Re: [Marxism] China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

[David McDonald via Marxism]

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These are Gulags. They are straight out of the totalitarian playbook of
destroying all foundations of life and social being by seeing any kind of
attachment as a threat to the Party. It's a society run by the secret
police. Such purges are always tried out first on troublesome "alien"
forces, even if they are the actual indigenes. Scary.
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[Marxism] China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Sept. 9, 2018
China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’
By Chris Buckley

HOTAN, China — On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing 
building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red 
characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and 
acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.


Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a 
high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to 
lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write 
“self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.


The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.

Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse 
of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and 
more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. 
Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.


“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That 
was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”


This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, 
is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. It is 
part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up 
hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what 
critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.


Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the 
country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era — and the 
focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.


China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and 
maintain an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska 
where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim 
ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and 
culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance 
to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.


After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 
2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the 
crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and 
other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.


A sign describes this facility on the edge of Hotan, a city in Xinjiang, 
as a “concentrated transformation-through-education center.”
“Xinjiang is in an active period of terrorist activities, intense 
struggle against separatism and painful intervention to treat this,” Mr. 
Xi told officials, according to reports in the state news media last year.


In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the 
use of informers and expanded police surveillance, even installing 
cameras in some people’s homes. Human rights activists and experts say 
the campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured 
communities and families.


“Penetration of everyday life is almost really total now,” said Michael 
Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at Australian National University in 
Canberra. “You have ethnic identity, Uighur identity in particular, 
being singled out as this kind of pathology.”


China has categorically denied reports of abuses in Xinjiang. At a 
meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does 
not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question 
as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.


“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in 
Xinjiang policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial 
Discrimination. “There is no such thing as re-education centers.”


The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been 
detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed 
the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security 
measures were comparable to those of other countries.


The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by 
overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news 
reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the 
eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have 
fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.


The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps — 
usually called “transformation through education” centers — that has 
expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any 
system of appeal for those detained.


The New York Times interviewed four recent camp 

[Marxism] China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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HOTAN, China — On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing
building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters
on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job
skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.

Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a
high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to
lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write
“self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.

The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.

Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of
the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than
30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he
went along but quietly seethed.

“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was
a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”

Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the country’s
most sweeping internment program since the Mao era — and the focus of a
growing chorus of international criticism.

China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain
an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than
half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups
.
Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a
history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long
unnerved Beijing.

After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014
,
the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown,
orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim
minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html
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