China’s mass detention camps laid bare in leaked blueprint
Uighur-Canadian activist jailed 13 years ago among more than one million ethnic detainees in forced indoctrination centres
OTTAWA — The “two Michaels” may have become Canada’s most well-known prisoners in China.
Former diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor have been imprisoned for almost a year since the diplomatic dispute between China and Canada erupted in early December of last year when the RCMP arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of the United States on an extradition warrant.
The emergence Sunday of a leaked Chinese government blueprint for imprisoning one million Muslim Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang province is focusing attention on another Canadian detainee. Huseyin Celil, who settled in southern Ontario after becoming a Canadian citizen, is a former Uighur activist who has been imprisoned in China for 13 years.
The leaked Chinese Communist government documents debunked Beijing’s claims that it is running a voluntary employment and language-training program aimed at integrating Uighurs into mainstream Chinese society. They detail China’s imprisonment and efforts to indoctrinate the Uighur minority, as well as the use of artificial intelligence and video surveillance to achieve that end.
The expansion of the detention camps and the roundup of Uighurs in 2016 coincided with the last time any of Celil’s relatives had any direct contact with him, said Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.
Celil gained his Canadian citizenship in 2005. He was arrested in Uzbekistan a year later while visiting relatives, and taken to China.
Prior to early 2016, Celil’s mother and sister visited him in prison about twice a year — his only contact with the outside world because Canadian diplomats have been barred from seeing him.
“The family reports stopped at exactly the time the mass incarceration and the roundups of Uighurs was underway,” Neve said Monday. “So, it’s very likely that the family has in some way shape or form either been incarcerated, or because of the crackdown visits aren’t being allowed any more, or because of the fear that is now prevailing are being much more cautious and not sending messages.”
On Saturday, Foreign Affairs Minister FrançoisPhilippe Champagne said he had a one-hour discussion with his Chinese counterpart about Kovrig and Spavor and that gaining their release is his “absolute priority.”
Neve agreed with Champagne, but added: “It’s really important that Huseyin Celil’s case be receiving that same attention.”
A spokesman for Global Affairs Canada said Monday the government is “deeply concerned” about Celil’s ongoing detention.
“We continue to raise our concerns with Chinese authorities,” Guillaume Bérubé said in an emailed statement. “We are deeply concerned by the human rights situation faced by Muslim Uighurs and other minorities in China.”
The confidential documents, leaked to a consortium of international journalists, lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up minorities, most of whom are Muslims, to rewire their thoughts and even the language they speak.
The documents stipulate watch towers, doublelocked doors and blanket video surveillance “to prevent escapes.” They describe an elaborate scoring system that grades detainees on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language, memorize ideology and adhere to strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet.
They also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. With the help of mass-surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week, including university students and party officials who wouldn’t need vocational training.
Taken as a whole, the documents give the most significant description yet of how the mass detention camps work in the words of the Chinese government itself.
Experts say they spell out a vast system that targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate them — especially Uighurs, a Turkic minority of about 10 million with their own language and culture.
“They confirm that this is a form of cultural genocide,” said Adrian Zenz, a leading security expert in the far western region of Xinjiang, where many Uighurs live. “It really shows that from the onset, the Chinese government had a plan.”
Zenz said the documents echo the aim of the camps as outlined in a 2017 report from a local branch of the Xinjiang Ministry of Justice: To “wash brains, cleanse hearts, support the right, remove the wrong.”
China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where hundreds, both Uighurs and Han Chinese, have died in terror attacks, reprisals and race riots. In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched what he called a “People’s War on Terror” in response to terror attacks carried out by radical Uighur militants.
In late 2016, the crackdown intensified dramatically when Xi named Chen Quanguo, a hardline official transferred from Tibet, as Xinjiang’s new head. Most of the documents were issued in 2017.
“Since the measures have been taken, there’s no single terrorist incident in the past three years,” said a written response from the Chinese Embassy in the United Kingdom. “Xinjiang is much safer.”