinion and that they feel a need to respond. And so if the international community can get organized and respond to this, I think it will have an effect and raise the cost of The Sacred Roots of Uyghur History.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thanks for watching! Thanks to our friendly travel companions at getquip.com slash explained for their support today. Again, the Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25. Again, your first set of refills is free with your purchase. That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Maybe you're planning a trip. Maybe you take your Quip.