According to the UN, more than 1 million Chinese Uighur Muslims are being detained in government 're-education' camps.
VICE News correspondent Isobel Yeung posed as a travel blogger to go behind the scenes in Xinjiang, a frontier region in China's west, to unveil what is happening to the Uighur in the most oppressed area in China.
VICE News journalist Isobel Yeung. Photo: Supplied
Uighur Muslims have been in the region of Xinjiang for many centuries.
“In my opinion this is one of the greatest human right’s atrocities going on in the world right now, there has not been a bigger mass extra-judicial detention of any race or religion since the holocaust and what the Chinese government is doing is rounding up at least a million of them, more recent research suggests it could be more like 1.5 million or even up to 2 million, detained in these so-called re-education camps and essentially trying to eradicate the Uighur culture.”
Xinjiang is now the most sophisticated surveillance state in the world and the best technology is being used to monitor the Uighur, she says.
However to what level the survellience every one or two metres is centralised, she doesn’t know.
“There was facial recognition, we also know that there’s voice recognition, we know that DNA samples are being taken from Uighur people… this is an extremely thorough and sophisticated system that they have in place.”
Yeung was constantly tracked, accosted, had camera footage deleted and interviews stopped while she was in China.
“There were times that were pretty hairy, there were some pretty chilling times, particularly the circumstances in which we had to leave the region the first time… there was some close shaves I would say.”
Yeung says it's undeniable that there’s been a handful of violent riots over the past decade.
“But to round up 1 million, or 1.5 million, and put them in these internment camps and also, it really does seem that from speaking with people who have served time in the camps as well as seeing with our own eyes what goes on there, it really does seem like an effort to not just clamp down on anti-extremist actions but also to really eradicate an entire identity and an entire culture.”
There is very little uprising there now, she says.
“From what we saw, this is a very effective tool they’re using, the Chinese communist party have really done an incredible story at really silencing the amount of information that is coming out of the area, they really are holding nothing back in terms of indoctrinating people with the Chinese mentality of utter loyalty to the communist party and to the country.”
One night, Yeung and her crew happened to be going out to a bar when they were stopped by the police, which led to a long and laborious exchange before they were let go.
That same night the group saw eight Uighur men walking down the street, led by three armed police. Yeung says it appeared they were being taken away in the middle of the night to an unknown location.
One girl Yeung met told her 13 of her classmate’s parents were in the re-education camps and the children lived at the school.
She spoke to a number of the Uighur diaspora who were separated from their children, unable to take them when they fled. The children are often re-educated and brainwashed in state institutions.
It’s clear the next generation are taught loyalty to the party and cut ties with their family members, Yeung says.
The communist party has hired Uighurs to supress their own people, she says . And they’re all expected to spy on their own family members and neighbours.
In addition, in a bid to encourage the Uighur people to drop their own traditions, 1.2 million Han Chinese have been sent to live in Uighur homes.
They’re there to act as snitches, she says.
The plight of the Uighur people is one that isn’t getting a lot of global attention, which speaks volumes to the political and economic prowess of China, says Yeung.
“With that silence around the topic, it is upsetting for a lot of Uighur people to see that the Chinese government is getting away with this for the large part.”
Isobel Yeung has made the short documentary China’s Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World from her time in Xinjiang. You can watch it here.
