II. “LIKE RATS”
As Sabit was deciding to move to Canada, in 2014, a dark future was being mapped out for Xinjiang in secret meetings in Beijing. Xi Jinping had become President the year before, and he was consolidating power. As he cleared away the obstacles to lifelong rule, he eventually subjected more than a million government officials to punishments that ranged from censure to execution. With China’s ethnic minorities, he was no less fixated on control.
Xinjiang’s turbulent history made it a particular object of concern. The region had never seemed fully within the Party’s grasp: it was a target for external meddling—the Russian tsar had once seized part of it—and a locus of nationalist sentiment, held over from its short-lived independence. Communist theoreticians long debated the role that nationalities should play in the march toward utopia—especially in peripheral societies that were not fully industrialized. The early Soviets took an accommodating approach and worked to build autonomous republics for ethnic groups. The Chinese pursued a more assimilationist policy.
In the fifties, Mao, recognizing that the Party’s hold on Xinjiang was weak, mobilized the bingtuan to set up its farms in the region’s north—a buffer against potential Soviet incursions. Revolutionaries flooded in, and within decades the population was forty per cent Han. Party officials, hoping to assimilate the indigenous residents, sought to strip away their traditions—their Muslim faith, their schools, even their native languages. The authorities came to regard Uyghur identity as “mistaken”: Uyghurs were Chinese.
In the late seventies, Deng Xiaoping took power, and rolled back the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In Xinjiang, mosques were reopened and local languages were permitted, giving way to a cultural flourishing. But amid the new openness people began to express discontent with what remained a colonial relationship. Adhering to regional traditions, or even maintaining “Xinjiang time”—two hours behind Beijing—became a subtle act of dissent. Some locals staged protests, bearing placards that read “Chinese Out of Xinjiang.” A few radicals discussed an insurgency.
In April, 1990, near the city of Kashgar, a conflagration broke out between locals and the authorities—apparently started by an amateurish group of militants and then joined by demonstrators who did not fully grasp what was happening. Police and members of the bingtuan quickly quashed the violence. It had been only a year since the Tiananmen Square protests, and the country’s ruling élite had little tolerance for disunity. A year later, when the Soviet Union fell, the Chinese Communist Party—convinced that ethnic nationalism had helped tear the former superpower to pieces—became even more alarmed.
With near-paranoid intensity, the government pursued any perceived sign of “splitism.” The Party secretary of Kashgar, Zhu Hailun, was among the most aggressive. Abduweli Ayup, who worked for Zhu as a translator and an aide, recalled that, in March, 1998, cotton farmers protested a ruling that barred them from planting vegetable patches. Zhu railed at them for being separatists, adding, “You’re using your mosques as forts!” On another occasion, he derided the Quran, telling an Uyghur audience, “Your God is shit.” Zhu ordered Ayup to lead a door-to-door hunt for families harboring nationalist or religious books—telling him that he was not to go home until he succeeded. Ayup worked until dawn, rousing people. But, he said, “I couldn’t find any books at all.”
Xinjiang’s insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam, which emphasizes mysticism, not politics. At the time of the September 11th attacks, there was no terrorist violence to speak of in the region. But Osama bin Laden’s operation, planned across the border in Afghanistan, put a new and urgent frame around the old anxieties. Chinese authorities drew up a long list of incidents that they claimed were examples of jihad, and made their case to the U.S. State Department. Many of the incidents were impossible to verify, or to distinguish from nonpolitical violence. In China, mass attacks—with knives, axes, or even improvised explosives—are startlingly common, and often have nothing to do with ethnic unrest. Not long ago, a man walked into a school in Yunnan Province and sprayed fifty-four people with sodium hydroxide, to enact “revenge on society,” officials said. Similarly, a paraplegic assailant from eastern China detonated a bomb at one of Beijing’s international airports—apparently an act of retaliation for a police beating. The bombing was treated as a one-off incident. An Uyghur, frustrated that this would never be the case in Xinjiang, asked on Twitter, “Why is everything we do terrorism?”
As the 2008 Olympics approached, Chinese authorities became obsessed with the concept of weiwen, or “stability maintenance”—intensifying repression with a ferocity that the Chinese sociologist Sun Liping compared to North Korea’s. Sun, who had served on a committee that reviewed Xi Jinping’s doctoral dissertation, noted that the Party was a captive of its own delusions: by overestimating the chance of an imminent societal rupture, it had become blind to the root causes of discontent. Reflexive crackdowns designed to eliminate a “phantom of instability,” Sun warned, would lead to a downward spiral of repression and unrest, which could bring about the very collapse that had been feared all along.
Nowhere did this seem more apt than in Xinjiang, where China’s leaders continually appeared to mistake popular discontent for a growing insurgency. The 2009 protests in Ürümqi—following similar ones in Tibet—caused Party theorists to call for engineering a monocultural society, a single “state-race,” to help pave the way for “a new type of superpower.” One influential domestic-security official noted, “Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, developing man.”
A new Party secretary in Ürümqi began to pursue such a policy: women were told not to wear veils, Uyghur books and Web sites were banned, historic buildings were demolished. Within a few years, the downward spiral that Sun Liping had warned of began to occur. In the autumn of 2013, an Uyghur man, accompanied by two family members, plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd of tourists in Tiananmen Square—possibly because his local mosque had been damaged during a raid. The S.U.V., filled with homemade incendiary devices, caught fire. The man and his family died, but not before killing two pedestrians and injuring thirty-eight others.
Several months later, in Yunnan Province, a small group of assailants dressed in black stormed a train station and, wielding knives, brutally killed twenty-nine bystanders and injured more than a hundred and forty others. Although no organization claimed responsibility for the incident, an insurgent group based overseas celebrated the attack. The authorities declared that the assailants were Uyghur separatists, and in Beijing the incident was called “China’s 9/11.” Xi was enraged. “We should unite the people to build a copper and iron wall against terrorism,” he told the Politburo. “Make terrorists like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them!’ ”
In April, 2014, Xi travelled to Xinjiang. At a police station in Kashgar, he examined weapons on a wall. “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” he said during the trip. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, axe heads, and cold steel weapons.” He added, “We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy.”
On the final day of his visit, two suicide bombers attacked a railway station in Ürümqi, injuring dozens of people and killing one. At a high-level meeting in Beijing, Xi railed against religious extremism. “It’s like taking a drug,” he said. “You lose your sense, go crazy, and will do anything.”
Soon afterward, the Party leadership in Xinjiang announced a “People’s War.” The focus was on separatism, terrorism, and extremism—the “Three Evil Forces.” The region’s top official took up the campaign, but Xi grew dissatisfied with him, and two years later appointed a replacement: Chen Quanguo, then the Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region—a tough-minded apparatchik whose loyalty was beyond question.
Ambitious and regimented, Chen had served in the military and then risen quickly through the political ranks. When he arrived in Tibet, in 2011, monks were immolating themselves—an urgent response to a long-running crackdown, which the Dalai Lama called a “cultural genocide.” The crisis was generating international headlines.
In a place where oppression had become the norm, Chen did not stand out for his use of physical violence. Instead, he distinguished himself as a systematizer of authoritarian tactics, ready to target entire groups of people with methods that pervaded daily life.
The vast majority of self-immolations were occurring to the east of the autonomous region, so Chen tightened the borders of his jurisdiction, restricting entry for Tibetans from outside it. In Lhasa, he made it impossible to buy gas without an I.D. He built hundreds of urban police depots, called “convenience stations,” which were arranged in close formation—an overwhelming display of force. He dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist Party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize and to surveil. Some locals reported that members of volunteer groups called the Red Armband Patrols upended homes to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese authorities blamed for the unrest. Detentions appeared to rise. In 2012, when a large number of Tibetans travelled to India to receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama, Chen had them consigned to makeshift reëducation facilities.
The vast majority of self-immolations were occurring to the east of the autonomous region, so Chen tightened the borders of his jurisdiction, restricting entry for Tibetans from outside it. In Lhasa, he made it impossible to buy gas without an I.D. He built hundreds of urban police depots, called “convenience stations,” which were arranged in close formation—an overwhelming display of force. He dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist Party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize and to surveil. Some locals reported that members of volunteer groups called the Red Armband Patrols upended homes to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese authorities blamed for the unrest. Detentions appeared to rise. In 2012, when a large number of Tibetans travelled to India to receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama, Chen had them consigned to makeshift reëducation facilities.
The self-immolations continued in neighboring territories, but Chen’s jurisdiction recorded only one in the next four years. “We have followed the law in striking out, and relentlessly pounding at illegal organizations and key figures,” he declared. He had a flair for cultivating his superiors. In March, 2016, just before his appointment to Xinjiang, delegates from his region arrived at the National People’s Congress, in Beijing, wearing pins with Xi’s image on them—“a spontaneous act to show gratitude,” state media noted. The Party deemed Chen’s tactics a success.
In Xinjiang, Chen wore his thin, jet-black hair in a precise coiffure, and travelled with a security detail brought with him from Tibet. Rather than move into the Party secretary’s residence, he set himself up in a hotel that was controlled by the government and secured by the People’s Liberation Army. The building was in close proximity to facilities that housed police organizations, and Chen had a high-speed data line run from his residence into the region’s digital-security infrastructure.
Xi had once compared reform to a meal, noting that after the meat is eaten what’s left is hard to chew. Chen made it clear that he came to “gnaw bones.” He titled one of his speeches “To Unswervingly Implement the Xinjiang Strategy of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping at the Core.”
His predecessor had borrowed from his Tibet strategy, deploying two hundred thousand Party cadres in Xinjiang. Chen increased their numbers to a million, and urged them to go from house to house, and grow “close to the masses, emotionally.” Under a program called Becoming a Family, local Party officials introduced them to indigenous households, declaring, “These are your new relatives.” Cadres imposed themselves, stopping by for meals; sometimes they were required to stay overnight. Terrified residents forced smiles, politely served them, engaged their questions, and even offered them their beds.
Assisted by Zhu Hailun, who by then had become the deputy Party leader of Xinjiang, Chen recruited tens of thousands of “assistant police officers,” for a force that could implement mass arrests and also quell any unrest that they provoked. He began constructing thousands of “convenience stations,” seeking to impose an “iron grid” on urban life. He set out to divide the population into three categories—trusted, average, untrustworthy—and to detain anyone who could not be proved sufficiently loyal.
In early 2017, half a year after Chen arrived, he prepared his leadership for a long, complex, and “very fierce” campaign. “Take this crackdown as the top project,” he instructed them, noting that it was necessary “to preëmpt the enemy, to strike at the outset.” The mission, he said, was to rip out the separatist problem by its roots. He expressed zero tolerance for any “two-faced” officials who were unwilling to zealously carry out his plan.
Chen went to Beijing to meet with Xi. Then, days later, he held a grandiose rally in Ürümqi, with ten thousand helmeted troops in sharp rows, automatic weapons at the ready. As helicopters hovered overhead and a phalanx of armored vehicles paraded by, Chen announced a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” and vowed to “bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People’s War.”
As a command tactic, he liked surprise inspections, sometimes calling police at random, in order to check their response time. “Round up everyone who should be rounded up,” he instructed, and by April, 2017, his forces were arresting people en masse. An official memorandum leaked to an Uyghur activist in the Netherlands indicates that in just one week, that of June 19th, the authorities in Xinjiang’s four southern prefectures seized more than sixteen thousand people; fifty-five hundred more were logged as “temporarily unable to be detained,” because investigators couldn’t track them down.
Even as the number of detentions surged, the authorities pushed for more. One police chief recalled a Party member explaining, “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops one by one—you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” In June, Zhu drafted a communiqué. “Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it reminded. “If they’re there, round them up.”
At Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, an official handed Anar Sabit a detention certificate, an administrative document noting orders for her apprehension. It was dated June 20th. Sabit was led to a small interrogation room. Her phone and documents were confiscated, and the airport official told her to prepare for a “video investigation.”
She was positioned before a computer; through a video link, another official began to question her in Uyghur, a language that she did not understand. (Many of the people Chen had recruited to administer the crackdown were from the ethnic groups that he was targeting.)
“Please,” Sabit said, “can you use Mandarin?” The official switched to clumsy Mandarin, asking about her immigration records and her passport. Why had she once renewed it at the Chinese consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan? Sabit replied that she was there on a family visit, and had run out of pages while travelling. After an hour, a soldier took her outside to wait. She expected to be let go; her answers had been honest, and they were easy to verify. Instead, she was called back into the room, and two soldiers were summoned to guard her.
When the Uyghur airport official who had first told her about the border control checked in on her, Sabit asked what she had done wrong. Irritated, he said, “You know what you have done. Now we have to wait for the people from the Public Security Bureau in Kuytun to take you away.” Sabit asked when that would be. He answered testily, “It depends on when they left.”
An announcement came over a loudspeaker that her flight had been delayed, and she imagined her mother on the plane, overwhelmed with worry. As she sat, her guards chatted with her. They were both women in their early twenties—enlisted from “inland,” as the rest of China is known in Xinjiang. They said that they could not grasp why anyone ever needed to leave China, especially for Kazakhstan. “What a backward country,” one said. Sabit decided that it would be unwise to disagree.
