CHINESE PRESIDENT XI JINping's crackdown on the "disease of separatism encouraged officials in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang to sweep up as many detainees as possible for internment camps, where they faced what the U.S. has described as genocide.
Officials in the northwestern region, hoping to satisfy their leader's drive for Draconian "reforms," were Incentivized to intensify the policy of repression, which escalated from "thought eradication" to mass internment, reeducation and sterilization under the guise of combating extremism, according to a recent report.
The report, based on files obtained from the Xinjiang Police Security Bureau and other local security sources, was released by China-sanctioned German anthropologist Adrian Zenz-a leading researcher on the topic whose past work shed light on the internment of an estimated 1 million or more Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the regionofficially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region-since 2017.
The camps were part of Xi's "medicine" for the "disease" of separatism. Detainees in the facilities, which Beijing has called "vocational education and training centers," were subject to extreme neglect, torture, forced sterilization and rape, according to the U.S., in what both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump's administrations characterized as a genocide. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told Newsweek they were "schools" and compared them to Western anti-terrorism programs.
Zenz said the groundwork for the campaign to crush perceived extremism was in place before Xi declared a "people's war on terror" in 2014. "The conceptual foundation for targeting wider populations for de-extremification had been laid; in 2014-16 officials trialed increasingly concentrated and centralized 'thought eradication' mechanisms; then in 2017 these were scaled into a mass internment campaign," Zenz wrote.
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