Leaked Chinese Study Outlines Plan to Crush Uyghur Population

The BBC on Tuesday reported on a “high-level Chinese study,” meant for top Chinese Communist Party officials only but accidentally leaked online, that outlined a plan to crush the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province by dispersing their population across China’s vast land mass, making it difficult for them to raise families and pass along their traditions.

The material reviewed by the BBC included a Chinese television report from 2017 that has “not featured in international news reporting until now.” The video included interviews with young Uyghurs that made it clear they were being intimidated into taking jobs far from home before they could start families with other Uyghurs.

“This video is remarkable. The Chinese government continually says that people are volunteering to engage in these programs, but this absolutely reveals that this is a system of coercion that people are not allowed to resist,” Professor Laura Murphy of Sheffield Hallam University told the BBC.

“The other thing it shows is this ulterior motive, that although the narrative is one of lifting people out of poverty, there’s a drive to entirely change people’s lives, to separate families, disperse the population, change their language, their culture, their family structures, which is more likely to increase poverty than to decrease it,” added Hallam, who once lived in Xinjiang.

The featured exhibit in the BBC article was a report prepared by Nankai University in Tianjin, China, in May 2018 that concluded mass labor transfers are “an important method to influence, meld, and assimilate Uyghur minorities,” reduce their “population density,” and produce a “transformation of their thinking.”

The authors found exported labor targets in some areas that amounted to shipping a fifth of their working-age populations to different provinces. Those mass labor transfers were accompanied by extensive political indoctrination, as each group of exported Uyghur workers was “led and accompanied by political cadres in order to implement security and management.”

The report, in other words, encouraged Chinese officials to force labor transfers upon the Uyghurs and other minorities for exactly the reason Hallam suspected: because if they were spread far and thin enough, they would soon cease to be Uyghurs. 

Nankai University researchers found the shipments of labor were so aggressive that officials on the receiving end would sometimes recoil at the large number of Uyghurs dumped in their laps and send them home. 

The authors of the Chinese report seemed uncomfortable with the amount of clearly forced labor involved in the program, trenchantly noting that the number of Uyghurs stuffed into Xinjiang’s vast network of prison camps “far exceeds” any reasonable estimate of potential terrorists or extremists.

BBC investigators visited some of the factories mentioned as destinations for mass Uyghur labor transfers in the 2018 report and found various levels of discriminatory treatment against the Uyghurs who still worked there, ranging from segregated living and eating areas to “dormitories” that were run suspiciously like prisons.

Canada’s Globe and Mail, which also reviewed the Nankai University report, noted Tuesday that Chinese government reports and state media articles confirm Uyghur laborers are compulsively enrolled in “training programs that mix Mandarin lessons with instruction by police and Communist Party cadres on the ‘rule of law’ and ethnic and religious policies,” supposedly leading them to “become models of hard work, national unity, and law abiding.”

“Together the documents show that, beneath China’s claims that it is seeking to combat poverty in Xinjiang, the government’s policies toward Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities are designed to sever them from their homes and traditional way of life, molding them into state-approved members of the ‘Chinese nation,’” the Globe and Mail wrote, citing the growing number of worldwide government agencies and human rights groups who say China’s policy toward the Uyghurs constitutes ethnic cleansing or genocide.