After about six hours, several young men from Kuytun’s Public Security Bureau arrived, dressed in black. As Sabit was transferred to their custody, the airport official told her that if there were no issues the bureau could expunge the border control, and then she could leave. Sabit nodded, thinking that perhaps he was a kindhearted man, and could see that she was innocent.
Outside, dawn was breaking. The Public Security Bureau team directed Sabit to the back seat of a car, where a guard sat on each side of her, with handcuffs at the ready. The men looked exhausted, having driven through the night, but they watched her vigilantly. An intelligence officer, in the passenger seat, questioned her as the driver sped with manic intensity toward Kuytun, pushing the car over a hundred and ten miles an hour.
At their headquarters, the men led Sabit into a basement containing several detention cells. Stopping at a narrow cell, they told her to enter. Suddenly, the enormity of her predicament hit her, and she began to cry. “Please, can you not put me in there?” she begged. “I am not a bad person. Please, let me wait in an office.”
“We travelled five hundred kilometres for you,” the intelligence officer said. “Don’t inconvenience us anymore!” She entered the cell, noting that the walls were covered with foam padding—to prevent suicides, she suspected. There were two padded benches, each below a wall-mounted pipe, which a label indicated was for handcuffs. Sabit was too frightened to sit.
An assistant police officer posted outside her cell told her, “You can have some rest.” Slowly, she lowered herself to a bench. The officer was Han, from a poor province neighboring Xinjiang which was a source of recruits. He told Sabit that investigators would arrive at nine that morning. Holding her file, he observed that it was very thin, and said that this was a good sign.
With her mind spinning, Sabit tried not to blame herself for ignoring the warnings about returning to China. “My anxiety ate away at me, like ants consuming their prey, bit by bit,” she later wrote, in an unpublished testimony. (This account draws on her written testimony, on primary documents, including texts that she saved, and on extensive interviews.) Each passing minute, she hoped, brought her closer to explaining herself to a higher-ranking officer, who would see that her detention was a mistake.
Hours later, two officers, a man and a woman, guided Sabit to an interrogation room containing a “tiger chair”—a metal contraption designed to shackle a seated person. Sabit recoiled. Seeing this, the male officer ordered a normal chair brought for her. “Here we respect human rights,” he said. “All you have to do is coöperate, and truthfully answer the questions. If there are no problems, we will let you go.”
Overwhelmed, Sabit felt a stab of pain in her stomach. The officer called for breakfast. Unable to eat, she asked if she could use a bathroom.
“Come,” the female officer said. Earlier, Sabit had been given access to a toilet near her cell—a squalid hole, with security cameras pointed at it. “Can we not go to that toilet with the surveillance cameras?” she asked. The officer led her to one on another floor. As they returned, Sabit was able to glimpse into an interrogation room across from her own. There she saw a young Uyghur man in an orange vest and black trousers, his wrists and ankles locked into a tiger chair. His face was dirty and unshaven. His eyes were unfocussed. His head was drooping. Officers dressed in black were screaming at him. Sabit was ushered past, back to her room for questioning.
Anyone who has experienced an interrogation knows that it involves repetition. Over and over, the interrogator asks the same questions, looking for small discrepancies that hint at unspoken truths.
Sabit’s interrogation lasted several hours, as officers recycled the same questions that she had been asked at the airport. While she spoke, she could hear smacks and electric shocks from the Uyghur man’s cell across the hall. With his screams filling the room, she found it hard to focus. The lead interrogator turned to his partner. “Tell them to cut it out,” he said. “It’s affecting our work.” The torture quieted, but only for a time.
When her interrogators left, she was brought lunch, but again she could not eat. An Uyghur officer, whom she politely called Older Brother, entered with hot water and medicine for her stomach.
Three hours later, the lead interrogator returned. “You’ve been to many sensitive countries,” he said. “We need to initiate a new interrogation.” When Sabit asked which countries were problematic, he named the United States, Thailand, Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
“Apart from the United States, I went to all those countries because of work!” she said. “My colleagues can confirm that.”
By the time the second interrogation was over, it was evening. Older Brother returned. Desperately, Sabit asked, “Can I leave?” He shook his head and told her, “Keep this cup for hot water, and be sure to eat.”
The intelligence officer who had brought her over from the airport arrived with her luggage.
“Am I going home?” Sabit asked.
“You will know,” he said. He began to walk her out of the facility. Another man came over and whispered something into his ear, but the intelligence officer shook his head. “Her name is on the list,” he said. “Nobody can save her.”
III. SHARP EYES
In 2005, the Chinese government began placing surveillance cameras throughout the country, in a plan called Project Skynet. After Xi Jinping came to power, China rolled out an enhanced version, Sharp Eyes, envisioned as a system of half a billion cameras that were “omnipresent, fully networked, always on and fully controllable.” In Beijing, virtually no corner went unobserved. The cameras were eventually paired with facial-recognition software, giving the authorities a staggering level of intrusiveness. At toilets in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimetres of toilet paper at a time.
In Xi’s effort to build a “wall” around Xinjiang, advanced technology would become central. Researchers with an organization called IPVM, which studies video surveillance, discovered evidence that in 2017 China’s Ministry of Public Security set a requirement: facial-recognition software used with surveillance cameras had to be trained to distinguish Uyghur faces. Several leading Chinese manufacturers quickly began to develop the technology—an “Uyghur alarm,” as one system was called in a Huawei test report. Although the race-based monitoring systems are of uncertain accuracy, they have been deployed in at least a dozen jurisdictions outside Xinjiang.
Xinjiang itself has become a laboratory for digital surveillance. By 2013, officials in Ürümqi had begun to affix QR codes to the exterior of homes, which security personnel could scan to obtain details about residents. On Chen Quanguo’s arrival, all cars were fitted with state-issued G.P.S. trackers. Every new cell-phone number had to be registered, and phones were routinely checked; authorities could harvest everything from photos to location data. Wi-Fi “sniffers” were installed to extract identifying data from computers and other devices. Chen also launched a program called Physicals for All, gathering biometric data—blood types, fingerprints, voiceprints, iris patterns—under the guise of medical care. Every Xinjiang resident between the ages of twelve and sixty-five was required to provide the state with a DNA sample.
To harness these disparate forms of surveillance, it was necessary to centralize them—a problem that had been foreseen at the outset of Xinjiang’s People’s War. In 2015, the Chinese state-security apparatus began building the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, where the streams of information could converge. “It’s very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror, but what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities,” a senior engineer on the project noted. After the system was launched, Zhu Hailun affirmed that it would be used to root out unseen threats. “Problematic people and clues identified by the integrated platform are major risks to stability,” a memo that he circulated said. “Persons or clues that are difficult to check are risks within risks—hazards within hazards.”
Tens of thousands of security officers were given the IJOP app and prodded to upload information to it. A forensic analysis of the software, commissioned by Human Rights Watch, revealed thirty-six “person types” that could trigger a problematic assessment. They included people who did not use a mobile phone, who used the back door instead of the front, or who consumed an “unusual” amount of electricity. Even an “abnormal” beard might be cause for concern. Socializing too little was suspicious, and so was maintaining relationships that were deemed “complex.” The platform treated untrustworthiness like a contagion: if a person seemed insufficiently loyal, her family was also likely infected.
The system was designed to regard gaps in its own knowledge as signs of potential culpability. This was never more evident than when a resident travelled overseas, especially to a country that was deemed “sensitive.” In June, 2017, Zhu signed off on a bulletin underscoring that anyone from Xinjiang who had travelled abroad was to be presumed guilty: “If suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, then a border control should be implemented to insure the person’s arrest.”
At the Public Security Bureau, Sabit was forced into a car with the intelligence officer who had picked her up from the airport. As she peered out the window, the Kuytun of her childhood seemed unrecognizable, the skyline looking brash and cold as it blurred by. They were travelling west, toward the neighborhood where she had grown up. “I had this hope, or illusion, that he was driving me to my old address,” she recalled. Instead, they arrived at a newly built police station on West Beijing Road. In the main hall, Sabit noticed an elderly man sitting in a chair, a neighbor who had taught at the same institute as her father, and whose daughter she had known since childhood. “Hello, Uncle,” she whispered in Kazakh. “Do you recognize me?” Silently, he motioned to her not to speak.
Sabit’s eyes welled up. “It was like seeing my own father, who had only just passed away,” she later recalled. “I felt immense horror and grief.”
Sabit was ordered to follow a pregnant officer, and as they walked the officer whispered in Kazakh, “Do whatever they ask. Under no circumstances resist, or else you’ll suffer.” In a private room, the officer ordered Sabit to disrobe; she searched her and confiscated her jewelry and shoelaces.
Back in the main hall, another officer took down her personal information. The man looked as if he might be Uyghur or Kazakh, so Sabit felt emboldened to ask, “Why do I have to stay here?”
“You were brought here by the people from the Integrated Joint Operations Platform,” he explained. “You’ve been to so many countries. The problem could be big.” He motioned to the old professor, still in his chair. “He’s been to Kazakhstan more than forty times,” he said. “We’ve had him here for ten days now. It looks like you’ll be staying, too.”
Sabit felt a chill. She took a seat beside the old man. “Child, how could I not recognize you?” he whispered, in Kazakh. “You grew up with my daughter, as if you were my child, too.” He added a blessing for her father: “May his spirit rest in Heaven.” Then he warned her to be careful—to refrain from criticizing the Communist Party, or praising anything that she had encountered while travelling. “You must be strong,” he said. “This will all pass. You don’t need to be afraid here. Old Uncle is keeping you company.”
Detainees normally slept in an interrogation room—men on one side, women on the other—but it was full. That night, the officers placed a military mattress in the hall and ordered Sabit and another young woman to share it. The woman was wearing a red dress. “She was extremely thin, and was calmly looking at me with a pair of innocent eyes,” Sabit recalled. “I could tell from her appearance that she was Uyghur.”
While they were squeezed together, the woman explained that she was a student who had been arrested for using a file-sharing program called Zapya to download music. Officials using IJOP were expected to log any “suspicious” apps—there were dozens, but many residents did not know what they were. The woman told Sabit that two Uyghur men locked up in the station, a classmate of hers and a butcher, had been detained because of Zapya, too.
It was July, and the heat and the mosquitoes were intense. Sabit spent a sleepless night trying to fend off bites. The lights in the hall stayed on all night, and the bleeps and static bursts of police walkie-talkies made a constant din, as the officers processed drug addicts, drunks, jaywalkers, and other petty criminals. The police treated people they brought in harshly. Once, an elderly man who was cuffed into a tiger chair began shouting, “Long live Mao Zedong! Long live the Chinese Communist Party!”
The next day, Sabit was shuttled to a hospital for a medical exam. Her blood was drawn, and a urine sample was taken; she was also given an electrocardiogram, an ultrasound, and a chest X-ray. Back at the station, officers took photographs and fingerprints, and sampled her DNA. She was given an iris scan, and compelled to speak into a microphone, so that her voiceprint could be taken: more data to be uploaded to IJOP.
That night, Sabit and the Uyghur woman slept in the interrogation room, which turned out to be worse than the main hall. The mosquitoes there were just as relentless, and the walkie-talkies were still audible, only now Sabit was crammed into a tiny iron cage with two other women. The room was hot and airless, and, even though she was drenched in sweat, she wrapped herself in a towel to ward off the mosquitoes. Her stomach churned in pain.
In another cage, the old professor was held captive with the two Uyghur men. At night, the professor slept on a mattress on the floor, and the younger men were handcuffed to the wall, so that they could not recline; in the coming days, Sabit noticed that the young men were unshackled only to eat and use the toilet, and that they never bathed.
As if being swept into a hurricane, Sabit was caught up in the immense program of detentions that Chen Quanguo had initiated. About twenty-five million people live in Xinjiang—less than two per cent of China’s population—but, according to an assessment based on government data, by the end of 2017 the region was responsible for a fifth of all arrests in the country.
At the police station, Sabit noticed that large numbers of Uyghurs were being brought in to have their information uploaded. Many had been stopped at checkpoints while entering Kuytun; others had been flagged by IJOP as untrustworthy. Most were elderly, or women, or children. The younger men, it seemed, had already been locked up.
During the day, Sabit was allowed to return to the station’s main hall, but, whenever one of her relatives came to visit, she was quickly ushered out of sight and into her cage. Sometimes other people she knew walked in, and the idea that they were seeing her in detention filled her with shame. Then she realized that they assumed she had merely come to solve a bureaucratic problem, as they had. On one occasion, an old acquaintance came in, seeking paperwork to visit her parents in Kazakhstan. The woman had heard that Sabit had been detained, and began to approach her, but the professor signalled her to stay away. Before leaving, the woman whispered that she would pass on news to Sabit’s mother. Gazing at her silently, Sabit fought to hold back tears.
Nineteen days after her arrest, Older Brother walked into the station. Remembering his kindness, Sabit felt a wave of hope. She called to him and asked if he knew when she could leave. He looked at her and at the others, and said, “You all need to be sent to school.” Sabit knew from station gossip that “school” meant a political-reëducation camp. Shocked, she asked, “For how long?” He said half a year.
