The Mass Detention of Uighur Muslims in China

The Xinjiang province of China has reportedly been turned into a “massive internment camp” for the Uighur Muslim minority. People in these camps are forced to learn Mandarin Chinese, swear loyalty to President Xi Jinping, and renounce their Muslim faith. Media is banned from the Xinjiang, so reporting on the issue has been difficult and undercover for years. The first report of China’s mistreatment of Uighur citizens emerged last year, and the international outrage has been growing.
The Chinese government has backed its actions by saying it is responding to "ethnic separatism and violent terrorist criminal activities". Chinese officials have denounced reports of human rights abuses as false news, arguing that people willingly attend the “vocational schools.” State-run news sites and television reports have been used to spread propaganda that these “re-education” sites are consensual and citizens are not being subjected to human rights abuses. Satellite images of the internment camp demonstrate how quickly the sites have developed in the past years:
The catalyst for the government-backed movement towards ethnic cleansing likely sparked in 2015, when 31 people were slaughtered by Uighur attackers at a train station in the Chinese city of Kunming. After the attack, Xinjiang has been the target of some of the most restrictive and comprehensive security measures––facial recognition cameras, monitoring devices, phone trackers–– all used by the government against its own people.
In an age of increasing xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments, the Chinese governments’ acts against its own Uighur community demonstrates how far institutions and the majority are willing to go to “delete” an ethnic minority that stands largely innocent and powerless against the government.

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