Pompeo: Files show repression in China

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that a cache of leaked documents proves that Chinese authorities are engaged in widespread and systemic repression of Muslims and other minority groups in western China, as a number of foreign governments expressed serious concern about the scale of the campaign.

Pompeo said the documents underscored “an overwhelming and growing body of evidence” that

China’s leaders are responsible for human-rights violations in the Xinjiang region.

The documents “detail the Chinese party’s brutal detention and systematic repression of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news conference. “We call on the Chinese government to immediately release all those who are arbitrarily detained and to end its draconian policies that have terrorized its own citizens in Xinjiang.”

Pompeo’s comments come at a delicate time in U.S.-Chinese relations because of ongoing negotiations to end a trade war and because of U.S. concerns about the situation in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrations have turned violent with clashes between police and protesters. Notably, Pompeo’s criticism was not accompanied by a warning about possible sanctions for the mass detentions, although U.S. lawmakers are pressing for penalties to be imposed.

“There are very significant human-rights abuses,” Pompeo said. “It shows that it’s not random. It is intentional, and it is ongoing.”

The leaked classified documents were provided to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which worked with The Associated Press and news organizations around the world to publish the material.

The documents, which include guidelines for operating detention centers and instructions for how to use technology to target people, reveal that the camps in Xinjiang are not for voluntary job training, as Beijing has claimed.

They show that the camps are used for forced ideological and behavioral re-education. The documents also illustrate how Beijing uses a high-tech surveillance system to target people for detention and to predict who will commit crimes.

Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than 1 million ethnic minority group members, most of them Muslim. But a classified blueprint leaked to the news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described.

The documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up members of ethnic minority groups even before they commit crimes, and to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.

The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass-surveillance technology,

computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.

Pompeo said the documents should encourage other countries to come forward with their concerns.

U.S. allies were among the first to do so.

“We have serious concerns about the human-rights situation in Xinjiang and the Chinese government’s escalating crackdown, in particular the extrajudicial detention of over a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities,” a British Foreign Office spokesman said. “We want to see an end to the indiscriminate and disproportionate restrictions on the cultural and religious freedoms of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that “if indeed hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are being detained in camps, then the international community cannot close their eyes.”

In Brussels, the European Commission said it was calling on China “to uphold its [national] and international obligations and to respect human rights including when it comes to the rights of persons belonging to minorities especially in Xinjiang but also in Tibet, and we will continue to affirm those positions in this context in particular.”

Japan’s Foreign Ministry said it believed that “freedom, respect for fundamental human rights and the rule of law, which are the universal value in the international community, are guaranteed in China as well.”

Meanwhile, there were indications that China was moving to destroy documentary evidence of abuses.

A man now living in exile said a Uighur cadre he knew had reached out to him in October. The cadre, who manages paperwork at a community-level office in southern Xinjiang, said that recently the government had ordered all papers to be burned and destroyed.

“All the shelves are totally empty,” his friend said. The man declined to be identified out of fear of retribution to him or his family.

The man said papers stored in such offices are forms filled in by government workers monitoring everyone in the community, containing sensitive personal information such as marriage status, residence registration and whether people are detained. Information from the forms is put into a database in a separate room in the office, while the forms themselves are stored on shelves.