The following evening, three harsh-looking men dressed in gray jackets arrived. From the deferential way they were treated, Sabit assumed that they were high-ranking officials. It turned out that one was the director of the Public Security Bureau’s domestic-security team, a man named Wang Ting. Sabit was called to meet with the group, as were the professor and one of the young Uyghur men. Wang questioned Sabit, focussing on her Kazakh visa. During the interview, one official lamented, “You cannot be controlled once you leave.” Nonetheless, the vice-director of the station told Sabit afterward that she would be released the next day.
Chen Quanguo portrayed his crackdown as a means of bringing order to Xinjiang, but, for people inside the system, the shifting rules and arbitrary enforcement created a condition close to anarchy. A police officer told Sabit that before she could leave she had to sign a document expressing regret and pledging not to repeat her offense. Sabit said that she didn’t know what her offense was.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I was abroad,” she said.
“Then write that you’ll not make that mistake again,” he said. When she hesitated, he told her to just write down any mistake. Sabit found a Communist Party magazine in the station’s waiting area and copied down some of its propaganda.
The following morning, Sabit walked out of the station and called her mother, who burst into tears. Sabit wanted to fly to her immediately, but the police had retained her passport; before they could release it, they said, she had to gain approval from the bureau’s domestic-security team. At its offices, Sabit found Wang Ting and explained that she wanted to return to her mother. He told her that he needed to consult his superiors. When she returned, the following week, Wang explained that her border control would automatically expire after three months, and then her passport could be returned. Sabit was confused: the official who had stopped her at the airport had told her that active steps had to be taken to remove the border control. But, when she tried to explain, Wang waved her away.
Sabit waited until the three months had passed, plus an extra day, to be safe. Then she returned to Wang, and he instructed the police to release her passport. Buoyant with relief, she booked a flight to Kazakhstan. At the airport, though, the same official stopped her again. Her border control had not expired. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said.
Within hours, Sabit was again in front of Wang, who glared at her with annoyance. Her border control had expired, he insisted; perhaps the system just needed time to reflect the change. He told her to wait another week. Sabit begged him for a document indicating her innocence, and he had someone write one up. It noted that she had been investigated because she had renewed her passport at a consulate, but was cleared of any suspicion. “We did not find that she or her family engaged in activities that endanger national security,” it stated, adding that she was “eligible to leave the country.” The next day, with the document in hand, she risked another flight. Once again, she was stopped. Whether there was no way to follow the rules or no coherent rules to follow, she was a captive.
The Chinese have an expression, gui da qiang, that describes “ghost walls”—invisible labyrinths, erected by phantoms, that confuse and entrap travellers. In Sabit’s case, the phantom was the state, and she was determined to find her way through its obstacles.
From a colleague of Wang Ting’s, she learned that a request to remove her border control had been sent up the bureaucracy for approval. It would go to the prefecture’s seat, Ghulja, two hundred and fifty miles away, and then another hundred and fifty miles to Ürümqi. Desperate to insure that her paperwork was being processed, she decided to follow it and nudge the relevant officials. When she arrived at the train station, she found it awash in propaganda for the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party, which was soon to begin. It was a politically sensitive time.
In Ghulja, Sabit learned that she was too late: her application had already gone to Ürümqi. The next train was not scheduled to depart for hours, so she went to visit a sick aunt who lived there. While they were sipping tea, her phone rang. It was the vice-director of the police station in Kuytun. “Where are you?” he barked.
Sabit told him.
“You were in Kuytun a few days ago,” he said. “How did you suddenly go?” He asked her to text him a photograph of her train ticket, as proof that she was in Ghulja. Then he ordered her to return immediately, to sign documents. “You will take the train back tonight,” he said.
The vice-director seemed oddly intent on her case. On the train, she got a text from him, asking her to confirm that she was on her way. When she arrived in Kuytun, it was past midnight, and the parking lot was empty. In the lights outside the station, she saw a police car waiting for her, with two officers inside. One was Han, the other Kazakh. They drove in silence, until Sabit asked why she had to return so urgently. The Kazakh officer quietly explained that she was being sent to school.
The officer had spoken to her in Kazakh, and so Sabit felt that she could question him. Incredulous, she asked, “Didn’t the vice-director say I was meant to sign documents?” She told him not to tease her, but he shook his head and said, “I am not joking.” At the police station, Sabit’s things were confiscated, and she was returned to the cage. The following day, she was given another medical exam. It was clear that she was being processed for reëducation, but she could not accept it as reality—a common reaction, which the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the “delusion of reprieve.” Frankl knew the hold of this delusion well. During the Holocaust, he was taken to Auschwitz; even as his train was pulling in, he later wrote, he believed “to the last moment that it would not be so bad.”
IV. SCHOOL
Chen Quanguo’s crackdown was aimed at a single goal: moving a large percentage of Xinjiang’s population into an archipelago of fortified camps for political reëducation. Shortly after he arrived, he had begun building hundreds of prison-like facilities—what an official later described as trusted destinations for the untrusted.
By treating the entire indigenous population as a target, Chen was realizing a years-old objective. In 2015, around the time the IJOP system was being developed, a senior official had argued that a third of the region’s Uyghurs were “polluted by religious extremist forces,” and needed to be “educated and reformed through concentrated force.”
Xi Jinping had compared separatism and radical Islam to a disease, and officials often invoked medicine when they sought to allay concerns about the camps. “Although a certain number of people who have been indoctrinated with extremist ideology have not committed any crimes, they are already infected,” one noted. “They must be admitted to a reëducation hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain.”
As the mass arrests began, the Xinjiang Daily, a Communist Party organ, offered one of the first public acknowledgments of Chen’s plan. It described two men who had been assigned to a reëducation camp in Hotan Prefecture: a farmer and the owner of a village drugstore. Both described themselves as ideologically healed. “I was increasingly drifting away from ‘home,’ ” the drugstore owner explained. “With the government’s help and education, I’ve returned.”
Cartoon by Karl Stevens
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied
Shop
The farmer noted that he had learned, to his surprise, that his thoughts were manifesting religious extremism. “I didn’t even know,” he said. Now, he added, “our lives are improving every day. No matter who you are, first and foremost you are a Chinese citizen.”
An official told the Daily that the camp had already processed two thousand people. “We have strict requirements for our students, but we have a gentle attitude, and put our hearts into treating them,” he said. “To come here is actually like staying at a boarding school.” The drugstore owner, he noted, was resistant at first to being reëducated. “Gradually, he became shocked by how ignorant he used to be.”
From the police station, Sabit and another detainee, a young Uyghur woman, were driven to a compound surrounded by a wall topped with concertina wire. A sign read “Kuytun City Vocational Skills Re-education Training Center Administrative Bureau.” Inside was a three-story building, a former police station that had been hastily repurposed. The women were ushered in and told to face a wall. Sabit tried to survey the place, but the light was dim. Standing beside her, the Uyghur woman began to cry.
“Don’t fidget!” an officer shouted. Sabit, noticing that the man’s Mandarin was imperfect, turned and saw that he was Kazakh; immediately, she felt disgust. The women were directed to the third floor, and, on the way, Sabit glimpsed several male detainees in gray uniforms. Their sullen figures made her fearful, and she looked away.
Sabit was led to a large room, where she was strip-searched. As she was getting dressed, she asked how long she would have to remain, and a guard said that no one would be let go before the Nineteenth National Congress, which was days away.
The detention cells were revamped offices, with walls, doors, and windows reinforced with iron latticework, giving them the appearance of cages. The doors were chained to their frames and could not be opened more than a foot; detainees had to shimmy through. In Sabit’s cell, five bunk beds were crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot space, with three cameras and a microphone hanging from the ceiling.
A few women, their eyes red from crying, were already there, and more arrived later. They were all sure that they had been rounded up in a dragnet preceding the National Congress. Some had been brought in for using WhatsApp. One was on leave from college in America; she had been detained for using a V.P.N. to turn in her homework and to access her Gmail account. A seventeen-year-old had been arrested because her family once went to Turkey on a holiday.
The Uyghur woman who was processed with Sabit had been assigned to the cell, too. She was a Communist Party propagandist. Years earlier, she told Sabit, she had booked a flight to Kashgar, but a sandstorm prevented the plane from taking off, so the airline had placed everyone on the flight in a hotel. Later, police officers in Kuytun detained her, and told her that two of the other people in the hotel were deemed suspect. Even though she was working for the Party, the mere fact of being Uyghur and staying in a hotel where others were under suspicion was enough to raise alarms.
The reëducation camp was nothing like a hospital, nothing like a boarding school. Chen Quanguo had instructed that such facilities “be managed like the military and defended like a prison.” Sabit and the other women had to exchange their clothes for drab uniforms that were accented with fluorescent stripes and a photo-I.D. tag. Male guards patrolled the halls and the compound’s exterior—each officer working a twenty-four-hour shift—while female staff members served as disciplinarians, following the women wherever they went, including the bathroom. When the disciplinarians were not there, the surveillance cameras were; even when showering, the detainees could not escape them.
The only language permitted in the building was Mandarin. Some of the older women did not know a word of it, and were consigned to silence, except for a few phrases they had to memorize. Everyone was required to shout “Reporting!” when entering a room, but many of the women forgot, enraging their minders. One disciplinarian, a member of the bingtuan, routinely insulted and humiliated the women. Detainees who angered her were subjected to punishments, which included being locked in a tiny room and shackled to a tiger chair for the night. She often intoned, “If you don’t behave, you’ll stay here for the rest of your life.”
Sabit quickly learned that every moment was controlled. The women had to wake at precisely eight each morning, but, except for trips to the washroom and the toilet, they were locked in their cells twenty-four hours a day. They had three minutes to wash their faces and brush their teeth, a minute to urinate. Showers could not exceed five minutes. Some women left soapy because they had misjudged their time.
For meals, the women had to line up in their cells to await a food cart, with their backs facing the door. The cups and bowls issued to them were made from cheap plastic, and Sabit, watching the hot food and water soften them, feared that toxins were leaching into her diet. (Later, replacements were introduced.) Sabit’s cell had no table, but the women were assigned stools—painful to use, because they were only about a foot tall. The women squatted on them and put their bowls on the floor. If they ate too slowly, or not enough, they were reprimanded. The elderly women, and people with dental problems, struggled, but neither age nor ailments spared them insults.
The detainees were forbidden to sit on their beds during the day, though after lunch they were made to lie down, with eyes shut, for a compulsory nap. At 10 p.m., they were ordered to sleep, but the lights in their cells were never turned off, and they were not allowed to cover their eyes with a blanket or a towel. (The younger women volunteered to take the top bunks, to shield the older ones from the light.) If anyone spoke, everyone in the room would be punished with an ear-splitting reprimand from a blown-out loudspeaker. Any nighttime request to use the bathroom was treated with contempt, and eventually the women stopped asking. Dispirited, uncomfortable, often verbally abused, they masked their pain, because displays of sadness were also punished. “You are not allowed to cry here,” the guards had told them. School taught them how to turn from the cameras, hide their faces, and quietly cry themselves to sleep.
The women had been told that they were going to be reëducated, but for a long stretch there was only dull confinement. To pass the time, they sat on the stools and traded stories. The college student who was studying in America entertained the others by recounting the entire plot of “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Twelve days after Sabit arrived, the National Congress ended, and the women were summoned for interviews with officials from the Public Security Bureau. Sabit was led to an interrogation room, where an officer told her, “Your case is basically clear now.” She asked how she had ended up in the camp, given that the domestic-security team had provided her with a written declaration of her innocence. The officer said that he didn’t know. Later, a detainee told Sabit that she had heard it was because officials came to view her failed departures at the airport as an inconvenience.
After the interviews, the women waited hopefully, but no one was freed. Then, a month into Sabit’s detention, it was announced that everyone would study Mandarin six days a week—to master the “national language.” After learning of a detainee who was let go after three months, Sabit thought that perhaps she, too, could sail through the lessons and “graduate.”
The classroom, fortified with iron meshwork, was adjacent to her cell. There were rows of desks, and a lectern behind a fence at the front. A surveillance camera was mounted in each corner. During classes, two police officers stood guard.
The women’s instructor—Ms. Y.—had been yanked out of her job as an elementary-school teacher and compelled to live at the facility most of the week. Although she was stern, the women liked her. Ms. Y. spoke frequently about how she missed her young students, and she brought a grade-school teacher’s sensibility to the camp: she sought to teach the women Chinese opera and calligraphy, and pushed the administrators to allow plastic scissors, for making traditional Han crafts. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to get the detainees time outside for exercise.) One day, she arrived visibly upset; the director had humiliated her for tardiness by forcing her to stand during a meeting.
At the outset, Ms. Y. had no Mandarin textbooks, or even worksheets, so she used first-grade instructional materials; later, she was provided with lesson plans, but they were riddled with errors. The detainees were told that they needed to master three thousand Chinese characters, even though several women, Sabit among them, already knew more than twice that many. No matter how fluent the women were, they were forced to perform the exercises, over and over, until the others caught up. Some of the elderly women who had never been schooled in Mandarin struggled with the lessons. To spare them punishment, Sabit and a few others covertly helped them.
The classes, of course, had nothing really to do with language. As a government document made clear, reëducation was intended to sever people from their native cultures: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
Sabit and the other women had to learn Communist songs and sing them loudly before each meal. (If they did not show sufficient zeal, guards threatened to withhold food.) Every morning, they had to stand and proclaim their fealty to the state:
Ardently love the Chinese Communist Party!
