11-24-19
A sample of classified Chinese government documents leaked to a consortium of news organizations, is displayed for a picture in New York on Nov. 22, 2019.
Classified documents lay out the Chinese regime’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak. The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.
Taken as a whole the documents give the most significant description yet of high-tech mass detention in the 21st century in the words of the Chinese regime itself. Experts say they spell out a vast system that targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them--especially Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic minority of more than 10 million people with their own language and culture….
The documents were given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source. The ICIJ verified them by examining state media reports and public notices from the time, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.
The documents were issued to rank-and-file officials by the powerful Xinjiang Communist Party Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the region’s top authority overseeing police, courts and state security. They were put out under the head official at the time, Zhu Hailun, who annotated and signed some personally….
It wasn’t education, it was just punishment,” said Qurban, who was held for nine months. “I was treated like an animal.” “With the powerful fist of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, all separatist activities and all terrorists shall be smashed to pieces,” Zhu announced into a microphone. With that began a new chapter in the state’s crackdown….
“There’s no other place in the world where a computer can send you to an internment camp,” said Rian Thum, a Xinjiang expert at the University of Nottingham. “This is absolutely unprecedented.”…Officials were asked to verify the identities even of people outside the country, showing how China is casting its dragnet for Uighurs far beyond Xinjiang. In recent years Beijing has put pressure on countries to which Uighurs have fled, such as Thailand and Afghanistan, to send them back to China. In other countries state security has also contacted Uighurs and pushed them to spy on each other. Despite the Beijing’s insistence that the camps are vocational training centers for the poor and uneducated, the documents show that those rounded up included party officials and university students….
Mamattursun Omar, a Uighur chef arrested after working in Egypt, was interrogated in four detention facilities over nine months in 2017. Omar told the AP that police asked him to verify the identities of other Uighurs in Egypt. Eventually, Omar says, they began torturing him to make him confess that Uighur students had gone to Egypt to take part in jihad. They strapped him to a contraption called a “tiger chair,” shocked him with electric batons, beat him with pipes and whipped him with computer cords. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Omar said. “I just told them what they wanted me to say.” Omar gave the names of six others who worked at a restaurant with him in Egypt. All were sent to prison….
Kazakh kingergarten administrator Sayragul Sauytbay, a Communist Party member who was abducted by police in October 2017, called the detention center a “concentration camp…much more horrifying than prison,” with rape, brainwashing and torture in a “black room” were people screamed. She and another former prisoner, Zaomure Duwati, also told the ICIJ detainees were given medication that made them listless and obedient, and every move was surveilled.
AP journalists who visited Xinjiang in December 2018 saw patrol towers and high walls lined with green barbed wire fencing around camps….“It’s the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, except now it’s powered by high-tech,” said Zenz, the researcher….
A former staffer at Xinjiang TV now in Europe told the AP that those who couldn’t respond in Mandarin were beaten or deprived of food for days. Otherwise, speaking was forbidden. “They didn’t see us as humans,” said the former teacher, who declined to provide his name out of fear of retribution against his family. “They treated us like animals--like pigs, cows, sheep.”
Detainees who do well are to be rewarded with perks like family visits, and may be allowed to “graduate” and leave. Detainees who do poorly are to be sent to a stricter “management area” with longer detention times. Former detainees told the AP that punishments included food deprivation, handcuffing, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
After they leave, the documents stipulate, every effort should be made to get them jobs. Some detainees describe being forced to sign job contracts, working long hours for low pay and barred from leaving factory grounds during weekdays.
Qurban, the Kazakh herder, said after nine months in the camp, a supervisor came to tell him he was “forgiven” but must never tell what he had seen. After he returned to his village, officials told him he had to work in a factory. “If you don’t go, we’ll send you back to the center,” an official said. Qurban went to a garment factory, which he wasn’t allowed to leave. After 53 days stitching clothes he was released. After another month under house arrest he finally was allowed to return to Kazakhstan and see his children. He received his salary in cash: 300 Chinese yuan, or just under $42. https://www.theepochtimes.com/secret-documents-reveal-how-china-mass-detention-camps-work_3155621.html
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