Ardently love the great motherland!
Ardently love the Chinese people!
Ardently love socialism with Chinese characteristics!
They were compelled to watch videos like “The Hundred-Year Dream,” which celebrated China’s economic growth and power. The screenings were followed by discussion groups, in which detainees had to repeat propaganda and profess gratitude to the Party for saving them from criminality. On Saturdays, guest speakers gave presentations on terrorism law. The detainees were obliged to recite seventy-five “manifestations” of religious extremism.
It didn’t take great insight, Sabit thought, to recognize the absurdity of the curriculum as a counterterrorism tool. Most of the young women who were rounded up had secular life styles; they frequented bars on weekends and had barely any ties to religion, let alone religious extremism. The elderly women, though more traditional, clearly posed no threat, but their internment would stymie the transmission of cultural knowledge to younger generations.
All their work seemed geared toward pageants that were organized for visiting Party dignitaries, who would come to inspect the women’s progress and the camp’s efficacy. During these events—held at first in a room where the guards slept, with beds pushed to one side—the women had to recite maxims of Xi Jinping, sing patriotic anthems, dance, and make a show of Han cultural pride. “You need to have a smile on your face,” guards would say. “You need to show that you are happy.”
Sabit was often a featured performer; because of her fluency and her education, the camp could count on her to demonstrate that the program was a success. She would project excitement and positivity, in an exhausting pantomime. Many of the women felt ashamed by the hollow display, but still campaigned to perform. The preparations offered a respite from the language classes, and the pageants gave them a chance to prove their “transformation” and perhaps be set free.
At some point during every inspection, the visiting dignitaries would ask, “Do you recognize your mistakes?” In preparation, the detainees wrote out statements of repentance; the guards explained that anyone who did not do so would never leave. One detainee, a member of a Christian sect called Eastern Lightning, invoked a Chinese law that guaranteed freedom of religion, declaring, “I did nothing wrong!” She was taken away, to what the women assumed was a harsher facility—a pretrial detention center or a prison.
The logic of these forced admissions was clear: to gain their freedom, the detainees had to tear themselves down. Sabit strove to qualify her answers with words like “potentially,” and to characterize her life overseas as a “lack of patriotism” rather than as a manifestation of Islamic extremism. But, having lived in Shanghai, she found it hard not to seethe; she knew Han urbanites who had left the country for vacations in Malaysia, and who had used WhatsApp and V.P.N.s. Were they also infected?
Over and over, Sabit and the women confessed. Yet no one was released, and gradually Sabit’s optimistic delusions collapsed. In February, 2018, China’s annual Spring Festival arrived, and the women were preparing for a pageant, when a camp administrator woke them in the middle of the night and forced them into a classroom to write out their mistakes. When they were done, he gathered their papers, tore them up, and berated the women for being dishonest, then kept them writing until dawn. Sabit wondered if she was losing her grip on herself. Could she be wrong? she thought. Had she betrayed China?
Then, as the pageant neared, Sabit learned that after the performances any detainee who was a student would be let go. Because Sabit had been enrolled in school in Canada, she made the case that the policy applied to her. The camp administrators agreed, and she filled out forms for her release—discreetly, so that women who were not slated to leave would not grow agitated. The director told her to wait for an official departure date. She tried not to become hopeful, having been let down so often. But, she recalled, she regarded the news as “a ray of light.”
V. THE CONFESSION
Yarkand County is about eight hundred miles from Kuytun, in southwestern Xinjiang, on the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. When Marco Polo visited, in the late thirteenth century, he noted that Muslims and Christians lived alongside one another there, and that the region, with its temperate climate and rich soil, had been “amply stocked with the means of life.”
Yarkand has a large Uyghur population, and the crackdown there has been severe. In 2014, authorities restricted Ramadan celebrations, and, according to a report from the region, police gunned down a family during a house-to-house search for women wearing head scarves. Locals armed with knives took to the streets, and, in an escalating confrontation with police, dozens were killed. Later, the authorities called in a seasoned Party official, Wang Yongzhi, to manage the county.
Wang moved aggressively to enact Chen Quanguo’s policies, but he evidently had misgivings. As he later noted in a statement, “The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with the realities on the ground, and could not be implemented in full.” He took steps to soften the crackdown, much to the dissatisfaction of Chen’s operatives, who monitored how officials were carrying out the measures. “He refused to round up everyone who should be rounded up,” an official assessment of Wang, later leaked to the Times, noted. In fact, he had gone further than that. He had authorized the release of seven thousand interned people.
Wang was removed from his post and duly submitted a confession, in which he wrote, “I undercut, acted selectively, and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment.” The Party savagely attacked him, accusing him of corruption and abuse of power. “Wang Yongzhi lost his ideals and convictions,” one government-run paper noted. “He is a typical ‘two-faced man,’ ” it added. “His problem is very serious.” He vanished from public life.
Wang’s confession was circulated across the Xinjiang bureaucracy as a warning, and it apparently reached Kuytun. Just as Sabit and the other students were to be released, her camp’s management revoked its decision—because, a guard told her, an official had been dismissed for freeing people without authorization. “Nobody is willing to sign off on your release now,” he explained. “Nobody wants that responsibility.”
A heavy silence fell over the building, as minders—the detainees’ conduits for news—became cautious about what they said. At first, Sabit was dismayed, but, just as she had modulated her joy at the prospect of leaving, she now dampened her disappointment. The one certainty she could count on was her patience. She had become good at waiting.
And yet the longer she was confined the more convoluted her path to freedom appeared. By then, her minders had instituted a point system: the detainees were told that they had each been assigned a score, and if it was high enough they could win privileges—such as family visits—and even release. Points could be gained by performing well on examinations, or by writing up “thought reports” that demonstrated an ability to regurgitate propaganda. The women could also win points by informing on others. One detainee, Sabit recalled, was “like another camera.”
The threat of losing points was constantly dangled over the women. For a minor infraction, the guards might announce that they were docking a point; for a large one, they might say that the penalty was ten points. Yet the women were never told their scores, so they were never sure if the points were real. One day, a woman got into a fight and was brought to a camp official, who furiously reprimanded her, then tore up a paper that, he claimed, recorded her score. “You now have zero points!” he declared. Back in the cell, Sabit and the others consoled her, but also gently pushed for details of what the official had said, hoping to glean some insight into how the system functioned. “We thought, Well, maybe they really are recording our points,” Sabit recalled. “Maybe there is something to it.”
In the winter of 2018, new arrivals began flooding into the camp. Word spread that the arrests were driven by quotas—a new kind of arbitrariness. As an official involved with IJOP later told Human Rights Watch, “We began to arrest people randomly: people who argue in the neighborhood, people who street-fight, drunkards, people who are lazy; we would arrest them and accuse them of being extremists.” An officer at the camp told Sabit that the arrests were intended to maintain stability before the Two Sessions, a major political conclave in Beijing.
The camp strained to manage the influx. Most of the new arrivals had been transferred from a detention center, which was also overflowing. There were elderly women, some illiterate, some hobbled. One woman, the owner of a grocery, was in custody because her horse-milk supplier had been deemed untrustworthy. Another was an adherent of Falun Gong; she was so terrified that she had attempted suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window.
For many of the new arrivals, the reëducation camp was an improvement. At the detention centers, there was not even a pretense of “transformation through education.” Uyghurs and Kazakhs were brought in hooded and shackled. The women spoke of beatings, inedible food, beds stained with urine, shit, and blood. Sabit met two women who had bruises on their wrists and ankles—marks, they told her, from shackles that were never removed.
With more women than beds at the camp, the authorities tossed mattresses on the floor, before shuffling the detainees around to find more space. New protocols were introduced. The women had to perform military drills inside their cells, and submit to haircuts. In Kazakh and Uyghur culture, long hair symbolizes good fortune; some of the women had grown their hair since childhood, until it was, as Sabit remembered, “jet black and dense, reaching their heels.” Later, evidence emerged to suggest that the internment system was turning hair into a commodity. (Last year, the United States interdicted a thirteen-ton shipment of hair, which White House officials feared had been partly harvested at the camps.) In Kuytun, the locks were cut with a few brutal chops, as some of the women begged the guards to leave just a little more. Sabit refused to beg, trying to hold on to some pride, but as her hair fell she felt a great shame—as if she had been transformed into a criminal.
At night, it was announced, the detainees would help police themselves, with the women serving two-hour shifts. For Sabit, the shifts offered rare moments of privacy. Sometimes, blanketed in solitude, she thought of her mother living alone. Over the months, she had convinced herself that she would be able to commemorate the anniversary of her father’s death with her family, in the Kazakh tradition. But a year had passed, and she was still stranded.
While on duty, Sabit often gazed through the small caged window and took in the nighttime view: a garden, a poplar tree, and then Kuytun’s urban panorama—the city’s glowing lights, the cars tracing lines on a highway, reminding her of her old life. Later, she captured these reveries in a poem, written in Mandarin, which ends:
Night watch
I turn toward the darkness and
Its wanton torment
Of the feeble poplar.
As the months passed, the system took its toll on everyone. Guards who were once lenient became erratic and severe. A mild-mannered staff member lost it one evening, after being confronted with multiple requests for the bathroom; she yelled maniacally, then refused to let any woman out for the rest of the night.
The detainees, too, began to buckle. They joked that the state was merely keeping them alive. Some went gray prematurely. Many stopped menstruating—whether from compulsory injections that the camp administered or from stress, Sabit was unsure. Because they could shower only infrequently and were never provided clean underwear, the women often developed gynecological problems. From the poor food, many suffered bad digestion. One elderly woman could not use the bathroom without expelling portions of her large intestine, which she had to stuff back into herself. The woman was sent to a hospital, but an operation could not be performed, it was explained, because she had high blood pressure. She was returned, and spent most of the time moaning in bed.
In class one day, a detainee who had lost most of her family to the camps suddenly fell to the floor, unconscious. Her sister, who was also in the class, ran to her, then looked up at the others with alarm. The women tearfully rushed to her aid but were stopped by the guards, who ordered them not to cry. “They started hitting the iron fence with their batons, frightening us,” Sabit recalled. “We had to hold back our sobbing.”
Signs of psychological trauma were easy to find. An Uyghur woman, barely educated, had been laboring to memorize Mandarin texts and characters. One evening, she started screaming, yanked off her clothing, and hid under her bed, insisting that no one touch her. Guards rushed in with a doctor and took her away. The camp administrators, however, returned her to the cell, arguing that she had been feigning illness. Afterward, the woman occasionally had convulsions and was sent to the hospital. But she was not released.
“I get it. You have a podcast.”
Cartoon by Brendan Loper
Copy link to cartoon
Link copied
Shop
Sabit, too, felt increasingly frail. She was losing weight. She couldn’t hold down anything, not even a sip of water, and had to be given medicine to manage non-stop vomiting. Like the other women, her emotions were raw. Once, she was chatting with a Han guard, who mentioned that the camp’s deputy director had told him, “Anar being here is purely a waste of time.” Sabit smiled, worried that if she showed distress he would no longer share news with her. But, as soon as he left, she ran to her bed, turned her back to the cameras, and wept.
By the summer of 2018, Chen Quanguo’s reëducation campaign had been operating for more than a year. Beijing strove to hide its existence, but accounts leaked out, and it slowly became clear that something on a monstrous scale was taking place.
Reporters with Radio Free Asia called up local Chinese officials, who, accustomed to speaking with Party propagandists, were strikingly candid. When one camp director was asked the name of his facility, he confessed that he didn’t know, because it had been changed so often, but gamely ran outside to read the latest version off a sign. A police officer admitted that his department was instructed to detain forty per cent of the people in its jurisdiction. In January, 2018, an official in Kashgar told the news service that a hundred and twenty thousand Uyghurs had been detained in his prefecture alone.
The growing camp infrastructure attracted notice, too. Shawn Zhang, a student in Canada, began using satellite data to map the facilities. By the summer, it appeared that roughly ten per cent of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population was under confinement. Adrian Zenz, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen’s crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps—a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others. Not since the Holocaust had a country’s minority population been so systematically detained.
As the crackdown evolved, hastily assembled facilities, like Sabit’s in Kuytun, gave way to titanic new compounds in remote locations. When forced to acknowledge them publicly, the government described them as benign or indispensable—noting, “Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil.”
That summer, amid these changes, the director of Sabit’s camp permitted the detainees time in a walled-in yard; there were snipers keeping watch, and the women were restricted to structured activities, like emergency drills, but he nonetheless insisted that they should be grateful. Eventually, the women were also allowed to air out blankets in a vineyard that the staff maintained. “We would hide grapes inside the bedding,” Sabit recalled. “Then we would bring them back to our cell and secretly eat them.”
When camp officials announced in July that Sabit and the other women were going to be moved to a new facility, the news seemed ominous. Not knowing where they were going, they feared that their situation would get worse. One night, guards roused the women and told them to pack: a bus was waiting to take them away. On the road, a caravan of police cars escorted them, and officers manned intersections. “A lot of people were crying,” Sabit recalled. “I asked the girl next to me, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘I saw a street that I used to walk on, and I started thinking of my previous life.’ ”
spoiler
II. “LIKE RATS” As Sabit was deciding to move to Canada, in 2014, a dark future was being mapped out for Xinjiang in secret meetings in Beijing. Xi Jinping had become President the year before, and he was consolidating power. As he cleared away the obstacles to lifelong rule, he eventually subjected more than a million government officials to punishments that ranged from censure to execution. With China’s ethnic minorities, he was no less fixated on control.
Xinjiang’s turbulent history made it a particular object of concern. The region had never seemed fully within the Party’s grasp: it was a target for external meddling—the Russian tsar had once seized part of it—and a locus of nationalist sentiment, held over from its short-lived independence. Communist theoreticians long debated the role that nationalities should play in the march toward utopia—especially in peripheral societies that were not fully industrialized. The early Soviets took an accommodating approach and worked to build autonomous republics for ethnic groups. The Chinese pursued a more assimilationist policy.
In the fifties, Mao, recognizing that the Party’s hold on Xinjiang was weak, mobilized the bingtuan to set up its farms in the region’s north—a buffer against potential Soviet incursions. Revolutionaries flooded in, and within decades the population was forty per cent Han. Party officials, hoping to assimilate the indigenous residents, sought to strip away their traditions—their Muslim faith, their schools, even their native languages. The authorities came to regard Uyghur identity as “mistaken”: Uyghurs were Chinese.
In the late seventies, Deng Xiaoping took power, and rolled back the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In Xinjiang, mosques were reopened and local languages were permitted, giving way to a cultural flourishing. But amid the new openness people began to express discontent with what remained a colonial relationship. Adhering to regional traditions, or even maintaining “Xinjiang time”—two hours behind Beijing—became a subtle act of dissent. Some locals staged protests, bearing placards that read “Chinese Out of Xinjiang.” A few radicals discussed an insurgency.
In April, 1990, near the city of Kashgar, a conflagration broke out between locals and the authorities—apparently started by an amateurish group of militants and then joined by demonstrators who did not fully grasp what was happening. Police and members of the bingtuan quickly quashed the violence. It had been only a year since the Tiananmen Square protests, and the country’s ruling élite had little tolerance for disunity. A year later, when the Soviet Union fell, the Chinese Communist Party—convinced that ethnic nationalism had helped tear the former superpower to pieces—became even more alarmed.
With near-paranoid intensity, the government pursued any perceived sign of “splitism.” The Party secretary of Kashgar, Zhu Hailun, was among the most aggressive. Abduweli Ayup, who worked for Zhu as a translator and an aide, recalled that, in March, 1998, cotton farmers protested a ruling that barred them from planting vegetable patches. Zhu railed at them for being separatists, adding, “You’re using your mosques as forts!” On another occasion, he derided the Quran, telling an Uyghur audience, “Your God is shit.” Zhu ordered Ayup to lead a door-to-door hunt for families harboring nationalist or religious books—telling him that he was not to go home until he succeeded. Ayup worked until dawn, rousing people. But, he said, “I couldn’t find any books at all.”
Xinjiang’s insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam, which emphasizes mysticism, not politics. At the time of the September 11th attacks, there was no terrorist violence to speak of in the region. But Osama bin Laden’s operation, planned across the border in Afghanistan, put a new and urgent frame around the old anxieties. Chinese authorities drew up a long list of incidents that they claimed were examples of jihad, and made their case to the U.S. State Department. Many of the incidents were impossible to verify, or to distinguish from nonpolitical violence. In China, mass attacks—with knives, axes, or even improvised explosives—are startlingly common, and often have nothing to do with ethnic unrest. Not long ago, a man walked into a school in Yunnan Province and sprayed fifty-four people with sodium hydroxide, to enact “revenge on society,” officials said. Similarly, a paraplegic assailant from eastern China detonated a bomb at one of Beijing’s international airports—apparently an act of retaliation for a police beating. The bombing was treated as a one-off incident. An Uyghur, frustrated that this would never be the case in Xinjiang, asked on Twitter, “Why is everything we do terrorism?”
As the 2008 Olympics approached, Chinese authorities became obsessed with the concept of weiwen, or “stability maintenance”—intensifying repression with a ferocity that the Chinese sociologist Sun Liping compared to North Korea’s. Sun, who had served on a committee that reviewed Xi Jinping’s doctoral dissertation, noted that the Party was a captive of its own delusions: by overestimating the chance of an imminent societal rupture, it had become blind to the root causes of discontent. Reflexive crackdowns designed to eliminate a “phantom of instability,” Sun warned, would lead to a downward spiral of repression and unrest, which could bring about the very collapse that had been feared all along.
Nowhere did this seem more apt than in Xinjiang, where China’s leaders continually appeared to mistake popular discontent for a growing insurgency. The 2009 protests in Ürümqi—following similar ones in Tibet—caused Party theorists to call for engineering a monocultural society, a single “state-race,” to help pave the way for “a new type of superpower.” One influential domestic-security official noted, “Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, developing man.”
A new Party secretary in Ürümqi began to pursue such a policy: women were told not to wear veils, Uyghur books and Web sites were banned, historic buildings were demolished. Within a few years, the downward spiral that Sun Liping had warned of began to occur. In the autumn of 2013, an Uyghur man, accompanied by two family members, plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd of tourists in Tiananmen Square—possibly because his local mosque had been damaged during a raid. The S.U.V., filled with homemade incendiary devices, caught fire. The man and his family died, but not before killing two pedestrians and injuring thirty-eight others.
Several months later, in Yunnan Province, a small group of assailants dressed in black stormed a train station and, wielding knives, brutally killed twenty-nine bystanders and injured more than a hundred and forty others. Although no organization claimed responsibility for the incident, an insurgent group based overseas celebrated the attack. The authorities declared that the assailants were Uyghur separatists, and in Beijing the incident was called “China’s 9/11.” Xi was enraged. “We should unite the people to build a copper and iron wall against terrorism,” he told the Politburo. “Make terrorists like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them!’ ”
In April, 2014, Xi travelled to Xinjiang. At a police station in Kashgar, he examined weapons on a wall. “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” he said during the trip. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, axe heads, and cold steel weapons.” He added, “We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy.”
On the final day of his visit, two suicide bombers attacked a railway station in Ürümqi, injuring dozens of people and killing one. At a high-level meeting in Beijing, Xi railed against religious extremism. “It’s like taking a drug,” he said. “You lose your sense, go crazy, and will do anything.”
Soon afterward, the Party leadership in Xinjiang announced a “People’s War.” The focus was on separatism, terrorism, and extremism—the “Three Evil Forces.” The region’s top official took up the campaign, but Xi grew dissatisfied with him, and two years later appointed a replacement: Chen Quanguo, then the Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region—a tough-minded apparatchik whose loyalty was beyond question.
Ambitious and regimented, Chen had served in the military and then risen quickly through the political ranks. When he arrived in Tibet, in 2011, monks were immolating themselves—an urgent response to a long-running crackdown, which the Dalai Lama called a “cultural genocide.” The crisis was generating international headlines.
In a place where oppression had become the norm, Chen did not stand out for his use of physical violence. Instead, he distinguished himself as a systematizer of authoritarian tactics, ready to target entire groups of people with methods that pervaded daily life.
The vast majority of self-immolations were occurring to the east of the autonomous region, so Chen tightened the borders of his jurisdiction, restricting entry for Tibetans from outside it. In Lhasa, he made it impossible to buy gas without an I.D. He built hundreds of urban police depots, called “convenience stations,” which were arranged in close formation—an overwhelming display of force. He dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist Party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize and to surveil. Some locals reported that members of volunteer groups called the Red Armband Patrols upended homes to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese authorities blamed for the unrest. Detentions appeared to rise. In 2012, when a large number of Tibetans travelled to India to receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama, Chen had them consigned to makeshift reëducation facilities.
spoiler
The vast majority of self-immolations were occurring to the east of the autonomous region, so Chen tightened the borders of his jurisdiction, restricting entry for Tibetans from outside it. In Lhasa, he made it impossible to buy gas without an I.D. He built hundreds of urban police depots, called “convenience stations,” which were arranged in close formation—an overwhelming display of force. He dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist Party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize and to surveil. Some locals reported that members of volunteer groups called the Red Armband Patrols upended homes to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese authorities blamed for the unrest. Detentions appeared to rise. In 2012, when a large number of Tibetans travelled to India to receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama, Chen had them consigned to makeshift reëducation facilities.
The self-immolations continued in neighboring territories, but Chen’s jurisdiction recorded only one in the next four years. “We have followed the law in striking out, and relentlessly pounding at illegal organizations and key figures,” he declared. He had a flair for cultivating his superiors. In March, 2016, just before his appointment to Xinjiang, delegates from his region arrived at the National People’s Congress, in Beijing, wearing pins with Xi’s image on them—“a spontaneous act to show gratitude,” state media noted. The Party deemed Chen’s tactics a success.
In Xinjiang, Chen wore his thin, jet-black hair in a precise coiffure, and travelled with a security detail brought with him from Tibet. Rather than move into the Party secretary’s residence, he set himself up in a hotel that was controlled by the government and secured by the People’s Liberation Army. The building was in close proximity to facilities that housed police organizations, and Chen had a high-speed data line run from his residence into the region’s digital-security infrastructure.
Xi had once compared reform to a meal, noting that after the meat is eaten what’s left is hard to chew. Chen made it clear that he came to “gnaw bones.” He titled one of his speeches “To Unswervingly Implement the Xinjiang Strategy of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping at the Core.”
His predecessor had borrowed from his Tibet strategy, deploying two hundred thousand Party cadres in Xinjiang. Chen increased their numbers to a million, and urged them to go from house to house, and grow “close to the masses, emotionally.” Under a program called Becoming a Family, local Party officials introduced them to indigenous households, declaring, “These are your new relatives.” Cadres imposed themselves, stopping by for meals; sometimes they were required to stay overnight. Terrified residents forced smiles, politely served them, engaged their questions, and even offered them their beds.
Assisted by Zhu Hailun, who by then had become the deputy Party leader of Xinjiang, Chen recruited tens of thousands of “assistant police officers,” for a force that could implement mass arrests and also quell any unrest that they provoked. He began constructing thousands of “convenience stations,” seeking to impose an “iron grid” on urban life. He set out to divide the population into three categories—trusted, average, untrustworthy—and to detain anyone who could not be proved sufficiently loyal.
In early 2017, half a year after Chen arrived, he prepared his leadership for a long, complex, and “very fierce” campaign. “Take this crackdown as the top project,” he instructed them, noting that it was necessary “to preëmpt the enemy, to strike at the outset.” The mission, he said, was to rip out the separatist problem by its roots. He expressed zero tolerance for any “two-faced” officials who were unwilling to zealously carry out his plan.
Chen went to Beijing to meet with Xi. Then, days later, he held a grandiose rally in Ürümqi, with ten thousand helmeted troops in sharp rows, automatic weapons at the ready. As helicopters hovered overhead and a phalanx of armored vehicles paraded by, Chen announced a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” and vowed to “bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People’s War.”
As a command tactic, he liked surprise inspections, sometimes calling police at random, in order to check their response time. “Round up everyone who should be rounded up,” he instructed, and by April, 2017, his forces were arresting people en masse. An official memorandum leaked to an Uyghur activist in the Netherlands indicates that in just one week, that of June 19th, the authorities in Xinjiang’s four southern prefectures seized more than sixteen thousand people; fifty-five hundred more were logged as “temporarily unable to be detained,” because investigators couldn’t track them down.
Even as the number of detentions surged, the authorities pushed for more. One police chief recalled a Party member explaining, “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops one by one—you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” In June, Zhu drafted a communiqué. “Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it reminded. “If they’re there, round them up.”
At Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, an official handed Anar Sabit a detention certificate, an administrative document noting orders for her apprehension. It was dated June 20th. Sabit was led to a small interrogation room. Her phone and documents were confiscated, and the airport official told her to prepare for a “video investigation.”
She was positioned before a computer; through a video link, another official began to question her in Uyghur, a language that she did not understand. (Many of the people Chen had recruited to administer the crackdown were from the ethnic groups that he was targeting.)
“Please,” Sabit said, “can you use Mandarin?” The official switched to clumsy Mandarin, asking about her immigration records and her passport. Why had she once renewed it at the Chinese consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan? Sabit replied that she was there on a family visit, and had run out of pages while travelling. After an hour, a soldier took her outside to wait. She expected to be let go; her answers had been honest, and they were easy to verify. Instead, she was called back into the room, and two soldiers were summoned to guard her.
When the Uyghur airport official who had first told her about the border control checked in on her, Sabit asked what she had done wrong. Irritated, he said, “You know what you have done. Now we have to wait for the people from the Public Security Bureau in Kuytun to take you away.” Sabit asked when that would be. He answered testily, “It depends on when they left.”
An announcement came over a loudspeaker that her flight had been delayed, and she imagined her mother on the plane, overwhelmed with worry. As she sat, her guards chatted with her. They were both women in their early twenties—enlisted from “inland,” as the rest of China is known in Xinjiang. They said that they could not grasp why anyone ever needed to leave China, especially for Kazakhstan. “What a backward country,” one said. Sabit decided that it would be unwise to disagree.
After about six hours, several young men from Kuytun’s Public Security Bureau arrived, dressed in black. As Sabit was transferred to their custody, the airport official told her that if there were no issues the bureau could expunge the border control, and then she could leave. Sabit nodded, thinking that perhaps he was a kindhearted man, and could see that she was innocent.
Outside, dawn was breaking. The Public Security Bureau team directed Sabit to the back seat of a car, where a guard sat on each side of her, with handcuffs at the ready. The men looked exhausted, having driven through the night, but they watched her vigilantly. An intelligence officer, in the passenger seat, questioned her as the driver sped with manic intensity toward Kuytun, pushing the car over a hundred and ten miles an hour.
At their headquarters, the men led Sabit into a basement containing several detention cells. Stopping at a narrow cell, they told her to enter. Suddenly, the enormity of her predicament hit her, and she began to cry. “Please, can you not put me in there?” she begged. “I am not a bad person. Please, let me wait in an office.”
“We travelled five hundred kilometres for you,” the intelligence officer said. “Don’t inconvenience us anymore!” She entered the cell, noting that the walls were covered with foam padding—to prevent suicides, she suspected. There were two padded benches, each below a wall-mounted pipe, which a label indicated was for handcuffs. Sabit was too frightened to sit.
An assistant police officer posted outside her cell told her, “You can have some rest.” Slowly, she lowered herself to a bench. The officer was Han, from a poor province neighboring Xinjiang which was a source of recruits. He told Sabit that investigators would arrive at nine that morning. Holding her file, he observed that it was very thin, and said that this was a good sign.
With her mind spinning, Sabit tried not to blame herself for ignoring the warnings about returning to China. “My anxiety ate away at me, like ants consuming their prey, bit by bit,” she later wrote, in an unpublished testimony. (This account draws on her written testimony, on primary documents, including texts that she saved, and on extensive interviews.) Each passing minute, she hoped, brought her closer to explaining herself to a higher-ranking officer, who would see that her detention was a mistake.
spoiler
Hours later, two officers, a man and a woman, guided Sabit to an interrogation room containing a “tiger chair”—a metal contraption designed to shackle a seated person. Sabit recoiled. Seeing this, the male officer ordered a normal chair brought for her. “Here we respect human rights,” he said. “All you have to do is coöperate, and truthfully answer the questions. If there are no problems, we will let you go.”
Overwhelmed, Sabit felt a stab of pain in her stomach. The officer called for breakfast. Unable to eat, she asked if she could use a bathroom.
“Come,” the female officer said. Earlier, Sabit had been given access to a toilet near her cell—a squalid hole, with security cameras pointed at it. “Can we not go to that toilet with the surveillance cameras?” she asked. The officer led her to one on another floor. As they returned, Sabit was able to glimpse into an interrogation room across from her own. There she saw a young Uyghur man in an orange vest and black trousers, his wrists and ankles locked into a tiger chair. His face was dirty and unshaven. His eyes were unfocussed. His head was drooping. Officers dressed in black were screaming at him. Sabit was ushered past, back to her room for questioning.
Anyone who has experienced an interrogation knows that it involves repetition. Over and over, the interrogator asks the same questions, looking for small discrepancies that hint at unspoken truths.
Sabit’s interrogation lasted several hours, as officers recycled the same questions that she had been asked at the airport. While she spoke, she could hear smacks and electric shocks from the Uyghur man’s cell across the hall. With his screams filling the room, she found it hard to focus. The lead interrogator turned to his partner. “Tell them to cut it out,” he said. “It’s affecting our work.” The torture quieted, but only for a time.
When her interrogators left, she was brought lunch, but again she could not eat. An Uyghur officer, whom she politely called Older Brother, entered with hot water and medicine for her stomach.
Three hours later, the lead interrogator returned. “You’ve been to many sensitive countries,” he said. “We need to initiate a new interrogation.” When Sabit asked which countries were problematic, he named the United States, Thailand, Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
“Apart from the United States, I went to all those countries because of work!” she said. “My colleagues can confirm that.”
By the time the second interrogation was over, it was evening. Older Brother returned. Desperately, Sabit asked, “Can I leave?” He shook his head and told her, “Keep this cup for hot water, and be sure to eat.”
The intelligence officer who had brought her over from the airport arrived with her luggage.
“Am I going home?” Sabit asked.
“You will know,” he said. He began to walk her out of the facility. Another man came over and whispered something into his ear, but the intelligence officer shook his head. “Her name is on the list,” he said. “Nobody can save her.”
spoiler
III. SHARP EYES In 2005, the Chinese government began placing surveillance cameras throughout the country, in a plan called Project Skynet. After Xi Jinping came to power, China rolled out an enhanced version, Sharp Eyes, envisioned as a system of half a billion cameras that were “omnipresent, fully networked, always on and fully controllable.” In Beijing, virtually no corner went unobserved. The cameras were eventually paired with facial-recognition software, giving the authorities a staggering level of intrusiveness. At toilets in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimetres of toilet paper at a time.
In Xi’s effort to build a “wall” around Xinjiang, advanced technology would become central. Researchers with an organization called IPVM, which studies video surveillance, discovered evidence that in 2017 China’s Ministry of Public Security set a requirement: facial-recognition software used with surveillance cameras had to be trained to distinguish Uyghur faces. Several leading Chinese manufacturers quickly began to develop the technology—an “Uyghur alarm,” as one system was called in a Huawei test report. Although the race-based monitoring systems are of uncertain accuracy, they have been deployed in at least a dozen jurisdictions outside Xinjiang.
Xinjiang itself has become a laboratory for digital surveillance. By 2013, officials in Ürümqi had begun to affix QR codes to the exterior of homes, which security personnel could scan to obtain details about residents. On Chen Quanguo’s arrival, all cars were fitted with state-issued G.P.S. trackers. Every new cell-phone number had to be registered, and phones were routinely checked; authorities could harvest everything from photos to location data. Wi-Fi “sniffers” were installed to extract identifying data from computers and other devices. Chen also launched a program called Physicals for All, gathering biometric data—blood types, fingerprints, voiceprints, iris patterns—under the guise of medical care. Every Xinjiang resident between the ages of twelve and sixty-five was required to provide the state with a DNA sample.
To harness these disparate forms of surveillance, it was necessary to centralize them—a problem that had been foreseen at the outset of Xinjiang’s People’s War. In 2015, the Chinese state-security apparatus began building the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, where the streams of information could converge. “It’s very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror, but what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities,” a senior engineer on the project noted. After the system was launched, Zhu Hailun affirmed that it would be used to root out unseen threats. “Problematic people and clues identified by the integrated platform are major risks to stability,” a memo that he circulated said. “Persons or clues that are difficult to check are risks within risks—hazards within hazards.”
Tens of thousands of security officers were given the IJOP app and prodded to upload information to it. A forensic analysis of the software, commissioned by Human Rights Watch, revealed thirty-six “person types” that could trigger a problematic assessment. They included people who did not use a mobile phone, who used the back door instead of the front, or who consumed an “unusual” amount of electricity. Even an “abnormal” beard might be cause for concern. Socializing too little was suspicious, and so was maintaining relationships that were deemed “complex.” The platform treated untrustworthiness like a contagion: if a person seemed insufficiently loyal, her family was also likely infected.
The system was designed to regard gaps in its own knowledge as signs of potential culpability. This was never more evident than when a resident travelled overseas, especially to a country that was deemed “sensitive.” In June, 2017, Zhu signed off on a bulletin underscoring that anyone from Xinjiang who had travelled abroad was to be presumed guilty: “If suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, then a border control should be implemented to insure the person’s arrest.”
At the Public Security Bureau, Sabit was forced into a car with the intelligence officer who had picked her up from the airport. As she peered out the window, the Kuytun of her childhood seemed unrecognizable, the skyline looking brash and cold as it blurred by. They were travelling west, toward the neighborhood where she had grown up. “I had this hope, or illusion, that he was driving me to my old address,” she recalled. Instead, they arrived at a newly built police station on West Beijing Road. In the main hall, Sabit noticed an elderly man sitting in a chair, a neighbor who had taught at the same institute as her father, and whose daughter she had known since childhood. “Hello, Uncle,” she whispered in Kazakh. “Do you recognize me?” Silently, he motioned to her not to speak.
Sabit’s eyes welled up. “It was like seeing my own father, who had only just passed away,” she later recalled. “I felt immense horror and grief.”
Sabit was ordered to follow a pregnant officer, and as they walked the officer whispered in Kazakh, “Do whatever they ask. Under no circumstances resist, or else you’ll suffer.” In a private room, the officer ordered Sabit to disrobe; she searched her and confiscated her jewelry and shoelaces.
Back in the main hall, another officer took down her personal information. The man looked as if he might be Uyghur or Kazakh, so Sabit felt emboldened to ask, “Why do I have to stay here?”
“You were brought here by the people from the Integrated Joint Operations Platform,” he explained. “You’ve been to so many countries. The problem could be big.” He motioned to the old professor, still in his chair. “He’s been to Kazakhstan more than forty times,” he said. “We’ve had him here for ten days now. It looks like you’ll be staying, too.”
Sabit felt a chill. She took a seat beside the old man. “Child, how could I not recognize you?” he whispered, in Kazakh. “You grew up with my daughter, as if you were my child, too.” He added a blessing for her father: “May his spirit rest in Heaven.” Then he warned her to be careful—to refrain from criticizing the Communist Party, or praising anything that she had encountered while travelling. “You must be strong,” he said. “This will all pass. You don’t need to be afraid here. Old Uncle is keeping you company.”
Detainees normally slept in an interrogation room—men on one side, women on the other—but it was full. That night, the officers placed a military mattress in the hall and ordered Sabit and another young woman to share it. The woman was wearing a red dress. “She was extremely thin, and was calmly looking at me with a pair of innocent eyes,” Sabit recalled. “I could tell from her appearance that she was Uyghur.”
While they were squeezed together, the woman explained that she was a student who had been arrested for using a file-sharing program called Zapya to download music. Officials using IJOP were expected to log any “suspicious” apps—there were dozens, but many residents did not know what they were. The woman told Sabit that two Uyghur men locked up in the station, a classmate of hers and a butcher, had been detained because of Zapya, too.
It was July, and the heat and the mosquitoes were intense. Sabit spent a sleepless night trying to fend off bites. The lights in the hall stayed on all night, and the bleeps and static bursts of police walkie-talkies made a constant din, as the officers processed drug addicts, drunks, jaywalkers, and other petty criminals. The police treated people they brought in harshly. Once, an elderly man who was cuffed into a tiger chair began shouting, “Long live Mao Zedong! Long live the Chinese Communist Party!”
The next day, Sabit was shuttled to a hospital for a medical exam. Her blood was drawn, and a urine sample was taken; she was also given an electrocardiogram, an ultrasound, and a chest X-ray. Back at the station, officers took photographs and fingerprints, and sampled her DNA. She was given an iris scan, and compelled to speak into a microphone, so that her voiceprint could be taken: more data to be uploaded to IJOP.
That night, Sabit and the Uyghur woman slept in the interrogation room, which turned out to be worse than the main hall. The mosquitoes there were just as relentless, and the walkie-talkies were still audible, only now Sabit was crammed into a tiny iron cage with two other women. The room was hot and airless, and, even though she was drenched in sweat, she wrapped herself in a towel to ward off the mosquitoes. Her stomach churned in pain.
In another cage, the old professor was held captive with the two Uyghur men. At night, the professor slept on a mattress on the floor, and the younger men were handcuffed to the wall, so that they could not recline; in the coming days, Sabit noticed that the young men were unshackled only to eat and use the toilet, and that they never bathed.
As if being swept into a hurricane, Sabit was caught up in the immense program of detentions that Chen Quanguo had initiated. About twenty-five million people live in Xinjiang—less than two per cent of China’s population—but, according to an assessment based on government data, by the end of 2017 the region was responsible for a fifth of all arrests in the country.
At the police station, Sabit noticed that large numbers of Uyghurs were being brought in to have their information uploaded. Many had been stopped at checkpoints while entering Kuytun; others had been flagged by IJOP as untrustworthy. Most were elderly, or women, or children. The younger men, it seemed, had already been locked up.
spoiler
During the day, Sabit was allowed to return to the station’s main hall, but, whenever one of her relatives came to visit, she was quickly ushered out of sight and into her cage. Sometimes other people she knew walked in, and the idea that they were seeing her in detention filled her with shame. Then she realized that they assumed she had merely come to solve a bureaucratic problem, as they had. On one occasion, an old acquaintance came in, seeking paperwork to visit her parents in Kazakhstan. The woman had heard that Sabit had been detained, and began to approach her, but the professor signalled her to stay away. Before leaving, the woman whispered that she would pass on news to Sabit’s mother. Gazing at her silently, Sabit fought to hold back tears.
Nineteen days after her arrest, Older Brother walked into the station. Remembering his kindness, Sabit felt a wave of hope. She called to him and asked if he knew when she could leave. He looked at her and at the others, and said, “You all need to be sent to school.” Sabit knew from station gossip that “school” meant a political-reëducation camp. Shocked, she asked, “For how long?” He said half a year.
The following evening, three harsh-looking men dressed in gray jackets arrived. From the deferential way they were treated, Sabit assumed that they were high-ranking officials. It turned out that one was the director of the Public Security Bureau’s domestic-security team, a man named Wang Ting. Sabit was called to meet with the group, as were the professor and one of the young Uyghur men. Wang questioned Sabit, focussing on her Kazakh visa. During the interview, one official lamented, “You cannot be controlled once you leave.” Nonetheless, the vice-director of the station told Sabit afterward that she would be released the next day.
Chen Quanguo portrayed his crackdown as a means of bringing order to Xinjiang, but, for people inside the system, the shifting rules and arbitrary enforcement created a condition close to anarchy. A police officer told Sabit that before she could leave she had to sign a document expressing regret and pledging not to repeat her offense. Sabit said that she didn’t know what her offense was.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I was abroad,” she said.
“Then write that you’ll not make that mistake again,” he said. When she hesitated, he told her to just write down any mistake. Sabit found a Communist Party magazine in the station’s waiting area and copied down some of its propaganda.
The following morning, Sabit walked out of the station and called her mother, who burst into tears. Sabit wanted to fly to her immediately, but the police had retained her passport; before they could release it, they said, she had to gain approval from the bureau’s domestic-security team. At its offices, Sabit found Wang Ting and explained that she wanted to return to her mother. He told her that he needed to consult his superiors. When she returned, the following week, Wang explained that her border control would automatically expire after three months, and then her passport could be returned. Sabit was confused: the official who had stopped her at the airport had told her that active steps had to be taken to remove the border control. But, when she tried to explain, Wang waved her away.
Sabit waited until the three months had passed, plus an extra day, to be safe. Then she returned to Wang, and he instructed the police to release her passport. Buoyant with relief, she booked a flight to Kazakhstan. At the airport, though, the same official stopped her again. Her border control had not expired. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said.
Within hours, Sabit was again in front of Wang, who glared at her with annoyance. Her border control had expired, he insisted; perhaps the system just needed time to reflect the change. He told her to wait another week. Sabit begged him for a document indicating her innocence, and he had someone write one up. It noted that she had been investigated because she had renewed her passport at a consulate, but was cleared of any suspicion. “We did not find that she or her family engaged in activities that endanger national security,” it stated, adding that she was “eligible to leave the country.” The next day, with the document in hand, she risked another flight. Once again, she was stopped. Whether there was no way to follow the rules or no coherent rules to follow, she was a captive.
The Chinese have an expression, gui da qiang, that describes “ghost walls”—invisible labyrinths, erected by phantoms, that confuse and entrap travellers. In Sabit’s case, the phantom was the state, and she was determined to find her way through its obstacles.
From a colleague of Wang Ting’s, she learned that a request to remove her border control had been sent up the bureaucracy for approval. It would go to the prefecture’s seat, Ghulja, two hundred and fifty miles away, and then another hundred and fifty miles to Ürümqi. Desperate to insure that her paperwork was being processed, she decided to follow it and nudge the relevant officials. When she arrived at the train station, she found it awash in propaganda for the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party, which was soon to begin. It was a politically sensitive time.
In Ghulja, Sabit learned that she was too late: her application had already gone to Ürümqi. The next train was not scheduled to depart for hours, so she went to visit a sick aunt who lived there. While they were sipping tea, her phone rang. It was the vice-director of the police station in Kuytun. “Where are you?” he barked.
Sabit told him.
“You were in Kuytun a few days ago,” he said. “How did you suddenly go?” He asked her to text him a photograph of her train ticket, as proof that she was in Ghulja. Then he ordered her to return immediately, to sign documents. “You will take the train back tonight,” he said.
The vice-director seemed oddly intent on her case. On the train, she got a text from him, asking her to confirm that she was on her way. When she arrived in Kuytun, it was past midnight, and the parking lot was empty. In the lights outside the station, she saw a police car waiting for her, with two officers inside. One was Han, the other Kazakh. They drove in silence, until Sabit asked why she had to return so urgently. The Kazakh officer quietly explained that she was being sent to school.
The officer had spoken to her in Kazakh, and so Sabit felt that she could question him. Incredulous, she asked, “Didn’t the vice-director say I was meant to sign documents?” She told him not to tease her, but he shook his head and said, “I am not joking.” At the police station, Sabit’s things were confiscated, and she was returned to the cage. The following day, she was given another medical exam. It was clear that she was being processed for reëducation, but she could not accept it as reality—a common reaction, which the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the “delusion of reprieve.” Frankl knew the hold of this delusion well. During the Holocaust, he was taken to Auschwitz; even as his train was pulling in, he later wrote, he believed “to the last moment that it would not be so bad.”
spoiler
IV. SCHOOL Chen Quanguo’s crackdown was aimed at a single goal: moving a large percentage of Xinjiang’s population into an archipelago of fortified camps for political reëducation. Shortly after he arrived, he had begun building hundreds of prison-like facilities—what an official later described as trusted destinations for the untrusted.
By treating the entire indigenous population as a target, Chen was realizing a years-old objective. In 2015, around the time the IJOP system was being developed, a senior official had argued that a third of the region’s Uyghurs were “polluted by religious extremist forces,” and needed to be “educated and reformed through concentrated force.”
Xi Jinping had compared separatism and radical Islam to a disease, and officials often invoked medicine when they sought to allay concerns about the camps. “Although a certain number of people who have been indoctrinated with extremist ideology have not committed any crimes, they are already infected,” one noted. “They must be admitted to a reëducation hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain.”
As the mass arrests began, the Xinjiang Daily, a Communist Party organ, offered one of the first public acknowledgments of Chen’s plan. It described two men who had been assigned to a reëducation camp in Hotan Prefecture: a farmer and the owner of a village drugstore. Both described themselves as ideologically healed. “I was increasingly drifting away from ‘home,’ ” the drugstore owner explained. “With the government’s help and education, I’ve returned.”
Cartoon by Karl Stevens Copy link to cartoon Link copied
Shop The farmer noted that he had learned, to his surprise, that his thoughts were manifesting religious extremism. “I didn’t even know,” he said. Now, he added, “our lives are improving every day. No matter who you are, first and foremost you are a Chinese citizen.”
An official told the Daily that the camp had already processed two thousand people. “We have strict requirements for our students, but we have a gentle attitude, and put our hearts into treating them,” he said. “To come here is actually like staying at a boarding school.” The drugstore owner, he noted, was resistant at first to being reëducated. “Gradually, he became shocked by how ignorant he used to be.”
From the police station, Sabit and another detainee, a young Uyghur woman, were driven to a compound surrounded by a wall topped with concertina wire. A sign read “Kuytun City Vocational Skills Re-education Training Center Administrative Bureau.” Inside was a three-story building, a former police station that had been hastily repurposed. The women were ushered in and told to face a wall. Sabit tried to survey the place, but the light was dim. Standing beside her, the Uyghur woman began to cry.
“Don’t fidget!” an officer shouted. Sabit, noticing that the man’s Mandarin was imperfect, turned and saw that he was Kazakh; immediately, she felt disgust. The women were directed to the third floor, and, on the way, Sabit glimpsed several male detainees in gray uniforms. Their sullen figures made her fearful, and she looked away.
Sabit was led to a large room, where she was strip-searched. As she was getting dressed, she asked how long she would have to remain, and a guard said that no one would be let go before the Nineteenth National Congress, which was days away.
The detention cells were revamped offices, with walls, doors, and windows reinforced with iron latticework, giving them the appearance of cages. The doors were chained to their frames and could not be opened more than a foot; detainees had to shimmy through. In Sabit’s cell, five bunk beds were crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot space, with three cameras and a microphone hanging from the ceiling.
A few women, their eyes red from crying, were already there, and more arrived later. They were all sure that they had been rounded up in a dragnet preceding the National Congress. Some had been brought in for using WhatsApp. One was on leave from college in America; she had been detained for using a V.P.N. to turn in her homework and to access her Gmail account. A seventeen-year-old had been arrested because her family once went to Turkey on a holiday.
The Uyghur woman who was processed with Sabit had been assigned to the cell, too. She was a Communist Party propagandist. Years earlier, she told Sabit, she had booked a flight to Kashgar, but a sandstorm prevented the plane from taking off, so the airline had placed everyone on the flight in a hotel. Later, police officers in Kuytun detained her, and told her that two of the other people in the hotel were deemed suspect. Even though she was working for the Party, the mere fact of being Uyghur and staying in a hotel where others were under suspicion was enough to raise alarms.
The reëducation camp was nothing like a hospital, nothing like a boarding school. Chen Quanguo had instructed that such facilities “be managed like the military and defended like a prison.” Sabit and the other women had to exchange their clothes for drab uniforms that were accented with fluorescent stripes and a photo-I.D. tag. Male guards patrolled the halls and the compound’s exterior—each officer working a twenty-four-hour shift—while female staff members served as disciplinarians, following the women wherever they went, including the bathroom. When the disciplinarians were not there, the surveillance cameras were; even when showering, the detainees could not escape them.
The only language permitted in the building was Mandarin. Some of the older women did not know a word of it, and were consigned to silence, except for a few phrases they had to memorize. Everyone was required to shout “Reporting!” when entering a room, but many of the women forgot, enraging their minders. One disciplinarian, a member of the bingtuan, routinely insulted and humiliated the women. Detainees who angered her were subjected to punishments, which included being locked in a tiny room and shackled to a tiger chair for the night. She often intoned, “If you don’t behave, you’ll stay here for the rest of your life.”
Sabit quickly learned that every moment was controlled. The women had to wake at precisely eight each morning, but, except for trips to the washroom and the toilet, they were locked in their cells twenty-four hours a day. They had three minutes to wash their faces and brush their teeth, a minute to urinate. Showers could not exceed five minutes. Some women left soapy because they had misjudged their time.
For meals, the women had to line up in their cells to await a food cart, with their backs facing the door. The cups and bowls issued to them were made from cheap plastic, and Sabit, watching the hot food and water soften them, feared that toxins were leaching into her diet. (Later, replacements were introduced.) Sabit’s cell had no table, but the women were assigned stools—painful to use, because they were only about a foot tall. The women squatted on them and put their bowls on the floor. If they ate too slowly, or not enough, they were reprimanded. The elderly women, and people with dental problems, struggled, but neither age nor ailments spared them insults.
The detainees were forbidden to sit on their beds during the day, though after lunch they were made to lie down, with eyes shut, for a compulsory nap. At 10 p.m., they were ordered to sleep, but the lights in their cells were never turned off, and they were not allowed to cover their eyes with a blanket or a towel. (The younger women volunteered to take the top bunks, to shield the older ones from the light.) If anyone spoke, everyone in the room would be punished with an ear-splitting reprimand from a blown-out loudspeaker. Any nighttime request to use the bathroom was treated with contempt, and eventually the women stopped asking. Dispirited, uncomfortable, often verbally abused, they masked their pain, because displays of sadness were also punished. “You are not allowed to cry here,” the guards had told them. School taught them how to turn from the cameras, hide their faces, and quietly cry themselves to sleep.
The women had been told that they were going to be reëducated, but for a long stretch there was only dull confinement. To pass the time, they sat on the stools and traded stories. The college student who was studying in America entertained the others by recounting the entire plot of “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Twelve days after Sabit arrived, the National Congress ended, and the women were summoned for interviews with officials from the Public Security Bureau. Sabit was led to an interrogation room, where an officer told her, “Your case is basically clear now.” She asked how she had ended up in the camp, given that the domestic-security team had provided her with a written declaration of her innocence. The officer said that he didn’t know. Later, a detainee told Sabit that she had heard it was because officials came to view her failed departures at the airport as an inconvenience.
After the interviews, the women waited hopefully, but no one was freed. Then, a month into Sabit’s detention, it was announced that everyone would study Mandarin six days a week—to master the “national language.” After learning of a detainee who was let go after three months, Sabit thought that perhaps she, too, could sail through the lessons and “graduate.”
The classroom, fortified with iron meshwork, was adjacent to her cell. There were rows of desks, and a lectern behind a fence at the front. A surveillance camera was mounted in each corner. During classes, two police officers stood guard.
spoiler
The women’s instructor—Ms. Y.—had been yanked out of her job as an elementary-school teacher and compelled to live at the facility most of the week. Although she was stern, the women liked her. Ms. Y. spoke frequently about how she missed her young students, and she brought a grade-school teacher’s sensibility to the camp: she sought to teach the women Chinese opera and calligraphy, and pushed the administrators to allow plastic scissors, for making traditional Han crafts. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to get the detainees time outside for exercise.) One day, she arrived visibly upset; the director had humiliated her for tardiness by forcing her to stand during a meeting.
At the outset, Ms. Y. had no Mandarin textbooks, or even worksheets, so she used first-grade instructional materials; later, she was provided with lesson plans, but they were riddled with errors. The detainees were told that they needed to master three thousand Chinese characters, even though several women, Sabit among them, already knew more than twice that many. No matter how fluent the women were, they were forced to perform the exercises, over and over, until the others caught up. Some of the elderly women who had never been schooled in Mandarin struggled with the lessons. To spare them punishment, Sabit and a few others covertly helped them.
The classes, of course, had nothing really to do with language. As a government document made clear, reëducation was intended to sever people from their native cultures: “Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
Sabit and the other women had to learn Communist songs and sing them loudly before each meal. (If they did not show sufficient zeal, guards threatened to withhold food.) Every morning, they had to stand and proclaim their fealty to the state:
Ardently love the Chinese Communist Party! Ardently love the great motherland! Ardently love the Chinese people! Ardently love socialism with Chinese characteristics!
They were compelled to watch videos like “The Hundred-Year Dream,” which celebrated China’s economic growth and power. The screenings were followed by discussion groups, in which detainees had to repeat propaganda and profess gratitude to the Party for saving them from criminality. On Saturdays, guest speakers gave presentations on terrorism law. The detainees were obliged to recite seventy-five “manifestations” of religious extremism.
It didn’t take great insight, Sabit thought, to recognize the absurdity of the curriculum as a counterterrorism tool. Most of the young women who were rounded up had secular life styles; they frequented bars on weekends and had barely any ties to religion, let alone religious extremism. The elderly women, though more traditional, clearly posed no threat, but their internment would stymie the transmission of cultural knowledge to younger generations.
All their work seemed geared toward pageants that were organized for visiting Party dignitaries, who would come to inspect the women’s progress and the camp’s efficacy. During these events—held at first in a room where the guards slept, with beds pushed to one side—the women had to recite maxims of Xi Jinping, sing patriotic anthems, dance, and make a show of Han cultural pride. “You need to have a smile on your face,” guards would say. “You need to show that you are happy.”
Sabit was often a featured performer; because of her fluency and her education, the camp could count on her to demonstrate that the program was a success. She would project excitement and positivity, in an exhausting pantomime. Many of the women felt ashamed by the hollow display, but still campaigned to perform. The preparations offered a respite from the language classes, and the pageants gave them a chance to prove their “transformation” and perhaps be set free.
At some point during every inspection, the visiting dignitaries would ask, “Do you recognize your mistakes?” In preparation, the detainees wrote out statements of repentance; the guards explained that anyone who did not do so would never leave. One detainee, a member of a Christian sect called Eastern Lightning, invoked a Chinese law that guaranteed freedom of religion, declaring, “I did nothing wrong!” She was taken away, to what the women assumed was a harsher facility—a pretrial detention center or a prison.
The logic of these forced admissions was clear: to gain their freedom, the detainees had to tear themselves down. Sabit strove to qualify her answers with words like “potentially,” and to characterize her life overseas as a “lack of patriotism” rather than as a manifestation of Islamic extremism. But, having lived in Shanghai, she found it hard not to seethe; she knew Han urbanites who had left the country for vacations in Malaysia, and who had used WhatsApp and V.P.N.s. Were they also infected?
Over and over, Sabit and the women confessed. Yet no one was released, and gradually Sabit’s optimistic delusions collapsed. In February, 2018, China’s annual Spring Festival arrived, and the women were preparing for a pageant, when a camp administrator woke them in the middle of the night and forced them into a classroom to write out their mistakes. When they were done, he gathered their papers, tore them up, and berated the women for being dishonest, then kept them writing until dawn. Sabit wondered if she was losing her grip on herself. Could she be wrong? she thought. Had she betrayed China?
Then, as the pageant neared, Sabit learned that after the performances any detainee who was a student would be let go. Because Sabit had been enrolled in school in Canada, she made the case that the policy applied to her. The camp administrators agreed, and she filled out forms for her release—discreetly, so that women who were not slated to leave would not grow agitated. The director told her to wait for an official departure date. She tried not to become hopeful, having been let down so often. But, she recalled, she regarded the news as “a ray of light.”
spoiler
V. THE CONFESSION Yarkand County is about eight hundred miles from Kuytun, in southwestern Xinjiang, on the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. When Marco Polo visited, in the late thirteenth century, he noted that Muslims and Christians lived alongside one another there, and that the region, with its temperate climate and rich soil, had been “amply stocked with the means of life.”
Yarkand has a large Uyghur population, and the crackdown there has been severe. In 2014, authorities restricted Ramadan celebrations, and, according to a report from the region, police gunned down a family during a house-to-house search for women wearing head scarves. Locals armed with knives took to the streets, and, in an escalating confrontation with police, dozens were killed. Later, the authorities called in a seasoned Party official, Wang Yongzhi, to manage the county.
Wang moved aggressively to enact Chen Quanguo’s policies, but he evidently had misgivings. As he later noted in a statement, “The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with the realities on the ground, and could not be implemented in full.” He took steps to soften the crackdown, much to the dissatisfaction of Chen’s operatives, who monitored how officials were carrying out the measures. “He refused to round up everyone who should be rounded up,” an official assessment of Wang, later leaked to the Times, noted. In fact, he had gone further than that. He had authorized the release of seven thousand interned people.
Wang was removed from his post and duly submitted a confession, in which he wrote, “I undercut, acted selectively, and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment.” The Party savagely attacked him, accusing him of corruption and abuse of power. “Wang Yongzhi lost his ideals and convictions,” one government-run paper noted. “He is a typical ‘two-faced man,’ ” it added. “His problem is very serious.” He vanished from public life.
Wang’s confession was circulated across the Xinjiang bureaucracy as a warning, and it apparently reached Kuytun. Just as Sabit and the other students were to be released, her camp’s management revoked its decision—because, a guard told her, an official had been dismissed for freeing people without authorization. “Nobody is willing to sign off on your release now,” he explained. “Nobody wants that responsibility.”
A heavy silence fell over the building, as minders—the detainees’ conduits for news—became cautious about what they said. At first, Sabit was dismayed, but, just as she had modulated her joy at the prospect of leaving, she now dampened her disappointment. The one certainty she could count on was her patience. She had become good at waiting.
And yet the longer she was confined the more convoluted her path to freedom appeared. By then, her minders had instituted a point system: the detainees were told that they had each been assigned a score, and if it was high enough they could win privileges—such as family visits—and even release. Points could be gained by performing well on examinations, or by writing up “thought reports” that demonstrated an ability to regurgitate propaganda. The women could also win points by informing on others. One detainee, Sabit recalled, was “like another camera.”
The threat of losing points was constantly dangled over the women. For a minor infraction, the guards might announce that they were docking a point; for a large one, they might say that the penalty was ten points. Yet the women were never told their scores, so they were never sure if the points were real. One day, a woman got into a fight and was brought to a camp official, who furiously reprimanded her, then tore up a paper that, he claimed, recorded her score. “You now have zero points!” he declared. Back in the cell, Sabit and the others consoled her, but also gently pushed for details of what the official had said, hoping to glean some insight into how the system functioned. “We thought, Well, maybe they really are recording our points,” Sabit recalled. “Maybe there is something to it.”
In the winter of 2018, new arrivals began flooding into the camp. Word spread that the arrests were driven by quotas—a new kind of arbitrariness. As an official involved with IJOP later told Human Rights Watch, “We began to arrest people randomly: people who argue in the neighborhood, people who street-fight, drunkards, people who are lazy; we would arrest them and accuse them of being extremists.” An officer at the camp told Sabit that the arrests were intended to maintain stability before the Two Sessions, a major political conclave in Beijing.
The camp strained to manage the influx. Most of the new arrivals had been transferred from a detention center, which was also overflowing. There were elderly women, some illiterate, some hobbled. One woman, the owner of a grocery, was in custody because her horse-milk supplier had been deemed untrustworthy. Another was an adherent of Falun Gong; she was so terrified that she had attempted suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window.
For many of the new arrivals, the reëducation camp was an improvement. At the detention centers, there was not even a pretense of “transformation through education.” Uyghurs and Kazakhs were brought in hooded and shackled. The women spoke of beatings, inedible food, beds stained with urine, shit, and blood. Sabit met two women who had bruises on their wrists and ankles—marks, they told her, from shackles that were never removed.
With more women than beds at the camp, the authorities tossed mattresses on the floor, before shuffling the detainees around to find more space. New protocols were introduced. The women had to perform military drills inside their cells, and submit to haircuts. In Kazakh and Uyghur culture, long hair symbolizes good fortune; some of the women had grown their hair since childhood, until it was, as Sabit remembered, “jet black and dense, reaching their heels.” Later, evidence emerged to suggest that the internment system was turning hair into a commodity. (Last year, the United States interdicted a thirteen-ton shipment of hair, which White House officials feared had been partly harvested at the camps.) In Kuytun, the locks were cut with a few brutal chops, as some of the women begged the guards to leave just a little more. Sabit refused to beg, trying to hold on to some pride, but as her hair fell she felt a great shame—as if she had been transformed into a criminal.
At night, it was announced, the detainees would help police themselves, with the women serving two-hour shifts. For Sabit, the shifts offered rare moments of privacy. Sometimes, blanketed in solitude, she thought of her mother living alone. Over the months, she had convinced herself that she would be able to commemorate the anniversary of her father’s death with her family, in the Kazakh tradition. But a year had passed, and she was still stranded.
spoiler
While on duty, Sabit often gazed through the small caged window and took in the nighttime view: a garden, a poplar tree, and then Kuytun’s urban panorama—the city’s glowing lights, the cars tracing lines on a highway, reminding her of her old life. Later, she captured these reveries in a poem, written in Mandarin, which ends:
Night watch I turn toward the darkness and Its wanton torment Of the feeble poplar.
As the months passed, the system took its toll on everyone. Guards who were once lenient became erratic and severe. A mild-mannered staff member lost it one evening, after being confronted with multiple requests for the bathroom; she yelled maniacally, then refused to let any woman out for the rest of the night.
The detainees, too, began to buckle. They joked that the state was merely keeping them alive. Some went gray prematurely. Many stopped menstruating—whether from compulsory injections that the camp administered or from stress, Sabit was unsure. Because they could shower only infrequently and were never provided clean underwear, the women often developed gynecological problems. From the poor food, many suffered bad digestion. One elderly woman could not use the bathroom without expelling portions of her large intestine, which she had to stuff back into herself. The woman was sent to a hospital, but an operation could not be performed, it was explained, because she had high blood pressure. She was returned, and spent most of the time moaning in bed.
In class one day, a detainee who had lost most of her family to the camps suddenly fell to the floor, unconscious. Her sister, who was also in the class, ran to her, then looked up at the others with alarm. The women tearfully rushed to her aid but were stopped by the guards, who ordered them not to cry. “They started hitting the iron fence with their batons, frightening us,” Sabit recalled. “We had to hold back our sobbing.”
Signs of psychological trauma were easy to find. An Uyghur woman, barely educated, had been laboring to memorize Mandarin texts and characters. One evening, she started screaming, yanked off her clothing, and hid under her bed, insisting that no one touch her. Guards rushed in with a doctor and took her away. The camp administrators, however, returned her to the cell, arguing that she had been feigning illness. Afterward, the woman occasionally had convulsions and was sent to the hospital. But she was not released.
“I get it. You have a podcast.” Cartoon by Brendan Loper Copy link to cartoon Link copied
Shop Sabit, too, felt increasingly frail. She was losing weight. She couldn’t hold down anything, not even a sip of water, and had to be given medicine to manage non-stop vomiting. Like the other women, her emotions were raw. Once, she was chatting with a Han guard, who mentioned that the camp’s deputy director had told him, “Anar being here is purely a waste of time.” Sabit smiled, worried that if she showed distress he would no longer share news with her. But, as soon as he left, she ran to her bed, turned her back to the cameras, and wept.
By the summer of 2018, Chen Quanguo’s reëducation campaign had been operating for more than a year. Beijing strove to hide its existence, but accounts leaked out, and it slowly became clear that something on a monstrous scale was taking place.
Reporters with Radio Free Asia called up local Chinese officials, who, accustomed to speaking with Party propagandists, were strikingly candid. When one camp director was asked the name of his facility, he confessed that he didn’t know, because it had been changed so often, but gamely ran outside to read the latest version off a sign. A police officer admitted that his department was instructed to detain forty per cent of the people in its jurisdiction. In January, 2018, an official in Kashgar told the news service that a hundred and twenty thousand Uyghurs had been detained in his prefecture alone.
The growing camp infrastructure attracted notice, too. Shawn Zhang, a student in Canada, began using satellite data to map the facilities. By the summer, it appeared that roughly ten per cent of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population was under confinement. Adrian Zenz, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen’s crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps—a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others. Not since the Holocaust had a country’s minority population been so systematically detained.
As the crackdown evolved, hastily assembled facilities, like Sabit’s in Kuytun, gave way to titanic new compounds in remote locations. When forced to acknowledge them publicly, the government described them as benign or indispensable—noting, “Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil.”
That summer, amid these changes, the director of Sabit’s camp permitted the detainees time in a walled-in yard; there were snipers keeping watch, and the women were restricted to structured activities, like emergency drills, but he nonetheless insisted that they should be grateful. Eventually, the women were also allowed to air out blankets in a vineyard that the staff maintained. “We would hide grapes inside the bedding,” Sabit recalled. “Then we would bring them back to our cell and secretly eat them.”
When camp officials announced in July that Sabit and the other women were going to be moved to a new facility, the news seemed ominous. Not knowing where they were going, they feared that their situation would get worse. One night, guards roused the women and told them to pack: a bus was waiting to take them away. On the road, a caravan of police cars escorted them, and officers manned intersections. “A lot of people were crying,” Sabit recalled. “I asked the girl next to me, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she said, ‘I saw a street that I used to walk on, and I started thinking of my previous life.’ ”